Beijing I: Great Wall

August 12th, 2007
I entered Beijing the second time almost as ignominiously as I did the first (shrunken, swollen, and sobbing). I had only managed to obtain a hard seat for my overnight train ride when I bought my tickets, but as a result of trying to avoid the long semi-queue to get on the train, I managed to avoid my train entirely. I was able to transfer to the next train that night at no cost except my hard seat. Great. 12 hours of sleeping on the floor of the smoke-filled spit-covered space between compartments.

Fortunately, I got put on the same train as my friend Charles, whom I had met the night before in the hostel bathroom. In an act of valiance dubbed as xue Leifeng by the Chinese passengers next to us, Charles gave me his seat (Salut Charles! Si tu lis cela maintenant, merci beaucoup! Je t'embrasse!). Some time in the morning, Charles got his seat back as a result of someone else vacating theirs.

August 14th, 2007
My friends Nicolas and Pierre arrived that morning. Nico had read on his friend's blog about how the friend got to see a wild part of the Great Wall sans the commercial clatter of Badaling, Simatai, or Mutianyu over in Huairou. Problem is, his friend didn't really detail how he got there, but we decided to go to Huairou and ask around there. Being the adventurous type (Aren't we all more daring in another country?), the 4 of us hopped on a bus and hoped for the best.

The second we got off the best, we were accosted by a mob of Mandarin speaking solicitors. Interestingly enough, they followed me as opposed to the French boys, probably because they (the solicitors) spoke only Chinese. In the end, we arranged for one guy (le conard) to take us to an obscure part of the wall where there would be nobody else.

The drive took over an hour up the winding mountain path. When we got there, the guy demanded more money to wait for us to go explore and to take us back afterward. The final price was 40 yuan each, not too expensive, I suppose, considering the entry fees for the more frequented parts of the wall cost about that much.

Pictures as follows:

When we decided to go with our driver, he told us to hurry into the car because the police was coming. At the wall, I think we were guilty of trespassing.

There was a random-ass ass on the path up the mountain.

View from the sans annoying tourists in the way (!)

Some precipice. Yes, I climbed the great wall in a dress and jelly sandals.

Pierre, Nicolas, et Charles

Hi, Mom, this isn't as steep as it looks.

I think I miss you

Patricia: " Quelle est votre plus grande ambition dans la vie ? "
Le romancier Parvulesco: " Devenir immortel…et puis mourir. "
- A Bout De Souffle

Xi'an Part II

Saturday and Sunday (8/11 and 8/12. Yes, I realize all my entries are about two weeks behind and lack the flavor of the moment. Many apologies), I went out exploring with my new friends. Narration in picture captions.

First stop of Saturday: Dayanta, or Big Goose Pagoda. I don't really like the translation, for it makes the structure sound big and awkward like a goose. I think yan should actually be "swallow", a much more elegant bird.

A tree with its parasitic twin on the grounds of the pagoda. It reminds me of some artistic renditions of the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

In the afternoon, we went to the Great Mosque. On the way there, we passed by this display in a shop. Note the hairdo of the mannequin.

A Buddhist temple? Nope. This is the Great Mosque- the largest mosque in China.

There were a lot of tourists there, mostly foreigners with fancy cameras rabidly taking pictures of the interesting melange of traditional Chinese and Islamic cultures. I tried not to take with them too prominent.

At night, the city walls are illuminated rather beautifully.

My Oxford friends left Saturday night right after I met another boy from Paris. On Sunday, I went exploring with the three French boys. In the morning, we went to the Bell Tower and the Drum Tower. Observer the picture closely and take a wild guess which one this is.

There were a bunch of drums on display all around the drum dower with names of what appeared to be seasons inscribed on them. There was also a large drum that you can pay 30 yuan to hit.

The plaza in the center of the city had a bunch guys selling kites and loads of beggar children (not shown). Overall, it was an appealing sight.

In the afternoon, we went biking on the city walls. The ground is much, much bumpier than it looks.

fin.

Xi'an Part I

On the afternoon of Wednesday, August 8, I boarded a plane from Chengdu to Xi'an, a little hesitant that I did not pick the flight leaving the following evening. I had met my first batch of friends and was not yet used to the rapid succession of introductions and goodbyes of traveling alone in China.

My first two days in Xi'an were disappointing. I thought I had made a reservation at a Shuyuan hostel, a beautiful lodge in an old courtyard right next to the city walls, through my hostel in Chengdu, but it turned out that the staff failed to inform me that the hostel was full and they had stuck me in the other hostel owned by the same place, a rather shitty accommodation on the 3rd and 4th floors of some local university dorm. This place had none of the atmosphere of Shuyuan and few of the interesting internationals like the ones I met in Chengdu. Fortunately, Shuyuan had room for Thursday night, and I moved over the next day.

However, Thursday didn't fare much better for me. I had planned on biking around the city walls that morning but had to modify my plans as a result of the monstrous thunderstorm I had woken up to. I moved to Shuyuan in the morning, dragging my suitcase through the rain until I found a cab. In the afternoon, I visited the local history museum.

I suppose the museum was interesting although it had very few bilingual signs. It had artifacts dating all the way back to the bronze age. I was a bit tired and fell asleep in the lobby for about an hour. Here are some objects that I found amusing.

Tangsancai is a technique of ceramic glazing developed during the Tang dynasty involving 3 colors: ochre, green/blue, and the background beige. Here is a horse in Tansancai.

This is some sky god or another. There was a bunch of them at the museum. They're all standing on a midget, which is supposed to symbolize evil or something.

Thing with a human head in a cat-like lounging pose- downright creepy. It's also ceramic and supposed to be a (painful) pillow.

Thursday night, I hung out in the courtyard of Shuyuan being generally antisocial, observing the other travelers engaged in their small circles of conversation, too shy to join a group myself. I wasn't too happy with my situation.

Friday morning, I woke up early to go see the Terra Cotta Warriors (TCW). After a couple of hostel-organized trips in Chengdu, I had decided that I didn't like the feeling of being herded around like a tourist and opted to go myself via bus.

While waiting for the bus, I ran into four foreigners who turned out to also be going to TCW. Two of them were from Oxford University and two were from France. One of the French guys actually studied in Dalian for a year, and it turned out that we knew some people in common (like Ginger, the chic, trilingual chain-smoker girl).

Everyone knows what the TCW looks like. Here are a some pictures anyway just for kicks:

The obligatory "I was there and did not just google the images" picture. The guy is Dave, engineering student from Oxford.

Pit One (yes, it's actually called that officially) in all its glory.
The way the people are arranged is supposed to reflect the battle formation of the time. The people in the front are unarmored because they are just there are human shields for people behind them. There are also people facing the sides to prevent infiltration of the ranks.

They had Terra Cotta horses too! The original TCW were all painted lifelike colors. You can kind of see some color variation (long faded, of course) in the pieced together guys standing in the back.

There were all these places there where you can take pictures posing with or as TCW. They make you wear these foamy, terra cotta colored things. Some people (as in this picture) are actually cheesy enough to fall for these tourist traps.

And so began my real fun in Xi'an. More on that in the next entry. Meanwhile, here is a picture of my new friends walking down a picturesque street in the art district of Xi'an.

Chengdu

Monday, August 6th, 8 am: I had successfully arrived at my hostel in Chengdu and spontaneously decided to join a group of 5 westerners (2 English, 2 American, 1 Australian) on a day trip to Leshan, home to the world's largest Buddha. We arrived a couple hours later to a misty morning in the mountains. Due to the tiny droplets of moisture saturating the air, the surroundings had a hazy glow like in those Chinese kungfu movies where people fly through bamboo forests. Needless to say, it was absolutely breathtaking.

According to Wikipedia, construction for the Buddha was started in 731 by a monk who hoped to calm the adjacent waters with the Buddha's presence. The monk lived in a cave next to the construction site and gouged his own eyes out to show his piety. The Buddha was completed 90 years later and actually indeed made the waters safer as a result of the massive amounts rock removed from the mountains and deposited in the river. Photos as follows:

We waited almost 2 hours to get to the foot of the Buddha. The queue zigzags down the cliff next to the Buddha.

A feat of auto-photography. This took me several tries to get the angle just right.

At the foot of the Buddha. I'm not even as big as one of its toes.

The mountain and the waters next to the Buddha.

Tuesday, August 7th, 9:30 am: I arrived at the Panda Research Center after about an hour on two buses with the Australian from the day before. We decided to forgo the hostel organized tour to save money (him) and to experience the life of the common Chinese (me). We went in the morning because that is apparently the only time in the day when the pandas are awake and frolicking. We wandered around a bit, trying to squeeze ourselves between the throngs of squealing foreign tourists with their fancy cameras, and took a bunch of pictures ourselves. Here's a selection:

This is an adult panda. It was smaller than I imagined a panda should be. I got within a couple of feet of it while it was munching bamboo in its enclosure.

This is supposed to be a panda cub. A worker had put it on a horse thing. Oh look how cute!

A bunch of cubs reclining on a tree house thing. Pandas are incredibly lazy creatures, at least in captivity. All they do is eat and lie around all day. A worker coaxed one down, and it just climbed over the other ones in its way.

For 1000 yuan, you could hold a giant panda cub for photos. For 400 yuan, you could take pictures right next to a giant panda. I opted to hold a red panda (the kind nobody loves) for only 50 yuan. It was very soft and fluffy and came to nuzzle my feet before I held it.

Tuesday, August 6th, 8pm: For the sole sake of convenience, I payed 80 yuan to tag along with an organized trip to see Sichuan opera, an art famous for bombastic displays of fire breathing, acrobatics, and face-changing. The show turned out to be a watered down variety show catered mostly for foreigners, with excerpts of opera, erhu, puppets, and other pyrotechnics. All the performers were extremely talented, but the way the show was presented had a decidedly contrived feel meant to impress tourists. I suppose that this is the best way for practitioners of old Chinese arts to make money these days- to cater to rich, foreign tourists...

A scene from Romance of the Three Kingdoms rendered in Sichuan opera form.

Dance of the puppets. They twirled their flowing sleeves to flowering sounding music. Very pretty. At the end of the show, the same puppets did face changing along with the actors.

Tuesday, August 6th, 10pm: I had met a couple of English boys at my hostel and decided to go out with them that night after the show to a Dave's Oasis bar. The cab driver didn't exactly know where it was, but by a stroke of luck, I ran into my new friends on the street as they were coming out from dinner. What follows is an adventure that kept us up the entire night involving a pool, cards, a cafe resembling senior house, and conversation in the garden of the hostel.

Patio of the garden, where I pulled an all-nighter with the two English boys, a Canadian, and later a couple of French.

Finally, a brief list of people I hung out with in Chengdu by country:
2 American
1 Australian
1 Canadian
4 English
2 French

30 hours

When planning my travels around China, I had completely underestimated the sheer size of the country. I had planned to go from city to city by train as it is cheaper than plane tickets. The first leg of my journey, from Hangzhou to Chengdu, I had expected to take no longer than a night and maybe part of a day. When I went to buy my ticket, the sales lady informed me that the trip was in fact 30 hours- two nights and an entire day on the train.

Feeling somewhat intrepid, I bought the tickets even though all my new Chinese friends all told me that I should have just flew. How bad could it be? I got the soft sleeper, the first class of trains in China, so it shouldn't be too uncomfortable. Besides, I would get to see some lovely scenery across China. Thus, armed with two books and a large supply of snacks, I headed to the train station on Saturday night.

The 30 hours actually weren't bad at all. I slept well, and time seemed to pass quickly, much more so than it does on long plane rides. I shared a cabin with a university student, a man and his son, and an old woman, none of whom seemed particularly interested in a conversation with me, so I kept to myself the entire time and read my book. My only complain about the train was the provided "entertainment". A television that incessantly broadcasted the most irritating Chinese television shows and the most insipid music videos in a volume that could not even be blocked by my noise reducing headphones. With the exception of sleep time and nap time, it was always on and could not be turned off. Terrible.

But the scenery was absolutely magnificent. Thus, I spend much of my waking, non-reading hours outside my cabin marveling the view. To my pleasant surprise, I discovered by noon on the second day that I could take non-blurry pictures even though the train was moving. A selection of my photos as follows:

A peasant village with mountains in the background.

A house from another village. If you click to enlarge it, you can see a man in the front yard and some crops lying out to dry in the sun. Also note the duilian, lines of verse on red paper traditionally pasted around doors for luck.

Because of the mountainous terrain in much of China's south, crops are planted on terraces, as shown here.

Sometimes, the train would duck into a tunnel and emerge on the other side to a valley straddling a sparkling river.

In the evening, the mountains were a perpetual, hazy arabesque on the horizon.

And in the twilight, the mountains were reduced to enormous dark shapes in the expanses.

The next morning, I woke up to an attendant checking tickets a little after 5 am. The train arrived soon after, and I stumbled my way to my hostel at 6 am with the streets dark and the sky rainy. By 7, I came down to the lobby after showering to grab a small breakfast, and by 8, I was on a van to see the largest Buddha in the world with five foreigners that I had just met. More on that soon.

ZJU

I spent the past three weeks teaching at Zhejiang University. It's about time that I gave an introduction of the place along with pictures.

Zhejiang University (ZJU) was originally a school that specialized in engineering. In the early 90's, it combined with several other Hangzhou universities to become the new, monolithic Zhejiang University, with some 20,000 (I think...) undergrads and several campuses. I visited three of these. Pictures as follows:

Yuquan Campus
Yuquan was the original Zhejiang university, home to all the engineering departments and a ~10:1 boy to girl ratio. This is where I lived and taught.

Mao, with his arms raised in a salute to the people. The students say that he's hailing a cab.

The founder of the campus rendered in bronze in front of the library. He doesn't looks so big until you try to stand next to him.

The main teaching/research area of Yuquan dates back from at least the first half of this century. Here is an example of the old architecture, with the elegant uptilted eaves.

The student center of Yuquan has a pond in the middle. Around this are piano practice rooms and a cafe.

The dorm where I lived.

Huajiachi Campus
Named for a pond in the middle of the campus, Huajiachi is home to the agricultural research departments of Zhejiang University. Unfortunately, this campus has been sold and will be relocated in the next couple of years.

The eponymous pond.

Guide to the campus, including such sites as "Democracy Hall", "Peace Hall", and "Institute of Nuclear".

As it is an agricultural research campus, it had a bunch of experimental fields with experimental crops. They also had experimental pigs (not shown), euphemistically dubbed "safety pigs".

A red dragonfly perched on a twig in the middle of a small pond. I thought it was rather pretty.

I was rather amazed by an entire field of these, but all the people I showed this to never seemed to get what's so great about it. Do you?

The campus hires farmers to do the planting for the students. I rather like the juxtaposition between the fields and the buildings in the background.

My friend Zhou Wei, who took me around this and Zijingang campus. She is a communications major focusing on advertisement and made the two ads behind her.

Zijingang Campus
This is the newest and most modern campus of Zhejiang University, home to all freshmen and sophomores plus some upperclassmen of several majors. In the future, all majors except those housed at Yuquan will be relocated to this campus. I visited Zijingang the morning before I left with Zhou Wei. We rode bikes around because it is so large.

Zijingang had very modern architecture.

The inside of the architecture department building. I like the spherical things hanging from the ceiling.

Some guy with more spheres. Spheres seem to be a recurring theme of the decor of this campus.

A mushroom! These innocuous looking things are all over Zijingang, apparently used as little speakers to broadcast student news (and other propaganda).

And that is all. In other news, I left ZJU a couple days ago. After spending 30 hours on the train, I arrived in Chengdu this morning and immediately went on a day trip to see the world's largest buddha. Pictures soon.