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.

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.

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.

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.

The City Wall

The next morning we packed up our bags and left them at the hostel lobby in a big heap while we went off to the city wall for a bike ride. The four sides of the city wall make up about eight and a half miles. Bryan got his bike rented first and he was off like a shot, leaving me to meander after at my own pace and Brennan and Max to figure out how to ride a tandem bike.

I would like to present this picture as proof that it is impossible to ride a tandem bike without grinning like a fool.



The surface of the wall was a bit rough, and my bike may as well have been named Rickety. The sun was out in spades, which made it kind of brutal. I had to stop at each of the directional watchtowers to rest in the shade. The orange juice and chocolate from my breakfast didn't think this whole heat thing was a great idea, but there were some pretty keen sights from the walls.










As you can see, by the end of the ride I was red-faced and sweaty, but ever so pleased with my Xi'an experience. From here we headed off to the airport and flew to Guangzhou, capitol city of Canton. I experienced a bout of pickiness and homesickness, all I wanted was recognizable food to eat. I ate a hotdog and a "fruit salad" at the airport, even though the fruits were cherry tomatoes and watermelon. Brennan also shared a potato from his curry and it was so decadent. I missed potatoes.

The Guangzhou airport was all curved glass from floor to ceiling and rain was pouring down it when we landed, so much rain that it looked like someone was standing outside and hosing everything down. We took a bus to our hostel, upping our modes of transportation to feet, bike, plane, taxi and bus (and we could have taken the subway and a boat, too!) The rain gradually slacked off, but the advertisement playing at the front of the bus repeated over and over and over again, so that we got to see more then enough of the 30-second shampoo commercial. I swore never to use Slek shampoo, in fact, if I ever saw that actress sitting on her damn swing thinking about using Slek shampoo I'd probably go and shove her off.

Our Guangzhou hostel was on Bai'e Tan, one of the city's bar districts. We walked past neon lights and live music and more neon lights and found our place, right across the street from the Pearl River. In the evening I walked along the waterfront, looking at flotsam in the river (which was mostly organic, big bunches of river reeds that had washed loose of their moorings) and the neon reflected on the water. Guangzhou was a beautiful city at night, for sheer gaudy neon delight. It was also a beautiful city during the daytime, because its grey concrete apartment buildings were decked with greenery, as each balcony held as many live plants as would fit and true to the humid tropical air, they all thrived by pulling moisture straight out of the air.

Since we were right there on the bar street we went out for a drink--and some heavily/heavenly salted french fries--at the Amigo, which had live music in the form of a woman in a denim shortshorts (bordering on hotpants) and cowboy boots and a man playing a keyboard, I think they were both Filipino. When she wasn't singing the woman dragged people bodily onto the dance floor, so Max ended up out there multiple times, dancing with the middle-aged Chinese ladies who were already dancing. The woman kept coming back and trying to grab me, but I was much more content with my fries and my beers and I would not be moved.

This fresh, bright day was spent exploring the city within Xi'an's old city walls. We wandered towards where our hostel's handy map indicated there was a "Bird Market" and even though we never found that we found plenty to occupy us. In the morning and afternoon we found people sitting at card tables on the sidewalk playing Mahjong and Chinese chess.



We found a street full of food and restaurants, including a window I could peek through and see every bit of a chicken fried up and ready to eat.



See? Even greasy little chicken feet waiting to be eaten.

At one point we passed a fence and a sudden waft of foreign sounding music came to us. We peeked through the fence and were faced with an unexpected sea of brilliant, organic green.



We found our way around the fence, over a wall and were suddenly in a very pretty public park. We followed the sound of music to its source and discovered, well, several sources. There were at least three separate musical activities going on in the park. First we found a few musicians seated at strange few-stringed instruments which made very alien sounding melodies and squeaks. Then we ran into a flat, paved section of park where a small cluster of people were dancing ballroom. A Chinese man asked me to dance (I think, or at least urged me to dance) and I had to duck my head and claim that I didn't know how. Which is a true enough claim, I think. Finally we discovered a saxophone-heavy jazz band in yet another part of the park.



The people who were standing around weren't just listening, they were also singing along in Chinese to songs I didn't recognize, but were in a must more Western style than the other music we had encountered.

Towards the park entrance--the real one, which didn't involve climbing fences or walls--we found an adult playground full of ordinary gym equipment that was weatherized for the outdoors and covered in primary-colored plastics.



It's harder to tell in this picture, but there was StairMaster-esque equipment, and leg presses and stationary bikes and even some elliptical equipment!



We ate dinner at a hotpot restaurant next to the hostel. We tried the restaurant's special warm-yeast-beer before we decided to stick to nice cold Tsingtao. Dinner came to our table and was cooked on the hotplate set in the middle. The broth contained basically all that there is of a chicken except for the head and the feet. There were actually parts in there that appeared to be perfectly inedible, bone and gristle and what appeared to be... neck bits? I could find nice recognizable pieces of chicken, and there was cabbage and radish and noodle to eat, but every now and then I would fish up a long, white segment of... /something/. The Something had the exact texture of animal fat (I know, because I tried one before I knew better) but the pieces were too big to be chicken fat, and it had the wrong flavor for pork fat and even as the broth bubbled and boiled it didn't cook down or react like fat normally would. I swore off the mystery lipid after my one piece, and concentrated on the noodles and the hunt for recognizable chicken meat.

After exploring all day I was a bit hot and fried, so the idea of running through sprinklers definitely occurred and appealed to me. So, for our second visit to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, Brennan and I came prepared.



By prepared I mean that we wore our bathing suits and money in a Ziploc bag. This time as soon as the music started people streamed into the fountain, mostly children and young people who dragged their protesting friends in after them. Brennan attempted to teach me a box step, but I'm pretty crap at dancing under the best circumstances, let alone when I'm dancing into cold jets of water every few steps. We did manage some theatrical spins and a pretty good shuffle step.

I need to take some dance lessons for when I travel abroad next time. I want to be able to accept a dance from a stranger in the future, whether it is in a public park or a fountain.

Terracotta Warriors

I don't think I was hungover, because I felt fine in the early morning, but by the time we had bussed out to the terracotta warrior site I was sort of limping, and another day of blistering hot sun left me feeling completely fried. Of all the sites I saw on my China trip, I'd have to say that the warriors might have been the biggest letdown. Not because they weren't cool, they just weren't as cool as my mind had cast them as. I remember poring over the National Geographic magazine that had pictures of the warriors when I was little, and I was just fascinated by how they all had different faces, and the details on the weapons and the chariots and all that stuff.

In person, you have to climb a long but gradual incline to get to the three pits where the warriors live. Climbing the hill you pass by vendors selling water and ice cream and hats and fans and, rather perversely given the incredible heat of the day, fur caps and scarves.

By the time we got up to the front of the warehouses that house the pits I was having little hot-cold tingles and was thoroughly overheated. The rest of the afternoon was kind of a blur, but I did retain a couple of fascinating facts.

The chrome plating on the arrows and the shafts of most of the weapons found in the pits was pretty advanced stuff. In fact, the chrome plating technology was so advanced on these 2,000+ year old weapons that similar technology was not utilized again until the 20th century by Germans and Americans.

Also, I made sure to take plenty of pictures of headless terracotta warriors from above, for my brother, because you can see right down into their neck holes. I did find the warriors oddly easy to empathize with, which meant I was doing a lot of anthropomorphizing. "They're not real people," I kept having to remind myself, even though I was feeling more upset by their broken bodies and tangled torsos in heaps down in the dig site that I've felt at actual graves before, or in the plague pits in Europe.

Got back to the hostel and I slept for the rest of the night except for a brief time when I got woken up and fed some sort of crispy tasty meat-inna-bun that Brennan found in the nearby Muslim district. I guess I earned at least one day with malady on my trip.

I felt completely recovered by the next morning and woke up fresh and bright and early. I went walking before it got miserably hot out and decided that really all that I'd needed was an incredibly long nap to heal myself.