The Beijing airport feels like the inside of a giant spaceship, at night. The ceiling is domed in a pleasing, organic curve kind of way but a drop-down mesh grill covers the whole thing which flattens the look out a bit. Little white lights set in the ceiling and shining through the grill give everything a diffused glow and when looked at (in a travel and fever induced haze) seem rather like a night sky, little twinkly stars. By the time morning came and dawn painted the floor-to-ceiling windows with light the ceilings set in the light winked out and natural light flooded in through skylights.
Moving from my faux-marble (but as cold as the real thing) perch in the middle of the night to a real cushy bench had been another nighttime interruption, so sleep-deprived and ill I set my brain in zombie mode and happily herded myself through security and onto my plane with my heavy bags and my funny sleep-tufted hair.
In Tokyo a Caribbean man came up to me and asked if I was a fan of the Rays. I was a little confused, even though I'd had some pretty good napping and wasn't feeling sick anymore. He gestured to my haircut and repeated, asking if I was a fan of the Rays. "Oh, no, I just like... the, uh, hair." I explained rather lamely, and then he launched into a lovely tangent about how on the island where he was from they would go spearfishing and have huge parties with drinking and eating, and how that is even better than baseball (and baseball is pretty good.) He mistook Brennan's "Hurley" t-shirt for a "Harley" t-shirt, and Brennan tried to explain that it was comfortable. "I just like soft things." The Caribbean man asked slyly, "Is she a soft thing?" Gesturing to me. Brennan quickly explained, "She could actually beat me up." And we were on our way.
With his leftover yen Brennan bought me a weird Japanese drink from a vending machine, it was a pale milky white and had bits of aloe floating in it. It felt good to be going home, actually.
Because of the strangeness of timezones we left Japan on Wednesday, the 1st of July at 5:10 in the evening and landed in California on Wednesday, the 1st of July, at 11:00 in the morning. I wandered off of the plane, jet-lagged and wobbly-headed. I was impressed by the amount of things I could read and overhear and understand but I kept using my traveler's eyes and scrutinizing things extra sharply. What an odd impression one gains just by paying attention to advertising, for example, and trying to make up scenarios for the little groups of people standing around and talking and interacting.
All in all it was very good to be back home.
I don't know where I'm going next.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
The Last Day
Brennan and Max flew out a day before I did, so they had roughly 24 hours in Tokyo while I didn't join them there until the next day, just a few hours after we shared the #8 flight back to San Francisco. They were on their way around eleven o'clock, so after that I was on my own. I had plans to spend the day enjoying Beijing's dead things, mainly Chairman Mao and the Natural History Museum. While that was the plan, that's hardly what I ended up doing.
Mao stops seeing visitors at noon, so by the time I got my luggage stowed in the hostel's dark and scary luggage closet (complete with horrible low ceilings that I cracked my skull on rather resoundingly) and trtekked all the way out to Tienanmen Square it was too late. No worries, I thought, I'll just hike down to the museum and spend extra time there. On the guide book's inset map of this area of Beijing it didn't look like a terrible walk, but it was several blocks from a subway stop and even though I did my best to cling to the shaded areas it was miserably hot. The Natural History Museum is free, it turns out, but you must make reservations 5 days in advance. Though the walk down Qianmen Dajie was hot and starkly sunny I did keep laughing when I glanced down. The sandals I'd been wearing for the past two weeks had left my feet with well-defined stripes on them.
At a loss, I decided to spend some time in one last Chinese temple and see if I could decipher any of the Buddhist iconography that so escaped me at the Tianjin monastery. So, I ended up going to Yong He Gong Lama temple and proving to myself that when I see any Bodhisattva I always think it's Buddha. Unless the Bodhisattva has breasts and then I think it's Guayin, Goddess of Mercy (but she's usually got a lot of props and the whole eight arm thing, so she's a bit less confusing.) It's like going into those Catholic churches all over Central Europe, I'm missing so much of the stories of the saints and only getting the "ah, so they died in this horrible way." (Of course the rather glaring difference between that and the Buddhist tradition is the, "Ah, so they transcended this splendid way." I suppose the idea of shuffling off mortal concerns and suffering is the same.)
One hall that was fairly comprehensible was a bunch of friendly-but-demonic figures in tantric sex positions. They had extra arms and legs and some of them even had tails, which I imagine can do wonders for balance. Er, yes, balance.
The courtyards were full of hot sunlight and heavy with incense smoke which made the inside of my face feel positively saturated with rich oily smells.
The eight auspicious Buddhist symbols are apparently: a parasol, pair of golden fish, the great treasure vase, a lotus, the right turning conch, the endless knot, the banner of victory and the wheel of dharma.
Even the brightest of these pictures don't really do a good job of showing how brilliant the colors were inside the temple rooms. Huge silks hung from the ceilings, tattered at the ends but still ablaze with color, flats and colorful lamps and pennants and banners fluttered slowly in the artificial breeze from standing fans.
By the end of my temple tour I felt overheated, sticky and somewhat triumphant, since I had finally managed to find a set of Chinese Chess in one of the souvenir shops right outside the temple. Chinese Chess appears to be rather similar in play to Western Chess, pieces have roles like general, chariot and cannon. The main superficial difference is that the game board is intersected by "the river" and this impedes different pieces in different ways.
I finished purchasing souvenirs for people back home, mostly candy and weird edible things from the convenience store. My favorite may have been the little pretzel sticks with the marvelous Engrish flavor text. "Like swimming in the Aegean sea, remember the Greek cheese myth." That one was for cheesecake, but of course you knew that since the Greek cheese myth is so well known. I was thoroughly shagged out and in need of a shower so I went back to the hostel to recuperate. Recuperation didn't really happen, I just sat in the cool, dim room for a while. I felt like I was coming down with a cold, and my sniffles and congestion grew progressively worse. I did not want to be sick while traveling, especially given the temperature guns that had been aimed at me on my landing and I felt as though I were experiencing the beginning twinges of a fever. I repacked my bag, now heavy with gifts and goodies. The heft of my luggage made me feel rather properly Chinese, since I always saw people in train stations schlepping huge bundles of food and sweets and other gifts for the folks back home.
I figured out my timetables and realized with great disappointment that my plane left too early in the morning for me to get there by using the subway. So, I figured I would just spend a night in the airport and cozy down on a bench somewhere. The subway line out to the airport was cool and tranquil, but my feverish feeling never died down completely. Once in the airport I camped out behind a large monitor announcing flight arrivals and partially hidden and protected by the large Skoda vehicle on display.
I read Just-So Stories for a while and then slipped into a fitful series of naps. And that was how I spent my last day in China.
Mao stops seeing visitors at noon, so by the time I got my luggage stowed in the hostel's dark and scary luggage closet (complete with horrible low ceilings that I cracked my skull on rather resoundingly) and trtekked all the way out to Tienanmen Square it was too late. No worries, I thought, I'll just hike down to the museum and spend extra time there. On the guide book's inset map of this area of Beijing it didn't look like a terrible walk, but it was several blocks from a subway stop and even though I did my best to cling to the shaded areas it was miserably hot. The Natural History Museum is free, it turns out, but you must make reservations 5 days in advance. Though the walk down Qianmen Dajie was hot and starkly sunny I did keep laughing when I glanced down. The sandals I'd been wearing for the past two weeks had left my feet with well-defined stripes on them.
At a loss, I decided to spend some time in one last Chinese temple and see if I could decipher any of the Buddhist iconography that so escaped me at the Tianjin monastery. So, I ended up going to Yong He Gong Lama temple and proving to myself that when I see any Bodhisattva I always think it's Buddha. Unless the Bodhisattva has breasts and then I think it's Guayin, Goddess of Mercy (but she's usually got a lot of props and the whole eight arm thing, so she's a bit less confusing.) It's like going into those Catholic churches all over Central Europe, I'm missing so much of the stories of the saints and only getting the "ah, so they died in this horrible way." (Of course the rather glaring difference between that and the Buddhist tradition is the, "Ah, so they transcended this splendid way." I suppose the idea of shuffling off mortal concerns and suffering is the same.)
One hall that was fairly comprehensible was a bunch of friendly-but-demonic figures in tantric sex positions. They had extra arms and legs and some of them even had tails, which I imagine can do wonders for balance. Er, yes, balance.
The courtyards were full of hot sunlight and heavy with incense smoke which made the inside of my face feel positively saturated with rich oily smells.
The eight auspicious Buddhist symbols are apparently: a parasol, pair of golden fish, the great treasure vase, a lotus, the right turning conch, the endless knot, the banner of victory and the wheel of dharma.
Even the brightest of these pictures don't really do a good job of showing how brilliant the colors were inside the temple rooms. Huge silks hung from the ceilings, tattered at the ends but still ablaze with color, flats and colorful lamps and pennants and banners fluttered slowly in the artificial breeze from standing fans.
By the end of my temple tour I felt overheated, sticky and somewhat triumphant, since I had finally managed to find a set of Chinese Chess in one of the souvenir shops right outside the temple. Chinese Chess appears to be rather similar in play to Western Chess, pieces have roles like general, chariot and cannon. The main superficial difference is that the game board is intersected by "the river" and this impedes different pieces in different ways.
I finished purchasing souvenirs for people back home, mostly candy and weird edible things from the convenience store. My favorite may have been the little pretzel sticks with the marvelous Engrish flavor text. "Like swimming in the Aegean sea, remember the Greek cheese myth." That one was for cheesecake, but of course you knew that since the Greek cheese myth is so well known. I was thoroughly shagged out and in need of a shower so I went back to the hostel to recuperate. Recuperation didn't really happen, I just sat in the cool, dim room for a while. I felt like I was coming down with a cold, and my sniffles and congestion grew progressively worse. I did not want to be sick while traveling, especially given the temperature guns that had been aimed at me on my landing and I felt as though I were experiencing the beginning twinges of a fever. I repacked my bag, now heavy with gifts and goodies. The heft of my luggage made me feel rather properly Chinese, since I always saw people in train stations schlepping huge bundles of food and sweets and other gifts for the folks back home.
I figured out my timetables and realized with great disappointment that my plane left too early in the morning for me to get there by using the subway. So, I figured I would just spend a night in the airport and cozy down on a bench somewhere. The subway line out to the airport was cool and tranquil, but my feverish feeling never died down completely. Once in the airport I camped out behind a large monitor announcing flight arrivals and partially hidden and protected by the large Skoda vehicle on display.
I read Just-So Stories for a while and then slipped into a fitful series of naps. And that was how I spent my last day in China.
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