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.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
The Great Wall, Simatai to Jinshanleng
Sleeping in marvelously powerful air-conditioning was lovely and cool but it meant that I woke up on my second-to-last day in Beijing with a sore throat. I figured that the day would be long and arduous, what with our plan to head to the Great Wall, so I went down to the hostel's restaurant and ordered myself a big breakfast with beans on toast and hot tea. I listened to Daft Punk playing in the restaurant and double-checked the very sketchy directions that I had gleaned from the guidebook and online.
See, not all stretches of the Great Wall are created equal. The closest section to Beijing is a huge tourist destination and I'd been warned away from it. "You go there and take a picture and leave" wasn't what I wanted from this immense human construct. So I read up on the longer hikes which can be done and found the coolest sounding one, between Jinshanling and Simatai. This one got extra points for being 10 kilometers (an easy hike, we figured) and having a rope bridge at the end of it. All the same, choosing that stretch of wall had its downside, the directions I could find for getting to Jinshanling were sparse and vague. Getting from Beijing to Miyun didn't seem bad, but once in Miyun we had to catch another bus whose number I couldn't find, or hire a taxi or minibus a prospect which was made more complicated by the fact that be no longer had our Mandarin-capable Bryan in tow. I was fretful over all the planning aspects for the first part of the morning, but by the time we got to Miyun I had calmed down considerably. I should always remember that it works out in the end.
In Miyun we ran into a minibus driver who was selling his services to Jinshanling and even though he spoke no English and we no Mandarin we were able to haggle the price of transportation down from 180 RMB (about $30) to 75 RMB ($4 perm not bad) to the start point. He would also meet us at the end of the hike, in Simatai to bring us back to Miyun to catch the bus. He ended up being a great driver, totally crazy and a firm believer in passing everything on the road that he could, even when the road had dropped to one active lane up a mountain and around a corner. Even though China's roadways were sometimes extremely chaotic Max put it in perspective for me. When he traveled in Thailand last year he ended the trip not knowing which side of the street they were supposed to drive on, legally. At least in China most people drove on the right side of the road most of the time.
To start our hike we headed up a steep track set into a hillside, feeling like Indiana Jones.
I feel rather grand about that day, but there isn't a whole lot I can say about it. We were alone for most of the hike, except for a few run-ins with other hikers and the numerous intrepid salesman who sat in the shade selling much desired ice water. The wall felt very remote, since it was set in among wooded hillsides and we could only spy the occasional valley farmstead. I heard a rooster crow once, which seemed fitting and appropriate (certainly moreso than hearing a peacock in the Nevada desert.)
Parts of the wall on the Jinshanling section are in great disrepair so instead of walking on the top layer of smooth flagstones, or even the second layer of more haphazard laid stones you're walking on crumbling rock dust and the rammed earth core of the wall which is orange, like the surrounding hillsides.
Words like grand, vista, awe-inspiring floated around in my head after we got back from the hike, but they didn't really connect to anything in a coherent way so all I can say about the day was that it was amazing. See, my proof of amazing:
As you can tell from the pictures, some stretches of wall were difficult to walk on, and some were just extremely sheer, so by the time we reached our goal we were all sweaty, hungry and thoroughly exhausted. We were also fantastically pleased with ourselves. On the bus from Miyun to Beijing Brennan read me two Just So Stories, one about the Alphabet and one about the Armadillo and then I was asleep, in a blissful doze.
See, not all stretches of the Great Wall are created equal. The closest section to Beijing is a huge tourist destination and I'd been warned away from it. "You go there and take a picture and leave" wasn't what I wanted from this immense human construct. So I read up on the longer hikes which can be done and found the coolest sounding one, between Jinshanling and Simatai. This one got extra points for being 10 kilometers (an easy hike, we figured) and having a rope bridge at the end of it. All the same, choosing that stretch of wall had its downside, the directions I could find for getting to Jinshanling were sparse and vague. Getting from Beijing to Miyun didn't seem bad, but once in Miyun we had to catch another bus whose number I couldn't find, or hire a taxi or minibus a prospect which was made more complicated by the fact that be no longer had our Mandarin-capable Bryan in tow. I was fretful over all the planning aspects for the first part of the morning, but by the time we got to Miyun I had calmed down considerably. I should always remember that it works out in the end.
In Miyun we ran into a minibus driver who was selling his services to Jinshanling and even though he spoke no English and we no Mandarin we were able to haggle the price of transportation down from 180 RMB (about $30) to 75 RMB ($4 perm not bad) to the start point. He would also meet us at the end of the hike, in Simatai to bring us back to Miyun to catch the bus. He ended up being a great driver, totally crazy and a firm believer in passing everything on the road that he could, even when the road had dropped to one active lane up a mountain and around a corner. Even though China's roadways were sometimes extremely chaotic Max put it in perspective for me. When he traveled in Thailand last year he ended the trip not knowing which side of the street they were supposed to drive on, legally. At least in China most people drove on the right side of the road most of the time.
To start our hike we headed up a steep track set into a hillside, feeling like Indiana Jones.
I feel rather grand about that day, but there isn't a whole lot I can say about it. We were alone for most of the hike, except for a few run-ins with other hikers and the numerous intrepid salesman who sat in the shade selling much desired ice water. The wall felt very remote, since it was set in among wooded hillsides and we could only spy the occasional valley farmstead. I heard a rooster crow once, which seemed fitting and appropriate (certainly moreso than hearing a peacock in the Nevada desert.)
Parts of the wall on the Jinshanling section are in great disrepair so instead of walking on the top layer of smooth flagstones, or even the second layer of more haphazard laid stones you're walking on crumbling rock dust and the rammed earth core of the wall which is orange, like the surrounding hillsides.
Words like grand, vista, awe-inspiring floated around in my head after we got back from the hike, but they didn't really connect to anything in a coherent way so all I can say about the day was that it was amazing. See, my proof of amazing:
As you can tell from the pictures, some stretches of wall were difficult to walk on, and some were just extremely sheer, so by the time we reached our goal we were all sweaty, hungry and thoroughly exhausted. We were also fantastically pleased with ourselves. On the bus from Miyun to Beijing Brennan read me two Just So Stories, one about the Alphabet and one about the Armadillo and then I was asleep, in a blissful doze.
Airports, Trains and Returning to Beijing
I had my picture taken three times in the Guangzhou airport. I guess I was having a really celebrity kind of day. The first guy who took my picture was very surreptitious about it as I was standing in line to check in for my flight back to Tianjin, I caught him in the act though. The second and third pictures were taken when two tiny Chinese girls waved me over and thumbs-upped me and made the universal camera motion, miming taking a picture. I grinned at the camera and flashed a peace sign, sure, I can dig it. (C'mon, it's not like I was wearing sunglasses and swank clothes, I had on my scratched glasses and a red bandanna because I was having a bad hair day, what gives with all the attention?)
We made it to Tianjin, and left Bryan in the waiting arms of his family before Max, Brennan and I boarded the second fastest train in China, which travels from Tianjin to Beijing (a distance of about 80 miles) in a half hour. We got on the train, chatted a bit and then we were at our station already. It was a bit anticlimactic, really.
Finding out hostel was a bit of a problem, since we had to figure out how to get from the shiny new train station to the subway. We found a very sweet boy manning an information desk who apologized profusely at his terrible English (it wasn't, really) and directed us to the right train. Thank you, Chinese public transportation, you never let us down! The bus dropped us off at the metro and I was startled to discover that since my last overwhelmed experience with the Beijing subway I had learned some traveling skills. Picking out the station names and reading station maps was as simple as reading the map for the BART or the El-trains in Chicago. I guess before I was too shocked that I was actually in China really and truly to properly function, before. After almost two weeks, Beijing was still huge but no longer incomprehensible and threatening.
Wufangjin hostel is near a big shopping street that is in turn very close to Tienanmen square. Wufanjin street is gew-gaw paradise, fans and chopsticks and beetles encased in plastic and tea sets and electronics and keychains and snowglobes, etc. The main street is lined with little alleys (Beijing hutong, I missed you!) that are devoted to more plastic souvenirs than you can sneeze at, and all of the animals of the world offered to you fried on a stick.
The polyglot hawkers at some of the food booths would call out to us in English, waving their hands over mysterious food items. The starfish, seahorses and tentacled octopi on a stick were recognizable, but there was all manner of other seafood items that were mysterious. "Snake!" one hawker cried, brandishing a stick covered in wiggly, chopped pieces of snake. "Dog!" he offered another meat on a stick with his other hand. Max was very excited, since eating dog was one of his remaining goals and he only had two days left to realize it. So we bought dog on a stick, which the man proceeded to deep fry for us. Brennan refused to eat something that he had helped name, in the past so no dog (or duck) for him, but Max and I shared bites of fried dog. "Alsatian!" Max crowed, but it really just tasted like crunchy breaded fried meat. The creepiest thing on a stick was definitely the still-moving scorpions, twitching their little tails at me.
In more appetizing food on a stick news, I had one of these. Fruit on a stick that had been dipped into some sort of hot sugar that dried and looked like golden glass. I got one of the mixed fruit sticks, the plum and pineapple were especially delicious. The only part that was disappointing was that little red blob on the end of the stick, which is a cousin to the crabapple called a "haw" because that sucker was gritty and bitter.
Back at the hostel I totally won my very first ever game of pool against Brennan (even though really both of us lost since I got the 8-ball in during the middle of the game but Brennan let me have a re-do.) Considering how much I suck at pool this very much bragging rights for me.
The hostel didn't have any more room in their bunk rooms so they bumped us up to the next best thing, a three person private room. At night Max is a sleep-talker, and my favorite moment was in the dark middle of the night when I woke up long enough to hear him talking and cry out, "Scones!" with concerned urgency. It was probably one of those dreams where what you say outloud isn't what you mean in the dream. Then again, he is British so scones might be an urgent matter after all.
We made it to Tianjin, and left Bryan in the waiting arms of his family before Max, Brennan and I boarded the second fastest train in China, which travels from Tianjin to Beijing (a distance of about 80 miles) in a half hour. We got on the train, chatted a bit and then we were at our station already. It was a bit anticlimactic, really.
Finding out hostel was a bit of a problem, since we had to figure out how to get from the shiny new train station to the subway. We found a very sweet boy manning an information desk who apologized profusely at his terrible English (it wasn't, really) and directed us to the right train. Thank you, Chinese public transportation, you never let us down! The bus dropped us off at the metro and I was startled to discover that since my last overwhelmed experience with the Beijing subway I had learned some traveling skills. Picking out the station names and reading station maps was as simple as reading the map for the BART or the El-trains in Chicago. I guess before I was too shocked that I was actually in China really and truly to properly function, before. After almost two weeks, Beijing was still huge but no longer incomprehensible and threatening.
Wufangjin hostel is near a big shopping street that is in turn very close to Tienanmen square. Wufanjin street is gew-gaw paradise, fans and chopsticks and beetles encased in plastic and tea sets and electronics and keychains and snowglobes, etc. The main street is lined with little alleys (Beijing hutong, I missed you!) that are devoted to more plastic souvenirs than you can sneeze at, and all of the animals of the world offered to you fried on a stick.
The polyglot hawkers at some of the food booths would call out to us in English, waving their hands over mysterious food items. The starfish, seahorses and tentacled octopi on a stick were recognizable, but there was all manner of other seafood items that were mysterious. "Snake!" one hawker cried, brandishing a stick covered in wiggly, chopped pieces of snake. "Dog!" he offered another meat on a stick with his other hand. Max was very excited, since eating dog was one of his remaining goals and he only had two days left to realize it. So we bought dog on a stick, which the man proceeded to deep fry for us. Brennan refused to eat something that he had helped name, in the past so no dog (or duck) for him, but Max and I shared bites of fried dog. "Alsatian!" Max crowed, but it really just tasted like crunchy breaded fried meat. The creepiest thing on a stick was definitely the still-moving scorpions, twitching their little tails at me.
In more appetizing food on a stick news, I had one of these. Fruit on a stick that had been dipped into some sort of hot sugar that dried and looked like golden glass. I got one of the mixed fruit sticks, the plum and pineapple were especially delicious. The only part that was disappointing was that little red blob on the end of the stick, which is a cousin to the crabapple called a "haw" because that sucker was gritty and bitter.
Back at the hostel I totally won my very first ever game of pool against Brennan (even though really both of us lost since I got the 8-ball in during the middle of the game but Brennan let me have a re-do.) Considering how much I suck at pool this very much bragging rights for me.
The hostel didn't have any more room in their bunk rooms so they bumped us up to the next best thing, a three person private room. At night Max is a sleep-talker, and my favorite moment was in the dark middle of the night when I woke up long enough to hear him talking and cry out, "Scones!" with concerned urgency. It was probably one of those dreams where what you say outloud isn't what you mean in the dream. Then again, he is British so scones might be an urgent matter after all.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Chimelong Paradise Waterpark and the Pearl River
The theme of our third day in Guangzhou was Water. I'd spent the first two days in the city dripping from the humidity so why not splash around in a pool for a while. Danching and Bryan and Max had all gone off to visit with Danching's family. (Max got to eat a Chinese delicacy which came in four different courses, each of the four different stomachs of a cow. And a bit of what was probably spinal cord. I really missed out.) The waterpark was very Westernized, it played all American music and was actually the only place to do so in China. It worked exactly the same as any waterpark in the U.S., so I rented a locker and stowed away my shoes and clothes and glasses and walked around like a blind person all day. By the time I was actually waiting in line for a ride it had started raining, which was fine since I was in my bathing suit and planning on getting wet anyway.
At the center of a wave pool there was a big dais and a stage where an emcee excitedly announced contestants for what appears to be another Americanization, a beauty pageant or at least a swimsuit competition. I didn't watch that for long, since I'm always boggled enough by those, let alone when they're in Cantonese. After soaking all day and smelling suspiciously unlike chlorine (they purify with O3, instead, according to Brennan) I slogged back to the hostel and got ready for our second water float of the day.
Brennan and I grabbed a river cruise down the Pearl River. The dock was conveniently right in front of our hostel and I wanted a bunch of pictures of the city neon, so I very cleverly forgot my camera. So the following pictures come from Brennan's very splendid camera.
This was the street our hostel was on, you can see the big alluring sign to lure in the drinkers for Bai Etan Bar Street.
Some buildings completely changed color as I watched them.
Bridges were lit with many colors.
And buildings that during the day were covered with a thin covering of coal dust and grime became brilliant.
While the skyscrapers lining the river were brilliant, they didn't hold a candle to the gaudiness of some of the other ships cruising along the Pearl River.
On the way back from the river cruise I passed the Guangzhou Brain Hospital. Even their hospital sign was covered in brilliant neon.
At the center of a wave pool there was a big dais and a stage where an emcee excitedly announced contestants for what appears to be another Americanization, a beauty pageant or at least a swimsuit competition. I didn't watch that for long, since I'm always boggled enough by those, let alone when they're in Cantonese. After soaking all day and smelling suspiciously unlike chlorine (they purify with O3, instead, according to Brennan) I slogged back to the hostel and got ready for our second water float of the day.
Brennan and I grabbed a river cruise down the Pearl River. The dock was conveniently right in front of our hostel and I wanted a bunch of pictures of the city neon, so I very cleverly forgot my camera. So the following pictures come from Brennan's very splendid camera.
This was the street our hostel was on, you can see the big alluring sign to lure in the drinkers for Bai Etan Bar Street.
Some buildings completely changed color as I watched them.
Bridges were lit with many colors.
And buildings that during the day were covered with a thin covering of coal dust and grime became brilliant.
While the skyscrapers lining the river were brilliant, they didn't hold a candle to the gaudiness of some of the other ships cruising along the Pearl River.
On the way back from the river cruise I passed the Guangzhou Brain Hospital. Even their hospital sign was covered in brilliant neon.
Pornographic Chicken
The street the orchid garden was on was a busy, cosmopolitan one with lots of big hotels like the Guangzhou Mariott, and lots of banks. We also happened to pass a great many African and Arab Muslims, often dressed in "odd" hats and robes, really the first non-Westernized garb I'd seen the whole trip. Lots of the restaurants advertised themselves not only in three different languages but three entirely different alphabets: Chinese characters, Arabic script and boring old English with roman letters. We passed a place advertising Lebanese food and one called 1001 Nights. Then we found what is probably the most terrifying billboard in existence:
I almost wish I could understand what the words being squawked out the chicken's butt were supposed to say, but that really cuts down on my ability to wildly speculate, so I'll make do with things being the way that they are.
After seeing this come hither chicken we headed back to the subway to return to the hostel. After we emerged from the subway we met the other chicken. She was parked outside of a little shop and had been all day, with a handy puddle of water to drink from and a flagstone to perch dejectedly on for hours on end. Her little comb was flopped to one side.
She must have been somebody's pet, because she was always there in the daylight hours when we passed by that tree, but after dark she would be gone. Not really a streetwalker chicken, not really a daywalker either.
I opted for a quiet afternoon spent melting beneath the ceiling fans, reading more Sherlock Holmes and catching up on The Internet. Brennan went out and foraged for a while, finally coming back from a pastry shop with some really interesting goodies. He had almost brought an entire cake, because some of them were lavish and glossy and very strange looking, but instead he brought just a little slice of fruit tart. He also had some green bread, which he thought would be like the melon bread he tried in Japan, but ended up just being studded with red beans and vaguely sweet. He also brought kiwi milk, which tasted sweet and dusty and a little acidic all at the same time. The pièce de résistance was his find of what looked like cute little cakes decorated like sushi. He took one bite into his sushi cake and discovered several dismaying things. 1) Though the "rice" part of the cake was made of a spongy yellow cake, the wrap was authentic nori seaweed and 2) the center of the sushi roll cake was made of some sort of fish paste. I stuck to kiwi milk and fruit tart and green bread, it seemed safest.
I almost wish I could understand what the words being squawked out the chicken's butt were supposed to say, but that really cuts down on my ability to wildly speculate, so I'll make do with things being the way that they are.
After seeing this come hither chicken we headed back to the subway to return to the hostel. After we emerged from the subway we met the other chicken. She was parked outside of a little shop and had been all day, with a handy puddle of water to drink from and a flagstone to perch dejectedly on for hours on end. Her little comb was flopped to one side.
She must have been somebody's pet, because she was always there in the daylight hours when we passed by that tree, but after dark she would be gone. Not really a streetwalker chicken, not really a daywalker either.
I opted for a quiet afternoon spent melting beneath the ceiling fans, reading more Sherlock Holmes and catching up on The Internet. Brennan went out and foraged for a while, finally coming back from a pastry shop with some really interesting goodies. He had almost brought an entire cake, because some of them were lavish and glossy and very strange looking, but instead he brought just a little slice of fruit tart. He also had some green bread, which he thought would be like the melon bread he tried in Japan, but ended up just being studded with red beans and vaguely sweet. He also brought kiwi milk, which tasted sweet and dusty and a little acidic all at the same time. The pièce de résistance was his find of what looked like cute little cakes decorated like sushi. He took one bite into his sushi cake and discovered several dismaying things. 1) Though the "rice" part of the cake was made of a spongy yellow cake, the wrap was authentic nori seaweed and 2) the center of the sushi roll cake was made of some sort of fish paste. I stuck to kiwi milk and fruit tart and green bread, it seemed safest.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
When I got down to the common room in the morning our Chinese friends were already gone (we'd met up with Bryan and Max's classmate Danching who lived nearby and, conveniently, spoke Cantonese) and Max was dejected and glum, either feeling the weight of a trip about to end or a bout of homesickness that could only be cured with loneliness and baozi. I did find Brennan though, so we decided to go out and try our hand at the subway system and try finding a place I read about in the guidebook, the Guangzhou Orchid Garden.
Before we went out to do anything though, we grabbed breakfast from a little place on the same street as the subway station. I was particularly attracted to the large photo placards on the wall, which meant that we could point and gesture at things and probably get that thing to eat. The place served mostly noodles and broth, and it smelled good, so I was looking forward to the meal, but not terribly excited. That is, I wasn't terribly excited until I started watching the man making our noodles fresh to order. To make the noodles he took a hunk of dough and kneaded it and worked it for a few minutes until the texture changed entirely and what started as a lump became smooth and elastic. To shape the noodles he did magic, arcane things with his hands and twirled the band of dough until the strings of dough lengthened and then ! magically became noodles. These were boiled for a minute and then rushed to a different kitchen area, to be covered in some sort of mild gravy and bright green beans.
And this was after I had eaten half of the delicious meal. Brennan somehow managed to eat all of his, which made me feel as tough my little stomach were somehow lesser. I wanted to eat more, I honestly did, but the idea of eating more and then walking around in the extreme humidity just didn't seem like a good idea at all.
The subway was a remarkably uncomplicated procedure, with fairly intuitive touchscreen machines that told us our fare and dispensed little black plastic tokens that felt like crappy poker chips but whooshed us down the track to our destination anyway.
The garden was the perfect way to spend the day, after the neon of the night before and the modern efficiency of the subway and the general hugeness and business of the city it felt like a respite. The Orchid Garden was a jungle of green best seen through a haze of humidity, for that authentic tropical feel. Yellow flowers littered the ground under nests of orchids that hung from tree branches. I sat by a fountain full of koi and it was so hot and so humid that it felt more like beads of water were precipitating out of the air to collect on me, rather than beads of sweat.
Plunging as deep as we could into the garden took us to a quiet pond full of lily pads and apparently--thanks to Brennan's sharp eyes--delicate water snakes. Water snakes give me the willies, but we sat by the water for a long time, partly for the beauty of the scene and partly because it started raining and we had a nice little overhang to protect us from most of the rain.
Before we went out to do anything though, we grabbed breakfast from a little place on the same street as the subway station. I was particularly attracted to the large photo placards on the wall, which meant that we could point and gesture at things and probably get that thing to eat. The place served mostly noodles and broth, and it smelled good, so I was looking forward to the meal, but not terribly excited. That is, I wasn't terribly excited until I started watching the man making our noodles fresh to order. To make the noodles he took a hunk of dough and kneaded it and worked it for a few minutes until the texture changed entirely and what started as a lump became smooth and elastic. To shape the noodles he did magic, arcane things with his hands and twirled the band of dough until the strings of dough lengthened and then ! magically became noodles. These were boiled for a minute and then rushed to a different kitchen area, to be covered in some sort of mild gravy and bright green beans.
And this was after I had eaten half of the delicious meal. Brennan somehow managed to eat all of his, which made me feel as tough my little stomach were somehow lesser. I wanted to eat more, I honestly did, but the idea of eating more and then walking around in the extreme humidity just didn't seem like a good idea at all.
The subway was a remarkably uncomplicated procedure, with fairly intuitive touchscreen machines that told us our fare and dispensed little black plastic tokens that felt like crappy poker chips but whooshed us down the track to our destination anyway.
The garden was the perfect way to spend the day, after the neon of the night before and the modern efficiency of the subway and the general hugeness and business of the city it felt like a respite. The Orchid Garden was a jungle of green best seen through a haze of humidity, for that authentic tropical feel. Yellow flowers littered the ground under nests of orchids that hung from tree branches. I sat by a fountain full of koi and it was so hot and so humid that it felt more like beads of water were precipitating out of the air to collect on me, rather than beads of sweat.
Plunging as deep as we could into the garden took us to a quiet pond full of lily pads and apparently--thanks to Brennan's sharp eyes--delicate water snakes. Water snakes give me the willies, but we sat by the water for a long time, partly for the beauty of the scene and partly because it started raining and we had a nice little overhang to protect us from most of the rain.
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