So I wrote this a few days ago and I don't feel like changing the tense. As I wrote it the woman next to me was staring over my shoulder trying to look at what I was writing, as if she had any means by which to understand it. Maybe no one writes in China, maybe it's the act she found so mesmerizing.
So I'm on the train from Hangzhou to Guangzhou for the next 20 hours and when I first boarded there were more people on the train than I can recall ever seeing on any train, anywhere, and that's saying a lot because I went to India once. There were people all through the aisles, in the bathroom, in the little cranny next to the bathroom, in every seat, some even sitting on laps of others, very possibly strangers. And there was luggage everywhere, in places you would never even think to put luggage, and no clear space for my hulking bag.
So I located my seat slowly and, unsurprisingly, found it occupied, but, somewhat surprisingly, by a baby. I had a quick discussion with him about how he was in my seat and surely he had simply made a mistake, but only after I showed his mother and every other person around me my ticket, emphasizing the seat number with my finger, did anyone move at all, and even then, very casual and begrudgingly. But happy day I got the window seat by some stroke of luck and there was no way some fucking baby was going to deprive me of that sweet, sweet joy. It truly is the difference between a night of a little sleep and a night of no sleep whatsoever.
Even after getting the baby out of the way, no one was moving to actually allow me access to it, so I threw my man purse over several people (they are rather small, it was easy) and landed it perfectly in my berth.
Next up, my backpack, which was going to be more difficult as I couldn't even move enough to get it off my back. I tried making gestures to my back and then up to the luggage racks and then moving from side to side a bit as if to say "could you please get right up out my way", and soon the man next to me sprung into action, parting the crowd toward the only space I could see in the entire car big enough for my bag, and when we got there he bent down for a moment and materialized some magic purple duffle bag from out of the ether and lifted it up to place into my bag hole. Dick. Even when you think you've found a good one, you haven't.
I realized that my usual approach of polite, soft-voiced tones and incoherent hand gestures wasn't going to work this time; I was gonna have to go Chinese style. I forcefully pushed my way past two people, nearly lifting one of them off the ground, then gently urged a man out of his seat so I could stand on it to begin rearranging the luggage rack to make room for my own. After 5 minutes and with shockingly little regard for any luggage that wasn't my own, I had managed to a small space to fit it, sideways and hanging precariously over the edge, but rammed so tightly between two others as to provide me assurance enough against it's dropping in the night onto some poor Chinese head.
There is a dude whose job it is to walk the entirety of the train making sure all the luggage is safely stowed, moving it around when it isn't, and when he made it my bag he said something rapidly which I took to mean "who in Mao's name does this one belong to?", because directly afterward everyone around pointed and looked straight at me. Then he muttered something like "why did I even ask" or "fuckin' white people" and moved on without doing a thing.
Luggage stowed, I climbed down from the seat and let the rightful owner re-occupy his place and in his movement to my right side used him as a buffer to move past him and, with that new momentum, past the family who hated me with their eyes and their immovable bodies and landed safely into my beautiful window seat.
I've yet to get out of it in six hours because I worry if I do I'll never get back into it. And I worry that if this little kid decided to bounce off me the entire night I might have to club him like a seal. Just kidding, but seriously, just kidding. I saw this kids mom get so pissed at him earlier that when he turned his head away she pushed it right into the table and tried to make it look like it was his fault. He wailed and wailed and at the time I felt quite bad for him, but now I no longer do.
It remained pretty much like this for 21 hours. It was great.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
China
Despite the people, China is a lovely place, naturally one of the most stunning places I've been. The China you've seen in pictures, huge mountains, lush greens, big water, really is the China that you find there. Some of the mountains have such odd formations you wonder how they don`t fall into the sea. And the smog, as well, is quite like you've heard or seen. Except it's worse. In Beijing you literally couldn't see the other end of Tiananmen Square from one end. Even the ever imposing painting of Mao hanging above the Forbidden City gets a little blurry. It was crazy, and quite bothersome as you had to wait until morning to judge how smoggy it was going to be before planning on what to do. Super smoggy, go visit the preserved corpse of Mao Zedong housed indoors, not as smoggy, temples and gardens outside.
And not only the big cities, all cities. Cities I had truly never heard of that house millions of people that you couldn't`t see from across the street.
Chinese people have this great habit of spitting, reaching deep within their guts first to summon every last glorious drop, then letting it fly in the loudest possible manner towards the nearest possible section of ground, be it inside or outside. This might sound awful but I came down with a cold a few days into China that stayed with me the entire time I was there, so the ability to cough up some seriously nasty shit that really wanted out of my body in public was actually a strange comfort. Urte did not see it that way.
In Xi`an we took the bus an hour out of town to see the famous Terra Cotta Warriors, a massive underground tomb filled with over 7,000 life-size terra cotta figures in full battle armor, each with distinctive faces built hundreds of years ago during the Qin dynasty and then buried with terra cotta horses, birds, weapons and the unlucky few real humans who set the final figures in place before the entrance was sealed behind them, burying them alive. I had seen pictures of the figures for years and thought that I would be a bit unimpressed, but once you get out there and see the magnitude of the undertaking and realize the balls of emperor Qin Shi Huang in hoping he could carry all this might into the afterlife, it is quite stunning. There are three different buildings in which the warriors are housed, and the largest of them is as big as two aircraft hangars. And after seeing all the excavated warriors you find out that the excavation is still ongoing, and that they expect to find many more, and also that 2 km away lies Qin's own tomb, a massive underground pyramid that is the biggest known tomb in the world. Mad, mad people have existed before us.
In Luoyang we walked two sides of a river where hundreds of years ago a hundred different people spent years carving likenesses into the rock face.
In Tai`an we walked up and down over 20,000 steps to reach and descend Mt. Tai`shan with thousands of other people.
In Shanghai we walked into the future, or the past, depending on your architectural affinities, and saw one of the world`s greatest skylines.
I spent my entire allowed stay of 30 days in China (for which I paid $198 for my visa in Nepal), breaking off with Josh and Urte a few weeks ago in Shanghai as they flew off to Japan and I traveled further south to Hong Kong. On the way down I stopped in Suzhou, a slightly quiet city referred to (at least by some Chinese people) as the Venice of China due to the canals streaming throughout, then Hongzhou with it`s massive lake Xi Hu, to which every single person in the in Zhejiang province had decided to come the weekend I arrived (apparently the second biggest holiday in China) and then to Guangzhou (ugly, hot) for a couple hours before catching the train to Shenzen (clean, hot) and walking myself across the border to Hong Kong, mere hours before my visa expired. There, I spent a few days walking the streets I walked almost exactly a year prior, watching A Symphony Of Lights at Victoria Harbour every night at 8pm, haggling for a room at the Chung King Mansions, eating red bean curd peanuts (the absolute best peanut in the world), even going back to Hotel New China to ask if they ever found the journal I left hiding under my mattress when I stayed there a year ago. They thought I was trying to use this story to haggle for a better room price. This is why I love Hong Kong. For someone who rarely returns it was nice returning.
And not only the big cities, all cities. Cities I had truly never heard of that house millions of people that you couldn't`t see from across the street.
Chinese people have this great habit of spitting, reaching deep within their guts first to summon every last glorious drop, then letting it fly in the loudest possible manner towards the nearest possible section of ground, be it inside or outside. This might sound awful but I came down with a cold a few days into China that stayed with me the entire time I was there, so the ability to cough up some seriously nasty shit that really wanted out of my body in public was actually a strange comfort. Urte did not see it that way.
In Xi`an we took the bus an hour out of town to see the famous Terra Cotta Warriors, a massive underground tomb filled with over 7,000 life-size terra cotta figures in full battle armor, each with distinctive faces built hundreds of years ago during the Qin dynasty and then buried with terra cotta horses, birds, weapons and the unlucky few real humans who set the final figures in place before the entrance was sealed behind them, burying them alive. I had seen pictures of the figures for years and thought that I would be a bit unimpressed, but once you get out there and see the magnitude of the undertaking and realize the balls of emperor Qin Shi Huang in hoping he could carry all this might into the afterlife, it is quite stunning. There are three different buildings in which the warriors are housed, and the largest of them is as big as two aircraft hangars. And after seeing all the excavated warriors you find out that the excavation is still ongoing, and that they expect to find many more, and also that 2 km away lies Qin's own tomb, a massive underground pyramid that is the biggest known tomb in the world. Mad, mad people have existed before us.
In Luoyang we walked two sides of a river where hundreds of years ago a hundred different people spent years carving likenesses into the rock face.
In Tai`an we walked up and down over 20,000 steps to reach and descend Mt. Tai`shan with thousands of other people.
In Shanghai we walked into the future, or the past, depending on your architectural affinities, and saw one of the world`s greatest skylines.
I spent my entire allowed stay of 30 days in China (for which I paid $198 for my visa in Nepal), breaking off with Josh and Urte a few weeks ago in Shanghai as they flew off to Japan and I traveled further south to Hong Kong. On the way down I stopped in Suzhou, a slightly quiet city referred to (at least by some Chinese people) as the Venice of China due to the canals streaming throughout, then Hongzhou with it`s massive lake Xi Hu, to which every single person in the in Zhejiang province had decided to come the weekend I arrived (apparently the second biggest holiday in China) and then to Guangzhou (ugly, hot) for a couple hours before catching the train to Shenzen (clean, hot) and walking myself across the border to Hong Kong, mere hours before my visa expired. There, I spent a few days walking the streets I walked almost exactly a year prior, watching A Symphony Of Lights at Victoria Harbour every night at 8pm, haggling for a room at the Chung King Mansions, eating red bean curd peanuts (the absolute best peanut in the world), even going back to Hotel New China to ask if they ever found the journal I left hiding under my mattress when I stayed there a year ago. They thought I was trying to use this story to haggle for a better room price. This is why I love Hong Kong. For someone who rarely returns it was nice returning.
Tibet
The Chinese government blocks many websites, including Blogger, Facebook and Wikipedia. They seem rather determined to write their own history, and it may be working: I spoke with many people who thought that when you would type in Facebook.com and arrive at the "web page not loading properly" page that it was because of some fault in the website, not a direct block by the biggest of big brothers. Very strange. Now on to better things.
Tibet was unreal, unlike any landscape I've ever seen. In certain passes you would see these huge 6-7,000 meter mountains one right after the other. You'd see Everest, then turn a corner and see an equally stunning peak you've never heard of. Literally mountains everywhere in every direction all the time. And the elevation of the entire country is always above 3,000 meters (close to 10,000 feet) and at our highest pass we hit 5200, which is 17,000 feet, over three times as high as Denver. The capital Lhasa sits at around 13-14,000 feet. I have never been anywhere near that height and was completely unaware of exactly what it can do to a body. On our very first day as we climbed our first pass I began noticing that it was slightly difficult to breath, and ahead of me in the front seat Josh began to lay his head back against the headrest often and seemed strangely tired. We stopped for lunch and things seemed fine, but an hour after getting back on the road we climbed to the 5200 meter pass and by the time we got there I could tell that my body did not work as it used to. We stopped the jeeps so everyone could get out to take some photos and have a look around at the scenery. I had to pee so I walked maybe 50 yards off the road to a bathroom which had a staircase of maybe ten stairs leading up to it. By the time I got to the top I felt like I had just run a mile. On my way back down I was breathing deeply and feeling totally loopy. I snapped a picture or two because I had to and then got back in the jeep and tried to figure out exactly what was happening. I tried to eat some peanuts and drink water because I figured it would help, but I was having a hard time getting my mouth to do what I wanted of it. For the next hour I barely said a word because I was incredibly tired and somewhat apathetic, zombie-like, and also because I wasn't sure I still knew how to communicate. Finally we came back down to around 4,000 meters and things slowly began returning to me. I realized that none of us had been speaking and that we had all been dealing with the beginnings of altitude sickness. Urte actually seemed slightly drunk for the next hour, which I heard later is common for someone coming out of the heights.
Over the days my body got used to the altitude, but the entire 8 days I was in Tibet it was noticeably harder to breathe. This is made more evident when climbing the innumerable staircases toward monasteries and temples that the Tibetans love to build as high up as possible. All the white kids on the tour were often made to look like old, old men while simply trying to climb up to the second floor to their hotel room.
The next week was quite beautiful, driving the country and stopping in the towns of Nyalam, Shigatse and Gyantse to explore ancient places of worship. I've never met a group of people like the Tibetans, always smiling and loving even when they have no idea who or what you are. I didn't meet one who even looked at me with a frown. One day at the monastery in Shigatse I had walked off on my own to explore quietly when I turned a corner and found a group of 10-15 teenage monks. They invited me to sit with them, as sit was one of the only English words they knew, so of course I did and they instantly began feeling my ears and playing with my earrings. They loved it and couldn't quite grasp it but laughed and smiled. Eventually one of them lifted my jacket sleeve and saw my arms and so I was made to take off the jacket as ten monks rubbed my arms at the same time. Soon word spread to all parts of the monastery and slowly more and more monks arrived to touch me, and soon after a good portion of the tour group arrived to stare with equal amazement at the throng of monks gathered around me. This same story would play out a few more times in the next week, with children or old women in place of monks. Truly unusual people in the most glorious sense of the word.
Arriving in Lhasa I assume everyone has nearly the same reaction, which is something like disbelief mixed with wonder coupled with a frown every time you pass a military base, which we counted 14 of before we made it to our hotel. It really is China there, surprisingly, with military and Chinese flags everywhere in case you haven't quite grasped the concept yet. You have one of the most monolithic buildings in the world in the Potala Palace, somewhat sullied by the new urban mass that has been built up around it. There is a Playboy store not two minutes away. You could be inside a Louis Vuitton and look out the window and see the Potala. I did not expect that. Josh didn't either. We were allowed our one hour inside, basically rushing through the few rooms they allow you to see inside, but the building is truly massive so you know they've got some secret shit hidden in there somewhere.
After the week was spent we said goodbye to our new friends (there were 42 people on the tour) and boarded the Tibet railway for a 36 hour ride towards Xi'an, China. It was crazy packed and the hard seat ticket we bought was truly a hard seat, so much so that Josh and Urte upgraded on the train to a sleeper. I, as I'm sure you would guess, stuck it out in the seat and spent a lovely evening with a complete stranger's head in my lap. No joke, the second Josh and Urte left for their sleeper this guy jumped over to my side and occupied the two vacant seats with his whole outstretched body, and at some point in his slumber he mistook my left leg for a pillow and snoozed away. I, on the other hand, got maybe two hours at most as my pillow was the window or the small table in front of me. I even took a tylenol pm and drank a little strange Chinese booze and none of it helped at all.
You don't really know exactly when you leave Tibet and enter mainland China, because Tibet is, after all, part of China (please sense the sarcasm here), but you definitely feel it in the crazy bustle that moves through every single Chinese city, even the smaller ones, which are still gigantic. And you feel it in the people, who I found for the most part to be rather foul, often looking at you with displeasure and completely unremarkable in any way. There were very few I met who redeemed them, as apparently all the kind ones live in Tibet.
Tibet was unreal, unlike any landscape I've ever seen. In certain passes you would see these huge 6-7,000 meter mountains one right after the other. You'd see Everest, then turn a corner and see an equally stunning peak you've never heard of. Literally mountains everywhere in every direction all the time. And the elevation of the entire country is always above 3,000 meters (close to 10,000 feet) and at our highest pass we hit 5200, which is 17,000 feet, over three times as high as Denver. The capital Lhasa sits at around 13-14,000 feet. I have never been anywhere near that height and was completely unaware of exactly what it can do to a body. On our very first day as we climbed our first pass I began noticing that it was slightly difficult to breath, and ahead of me in the front seat Josh began to lay his head back against the headrest often and seemed strangely tired. We stopped for lunch and things seemed fine, but an hour after getting back on the road we climbed to the 5200 meter pass and by the time we got there I could tell that my body did not work as it used to. We stopped the jeeps so everyone could get out to take some photos and have a look around at the scenery. I had to pee so I walked maybe 50 yards off the road to a bathroom which had a staircase of maybe ten stairs leading up to it. By the time I got to the top I felt like I had just run a mile. On my way back down I was breathing deeply and feeling totally loopy. I snapped a picture or two because I had to and then got back in the jeep and tried to figure out exactly what was happening. I tried to eat some peanuts and drink water because I figured it would help, but I was having a hard time getting my mouth to do what I wanted of it. For the next hour I barely said a word because I was incredibly tired and somewhat apathetic, zombie-like, and also because I wasn't sure I still knew how to communicate. Finally we came back down to around 4,000 meters and things slowly began returning to me. I realized that none of us had been speaking and that we had all been dealing with the beginnings of altitude sickness. Urte actually seemed slightly drunk for the next hour, which I heard later is common for someone coming out of the heights.
Over the days my body got used to the altitude, but the entire 8 days I was in Tibet it was noticeably harder to breathe. This is made more evident when climbing the innumerable staircases toward monasteries and temples that the Tibetans love to build as high up as possible. All the white kids on the tour were often made to look like old, old men while simply trying to climb up to the second floor to their hotel room.
The next week was quite beautiful, driving the country and stopping in the towns of Nyalam, Shigatse and Gyantse to explore ancient places of worship. I've never met a group of people like the Tibetans, always smiling and loving even when they have no idea who or what you are. I didn't meet one who even looked at me with a frown. One day at the monastery in Shigatse I had walked off on my own to explore quietly when I turned a corner and found a group of 10-15 teenage monks. They invited me to sit with them, as sit was one of the only English words they knew, so of course I did and they instantly began feeling my ears and playing with my earrings. They loved it and couldn't quite grasp it but laughed and smiled. Eventually one of them lifted my jacket sleeve and saw my arms and so I was made to take off the jacket as ten monks rubbed my arms at the same time. Soon word spread to all parts of the monastery and slowly more and more monks arrived to touch me, and soon after a good portion of the tour group arrived to stare with equal amazement at the throng of monks gathered around me. This same story would play out a few more times in the next week, with children or old women in place of monks. Truly unusual people in the most glorious sense of the word.
Arriving in Lhasa I assume everyone has nearly the same reaction, which is something like disbelief mixed with wonder coupled with a frown every time you pass a military base, which we counted 14 of before we made it to our hotel. It really is China there, surprisingly, with military and Chinese flags everywhere in case you haven't quite grasped the concept yet. You have one of the most monolithic buildings in the world in the Potala Palace, somewhat sullied by the new urban mass that has been built up around it. There is a Playboy store not two minutes away. You could be inside a Louis Vuitton and look out the window and see the Potala. I did not expect that. Josh didn't either. We were allowed our one hour inside, basically rushing through the few rooms they allow you to see inside, but the building is truly massive so you know they've got some secret shit hidden in there somewhere.
After the week was spent we said goodbye to our new friends (there were 42 people on the tour) and boarded the Tibet railway for a 36 hour ride towards Xi'an, China. It was crazy packed and the hard seat ticket we bought was truly a hard seat, so much so that Josh and Urte upgraded on the train to a sleeper. I, as I'm sure you would guess, stuck it out in the seat and spent a lovely evening with a complete stranger's head in my lap. No joke, the second Josh and Urte left for their sleeper this guy jumped over to my side and occupied the two vacant seats with his whole outstretched body, and at some point in his slumber he mistook my left leg for a pillow and snoozed away. I, on the other hand, got maybe two hours at most as my pillow was the window or the small table in front of me. I even took a tylenol pm and drank a little strange Chinese booze and none of it helped at all.
You don't really know exactly when you leave Tibet and enter mainland China, because Tibet is, after all, part of China (please sense the sarcasm here), but you definitely feel it in the crazy bustle that moves through every single Chinese city, even the smaller ones, which are still gigantic. And you feel it in the people, who I found for the most part to be rather foul, often looking at you with displeasure and completely unremarkable in any way. There were very few I met who redeemed them, as apparently all the kind ones live in Tibet.
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