Memories from the South

May 7-14
My program gave us a week off in which we were supposed to travel the country. Yuri and I waited until the last minute to make travel arrangements. We did not know exactly what we wanted to see except that we did not want to find the hordes of Chinese tourists and we did not want anything too complicated. That ruled out the limestone hills of Guilin, the distant Sichuan and the complexities of Tibet (which is more or less impossible to get into if you are an American college kid). We ruled on going to Shenzhen—the city where a good friend of ours from Wheaton resides—and then meeting up with Alex and Annie in Xiamen.
The Flight In
Yuri and I got a cheap flight (like $80) for the two hours down to Shenzhen. We had to pay for it at the airport when we realized the travel agent entered the incorrect passport number on our reservations. In a typical Chinese way, we just entered in the incorrect numbers and no one seemed to mind. Landing in Shenzhen we looked out the window at an endlessly expansive urban area. What were we thinking? There’s nothing down there for us, nothing interesting to see in the least.
Getting off the plane we were greeted with warm humid tropical air and the ever present smell of flowers. Yuri convinced me that it was a good idea to take a cheap airport bus into the city center and we ended up saving like 100 rmb. In the city, after some confusion, we figured out that the hotel I had booked was in the wrong area of town—in the middle of nowhere. We rebooked another place that was just as pleasant and closer to the “sights” of Shenzhen.
Pigeon
After getting off the plane, we were pretty hungry and eager to sample some of the world renowned cuisine of the area. The most famous plate to try was duck so we went to the first restaurant we found with roasted birds in the window. The menu was in traditional Chinese characters—typical of Cantonese speaking places—and Yuri pointed to what she thought was two plates of duck and rice. After a couple of bites Yuri relooked at the menu and realized that we were in fact eating pigeon, the delicacy of Shenzhen! It was just as tasty as duck but had way more fat and less meat. Being the birdbrain that I am I was a little spooked by the whole ordeal.
The “Sights”
Shenzhen is not known for much in terms of tourist attractions. All the same, it is a beautiful city and brand new in every way. The sidewalks are big and actually accommodate enough foot traffic—not common of any place in China. On the first evening, Yuri and I walked around the neighborhood our hotel was in. Close by was the Shenzhen stock exchange and many other financial and commercial monstrosities. It is quite the sight to see China’s brand new decadent architecture. Shenzhen is especially beautiful because when city planners were building the place 20 years ago, they didn’t have to work around any traditional neighborhoods, so it was possible to make a modern utopia without disturbing what was once there (or knocking over some poor people’s neighborhood).
A bunch of people asked us for directions. Most were South Asian, one was from Dallas by way of West Africa. All of them came up to us and asked me if Yuri spoke English, then they asked us both about directions, then I would say that we were from Shanghai and knew nothing about this place.
Walking around we ended up at the mall and spent some time there window shopping. We spent so much time in the mall in Shenzhen it reminded me of living in Ecuador and how I would spend hours just hanging out in the mall. When it was dark outside we walked around a park, saw some elderly ladies hip hop dancing and then we found a restaurant to eat at. We capped of the night by returning to the mall to watch an American movie in the Imax theater.
Tang
We had come to Shenzhen to hangout with our friend’s family or maybe some of his friends. Because our buddy Alfred’s parents couldn’t speak any English he didn’t think it was a very productive idea to introduce us to him. Instead we got the number of Alfred’s friend Tang. We were supposed to meet him at a starbucks at some mall.
As we were sipping ice lattes in the morning heat I got a call from Tang wondering where we were. Apparently we had gone to the wrong mall, he was on the other side of town. After a very expensive cab ride we found the guy. He took us to a brunch place to have traditional dim sum. The food there was exquisite.
Tang had just graduated from Parsons art school in New York. Now he was running the franchise of Dickies in China and working with several art galleries throughout the province. Because of his prosperous success he is emblematic of the people of Shenzhen and Guangdong province in general. I tried to pay the bill but he wouldn’t have any of it.
Parks
Yuri and I searched for some art galleries in Shenzhen but many of the galleries had nothing in them. Literally, they were open but had no art work what so ever. We instead hung out at another Starbucks and walked around the beautiful urban architecture. There was a park that we walked around for a little while. It was of course, full of people enjoying their weekend to the fullest. There were various park activities, music, dancing, kite flying, tai chi, yoyo slinging etc. the back drop of the park was the enormous buildings surrounding the stock exchange.
The Bus
We thought it was a good idea to take land transportation the few hundred miles north to Xiamen. There was only one option: the nine hour night bus. We overpaid an agency to get us a ticket on the bus after we were approached by some hawkers trying to pawn off some tickets to “anywhere we wanted to go.” When we arrived at the agency to pick up our tickets they assured us that we had booked the wrong day but that they would work it out any way. It was clear we were getting scammed and it only got more creepy…
When it came time to board the bus, they asked us if we wanted sleeping births or regular seats. I thought it was obvious—sleeping births. We followed some random employee around the endlessly large Shenzhen train station. Along the way we met more people who were going to get on our bus which made it a little more believable that, at some point, we would see a bus. We ended up waiting outside on the side walk for the bus to finally pull up and park illegally.
On the bus there was three rows of skinny sleeping births stacked three to the ceiling. You could sleep on ground floor middle or somewhere in the rafters. We settled on two beds right above the driver’s compartment. The bed only fit half of my legs, the other half just crumpled themselves up like I was dancing a jig. I felt bad for the two Swedish guys at the back of the bus who were a little taller than me. All night long the bus drivers sat below smoking cigarettes and talking. They never turned off the lights so there were a couple LED bulbs right in front of my face. It could have been worse but overall the whole experience sucked. Nuff said.
Xiamen?
Arriving in Xiamen was a true pain. Somehow every free cab in town knew about our coming and would not get us to our hotel for less than five times the normal price. Some guy eventually told us a price we could agree on and we got in his cab. He took us to one end of town, to some random hotel and said we were where we wanted to go. When we told him this was not where we asked to go he said it was going to cost us extra to get where we had originally negotiated on. When we finally got to the right hotel, I threw the money at his face I was so angry.
In the early morning Yuri and I walked around the hotel’s neighborhood which was a pretty normal urban Chinese scene: KFC, elevated roadway, garbage, cheap department stores but no people—it was a little early.
Temples and the beach
After eating some excellent, fresh seafood at one of Xiamen’s one zillion seafood stalls we headed by bus to Xiamen University. When we got off the bus instead of heading to the university saw a mountain side temple and headed there. On the way we bought some hats which we wore for the rest of the trip. Walking around the grounds a while we realized that you could climb to the top and get a great view from the various shrines built on the hill side. So we took off our flip flops and hiked to the top.
There were only a few other people on the trail. Mostly Taiwanese couples about our age. At the top we got some water and soda, took a few good pictures and then headed back down. We could see the new part of Xiamen, its port and the old town. The city of Xiamen is mostly on its own island and at this point we could look out over all of it.
After the temple, Yuri and I walked through Xiamen University. When we stopped for an ice cream break I realized that Chinese universities continue to amaze me: I thought they were going to be the ugliest collection of state funded buildings, and sometimes they are but more often than not, the campuses are very elegant in architecture and generally well kept. The one notable exception to this is Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, which is the worst learning facility ever created.
After walking through the campus we found ourselves on the beach. I thought it was going to be a polluted, oily, trashy, overgrown sand box but I was pleasantly mistaken; the city beach that we ended up on reminded me of the beach in Long Beach—big, crowded but enough sand to get the job done. We sat there for a while and realized we did not have the vantage to watch the sun go down.
Moss Burger
It took us about an hour and a half to get back across town by bus. When we got off the bus Yuri was very enthusiastic about going to a specific burger chain called Moss Burger that had an outlet in the mall close to our hotel. I ordered literally half of the menu and feasted out on burgers, chicken, fish sandwich with rice for a bun and fries. Moss Burger is a Japanese chain so portions are for small people—hence the indulgence. Yuri was happy with her little shrimp burger.
Resort Livin
Yuri and I decided that we wanted to live it up a little and stay at a nice hotel for a nice where we could meet Alex and Annie and share a room. So we ended up finding a Chinese run resort on the other side of the island. We got there and it was like arriving in Hawaii with flowers everywhere, bellmen, huge marble floors etc. It was pretty nice place.
We spent most of the day lounging by the pool, the in the evening we walked on the beach and ate seafood barbeque. It was funny to see Chinese newlyweds get their picture taken on the beach. There had to have been 20 couples all trying to get the same shot. One couple brought horses with their photographers. It was funny when the groom nearly stepped in horse dung. There were also a lot of WWII era bunkers that the Japanese had created during occupation.
Gualng (Yu) Island
Alex and Annie had gone ahead to Gulang Yu and Yuri and I were planning to meet them there in the late afternoon on the island. We had to take a ferry across the channel that was only a few hundred meters to the island. We asked around at the terminal for the right ticket to the island. Not listening to what we said an attended just waived us on the boat and told us we could buy tickets on the boat. Once the boat had filled a little over capacity the crew picked up the gang plank and we were off.
Something was not right about the ride though and once we were off some tour guide started yelling into a microphone at full volume random facts about the island. We turned the corner around the port on Gulang Yu and it was clear that we had got on the wrong ferry—the tourist ferry. I was in hell. I hate boats to begin with and having to overpay for a longer ride was not what I had in mind. Yuri enjoyed herself though, snapping pictures of island as we passed around the colonial ruins.
For some background on the place Gulang Yu was the center of European concessions after the opium war. It was the site that first the British, then French and the Dutch were allowed to trade with Xiamen and the surrounding area. During WWII the Japanese took over and made it the center of their colonial possessions near Xiamen. Somehow the colonial styled buildings lived through the Cultural Revolution and today it is a cute little tourist attraction overrun with Chinese visitors since there was some love movie made about the place some years ago.
On the island it took a while to find Annie and Alex at our hotel. The island’s streets are impossible to navigate and have no real marked addresses. Our place was quiet, relatively mosquito free but very much a few steps down from the place we were just at.
For dinner we went to a beach side restaurant to get some seafood. Yuri used her expertise to pick out the tastiest live specimens she could find. Every sea creature they had was alive and swimming or floating around of little Plexiglas containers. They had everything from octopuses to dungenous crap. Unfortunately for us we paid way more than we should have and we got ripped off at this particular restaurant.
Because of the unbearable heat (for the non-South Americans anyway) and the overwhelming crowds we decided to wake up at the crack of dawn and wander around the city then. It was a process of getting lost and then finding something interesting like a nice café or a church and then getting lost again. There was nothing on the island that was really a must see location so we were fine with just wandering. In the late afternoon we slept.
In the evening the four of us found a street food street that had the same seafood menu as nicer places but at a quarter of the price. We munched on the delicacies of the region in the alley way surrounded by wandering bodies and wandering mounds of trash moving windward. Then we played darts at a small bar and had dreadfully awful beach cocktails.
The next day was mostly the same pattern of wandering, eating and napping.
The Train Back
The last day spent on Gulang Yu was a short one. Yuri wanted to get to the train station early, before our train showed up so we wouldn’t miss anything. We got to the station almost three hours early and waited at Moss burger in the interim. We had purchased first class ticket because they were only 50 kuai more than normal seats and we figured we might need the extra room as the train was going to take almost nine hours.
On the train we expected the worst and got it. It was an almost unbearable trip to ride for the first six hours as two little children ran up and down the hallway screaming and playing. It wasn’t the kids fault, just their nannies who just played cards and gambled the entire trip.
When we got to Shanghai our cab driver blasted Lady Gaga and sped to Fudan to get us home in record time. The trip overall, a success.

Kaifeng pictures

Kaifeng II

We had an early morning appointment with the leader of Kaifeng’s society of Jews. Our tour bus pushed its way through clogged alley ways and dropped us off at a road that was too small for cars. We all crammed in her doorway as she told us her story in Chinese and broken English. Our program director was turned onto the idea of going to Kaifeng because Kevin, my roommate from last semester, had done research on this woman and the rest of the Jewish people in the city. Most of the descendants in Kaifeng trace their roots back to a lost Persian tribe who showed up in China around the year 1000. A small portion of the Jewish population came from Russian Jews during WWII and stuck around after the war. Racially speaking, the Kaifeng Jews resemble Han Chinese but of course do not have the same cultural traits. They are a small group of believers in Kaifeng, they do not have a rabbi but they are able to sing some of the prayers in Hebrew they learned from travelers that have passed through the area over the years. In any case, the Kaifeng Jews area passionate bunch. The woman who led the tour gave a story about how she once tried to become an Israeli citizen but failed. Although they would allow her to convert to Judaism and repatriate she has refused because she claims that she was born a Jew and has no need to convert to a religion that she has already been born into.
We walked through the streets, passed a mosque and a church. It seemed that the lifestyle on the streets we walked on had not changed for 1000s of years, regardless of innovation. Old men sat on their chairs, smoking their long tobacco pipes, simply watching foot traffic. There were skinned rabbits hanging in the air and people selling giant baozi. Everyone seemed to live in a small two-story wooden apartment building with little court yards in front.
We passed through a mosque and then onto a catholic church. The mosque was very old and built in a traditional Chinese architecture style, meaning it had curved slate roofs and the paint scheme was delicately created. It didn’t resemble any conventional mosque I had ever seen in Africa or Europe. The church however was what one would expect from a church. It had high columns and it looked similar to what one could find in the west. All the Catholics in my program sat and prayed for a few minutes and then we were off.
After eating “kosher dumplings” we walked through a historic museum of sorts. I couldn’t quite tell if the buildings were remakes or they had just been left in perfect condition since the last flooding of the city some 500 years ago. The most interesting thing that I saw was a miniature rendition of what the streets of Kaifeng were supposed to look like 1000 years ago. There was almost no change to the present day except for the fact that in the 21st century cars roamed the streets. Every street in Kaifeng might be the same as it was 1000 years ago in China. And that is why this city blew me away.
Our next stop before the train ride home was at another historic park of the iron pagoda. I walked around the premise for a little while but I had no interest in waiting in line to get to the top of the monument, especially when there were only two windows in the whole thing. Instead I kept exploring and found a man made pond. It was big enough to cater to a steady amount of fishermen. One guy had a troop of body guards around him as he threw a few lines in. I walked past their militant stares and ended up at the historic city wall. There at the edge of all things Kaifeng, there were no people.
At the train station we waited for a good hour for a late train to show up. Although the train back to Shanghai took seven hours it was a great time to pass with friends. We drank beers and played cards mostly. The train, which is the same design as the Swedish X2000, was brand new and very comfortable.
Back in Shanghai, it was clear by the steel and neon that I was back in the 21st century.

Kaifeng and my birthday

4.14-16.11
I was a little bummed because Yuri was gone in Hong Kong with her study trip during my birthday but my buddies were hell-bent on celebrating the event. The night before we went to my favorite bar, club DaDa, for Motown music night. In the morning I had class and then I met up with the rest of my group to go to Kaifeng on our weekend study trip.
The forty-odd number of were booked on a hard bunk sleeper for twelve hours to the ancient city. Getting on the train we were greeted with the raw stench of a cooped up a travelers and an unclean toilet. The beds weren’t too hard anyway.
Any feelings of discomfort were soon forgotten. My compartment filled up with people and we started drinking the cocktails we smuggled in our rucksacks. When it comes to a competition of who can be more obnoxious, Chinese migrants or rowdy Americans, the college students win. I had a lot of fun. Spending my birthday on a train was just what how I wanted to celebrate!
In the early morning we arrived in Kaifeng. It was a real funny feeling stepping out into the train station at 7 in the morning; it was like I had stepped back into time, 10-20 years—maybe one or two thousand years. Kaifeng was something else. Everything was communist era buildings. The traffic plaza in front of the train station was clogged with wandering rickshaws, tricycles, bicycles, busses, human feet and cars. The town was not sleepy in the morning; it had been used to such a wake up routine for thousands of years.
We checked into our five star hotel and had a huge breakfast. When we were about to leave, people acted kind of weird, like there was something they weren’t telling me. Then out of nowhere, Michelle led a waitress wielding an enormous birthday cake to my table. We had cake and Annie put her piece in my face. On the bus Alex commandeered the stereo and put on a birthday mix of music I like. It felt really nice have my buddies pitch in for a good birthday.
The bus took us to the village of Shaolin—the bus got lost along the way for about an hour. The town that is world renowned for finding the art of kung fu is situated in between some bumpy mountains. We had lunch and then stood outside looking at a completely empty field. It was about the size of two football fields and I thought it would serve a purpose along those line but later that night I learned that the space was actually used for hundreds people practicing kung fu.
We got to the Shaolin temple and had to walk through hundreds of trinket stands to get there. We were led for a while as a group through the temple area then left on our own to explore through the various shrines. Most of the shrines were obstructed by gates and souvenir stands, at least the stands were being operated by monks.
There were a few blossoming trees that I took pictures of but I was not too interested in the temple, it was simply too nice and too well put together. I ventured on and found the cemetery. It was special because the graves were above ground and were shaped into small pagodas. Apparently this practice dates back to the Song dynansty, which is quite a long time ago. It felt a bit like walking around a graveyard in New Orleans but much more peaceful.
I walked across the monastery because I heard loud and flashy music. On a stage close to the entrance the monks were giving a presentation of their kung fu skills in front of flashing Chinese tourists and oriental hip-hop music.
That night after returning to the hotel I headed out to a street market with Steven, Alex and Annie. Steven and I had a strange hankering for either McDonalds or street food, both options were abundant but somehow street food just seemed like the thing to do. We arrived on at an intersection of two alleys. There were wooden two story buildings on the street; one was blasting Chinese opera music. The music sounded awful, with its terrible intonation but it was all fitting. With the slow movements cars, bicycles and rickshaws crawling through the streets, the horrible music and the fact that the street always had trash on it, but never seemed dirty, I felt this was probably the most Chinese moment I had yet come across.
We ate fried dumplings, lamb kebabs and some chicken necks. We passed on frogs and roaches on sticks and stayed clear of stinky tofu, which literally smells like feces. We looked at a street vendor stands but it was all junk. During our walk down the alley, people would stop us and ask us questions like where we came from and what were we doing in Kaifeng. People in this city were exceptionally nice to us and happy to see foreigners. One couple reminded us how lucky we were to be there, if they saved up for all their lives they could never travel to our country.

Time to Pretend

Now my life is out of the safety of American education system, off the Fudan campus and away from my friends—most of whom have now left to go be back home. Yuri left two Thursdays and now I am alone in a new apartment building. Actually, I’m not alone, I live in a penthouse apartment at the top of an ordinary complex with seven other roommates from various different countries and cultures.
I moved to a new place where I will stay for the next two months as I do an internship downtown at a consulting company named Emerging Asia Group.
The neighborhood that I am living in is a big change from the college atmosphere that I was previously in. Yanchang and Pingxingguang road is a far more useful place, full of life, a step back into the life of traditional Shanghaiese. When I walk the streets to the metro stop, to the watch repairman, to the grocery store I cannot understand a word spoken. Everyone speaks Shanghaiese which sounds like the humming and grinding of a band saw with the cozy complexion of Japanese; a steady humzzzshshsh.
Being one of few foreigners in the neighborhood I get the usual stairs walking down the street. As usual, when I order in a restaurant or get my dry-cleaning done it is expected that I can’t speak Chinese or understand anything. Usually, I can’t understand the Shanghai dialect they speak but when I reply in Mandarine I am received with reactions of excitement and surprise. It turns out that before the communists took over it was more common for people to speak English than Mandarin.
My daily routine starts in the morning after I leave my apartment for the day. I step outside on the city streets and almost immediately I am greeted with the most intense breakfast action one can imagine. Right outside the vegetable market stands selling buns, fried dough, Chinese sandwiches and—what I always order—cracker sandwiches made like a wrapped up egg crape. I wished it smelled like breakfast but instead it’s a combination of slaughtered chickens, liquid garbage and the sweet foreign smell of roasting ducks. I push through the clogged sidewalk traffic of early morning grocery shoppers until I get to the metro line 1, ten minutes outside my apartment. I push bodies to cram on the train and it remains clogged for a few stops until the Shanghai Railway station. Listening to my iPod somehow relieves the personal space problem.
I get off at Huang Pi South Station. When I emerge to the surface I arrive in a different world from the one that I live in. I take a shortcut through a Hong Konger built skyscraper that is always immaculately clean. Street side Starbucks and Coffee Bean compete for their corner posts; there is a Mac store and a Zara. I cross the street kitty-corner in the four way cross walk and head for the Tiffany’s, at the corner of that building is the skyscraper where I shoot up to the seventh floor.
At work I spend my day researching companies that no one has ever heard of, mid-size pharmaceuticals, branches of major conglomerates, HR, financial M&A etc. I search very oblique information and try to understand how these companies could fit into China. Then I write reports about it. At about 12:30pm, the whole office leaves for lunch and we enjoy a one hour break together. The afternoon goes by with more Google searches and corporate research.
At six o’clock I get off work and head downstairs to head home. When Yuri was still here she met me a couple of times at my office and then we headed out for dinner or just an evening walk. It was fun to walk past to Porsche and Cartier shops pretending I had a real job that could afford this stuff. Because my stipend is so modest and my time at my internship is so short, it is like everything is a game of pretend, just to see if I like this lifestyle. All evening long Shanghai unnaturally puts on a light show with its florescent signs and designer neon lights.
When I don’t eat downtown near my office I head up to where my apartment where I can either have a meal for a little over a dollar or I can head to the nearest shopping mall and get a burger or some Japanese food. The neighborhood gets quite once the market closes around 6:30 or 7pm. Heading home, the interestingness of the day is over when I get to the top of my apartment to my cozy little room and the 14th and a half floor.

Day 3

5.1.11
I checked out of my hotel late and went toward the mid-level escalators in Soho. There you can walk up hill through different levels of bars and restaurants. This would have been the place to go to a bar or two. The restaurants were expensive and too classy for my raggedy ass backpacker mentality. I did end up in a Cuban cigar store.
Crossing Soho off my list I then wanted to buy some t-shirts in a shopping district in Kowloon. Coming out of the subway I found thousands of people clogged onto sidewalks in the soggy heat. Not what I was expecting, not what I wanted and on top of that, I was disablingly hungry. I found a back street Yunnan noodle shop that tasted nothing like anything I had ever had in Yunnan and was happy. It took me about 10 minutes of walking amongst the masses of people (the only place I had ever seen so many people in China was at the Expo) to realize that this was not my scene. I was tired and wanted a nap so I headed to Victoria Park to find a park bench or some grassy shade to rest on.
Again, not what I was expecting. This time I found that Victoria Park (it’s like New York’s Central park but a lot smaller) was invaded with South East Asian women. I mean completely taken over! I imagine most of these women are nannies or housekeepers on their day off, they were certainly having the times of their lives. Everywhere I walked I tried not to step on people or the plastic blankets they put on the ground to sit on. The women separated out into groups, probably by language and by religion—some had head scarves, some didn’t. Sometimes I could pick up on a few words of Tagalog—a Spanish crossover—or Indonesian—said to be the simplest language in the world to understand. I finally found a place outside the park in front of the harbor to collect my exhausted thoughts. Then another group of women smoking katarek cigarettes came over and joined me speaking loudly in Indonesian.
I walked around town until I found the impressive Hong Kong convention center and had an ice coffee. I walked around the largest glass window in the world and then set out for the metro. Abruptly my adventures in Hong Kong came to end, hopefully with the epitaph: to be continued.

The plane ride to Shanghai was simple and comfortable. I met some Americans, one guy who was on a holiday with his Shanghaiese fiancée and another pair of young doctors who worked at the clinic I go to. Back in Shanghai things were quiet on the May day holiday and part of me felt like I still wanted to be in Hong Kong, not heading back to my Chinese home.

Day 2

I got a prep call early in the morning before my meeting with Will Hay from mom and dad. From there I headed down town, back to Central Hong Kong. I was able to find the restaurant we were to meet at easily and I got there about ten minutes early. I went into the restroom, where once I was leaving I met Will. Soon we were sitting at the table of a Michelin one star restaurant with a view of the Hong Kong harbor.
Will’s wife joined us and we sat for two hours, at dim sum and talked about everything China. Will and his wife are very knowledgeable in the area, not only because their family has been living in Hong Kong since the mid 90s but also because they both have graduate degrees in Asian studies. After a pretty great brunch, we parted ways and I left walking, to where exactly, I didn’t know.
I headed up the hill following signs to a Catholic cathedral. Instead I wound up finding a botanical garden and zoo carved out of the mountain side. I visited with the various anthropoids and sniffed a few flowers and tried again to find the cathedral. This time I found it. It was lodged in between enormous apartment blocks that obscured it from view. I was more interested in the apartments than the normal looking church. It turns out that most housing complexes in Hong Kong are public projects funded by tariff surpluses.
Walking through some more neighborhoods I realized I was not finding what I really wanted to find: the Peak tram. Somehow I wound up following some signs in the right direction to get to the tram stop. At the tram stop I became nauseous by how many eager tourists were in front of me. I did something radical and for the next hour and a half climbed the 2km straight up. The endless amount of stairs and paved trails made me sweat buckets in the tropical heat but I couldn’t complain, the views got increasingly better. At one point I was about to give up, thinking I was lost beyond recognition and I wanted to turn around, but just at that point I saw this I saw sign pointing me to the top. Bellow the beautiful city was quiet and peaceful next to the steep green cliffs. The peak did have the best view I had come across yet but it was at a steep cost: the place was overrun by tourists. I thought the place lacked too much class so I was soon heading down toward civilization.
Back in the city I tried to find a place where I could soak up some architecture. I found it on a walkway beneath the Bank of China building, Hong Kong’s most recognizable structure. I stood above a busy intersection for about 20 minutes just tacking in the city. After the urban amazement I was considerably worn out and headed back to my room to take rest, stopping along the way for some world famous mango juice.
At night I went on a mission to find some street food. I went close to the hostel, in a mostly residential neighborhood. I finally found a place that had food in front of the woks and grill (most places had menus which I couldn’t read). I stood in front of the women making food waiting for them to listen to my pointing and food charades until a man who was sitting put his hands in the air and said in English “Ok I will help you”. He wrote down a menu card and then invited me to sit with him. It turned out he had recently retired from owning a live fish selling business in Oakland, he was very happy that I was from the Bay Area. He was half drunk and had some sort of neurological issue so he was a bit goofy but a great dinner companion all the same.

Hong Kong I

4.29.2011
In a non-caffeinated stupor my day more or less started when I tried to call my parents at the gate at Pudong international airport. As soon as my call went through a horde of retired Chinese tour-goers invaded my clearly available waiting bench and personal space. Fighting for seats they barked in full volume from across the airport. When it was time to board the plane the aircraft quickly filled to capacity with more extremely loud Chinese tour groups. These are the people that are taking retirement trips provided (presumably) by their former employers. Chinese grandmas and grandpas populate these tour groups, many had never been on a plane before, nonetheless traveled across the border to Hong Kong.
I left the Mandarin China behind me when the Chinese tour groups were grazed in the opposite direction by the florescent flags of their tour guides, the flags that they would live and die by for the next few days. In Hong Kong I was immediately presented with a humid tropical smell mixed up in the ping-pong like syllabic clarity of Cantonese. I knew by the smell and the language that this was a new country all of its own. And also because the first business I saw was a caviar bar serving winded jetsetters.
I stood in the immigration line with a constantly increasing number of foreigners. I was quick to get my carryon and person into Hong Kong as I sprinted through declarations. Upon official entry into the Special Autonomous Region I asked information how to get to my hostel on public transportation and if I had the right SIM card. I soon bought my ticket on the fast train to the city center and was whisked into one of city that I had always dreamed about traveling to.
My analysis of Hong Kong began underground in the metro towards my hostel. I felt I could look at people here because they did not stare at me with infinite curiosity like migrants and common peddlers might in the Shanghai metro. People got on and off the train, mostly Hong Kongers speaking Cantonese, but also Australians, Brits and Americans. Generally speaking young people looked fit and healthy, wearing new designs and classy dress; old folks looked older than in China but with the humble grace of the elderly.
When I finally got to my train station I felt a bit like a paratrooper dropping into the depths of chaos and disorganization; everything was new to me. I focus on finding my hostel and followed some maps and directions, crossed the rooftop walkway that felt a bit like a tree house, climbed to the 12th floor of an immaculate youth center and found my fresh and clean hostel. I checked into my room, the cheapest single in town at a cost of $80USD a night.
Once I got situated in my new room, I stumbled out of the hostel in hypoglycemic delirium. I searched for any restaurant with edible options. The first place I found was packed and the food looked good but the menu was in traditional characters and I didn’t have a clue what was going on. The place next door had a menu with pictures and English, so I got some duck noodles and was happy.
After the quick refresher I headed out to explore the city, after all I hadn’t yet seen terrestrial Hong Kong. I headed for a street walk which the guide book claimed was a taste of the old world. After riding the Island Railway to its end (HK gives its metros names instead of numbers) I emerged into a normal day in Hong Kong. Small streets lined with sidewalks filled with hurried workers and business people lay bellow the towering apartment buildings. The streets reminded me a lot of Chinatown (in Boston or San Francisco) because the shops sold dried meats and fish, along with herbal medicines. I snapped shots of giant shark fins and dried lizards on sticks while shop keepers watched me in amusement. Along the way I also walked around a hospital and saw some double-decker street cars. After a while the newness of everything was warring off and I decided to move onto Central Hong Kong to see some buildings.
This time I got off at the Central Hong Kong stop and headed for the ferry terminal. I walked on one of Hong Kong’s many tree-house like rooftop walkways through the financial institutions and five star hotels bellow. Along the way I saw lots of expats, to my surprise many Americans. Judging by their suits and tastes in eye glasses these Americans had been here since the 80s. The ferry I got on took me across the harbor to Kowloon. It was very foggy and I could not see buildings or the surrounding hilltops very well. All the same I walked on the water front. After a little walk I went to the same place I had lunch and crashed in my hotel room.

Yunnan VIII

3-19
In the morning I knew it was time to get up not when the rooster hollered at 3am but more when the Water buffalos started farting at 6am or so; once the funny looking beasts were awake they start eating and digesting. I was particularly fond of the water buffalos and they were interested in me too. The first one I saw was when we were first entering the village. She came up and greeted us all with big black eyes and loud sniffs.
Before breakfast the group toured a monastery. In the regional sect of Buddhism—which is closer to the Thai sect rather than traditional Chinese Buddhism—it was the beginning of the New Year. Traditionally people head to the monasteries before breakfast and give offerings but either 8am in the morning is not early in the village or people were still doing chores because the place was deserted except for a few orange robed boy monks. The temples shrines and religious statues were small and simple but touching all the same.
Breakfast was simple and soon we slapping on sunscreen in preparation to hit the trails back toward another village with paved roads. The trip started out downhill through hill side tea plantations. The morning air was cool and pleasant and we walked fast. Our tour guides encouraged us that we were going to make our destination in half the time. As we eventually hiked uphill and the South East Asian sun showed its might, the village couldn’t come soon enough. Some pathetic hikers refused to walk anymore forced our super-man tour guide Jimpa to whisk them to our destination on a motorcycle he borrowed from a villager.
After lunch I dug into my seat on the tour bus and rested the three hour trip back to the city. Outside were fruit, sugarcane and rice plantation. I saw the first evidence of mechanized agriculture on the sugar cane fields.
Back in the city we were treated to a five star hotel—I would have been fine with just a place with a shower. At night I walked around with a rowdy group of my friends. We were happy to eat at KFC and drink cold beer in the humid night. Later I walked around a bar district right next to the Mekong River with Annie—a friend from Brooklyn, Alex and Jimpa. Our last night in Yunnan was clear and pleasant; it was night to end a great trip in a city that smelled like flowers.

Yunnan VII

3-18
Felling better I ate a great Western breakfast. Today was the day to leave beautiful Lijian which by 8am was quickly becoming overrun by tourists. We were flying to the south of Yunnan province, to the prefecture of Xishuangbanna. The flight out of town was a simple 20 minutes. It was comfortable because I got my own row on the airplane. It really beat the hell out of taking a 10+ hour bus ride through the mountains.
At the airport it was clear that Xishuangbanna was a completely different place—the northern tip of South East Asia. The climate was once again tropical and the ground flatter. Huddling into a tour bus we headed toward the center of Jinghong to have our lunch and drop off our bags. Also leaving the airport was a tour bus full of women in their colorfully traditional South East Asian dresses.
After leaving the city, which is the first city of the Mekong River, we headed to the hills. It took us three hours to get to a place where the tour bus could no longer move. The bus got stuck in the mud and after Team Gucci hoisted enough logs into the thick brown mess the entire group set out by foot for a village deep in the mountains.
We walked through tea groves for about an hour until we reached the village of Bulang at dusk. The humid air was coming off of the cane houses. There was a pleasant warmth and coziness to the little hamlet. We took pictures of the sunset and the cute babies that were wandering about. The hills five miles in the distance belonged to Burma, not China. We took pictures of that too.
After dinner there was some talk that the villagers wanted to challenge our group to a game of basketball but with nine o clock darkness no one showed up. A group of friends and I decided that we wanted to get to bed so we found our accommodations on the floor of the house of a family from the village. The village was populated with an ethnic flock that had more similarities with Thai people than Han Chinese, known commonly as Dai people. This was mainly because they took most of their religious practices from Theravada Buddhism.
The house that we stayed in reminded me of the cane houses that I routinely visited in the slums of Ecuador. They were simple structures made of bamboo and flattened cane, the roofs were tin, there was an outhouse outside and of course there was no electricity. Before we went to sleep, we drank tea with the house’s matriarch. Our mandarin skills were at about the same level as hers but we communicated enough to learn that she had once been to Beijing but traveled back to her village because it was a much better place by far. Even though we only had the hard wood floor for a bed I was comfortable there and fell asleep soon.

Yunnan VI

3-17
A combination of tired white blood cells and dogy food meant I had to take the day off. The group was planning on taking a bike ride out to see a performance by Zhang Yi Mo (the guy who designed the opening ceremony for the Olympics). One guy from Team Gucci asked me “what you can’t do the bike ride?!” My only response was:“Are you joking me?!”
I spent the day sleeping reading. In the mid afternoon and the evening I took light walks through the alleys and along the canals of Lijiang. The old city is stunningly beautiful, kept the way it must have been hundreds of years ago. It is very easy to get lost anywhere but luckily there are maps on almost every corner, the only problem is that they are written in Chinese.
The shops mostly sell modern things like sushi and souvenirs. The city caters to armies of urban Chinese and a few foreign tourists. Regardless of tackiness, the old architecture remains and there are a few ancient walking humanoids that look like they have been living in the old city since the beginning of time. In the evening some friends of mine dragged me out for a night walk to do some shopping. I wasn’t quite feeling up to it, but I tagged along for a couple of blocks.

Yunnan V

3-16
The next day started out with the delicious banana pancakes. After breakfast we were given “hiking instructions” and then told to organize in groups ranging from the fastest walkers to the slowest. I was in the fastest; one guy had a knock-off scarf that we raised like a flag so we called ourselves team Gucci. We were six guys and one Tibetan tour guide, Jimpa.
It took us an hour to get to the top. At times we were almost running up the peak. At the top we raised our flags and then quickly began again. There was very little time to enjoy the jagged mountains and the snaking river thousands of feet below. Tiger Leaping Gorge is China’s equivalent of the Grand Canyon. The trail got warmer as we went higher up and the trail also gets more interesting. The end of the walkway fell almost immediately into the emptiness bellow. Along the way we saw a group of Korean tourists who we cheered on with the enthusiastic rowdiness of any group of American men. We also came across a goat Sheppard dressed in traditional mountain attire. I told him in Chinese that I liked his vest.
After having lunch at a hotel along the trail we made the boring decent back down to the road. The trail went through a mineral factory which was busy putting holes in the mountains. By the time that the bus left the mountainous road I got the idea that beautiful scenery destroyed by bad engineering to make this place accessible to tourists. Chinese people think they can completely control Mother Nature whereas Americans think that nature gives gifts that much be harnessed from the earth. The end result of the prior ideology causes great erosion and environmental destruction.
Our stop for the next two nights was the UNESCO world heritage site of the old town of Lijiang. There I ate some bad beef which floored me for the next two nights.

Yunnan IV

3-15
Leaving Shaxi in the morning I got to enjoy some morning light by the crystal clear river on the outskirts of the old town. The first place the tandem tour busses stopped at was a monastery in the hills where images of the Buddha had been carved into a mountain side until the youth brigades of the Cultural Revolution blew them to dust. It was a freezing morning walk to the top of the main part of the monastery. The climax of the monastery trail was beautiful but I was sure if I could walk a little more up the trail I would find something a little more significant.
I wandered up the trail and I began to miss my mountain bike. The trails reminded me of Nor Cal and the best mountain biking trails I could imagine. Climbing up a rocky switch back I could hear voices above me. It was a group of my colleagues and we hiked up the mountain together.
We ended up finding an untouched nunnery that was as old as time. Walking further we entered the temple associated with the monastery to find that two people were still constructing and painting the images of their deities. There were flowers blossoming in front of the wooden monastery. It looked like the ancient temple had been gutted a few years ago but came upon a little pity money from the government to rebuild what had been lost during the destructive frenzy of the Cultural Revolution.
Continuing on the trail we came to the flat part of the mountain where I could see nothing but trees and mountains—the first time this has ever happened to me in China. It was unstoppably awesome: all I could see was trees and mountains all I could hear was wind. There is a connection with nature that knows no national boundaries—only peace of the natural world.
On the walk down back to our tour bus doom we saw a tribe of monkeys as interested in us as we were in them. It’s always nice to see relatives. The bus took us through a valley known for stone carving and eventually had a tasty lunch in an agricultural and industrial town.
On the way up the mountains our tour bus caravan stopped abruptly and we all got out to go into a Naxi woman’s home (Naxi being the main ethnic minority of the region). This was in a village in which no one knew its name, a woman who was not expecting 40 foreign visitors let us into her home. With all that aside she offered us all tea and walnuts that we cracked with the bottoms of our shoes.
She wore traditional Naxi dress and told us she was a communist party member and she lived in the home of the former landlord. I looked around her house and found ancient farming tools and donkey sheds that have since changed their purpose. It turns out that Naxi people are an umbrella minority for many other minorities in the area. Many villages have different languages and styles of dress but if they were all to be official minorities they would get a place in the National Congress, which would make there be more minorities than Han Chinese. Outside a very old Naxi woman was working the canola fields. It was all a great site (see the picture of the woman in the field).
Back on the bus we burned through mountainous death roads on the cliffs of the steep canyons that we would soon call home for the night. By the time we got to our hostel we all became aware that we were surrounded by mountains and cliffs at a place called Tiger Leaping Gorge. I took a before dinner walk to a waterfall then had a simple night of sipping beers and talking about Giants baseball.

Yunnan III

3-14
Now that we were further west in China early morning light was scares. After a breakfast of the odd combination of drip coffee and one steamed bun the tour was led to a small village outside the limits of Dali. By the time we got off the bus in the village, the light was just perfect enough to snap a few great shots of village life. The village was a little too nice to be true. We walked through the streets as a 40 foreigner army of students and yet no one really glared at us too closely. This is an odd occurrence, a sign that too many tourists visit this town. The village was clean and beautiful and the blossoms were just coming out in the gardens of the white walled homes.
The goal of seeing this village was to farm a little bit and get a feel for peasant life. What we actually accomplished was trampling the villagers’ plots. We crossed into three garden plots, about the size of a plot in Dad’s garden, and picked cabbages and onions. I worked as hard as I could and for that my Chinese teacher, Miss Ding said: “you are a bad student but a good farmer.” It was a very nice feeling to work with some dirt in the middle of the massive valley in the sky blue air. I felt a strong connection with the natural surroundings in the valley and the small villages close by.
Once we had “sold” the poorly picked vegetables at the market we crammed on the tour busses to head to another tourist scam, a tie-die factory. There while I waited around for lunch I went for a little walk. I walked by an amazing aqueduct that pushed lake water uphill to service raised rice patties. I went down the road to find the most Chinese scene I was yet to come across. As the valley flattened out into the lake small farming plots were spread across, all the way to water’s edge—some two or three km away. Cutting across the valley, where I was, was a newly constructed freeway. It was still being worked on and not officially open to traffic but famers were driving their two stoke tractor-trucks over it and peasants would cross the road with their rice patty hats and their vegetables on their backs. I wondered how much peasant life will change when they can no longer cross the freeway. For a few moments, it was just me and China, a dialogue between a student and his teacher.
On the way back from the perfect Chinese scene a young woman came running up along the path. I thought she found something I dropped but she passed me, started to walk and then took out her cell phone. She was wearing elements of one of the Naxi traditional dresses and she wanted my attention.
My nice breakaway was ended by bad lunch and bad company. The bus ride to our mountain destination was the bus ride from hell. For four claustrophobic hours the bus thrashed up and down dangerous mountain roads, swerving around oncoming semis and tractors. Bellow the mountains that we were climbing you could see the construction of an impossible highway. Finally at the end of the road we stopped in an especially calm and peaceful village.
After dinner Alex and I explored the town of Shaxi. It reminded me of Bhutan to see kids playing with their brothers and sisters right outside the monasteries. Shaxi seemed to be a relatively affluent and lively place—a nice center to the high mountain village. We ended up finding a carnival at the night market. As the night went on the place picked up and we met some friends to nock prizes off the wall with baseballs and shoot balloons with bb guns for winnings—I won a coconut soda and oddly enough for a carnival, a pack of cigarettes.
The day ended in my cozy bed at the beautiful guesthouse that we stayed at. I fell asleep thinking about Balboa and how he claimed to be the first to discover the Pacific Ocean. As he came across the ocean, he claimed it for himself not thinking that millions before him had interacted with the great natural monument. Balboa may have felt once he discovered the amazing new place but there were plenty of people before him who also found it who did not call it the Pacific Ocean.

Yunnan II

3-13
Our first real day in Yunnan province was meant to get two tour buses (one big one full of non-intensive language students, and one small bus full of intensive language students) out of the big city and into the beautiful countryside. It did not take long to be outside of Kunming and surrounded by beautiful countryside. The landscape was full of free flowing beautiful fields with patches of dark greens interrupted by mustard yellows. There were butterflies fluttering all over and off and on I could see a peasant’s head working her land. We stopped and had lunch in the heart of the “Dinosaur Valley” (a location with a high concentration of prehistoric bones) at a model village. After the meal I trekked around the canal town and discovered the pristinely reconstructed town was completely deserted. Finally some peace and quiet!
The further we went on the highway it seemed the peasant lifestyle became more concentrated. The villages we passed through had no conception of a 10% GDP growth model and the communist revolution was something only important in textbooks. In the late afternoon we came into the large crossroads town of Dali. Dali was situated on a series of hills that eventually turned into mountains. Bellow the city was a glacier lake.
The bus caravan stopped next to the beautiful old town and we checked into a dirty hotel. Outside the streets were made more beautiful by the explosions of pink blossoming trees (momo in Japanese, not sure on an English name). It was already late afternoon but the tour led us to an ancient Buddhist monastery carved into the hill side. It was famous because the three pagodas at the bottom of the abbey were created in the Song dynasty about a thousand years ago. I climbed up the stairs to the pagodas to take some pictures and soon realized that ascending up the stairs were more temples. There were something like seven temples in all but because of a lack of oxygen and the feeling of aw I lost count. The temples were all recently rebuilt, because they were destroyed in the cultural revolution. Now they have a much more touristy feel. To my disgust I found gift shops inside the shrines right next to statues of Buddha and the various prophets and deities. At the second to highest level I found some prayer wheels which I gave a twirl. As they were spinning the sun came out and it seemed like the heavens opened up because I had awakened the giant mechanical prayer devices.
The group ate duck hot pot together and after that I went to the tourist old town for some evening drinks. I roamed the streets with a buddy from the Bay Area and somehow we were able to find cheap local brews.

Yunnan I

3-12
My trip may have started out with a bad push-off from my apartment complex. My travel group of 40 obnoxious (many of them drunk) Americans filled a bus and headed to the airport. The process of getting on the plane was slow with a group so large but after an expensive airport espresso I climbed into an uncomfortable middle seat at the front of the plane.
Sitting next to me was a crusty old Chinese man with a thick Shanghaiese accent. This turned into a bit of a mixed blessing for me as for the three hour long flight the man relentlessly tried to strike up conversation. He was aware that my Chinese language skills were beginner to say the least but nonetheless we were able to communicate vey complex details about each other. I told him that my dad keeps a huge garden and my mom is a practicing doctor. It turns out he was a generator salesman from Shanghai who spends much of his time selling units in Kunming, the destination of our airplane.
Arriving in Kunming was rough, the air was thick and the pilots seemed inexperienced in the bumpy transition back to the surface of the earth. Getting out of the plane it was great to swallow some fresh air. Walking to our tour bus the group enjoyed a sunset that reminded me of the tropical endings to the days in Ecuador.
After a group dinner I went with a few friends to find a Ferris wheel that we could see illuminated from a distance. Kunming looked like a very basic large Chinese city with a maze of communist bloc buildings, small cheap clothing stores and a frenzy of KFCs. On the walk to the far off amusement park however I came to realize that Kunming was a quietly laid back city of canals with a lazy climate that felt great coming from the hectic Shanghai. The moon shined against the water in the summer-like evening—it was like walking through ancient Chinese poetry. We walked along water ways and passed bright night markets but when we got the gates of the Ferris wheel we learned that the place had been closed for many hours. I wanted to hop the fence but my friends told me it would be better if we headed back. On the way back we stopped at a nice snack shack to have a few warm beers by the canal.

Hangzhou

March 4 to 6 2011

On Thursday afternoon I bought three roundtrip, high-speed train tickets (in Chinese) and booked the last hostel room I could find for a weekend in Hangzhou. We were told the city of 8.1 million people is a great spot to spend a beautiful relaxing weekend.
The journey for me started on Friday at noon. I was giddy with excitement and after I grabbed my rucksack I practically sprinted for the metro stop to begin the journey. I met Yuri and our travel mate CJ at their dorm and then we headed to the southern Hongqiao station.
At Hongqiao we were surprised to find one of the biggest buildings ever constructed by man. With its stainless steel and big glass windows the architecture of this railway station is the pinnacle of modern. We ate dumplings and soup at a fast food place while we waited for our train to be announced. While in the waiting room a Chinese electrical engineer spoke to Yuri and I so he could practice his English.
Getting on the train it became apparent that I we were going to be riding a very fast Shinkansen style train. Yuri and CJ settled in and I walked around to snap some photos of the modern marvel. The train ride to Hangzhou was uneventful and I spent the time looking out at the villages we whizzed passed at 230kmh.
Arriving in Hangzhou we slowly became aware that the peaceful anti-city was a complete myth. We searched for a cab on the overwhelmingly busy streets outside the station but not a single (authorized) taxi would stop. We found the taxi line and we were faced with the choice of waiting 40 minutes for a legitimate cab or paying double and going with a pirate taxi. We opted for the prior.
Our hostel was tucked in a driveway and our driver had a very hard time finding the place. Soon we would find out that almost all cab drivers in Hangzhou are completely useless, especially when it comes to directions. Our room was cozy but small and expensive. The establishment was in a typical backpacker fashion.
As soon as we arrived Yuri befriended a blond haired Dutch girl named Sana and soon the four of us we off to find dinner around a night market. After our taxi got lost and left us in the wrong place, we ended finding a restaurant that served us typical Hangzhou cai (food). We had sweet and sour pork, tofu stir fry and a simple “farmers” soup. After dinner we walked around a pedestrian street that elaborately sold souvenirs and tourist traps. We at traditional Chinese candy and did a lot of people watching. When it was time to head back to the hostel we spent 45 minutes trying to find a cab (it seemed as if there were only three on duty at all times). We all retired very early.
The next day after an American breakfast at the hostel, the three of us wandered around West Lake—the man-made watershed that is the city’s main attraction. Our first stop was a Zen temple. It was Saturday morning and the place was very busy with people burning money for their ancestors and saying prayers in shrines. We walked through three colorful shrines. As we did so I looked at the architecture and artwork and Yuri bowed and prayed.
We continued walking this time through the lake’s walkway, which pretty much took us over the water. A long the way one could stop in and see some traditional looking architecture around some koi ponds but there were too many Chinese tourists spewing out of tour busses for it to be enjoyable. Massive globs of black-haired people traveled together, periodically stopped to take pictures of two fingers in the air and fake smiles. Most of the tour groups were retirees on their union funded end of life trip.
The walkway was one and a half miles long and when we reached the end we climbed up a mountain for another mile or two. We were aiming to find a Taoist temple and some rock caves. We never exactly found the temple but we were impressed by being able to walk into huge spaces carved into the mountainside. When we were leaving a party of chanting monks walked by with an entourage and landed at a colorful shrine inside a cave.
Outside of the caves we began descending down to the city. Along the way we walked through the forest and passed patches of tea leaves. At the parking lot we sought a taxi. We found one after a few minutes and told him that we wanted to go to a place called Grandma’s House for lunch. We gave him cross streets, an address and showed a map but the driver still had no idea where we were talking about. Unfortunately he continued driving and then started yelling at us. “Here we’re there” he said even though we were nowhere close and we all knew it. We left the cab and didn’t pay a dime (or a Mao).
After a long walk we found a shopping mall and climbed up to the eighth floor to a packed restaurant that served good food at a very cheap price. We spent a good hour and a half there and then we continued on our walking tour of the city. Yuri found a shoe market where she made some purchases and after that we walked around Hangzhou’s urban streets.
We walked for about two hours and finally decided to take a break sitting on a bench on a busy street across from the lake. The three of us began talking about how many stares we were getting. CJ (who is half black) said: “I get a lot of double takes from people.” Just as she said that an old lady walked past and turned around to give us a second glance!
We walked down the developed lake side for another few kilometers until we found ourselves on a bench, still very far away from the hostel. Hangzhou wasn’t a bad place, it had its scenic views and the comfortable, developed feel of any tourist local but in all it was too much. A crowd of Cantonese tourist swarmed the bench that we had been seeking refuge on and we all came to realize that there were simply too many tourists to find this lake enjoyable.
Nightfall came and after a rest we decided to head out to a street food market downtown. Along the way we walked next to the lake, which by now had been deserted. It was a beautiful sight to see Hangzhou’s ancient architecture highlighted by neon light and then reflected on the lake and the best part was that all was quiet.
Downtown we heard crappy hip-hop dance music and found a group of about 100 Chinese ladies dancing choreographed steps in a public park. Yuri was enthralled and could stop giggling at the sight. Eventually we found the street food alley and dined on cheap delicacies. Yuri and I shared a whole chicken raped in tea leaves and baked for an entire day (head and feet intact), four crabs on a stick (we had to just eat it the shells), fried dumplings and fried noodles wrapped in a tortilla like pancake. It was heavenly.
The next morning CJ had ventured off to find a catholic mass and when Yuri finally woke up we set out to find her. It was raining but Yuri and decided to walk the three miles or so anyway. We walked passed Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini and Rolls Royce car dealerships. The rain became too much and we hopped in a cab and the confused driver took us to a church.
We waited outside for a minute but the ushers wouldn’t let us stand in the rain, so they took us in and demanded that we take seats in the pews. As we got there they were handing out the sacrament in little plastic cups. I looked around and saw no crucifix but only a single red cross above the alter. The pastor (dressed in a suit) gave a fervent blessing and the prisoners responded in a random chorus of AMENs. Something was wrong, this church felt really funny. After the mass had ended we realized that the cabbie had taken us to the wrong church and we had just witnessed the end of a Baptist mass.
CJ appeared after we found the real catholic church a block away. We looked around the authentic chapel and then went to eat hot pot. After brunch we caught a cab, picked up our bags from the hostel and headed to the train station.
The train back to Shanghai was packed and we fought with a sea of people to get to our assigned seats. I booked us on the fastest train which meant that we rode on a German designed ICE-like bullet train. We cruised at 210mph for 40 minutes back to Shanghai. Off the train I was a little motion sick but thoroughly amazed by the rail adventure. China has the world’s most impressive high speed rail network today. This is in a country that started phasing out steam engines in 1980!
It took some time to get to my apartment on the metro but when I was home I was happy to be back. It is a great feeling to call a wonderful city like Shanghai my home.

the "Shanghai I love you" Movie Skit

On the subway I held Yuri and the metal bar next to us for support. We whispered about funny looking people on the train. Yuri who was busy studying her Japanese-English-Chinese phrase book quizzed me on how to say simple things in Chinese. When it came time to get off at Shanghai Railroad Station I huddled next to the door and squeezed my girlfriend through the sliding doors and the pushing oncoming passengers.
The train station was full of travelers returning to Shanghai from their holiday exodus to their home villages. Peasants stinking of farm life and claustrophobic train rides clogged the tunnel to the exit along with the urbanites dragging roller suitcases. The tunnel took us through a market—about a half mile long—selling everything from juice to watch bands and jewelry. At the end of the tunnel was a dark, sweaty stairwell taking us upstairs.
At the top of the stair well a migrant women yelled something in Chinese that no one but me heard. She had two oversized burlap sacks and she rolled them down the long stair well. A few people were almost hit by the first tumbling piece of luggage. When she rolled the other, this time a young man walked right into the falling bag.
Outside the pollution was heavy. The white sky, the concrete and the stainless steel panels from the train station were blinding my pale eyes. The horde of hurried travelers was thick and everywhere I bumped shoulders with oncoming traffic, all the while dragging Yuri by the hand behind me.
I caught people doing strange stuff, like one couple rearranging their entire suitcase and an old man spitting into a sewer drain. At some point there are so many listless people that no one really acknowledges the presence of anyone else. One can feel alone, even around so many people. All the while, there was shrieking Chinese woman screaming on a loudspeaker with what I imagined to be some communist slogans.
Yuri found a map and peered onto it. “We need to go here, I think we have to take the long way around” she said. “I guess that’s what we have to do.” The way we thought would take us to the direction we wanted to go was blocked by a police station that must be newer than the map that we read.
We walked past the departure hall and out of the train station parking lot. We stopped on the corner in a crowd-whipped pant. “I think we are lost” she said. “I don’t know where we are.” “Let’s just get a cab and get on with it” I replied. I motioned for a taxi and there was a free one a stop light away. “No I want to find this place and let’s save some money.” “I just want to get there, common I’ll pay for it.” She shrugged and as the light turned green we ignored the oncoming taxi. Yuri looked at the map again and I impatiently waited for her to find our way. “I don’t know what this street is” she said. Just then an empty Expo taxi pulled around the corner and I motioned with my finger for him to stop. I opened the door for an unhappy girlfriend and she showed the taxi driver on a map of where we wanted to go. “Now we will be there sooner rather than later” I said smirk.
We got comfortable as the taxi honked its way through moped traffic and innocent pedestrians. As I swung my arm around Yuri I elbowed her in the face. She grabbed her check in pain. “I’m so sorry.” “Why do you have to be like this?” “I’m sorry it was an accident.” “If we hadn’t of taken a cab this would have never happened.” “I know but it was an honest mistake.” She was silent with anger now and I held her to try and calm her down.
Then I started to laugh. “Are we having a Shanghai melodrama?” “Yes” she said this time with a bit of a chuckle.
In a little bit we went down a street where there was a communist wall covered in classy and colorful graffiti. “Hey wait, I know where we are!” I said. The cabbie dropped us off in front of the gate to the art district, I paid him and we went into the refurbished factories for some coffee and art.