Inside painting and the way to Tianjin

After the wedding festivities were really over (except for the drunken sleeping stupor in the lobby) Granddad asked us to come see Hengshui's museum of "inside painting." Having no idea what this might be we, of course, said yes.

This style of painting is done on the inside of a clear glass bottle, one that is traditionally filled with snuff tobacco for disgusting snorting up the nose. The glass bottles are small, most of them fit in the palm of the hand. The artist reaches a tiny brush into the bottle and paints a completely mirror image to the one that shows up on the outside of the glass. The paintings are mostly traditionally Chinese in style and subject-matter (with an exception I will describe below). Many were of scenes of small, peach-fuzzy kittens with fat heads and birds on branches. In my opinion the most impressive ones involved a lot of little black lettering, the Chinese characters have to be painted backwards, as if you written in a fogged window to be read from the other side. I can't even remember which way my 'e' and 'r' are supposed to face when writing backwards, let alone take care of characters like these:



(Oh, btw, the bottom-most character on the left is literally the symbol for day and the symbol for entrance or opening. Nice.)

The inside painting museum had a bunch of unusual and beautiful bottles displayed upstairs, as well as a collection of snuff-snorting tools. I got a tour of the museum with my very own personal English-speaking tour guide. He hovered, following me around the fairly small showroom. It only took about fifteen minutes, but he was eager to tell me all about the everything, so I was relieved when I ducked into the alcove in the middle of the room and he only half followed. It was also there that I discovered The Presidents. A set of glass bottles on a slowly spinning pyramid showed presidents one through forty-one (that is, Washington to Bush, Sr.) slowly swiveling under a bright light. The little presidential portraits were finely detailed, but they weren't quite right. Even Theodore Roosevelt looked just a little fishy, as though they'd been copied from a copy or a copy. They didn't look like the expected portrait, exactly. They were so odd and delightful.

After the museum we had to track down some internet so that we could make hostel bookings for Tianjin the following day. We tried to use the dim, hot internet cafe near our hotel, but they refused to let us because we were foreign (at least that was what our mimed conversation and the repeated use of the word 'passport' led us to believe.) Everybody in the internet cafe was playing World of Warcraft. It was spooky and smoky and dark.

For internet use, Bryan's uncle swept us off to his apartment once again, to use his computer. He uncovered it (another electronics-hiding doily!) and we booked up at the only hostel in Tianjin. While we made our plans for the following day the uncle and his wife brought us nuts and seeds and dried fruit and tea, continuing to press us with fierce hospitality. Max made some joking comment about wanting some lychee fruits, and then repeated with as best a Mandarin intonation as possible, "Lychee?" The aunt and uncle both nodded vigorously. A short while later, they filed out, leaving us in their apartment with Granddad. Bryan was back at the hotel, so we couldn't really make conversation, but filled the silence and the time by playing what felt like Pictionary. Granddad would draw a picture, and then draw a Chinese character, letting us know what he was drawing. We went through the numbers, then drew some maps and some names of countries. The most useful ones that he showed us were the cardinal directions, bei (north), dong (east), nan (south), xi (west).

Granddad also tried to write our names with Chinese characters. He managed to write out "Chesley" just fine, but when I showed him how I spell my last name he kind of squinted and frowned at me, and underlined it, as if to say "That whole thing??" Yes, that whole thing. Hyphen and all. So the Digges-Elliott sparks cross cultural confusion, nice.

At this point, Uncle and Aunt came back completely laden with fruit. They gave us tiny nectarines, fresh slices of melon and whole branches of lychees with white-grey flesh and pupil-glossy black pits. There was again, so much food that plates and bowls had to be stacked on top of each other on the coffee table to fit everything.

We slept at the hotel that night, and then woke up early, fresh for a train ride. Bryan's family took us out for breakfast, a salty boiled egg that had been soaked in soy sauce and a bunch of tasty meat wrapped in bread. I looked at the paper wrapping the whole thing came in when I was done eating and it had a few words written in English. Looks like my tasty meat wrap was made out of donkey. Noms.

The whole family, both Bryan's and the family of the bride waited with us at the train station. The women in the family admired my knitting when I pulled it out. I showed them the pictures of the finished sock from my pattern so they knew what I was making. I got approving looks.

We finally boarded the train bound for Tianjin, looking forward to several hours of travel. Our seats were not all together, so I ended up sitting with Brennan across from a two year old boy and his mom.



The boy was thoroughly engrossed in eating his hot ramen noodles and stretching his feet out towards me, poking me in the leg with his hot little toes. The little boy eventually got into a poking match with Brennan, especially delighted when Brennan made great "woobwoobwoobwoob!" noises and bugging his eyes out in surprise when the kid poked him. This occupied our next hour, easily, until the kid pulled out his finger gun and started shooting us, "pop pop pop!" We faked our deaths valiantly, which excited him. so that he hopped up and down and up and down and up and down and vomited his noodles into his mom's purse. She took it in stride and cleaned him up, and he was completely and utterly unphased.



As a nice, calm sit-down game Brennan made him a little origami hop frog out of a one yuan bill. The kid lit up at the frog, he made it hop all over the place, including (sometimes) through the goal post that Brennan made of his hands. When he finally tired of the hop frog he gutted it, unfolding and yelling "gwah! gwah! gwah!" which is a damn sight closer to a bullfrog noise than "ribbit."

Hengshui - Baby fashion and adult gluttony

As promised, baby fashion:



The picture is small, so I will explain. Those are in fact buttless pants, and they are what most babies up to about two years wear. Convenient, and reinforces my notion of the Chinese as what Brennan called, "not fecal phobic" people.

Finally the baby got cleared away, and so did the furniture in front of the couches. The bride and groom came out of their room and after the window they were facing was ceremoniously closed, they faced the empty couch, looking goofy and nervous.



The young couple faced the couch, and two-by-two the older relatives would come and sit on the couch. Bride and groom would bow and address both people by their titles and bow again, and then the relatives would leave a red paper envelope of money on a tray for them and the next relatives would take a turn. We went through Grandmother and Grandfathers, Aunts and Uncles, and parents in this way. It was very symbolic of accepting the other person's family completely, and the mingling of relatives going on in the background indicated that people took this uniting of families business pretty seriously. On a whole this part of the ceremony was really nice, very low key and informal, since very few people were actually paying attention to it, and sometimes people forgot their envelopes of money and dashed off to hunt for them in big purses while the ceremony continued without them.

We were finally ushered back to the hotel by the engineer, and given an hour to rest before the reception. I wrote about my day and the guys dozed, and I heard more fireworks going off out in front of the hotel.

A room just off the lobby in the hotel was set for a banquet. The room was crowded with tables, easily twenty or so great round tables, each table set for at least ten diners. The room was just beginning to fill up when we trailed downstairs. Tables were wet with tiny cups, plates and bowls, chopsticks and spoons and more peanuts and candy. People shelled their nuts and threw the shells on the floor. Great big gold boxes on our table housed delicate red and white ceramic bottles of potent wine, and there were liter bottles of Sprite and Coke, which seemed incongruous.

The room filled up with crowds of people and their noise and their smoke. Even people who didn't normally smoke would smoke on a wedding, Bryan told us, translating for Granddad, it was lucky. Only one pictures kind of gives the impression of how the room was, and then only a bit. This was taken as the bride and room entered, and it was the only time for the rest of the afternoon that there was anything approaching a quiet or hush.



The bride and groom marched up the center aisle and then stood awkwardly on a platform at the front of the room, being stared at. A man with a microphone (who seemed to be a professional, though so far removed from a minister or justice of the peace that he reminded me more of an auctioneer) led them in another part of the wedding ceremony. He had them bow to each other, and then drink a toast to each other. Making this toast more difficult was the fact that it was done by hooking arms around each other, and giving each a drink from the other's glass. The bride kept covering her mouth and making embarrassed giggly faces. After repeating some things into the microphone with varying degrees of giddiness, they were (I suppose) married. After that they went around and drank a toast at every single table in the place, patiently making the rounds as the food started to come out. I can only imagine that they were exhausted and/or drunk by the end of their rounds.

The food... Food arrived, plateful by plateful for the next hour and a half at least. Everything came out and was served family style on the big Lazy Susan in the middle of the table. The uncles and cousins were impressed by how us awkward white folks could handle chopsticks at all.


Some sort of noodle thing with cilantro and green onion and soy sauce, and some sort of preserved plums that were ultra sweet and sticky.





An entire (recognizable) duck arrived, plated in such a way that his little bill could face his devourers. The bill was deformed from the heat of the oven, and he looked like he was leering slightly.



Corn, shrimp, an entire fish, salt flavored salad, bacon and celery, some sort of meaty meatballs, noodles, a whole chicken, preserved pressed ham that was more pink than flavor, liver and green pepper, green onions and porkbelly, stew, buns, food food food food food.

The uncles kept toasting us, which was dangerous since as soon as a glass was empty they made sure that it was filled again, with the potent brew. They made us feel very welcome, that is for certain.

As an entertainment towards the end of the meal a woman came up front, hotel staff I think, and sang karaoke for us. She sang a piece that involved many alien noises and vocal twitches in a high soprano, so it was impressive and irritating at the same time. The door from whence all of our food had come was soon clogged with what looked like kitchen helpers, all listening to the singing. They were smirking a great deal, and some of them looked to be really enjoying it, but others looked more amused than anything else.

There was an all call for people to do karaoke, but no one else came to the front to sing, un/fortunately. People began to trail out, leaving the carnage of devoured food and smoked cigarettes and demolished wine. The lobby furniture, a few sofas and chairs was covered in the unconscious bodies of the heaviest drinkers of the afternoon. It was just like Thanksgiving!

I will continue with a post about inside painting, the American Presidents and the train to Tianjin!

Hengshui - the wedding

In case I didn't mention it, our purpose for traveling to Hengshui was to reunite Bryan with his family and attend his cousin's wedding. For this part of our trip we got treated like everybody's pet tourists.

The morning of the wedding we four got whisked off to Bryan's uncle's home in Hengshui, a real live Chinese apartment. The apartment was fairly spartan, tidy, and there were white doilies covering all of the electronics (a feng shui thing, I think.) While Bryan and his cousin (the Engineer) went off to get us breakfast the Uncle puttered around his apartment and made us at home. It felt more than a little awkward, because Engineer and Bryan were the only ones who spoke both Mandarin and English, so we were left mumbling at the Uncle, only able to thank him with a "xiexie" every now and then, when he brought us fresh fruit.

Breakfast, when it came, was cans of hazelnut (soy?) milk and hot, flattened meat-in-a-bread-pocket disks. The bread pockets were also filled with cilantro and fresh green onions, so it was very tasty. (Food, it was to turn out, was hardly sparse as the day progressed.)

After we ate, we were ushered over to the bride's home, a sixth floor apartment in a twenty story building. The entrance to the alley out front was crowded with an assortment of relatives, mostly men standing and smoking. The alley itself had a haze of smoke hanging over it, the cause of which we would soon discover. While we waited by the car with Granddad and Uncle some younger relatives bounced out of the apartment's courtyard, to be followed by a riotous cacophony of firecrackers going off.



Granddad pulled us aside and explained various things to Bryan and the rest of us, though Bryan of course had to translate for the rest of us. In Chinese tradition the groom's family meets in the home of the bride's family and then the bride is carried away in a covered bower, traditionally festooned with flowers. It isn't lucky for the bride to be alone in the bower, so a boy child would accompany her and Granddad had played that role when he was a little 'un. Nowadays, no bower, but a black car with a red and gold license plate cover and wreathes of red roses on it.



Granddad had all four of the visitors pose in front of the wedding car for a picture. Then he chased everybody out of the frame except for me and Brennan, so he got an all-American photo of the Chinese wedding mobile. Hilarious. Also amusing, was the fact that while he was explaining the bride's part in the ceremony, Granddad always pointed at me. Which, for those of you that know me, is very funny.

Granddad led us into the building and up the stairs, we followed a line of sand, confetti and glitter had been trailed on the stairs, all the way up to the bride's apartment. The glitter and sand is for good luck, as are most wedding symbolic acts, and to bring wealth and prosperity into the home.

As soon as we entered we were given peanuts and candy and places to sit on the sofa (which was covered in Mickey and Minnie Mouse motif). None of these things could be refused, since they were all offered with typical fierce Chinese courtesy. The couch was positively crawling with doilies, so we kept knocking them askew. We were given red roses to pin to ourselves, to indicate our celebration, I reckon.



I'll talk about baby fashion and food tomorrow.

Hengshui - getting there

We missed the train we meant to catch to Hengshui, so we caught the next one (I cannot stress the convenience of transportation while we were in China enough, trains, buses and subways took us everywhere that we needed to go.) Hengshui is a city slightly southwest of Beijing, with a population of (only) 4 million.

We ate bad train station fast food for dinner, baozi, which are steamed buns with some sort of paste stuff inside that involved meat, possibly. The best ones have a thick, fluffy dough and a pleasant smear of meat or vegetable and flavorings on the inside. These were not the best ones, having a texture more akin to cardboard outside and hot grease on the inside.

We boarded and traveled in the dark on the full train, so I didn't have any opportunity to peek out the window at the non-city landscape we passed through. We did luck out with seats, though. Our tickets were for standing room only, but we managed to snag a whole bench seat. Three out of our four person party got to stand, with Bryan our Chinese friend (and the only one of us who spoke a lick of Mandarin) refusing to stand. This refusal was my first introduction to what I came to think of as the fierce Chinese insistence of courtesy.

We befriended the girl sitting across from us by butchering sentences from the phrase book and slowly repeating them after her, with tones only half mangled instead of completely destroyed. She introduced herself as "Lauren," her English name. She was a student, taking classes in hotel management and desiring to work at The Forbidden City for the summer. Our talk in English caught the attention of another gentleman who was standing in the aisle nearby and he came over and joined us. He was a student of law, and since we started discussing law and politics we had to consult the phrasebook's meager dictionary many times, and rely more heavily on the girl's excellent electronic dictionary to give us more specific language to use. We encountered a lot of reticence to the subject of politics. The girl didn't seem afraid, just completely uninterested, as though it was none of her business.

We got in to the city of Hengshui late, after dark and after dinner. As we disembarked with a clump of other passengers Brennan pulled his camera out, so that he could take a picture of the little old man who was poised with a camera right by the door. The little man clicked away with his camera, and Brennan clicked away with his as we continued to push our way through the turnstile. Turns out, the little old man was Bryan's grandfather (henceforth to be called Granddad, in this account) and he was very tickled by Brennan and his camera and stood making comments in Mandarin and prodding Brennan's camera with the curiosity of a passionate amateur. It was late enough that all of the family had already eaten, but they insisted on taking us out for dinner, anyway.

In the restaurant I got to experience my first real life authentic squat toilet, basically a basin set into the floor with the sort of black hole that gives little kids at potty training age the absolute terrors. The door to the bathroom would not lock or close all the way, and the stall door to the toilet had been taken down, so it was quite the rustic experience. Hey, in countries with squat toilets they have much stronger pelvic girdles from all that squatting, so there's always an upside.

This is the first incoherent installment. Keep in mind that I was traveling with three other people, Brennan, Max, and Bryan and that I will probably mention these people and use the term 'we' a lot, assuming that you have some idea of who I'm talking about.

My first day waking up in Beijing was devoted to the two biggies of the city. The Forbidden City, which should now be known as the Really Full of Tourists City, which really was stuffed to the gills with tourists, mainly Chinese.




The other big sight was Tiananmen Square, which is famous in China for mostly things other than the 1989 protests on behalf of Democracy. Max suggested that we do a reenactment of the famous photograph of a single protester standing in front of a tank, but since you can't really make a tank out of one person, and a protester out of the other person and still have somebody to take the picture we abandoned that notion.

There is a big mausoleum smack dab in the middle of the square, guarded by men in uniform that stand under big green umbrellas all day. Mao's remains are displayed from 8am to noon every day, and our timing was never right, so we didn't get to see the Chairman. Also on the square itself is a giant statue to "The People." Max kept wondering why giving them the definite article is necessary, but I think that referring to "the people" and just "people" gets two very different ideas going. We had been warned that the square would be full of hawkers and people trying to scam tourists into buying overpriced art, but for our explorations that day we didn't get bothered at all. The flapping of the red flags and the nearby honking (because anywhere in China there is a road there is honking) were far louder than anyone trying to sell cold water or souviners.



The funniest thing about the first day to penetrate my befuddled, jet-lagged, scared-country-mouse-in-a-huge-city-of-13-million-other-mice brain, was when two Chinese guys came up to Brennan in The Forbidden City and wanted to take their picture with him. He was't even wearing the kilt or the individually toed shoes that day, so was just kind of a scruffy, fluffy white guy. Noteworthy enough to have your picture taken with, though.



I felt extremely popular when I ended up in the position of having my picture taken by strangers as the token foreigner. It happened three times in the Guanzhou airport alone. Though one guy did it all stealthy like, the other two ladies came up and posed with me, holding their hands in peace pr v-for-victory style. I have no idea why that pose is so ubiquitous when you are standing with an American, but it happened over and over again.

In the afternoon we had to leave our hostel to catch a train (my first Chinese train!) to Hengshui, to go to the wedding of one of Bryan's cousins. And that's where the real adventure began. (In eating, anyway.)

Thanks, Twitter.

This is what I call need to know information.


onelark Wonder if there is anything specific I should or should not bring to China now that I have my visa and I can officially go.

rupsyfrimbles @onelark toilet paper.

Let me describe the rigmarole of getting my Chinese Visa, because it is worth complaining about.

To get a Chinese visa you have to either hire a special visa courier to drop off your paperwork, or you have to go in person to one of the six Chinese embassy/consulates. These are located in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Houston, Los Angelos and Washington, D.C. The official webpage of the D.C. embassy is difficult to navigate and provides few clues as to what is needed in the visa application. I found the visa application on a courier's webpage, actually, and found the declaration form there, too. (I think the declaration form is because of the recent N1H1 pandemic, since all it requires is for me to state where I have been in the past two weeks. Easy: Bowling Green.)

The listed phone number -- (202)3386688 -- leads one into a maze of options. I was finally able to find hours of operation (which were out of date) visa fees (which were right, but incomplete since they made no mention of the $5 mail-back fee) expected turn-around time (which was out of date, they said three days, turned out it was six days.) I tried in vain for several hours at several different times of day on different days of the week to reach a real live human being, so that I could make sure they do offer mail-back service since Mom was going to be in D.C. to drop my application off. I failed to speak to a human being, so just crossed my fingers and hoped I had everything I needed in a pile. I filled out the application, the declaration, purchased a money order for the visa and a money order for the mail-back fee that I had read about on the section of the official website dealing with marriage certificate notarization. I put the whole thing into an envelope with a priority stamp on it so that my passport would be sent back to me.

My mom dropped all of my info off on the morning on a Tuesday morning and I got my Chinese visa in the mail exactly six working days later. It is a huge relief to have my passport back in my hands and out of the wily grip of inefficient bureaucracy.