Chapin Does China

Tuesday, January 9, 2007

My flight to Shanghai left Singapore at 2 a.m. and got in at 7 a.m. The hostel (Hostelling International-recommended Mingtown Etour Youth Hostel) had e-mailed directions for how to take a bus from the airport to the nearest main road, but then had not provided further instructions for the five-minute walk to the hostel. I was also without a map, which was in the box (also containing winter clothes) that my mom had sent to my cousins in Shanghai, Wayne and Sandy (who used to live in D.C. but are spending a four-year stint in China because of Wayne's job doing agricultural work with the Chinese government). Wayne and Sandy were on a trip to Hainan Island in southern China, so I had to spend two very cold days in Shanghai until we could meet at their apartment.

In short, it took me a while to find the hostel, since no one in China speaks English even close to as well as the worst English speaker in SE Asia. I wound up wandering around, finding a China Eastern airline booking office, and having the woman point me in the direction of the right road. When I miraculously got to the room, it was extremely nice and clean and well-decorated, but the heat was very, very poor. So I put on every article of clothing I owned and, after a rather uncomfortable, shivering nap, went to sit down in the cafe, which was the only warm place in the hostel (since the internet was free but OUTSIDE in the courtyard). I had a cup of tea and befriended a 19-year-old Australian named Michael. He had studied Mandarin for six weeks and was killing time before returning to his home near Melbourne. We had a long chat with the waitress and played some fun Chinese and American music over the speaker system; Michael wrote down some important phrases in Chinese for me, like "That's too expensive" and "Make it cheaper" and "Where's the bathroom?." I expected Julia earlier in the evening, but when she arrived at 6 p.m. I was starving and ready to brave the cold room and the colder outdoors. I was giddy with excitement at the sight of her, and we starting talking a mile a minute about our respective adventures.

We were too cold in our room (sense a theme?), so we dropped her pack in the room and went looking for a restaurant on Shanxi Road (on which there are a lot of restaurants, just south of Huaihai Road, a major shopping artery) that I had gotten from Michael’s Lonely Planet. It had a smoky small upstairs and a large downstairs dining room where we sat, and the food was not memorable (but not bad!) and the only thing Julia and I can remember about this place is the adorable little boy at the table next to us who, like most Chinese babies, waddled around in a puffy jacket under which was perhaps seven layers.

We walked back to the hostel, thinking about watching a movie in the café there, but a couple there had put on a violent action movie that we decided to forego in favor of sleep in our cold room.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

We had the “British Breakfast” (eggs, toast and jam, fruit, and tea for about $1.50) in the hostel cafe and befriended a nice Austrialian named Marty during the meal, who we agreed to meet for dinner. We went straight to the Shanghai Museum, where we spent about 2.5 hours wandering through its beautiful collections of ancient Chinese sculpture, calligraphy, landscape painting, and jade (which, by the by, served as a symbol of wealth, and link to the gods, and an inducer of good personality traits like benevolence and loyalty). In case you were wondering, there are seven types of wood furniture, 75 scripts, 5 porcelains, and 47 bronzes. As an afterthought, we peeked in the room of ancients bronze items. We later read in “1,000 Things To See Before You Die” that the museum is world-renowned for its bronze collection, which we had given but a cursory glance. Oh, well. The museum was definitely a highlight for us dorky culture-grubbing New Yorkers – each exhibit had an accompanying handout that went into massive detail; for example, explaining the intricacies of the eight types of jade, seven types of wood furniture, seven scripts, five porcelains, and 47 bronzes.

We bought some bao zi (steamed buns) of various types off the street – finding that although we pointed to five different types they basically all contained pork. Carrying our warm cargo in plastic bags, we sat on a bench along the Bund, which is Shanghai’s most famous sight – a riverside strip of art-deco buildings built by the Europeans with massive skyscrapers interspersed among them across from a riverside strip of massive skyscrapers called the Pudong. All the aforementioned skyscrapers are remarkably and intricately and beautifully lit up at night, as are the art-deco buildings, which were built when Shanghai was carved up into British, French, Japanese, and American sections around the time of the Opium Wars. We read that 1/12 of the world’s cranes are in Shanghai, and I think we counted 27 or so from where we were sitting, so that seems plausible even though we didn’t check it out fully. As we sat, a group of twenty-somethings approached us, claiming to be college students who studied English. After a brief chat with them about where we were from (during which I clutched my purse tightly), they asked if we liked Chinese food. We hesitantly nodded yes, and they asked if we liked tea, and I said, “Yes,” but it triggered something for Julia and she said, “We have to go,” and led me away. Turns out this is a common scam, and if you wind up going to a teahouse with them, they take off and leave you to foot the pricey bill. With that evaded, we took some pictures with the Oriental Pearl TV Tower (the most distinctive feature of Shanghai’s skyline) and then wandered into the historic Peace Hotel.

Ambling northward but still hungry, we grabbed some yummy dim sum at this great place whose name was only written in Mandarin, but it was on the southeast corner of Nan Suzhou Lu and Sichuan Zhonglu, just south of the Suzhou Canal. We then walked west on Nanjing road, a world famous shopping street, watching a trumpet player rocking out on a balcony. We went into medical store and saw both really expensive and really cheap ginseng, and stopped into a Beijing 2008 Olympics store where I got a cell phone charm and Julia bought a magnet of a panda bear playing baseball for her grandpa. We also swung by a department store at the northeast corner of People’s Square to price-check scarves and wool separates. We went back to the hostel to met Marty, his friend and travel companion, Dan, and Michael of café-time-wasting fame. We headed to Crystal Jade Restaurant at Xiantindi, which is an old-fashioned Shanghainese housing complex centered on a courtyard that has since been turned into a rather chic shopping and eating arcade. We feasted on eel (surprisingly yummy and crunchy), pigeon (surprisingly chewy and bony), two kinds of tofu, pork buns, noodles, and dumplings. In the meantime, I had reached Wayne and Sandy, so I picked up my clothes and was finally reunited with my long underwear.

After a light-hearted dinner, the five of us ambled over to the Bund, passing night markets full of dried fish, but by the time we had gotten there, the skyscraper lights had been turned off. We used the very fancy bathroom at the Peace Hotel and eavesdropped on a jazz band comprised of Asian musicians playing Sinatra-like stuff. We hunted around for a bar and found one at the top of the Captain Hostel off the Bund, and we downed some drinks while laughing and joking around.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

After another British breakfast, we headed to the Shanghai Planning Exhibition Hall, Shanghai’s urban planning museum, which has exhibits both about the history of the city’s various sections (with lots of dated/yellowed photos) and a scaled model of the city as it will look in 10 years. At the museum, we made a postcard with our picture on it, and also looked at some pretty random modern art from the Ukraine. We went back to the hostel to check out, moved west down Nanjing Road to the Wayne and Sandy’s beautiful apartment at the Shanghai Center (in the same complex as the Ritz-Carlton and near such couture establishments as Gucci, Ferragamo, and Burberry).

Thus began our streak of looking for markets that didn’t exist. We went looking for the Xiangyang clothing market only to find out that it had been closed and the site was being bulldozed to make way for some kind of megamall. Wandering through the French Concession south of Huaihai Road, we stopped into a travel agent to check on flights to Xi’an, and into a bra store out of sheer curiosity to see if they had one in my size. On our way to the YuYuan Gardens, we walked Dongtai Lu, which was brimming with antiques stalls. Once we arrived at the famous traditional garden, we chose to forego the pricey Huxinting Tea House in favor of LG-recommended recommend Nanxiang Steamed Buns at 85 Yuyuan Lu. After a dumpling/bun sampler platter, I bought a big soup dumpling with a straw poking out of it on the street, and Julia got a yummy sesame doughy treat. We continued to walk south, looking for the fabric market our guidebook had recommended. On our eventful journey, I bought peanut candy off street, and we walked through this narrow street that it seemed like a tourist had never traversed. On the ground level, the street had about a dozen small grocery and produce stores and two dozen one-room barber shops. Everyone’s doors were open, and kids careened around on bikes, while women sat in the barber shop chairs, gossiping, and men squatted on the road, gossiping. Still in search of the fabric market, we saw dozens of uniformed kids streaming out of school.

We finally found the site of the old market, which was scaffolded with a painted notice that the market had moved, and there was an arrow pointing in the direction of where we could find relocated market. In our attempts to find it, we found ourselves in a rather dark series of alleyways and stumbled upon a fish/meat/produce market eerily bathed in yellow light, with, among other tasty morsels, gigantic dead fish hanging from the rafters, live chickens, and massive sides of beef that a petite woman was hacking with a machete. Wide-eyed, we emerged from this scene onto a wider avenue, and there was the fabric market, right in front of us, closing its doors. We browsed around the stalls outside the market before catching a cab back to the Shanghai Center for a delicious dinner that featured two kinds of tofu and fun bonding with Sandy and Wayne. We wanted to see the Bund at night, so on their recommendation, we went up to one of the bars at Three on the Bund and took pictures, noting the very elaborate spectacles in neon that adorn the sksyscraper facades (changing/fading colors, patterns, and lasers galore) and the Chinese flags flying at the top of every building along the art-deco Bund. We walked along Nanjing Road to see the lights there, but they had been turned off. In a brilliant move on her part, Julia spotted the lit-up, rather spiky roof of the tall Radisson Hotel and guess that there was maybe something worthwhile up there. Walking through a deserted lobby, we took the elevator up to the 50-something floor, only to find a fun circular bar with a great view and a HILARIOUS Filipino cover band that played, among other classics, Total Eclipse of the Heart and Pour Some Sugar on Me as well as songs by Maroon 5 and Vanessa Carleton. We lip-synched our hearts out and cabbed it back to Wayne and Sandy’s, where we booked our flight to Xi’an and from Xi’an to Guilin for pretty cheap on ctrip.com, a fantastic website that we have had good experiences with.

Friday, January 12, 2007

For breakfast, I had peanut butter and toast for the first time in ages. Julia went to the contemporary art museum and I wrote emails and tried to find the shop nearby where they custom-make puffy vests from fabric you pick out (I found the place and with a lot of pantomime, figured out that they could not make the vest in three hours). During this time, Julia purchased some gorgeous brocade fabric to make skirts out of; after we met, I forced us to go into Zara where I bought two skirts, a dress, and tank top for $100. We ate a wonderful dim sum meal at a restaurant across from the Shanghai Center and about one block further west. I was thrown into a panic by how late it was, so we took a cab to the Maglev (magnetic levitation train), which got us to the airport eight minutes, clocking a maximum speed of over 430 km/hour. We caught our plane to Xi’an with about forty minutes to spare. After a bus ride to Drum Tower and a short walk to the Han Tang Inn International Youth Hostel, we settled into our room and headed to the upstairs café for a “dumpling party.” We’d apparently missed the part where they taught hostel guests how to make the dumplings, so we simply ate the freshly cooked-ones and checked our e-mail and laughed at the fact that two puppies, one named Terra and one named Cotta, were running around the café and sliding all over the waxed floor. Julia watched part of “Cars” and I befriended to Minnesotans, Andy and Chris, who we said we’d try to have dinner with the next day. We headed to bed so that we could get an early start at the warriors.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

We chose to visit the warriors on our own because it was both cost-effective and we wanted to do other things in the afternoon. After an initial stint on a bus heading in the wrong direction, we grabbed a local bus (1 yuan, or about 12 cents per ride) to the train station parking lot, where we picked up some buns and caught our hourlong ride to the warriors. The deal with the terra cotta warriors is that they were part of a master plan of Emperor Qin (who ascended the throne in 246 BC and died some thirty years later) to have the most elaborate, well-protected, and auspicious tomb in the world. The vast underground army – intended to protect Qin in the afterlife – is comprised of thousands of cavalry and infantry soldiers and charioteers with unique stances and faces, wielding weapons with blades that were still knife-sharp and coated with poison when they were discovered. The first ones were discovered in 1974 when some farmers were digging a well, and it is now a large archaeological site with three vaults/exhibition halls where more work is constantly being done. We chose to bypass the area under which Emperor Qin himself is apparently buried, because although the guidebook went into detail about the jewels and other lavish objects with which he is buried, it also said that we could not see them since the site was still being excavated, so one would be visiting a mound of dirt.

We took a pretty cold bus back to Xi’an that made quite a few more stops and picked up a bunch of passengers that I am sure paid much less than we did for our ride (which was about $3). Upon arrival, we were hungry and cold, and thus stumbled into a warm hotel lobby with an adjoining restaurant on the west side of the street just south of the train station. After a bunch of dumplings, tea, soup, and rice, we grabbed another crowded local bus to the Shaanxi Museum of History, about which we had heard excellent things. We got off the bus and reached for our wallets to pay for our museum tickets when Julia realized that her backpack’s zipper was open, and after a quick search determined that her wallet had been stolen. The $100 or so wasn’t the big issue – it was the two credit cards, one American debit card, one Korean bank card and her Fulbright ID card that were the bigger hassles. On top of that, the museum wasn’t letting in any more people since it was one hour before closing.

Since we were in the area, we walked to the Big Goose Pagoda, at the center of a temple that a famous monk founded in the 1600s or some such thing. It was in the park surrounding the temple that we saw a hilarious sight – a large inflatable swimming pool with four-foot-tall clear beach balls floating in it. But inside the beach balls were children, who were running and falling bouncing around inside there like hamsters on a wheel to the amusement of a crowd of onlookers. Then we went back to the hostel to deal with fallout of the stolen wallet. Having met up with Andy and Chris, we walked around the Muslim district (there are 20 mosques in Xi’an!) and at last found a restaurant that looked like it had heat, where we had mutton, a local specialty.

Julia went back to go to bed and I went with the two Minesottans to check out this bar, China City (C.C. Soho), that my guidebook had said had good cover bands (I was hoping for a reprise of the night in Shanghai at the top of the Radisson). It was located just west of South Road at the first east-west cross street south of the Bell Tower (the center of the city, where, imaginatively, North, South, East, and West Roads meet). When we got there, there were flashing lights and a band singing what sounded like covers of Chinese pop songs, but we were assured that a Filipino band would come out and start belting out English songs at 11. This turned out to be the case. But as we were waiting – and having a few drinks while the guys taught me to play a drinking game with the dice and dice shakers that are PROVIDED at pretty much every bar – suddenly this huge fruit platter and three Heinkens show up at our table. The waiter, who does not speak a lot of English, points to an older man (in his forties, maybe) and two twentysomething girls a few tables away. Andy and Chris and I exchanged puzzled glances, unsure if whether that gesture of kindness meant that we should go over and join them. I groaned, and hoped that the older man was not meant for me while Andy and Chris got the girls, who were actually our age. We found out, though, after we joined them, through another waiter’s broken English translation, that the gentleman was the owner, and he was so thrilled to have foreigners in his bar that he wanted to treat us so that we would tell our other friends and bring him more business. So we had some more snacks and drinks on him while we listened to the band and some of his female attaches grabbed us to dance on stage. It was a blast.

Sunday, January 14, 2007

Julia and I started by exploring the Muslim neighborhood north of our hostel by daylight. The Muslim population of about 30,000 is descended from 8th-century Arab soldiers, and there are 20 mosques in Xi’an total. We really enjoyed that neighborhood, snacking on street food and observing the women running errands and chatting in the streets. We wandered onto a mosque that we thought was the Great Mosque (though it looked like a Buddhist temple). It turned out to be a different mosque, but it was practically deserted and I found the combination of Arabic and Chinese characters to be very beautiful. We found the Great Mosque (built 742) and decided not to spring for the entrance fee but spied on some monks through the front gate. I bargained for a black fake-Tod’s shoulder bag using my one Mandarin phrase (“Tai gue-le!” or, “That’s too expensive!”) and walked away having gotten the bag for 70 percent off his asking price. We walked past the Drum Tower (which used to ring at dusk) and the Bell Tower (built in 1582 which rings at dawn), to Calligraphy Street in the southeast quadrant of the city. We saw beautiful murals with characters on them for sale, and I got two custom-made square stamps that are traditionally used with red ink on letters or art.

While I was waiting for Julia to come back from the tseshuo (toilet), I talked to a ten-year-old girl who approached me. At first I suspected something along the lines of the tea scam, but she asked me such standard classroom-taught conversation questions that I had to laugh that I ever doubted her. She asked my name, where I was from, how old I was, and – this was the clincher -- what my hobbies were. She told me hers were table tennis and reading. She told me she studies English very hard and I told her that she was good at it and to study hard!

Julia and I then passed through the South Gate (most cities in China had city walls for defense, but Xi’an is one of the few cities that has not knocked theirs [built in 1370] down in the name of development and expansion) to pick up our ctrip tickets from a travel agent (a whole ordeal, unlike in Shanghai where we picked ours up from a counter in the airport’s departure hall). We headed back to the hostel to grab our stuff and took a shuttle to the airport.

Our first sight upon leaving the airport in Guilin was palm trees illuminated in green, purple, and yellow neon lights; they must be imported palm trees, for the temperature was about 42 degrees. We took an airport bus to its final stop and then had to take a cab to our hostel (Guilin Backstreet Youth Hostel, No. 3 Renmin Road near the Sheraton). I fell asleep while Julia went for a walk in the area; when I got back she tried to talk to me but I was shivering and only would say how cold I was, so she got me an extra blanket from the front desk (awww, thank you, Julia!), and we slept until morning.

Monday, January 15, 2007

We arose and walked around the town, soaking in the aura of absolute kitsch. Guilin is a popular tourist spot, especially for travelers within China, and it reminded me of Dalat in its fabricated-but-still-enjoyable cuteness. We found a travel agent and booked a boat tour down the Li River for the next day. We walked through a large open square (which we later learned wasn’t in the city’s original layout, but I think because of Tiananmen Square, many cities of bulldozed some space to create central squares of their own. On the west side of the square, along Zhongshan Lu, we found a wonderful bakery where we bought assorted buns and pastries for breakfast. We then wandered around two of Guilin’s four lakes, taking in the groups of women doing tai chi, cute families posing for photos, and the sights of adorable little bridges to nowhere and weeping willow trees.

We walked north to Solitary Beauty peak (also called the Ming Prince Mansion), where we watched a 20-second dance show in a restored building and climbed up a few hundred steps to the top of the 150-meter peak, one of the several hundred limestone peaks in the area for which Guilin is famous. Unlike Halong Bay, through, in Guilin the forest-covered craggy karst formations crop up amidst the grayish/brown blocky forms created by a small city’s residential and commercial sprawl, providing a stark contrast between nature and urban development. We enjoyed the cave-like grotto underneath solitary beauty peak that has 60 status of various gods associated with different years of birth, and people put money into a small slot at the bottom of the statue to make an offering. Julia and I stood in front of the 1984 one for awhile but decided not to give away any of our precious yuan.

Julia and I then walked out to Guilin’s main intersection (Jiefang Lu and Zhongshan Lu) where we found an incredible food court on the top floor of Niko-Niko-Do Plaza, a department store. We then took a bus south to the train station, planning to buy an overnight train ticket to Hong Kong for the next day. However, we took a local bus one stop too far, and while backtracking we discovered a small shop that custom-makes puffy vests. Needless to say, communicating our preferences was difficult, but somewhere we managed to tell them what kinds of fabric, seams, zippers, snaps, and buttons we wanted. I wanted to make sure that mine was fit (since the Chinese are so small), so I used another important Mandarin word that Sandy taught me – “da!” which means “Big!” There was a lot of giggling and I think the ladies at the store got a big kick out of us.

When we finally got to the CITS office at the train station, our new English-speaking buddy Jack recommended we take the overnight bus, which cost 1/3 as much as the train and went faster, letting us off in Shenzen (where we could cross the border into Hong Kong and take the subway), as opposed to Guangzhou (where we’d have to take another bus three hours to Hong Kong). From the photos he showed us, it looked like the seats turned back into beds. So we said, why not, and bought tickets for about $30.

We moved on across the Li River (which was practically dry at that spot – kids were playing in the dusty river basin!) to Seven Star Park (which has seven peaks). We wandered up a mountain and into a small pagoda, into a cave, into a stelae garden, visited the cleanest bathroom public bathroom in China, latched onto an unmarked trail around the park’s perimeter, and saw a hill called Camel’s Hump that really looks like it. We tried to avoid the zoo because we’d heard they were rather sad in Asia, but as we were taking a circuitous route back to the front gates of the park because we didn’t want to go into the cave we saw a tiger being transported in a smallish cage. Near the front gate, we wandered into a deserted temple with the limestone craggy background that had fluttering prayer flags out front, and then, finally, into a deserted smallscale amusement park that must be hopping in the summer time. The rides all shut down and boarded up was kind of creepy. The one salient feature of seven star park besides all the limestone karst formations was a TON of monkeys. They were actually quite brash and there were so many of them that we encountered when it was just me and Julia that it was sometimes a little scary. We returned to the hostel, ate in neighborhood hotpot place (we got the chicken hotpot because we thought it was safe, and it turned out to have the entire chicken thrown into the pan on the tabletop burner, including the head and the feet). Back in the hostel lobby we befriended a nice couple that was traveling on a year-long honeymoom around the world. They had come from India and were heading to Southeast Asia. The four of us settled in for a cozy evening of watching “13 Going On 30” before bed.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Julia popped out to “our” bakery on Zhongshan Lu to get buns for breakfast while I packed like a madwoman. Over the course of our travels together, we discovered that Julia can barely sleep for six hours at a time, while I can easily be dead to the world for nine. This usually meant that she often got stuck fetching food or some such think while I scurried around getting my stuff together. Jerry, the savvy tour guide who had arranged our tour of the Li River, picked us up at 9 a.m. sharp and, after a brief detour to store some luggage at the train station from where our bus would later depart, drove us south to small town called Doxiu on our way to Zhujiang, where the boat for Yangshuo departed. When it’s not winter, the boats leave from Guilin, but in the winter the water is at such a low level that it is basically just a sandy basin in which kids play, so the tours all have to start quite a ways downstream.

In Doxiu, we walked down a narrow cobble-stoned lane parallel to the mostly-dried river, peeking in windows of the wooden two-story houses that lined the street. We often had to leap to the side of the road and press ourselves against the buildings because the tuk-tuks there (which were basically tractors with rectangular trunks on the back full of vegetables or wood) often careened down the road with little warning. Most of the houses along the lane were centered around an interior courtyard or open-air space, and they were pretty breezy and cold (we went to the bathroom in one). Most had front rooms that overlooked the street, and that seemed to be where everyone hung out, ate, and watched TV while clustered around a small fire in a bucket or a space heater. Often these front rooms also served as convenience stores or grocery stores or some other family business (we also saw people selling tea leaves, rice paper, and dried squid out of their homes). As we walked past the rather dirty and trash-filled tributary near the edge of town, we saw women up to their knees in water, doing the wash. It was an interesting if slightly sobering opportunity to see a “real” town in southern China.

Back in the car, we headed to Zhujiang, where we would catch our boat down the Li River. On the way, I fell asleep, since I get narcoleptic in moving vehicles, but Julia kept an eye on the passing countryside and noted that we often drove through large herds of cows led by farmers who did not seem to care that their precious cargo was meandering through the center of the one-lane highway.

We got on our small boat, which was labeled as commercial and thus not technically allowed to take on tourists because its owners probably do not pay the proper taxes…but in any case, we were happy to be out on the water. We were the only passengers on our particular fishing boat, so we sat on the covered prow and watching the vast array of karst formations. They were really stunning – thought the weather was overcast, chilly, and drizzly – but it did give the whole place a mysterious, otherworldly feel. We’ve seen pictures of the river in the summer, and it looks green and bright and as if you could see forever. Oh well, maybe next time. We passed several bigger ferries, and they seemed to have a hard time navigating the low river. We saw several of these ferries listing severely to one side because all of the Chinese tourists on these boats were leaning over one side for one photo opportunity or another, which made for some pretty funny sites from the vantage point of our little junk. Our little boat was able to traverse more of the river than these larger ferries, whose mobility was limited to a short stretch in the middle of the river. There were several times. Though, when we would peek over the side of our boat and see rocks and sand at most five feet below the surface. Watching the life along the side of the river got our attention after the craggy peaks grew monotonous – there were many women doing the wash, and others digging for clams or mussls; men transporting goods and food on flimsy rafts made of four bamboo stalks lashed together, propelling themselves with another stalk of bamboo against the river bed. We saw crowds of people clustered around fires on the riverbank, and men hauling large bags of sand from place to place (which is later sold to make cement). (1,000 Place to See Before You Die says “a cruise down the Li River is like entering a classic Chinese painting of mist, mountains, and rivers.”)

After arriving in a town about 45 minutes north of Yangshuo, we left our boat, and our driver took a quick picture of us holding a 20 RMB bill, which features the limestone peaks on the back. It was at that dock where we saw another sight that the area is known for – cormorant fishing. Men take out the narrow bamboo rafts with a bird on one end, and the birds have been trained to duck underwater and bring up a mouthful of fish. A small tie in their throats prevents the bird from swallowing the fish, and the fisherman removes the fish and cleans it for sale. Our tour company provided a car and driver to take us south to Yangshuo – a smaller town with similar scenic beauty as Guilin that is much loved by backpackers because it’s a quaint and comfortable place to stay and offers some Western food – where we searched for a restaurant warm enough to help us recover after three-plus frigid hours on the water. This was not easy, as no place in China has central air, and while our hotels had mounted wall units for heat, they were basically ineffective. We finally found a restaurant with adequate heat (because we were the only customers and they turned the freestanding heating unit directly on our table), where we had a yummy if slightly bland hotpot with tofu, fresh vegetables (bok choy, Chinese broccoli, spinach, cabbage), and noodles that we chopsticked into a pot of boiling water on a burner at our table. For dessert, we ordered warm little buns – some fried and some steamed – that came with a sweet dipping sauce made of condensed milk. We walked through the town, stopping into a few stores and walked past some live-animal-fresh-meat-dried-meat-fruit-and-vegetable markets that now seemed commonplace to us. We grabbed a bus back to Guilin, picked up our vests to much amusement and posed for some photos with the lovely ladies at the tailor shop, grabbed our luggage and boarded the overnight bus.

Oh, the overnight bus. It was likely one of the more disgusting experiences of my life – and at the time I was not very amused at what transpired that night. In retrospect, though, the whole ordeal was rather hilarious. The first sign of trouble was when we got on the bus at 7:15 p.m. and our luggage was suddenly taken from us and thrown into the back of the bus. I was unsure whether my bag had made it on, and I certainly didn’t want to leave without it, so Julia remained off the bus (so it wouldn’t leave) and I had a five-minute shouting match with the bus attendant that mostly consisted of my yelling “My bag! My bag! Is it here?” I tried to go look myself, since half the luggage was piled in the back of the bus instead of in the underbus storage compartment, but I discovered that the one word people on the bus knew besides “HELLO!” (said really loud and with a somewhat high-pitched tone), was “SHOES,” because we had to take off our shoes upon entering the bus and carry them in a little pink bag. The bus was fairly grimy anyway, so I didn’t understand why they were such sticklers about the shoe thing. I finally squeezed down one of the bus’ two narrow aisles and found it at the back of the bus on a seat that nobody was using. Julia and I finally plopped down into our seats on the bottom level (the seats were bunked) after an argument with the bus attendant that we had paid for seats on the bottom after he gestured rudely to seats on the top level (five feet up).

After we were somewhat settled, we could take in the scene: three rows of bunk bed-style seats (one along either window and one down the middle) – space for about 30 people in all – except that seats weren’t really seats. First of all, ours were on the ground, and consisted of two parts – a flat bottom part with a padded cushion that extended so that I could put my legs straight out in front of me (though from the knee down my legs were covered by a metal covering upon which rested the reclining back part of the seat of the person in front of me) and a back part that was tilted at perhaps a 25-degree angle. When we sat up straight, our heads hit the seats above us, and when we lay down, we were just reclining too far to be able to relax comfortably when we weren’t sleeping. The seat was covered in red vinyl, though Julia’s had a kind of stained fabric cover. They gave us thick fleecy patterned blankets that looked like they hadn’t been watched in years. We were concerned about putting those directly on our skin, so we both wore long underwear with pants over them and about four shirts before we would even think of putting those blankets over our legs. The people surrounding us were either guys in shabby-looking business suits or older women who talked and laughed extremely loudly. When we first got on the bus, really loud Chinese techno-pop was blasting, and not long after we were on the road, the movie War of the Worlds came on, so our ride was set to the lovely music of explosions and screams.

We were told there would be a dinner stop and bathroom stops, but we would often stop for about 20 seconds, and before Julia and I could get up or attempt to ask someone, the bus would start moving again. When we had stopped for about the ninth time, more of our luggage suddenly got thrown onto the back of the bus, and we saw what looked like dozens of crates of oranges being loaded onto our bus. This appeared to take awhile, so I walked to the front of the bus and tried to ask where the bathroom was. They kept shaking their heads and I knew that they didn’t really understand. Thank god another passenger came up and gestured at me to follow her, and I did, and we went to the side of the fruit market and just peed in the middle of all the stalls in the dark. I sure know that fruit market was not clean. Back on the bus, it was just cold and uncomfortable, and cramped, and somehow the aisles were full of boxes and suitcases so that when you lay back your head was practically on top of the grimy squished cardboard (because people had to walk on top of it). We stopped for dinner at about 10 p.m.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Because of our layers (which we had put on for warmth and for germ-and-parasite protection), we woke up sweating horribly under our putrid fleece blankets. After an uncomfortable few hours (because you couldn’t sit up fully on the “beds” without hitting your head on the top bunk, and if you lay down your neck kind of ached and your legs were either straight out in front of you or you had to hug your knees to your chest AND you remembered the true ickiness of the plastic mat on which you were sleeping), we pulled into the Shenzhen bus station. I put on my sneakers in my “seat,” and then dragged my luggage through one of the narrow aisles (walking sideways), choosing to ignore that the one English word that everyone seemed to know, besides “HELLO!” is “SHOES!” I muttered some curses under my breath and said to Julia that if they think my wearing shoes is the only thing making this bus dirty, they are severely deluded. We finally got all of our luggage off the bus and went to the bathroom for the first time in 10 hours. We knew we needed to get to the Shenzhen train station in order to pass through immigration for leaving China and entering Hong Kong SAR (special administrative region). It had started to rain, and after first waiting at the wrong bus stop, we found the right one and took it about 45 minutes to the train station. After a bunch of missteps because of unclear signs at the Shenzhen train station (including one unnecessary trip in an elevator during which a man accidentally tipped over a dolly, leaving chicken parts strewn across the ground), we finally walked through the several stages of immigration and made it over to the Hong Kong side. We took the KCR train (like a commuter rail) to the station at Tsim Sha Sui on the Kowloon side of Victoria Harbor.

We first attempted to stay at the Y, but since there was no room, we moved on to the much sketchier but also conveniently located Mirador Mansions. Mansions they are not – rather, the apartment complex is about 20 stories high and comprised of square hallways surrounding a central atrium. There are about four hostels on each floor, and the rest of the space is taken up by what appear to be some combination of tailors, massage parlors, gambling halls, and family residences (for example, one room I passed had a big table that was covered with big swaths of suit fabric during the day, but by night a woman and man and child laid out blankets and slept there, too). SUPER sketchy, but perhaps not as much so as the more infamous Chungking Mansions, one block south on Nathan Road. The mansions are where basically all of the budget travelers stay, and while Julia stayed with the luggage in the lovely Holiday Inn lobby nearby, I was shown five different rooms in Mirador (on various floors, in hostels that seemed to be run by mostly the same people but had different names….again, sketch-o-rama) before I found one in Kowloon Hotel/New Garden Hostel (13th floor reception) that was a) not the size of a pin, b) clean, and c) had a nice bathroom with a strong shower (not just a wimpy handheld spray), because at that moment I wanted to scrub the overnight bus stench and feeling off of me as fast as possible.

After our much-needed showers, Julia went across the river to Hong Kong Island to check on the cash that her dad had arranged she pick up from a friend of a friend with an office in Central (since she still had no ATM card or credit card). I poked around the shops on Nathan Road before we met up for an early dinner at the LG-recommended and excellent Sweet Dynasty, where we had turnip/shrimp dish, a vegetable wonton in chili sauce, mango pudding, watermelon chrysanthemum juice, and a lychee honey drink. We walked over to the TST harbor and marveled at the modern cultural center on our side and the HK island skyline (verrrry bright and skyscrapery and colorful!) on the other side. We walked a bit more around TST, hitting up the Temple Street night market (where Julia bought a fake Prada bag she’d been eyeing), before crashing for a good night’s sleep.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

We started the day by taking the Star Ferry (in operation since 1898) across the harbor to Central, where we had some incredible dim sum at Knopf Guides-recommended Luk Yu Teahouse on Stanley Street. Alongside businessmen, we devoured pork with a side of dough, mini egg tarts, beef steamed dumplings, turnip cake, shumai, and a sweet potato bun with sugar on top. We meandered through the largely residential neighborhoods south and west of Central, in which many of the streets have steeeeeeeep inclines. My guess is that this is a result of the lower foothills of Victoria Peak. We walked through a produce market that was somehow located almost on its side because of the slope of the hill. In any case, the uphill hike to Man Mo Temple gave us a workout. (N.B. We later learned that there is a network of escalators called the Mid-Levels that ferries businesspeople down the hill to Central during the morning rush hour and ferries everyone else up the hill the rest of the time. You can bet we took advantage of this on our second visit to the neighborhood.)

We moseyed around the temple, which is one of the oldest in Hong Kong (though it was only built in 1848), observing people clad in business suits placing some offerings (oranges, or cookies, or incense) at the bases of statues of the various deities or burning some jo paper (it has pictures of various things, like food and jewelry and animals, meant to be offerings to ancestors and gods) in a giant outdoor wood-burning stove. We passed through the antique/gallery district, and a bunch of very sweet residential areas, complete with a seemingly inordinate number of places to take music lessons and kids who appeared to be going home for lunch. With the help of a kind Hong Kong-ian, we hopped on a bus back to Central to pick up Julia’s money and check out a swanky office building all in one go.

At the advice of Beverly, the lovely secretary, we took a bus from Central Bus Terminal (a very important place – buses from there go everywhere!) up Victoria Peak. We sat at the top of the double-decker bus behind two French couples who shrieked as if it were a roller coaster, which made the winding roads seem even more swervy, and saw a large racetrack and cemetery. We walked a bit around one of the paths at the top of Victoria peak, then went to a new observation deck that had just been built at the top of a building. For being free, it was rather nice, and the most convenient thing was the diagram of the skyline identifying the different buildings. This proved to be a great way to get our bearings, and it was at this time that we first took note of the warring HSBC and the Bank of China buildings. I had a cookie in the café downstairs while we plotted our next move.

We took the famed and over-priced funicular (though it is the world’s steepest funicular) 1805 feet back down to Central, headed back to the bus terminal and took a bus to Stanley, a town on the southern shore of Hong Kong Island. Stanley Market, which we’d read a lot about, was unexciting, but we liked our walk through a shaded residential area and our visits to a temple in sight of a sea and a baby temple not far from there that jutted out over the rocky shoreline. We ate a great meal at the Southeast Asian restaurant in Murray House called Chili N Spice (I think - it was on the second floor and had appropriate decor) right along the shore of Stanley. We disembarked a few stops before Central and walked around Lan Kwai Fong, a really trendy bar and club neighborhood. We had Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (which Julia said they don’t have in Korea! Only Baskin Robbins…) and had a drink at a bar playing classic American music, where I worked up the nerve to talk to a group of attractive guys, one of which turned out to be one the bureau chiefs for Reuters in Hong Kong. I asked them where to find good cover bands in the area (since we had fallen in love with them in Hong Kong), and they recommended a nearby place called Insomnia. We headed back to hostel, and while checking e-mail I met a lovely British chap named Ben, who invited us out. We declined in favor of bed. We still hadn’t recovered from that overnight bus.

Friday, January 19, 2007

We set out early the next morning after securing our respective flights from nearby Shoestring Travel. After a brief pit stop at Starbucks, we rode the subway over to the Ngong Ping 360 cable car, which took us from the northwestern side of the New Territories above a body of water past the Hong Kong International Airport and then over national parkland to the middle of Lantau Island, where the Big Buddha and the Po Lin Monastery were located. The cable car advertises itself as a “journey of enlightenment” from which you can see Lantau County Park, the South China Sea, the Hong Kong International Aiport, Tung Chung Valley, and the Ngong Ping Plateau. The scenery was all kind of the same -- misty and foggy and hilly. Fifty percent of Lantau’s land mass is county park, and only 450,000 people live on it compared to HKI’s 1.4 million. The Buddha, by the way, is the largest bronze, seated, outdoor Buddha in the world. There are larger bronze ones, larger seated ones, and larger outdoor ones, but when considering ones that encompass all three characteristics, this one’s got them beat. After taking the requisite photos and wandering around the very pretty monastery (which had lots of quiet rooms off to the sides and quite a few large dogs roaming around), we decided to walk down something labeled “Path of Wisdom.” We’re pretty sure we got lost – well, as long as we could see the big Buddha, we figured we weren’t that lost – but we stumbled upon a mini-prayer site/clearing/place for offerings, and sat there and carried on with thoughtful conversation for awhile.

We headed back to the hotel the same way, via cable car and subway, and then I took a rest at the hostel and Julia checked out the Hong Kong Museum of Art. After she returned, we had quite a bit of fun dressing up for tea in the ornate lobby of the Peninsula Hotel. It was a classy affair – we ordered the specialty, which came with a pot of tea for each of us (Peninsula Afternoon blend for me and English Breakfast for Julia) and a tiered rack of various sandwiches and pastries. YUM. Half the fun, though, is observing who else is having tea! People on dates or friends meeting for pre- or post-dinner drinks, other tourists, businesspeople. (1,000 Places calls it “a cool oasis of civilization.”)

The Peninsula used to have a view of the harbor until the government reclaimed some land from the harbor and built assorted things on it that comprise the Peninsula’s new view. We walked across the street to check out a modern art gallery within a big shopping mall (which turned out to be closed) and wandered through the lobby of the Hotel Inter-Continental, which has floor to ceiling windows that are 40 feet high that look out on a 180-degree view the beautiful skyline of Hong Kong Island at night. We headed back to the hostel and changed, and I went to check e-mail while Julia went to wander around across the river. We agreed to meet at 11:15 at Insomnia in Lan Kwai Fong, but I wound up adopting four guys (Ben from the previous night, his friend from university, Simon, and two other guys they had met) and three girls and it took me a while to get them across the river. We had a blast listening to the cover band Insomnia play Lynyrd Skynyrd and other amazing American songs, then hung out a while at a quieter and roomier bar next door before Julia and Ben and Simon and I headed back to the hostel by cab. The others, however, decided to hang out on the HKI side until the Star Ferry started running again at 6 a.m. Crazy kids.

Saturday, January 20, 2007

The night before had done us in a little, and Julia and I inhaled coffee and croissants at a small French café across from Museum of the History of Hong Kong on the Kowloon side. That museum turned out to be super-fascinating, starting with a timeline about the character of the land Hong Kong is currently on (over thousands of years changing from a desert to a mountain range to a delta) and ending with exhibits on each kind of minority group living in Hong Kong and their various cultural traditions, such as weddings and this one quirky festival where people built giant towers out of steamed buns! We learned about the role of the British in Hong Kong and how the place has developed over the last fifty years. We had a fantastic and informative English tour guide.

Julia wanted to take advantage of Hong Kong’s multinational cuisine before heading back to Korea, the land of culinary homogeneity. So we opted to have lunch in Hong Kong Island’s Soho, taking the Mid-Levels up the hill and eating in an excellent Greek and Middle Eastern restaurant called Olive (32 Elgin street, Soho). Julia had checked her bag through to Seoul at the unbelievably convenient Airport Express train station in Central, so we stopped at Ben and Jerry’s for one last ice cream cone before she headed back to put herself, sans bag, on the Airport Express.

Feeling a little lonely, I opted for the best tonic I know – shopping. I took the subway to northern Kowloon where I wandered around the wholesale fashion district on Cheung Sha Wan Road and Ap Liu Street, where I bought a pair of jeans, two tank tops, a $1 sweater that I wasn’t allowed to try on because it was in a sale bin, and a blue polypro half-zip top. All this for under $50! Amazing, truly. Though some of the stores required that you buy more than one item (those are customers are limited to store owners who want to resell the items), most served both store owners looking for new stock and individual shoppers, mostly lades with an eagle eye for bargains who liked to cluster around the for-sale bins, grabbing at clothes as if they’re going out of style (they probably are). I also walked to a street with a famous electronics market and marveled at all the gadgets and the eyeball-hurting stalls selling florescent lights.

Once back to my segment of Nathan Road, I ate a wonderful (and cheap!) Indian dinner in Khyber Pass, a restaurant in the E-block, 7th floor of Chungking Mansions recommended by many guidebooks. It had super-friendly waiters, and if anyone plans to go there, let me know and I will send you my membership card, which gets you 10 percent off!

Following this meal, I did something rash. I had decided during my afternoon flying solo that I wanted to welcome change and not be afraid of it. I wanted to distance myself a bit from my usual love of routine and scheduling and attempt to embrace spontaneity. I made a decision to act on this idea in what, in retrospect, was the most stupid way possible – to get a haircut in Asia.

The scene: A trendy hair salon in Kowloon where all customers and hairstylists were Asian, many of whom sported Mohawks, fly-aways, and assorted tufts of hair poking out at various angles. Dramatis personae: (1) Me. (2) The woman I entrusted with my locks, who had fairly normal hair herself except for some bright blond streaks. Oh, and her name was C-Man. Plot summary: I explained to the salon owner that I wanted a haircut, and the mistake I made was looking through some sample magazines they had and pointing to one and then amending with an “But I want to be longer.” C-Man proceeded to take a razor and basically get rid of all of my hair’s volume, and cut it into a jagged flat-as-a-pancake bob that I swear was very uneven. (N.B. When I arrived in New York, I went to my regular hair-cutter-guy so that he could try to redress some of C-Man’s wrongs. He didn’t even laugh when I told him the story. He looked deadly serious as he told me I practically had a rat tail in the back.) To be fair, there are not only different cultural standards about what makes a good haircut but also my hair is not like most of the hair they cut. It’s very en vogue for hair in Asia to be very flat and straight, or else gelled and spiked and teased all over the place, and in order to do that there needs to not be a lot of it, which makes my hair look, well, limp. And thin. Cost: $9 USD. Epilogue: As I mentioned, I had it fixed in New York, and while it’s still shorter than I would have liked, at least it’s even. I am going to embrace change in other ways from now on…

Later that night, I was reassured by everyone in the hostel that it really didn’t look that bad. Ben and Simon came by my room and I gave them some suggestions for things to do in Southeast Asia, where they were heading the next day.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

In order to lighten my load, I sent a package home. (N.B. Yay for the Hong Kong postal system! It arrived home in a few days, and the postcards I sent from Hong Kong also arrived in record time, taking less than one-third of the time as the ones sent from Thailand and Taiwan.) I ate a wonderful dim sum meal at the Shamrock Seafood Restaurant at 223 Nathan Rd. Then I hopped on the subway to the Central Bus Terminal and took a bus Aberdeen Harbor, on the south side of the island. I did in fact fall asleep on this bus, and when I woke up, I was alone on the upper level of the double-decker and when I went down to the bottom level, the driver had left and the bus was locked. I signaled to someone outside and they ran to get the driver, who was on his break, to open the bus. Good thing Aberdeen was the last stop on the bus, or who knows where I might have ended up!

At Aberdeen, I wandered in and out of a few bakeries and shops selling various exotic foods and curios, I examined the harbor and wandered alongside it, trying to figure out if I could take a boat to a nearby island. I found one going to Lamma, an island I had read about in the guidebook, so I decided to take the next boat there, which left at 3:50 p.m.

I was killing some time around the harbor and an old woman came up to me and asked if I wanted a boat ride around the harbor for 100 HKD (about 12 USD). I did want a boat ride around the harbor (it was full of refurbished junks and fishing boats and lots of houseboats and floating restaurants that I wanted to see up close), but I knew that was too much. I bargained her down to 40 HKD (5 USD), and told her to tell the driver I had to be back at shore in time to catch my boat to Lamma. The boat, it turned out, was a little motorboat that people who live on the houseboats in the harbor use to get on and off shore. So I was on a boat with people carrying groceries back to their houseboats, and I believe they must have been paying 5 or so HKD for their journeys. But it was worth it, because when we dropped off one mother with her two children, all of whom were carrying bags of groceries, one of the children dropped a bag into the water and everyone scurried for their long-handled fishing nets to retrieve the soaked bag while the young boy looked forlorn at the stern of his family’s boat. The life on the harbor was so vibrant and fun, especially watching all the fishing boats with their large unwieldy nets and dogs running all over the deck, that we returned to shore with little time until my boat to Lamma.

After running along the shore to catch my boat, the pleasant 15-minute boat ride south to Lamma was a lovely respite. Lamma is SW of HKI and has apparently been inhabited since the Stone Age. As I was disembarking in Yung Shue Wan I befriended Dan, unknown adult age, and Sascha, 12. As it turns out, he’s an expat from Canada who married someone from Hong Kong and has three children. Sascha, who was very bright and chatty, goes to school on Hong Kong Island, because Lamma only has an elementary school. They offered to show me around downtown Lamma (which is about one street) and recommend a place for dinner. (There are a couple of low-key hiking trails around Lamma that lead to nice beaches, but it was a bit chilly in January to go cavorting along those, and in any case it was later afternoon so I wasn’t about to try and, a la the Cameron Highlands, get lost in the dark.) I saw the cute little Tin Hau temple. Lamma turned out to be a great place to shop, and I bought some assorted jewelry and scarves and this yummy waffle with sweetened condensed milk and peanut butter and some used books in English from this man with a big dog who sold them from a little shelf on the street. It was there that I found a classic: How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. I informed the bushy-haired man with the dog how rare this particular work is, since it was recalled off the shelves in the U.S. He sold it to me for 4 USD after I explained the story.

By this time Dan and Sascha had gone back to their home on a hill overlooking the ferry docks (at the foot of the hill is the Lamma library, it is one room). They recommended a seafood restaurant in which I ate, but I think since I didn’t have seafood (noodles and an oily shrimp appetizer instead) it wasn’t as good as it could have been. On my way back to the ferry dock, I ran into Dan and Sascha again in town buying raisin bread for Sascha’s brother. Dan works from home and co-owns The Island Bar, and they invited me into the bar for a beer before I caught the ferry back to Central.

I rounded the northeast corner of Hong Kong Island just in time to see the light show at 8 p.m., which is what they call it when the skyscrapers light up. They don’t just turn on the lights – never! There are colors, and lasers, and music, and patterns the buildings light up one by one and then they all flash various colors and patterns and so forth as if they are all in competition with each other. It is really fun and I got to see it from the water, which made it even better. After taking the Star Ferry back to Kowloon, I went shopping at the Espirit outlet for me and at the multi-story Chinese handicrafts store to pick up presents for Corey and for Julia’s Korean host family, with whom I planned to stay for one night. Then I packed up my things and prepared to take a very early morning cab to the (amazing!) Airport Express station in Kowloon (where you check your bags and they end up in your destination!) in order to make my 8 a.m. flight.