East is Relative

Xi’an yet again, parting from the family

We got to Xi’an the next day, and our hostel picked us up for free, which was really nice. We ate some good Chinese food at the hostel, then walked to the Bell and Drum Towers, but again, didn’t go in – we decided looking at them from the outside was enough. We ended up in the Muslim Quarter going through the market, which was great, as usual. I really like it in there – it’s fun and noisy and smells awesome from all the great street food.

The next day we went to the Terra Cotta Warriors on a tour through the hostel. Our tour guide, Raymond, was awesome. It turns out he studied history a lot, mainly Qin and Han Dynasty, and he had a ton of information for us. He’d tried to get into graduate school the year before but didn’t score high enough on the exams, so he’s trying again this year. We had two Colombians, a mother and son, and a Korean on our tour, and they were all pretty cool to talk to, so that was good. When we got back, we ate at the hostel again and then headed out for the Great Mosque with Laura. We took a bunch of awesome pictures (including one of Josh and an old man with the same beard as Josh’s), and then did a little more market shopping in the Muslim Quarter. That night, we ate with Laura and Laura’s friend Tiger, who she met in Hanzhong (he’s a university student there, but he lives in Xi’an). He helped us order some good Chinese food. Laura and I thought it was only mediocre, but my parents liked it, so that was really more important.

We got up early the next morning and took a bus down to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. There were some people dancing in the plaza next to the pagoda and Mom took a lot of pictures. Then she and Theo did a little dancing, too, and I got some pictures. There were more booths to shop at there, so we did that for a bit, then watched a dancing water show they had in the park. We ate Papa John’s for lunch (there were no Chinese food restaurants outside the park except fast food places and I’m not such a big fan of Chinese fast food). Outside the Papa John’s, there was a woman selling baby chicks that were dyed different colors. We took a bus to the east side of town, and visited the Temple of the Eight Immortals, a Taoist temple that was really interesting. There were some ceremonies going on, and a lot of people were burning incense and praying. It also had a lot more buildings and gardens than the one I visited in Suzhou in September. After that, we went to the East Gate of the city walls, climbed up to the top, and walked around to the South Gate (near our hostel). It was really interesting to see the city from that high up; it gives you a different perspective. There are a lot of economically poor areas right near the walls, and we saw some houses that looked like they were just 15′x8′ cells with a garage door. I don’t know if they opened on another part of a house or something, but it certainly just looked like a bunch of storage cells that people were living in.

We went back to the Muslim Quarter one last time, and then headed back to the hostel. We stopped for dinner at a hotpot restaurant, and it was delicious. We each had individual pots with our own kind of broth. Theo got tomato soup broth, Josh and Mom got plain broth, and I got the spicy broth, which was burn-your-face-off spicy and so good. By the end, Josh and Mom were taking spoonfuls of my broth so they could give their broth a little flavor. We had beef, chicken, pork, bok choy, tofu, spinach, noodles and potatoes. It was really awesome.

The next morning, we all just packed up our bags and played a little cards, and then my parents left for the airport. I went to a market near the South Gate with Laura, because I was looking for another bag to use, since my backpack didn’t have wheels and I wanted something bigger and on wheels for going home. That market didn’t really have anything, so we went back to the Muslim Quarter (with a stop at Haagen-Dasz, mmmm), and I finally found a good, big, rolling bag that’s also a backpack. The lady started at Y375 and I got her down to Y160. We went to meet Tiger at the big walking street where he works, and he told me I shouldn’t have paid more than Y120. Oh, well – I’m not an expert bargainer yet, I suppose. I met Tiger’s parents, who were visiting him at work, and they were awesome. They were nice and tried to talk to me in Chinese a lot, which was great. I was sad that I was meeting them the last day I was in Xi’an.

Nanjing wanderings

On February 14th, New Year’s Day, we went to the Nanjing Massacre Museum in the morning and spent several hours there. It was a really grim, really detailed museum of the things that happened when Japan occupied Nanjing before World War II. It was really interesting and made me wish I knew more about modern Chinese history. Most of what I know is pre-1911, during the dynasties, and because of my sieve-like memory, I’ve already forgotten a lot of that, too. We went to Xuanwu Lake later that afternoon to walk around and see a “light sculpture” festival, which was pretty anti-climactic for me. There were a bunch of arches over walkways that lit up, but most of them looked the same and it just wasn’t much to look at.

The real fun happened later when we walked out of the lake and people were lighting wish balloons (essentially paper lanterns that work like hot air balloons), so we lit one together. The people gathered there were explaining to us with big arm motions that the balloon would inflate and float, which we thought was pretty funny, since we’d been standing there watching for about 5 minutes and had already figured it out. A little further down the street, a man was selling fireworks off a cart, and we walked up to look at the boxes. He was smoking a cigarette (awesome). I asked him how many fireworks were in the biggest box and he said 100. We asked him how much it cost, and he said something like Y380, which works out to about $55. Then, to give us the full effect, he made noises like fireworks going off really fast (like a tommy gun). It was classic. We ate dinner at Pizza Hut because Theo was curious about it; I’d explained to them that Pizza Hut’s a really fancy deal here in China. They have calamari and escargots on the menu. My family was sufficiently impressed with the food and the atmosphere.

The next morning, we took the subway to the Yangzi River Bridge that established the first direct rail link from Beijing to Shanghai in the 1960s (I think). It was big and impressive, but the viewing platform was pretty much right on the highway, so it wasn’t someplace you wanted to linger too much. Then we went to the Fuzi Miao (Confucius Temple) market and went to the Imperial Examination museum. This is a part of Chinese history that I know a good bit about, thanks to LK’s classes, and she had told me I should go to the museum because it was hilarious – and she was right. In Chinese history, up until the end of the Qing dynasty, the only legitimate way to get a position in government was to take the imperial examination, and it was a really high-stress test. Examinees were essentially locked in a cell about 3′x4′ for 9 days to take the test, with only their writing implements and a table that could be converted to a bed. The museum had these cells on display with some really ridiculous mannequins of the examinees doing random things, like trying to fight off snakes that had crawled into their cell, or trying to cheat. The best part is that the English translations were probably the worst I’ve seen in all of China, so the labels on the display made no sense.

We went to the Confucius temple after that, which was really interesting (but filled with really tacky fabric lanterns for the annual lantern festival they hold there), and then we made our way to the hotel to pack up and leave Nanjing for Xi’an.

Relaxing in Nanjing

It has been a relatively uneventful time in Nanjing. We arrived at the airport and took a bus to a stop where the woman said we would be able to see our hotel. Unfortunately, this was not true – we ended up wandering around Nanjing for 2 hours with our bags trying to find the hotel. We found it eventually, after a lot of help from a lot of people. Ultimately, we were going in the right direction and to the right place, but if we’d known how far we would have had to walk, we would have called a cab instead of taking the bus. It was really aggravating and we hadn’t really slept in about 24 hours (at least, I hadn’t!). When we checked into the Holiday Inn (which is, in fact, the nicest hotel I’ve ever been in), we slept for most of the morning and afternoon, and then got dinner at the hotel and walked around the attached mall. I finally found myself a pair of jeans that fit (thanks, H&M!) and my mom bought them for me, since the jeans I’ve been wearing are huge on me and I’ve lost a bunch of weight here.

Today, we stayed in the hotel most of the day, did some more shopping in the mall, and walked around for a bit, but it was pretty evident that most places were closing for Chinese New Year (it’s New Year’s Eve, here in China). At about 5pm, the fireworks and firecrackers started going off, and went non-stop all over the city from every single apartment building and large area until 9pm. It’s been pretty crazy. We ordered room service and watched the show, and it’s expected to get crazier at midnight. Tomorrow, we start to really explore Nanjing, but I do think we needed a little bit of a breather after our terrible flight and the craziness of the last week. It’s been relaxing, which is alright when you’re on vacation.

I’ll post more as we make our way around Nanjing. I’ve updated the photos to include my pictures, and I’ll add some that my mom and brother have taken as well, soon.

Back to Beijing

That night, we got on a train back to Beijing (we were all in the same cabin this time, so we all just felt much better). However, once we got to Beijing on Monday morning, we could not, under any circumstances, get a taxi driver to take us to our hostel. I started getting really angry again, because the taxi drivers in the line in front of the train station were just shaking their head at me and telling me no before I even got up to the car. I suppose we could have just gotten in and made them take us, but either way, I was so angry that I was crying. I felt like Beijing was going to be nothing but trouble for us. It’s very frustrating to spend six months living in a country, learning a bit of the language and getting yourself around in a small town, only to get treated like an idiot foreigner in the capital city.

We called the hostel and the girl at the desk told us what subway to take (thankfully near the train station, but unfortunately, full of stairs – A/N to Beijing: please get escalators in every train station, kthxbai). She met us at the subway station and helped us drag our bags to the hutong hostel we were staying at. It was a semi-dismal first impression (they wouldn’t really open the kitchen for us, it was cold inside and very quiet, like no one was staying there), but ended up being just fine in the end and we really liked it, especially once the heater kicked in and the room warmed up.

After we checked in, we went to Temple of Heaven Park (beautiful buildings and a really awesome Echo Wall), and then went to a Kung Fu show, which had a bunch of modern dance and ballet mixed in with the kung fu. It was interesting, but I was expecting it to be a lot more action-filled. It was definitely fun to watch, though. Before the show, we had our first real Chinese meal at a restaurant near the theatre. We ordered gan bian siji dou (my favorite dish), scrambled eggs and tomato, fried rice, and sweet and sour soup. It was served family style, and I felt like I was really showing my family true Chinese cuisine. It was delicious.

Tuesday, we took a tour of the Great Wall at Badaling, and the nearby Ming Tombs. Of course, because it’s a tour, they took us to two factories to try and sell us stuff. One was a jade factory and another was a silk factory. It wasn’t as obnoxious as I thought it would be, but we did get stalked by salesgirls at the silk factory. The Great Wall was awesome, though walking on it is less cool than looking at it. Badaling is a really steep section of the wall, so it’s not so fun to walk up and down it (especially when it’s a little snowy/icy). But it was very cool to stand at the top and see the wall snaking off into the distance over the mountains. The Ming Tombs were pretty boring, but they only took us to one (only three are open to the public, but it still would have been nice to see them). That night, we went to a Chinese acrobatics show, which had some really amazing sections (tossing girls and ceramic bowls) and some really disappointing sections (the contortionists). All in all, though, it was fun.

On Wednesday, we spent the morning catching up on emails and eating western breakfast, and around 1pm we headed to the Summer Palace on the northwest end of the city. The Summer Palace is amazing. There are tons of structures (we didn’t have time to go into all of them because the park closed at 4pm), and Kunming Lake is huge. The Empress Dowager Cixi’s marble boat is colossal. Cixi was the mother of the second-to-last emperor of China. When she turned 60 years old, she built a gigantic marble boat with money that was supposed to be used to bolster the military (this is the reason most often cited in China for why China lost the wars leading up to the fall of the Qing Dynasty). When I turned the corner and saw it, I thought to myself, “That woman was insane.”

After the Summer Palace, we took the subway to the Bird’s Nest and the Cube at Olympic Stadium Center and took some cool pictures after being accosted by peddlers. We went to a mall to get some coffee and do a little shopping, and then headed back to our hutong to eat and go to sleep. My mom and stepdad were going to get up early on Thursday morning and go back to the Temple of Heaven in the morning to see the people who do early morning tai chi and ballroom dancing, but they ended up sleeping in. We were also going to go to Jingshan park north of the Forbidden City to take an aerial picture of the city and to see the temples, but we decided we didn’t have time and walked around the hutong for a bit. We rode the subway to get my bag from Donovan, Sarah and Taylor, and then headed back to get all of our bags from our hostel and get out to the airport for our flight to Nanjing, our next stop. We had originally been planning to go to Huang Shan, a famous mountain near-ish to Nanjing, but our travel company couldn’t get our train tickets there, so we ended up making arrangements to fly to Nanjing a few days early.

After we picked up my bag, we sent my mom ahead to drop my bag off at left luggage at the airport (so they’ll hold it and we don’t have to drag it around) and had gone back to get our bags. It looked like we were going to be really late for our flight (we got to the airport about 50 minutes before the flight was supposed to take off). The plane should have taken off at about 5:30pm. Our flight was delayed, however, and the airport diverted us to a really shady nearby hotel. We stayed there for several hours, where we were served a really crappy dinner, and then they called us and told us our flight was alright about 9pm. They drove us back to the airport and we finally boarded around midnight. Then there were mechanical issues and we sat in the plane on the tarmac for two hours. The flight finally took off around 2:30am, and we arrived in Nanjing at 4:30am. Talk about a freakin’ stressful day!

Next stop: Nanjing.

Harbin

On the train to Harbin, we tried to get our seats switched, but they couldn’t find space. At this point, Josh was already asleep, and the people in Josh and my mom’s cabin were pretty nice and spoke a little English, so we were feeling a little better about it. We all went to bed, and when we got up on Saturday morning, everyone felt about a hundred times better about everything. Harbin was positively freezing, but we got two cabs and headed to the hostel (though Theo had to jump out of their cab and weave through traffic to get the address from us because their taxi driver couldn’t seem to remember where we were going). The hostel was really cool – converted from an old synagogue. That day, we walked around a bit, despite the cold, and got to see some really cool areas of Harbin, including St. Sophia’s Russian Orthodox Church and some walking-street-type shops (but in really beautiful old buildings). You can see a lot of Russian influence in the buildings near where we stayed.

Sunday, we went to the Siberian Tiger Park (really, they’re Manchurian tigers, but who’s counting?), which was awesome. We saw them feed an antelope to the tigers – one grabbed the whole thing in his mouth and just bolted with it, which was really amazing to see. The bus takes you around the park like in Jurassic Park but without the fences. The tigers were coming right up to the bus and stuff, it was amazing but a little nerve-wracking. I wondered how often they have to give the tigers medical attention because they get run over by the bus drivers. Anyway, they had a few other cats there, like lions and ligers, and we got to watch some people feed them meat right up close. It was pretty awesome. We ate at hotpot restaurant inside a mall (not exactly the “real” hotpot experience, but the food was still good).

Later that evening, we went to the Harbin Snow and Ice World, which is a park with a bunch of snow and ice sculptures lit up at night, and it was beautiful. The taxi driver that took us there charged us Y30 (which is less than the Y60 and Y80 other people were trying to charge), and he took us to a satellite ticket office so we could buy our tickets without waiting in line, and with no extra fee (though there wasn’t much of a line to wait in once we got there). Now that is what a Chinese taxi driver is really like. I felt much better about the whole trip once we were in Harbin, honestly.

The Ethicist on Chinatown

I want to repost this from the most recent Ethicist column in the New York Times (it’s the last of 3 letters) because it’s a funny little bit about Chinese-American culture and it made me giggle.

A market illegally displays fish on the sidewalk in front of my squalid little building in Chinatown. For 20 years, I’ve tried in vain to get the city to enforce the law. The fishmonger began giving me little gifts around the Chinese holidays, although I always protest that I object to his placing fish on the sidewalk. When he gave me moon cakes for the autumn holidays, I responded with friendliness but felt compromised. What should I do? P.E., NEW YORK

You should enjoy your moon cakes. Having failed for 20 years to reform the fishmonger, your ability to fail over the next 20 years will be uninfluenced by his modest gift. You two have exchanged neighborly courtesies, and there’s nothing unethical about that. Indeed, it is to your credit that you can disagree with both candor and civility. Why you persist in this is a question less about ethics than psychology. Why the city fails to enforce the law is a question for the courts. Why I continue to order Sidewalk Fish Hunan Style is between me and my conscience and my gastroenterologist.

Leaving Shimen, Beijing via Xi’an

I had fully intended to write long posts about everything that’s been going on, but it really has been the most hectic crazy time of my life. I’m going to try and give you the shortest version possible.

I left Shimen on January 29th after my last classes. I spent the last week in class asking my students to think about what they wanted to accomplish with English one year from now. We took pictures, and we listened to “Dangerous” by Michael Jackson, a song they’ve been talking about all semester. I tried to convince them that there are much better MJ songs, but they won’t have it.

I took a train to Changsha, and on the way, spent time with a very talkative young boy (who spoke no English and seemed not to be bothered by the fact that I don’t speak much Chinese), and a very shy young girl. I gave them English names (Lily and Toby) and Toby and I messed around with my iPod Chinese dictionary so we could half-communicate. It was quite a fun ride (but my head hurt at the end). I took a train to Xi’an from Changsha, and met up with my friend Laura at our usual Xi’an hostel. We spent a few days deliberating our decisions about teaching, staying in China, etc. You already know what my decision turned out to be.

On Feb. 3rd, I left Xi’an on a sleeper train to Beijing, and I arrived really early in the morning on the 4th. I met my friends Donovan, Sarah, and Taylor for lunch and to drop off one of my bags with them so we wouldn’t have to check it into a Beijing train station for a week. For dinner, I met up with a fellow China blogger, Fred Dintenfass, who took me to a really awesome Yunnan restaurant. The food was fantastic and the company was great. It was nice to make a new pal, too.

In the morning on Friday, Feb. 5th, I went to meet my parents at the Beijing airport, and they brought my younger brother Josh with them. This was supposed to be a surprise, but in actuality, my mom had slipped a few weeks ago and I’ve been telling everybody that I thought they were going to bring him. I had become quite the conspiracy theorist about it, reading between the lines on everything they were saying for the past few weeks while we made plans. But despite the fact that I knew he was coming, I was no less thrilled to see all three of them come through the International Arrivals gate. We got on the Airport Express subway line back to the city and we were off.

Once in the city, we dropped off our bags at the train station (we were leaving for Harbin that night), and headed for Tiananmen Square. We met up with a guy from our travel agency at a hotel, exchanged money for some of our train tickets, and then headed to the Forbidden City. It was really awesome to check out all the buildings (which are in much worse repair than I thought they’d be). It was pretty awesome to be in all the same places the various emperors since the Ming Dynasty had wandered about, especially since I’ve been reading up a bit on Pu Yi, the last emperor of China, who was essentially imprisoned in the Forbidden City for a while by the Chinese government after the end of the Qing Dynasty.

After the Forbidden City, we took some tuk-tuks (essentially motorcycle rickshaws) to one of the hutong because I wanted to show the area to my parents. I told the guy we had 4 people, and he told me Y20. When we got out, however, they tried to charge us Y20 per person, which of course was nonsense – I had already bargained him down from Y40 and I had specified we had 4 people. So I got into a huge argument in Chinese with these two drivers who kept trying to drive in front of us to stop us from crossing the street. Eventually, since I had already paid him the Y20 we agreed on, we just crossed the street away from them and went into the hutong, and they left. I was so angry because I have never had a taxi driver do that to me in the six months I’ve been here. I’ve been overcharged for sure, but the hutong where we were going would have been Y10 in a regular taxi; Y20 for two tuk-tuks was even an overcharge. I couldn’t believe how stupid they must have thought I was, even though I spoke Chinese. I think I was angrier at that driver than I was with the 2-week process of sending money home through the rural Postal Savings bank in Shimen, and that time I had been pretty upset.

Anyway, it all boiled down to a lot of stress for me and the family. Josh was feeling really uneasy because people were staring at him a ton (after all, he’s almost 6′ tall, pasty white, and has red hair and a long beard – not exactly your typical foreigner), and the tuk-tuk drivers had been driving crazily against traffic, and then I had gotten in the argument. All of these things combined to make him and my parents really anxious. We ended up walking to a bank near the hutong to get some money, walking around one of the parks near the hutong, and then hailing a cab to the train station. Things were really touch-and-go at that point. On top of the previous anxiety, we were supposed to get on a sleeper train to Harbin that night, and our train tickets weren’t all in the same car, so Josh and my mom were going to be in a cabin with strangers (and Theo and I would each be by ourselves in a cabin with strangers). Obviously, that’s something I’m used to, but they’re not. We decided to give it a shot anyway, though.

During the anxious part, we decided to get some western food so everyone could have a little comfort, and I broke down and ate McDonald’s. That’s right, I broke my no-McDonald’s-in-China pact. See how much I love my family? And everyone is right – it tastes almost exactly like McDonald’s at home. We’ve eaten at McDonald’s several times since then. Oh, well.

Stay tuned for the next part of our trip: Harbin!

Crazy Beijing

Trust me when I say things have been too crazy for me to update. My family is here safely and we are enjoying ourselves, despite some random craziness. But I don’t have time to talk about it now! I hope I can update soon – watch this space!

The decision I have made

The decision I have made has been well-deliberated. The decision I have made has been debated and argued and thought about and meditated on and processed in all ways possible. The decision I have made is to come home.

Shimen was not a good fit for me for several reasons. Buckland has offered me several other options for schools, but they seem to be bad fits for similar reasons to Shimen. Ultimately, I’m a city girl. I had a good time finding out about small-town China, but I feel that all I will accomplish in six more months is to realize that I really don’t like small towns. Especially small towns in which I don’t speak the language.

I love China. I love the language and the people and the cities and the small towns. I do not, however, love teaching EFL. I love teaching, but there’s a reason I didn’t minor in English…I hate English. There’s a reason I didn’t certify in lower grade levels…I have to be able to reason with my students (something that’s impossible with low-comprehension, low-participation Chinese students). The negatives outweigh the positives here.

I’ve also been extremely lucky in this term as far as travel opportunities. I have been to Shanghai, Suzhou, Changsha, Liuyang, Changde, Hanzhong, Xi’an, Yangshuo. When my mom and stepdad come to visit, we are going to Beijing, Nanjing, Huangshan, Harbin, and Xi’an. After they are gone, I will go to Lhasa and Chengdu. I will have been to almost every place I wanted to go in China in around 6 months. I have been so fortunate to have that opportunity.

For all these reasons (and of course, more), I have decided that after I travel this Spring Festival, my time in China is over. I don’t want to continue to teach EFL, and I’d much rather leave China while I still love the country than stay another six months and risk getting bitter.

I will be coming home to the US around March 4th (I haven’t thought far enough ahead to factor in the time-changes – I leave Beijing on March 3rd). I will, of course, keep you up to date about my travels with my parents, and my impressions of America and China once I’ve left the Middle Kingdom.

It is a bitter-sweet parting, but I think the decision I have made is for the best.

Chaos and stillness

Apologies for the very long delay, but things have been in a bit of an uproar, not least of which because my mom and my stepdad are coming in two weeks and I’m trying to pack up everything I have in a way that I can actually carry it to the train station. As such, I don’t really have an update. Once my parents get here, I plan on posting at least once in each city so you can follow along with us and our good, awesome times. But for the next two weeks, you’ll probably get silence, and for that, I apologize in advance!