I recently returned from a trip to China, during which I had an amazing time. I kept in touch with my family, because quite frankly they would have sent in the Red Cross if they hadn't heard from me in a few days. I epically failed, however, to include the rest of people on these emails to my family, which turned out, in the end, to be more of a semi-daily journal of events. In order to share my adventures more fully, I have copied all of those emails here, (with a few edits for coherence's sake). Yes, it's long; if you want the true email experience, read it every few days over the course of two weeks.
Mon, July 20 -
It's been sort of a whirlwind start to my China tour. After my flight from Boston to New York, and then the 14-hour flight from JFK to Beijing, (which took me from Wednesday morning into Thursday evening, an event which I'm still not confident follows conventional science), my flight to Chengdu got delayed almost two hours. I sat in the airport sort of napping, reading, and generally keeping busy until a group of Chinese children made camp across the seats from me. After almost an hour of noise and chaos, one of them approached me.
"Hello," he said, "what is your name?" The conversation quickly evolved into a game of let-me-practice-my-english-on-the-American-tourist, and when he asked "What do you do?" I was confronted with trying to explain my juggling career. I hesitated; no words came to my mouth. Instead, I pulled out my juggling balls and did a demonstration. I did some basic juggling (including a relatively successful attempt at 5-ball, which I'm still working on), which was greeted by the boy, his friends, and all of the people around me with delighted applause. This was followed by a barrage of people asking questions, and then to take their picture with me. Group shots, family shots, etc. International celebrity status.
I didn't arrive in Chengdu until 2am, where a tired Karen met me at the airport and hailed us a cab. After now 29 hours of travel, I was barely coherent. We got to her apartment and promptly fell asleep. The next day, however, we were up at 8am to go BACK TO THE AIRPORT. Turns out, Catherine (karen's mom) scored us some hard-to-get vacation time at a Tibetan settlement/village city called SongPan in a reserve called JiuZhaiGou in the mountains an hour or so north of Chengdu by flight, (the only road from Chengdu to JiuZhaiGou was recently destroyed by an earthquake, so the many-hour bus ride was not an option. Phew). It was a great trip overall, lots of hiking in the mountains and lakes and waterfalls, and nice cool weather, (compared to the disgustingly humid 85+ degrees here in Chengdu), and a delightful tour guide to show us around. Again, more people asking to take pictures with Karen and me, and the rest of the American teachers with whom we were touring. Apparently, this is quite common. In any case, the scenery was amazing, and I have several hundred pictures which I'm sure you will see when I get back. I am also learning the numbers 1 through 10, (Yi, Er, San, Si, Wu, Liu, Qi, Ba, Jiu, Shi! ...with spelling correction by Karen).
Now we're back in Chengdu sitting in the "air conditioned" internet cafe, although I'm still sweating. I sat in on a lecture by Karen and Grace (Karen's sister) this afternoon. They discussed American culture by region, including food and agriculture. Then the class devolved into history and politics, none of which they're quite qualified to be teaching, but they did their best. We're meeting up with Catherine for dinner tonight, who (hopefully) will give me some more information about what I'm doing here, and whether or not I'm paying for all of my meals. I brought along my Canadian busking money to change, although the bank rejected one of the $5 bills for being a bit ripped. "You can spend this in Canada," the bank teller said, "but not here." Well, yes.
Anyway, my jet-lag has been minimal due to my inability to sleep on planes, so I settled into things pretty easily. The food has been fabulous -- Sichuan province is known for spicy food, which so far has been delicious -- and you'll be happy to know that I'm eating lots of vegetables whose names I simply don't know in English. I am still, however, avoiding the mushrooms.
I'll write again in a day or two, I'm sure. On days that I'm not "working", I'll basically be wandering the streets. This should be an entertaining adventure.
"Zai jian" from China!
-Tim
Tues. July 21 -
Ni hao from Chengdu!
Exciting news: This morning we witnessed a partial (EDIT: total) solar eclipse! Or, rather, we witnessed the world suddenly getting very dark and then very light again six minutes later. It's been very overcast/rainy the last few days, and while we were supposed to be right in line with the path of the eclipse, the cloud cover made it pretty much impossible to tell where the sun even WAS to begin with. But we drank our tea in the momentary darkness, and still it felt like witnessing something special. A total eclipse is an event which is not expected to be visible like this for another 5,000 years or so. Hopefully, the weather will be better then!
Yesterday Karen and Grace took me to their favorite noodle place for dinner. The food has been wonderful so far, (Sichuan province is known for their spicy food), and this place didn't disappoint. The spices here follow a ying-yang principle: two spices that balance each other, the "ma" and the "la". We've been eating plenty of spicy foods since I got here a few days ago, (the "la" spice), but this was one of my first authentic experiences with the "ma", which is based on the Sichuan peppercorn. This is a spice unlike any in the states. It tends to make your whole mouth tingle and go almost numb; a great counterpoint to the spicy "la" flavor, which makes your nose run like a faucet. The noodles were amazing, as were the "things on sticks," which were various vegetables on skewers which were cooked in a pot of broth filled with either the "ma" or the "la" spices. Some spicy pigeon eggs followed by some mouth-numbing potato slices... delicious.
I'm out of time here at the internet cafe, and I'm going to be late for lunch, so I will write again later on. Tomorrow I go down to XinJin, the city where I'll be doing most of the computer work for which I'm here in the first place. Hopefully I'll have time to write again down there.
Zai jian!
-Tim
Thurs. July 23 -
Ni hao from XinJin!
We arrived in XinJin last night via taxi, the city in which I'll sporadically be working while I'm here. When we came in it was dark, and as we drove along one side of the river, we could look across the water and see lots of buildings lit up with colorful neon lights. It reminded me of the boathouses along the river in Philadelphia, except without any sense of grace or coherence. A little tacky, really, but still quite a sight. Anyway, they put up all the visiting teachers in "the best hotel in town", (which is quite nice of course, but nothing like a nice hotel in the states), so this is where I'll be while I'm in XinJin.
This morning I awoke at 6.45am, (the earliest wake-up call of the trip so far, not counting the 5am departure from JiuZhaiGou), and had a small breakfast of steamed bread. Then we got onto the yellow school bus which took us the short ride to the school. Fun story: apparently, a few years ago some of the Chinese faculty here came to visit America and see an elementary and middle school there. After several days of observing, they returned to China and made one major change to their own school system: yellow school buses. Which, it turns out, amounted to a van being painted yellow and getting the words "school bus" written on the side. Wonderful.
I spent the morning looking around at the school's computers to "analyze their capabilities." The eventual goal is to wire the school such that students and teachers here in XinJin can have live video lessons with students and teachers in Catherine's school in Colorado. To begin, I met at length with Principal Xie, (first order of business: he invited me to his office where he served me tea that was locally grown and famous in XinJin). After talking about my trip so far and where I came from in the United States, he told me a little bit about the history of the city. Apparently there were 10 dynasty changes in this city, whereas there was only 1 in Chengdu. (Or something like that. It was a little hard to understand him).
After looking at the computers, the principal and a number of the elementary school teachers took Catherine, Karen and myself out to lunch at a wonderful duck soup restaurant. My mom noted to me that it seems like all we ever do is eat, and that really is true -- meal times are a big deal here. It also turns out that, in formal settings like this one, there is a very strict seating system based on your status in the group. Unbeknownst to me at the time, they put me at the position of honor for the meal -- the head of the table, and the furthest from the door. On one side of me was the principal; on the other was one of the head teachers at the school, and one of only teachers that spoke decent English. Also, all the men sit along one side and all the women along the other side. Very odd. The meal was great -- whole ducks sitting in boiling broth in the center of the table, with individual bowls of spicy sauce for each person -- and then as we sat there, the waitress brought out tray after tray of different kinds of mushrooms and tossed them into the broth to cook. Last night, I happened to put a temporary hiatus on my not eating mushrooms because they were in the fried rice, and now suddenly I was presented with more species of mushroom than I had ever seen before, let alone eaten. No sooner had they cooked than the teacher to my immediate right began to serve me, dropping things indiscriminately into my spice dish for me. Well, I have now officially eaten a great many mushrooms, including several species that I had never seen before, not even in nature documentaries. And I'll admit that with the spice sauce, they weren't half bad. The meal also included tripe, which I understand is some sort of intestinal something-or-other, and has quite a texture to it, like eating a shaved-down Koosh ball. The duck, of course, was delicious, although I couldn't make heads or tails of the duck feet with which I was presented. My stomach felt a little funny for the rest of the afternoon, which I'm going to chalk up to drastic dietary change.
After lunch, we headed out for a stroll around the city. Mom asked me if the cities here are like American cities, or if they have a distinctly older feel. I would describe it more like an old city with a sudden influx of modern people. Some of the architecture is old-world stuff, buildings with pointed roofs and dragon heads at the corners. But a great deal of the city feels like it was built quickly to accommodate a lot of people. Shops are crammed together---fruit vendor next to hardware store next to upscale shoe store. Wandering around today, Karen and I found ourselves in a wholesale fruit market with mountains of watermelons, which led into a series of booths selling tshirts and shoes, which spit us back out onto the road with the beauty salons, corner markets and lingerie stores. The city does this frequently, going from an old, cobblestone, covered-market feel to a more modern, busy, cars-honking, lights-flashing city at the turn of a corner.
It's also tough as a pedestrian, since traffic seems to have no rules whatsoever. Cars regularly honk just to let you know they're coming up behind you, or merging into another lane, or coming around a turn, etc. And the number of bicycles is staggering, not to mention the number of pedicabs, which are rickshaw-like bicycle taxis. This is true in both Chengdu and Xinjin, although XinJin is MUCH smaller and thus offers a more bicycle-friendly atmosphere. It's all a jumble, and people are everywhere.
Also, people like to stare, since I would estimate there are about 12 white Americans in this city of 70,000 people. We stick out. One of the American teachers on the program, a wonderful, crazy grandmother named Susie, is so outgoing that she says hello to anyone who stares for longer than a second, and often will go and chat in halting conversation with complete strangers. Walking back from dinner tonight, we stopped at a tea shop because the family of owners were sitting around a large table of fresh jasmine flowers, picking the stems from the petals, and they smelled delicious; before we knew it, Susie was sitting at a table with the family, de-stemming a pile of jasmine flowers right along with them.
And then it turns out that it's the season for chili peppers, which are the key ingredient for the "La" spice that is so important here, and out on the sidewalks are piles and piles of the peppers out to dry in the heat. Walking to dinner, we passed some women who were grinding it into a paste and storing it in vast quantities in huge, earthenware jars. We asked how much they had, and they said something like 10,000 pounds. Yes, ten thousand pounds! They had a whole garage full of them!
One last story before I crash for the night (and be warned, this is not for the faint of stomach): After dinner, Karen, myself and another teacher with the program named Mike took a walk down to the waterfront to take some pictures of the lit up buildings we had seen coming in along the river the night before. We did, and had a nice stroll, and were almost back to the hotel when we came across a man surrounded by 4 or 5 people, and this man was tying a 4 1/2-foot long snake to a tree. No, really---he had tied twine around its head and was hanging it from the tree. We couldn't figure out why at first until he took out his pocket knife and began to cut the skin from just below the head. He then began to pull the skin back from the snake -- which was still wriggling, mind you. He was pulling it down like a tube sock, one that was attached directly to the muscle. Best we could tell via Karen's translation, they found it in the trees nearby, (a rare find, we hope), and had decided to skin it for the meat. After the skinning -- which took some doing; at one point, the head actually ripped off from the force and he had to re-tie the rest of the body to the tree -- the man pulled out the stomach and intestines all in one go. He then put it all in a plastic bag and took it with him.
So far, this puts my animal slaughter count at three: at the market in JiuZhaiGou, I watched a goat be slaughtered at the meat market, and then I saw a chicken go from clucking to bleeding out in a box to totally limp and de-feathered in about five minutes. All in all, it's been a trip full of experiences... and I've got a whole week left!
On a sunnier note to close, I'll be heading back to Chengdu tomorrow, and this weekend I will hopefully be going to visit the Panda Reserve. I'll be sure to take plenty of pictures of these dopey yet adorable animals.
Zai jian,
-Tim
Sun. July 26 -
Ni hao!
I'm back in Chengdu with Karen and her sister, Grace. I return to the states on Wed. morning, so this is likely to be my last email until I get home.
As promised, this weekend took me to the Panda Breeding Center. One of Chengdu's most famous attractions, the Panda Breeding Center boasts one of the largest panda populations in China; the giant pandas, as you probably know, are on the endangered species list. As a species, pandas require a very large territory, and as humans encroach further and further into their land, the pandas become more scarce. The thing that is less commonly known about pandas is that they have a great deal of trouble breeding in the first place. It seems that the male reproductive organs are so small that, often, they cannot reach the female reproductive organs at all. A pretty poor design, really. So here in Chengdu, they have created a special breeding center to help preserve this national treasure, and also to promote panda copulation, even if it means artificial insemination.
Long story short, the Panda Breeding Center is a large outdoor zoo. Many of the paths are surrounded by bamboo plants, (the panda's primary diet), which are often shaped to curve up and over the paths, creating a sort of natural archway/tunnel. All of which would have been very picturesque had it not been steadily raining all morning. So we met up with the other teachers from XinJin, as well as a bunch of American exchange students and their host brothers/sisters and, after purchasing some cheap plastic ponchos for 3 Yuan, (the Chinese currency), we ventured out into the park. It should be noted that pandas are large, lazy creatures who, especially in the heat and humidity of Chengdu, spend most of the day either sitting on their butts eating bamboo or sleeping. Karen warned me that the last time she went there, most of the bears were just sitting there scratching their privates. We were positively lucky, then, that we caught a few of the bears munching on large bundles of bamboo plants, or walking around trying to find a place out of the rain, (just like us, really). A few of the other teachers had umbrellas, so I tried to do some guerrilla photography by slipping in and using them for protection from the rain when they had a good vantage point. I haven't gone through the photos yet, but I might have a few good ones.
After the panda reserve, we went to visit an active Buddhist temple. Karen loves this temple; because monks still live and pray there, it has not yet become just another tourist attraction. People tend to stay quiet and respectful, and it has a slow and peaceful quality that is hard to find in the city at large. This temple has an active history of over 600 years, which is older than pretty much everything we know in America. Karen explained a lot about the different Buddha statues, (she was a religion major, and focused largely on Eastern religions), most of which I've already gotten confused. I lit some incense and said a prayer for my family, and took some photos where I was allowed. It was very beautiful, with wonderful ornate statues and paintings, scrolls and murals. Every architectural detail seemed like it had been completed with great care.
Afterward, we wandered up an old-style street, which nowadays has been largely converted into shops. After some very wet shopping, (yes, it was still raining), we found ourselves a taxi and came back home. For dinner we went to a small noodle place where I watched them prepare the noodles by pounding and stretching the dough with their bare hands, over and over again. They were served in a salty broth with beef and vegetables; on the table was some ground chili pepper as well as red Sichuan vinegar. The vinegar is used here far more commonly than soy sauce -- I haven't been able to discern whether that is an American bastardization of Chinese cooking, (like most things on a Chinese food menu), or whether it is a regional variation. In any case, I proved to myself that I'm getting much better with chop sticks.
Tomorrow I will be helping Karen, Grace, and Dave, (the other American teacher here in Chengdu) with their conversation class tomorrow. Don't worry, this doesn't involve working with kids; their students are overwhelmingly young professionals or university professors who may have received invitations to work/study in America, so these are very smart adults who already have an elementary understanding of English. In theory, I'll just be helping guide a discussion in English about some cultural topic or another, so it should be pretty fun. We're also trying to cram in some last-minute sight seeing: we may visit Dushu's cottage, (a famous Chinese poet), or perhaps the historic museum of Chengdu. In any case, I'll let you know once I get home.
Zai jian,
-Tim
