BJ Day 2

I have now been in Beijing for over 24 hours, and I still have yet to see a building that was built more than probably five years ago.  Actually, most of the places I've been are about 3 months old: today I went to the airport to pick up my family (hoooray!!!!), and then we toured around the Olympic venues some.  

Here are the highlights:

Terminal 3 of Beijing Capital Intl Airport.  This is probably the single most impressive infrastructure building I've ever been to.  You take an Airport Express subway train that goes right up to the front of it, then branches up and down for departures and arrivals.  Then you walk into this GIGANTIC hall, all open air and really beautiful and absolutely huge, where, in my case, you get a sandwich and read a guidebook while you wait for your family to arrive.

Walking up the axis of the city towards the Olympic green.  Note how HUGE this thing is, and also the large number of people.  Also check out what the kid is doing: besides flying a kite, he's riding on one of these two-wheeled skateboards that are really common here.  You get on it and balance some, and then move your feet back and forward to keep from falling and to propel yourself.  They look like a lot of fun, though I would guess it's a little tricky at first.

The Bird's Nest!  We didn't know that it had lights on the same theme.  Cool.

More Bird's Nest.  This gives a little bit of a sense for how ENORMOUS this thing is.  That seems to be the idea of the city. 

The Water Cube, a little bit before it lit up. Very cool stuff.

That's everything for the moment.  Tomorrow my Dad's going to a meeting, while the rest of us go off exploring somewhere.  Hopefully we'll decide where exactly in the next hour or so.  I'll try to keep you updated.

The rest of Shangri-La!

These are terribly, terribly overdue--I got back from our trip exactly two weeks ago--so I'm sorry about that. But in the effort to actually get them up I think I'm going to cut back on narrative. Basically we went bike riding in a neighboring valley that was full of active Tibetan villages and was super beautiful and awesome, and then the next day we went to the monastery, which was awesome but discovered. Not bad at all.

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Here goes:

This is the valley we explored. You get an idea of lots of scattered houses, and big spaces in between.

A typical resident. Amazing, beautiful, possibly sad.

The northern end of the valley floods during summer to create Napa Lake, a huge shallow bird sanctuary.

Pretty cool, huh? We couldn't stay off of that causeway after seeing it from this angle..

Day two, we went to the monastery. Here we're looking back toward town. Gives a sense of the city. I liked this place.


This is the monastery. It's something like the second or third biggest one, with about 700 monks there now (including some cute kid monks!). Unfortunately for us it draws a crowd worthy of its awesomeness, at least during National Day.

These are the kinds of houses that surround the monastery. Except for the occasional satellite dish, you really don't see much sign that they've changed in the last couple centuries.. Though I suppose that could be said about a lot of houses at home, too.


We decided to climb the hill overlooking the monastery, mostly because it was there and we didn't have any better ideas, but it turned out to be a good call.This is looking back towards the lake we had visited the day before. Pretty impressive from this angle..


This is what we found at the top. You might not be able to see, but there were two Snow Mountains on the horizon, absolutely amazing glinting in the sun. Gave us a glimpse into yet another world.

Shangri-La

Yes, it’s real. Now. This was definitely the climax of our trip, to the point that prior to leaving we were both viewing Dali and Lijiang almost as things to be endured in order to get here. Definitely wasn’t fair in retrospect, but I think our excitement was pretty much justified.

This started on the bus ride up from Lijiang. The road was definitely one of the more spectacular I’ve ever driven (or rather, been driven on, thank goodness). Basically, significant portions of it involved climbing up the sides of what must have been almost as deep a gorge as the one we had visited the day before. This twisty road snaking up amazingly deep and steep and spectacular valleys, with our bus feeling slightly to large for the job.

A view out the bus window. Whoa.

To add to the thrill we saw not one but four accidents on the 150km journey, including one car that had flipped completely. Scary.

Once we got to the city, we dropped our stuff at our hotel, thankfully booked long in advance—the entire city was full, to the point that they had set up a checkpoint on the road and were turning back anyone without a reservation. Then we started our explore.

The view from our hotel window. I liked our spot a lot.

Two defining features of Shangri-La: 1) it is at 3200 meters, more than 10,000 feet above sea level, which means that it gets chilly quick but also that the air has that special, high-altitude feeling to it that I love. Though it doesn't translate into gigantic snowcapped peaks directly overlooking the city, as you might assume from the name it has adopted. 2) Even though it’s still a couple hundred kilometers from the border, it’s more or less a Tibetan city. This means all the signs have a third language (and a third alphabet :-) on them.

I thought that only tiny towns in the interior west did this!! I was pretty excited at the Tibetan version :-).

Tibetan also means that yak—literally, “plateau beef”—meat, milk, and butter is easily had everywhere. This was how we started our exploration: headed to a recommended restaurant and ordered a big pitcher of butter tea. Those of you who’ve had this delicacy before may know what’s coming. Basically, we saw the much larger pitcher available for only five kuai extra and figured we’d try it—we’re pretty thirsty, right? I know I can drink a fair amount of tea. Little did we know how serious the ‘butter’ part of it is. The tea is great, sort of sour at first but then quite creamy. Quite, quite creamy. After two cups each, we were both stuffed, to the extent that we had to force down the excellent dishes we’d ordered and couldn’t even contemplate another sip. Uff.

After that adventure, we actually walked around some. Both of us liked the town a lot: it somehow felt (perhaps inaccurately, but I don’t think so) much more like a real place than either Dali or Lijiang. Our hotel was two blocks from the central square of old town, but still the road more or less disappeared about 20 ft further on and turned into a grassy track that climbed a hill up to a pagoda.

Looking down on the city from the hill right above our lodging.

On the other side were lots more old houses in a sort of village, with cows and pigs wandering around and people doing farm work in Tibetan clothing (big pink headdresses). Futher up the hill is a another pagoda with a commanding view of the town, and beyond that is a real live monastery/temple, complete with prayer flags:

Yeah, this is how they work in real life. I’d like to see you do that in your dorm room.

The first day we just walked around old town buying souvenirs (our standard first day on this trip; it’s convenient but I still don’t know how I feel about buying the stuff before you’ve seen the place). But at one point we were walking through the square and I heard someone shout “Robert!” Turns out it was a couple of friends from Frisbee, who had amazingly also decided to go to NW Yunnan for the fall break. So we spent most of the evening with them, in large part because among their ranks was one person with not one month but two full years of Chinese under his belt, who thus could order confidently from restaurants, ask people not just for directions but recommendations on what to do, and a whole host of other incredibly useful things that we probably would have benefited from on our journey. He’s also a cool story because he goes to Macalester and had the same thought process as me: “Wait, we have to pay full tuition to study abroad? How about I pay the $1000 Chinese tuition instead, and go to Kunming because it has better weather and less pollution?”

Anyway, in their company we went to a plateau beef restaurant and had an amazing meal consisting of yak prepared in a variety of ways with a variety of vegetables. It was a good time, not just because of the food and company but also because the restaurant was a far cry from the ones we’d been frequenting. It was a little hole in the wall that didn’t have menus; you just pointed at the specific vegetables you wanted and said which ones you wanted yak with. And then they cook it all up for you, and it ends up costing 22 kuai a person for a gigantic meal with eight or so plates, and butter tea. Awesome.

Following that, we decided to get a movie. We had a pretty involved search for a DVD store that was still open, but these are the kinds of things you can do with a decent command of the language! I got there a little after the first people, and this is what I found in their hands:

Yes, Harry Potter VS. Lord of the Rings. Tell me that’s not worth coming to China for.

Everybody was pretty pumped, but the problem was that they weren’t going less that 15 kuai. That was a little more than we were willing to pay, but the concerted efforts of six people weren’t enough to drop them below ten. We tried every trick in the book, even invoking our status as students to get it down to seven (I later used this to great effect on a ‘yak’ leather belt, even bringing out my Yunnan Normal University ID to get the last 10 kuai off), but they weren’t budging. So eventually we counted out 9.50 in exact change, gave it to them, and headed for the door. They laughed and let us go, but not before trying one last time to bring it up to 9.80. Definitely a good bargaining experience. The movie itself didn’t live up to its case unfortunately, and turned out to be just a compilation of a bunch of the films, no real combat involved. Still, the concept alone was worth it.

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I think I'm going to leave off there for now, because this is already getting long and it's already getting late. More on what we actually did coming up in the hopefully near future.

Lijiang

Stop two for us was Lijiang, a little further north and quite a bit higher than Dali. It was an interesting place that has a lot of history, but unfortunately is known for it. We were sort of taken aback on arrival: here was this absolutely beautiful, very well-preserved, quite extensive old city, filled with tiny winding streets lined with canals of glacial runoff, and every single building is a shop selling jewelry, old Mao memorabilia, ‘antiques’, made-to-order wood carvings, and other souvenirs ranging from the slightly tacky to the ridiculous. My favorites were the dreamcatchers. Yes, American Indian dreamcatchers like the ones you buy on the great plains, complete with bald eagles at the center. Feeding all of this were enormous amounts of people, jamming all the streets and making a constant racket. Almost all Chinese tourists, too, which surprised me a bit, though later someone suggested that perhaps most Western backpackers had been warned off, at least during National Day (which, to be fair, probably exacerbated all this considerably). The net effect was sort of an Eastern Venice: a remarkable place—it’s a world heritage site, after all—but one that’s been completely given over to tourism and no longer has anything else.

This doesn't quite capture the density, but gives you and idea of what we were dealing with.

Still, it wasn’t that bad, and we managed to see some pretty cool stuff while we were there. The first day we wandered around the town, getting quite lost in some of its streets. We ended up climbing a hill from which you could overlook the old town. Pretty good view:

Look at the size of that old town! And the pretty mountains in the distance..

Then we wandered around some more and ended up on top of another hill, since the only way to avoid the crowds seemed to be to outclimb them. This one had a temple on top, plus a pretty great view of Jade Dragon Snow Mountain:

Yulong Xueshan. It’s pretty impressive, and definitely dominates the skyline of Lijiang. And, at 5500 meters, 18,000+ feet, it’s the largest mountain I had ever seen by a fair margin. Wow.

That night we retreated to our guest house, where they were having a barbecue. This consisted of a huge number of skewers containing everything from eggplant and tofu to beef and squid. For 38元 we got to cook and eat as many of them as we could stomach. At this point in our trip we were experts on the barbecue skewer, having supplemented around 70% of our meals with them, but we had never done our own. So we proceeded to learn, and as of one week later managed to succeed in avoiding undercooked badness. It was great fun, though I was definitely nervous about the potential for raw pork. Plus we stuffed ourselves in a big way.

By day two in Lijiang, we decided we had done the city itself. So instead of hanging around some more, we went to Tiger Leaping Gorge, about 2hrs away. The gorge is a pretty amazing place: basically, the Yangtze River cuts between Yulong Xueshan and another, almost-as-tall mountain, creating a gash that at its most extreme points is thirty meters wide and thirty-nine hundred deep. That’s somewhere between twelve thousand and thirteen thousand feet. Whoa.

The approach to the gorge. Here you can get a little sense of how hugely far up into the sky these mountains go.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to do the real trek, which involves hiking the whole 20km length about 3000 feet up on one side over the course of two days. Instead we walked what is supposedly the narrowest, deepest section for about 2.5km. But the problem with that kind of height is that it’s hard to appreciate fully from the bottom, where you can see up a thousand or two but not even close to the full height. Even so, we were impressed:

Looking down the gorge.

When we had finished with the gorge, we got back to the lot to find that our ride had disappeared and apparently broken down. After a bit of frustrated conversation with our hotel (who had arranged our transport) we ended up asking a nearby minibus if we could hitch a ride back with them. That worked out well: the were a friendly family from Hangzhou, a city near Shanghai, and they were staying in a village outside of Lijiang that we’d wanted to check out on account of it’s supposedly being a little less touristy. So we took our ride with them and ended up in Shuhe, which did turn out to be quite a bit less crowded and just as interesting, if much smaller. We ate a very pleasant linner in a café literally over a canal:

After that, we decided to walk back to town, mostly because we didn’t have much better to do and thought it might give us some nice views. It didn’t really—most of the trip back was spent in what can only be described as brand-new, prefab suburbs—but it did give us the chance to see some of the new (read: real) town, which was nice. And we had a great conversation about the past and potential futures of Chinese foreign policy on the way back. This is why I like traveling with Swatties.

On our return, we dumped our stuff at the hotel and assured them that we had in fact survived, then set out to explore Lijiang by night. This was especially exciting because it was National Day proper, October 1st, and people were out celebrating everywhere. It was pretty exciting, and the crowds contributed for once. We saw tons of people wearing light up devil horns, and people floating little candle boats down the canals (and other people, a few hundred yards downstream, fishing them out with nets), and eventually, as we made our way back up the hill to our favorite coffee shop, the whole city lit up in celebration. It was a pleasant night, and a good way to end our time in Lijiang.

Some pictures from the weekend.

I don't know why this is acting up, but it's frustrating... Here's two pictures..

Dian Chi, seen from Xi Shan

The restaurant where we ate

Escaping Kunming! Not...

Today was day one of a three-day weekend we got because of the Mid-Autumn Festival, one of the big three Chinese holidays. This is a time for families to get together, hang out under the full moon, and eat mooncakes and other round things. For those of you unfamiliar with them, mooncakes are worth checking out. They’re sort of like pastries, only way more serious and dense. There are lots of different flavors, ranging from pineapple to candied ham, but to give you an idea the first one that I had was almond-flavored, and basically it was a 3-inch by 1-inch circle of Marzipan with a thin pastry shell on the outside. Pretty nice.

Anyway, because of the festival we don’t have class on Monday, so it seemed like a good time to get out of town. However, as sometime seems to happen, the plans kept shrinking. My first hope was to go to Yuanyang, which is a photographer mecca about 7hrs bus south of here known for its absolutely spectacular rice terraces. Later on I was hoping to go to Dali, about 5hrs west of here, which is an ancient city sitting on a lake surrounded by huge mountains (also home to a Swattie!!!). But I wanted to go with someone, and my candidate didn’t want to do 5hrs in a bus for just two days. So after some conferencing, we decided to go to Shilin (literally Stone Forest; think Bryce with more green plants), about two hours south of here, and spend just one night. But then a party got planned for tonight, so we made it a day trip.

That takes us up to this morning. At 8.30 sharp, I met Aly (my partner in exploration, a girl from the class I just permanently vacated, originally from Calgary) in front of the school. We got a taxi to the long-distance bus station on the other side of town, and proceeded to approach likely-seeming strangers to say “Shilin?” and get a point in some direction. Eventually we got to someone who answered us not with a point but by taking us inside and relieving us of 40 kuai each, exactly like the Lonely Planet said.

So far so good. But then instead of taking us to the minibus sitting outside, she lead us across the street to another bus station, where we waltzed through the ticket area to the place where the buses were parked. However, instead of getting on a bus here for Shilin, they let us sit a while. Then a new person came over and told us that to get to Shilin we would have to pay 30 kuai each. We were sort of taken aback, especially since our first person hadn’t given us a receipt (lesson noted). But the original saleswoman was still there, and intervened on our behalf. Unfortunately, the end result of this intervention was not a seat on a bus but the return of our original 80 kuai and instructions to go to a third bus station, down the street by the train station.

We made it there and after some confusion in which we were told there were no more tickets to Shilin we got through on our second try (five minutes later, at the same window) and scored tickets for now only 27 kuai each. Nice. But they were for 10.45, which left us a little more than an hour. We went and ate some baozi, then came back around 10.30, found the stall where the bus would load, and contentedly began to wait.

And wait. And wait. Around 11.00, with no bus to Shilin in sight, we and the other passengers were shifted back indoors. We got lucky to sit next to a couple of Shilinren who were very nice and great for language exchange. So we had a good time talking to them, at least. But when the bus still hadn’t showed at 11.30, we decided to finally cut our losses and bail for the day—at two hours each way, we would only have gotten about four hours at Shilin itself, and it apparently has a pretty steep entrance fee. Next weekend. (about 10 minutes after we left, we got a call from the couple telling us the bus had arrived and we could still make it if we ran. They were so nice!).

Original plan foiled, we decided to make a day of exploring instead. I was a little sad at first—I’ve been exploring Kunming for the last three weeks, and while I like it a lot I’m starting to wonder if it is indeed possible to leave—but it turned out great. We started walking aimlessly around and bumped into a market street (this is as opposed to a market. In my lexicon, market street means lots of people with bikes and cars full of fruits, veggies, and chickens who have parked and set up shop. Market is a little more permanent). Had a good time exploring that, looking at all the beautiful produce:

Then we went downtown and got shaved ice, which was heavenly after lots of heat and stress. After that went to the market (see above), where Aly bought sunglasses and I was tempted yet again by these gourd instruments they have here: a gourd with a flute coming out the bottom. I think I’ll get one in the pretty near future. Also by some sculptures I saw: various military vehicles—planes, tanks, and artillery—made out of spent bullet casings. Next we walked over to my favorite Green Lake Park and got more cold beverages. While we drank (mine was a variation on a float: either Sprite or mineral water with chocolate ice cream in it. Quite good) we had a great conversation. She’s done a lot of stuff: basically every big trip I’ve done for 2-3 months, she’s done for a year. Talked a lot about traveling and the impact/issues it creates with the host communities. Good to keep in mind.

Recharged, we explored Green Lake Park some more. This was great: there were as always lots of musical acts around the park, but they seemed somehow of much higher quality today. We saw two different kinds of folk dancing:

Ribbon folk dancing. These guys were really cool, and they had a whole choir of live music backing them up.

Hat folk dancing. This was more chill, with a boombox and anyone with a hat allowed to join in.

Then we got into a conversation with an amazing guy. He was 84, and remembered very well the American presence here in WWII (this is something I would like to learn more about; all I know is that when the Japanese invaded China, the Allies had troops here—I think a lot of airplanes—to help the Chinese fight back). That might have been how he learned English, which he spoke amazingly well. It was touching to see how much he still liked and appreciated America because of what we did way back then, to the point where he consciously chose to imitate the American accent instead of the British one. Amazing, spot-on demonstration of the different ways to say ‘not’.

After many assurances of the importance of English as the ‘word of the world’ and the excellence of our Chinese (absolute bs; I think maybe complimenting pronunciation is seen as a good last resort when foreigners can’t speak worth anything) and three handshakes (I was very honored by this), we parted ways. Pretty soon we came across another music act: this one was a violin, one of those one-stringed, bowed instruments (I really should know the word for these; my apologies), and a guitar, but played horizontally like a zither. They were amazing. At first it was just really pretty music, but later on they maybe noticed us and started playing things like “Auld Lang Syne” and “Edleweiss”. We both sang on that one :-).

Horizontal Hold (hah! Anyone? No.) style guitar

We saw some other cool stuff as well, which deserves commenting on. People flying kites, for one:

And the other is one of my favorite things so far. How’d you like to drive one of these?


This pilot is a little older than average, but that was my best shot. I really like these cars: kids pay some money and drive around inflated animal cars, and the best part is that they play Christmas carols the whole time!! I think that those songs are associated with amusement or carnivals or something here, because I’ve heard them most times that I see carnival rids (which are pretty frequent: at the park, at the zoo, on the street…). I’m all for this: I like the melodies of Christmas songs a lot, and they deserve more than one month of air time.

That was the day. Not bad, as it turned out, and it was good to be exploring with company for once. Maybe next week I’ll get out of town, or else the week after that is our vacation, so I’ll hopefully at least make it then.