9/12 8:30am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_12?authkey=Gv1sRgCKOC2piOk7TaiQE
I woke up and groggily answered the phone. I was expected at the dim sum place next door. I shower and pack, and head downstairs to meet my dad, who'll walk me over.
Dim sum was with Lin Jin, some of my mom's other classmates, and one of my dad's friends. Basically all the people we knew local to Nanning. Dim sum was good. A lot of what you see in the dim sum places in the US, and pretty much the same quality. But also some specialty stuff that I took pictures of. My favorite was the pineapple bread. Somehow, they manage to infuse flour into a slice of pineapple and bake it into bread. It looks just like pineapple, has slight pineapple flavor, and has the texture of bread. After dim sum, we say our goodbyes and pack our bags into Lin Jin's Outlander. Or is it a Montero? I can't get my Mitsubishi SUVs straight.
Leaving Nanning, it's obvious how well developed this place is. It's one of the biggest cities in Guangxi, and rapidly developing into a clean and pretty city. I would say the architecture of the new buildings popping up is pretty Western. Unlike in Beijing, space is abundant and there's no fear of building tall. Recall that I said Beijing was not big on the skyscraper PR contest. One reason for that is because of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, which registered 8.6. Obviously the quality of construction back then in a Chinese city wasn't that great, but the city was pretty much leveled, and 25% of the people died. Tangshan is about 90 miles outside of Beijing, and the fear has always been there than another quake could hit the capital. Because of this, buildings are constructed much more conseratively in the north. In the south, where there have never been earthquakes, buildings are constructed to take advantage of that. I'll demonstrate with pictures later.
Before we totally leave Nanning, we stop by a fruit shop and pick up some longyan (longan). These are the smaller sweeter counterparts to lizhi (lychee). There were some other exotic fruit on display and I snapped pics. Once we got a good amount, we bailed and traveled out of the city.
After getting on the highway, we go for a couple hours. This gives my mom and Lin Jin plenty of time to catch up, and natually, reminisce about the past. Here, I go into an essay on my thoughts on that part of my mom's life, largely from what I knew before, but also influenced by this recent conversation.
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I list October Sky as one of my favorite movies. When asked, I try weakly to explain that it's as close to my parents' generation's version the Chinese Dream as possible. Read up a bit on the movie if you're not familiar. Perhaps my whole life will be lived in reflection of what my parents went through, which is fine with me. When I say my parents' generation, I'm talking specifically about Chinese who were eligible to apply for the first year of college, which reopened at the end of the Cultural Revolution, which ended in 1966. My parents were 22 or so when they went to college. They had been sitting around not doing much during the Cultural Revolution, which is why they were older than the normal age. Their classmates were younger and older, since college was rebooted from nothing. It wasn't as though they had their hearts set on going, though. For the most part, it just sort of happened. The consequences of such a thing, though, were obviously profound and worth describing. Lin Jin and my parents agreed that at the time, college was an intriguing prospect but not a thing which was clearly worth pursuing. I think my mom has talked the most about it, so it's easiest to present her story as the example.
Growing up, my mom didn't really have any long term goals. Contrast this to the modern US primary school student, who is crushed under various regimes of proto career development. Back then, my mom was happy to play around. She managed to get the best grades all through primary school. My mom finished high school in the middle of the Cultura Revolution, a segment of history too complex to cover here, but one of whose effects was the banning of college. After high school, my mom volunteered to go to the communes to work and learn. After three years on a commune, she was done with her tour of duty. She had been hoping to be granted a job by the Chinese Communist Party for her efforts, but there was nothing happening. They simply said, "you can go back home and wait for us to call you up, or you could apply to go to college, which is starting back up again." Going to college would be a virtual free pass into CCP membership, which was at the time a very desirable thing.
So my mom was certainly interested, though not completely motivated. Her dad didn't think much of college. He wasn't like the blue collar coal miner dad from October Sky. In fact, he was even an administrator in the local school department! And yet, he and many like him voiced the opinion that getting a college education was a hoighty-toighty way to put off making a good honest living. My mom had doubts that this was the right thing, if so many were opposed to it. One of her high school teachers sought her out and basically forced her to get her application together. He went to mom's dad and argued in favor of college. He gave her a crash course in chemistry and had another teacher school her in political history. Going into the exam, my mom was really buzzing with confidence. The national college exam in 1977 was an extremely selective process. For every 10,000 applicants, one was accepted. The applicant was asked to list several disciplines they wanted to study. On the other end, the various schools tried to pick out applicants whose interests matched majors they offered. The more prestigious schools go to go first, so they scooped up the best scorers. The distribution of majors was more or less centrally planned, so obviously, in this melee, not everyone could get a major from their list. My mom listed math, meterology, and physics. She was called up by the Changsha Technical Institute to be a geology major.
When my mom got to Changsha (in Hunan province), she made friends with another woman in the geology department. Someone had joked to my mom that a geology major would be slogging up and down mountains looking at rocks, which didn't that glamorous to either of them. Her friend had serious doubts, and asked mom for some money, promising to return it. My mom realized that her friend was looking to return home, and wouldn't give the money to her. My mom insisted that if she went home, nothing she could do in four years be worth more in the eyes of the CCP to get her closer to membership. Her friend still wonders if that decision has made all the difference in her life. So my parents' generation faced so many obstacles and discouragements against getting into college. Making it in was no small feat, a combination of luck and talent.
The 28 people in my mom's class were like a microcosm. The college system at the time meant that all people in the major took all their classes together. Think about it -- if you'd gone to all the same classes with all the same people, you'd build up a much higher level of kinship with them. These were friends who were chosen for each other. This deep bond is, 30 years later, why my mom has enough sway with her classmates that we can enjoy an expenses-paid trip to Tibet, and why another classmate can offer to spend a couple days driving us around in Guangxi. These friendships obviously play into the whole Chinese construct of 'connections.' Things in China happen through connections. Using Tibet as an example: my mom is classmates with a senior engineer at a big mining company (geology majors, remember?), headquartered in Beijing. This person is high-ranking enough that he has several connections in Tibet. He asked one of the local managers to take care of planning a trip for his frieds. Doing this well would get that manager props in Beijing, and perhaps get him a promotion down the road. So the local manager knows a guy who manager tour guides. Between these two, the necessary paperwork is drawn up to hire a tour guide and driver, and the all costs are to written up as a business expense. When we get to Lhasa, we meet the manager and hang out with him briefly. He has the tour guide (Tsenam) and his underlings usher us around the rest of the way. This completely coordinated affair is ultimately all thanks to who went to college with whom, supported by a chain of connections. So on this trip and previous trips to China, we have greatly benefitted from a network of well-to-do or influential friends.
A related topic is the fact itself that all these original college graduates have gone on to such big things. Lin Jin, in addition to his day job, has a lot of real estate going on and bootstrapped himself from basically nothing. This is a reflection less on his specific aptitude at school and more on how strongly China was filtering talent in that first year. Many of mom's classmates in China have done very well for themselves. Compared to some classmates who went abroad, they are relatively much better off. I don't have any regrets about my upbringing in the US and who I've become through it, but I acknowledge my family is completely middle class in its attitudes and level of living. If one of mom's classmates came to the US, I could offer to drive them around Boston, but we couldn't shower our friends with that same level of affection we've been shown in China. They couldn't get a translator and Sam the Patriot walk them around the Freedom Trail, for example. Sure, some of that is cultural, in that in the US, you'd have to be very very important to get that kind of treatment without paying for it, but by and large it's because my parents haven't had the level of career achievement that their peers in China have. When thinking about an evil twin, it's most natural for me to think of him as the me who had parents who stayed in China and stuck it out. What would I have learned differently? What would I have done with my life?
At the end of the Cultural Revolution, my mom decided to go to college on more or less a whim. She decided to come to the US the same way. One day she said to herself that it would be nice to have traveled abroad, and that come hell or high water, she would accomplish it. My dad got the itch when he came back from a conference in the Philippines with some US dollars. Eventually, my parents got student visas and found receiving schools. They thought that they'd give it a go, trying to earn a degree in the US or maybe making some money doing work, and then heading back to China. When we arrived, my parents talked to other Chinese grad students, the consensus was that no one ever thought of going back. Someone told them, "I stopped thinking about returning home the moment I stepped on the plane." My mom was quite surprised at the gap between her thinking and that of the grad students already there. Bit by bit, she found incidents that shaped her thinking about America and convinced her to stay. My parents stayed late at school doing work and also worked at a Chinese restaurant on the side. To facilitate all this running around, my dad bought an old orange Datsun 210. He wanted to show it off to my mom and drove us around. Because he was still so unfamiliar with driving and the American road system, he managed to high-center the car on a road median. He broke the oil pan and the car started smoking. My mom's heart sank, as the only extra money they had in the their whole lives had just been burned up. Some other grad students walking by saw us stranded and tried to help. Because we couldn't pay for a tow, they pushed us a mile back to the grad school dorms. There, someone fixed up the car for close to free. So glad were my parents that the car was working again that we decided to go to the beach for my birthday. About a few miles out of town, one of the tires blew. We were dumbstruck by our bad luck. While eating our picnic on the side of the road, a stranger pulled up in a truck to see if we were ok. We didn't even know what a spare tire was. He asked to see it. It was flat. So he told us to wait while he drove to get it inflated. When he got back, he put it on for us. We decided not to risk going to the beach on the donut, but were of course very grateful. These and other incidents left an indelibile impression on my mom about American culture. She came around to staying in America. As for me, that was the first moment where I really appreciated cars and the culture surrounding them in America.--------
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edit: My mom gave me some input and corrections to the narrative I wrote above. That mostly covered her college phase, but this gives more background into the years leading up to it:
As my mom was about to graduate middle school, my grandmother became pretty sick. She had trouble doing work and at times couldn't even walk. Because of this, my mom's father was concerned about the welfare of the family. He was against my mom's going to high school in the face of this situation. I think I may have composited my mom's high school and middle school teachers. In any case, her middle school teacher made a strong case for her to go to high school because my mom was doing well in class, and my grandfather ceded. Fortunately, my grandmother recovered and could resume running the household. When my mother graduated from high school, she was dispatched to a countryside commune to work alongside farmers. Because of her excellent performance, she was promoted to a paid position, leading a drilling crew consisting of three men and eight women at the Tangshan Hydroelectric Bureau. It was a decent job, paying 32 yuan a month. Furthermore, she was honored by the province and city government, and carried some real potential to be promoted to a much higher position. This was right around the time that the Cultural Revolution ended and the colleges reopened. At this point, my grandfather was neutral to the idea of my mother going to college. Her position with the bureau was considered quite an honor and the income was nice (and ultimately, pretty competitive with my mom's post-college salary of 46 yuan a month). Still, my grandmother was healthy and did not present a reason to stay close to home. At the time, my mom didn’t think going to college was such a big deal, probably in the light of her current job. My mom's high school teacher heavily encouraged my mom to take the exam because of her highest academic marks. The teacher did not want my mom to waste her talent.
Another anecdote that came out of the conversation --
My mom went on a tangent about the few times her mother had to quit her job. Once was in early 1960s, during the national famine disaster. There were three consecutive years of flooding and drought, which resulted in agricultural land being very unproductive. On top of that, the Soviet Union required that the Chinese government pay back what it borrowed during Korea War. The end result was grim -- a lot of Chinese were hungry to the point of death, and maybe only “80% of population could only eat to 80% full.” There was simply not enough to eat. The stories from that time are really scary. The other time grandmother quit her job was when she fell ill before my mother went to high school. This time, she qualified for a monthly pension, but she decided to take an up-front lump sum because the family needed cash desperately. The one-time package was actually quite high, enough to buy a bicycle and other big items to support kids or family’s immediate needs. I think it's hard for people of our day to imagine the poverty people faced. At the time, my grandmother worked, and her mother stayed home to cook and take care of the kids. As my mom recalls it, her grandmother favored her daughters (my grandmother and my grandmother’s younger sister), her son-in-law, and the grandson whom she had raised. But she wasn't as attached to my mother or my mother’s two older siblings. My grandfather could see that these three children were being underfed, even though mom's grandmother claimed or even believed she was setting out fair portions of food, inevitably the portions were slanted away from these three. To excuse herself, mom's grandmother would call out if she ever saw my mom dashing around, "Look at you, running around. How can you not be getting full?" My mom said that, indeed, the three of them (her sister, her older brother, and her) learned to sit still more often, not just to avoid such accusations but also because of the very real hunger they felt. Finally, my grandfather had had enough. He could not let his own children starve, so he asked my grandmother to stop working and to stay home. The pay was so poor back then that the family didn't really miss the lost income. At least this way, my mom got an extra bite to eat.
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One of mom's classmates managed to do two more degrees after his geology major. At the time, you had to sneak back into school somehow, since the government was expecting you to put the first degree to use asap. One of his extra degrees was from the Lu Xun Institute for the Arts. I was surprised when I heard the name. That's because Lu Xun was a revolutionary era writer. China's revolution and overthrow of the empire happened in 1911. But in some ways, you'd think nothing existed in China until the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. After all, prior to 1949, things are arguably not canonized as supporting or espousing Communist ideals. Lu Xun's intellectual writings were anti-fascist and anti-imperial, and with the right interpretations, were subversive against a regime like the CCP. I think in all of the interegnum between 1911 and 1949, the CCP and KMD have shared very few heroes, among which number Lu Xun and Sun Yat-sen. If the tree trunk of modern Chinese political history is Sun Yat-sen, then the two branches are Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek. It's a shame that it never quite worked out the way Sun wanted, but there you have it. Note that Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek are their Cantonese names, as that's part of their geographic identity. In Mandarin, their names are Sun Zhongshan and Jiang Jieshi.
10:45pm
I'm in my underwear and I'm sweating balls in my room. I'm sweating drops of sweat. The south is hot.
Friday, October 8, 2010
Thursday, October 7, 2010
9/11
9/11 10:30am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_11?authkey=Gv1sRgCIyyjr75zP-qhQE
Today we're heading out of Lhasa for Nanning, by way of Kunming and Shangri-la (yes, a Chinese city renamed itself that). The airport is about an hour out of Lhasa. Wouldn't you know it, our flight is delayed. I also lost my Germ-X alchol wipe going through security. I guess I'll have to get some ghetto Chinese version. The whole day is gonna be eaten up by flying. At this point we might not even be done by midnight.
Even at the airport, paper towels and tissue paper is non-existant. They know that if they offered any for free, the first person to come up to the dispenser would take all of it. This sort of ethical problem is long-standing enough that there's a term for moving away from it -- becoming civilized. Whenever someone does something like that, it's called not being civilized. And of course the goal as a nation is to become ever more civilized. Exhortations to become more civilized in various facets of life are plastered on signs everywhere. For example, I've seen in some bathrooms a poster that says, "one step closer to the urinal, one giant leap for our civilization." Because you know, splatter and pissing on the floor is a legitimate issue.
Eventually, we land in Nanning. One of mom's classmates, Lin Jin, is there to pick us up. He drives us on the nice Nanning highway system to where we'd stay for the night. Before we get to the hotel, he first swings by a noodle joint and has us sit down for a bit of a night snack. Nanning is in the province of Guangxi (Wide West) which is next to the province Guangdong (Wide East). Both these provinces are well in the area of China where Cantonese is spoken. Cantonese, like Mandarin, is subject to various dialects and local variations. Lin Jin and my dad are from counties that are fairly close to each other in Guangxi. The Cantonese they speak is quite different from that spoken in Hong Kong and Canton, but it's still mutually intelligible. These variants are probably far apart as a Puerto Rican from New York and a good ol Southern boy -- slight vocabulary difference and large accent difference. As far as Cantonese and Mandarin... if a Mandarin-only speaker listens carefully, he might pick up 25% of sentences/phrases a Cantonese speaker is saying, by similarity in sound and context.
The noodle soup Lin Jin ordered was excellent. It was savory and had nice and soft noodles. You can think of it as a Chinese version of pho, devoid of the Vietnamese style spicing. It was served in a big sandstone pot. Because of the air bubbles in the material, it acts like a thermos -- cool to the touch even when there's hot soup on the inside.
When we get to the hotel, it's pretty swank. It's not even a nice one. I guess it shows the level of refinement in Nanning. I have pictures.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_11?authkey=Gv1sRgCIyyjr75zP-qhQE
Today we're heading out of Lhasa for Nanning, by way of Kunming and Shangri-la (yes, a Chinese city renamed itself that). The airport is about an hour out of Lhasa. Wouldn't you know it, our flight is delayed. I also lost my Germ-X alchol wipe going through security. I guess I'll have to get some ghetto Chinese version. The whole day is gonna be eaten up by flying. At this point we might not even be done by midnight.
Even at the airport, paper towels and tissue paper is non-existant. They know that if they offered any for free, the first person to come up to the dispenser would take all of it. This sort of ethical problem is long-standing enough that there's a term for moving away from it -- becoming civilized. Whenever someone does something like that, it's called not being civilized. And of course the goal as a nation is to become ever more civilized. Exhortations to become more civilized in various facets of life are plastered on signs everywhere. For example, I've seen in some bathrooms a poster that says, "one step closer to the urinal, one giant leap for our civilization." Because you know, splatter and pissing on the floor is a legitimate issue.
Eventually, we land in Nanning. One of mom's classmates, Lin Jin, is there to pick us up. He drives us on the nice Nanning highway system to where we'd stay for the night. Before we get to the hotel, he first swings by a noodle joint and has us sit down for a bit of a night snack. Nanning is in the province of Guangxi (Wide West) which is next to the province Guangdong (Wide East). Both these provinces are well in the area of China where Cantonese is spoken. Cantonese, like Mandarin, is subject to various dialects and local variations. Lin Jin and my dad are from counties that are fairly close to each other in Guangxi. The Cantonese they speak is quite different from that spoken in Hong Kong and Canton, but it's still mutually intelligible. These variants are probably far apart as a Puerto Rican from New York and a good ol Southern boy -- slight vocabulary difference and large accent difference. As far as Cantonese and Mandarin... if a Mandarin-only speaker listens carefully, he might pick up 25% of sentences/phrases a Cantonese speaker is saying, by similarity in sound and context.
The noodle soup Lin Jin ordered was excellent. It was savory and had nice and soft noodles. You can think of it as a Chinese version of pho, devoid of the Vietnamese style spicing. It was served in a big sandstone pot. Because of the air bubbles in the material, it acts like a thermos -- cool to the touch even when there's hot soup on the inside.
When we get to the hotel, it's pretty swank. It's not even a nice one. I guess it shows the level of refinement in Nanning. I have pictures.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
9/10
9/10 7:40am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_10?authkey=Gv1sRgCPKenvfvrLbX6AE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l15SrABVlww
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q3riFjpkqU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWLr0iq8mYw
Today we're mostly taking a break. Because we advanced our schedule a bit with doing two trips yesterday, today we've got the morning free and the afternoon to visit Sera monastery. Our guide Tsenam seems to have been caught off guard by the schedule change, as he made some flimsy excuse about why he couldn't guide us through Sera. I think it'd have been slightly better if he'd told us right away yesterday when we asked to change the schedule instead of this morning. We should be able to get ourselves through Sera without too much trouble; we don't need a licensed tour guide to get tickets or enter.
For the morning though, we're just going to walk around and do some shopping. The obvious thing is that while, from stall to stall, the items are different, overall there's only a few kinds of items for sale. I was just reading on the Gaussian Unitary Exclusion principle, and I wonder if that governs the the distribution of items. You don't want to be the same as the vendor next to you, but you also don't want to be selling stuff that's too left-field, because few people will want it and you'll have trouble finding suppliers.
Walking around and just looking at the city is pretty relaxing. While I end up just buying a couple of gifts for friends back home, it's been pleasant walking around at our own pace and not having a strict agenda. I'm not even that miffed that the whole area is dedicated to tourism. We're just shopping, after all.
We head back to the hotel to have a quick lunch, and then meet up with the driver to go to Sera. The monastery is pretty close by, so we're right back out on our feet. This is a much bigger complex than the other sites, except for Norbulingkha, with dozens of buildings scattered around. Recall that a monastery is for training monks, so there's hundreds of them on site living in these dorms. The statues and chapels in the public areas look very similar to others we've seen, and without a guide to expound on them, we pass by them quickly. The main attraction at Sera is the monks' debates. This is held twice every other day. We made sure to get to Sera right before they start the event.
What happens --
The monks gather in a gravel courtyard, which is fortunately shaded by some trees. The tourists ring the outside of the courtyard. The monks split up into questioner-answerer pairs. The answering monk sits on a red pillow on the ground, while the questioning monk stands before him. When the event begins, the questioning monks proceed to present various questions. Each question is punctuated by an elaborate clapping motion, as though the questioner is sending the question on a current of air toward the answerer. If the answerer is wrong, the questioner gets to do multiple claps in succession.
Many of the monks did this with a lot of enthusiasm, seeming to have a good time of it. After all, they are all young men with a lot of youthful energy. There was a senior monk patrolling the rows, but he didn't seem to have objections to the content or procedure. Another monk was going around with what seemed to be a checklist. I suppose to make sure each pair had adequate performance? I can only assume the questions were trivia like, who was the founder of the Niungma sect? What are the Three Sorrows? What was the first Nepali chapter of Tibetan Buddhism? In any case, I'm not sure there's much debate to it.
Anyways, the monks are having a good time and enjoying themselves. It's a pleasant atmosphere, but because everything is conducted in Tibetan, we can't stay there watching it forever. We make a quiet exit (probably one of the earliest) and continue visiting around the monastery. We make a good circuit of it, hearing the monks debating the whole time. I hope nobody stayed for the whole thing.
After we left Sera, we went to our last dinner in Tibet. The coworker of my mom's college classmate couldn't make it as host, so he sent an underling to treat us to a good dinner. And boy was it a good one. We were dining at Sunset, or if you do a bit of wordplay, The Sun Never Sets. This was supposedly the best Tibetan restaurant in Lhasa. Everything was done according to Tibetan tradition, so midway into the dinner, they brought in three maids (I'm sure on any given night, some of the waitresses get to do serenade duty instead of serving) to serenade the guests. For each guest, they sing a traditional Tibetan song. After the song is over, the guest is presented with a glass of barley wine. The guest holds the glass in his left hand, and dips his right ring finger into the glass, and flicks the wine on his finger heavenward. He repeats a flick to the ground. Finally, he flicks toward the dinner table. These are the respective blessings to heaven, the earth, and the friends. Then, he takes a small sip and holds it. The maids top off the glass. He sips again, and the maids top it off again. Then he drains the glass. After he finishes, the maids put a kada on him and say Tashi delek. The maids did it to all three of us guests, singing a different song each time. It was pretty cool. The songs were really the best example of Tibetan singing, probably because they were acapella. I didn't drink my barley wine except for the sips, and I think I still managed to get a buzz off of that.
The food at the dinner had repeat dishes of stuff that we'd liked before, as well as new items. I think I liked the boiled lamb and yak momo the best. I have details in the photos. I think the only downside is that I won't be able to enjoy Rangzen in Cambridge as much, if only because of the limited menu.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_10?authkey=Gv1sRgCPKenvfvrLbX6AE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l15SrABVlww
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q3riFjpkqU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWLr0iq8mYw
Today we're mostly taking a break. Because we advanced our schedule a bit with doing two trips yesterday, today we've got the morning free and the afternoon to visit Sera monastery. Our guide Tsenam seems to have been caught off guard by the schedule change, as he made some flimsy excuse about why he couldn't guide us through Sera. I think it'd have been slightly better if he'd told us right away yesterday when we asked to change the schedule instead of this morning. We should be able to get ourselves through Sera without too much trouble; we don't need a licensed tour guide to get tickets or enter.
For the morning though, we're just going to walk around and do some shopping. The obvious thing is that while, from stall to stall, the items are different, overall there's only a few kinds of items for sale. I was just reading on the Gaussian Unitary Exclusion principle, and I wonder if that governs the the distribution of items. You don't want to be the same as the vendor next to you, but you also don't want to be selling stuff that's too left-field, because few people will want it and you'll have trouble finding suppliers.
Walking around and just looking at the city is pretty relaxing. While I end up just buying a couple of gifts for friends back home, it's been pleasant walking around at our own pace and not having a strict agenda. I'm not even that miffed that the whole area is dedicated to tourism. We're just shopping, after all.
We head back to the hotel to have a quick lunch, and then meet up with the driver to go to Sera. The monastery is pretty close by, so we're right back out on our feet. This is a much bigger complex than the other sites, except for Norbulingkha, with dozens of buildings scattered around. Recall that a monastery is for training monks, so there's hundreds of them on site living in these dorms. The statues and chapels in the public areas look very similar to others we've seen, and without a guide to expound on them, we pass by them quickly. The main attraction at Sera is the monks' debates. This is held twice every other day. We made sure to get to Sera right before they start the event.
What happens --
The monks gather in a gravel courtyard, which is fortunately shaded by some trees. The tourists ring the outside of the courtyard. The monks split up into questioner-answerer pairs. The answering monk sits on a red pillow on the ground, while the questioning monk stands before him. When the event begins, the questioning monks proceed to present various questions. Each question is punctuated by an elaborate clapping motion, as though the questioner is sending the question on a current of air toward the answerer. If the answerer is wrong, the questioner gets to do multiple claps in succession.
Many of the monks did this with a lot of enthusiasm, seeming to have a good time of it. After all, they are all young men with a lot of youthful energy. There was a senior monk patrolling the rows, but he didn't seem to have objections to the content or procedure. Another monk was going around with what seemed to be a checklist. I suppose to make sure each pair had adequate performance? I can only assume the questions were trivia like, who was the founder of the Niungma sect? What are the Three Sorrows? What was the first Nepali chapter of Tibetan Buddhism? In any case, I'm not sure there's much debate to it.
Anyways, the monks are having a good time and enjoying themselves. It's a pleasant atmosphere, but because everything is conducted in Tibetan, we can't stay there watching it forever. We make a quiet exit (probably one of the earliest) and continue visiting around the monastery. We make a good circuit of it, hearing the monks debating the whole time. I hope nobody stayed for the whole thing.
After we left Sera, we went to our last dinner in Tibet. The coworker of my mom's college classmate couldn't make it as host, so he sent an underling to treat us to a good dinner. And boy was it a good one. We were dining at Sunset, or if you do a bit of wordplay, The Sun Never Sets. This was supposedly the best Tibetan restaurant in Lhasa. Everything was done according to Tibetan tradition, so midway into the dinner, they brought in three maids (I'm sure on any given night, some of the waitresses get to do serenade duty instead of serving) to serenade the guests. For each guest, they sing a traditional Tibetan song. After the song is over, the guest is presented with a glass of barley wine. The guest holds the glass in his left hand, and dips his right ring finger into the glass, and flicks the wine on his finger heavenward. He repeats a flick to the ground. Finally, he flicks toward the dinner table. These are the respective blessings to heaven, the earth, and the friends. Then, he takes a small sip and holds it. The maids top off the glass. He sips again, and the maids top it off again. Then he drains the glass. After he finishes, the maids put a kada on him and say Tashi delek. The maids did it to all three of us guests, singing a different song each time. It was pretty cool. The songs were really the best example of Tibetan singing, probably because they were acapella. I didn't drink my barley wine except for the sips, and I think I still managed to get a buzz off of that.
The food at the dinner had repeat dishes of stuff that we'd liked before, as well as new items. I think I liked the boiled lamb and yak momo the best. I have details in the photos. I think the only downside is that I won't be able to enjoy Rangzen in Cambridge as much, if only because of the limited menu.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
9/9
9/9 9:19am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_9?authkey=Gv1sRgCIKFqeulw-uPRA
We're heading out of Lhasa for today. There's a ceremony for which we have to stay overnight at another site.
Had a decent headache for most of today, thanks to my dry sinuses. It took a bit out of my recall for the outings, but I'll try my best.
First, we had a schedule change. The basis for this is that when you enter Tibet, because of the political overcast, you need to fill out a fairly detailed tourism itenirary. The sites you want to visit may require explicit prior approval. So if you didn't apply to visit Temple X, you might not be allowed to visit during your stay. The consequence for filling out a limited number of sites (like we did) is that you schedule may be kind of light. What happened was that Tsenam took the list of sites we asked for and spread them out evenly over the number of days we'd be staying. We'd basically be doing an hour's worth of sightseeing per day for the last 3 days. When we heard the schedule for today and tomorrow, it was obvious that we could fit the 1 site per day into 2 sites on just today, so we asked to do it that way. The guides obliged, but it means tomorrow is up in the air. We'll try to figure out some stuff to do, but we don't necessarily have permission to go to any major sites.
Anyways, for today, we drove south out of Lhasa to visit two places, whose names I can't quite remember thanks to my headache. The first is the castle built by the first king of Tibet. The second is a temple whose particular significance escapes me. Going south means driving on the so-called Friendship Highway. This connects Lhasa to Kathmandu in Nepal. They're separated by only 900km, apparently. The road goes into a tunnel at the point where the Lhasa River empties into the Yaluzangbu River. Once you're out of the tunnel, you run alongside the Yaluzangbu for a while. The drive was scenic, but still quite a rollercoaster of honking and close calls. These are bound to happen when, around any blind corner, a cow can decide to bolt onto the road and have the right of way. Drivers respect the farm animals a lot and will make it a priority to work around them. We've encountered at least 3 animals simply sleeping on the road and getting away with it. Once a hawk decided to land on the road and we had to swerve to avoid it.
Lunch was at a restaurant in a city before our final destination. This was I think my best Tibetan meal to date. I ordered the blood sausage, and the guides ordered other dishes for us. There was no bad dish and a couple were outstanding. Everything fit together well. The only thing I've been avoiding is Tibetan tea. I guess the milk aspect just scares me. All the details in the picture section. Once we finished we got back onto the highway.
Anyways, when we got to the castle, there was a whole support village built nearby to handle the tourism needs. Not quite as artificial feeling as before, but still obvious. The path up to the castle is shaped much in the same way as it has been for centuries. The very start of the path is also conveniently where the road ends and the village is situated. Tsenam said it might be about a 2km hike to the castle, so my mom opted for the horse option. A guide helped her onto a little horse and led her up the horse path. The rest of us started walking. I got winded pretty easily on the uphill parts of the path, and soon my head was throbbing. I had to take a few breaks on the way up. I passed a woman selling small boiled potatoes for what seemed like too much. It just doesn't strike me as the best snack. It might work when it's cold, but it was like 80 degrees. In what I'm sure was much less than 2km, I was at the castle. I got to really catch my breath as I waited for my mom and dad to show up. Tsenam took us inside and explained the very interesting, bordering on mythical history of the castle.
Many centuries ago, there was no kingdom of Tibet. An Indian prince was exiled and began journeying north. He is remembered as Nyaturi Gyampo (don't quote me). Nyaturi means on the shoulders. When the natives in the area of Tibet saw this strange looking man, they tried to ask him who he was. He didn't speak the language and merely pointed up, meaning that he came from the heavens. The natives bought it and decided to hoist him up and make this heaven-sent man their king. And thus began the Kings' Time in Tibet. The king commanded that a castle be built on this hill, and it was done. A nearby field became the first cultivated farmland in Tibet. Any fantasies aside, this castle probably is one of the earliest constructions in Tibet. It's not anywhere close to original form, however. It was razed during the Cultural Revolution, and on top of that, the 5th Dalai Lama rebuilt it to be a Buddhist temple. Restoration has brought it back into the form it was in after that rebuild.
The tour inside was brief (delivering the story above, among a few repeats from Jokang temple). There was another adopted cat, and a monk who was chatting on his mobile. Mobile phones are so common in China that it doesn't bother me in the slightest to see a monk using one, from neither an ethical or practical standpoint. After touring the insides (no photos again), we went to the roof and looked around. The view is dazzling. Even though the village below isn't very original, it lends a great reference for how isolated the castle would have been in its time. Around the back, Tsenam pointed out the field where archeologists found fossilized evidence of cultivation. I didn't get details on how it could be concluded that this was the first farmed field in Tibet, but that's what it was. It was cool to look out onto a landscape, that, save for a road and the village, looked as rugged and natural as it must have been 2300 years ago. Regardless of current political borders, it's obvious this is a special place among all the peoples and cultures in south central Asia, and it's obvious that Tibetans have a unique stake in history from very early on.
Two more stories about the castle. After the 1st king built it, a scroll with Buddhist teachings fell out of the sky onto the upper landing of the castle. Because it was written in Sanskrit, no one could decipher it. These Indecipherable Sacred Scrolls were unknown until Tibet sent scholars to India to learn Sanskrit and create a written Tibetan language. When they came back, they translated the scrolls. The original relic, carefully housed in the castle, was lost when the castle was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution.
Story two: in the full Tibetan mythos, Tibetans (the natives the 1st king encountered, I suppose) came from the offspring of a monkey, which was an emanation of the goddess of compassion, and an ogress. Tsenam elaborated that the ogress looked like "a bigger monkey," but maybe he meant, I dunno, "a Yeti." The current Dalai Lama actually states that Tibetan Buddhists' standout tendency to enjoy meat might be attributed to Tibetans' monkey origins.
After we got down from the castle, we went on to a nearby temple. Once again, no pictures is disappointing. The inside was packed with statues of various deities, some of which were new and others the classic Tibetan pantheon. Frankly, I've been surprised by multitude of different kinds of gods and beings described by Buddhism. My high school world literature class level understanding of the religion had always presumed it was a simpler, no-god affair. I have to assume a lot of these gods overlap into Hinduism. Worth looking into later.
Ringing around the outside of the temple are the prayer bells that you can spin. Tsenam led us around in a short kora. A kora is a prayer circuit. There's one around Potala and another one around all of Lhasa. That one takes about 2 hours to complete. So going around this temple makes for a quite a short kora. Both when we were on top of the castle, and during the kora, Buddhism's principle of clockwise motion was carefully observed. Once we finished it, we drove back to Lhasa.
The last place we stopped at was a specialty shop that sold yak meat products. Our driver told us that Tsenam is contractually obligated to bring us here, and that he gets a cut of our purchase amount. Well, there was definitely a lot of interesting jerkies for sale, so I don't feel bad about the built-in money-making aspect. I'm sure most of the restaurants we land at, Tsenam has a deal of some sort. I can't complain; it's all new experiences. Anyways, I'm planning to bring various yak meats back to the US. Hopefully, if the US customs gives me grief about bringing in beef products, I'll point out that yak is a different species.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_9?authkey=Gv1sRgCIKFqeulw-uPRA
We're heading out of Lhasa for today. There's a ceremony for which we have to stay overnight at another site.
Had a decent headache for most of today, thanks to my dry sinuses. It took a bit out of my recall for the outings, but I'll try my best.
First, we had a schedule change. The basis for this is that when you enter Tibet, because of the political overcast, you need to fill out a fairly detailed tourism itenirary. The sites you want to visit may require explicit prior approval. So if you didn't apply to visit Temple X, you might not be allowed to visit during your stay. The consequence for filling out a limited number of sites (like we did) is that you schedule may be kind of light. What happened was that Tsenam took the list of sites we asked for and spread them out evenly over the number of days we'd be staying. We'd basically be doing an hour's worth of sightseeing per day for the last 3 days. When we heard the schedule for today and tomorrow, it was obvious that we could fit the 1 site per day into 2 sites on just today, so we asked to do it that way. The guides obliged, but it means tomorrow is up in the air. We'll try to figure out some stuff to do, but we don't necessarily have permission to go to any major sites.
Anyways, for today, we drove south out of Lhasa to visit two places, whose names I can't quite remember thanks to my headache. The first is the castle built by the first king of Tibet. The second is a temple whose particular significance escapes me. Going south means driving on the so-called Friendship Highway. This connects Lhasa to Kathmandu in Nepal. They're separated by only 900km, apparently. The road goes into a tunnel at the point where the Lhasa River empties into the Yaluzangbu River. Once you're out of the tunnel, you run alongside the Yaluzangbu for a while. The drive was scenic, but still quite a rollercoaster of honking and close calls. These are bound to happen when, around any blind corner, a cow can decide to bolt onto the road and have the right of way. Drivers respect the farm animals a lot and will make it a priority to work around them. We've encountered at least 3 animals simply sleeping on the road and getting away with it. Once a hawk decided to land on the road and we had to swerve to avoid it.
Lunch was at a restaurant in a city before our final destination. This was I think my best Tibetan meal to date. I ordered the blood sausage, and the guides ordered other dishes for us. There was no bad dish and a couple were outstanding. Everything fit together well. The only thing I've been avoiding is Tibetan tea. I guess the milk aspect just scares me. All the details in the picture section. Once we finished we got back onto the highway.
Anyways, when we got to the castle, there was a whole support village built nearby to handle the tourism needs. Not quite as artificial feeling as before, but still obvious. The path up to the castle is shaped much in the same way as it has been for centuries. The very start of the path is also conveniently where the road ends and the village is situated. Tsenam said it might be about a 2km hike to the castle, so my mom opted for the horse option. A guide helped her onto a little horse and led her up the horse path. The rest of us started walking. I got winded pretty easily on the uphill parts of the path, and soon my head was throbbing. I had to take a few breaks on the way up. I passed a woman selling small boiled potatoes for what seemed like too much. It just doesn't strike me as the best snack. It might work when it's cold, but it was like 80 degrees. In what I'm sure was much less than 2km, I was at the castle. I got to really catch my breath as I waited for my mom and dad to show up. Tsenam took us inside and explained the very interesting, bordering on mythical history of the castle.
Many centuries ago, there was no kingdom of Tibet. An Indian prince was exiled and began journeying north. He is remembered as Nyaturi Gyampo (don't quote me). Nyaturi means on the shoulders. When the natives in the area of Tibet saw this strange looking man, they tried to ask him who he was. He didn't speak the language and merely pointed up, meaning that he came from the heavens. The natives bought it and decided to hoist him up and make this heaven-sent man their king. And thus began the Kings' Time in Tibet. The king commanded that a castle be built on this hill, and it was done. A nearby field became the first cultivated farmland in Tibet. Any fantasies aside, this castle probably is one of the earliest constructions in Tibet. It's not anywhere close to original form, however. It was razed during the Cultural Revolution, and on top of that, the 5th Dalai Lama rebuilt it to be a Buddhist temple. Restoration has brought it back into the form it was in after that rebuild.
The tour inside was brief (delivering the story above, among a few repeats from Jokang temple). There was another adopted cat, and a monk who was chatting on his mobile. Mobile phones are so common in China that it doesn't bother me in the slightest to see a monk using one, from neither an ethical or practical standpoint. After touring the insides (no photos again), we went to the roof and looked around. The view is dazzling. Even though the village below isn't very original, it lends a great reference for how isolated the castle would have been in its time. Around the back, Tsenam pointed out the field where archeologists found fossilized evidence of cultivation. I didn't get details on how it could be concluded that this was the first farmed field in Tibet, but that's what it was. It was cool to look out onto a landscape, that, save for a road and the village, looked as rugged and natural as it must have been 2300 years ago. Regardless of current political borders, it's obvious this is a special place among all the peoples and cultures in south central Asia, and it's obvious that Tibetans have a unique stake in history from very early on.
Two more stories about the castle. After the 1st king built it, a scroll with Buddhist teachings fell out of the sky onto the upper landing of the castle. Because it was written in Sanskrit, no one could decipher it. These Indecipherable Sacred Scrolls were unknown until Tibet sent scholars to India to learn Sanskrit and create a written Tibetan language. When they came back, they translated the scrolls. The original relic, carefully housed in the castle, was lost when the castle was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution.
Story two: in the full Tibetan mythos, Tibetans (the natives the 1st king encountered, I suppose) came from the offspring of a monkey, which was an emanation of the goddess of compassion, and an ogress. Tsenam elaborated that the ogress looked like "a bigger monkey," but maybe he meant, I dunno, "a Yeti." The current Dalai Lama actually states that Tibetan Buddhists' standout tendency to enjoy meat might be attributed to Tibetans' monkey origins.
After we got down from the castle, we went on to a nearby temple. Once again, no pictures is disappointing. The inside was packed with statues of various deities, some of which were new and others the classic Tibetan pantheon. Frankly, I've been surprised by multitude of different kinds of gods and beings described by Buddhism. My high school world literature class level understanding of the religion had always presumed it was a simpler, no-god affair. I have to assume a lot of these gods overlap into Hinduism. Worth looking into later.
Ringing around the outside of the temple are the prayer bells that you can spin. Tsenam led us around in a short kora. A kora is a prayer circuit. There's one around Potala and another one around all of Lhasa. That one takes about 2 hours to complete. So going around this temple makes for a quite a short kora. Both when we were on top of the castle, and during the kora, Buddhism's principle of clockwise motion was carefully observed. Once we finished it, we drove back to Lhasa.
The last place we stopped at was a specialty shop that sold yak meat products. Our driver told us that Tsenam is contractually obligated to bring us here, and that he gets a cut of our purchase amount. Well, there was definitely a lot of interesting jerkies for sale, so I don't feel bad about the built-in money-making aspect. I'm sure most of the restaurants we land at, Tsenam has a deal of some sort. I can't complain; it's all new experiences. Anyways, I'm planning to bring various yak meats back to the US. Hopefully, if the US customs gives me grief about bringing in beef products, I'll point out that yak is a different species.
Monday, October 4, 2010
9/8
9/8 6:46am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_8?authkey=Gv1sRgCOKuuu_ryavPZQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqrvCkZeb6Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vAKLhwCNP0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEuiF-ke07g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFYcYdPUOQ8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7-xAMzSxNw
I'm starting a new sidestream, that I'm tentatively going to call Fashion Victims. I've tried forever to casually describe how the average Chinese person dresses. The closest I've ever come is labeling ones who try as fashion victims. That's not to say that I think the people I have in mind dress poorly or come off looking terribly. Rather, a lot of the looks just go way outside of the box from what you'd expect in the US. So yeah, I'll try my best to get candid shots of good examples. If anyone catches me and asks me what's going on, I'll just do my best "No speaking Chinese" impression and run.
Today we're going to that big lake we saw on the train, Lake Namtso. It's supposed to be very beautiful. Because of the distance, we have to get up really early to make it out in time. It's basically a frenzied drive through Lhasa and then the cities/zones up to Lake Namtso. The gutsy performance put on by our driver might make some people faint, but I have faith in the rules of the road in China and didn't sweat it too much. It was a long drive, punctuated by stops at various checkpoints. The way it works is that you get a timecard for your route, and the speed limit imposes a minimum time it should take between checkpoints. For every minute you arrive early, you're docked a fine of 100 yuan. This ends up working exactly like a Time-Speed-Distance rally event. If you know where the checkpoint is, and how long it should take to get there, you can speed like hell as you need, and park for some extra minutes at the end, just out of sight of the checkpoint. Our driver, being a tour guide professional, has done this circuit plenty of times and made quick work of finding places to park and knowing for how long. Whenever we had one of these stops, I'd walk around and look for interesting things. On the way up there was lots of traffic, so usually we didn't have to punt before checkpoints. At the places we did stop, though, there was highly specialized catering to tourism.
It's disappointing in that any heavily frequented area inevitably becomes commercialized and robbed of its original character. Whenever we stopped at one of these checkpoints, there'd be lots of tour buses also parked there. And when you have hundreds of people milling about, there's opportunity for making a buck. I saw broadly three classes of business going on. First, there were cart vendors. Each cart is a little table on wheels with a roof. You can pack your wares into the cart and push it away, or you can put all the wares out and start selling. It was all the trinkety stuff you'd expect, like jewelry, models, carvings, etc. I was actually looking for a phurba dagger as a gift for a friend, but nobody was selling at a price I wanted to pay. Second, there was the bathrooms. 1 yuan per person. These were pretty horrid bathrooms for that kind of money, but I didn't see the government running in and trying to regulate, so let the free market reign. That said, I've seen free "bathrooms" that I'd gladly avoid by paying 1 yuan to class it up a bit. Third, tiny roadside huts with their standardized shop signage, offering tea or food. I'm a brave eater but I wouldn't go into those places. Not only is hygiene a big question mark, but the huts, basically the building equivalents of a cubicle, seem ready to implode. In one place, some enterprising Tibetans had roped up their dogs and a goat for picture-taking. You pay a fee and take your pictures with these animals. I suppose they are better fed and cared for than the numerous strays in the area, but it must still be a very rough life for them. My disappointment is that, instead of being able to see something unique everywhere you go in Tibet, you are forced to run the same gauntlet every time you make a tour stop. I think the underlying reason it bothers me is that it highlights the casual wage-slavery accepted by the poor and looking-for-work. For example, at the Bird's Nest, there was a peddler at every corner clutching a sheaf of folded up flying bird toys. It was like a rubber band power airplane, except the rubber band turned a crank and flapped a pair of wings. I think they were being sold for 20 yuan a piece and subject to haggling, of course. I'm guessing each morning, each person selling would show up at the main office and get handed 20 toy birds from a box. They'd pay up front for the birds, and whatever profit they could make was theirs. The same routine every day. Some days, they might be able to sell out their stock. Some days, maybe not a single sale. Yet in the long term, each of them must be undoubtedly making a living doing it, otherwise they'd be off doing something else. And underlying this is the crippling realization that the vast majority of people out there don't have interesting lives by virtue of living in poverty. Back to Tibet -- I'm not exactly sure what all these tourist-stop vendors would be doing if there were no tourism. I suppose the stituation could be worse for them. When we were driving along, I saw one woman on the roadside, holding up a pan full of fried bread, standing next to her small stove. I'm guessing it was worth her time to sell some bread to tourists while tending to her livestock. I guess you could call that making the best of it.
Anyways, the weather got progressively worse as we drove up the mountains to get to Namtso. At some point the altitude peaked at 4700m. The rain turned to sleet and snow, and driving along was pretty treacherous. It was pretty miserable all the way to Namtso. My mom once again felt the effects of high altitude sickness. When we got to Namtso, all we did was huddle in a restaurant for a bit and then take some lakeside pictures. My mom didn't even come out. So about 15 minutes after we finished lunch, we were back in the Landcruiser on the way back to Lhasa. My mom started breathing out of the oxygen bags we'd brought for such emergencies, and she got better. I wish she'd taken it as soon as she started getting a headache and feeling lightheaded, but she was too stubborn to treat herself earlier, thinking all her preventative medicines would help.
The drive back to Lhasa was under much improved weather. I shot a couple videos of how daring our driver was. There are some principles to how to drive around here, and I've almost got them sorted out. Going out there and on the way back, we passed a Buddhist doing the prostration pilgrimage to Lhasa. The prostration is where you get on your knees and do sort of a butterfly stroke, and then stand back up. You only move a couple feet each prostration, so it can take years to get to Lhasa this way. Such is their devotion. I wasn't able to get a picture in time. I didn't spot if the pilgrim had a sack of food on him. I have no idea how they make it.
I'll take some time now to comment on how dirty things are over here. Hygiene standards are simply different. Like I mentioned before, nobody cares about the cleanliness of common spaces. If a wall in the lobby gets slightly scuffed, it'll stay that way pretty much forever. It seems like no one is in charge of cleaning these places up. That sort of casual attitude extends to cleaning most public bathrooms. When you're in America, you don't give too much thought to where your shoes have been. Yeah, you're reminded every so often that there's dirt on the ground, but it never seems like a big deal. Once you've stepped into a public bathroom or latrine in China, you'll never forget how dirty the soles of your shoes are. It's contagion theory. It's easy to track the grime from the bathroom onto your shoes, from which they'll never be clean. That's why Chinese people are such sticklers about taking off shoes before going into homes. So while I haven't made much explicit mention of it, whenever I've been going out, I've naturally assumed Chinese habits with respect to what is dirty. I won't ever lean on a wall, for example. It comes naturally.
After getting caught up reading on Tibetan languages on the wikipedia for a bit, I have to overturn my conclusion that Tibetan isn't tonal. The dialect spoken in Lhasa is a Central Tibetan language. The Central Tibetan family acquired tonality from its contact with Chinese languages. So somewhere in there, there are tones. I just can't hear them I guess.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_8?authkey=Gv1sRgCOKuuu_ryavPZQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqrvCkZeb6Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vAKLhwCNP0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEuiF-ke07g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFYcYdPUOQ8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7-xAMzSxNw
I'm starting a new sidestream, that I'm tentatively going to call Fashion Victims. I've tried forever to casually describe how the average Chinese person dresses. The closest I've ever come is labeling ones who try as fashion victims. That's not to say that I think the people I have in mind dress poorly or come off looking terribly. Rather, a lot of the looks just go way outside of the box from what you'd expect in the US. So yeah, I'll try my best to get candid shots of good examples. If anyone catches me and asks me what's going on, I'll just do my best "No speaking Chinese" impression and run.
Today we're going to that big lake we saw on the train, Lake Namtso. It's supposed to be very beautiful. Because of the distance, we have to get up really early to make it out in time. It's basically a frenzied drive through Lhasa and then the cities/zones up to Lake Namtso. The gutsy performance put on by our driver might make some people faint, but I have faith in the rules of the road in China and didn't sweat it too much. It was a long drive, punctuated by stops at various checkpoints. The way it works is that you get a timecard for your route, and the speed limit imposes a minimum time it should take between checkpoints. For every minute you arrive early, you're docked a fine of 100 yuan. This ends up working exactly like a Time-Speed-Distance rally event. If you know where the checkpoint is, and how long it should take to get there, you can speed like hell as you need, and park for some extra minutes at the end, just out of sight of the checkpoint. Our driver, being a tour guide professional, has done this circuit plenty of times and made quick work of finding places to park and knowing for how long. Whenever we had one of these stops, I'd walk around and look for interesting things. On the way up there was lots of traffic, so usually we didn't have to punt before checkpoints. At the places we did stop, though, there was highly specialized catering to tourism.
It's disappointing in that any heavily frequented area inevitably becomes commercialized and robbed of its original character. Whenever we stopped at one of these checkpoints, there'd be lots of tour buses also parked there. And when you have hundreds of people milling about, there's opportunity for making a buck. I saw broadly three classes of business going on. First, there were cart vendors. Each cart is a little table on wheels with a roof. You can pack your wares into the cart and push it away, or you can put all the wares out and start selling. It was all the trinkety stuff you'd expect, like jewelry, models, carvings, etc. I was actually looking for a phurba dagger as a gift for a friend, but nobody was selling at a price I wanted to pay. Second, there was the bathrooms. 1 yuan per person. These were pretty horrid bathrooms for that kind of money, but I didn't see the government running in and trying to regulate, so let the free market reign. That said, I've seen free "bathrooms" that I'd gladly avoid by paying 1 yuan to class it up a bit. Third, tiny roadside huts with their standardized shop signage, offering tea or food. I'm a brave eater but I wouldn't go into those places. Not only is hygiene a big question mark, but the huts, basically the building equivalents of a cubicle, seem ready to implode. In one place, some enterprising Tibetans had roped up their dogs and a goat for picture-taking. You pay a fee and take your pictures with these animals. I suppose they are better fed and cared for than the numerous strays in the area, but it must still be a very rough life for them. My disappointment is that, instead of being able to see something unique everywhere you go in Tibet, you are forced to run the same gauntlet every time you make a tour stop. I think the underlying reason it bothers me is that it highlights the casual wage-slavery accepted by the poor and looking-for-work. For example, at the Bird's Nest, there was a peddler at every corner clutching a sheaf of folded up flying bird toys. It was like a rubber band power airplane, except the rubber band turned a crank and flapped a pair of wings. I think they were being sold for 20 yuan a piece and subject to haggling, of course. I'm guessing each morning, each person selling would show up at the main office and get handed 20 toy birds from a box. They'd pay up front for the birds, and whatever profit they could make was theirs. The same routine every day. Some days, they might be able to sell out their stock. Some days, maybe not a single sale. Yet in the long term, each of them must be undoubtedly making a living doing it, otherwise they'd be off doing something else. And underlying this is the crippling realization that the vast majority of people out there don't have interesting lives by virtue of living in poverty. Back to Tibet -- I'm not exactly sure what all these tourist-stop vendors would be doing if there were no tourism. I suppose the stituation could be worse for them. When we were driving along, I saw one woman on the roadside, holding up a pan full of fried bread, standing next to her small stove. I'm guessing it was worth her time to sell some bread to tourists while tending to her livestock. I guess you could call that making the best of it.
Anyways, the weather got progressively worse as we drove up the mountains to get to Namtso. At some point the altitude peaked at 4700m. The rain turned to sleet and snow, and driving along was pretty treacherous. It was pretty miserable all the way to Namtso. My mom once again felt the effects of high altitude sickness. When we got to Namtso, all we did was huddle in a restaurant for a bit and then take some lakeside pictures. My mom didn't even come out. So about 15 minutes after we finished lunch, we were back in the Landcruiser on the way back to Lhasa. My mom started breathing out of the oxygen bags we'd brought for such emergencies, and she got better. I wish she'd taken it as soon as she started getting a headache and feeling lightheaded, but she was too stubborn to treat herself earlier, thinking all her preventative medicines would help.
The drive back to Lhasa was under much improved weather. I shot a couple videos of how daring our driver was. There are some principles to how to drive around here, and I've almost got them sorted out. Going out there and on the way back, we passed a Buddhist doing the prostration pilgrimage to Lhasa. The prostration is where you get on your knees and do sort of a butterfly stroke, and then stand back up. You only move a couple feet each prostration, so it can take years to get to Lhasa this way. Such is their devotion. I wasn't able to get a picture in time. I didn't spot if the pilgrim had a sack of food on him. I have no idea how they make it.
I'll take some time now to comment on how dirty things are over here. Hygiene standards are simply different. Like I mentioned before, nobody cares about the cleanliness of common spaces. If a wall in the lobby gets slightly scuffed, it'll stay that way pretty much forever. It seems like no one is in charge of cleaning these places up. That sort of casual attitude extends to cleaning most public bathrooms. When you're in America, you don't give too much thought to where your shoes have been. Yeah, you're reminded every so often that there's dirt on the ground, but it never seems like a big deal. Once you've stepped into a public bathroom or latrine in China, you'll never forget how dirty the soles of your shoes are. It's contagion theory. It's easy to track the grime from the bathroom onto your shoes, from which they'll never be clean. That's why Chinese people are such sticklers about taking off shoes before going into homes. So while I haven't made much explicit mention of it, whenever I've been going out, I've naturally assumed Chinese habits with respect to what is dirty. I won't ever lean on a wall, for example. It comes naturally.
After getting caught up reading on Tibetan languages on the wikipedia for a bit, I have to overturn my conclusion that Tibetan isn't tonal. The dialect spoken in Lhasa is a Central Tibetan language. The Central Tibetan family acquired tonality from its contact with Chinese languages. So somewhere in there, there are tones. I just can't hear them I guess.
Friday, October 1, 2010
9/7
9/7 7:41am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_7?authkey=Gv1sRgCP7N17XkqZuI-AE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToIvazPWs44
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw7QR1qQTc0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkBr4PqL-2Y
Got woken up by a call on the room phone. It was mounted in the bathroom of all places. Turns out my parents' room doesn't have hot water or a working toilet. So much for Xiongbala (I need to remember what this refers to; I guess I didn't play Uncharted 2 closely enough, which is where all my Tibetan mythos is coming from).
I do a very light workout to see if I can handle it, even after about 2 days at high altitude. It's a bit dizzying, but I feel fine. After I shower, I hand the bathroom over to my parents.
We pile into the Landcruiser and head out to what I consider THE image of Lhasa, the Potala palace. Constructed in stages since the 7th century, it's perched on a hill that makes a perfect landmark. When you're actually in the city, though, it doesn't stand out that much from the surrounding buildings. I can even see it from out my hotel room window, as one panaromic phoot shows. Still, it's a very striking monument to the history of Buddhism in Tibet.
Tsenam leads us through the outside and inside of Potala, explaining the significance of various rooms and relics. I have a lot more to say accompanying each photo. Potala was built by the 5th Dalai Lama, who acquired political power over Tibet, in addition to the Dalai Lama's role as spiritual leader. It was built on top of the King's Cave, one of the earliest religious sites in Tibet. Many of the rooms were once reserved strictly for the Dalai Lama's use. In one hallway, I looked out a window overlooking a square in front of the Palace. I asked Tsenam about what had been there before it had been a square. Tsenam said that the green pond to the left had always been there, and the square used to be a grassy park for people to enjoy. He also said that this was the window through which the 14th (and current) Dalai Lama would look out as a child, newly chosen as the Dalai Lama, and envy the children playing in the park. He said it was a great struggle for him to learn at such a young age to set upon a path to enlightenment. Admittedly, it's odd that a place that has such special religious significance is opened up to the public. The more holy parts of the palace don't allow photography, which is at once a shame and a proper measure of respect. Sights that haven't been committed to film include the golden tombs of several of the past Dalai Lamas, the biggest of which bears 3700 kg of gold inlaid onto the sarcophagus. That thing also has thousands of precious gems, the most unusual of which is a pearl harvested from the brain of an elephant. That tomb is known as Zamling Gyanchik, the Sole Ornament of the World. In one of the courtyards within the no-photography area, I found a very small cat sunning itself. It obviously was not afraid of people. I petted it for a bit, and it even jumped onto my crouched leg. It weighned next to nothing. I got pictures of some other stray cats, though. They seem to be treated pretty well by Tibetans.
We then went to a second major temple, the Jokang temple. Tsekam distinguished between temple and monastery in the following way -- a monastery is a place where many many monks live and learn. They train toward earning degrees in various aspects of the religion. A temple doesn't offer learning and instead operates ceremonies and rituals. The Jokang temple was the first entrance of Buddhism into Tibet, some time in the 7th century. The founder of the temple also started the (and bear with my transcription of a Tibetan tour guide's English name for something) Niuma sect of Buddhism. The Tibetan king at the time had enough sway to do two things: he sent a priest to India to study Sanskrit and to develop a written Tibetan language. After 9 years, the priest mastered Sanskrit and devised an alphabet and accompanying written language. This strengthened the bond among the various states in Tibet, who could now all mutually understand each other via the written language. I have no eye for it, but it seems pretty clear to me that the Tibetan and Sanskrit alphabets are similar. The second thing that was accomplished was that one of the greatest relics in Buddhism was gifted to Tibet and transported to the Jokang temple. It's a 2300 year old statue of the Buddha. It's been at Jokang for over 1400 years. Throngs of practicing Tibetan Buddhists were in line through the temple as we toured it. They went into each special chapel and gave offerings of money and candle butter. The candle butter they carried in jugs or thermoses. I wish I had pictures but again, not allowed. Each chapel or room had altars where one could pour the butter into a vat. Several wicks would draw up the wax and burn. Some of the butter would settle and wax up. I saw one monk tending to an altar, scraping up strips of wax and shoveling into a bucket. I guess it's recycled somehow. The reverence these Buddhist pilgrims showed on this site was amazing. While it is not a very big religion, Buddhism's history is rich and its roots are very deep in cultures across Asia. It's fascinating to me what differences exist in mindset between Chinese Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism. Even within Tibetan Buddhism, there are the aforementioned sects. Each sect has its own particular teachings. The last sect, the Gilupa, was conceived by the teacher to the first Dalai Lama. This man had spent time in each of the 4 existing sects, and synthesized a new school, which is also know as the Yellow-haired sect (though Gilupa monks often wear red caps). It's a bit unusual that even now, there are 5 practicing sects with their minor variations in thought, but all of them revere the Dalai Lama, whose position of spiritual authority is an institution maintained by the Gilupa.
Finally, in the afternoon, we went to Norbulingkha, an administrative site used by the Dalai Lamas. Basically, each Dalai Lama has what amounts to an office building he would use in the summer. There are trees and flower gardens all around, giving Norbulingkha a more pleasant atmosphere for the summer weather. The rooms belonging to the 13th and 14th Dalai Lamas were the most interesting. They both received gifts from a modern world, including horse carriages, vacuum tube radios, chandeliers, and a tiger (now stuffed and mounted). I thought the site would have been way more fascinating if there had been more pictures of these later Dalai Lamas using their offices.
Some miscellaneous notes that don't fit the narrative above:
- Tibetan incense is much more herbal and woody than what I'm used to. It didn't bother me as much as I thought it might, but it cast a choking, pervasive scent to everywhere we went. I think if I didn't have a completely dry sinus from the weather, it wouldn't have bothered me at all.
- The Jokang temple was built on, according to legend, the heart of a giant demoness. Converting evil into good is a common theme in Buddhism, and so astrologers advised the king to build the temple on this demon heart, and in doing so, transmute the evil emanating from it into good. Some of the other major Tibetan religious sites are built on this demoness' other joints. The effect in total is that her evil is locked in place, and as a side effect, Tibet is freed of earthquakes.
- Once Jokang was established, the city of Lhasa (which means God's land in Tibetan) was formed around it, which still feels true today Once we exited the temple, we took a 10 minute through some tightly knotted streets packed with shops back to the Xiongbala Hotel. Each shop had a sign that inadvertantly conformed to a standard: Shop. Or shup, if you're that one place that misspelled it. Anyways, one shop was called the Holy Land Carpet Shop. Having never been to Mecca or Jerusalem, I can say without reservation that Lhasa is absolutely as meaningful and important a destination to Buddhists as those famous cities. It is truly a Holy Land for many Tibetans.
- I saw a Tshirt for sale that I thought Ryan would have appreciated. It had pictures of yaks and read "Yak yak yak yak Tibet" I couldn't find one in VT colors, though.
- Around Jokang is a very heavily Tibetan area of the city. Here is where People's Army soldiers keep the most careful watch. In the square in front of the temple itself, 4 soldiers stand watch on each side and a squad of 5 patrol around the square. All are body-armored and carry shotguns or rifles. This was something added in 2008 after the anti-Han riots in various parts of Tibet. I don't think there's much tension in the air from this, but it's still a sore thumb for an otherwise very peaceful place.
- In 1959, the Dalai Lama and his administration was exiled from Tibet. He was chosen at the age of 5 in 1940, so he was 24 at the time and had been Dalai Lama for almost 20 years. The damage the Communist government has caused is two-fold -- 1) the disruption of a fully-functioning spiritual leadership for Tibetans and Buddhists around the world and 2) destruction of religious sites during the Cultural Revolution. (By the way, Potala is a place that was not greatly damaged by the PLA's initial 1951 liberation or afterwards. Even in China, everyone knows that liberation is a euphemism for dominion). Anyways, many temples were mostly or completely destroyed. Knowing destruction was on the way, many monks and lay people smuggled out relics from various temples that lay in the warpath. One monk managed to hide the body of the 4th Dalai Lama in his home for the 10 year duration of the Cultural Revolution. Others hid fragments of the bomb bodies of the other early Lamas. There is a "all-in-one tomb" that inters those pieces together. Thousands of small artifacts that include gifts from India and other visiting Buddhist parties have been given back to the survining temples over time. Even so, it must feel horrible to have lost so many of the originals. Even worse, I think, is question hovering over the continuance of the Dalai Lama. I mean to ask Tsenam in private what will happen when the 14th Dalai Lama dies. Will Tibetan ex-pats in India be allowed to build him a tomb and have it shipped into Jokang temple? Is there ever hope that the Dalai Lama will be allowed to return to Potala to resume his administration? I think that would be one of the strongest concessions the Communist goverment could make. It might really hurt non-Tibetan tourism, since Potala would be closed to the public once again.
- Traditional Tibetan prayer offerings can be plain, like water, butter, or flour. Money is a relatively modern thing, I think. The greatest gift one can make is the following: buying gold which monks at Jokang will use to restore to perfection the statue of Buddha.
- The greatest relic in Buddhism is the Buddha's teeth, which is housed in a temple in India.
Couple of language notes:
- Tibet is not a word in Tibetan. It's like China, a term made up by foreigners at some point. The Chinese name for Tibet is Xizang, the Western Trove. Tibetans call the place Bod. Zang is the shorthand in Chinese refering to anything Tibetan.
- While there's a lot of overlap in phonology between Tibetan and Chinese, making it easy for me to pronounce Tibetan words that are recited to me, it's hard to avoid putting accents on syllables. I'm pretty sure Tibetan is not a toned language. In fact, it seems to be less stressed compared to English, which makes it hard for me to remember how to say a word. Like the phrase for goodbye -- taxi delek -- as far as I can tell only the first syllable has much stress on it. The rest are spoken very softly.
- many of the transliterations between Tibetan and Chinese fall prey to a poor Chinese ear for r/l, n/l. For example Nurbulingkha is transliterated as Luo bu lin ka. And Tsenam is transliterated as Ci lang.
I'm pushing food commentary to the pictures. It wasn't a big day in food compared to the sightseeing.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_7?authkey=Gv1sRgCP7N17XkqZuI-AE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToIvazPWs44
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw7QR1qQTc0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkBr4PqL-2Y
Got woken up by a call on the room phone. It was mounted in the bathroom of all places. Turns out my parents' room doesn't have hot water or a working toilet. So much for Xiongbala (I need to remember what this refers to; I guess I didn't play Uncharted 2 closely enough, which is where all my Tibetan mythos is coming from).
I do a very light workout to see if I can handle it, even after about 2 days at high altitude. It's a bit dizzying, but I feel fine. After I shower, I hand the bathroom over to my parents.
We pile into the Landcruiser and head out to what I consider THE image of Lhasa, the Potala palace. Constructed in stages since the 7th century, it's perched on a hill that makes a perfect landmark. When you're actually in the city, though, it doesn't stand out that much from the surrounding buildings. I can even see it from out my hotel room window, as one panaromic phoot shows. Still, it's a very striking monument to the history of Buddhism in Tibet.
Tsenam leads us through the outside and inside of Potala, explaining the significance of various rooms and relics. I have a lot more to say accompanying each photo. Potala was built by the 5th Dalai Lama, who acquired political power over Tibet, in addition to the Dalai Lama's role as spiritual leader. It was built on top of the King's Cave, one of the earliest religious sites in Tibet. Many of the rooms were once reserved strictly for the Dalai Lama's use. In one hallway, I looked out a window overlooking a square in front of the Palace. I asked Tsenam about what had been there before it had been a square. Tsenam said that the green pond to the left had always been there, and the square used to be a grassy park for people to enjoy. He also said that this was the window through which the 14th (and current) Dalai Lama would look out as a child, newly chosen as the Dalai Lama, and envy the children playing in the park. He said it was a great struggle for him to learn at such a young age to set upon a path to enlightenment. Admittedly, it's odd that a place that has such special religious significance is opened up to the public. The more holy parts of the palace don't allow photography, which is at once a shame and a proper measure of respect. Sights that haven't been committed to film include the golden tombs of several of the past Dalai Lamas, the biggest of which bears 3700 kg of gold inlaid onto the sarcophagus. That thing also has thousands of precious gems, the most unusual of which is a pearl harvested from the brain of an elephant. That tomb is known as Zamling Gyanchik, the Sole Ornament of the World. In one of the courtyards within the no-photography area, I found a very small cat sunning itself. It obviously was not afraid of people. I petted it for a bit, and it even jumped onto my crouched leg. It weighned next to nothing. I got pictures of some other stray cats, though. They seem to be treated pretty well by Tibetans.
We then went to a second major temple, the Jokang temple. Tsekam distinguished between temple and monastery in the following way -- a monastery is a place where many many monks live and learn. They train toward earning degrees in various aspects of the religion. A temple doesn't offer learning and instead operates ceremonies and rituals. The Jokang temple was the first entrance of Buddhism into Tibet, some time in the 7th century. The founder of the temple also started the (and bear with my transcription of a Tibetan tour guide's English name for something) Niuma sect of Buddhism. The Tibetan king at the time had enough sway to do two things: he sent a priest to India to study Sanskrit and to develop a written Tibetan language. After 9 years, the priest mastered Sanskrit and devised an alphabet and accompanying written language. This strengthened the bond among the various states in Tibet, who could now all mutually understand each other via the written language. I have no eye for it, but it seems pretty clear to me that the Tibetan and Sanskrit alphabets are similar. The second thing that was accomplished was that one of the greatest relics in Buddhism was gifted to Tibet and transported to the Jokang temple. It's a 2300 year old statue of the Buddha. It's been at Jokang for over 1400 years. Throngs of practicing Tibetan Buddhists were in line through the temple as we toured it. They went into each special chapel and gave offerings of money and candle butter. The candle butter they carried in jugs or thermoses. I wish I had pictures but again, not allowed. Each chapel or room had altars where one could pour the butter into a vat. Several wicks would draw up the wax and burn. Some of the butter would settle and wax up. I saw one monk tending to an altar, scraping up strips of wax and shoveling into a bucket. I guess it's recycled somehow. The reverence these Buddhist pilgrims showed on this site was amazing. While it is not a very big religion, Buddhism's history is rich and its roots are very deep in cultures across Asia. It's fascinating to me what differences exist in mindset between Chinese Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism. Even within Tibetan Buddhism, there are the aforementioned sects. Each sect has its own particular teachings. The last sect, the Gilupa, was conceived by the teacher to the first Dalai Lama. This man had spent time in each of the 4 existing sects, and synthesized a new school, which is also know as the Yellow-haired sect (though Gilupa monks often wear red caps). It's a bit unusual that even now, there are 5 practicing sects with their minor variations in thought, but all of them revere the Dalai Lama, whose position of spiritual authority is an institution maintained by the Gilupa.
Finally, in the afternoon, we went to Norbulingkha, an administrative site used by the Dalai Lamas. Basically, each Dalai Lama has what amounts to an office building he would use in the summer. There are trees and flower gardens all around, giving Norbulingkha a more pleasant atmosphere for the summer weather. The rooms belonging to the 13th and 14th Dalai Lamas were the most interesting. They both received gifts from a modern world, including horse carriages, vacuum tube radios, chandeliers, and a tiger (now stuffed and mounted). I thought the site would have been way more fascinating if there had been more pictures of these later Dalai Lamas using their offices.
Some miscellaneous notes that don't fit the narrative above:
- Tibetan incense is much more herbal and woody than what I'm used to. It didn't bother me as much as I thought it might, but it cast a choking, pervasive scent to everywhere we went. I think if I didn't have a completely dry sinus from the weather, it wouldn't have bothered me at all.
- The Jokang temple was built on, according to legend, the heart of a giant demoness. Converting evil into good is a common theme in Buddhism, and so astrologers advised the king to build the temple on this demon heart, and in doing so, transmute the evil emanating from it into good. Some of the other major Tibetan religious sites are built on this demoness' other joints. The effect in total is that her evil is locked in place, and as a side effect, Tibet is freed of earthquakes.
- Once Jokang was established, the city of Lhasa (which means God's land in Tibetan) was formed around it, which still feels true today Once we exited the temple, we took a 10 minute through some tightly knotted streets packed with shops back to the Xiongbala Hotel. Each shop had a sign that inadvertantly conformed to a standard:
- I saw a Tshirt for sale that I thought Ryan would have appreciated. It had pictures of yaks and read "Yak yak yak yak Tibet" I couldn't find one in VT colors, though.
- Around Jokang is a very heavily Tibetan area of the city. Here is where People's Army soldiers keep the most careful watch. In the square in front of the temple itself, 4 soldiers stand watch on each side and a squad of 5 patrol around the square. All are body-armored and carry shotguns or rifles. This was something added in 2008 after the anti-Han riots in various parts of Tibet. I don't think there's much tension in the air from this, but it's still a sore thumb for an otherwise very peaceful place.
- In 1959, the Dalai Lama and his administration was exiled from Tibet. He was chosen at the age of 5 in 1940, so he was 24 at the time and had been Dalai Lama for almost 20 years. The damage the Communist government has caused is two-fold -- 1) the disruption of a fully-functioning spiritual leadership for Tibetans and Buddhists around the world and 2) destruction of religious sites during the Cultural Revolution. (By the way, Potala is a place that was not greatly damaged by the PLA's initial 1951 liberation or afterwards. Even in China, everyone knows that liberation is a euphemism for dominion). Anyways, many temples were mostly or completely destroyed. Knowing destruction was on the way, many monks and lay people smuggled out relics from various temples that lay in the warpath. One monk managed to hide the body of the 4th Dalai Lama in his home for the 10 year duration of the Cultural Revolution. Others hid fragments of the bomb bodies of the other early Lamas. There is a "all-in-one tomb" that inters those pieces together. Thousands of small artifacts that include gifts from India and other visiting Buddhist parties have been given back to the survining temples over time. Even so, it must feel horrible to have lost so many of the originals. Even worse, I think, is question hovering over the continuance of the Dalai Lama. I mean to ask Tsenam in private what will happen when the 14th Dalai Lama dies. Will Tibetan ex-pats in India be allowed to build him a tomb and have it shipped into Jokang temple? Is there ever hope that the Dalai Lama will be allowed to return to Potala to resume his administration? I think that would be one of the strongest concessions the Communist goverment could make. It might really hurt non-Tibetan tourism, since Potala would be closed to the public once again.
- Traditional Tibetan prayer offerings can be plain, like water, butter, or flour. Money is a relatively modern thing, I think. The greatest gift one can make is the following: buying gold which monks at Jokang will use to restore to perfection the statue of Buddha.
- The greatest relic in Buddhism is the Buddha's teeth, which is housed in a temple in India.
Couple of language notes:
- Tibet is not a word in Tibetan. It's like China, a term made up by foreigners at some point. The Chinese name for Tibet is Xizang, the Western Trove. Tibetans call the place Bod. Zang is the shorthand in Chinese refering to anything Tibetan.
- While there's a lot of overlap in phonology between Tibetan and Chinese, making it easy for me to pronounce Tibetan words that are recited to me, it's hard to avoid putting accents on syllables. I'm pretty sure Tibetan is not a toned language. In fact, it seems to be less stressed compared to English, which makes it hard for me to remember how to say a word. Like the phrase for goodbye -- taxi delek -- as far as I can tell only the first syllable has much stress on it. The rest are spoken very softly.
- many of the transliterations between Tibetan and Chinese fall prey to a poor Chinese ear for r/l, n/l. For example Nurbulingkha is transliterated as Luo bu lin ka. And Tsenam is transliterated as Ci lang.
I'm pushing food commentary to the pictures. It wasn't a big day in food compared to the sightseeing.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
9/6
9/6 7:11am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_6?authkey=Gv1sRgCNbcjZiRgsSKpAE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZGsFqPBVNg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F39cvUbfemk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs0i9Byz4ls
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDceo5LcLTo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhrCxEonSkM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWkvk2U20ZE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR4kXtTSvWo
Woke up after heading to bed pretty early. Supposedly we are above 3000m now, but I don't feel any different. The sun doesn't come up until around 8am or so. All of China is on the same timezone, so officially, the sunrises get later and later in time as you move west. Some people around Urumqi in Xinjiang (the provice north of Tibet) use a time that's offset by 2 hours, but it's not official.
Even without the sun up, it's apparent that the landscape has evolved overnight. There are almost no signs of habitation out there. Very occasionally you'll see a flock of yaks or whatever these cowlike animals are. I plan to get some sweet pics and movies of the scenery. It's really really wild. I saw a little antelope by itself running around near the track, and also a hyrax-like animal running on the drainage ditch near the track. Really wish I'd gotten these on camera.
Managed to snap a blurry photo of 3 antelope running along. But then I also saw this pair of strange sloth/anteater looking creatures. They were either really shaggy or really fat. Finally, I spotted this tiny fox running around. It seems like every wild animal is conducting its business and then has to bolt when the train comes by.
My mom's got some symptoms of high altitude sickness -- a touch of dizziness, headaches, purple lips. I haven't really felt anything, but hopefully it'll get better before we get to Lhasa. My cold seems to be going away, though leaving me with a bit of a dry nose and sinus.
My mom is getting a bit worse. After some deliberation on how to deal with her adjustment, she hooked up to the car oxygen, to see if it would improve her condition. Seems to be helping so far. As for me, my fingers are a little purple and I'm a bit more lightheaded when I get up and move about. I would say I just feel extremely languid. We're at 4500m and will peak to 5000m for a bit, then slope back down into 3000m for Lhasa. Hopefully we'll all be adjusted by then. We're not supposed to shower right away, as all the drawing of blood to the surface vessels can cause fainting.
We were parked for almost an hour at one station waiting for another train to pass. It's so remote now that there's only a single track for both ways. That train was going to Shanghai. Must be a hell of a ride. While we were waiting, it started hailing with the sun out. I managed to get that on video. Pretty weird, given that it was 16 deg C.
One thing I've noticed is that the railway workers seem to be instructed to stand at attention when a train passes. Some salute, some just stand, others stand but face the other way,even when there is no train track that way. Not sure what it means. But it's interesting to see so many employed by the Chinese rail system. I guess it'd be kind of terrible to get fired when an official catches you shirking your duties from a passing train.
Most depressing thing I saw was this tiny village whose basketball court didn't have poles on either end. Cows were lounging around on it.
The final hours til Lhasa are agonizing. We keep taking stops at tiny stations to let trains pass. I guess we're very close at this point.
When we arrive, it's again very picturesque. The Lhasa train station is built to evoke the shapes of Tibetan architecture. Eventually we find our contact, a coworker of my mom's college classmate. He has with him a Tibetan tour guide that he's hired to take us around for the next few days. Tsenam has the very cheesy honors of putting on us these white scarves, which I assume at some point must have been traditional. We get in some Landcruisers and go over to the Xiongbala Hotel, which claims to be the best in Lhasa. Cars seem to observe whatever traffic laws there are casually. Once we drop things off in our rooms, we quickly turn around and head out to a restaurant.
The restaurant isn't a Tibetan restaurant, but specializes in Shandong cuisine. Shandong is a northern province that I would say offers very good seafood dishes.
On a more negative note, I'll comment on the special treatment we're getting here. Obviously, not everyone has the connections to get ushered around Lhasa virtually free of charge. I have no pretensions that this part of the trip is anything but highly privileged. While I'm sure we could have made arrangements to do most of the same things on our own, having it all planned for us ahead of time is extremely convenient. Sometimes I'd like to think that when I go back to China, I'm just an ordinary person, but occasions like this remind me that's far from true. On top of all that, there's the extreme deference of our Tibetan guides, which is causing me some discomfort. One of the drivers joined us at the dinner table, and he absolutely was not part of the conversation. I wasn't chatting much either, but I still found the way he was being marginalized to be quite upsetting. If he were a Han Chinese in the same position, I'm sure everyone would have been warmer to him. There was a brief discussion on Tibetan independence, and everyone at the table practically treated him as empty space. My mom, it shames me to say, voiced some nationalist-tinged rhetoric on how the Dalai Lama would be ineffectual at improving an independent Tibet's economic status and added that some Tibetans are swayed by their blind love for the Dalai Lama. She tried to negate what she said by telling the driver to feel free to ignore her misconceptions, which of course does nothing to blunt the venom of an attitude like hers, which is very common. I told her right then that it was rude even to be able to think such things while we were in the presence of a Tibetan. The politics bother me less than my mother's ability to treat someone as a non-entity incapable of having legitimate opinions. As for my own views on Tibet, I note only this -- all along the railway, I saw an unyielding march of eletric towers bringing in electricity, courtesy of central planning from China. I wonder if Tibetans want or need that? If they didn't have those towers and power lines all over the place, my pictures of the countryside would probably look like Tibet 1000 years ago.
The driver and our waitress (also Tibetan) were beseeched by our host to speak some Tibetan and teach us a few phrases.
Tujin na -- thank you
Kalasa suo -- eat!
Tashi deleh -- something like aloha
My hotel room looks like a scene from Uncharted 2 and I have a picture to prove it.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_6?authkey=Gv1sRgCNbcjZiRgsSKpAE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZGsFqPBVNg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F39cvUbfemk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs0i9Byz4ls
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDceo5LcLTo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhrCxEonSkM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWkvk2U20ZE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR4kXtTSvWo
Woke up after heading to bed pretty early. Supposedly we are above 3000m now, but I don't feel any different. The sun doesn't come up until around 8am or so. All of China is on the same timezone, so officially, the sunrises get later and later in time as you move west. Some people around Urumqi in Xinjiang (the provice north of Tibet) use a time that's offset by 2 hours, but it's not official.
Even without the sun up, it's apparent that the landscape has evolved overnight. There are almost no signs of habitation out there. Very occasionally you'll see a flock of yaks or whatever these cowlike animals are. I plan to get some sweet pics and movies of the scenery. It's really really wild. I saw a little antelope by itself running around near the track, and also a hyrax-like animal running on the drainage ditch near the track. Really wish I'd gotten these on camera.
Managed to snap a blurry photo of 3 antelope running along. But then I also saw this pair of strange sloth/anteater looking creatures. They were either really shaggy or really fat. Finally, I spotted this tiny fox running around. It seems like every wild animal is conducting its business and then has to bolt when the train comes by.
My mom's got some symptoms of high altitude sickness -- a touch of dizziness, headaches, purple lips. I haven't really felt anything, but hopefully it'll get better before we get to Lhasa. My cold seems to be going away, though leaving me with a bit of a dry nose and sinus.
My mom is getting a bit worse. After some deliberation on how to deal with her adjustment, she hooked up to the car oxygen, to see if it would improve her condition. Seems to be helping so far. As for me, my fingers are a little purple and I'm a bit more lightheaded when I get up and move about. I would say I just feel extremely languid. We're at 4500m and will peak to 5000m for a bit, then slope back down into 3000m for Lhasa. Hopefully we'll all be adjusted by then. We're not supposed to shower right away, as all the drawing of blood to the surface vessels can cause fainting.
We were parked for almost an hour at one station waiting for another train to pass. It's so remote now that there's only a single track for both ways. That train was going to Shanghai. Must be a hell of a ride. While we were waiting, it started hailing with the sun out. I managed to get that on video. Pretty weird, given that it was 16 deg C.
One thing I've noticed is that the railway workers seem to be instructed to stand at attention when a train passes. Some salute, some just stand, others stand but face the other way,even when there is no train track that way. Not sure what it means. But it's interesting to see so many employed by the Chinese rail system. I guess it'd be kind of terrible to get fired when an official catches you shirking your duties from a passing train.
Most depressing thing I saw was this tiny village whose basketball court didn't have poles on either end. Cows were lounging around on it.
The final hours til Lhasa are agonizing. We keep taking stops at tiny stations to let trains pass. I guess we're very close at this point.
When we arrive, it's again very picturesque. The Lhasa train station is built to evoke the shapes of Tibetan architecture. Eventually we find our contact, a coworker of my mom's college classmate. He has with him a Tibetan tour guide that he's hired to take us around for the next few days. Tsenam has the very cheesy honors of putting on us these white scarves, which I assume at some point must have been traditional. We get in some Landcruisers and go over to the Xiongbala Hotel, which claims to be the best in Lhasa. Cars seem to observe whatever traffic laws there are casually. Once we drop things off in our rooms, we quickly turn around and head out to a restaurant.
The restaurant isn't a Tibetan restaurant, but specializes in Shandong cuisine. Shandong is a northern province that I would say offers very good seafood dishes.
On a more negative note, I'll comment on the special treatment we're getting here. Obviously, not everyone has the connections to get ushered around Lhasa virtually free of charge. I have no pretensions that this part of the trip is anything but highly privileged. While I'm sure we could have made arrangements to do most of the same things on our own, having it all planned for us ahead of time is extremely convenient. Sometimes I'd like to think that when I go back to China, I'm just an ordinary person, but occasions like this remind me that's far from true. On top of all that, there's the extreme deference of our Tibetan guides, which is causing me some discomfort. One of the drivers joined us at the dinner table, and he absolutely was not part of the conversation. I wasn't chatting much either, but I still found the way he was being marginalized to be quite upsetting. If he were a Han Chinese in the same position, I'm sure everyone would have been warmer to him. There was a brief discussion on Tibetan independence, and everyone at the table practically treated him as empty space. My mom, it shames me to say, voiced some nationalist-tinged rhetoric on how the Dalai Lama would be ineffectual at improving an independent Tibet's economic status and added that some Tibetans are swayed by their blind love for the Dalai Lama. She tried to negate what she said by telling the driver to feel free to ignore her misconceptions, which of course does nothing to blunt the venom of an attitude like hers, which is very common. I told her right then that it was rude even to be able to think such things while we were in the presence of a Tibetan. The politics bother me less than my mother's ability to treat someone as a non-entity incapable of having legitimate opinions. As for my own views on Tibet, I note only this -- all along the railway, I saw an unyielding march of eletric towers bringing in electricity, courtesy of central planning from China. I wonder if Tibetans want or need that? If they didn't have those towers and power lines all over the place, my pictures of the countryside would probably look like Tibet 1000 years ago.
The driver and our waitress (also Tibetan) were beseeched by our host to speak some Tibetan and teach us a few phrases.
Tujin na -- thank you
Kalasa suo -- eat!
Tashi deleh -- something like aloha
My hotel room looks like a scene from Uncharted 2 and I have a picture to prove it.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
9/5
9/5 6:56am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_5?authkey=Gv1sRgCPPPovr7-aGzZQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIf3FEzhtJo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvaf8sYM-So
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yo8ZRyX1QI
Woke up on the train. We're probably an hour outside of Xi'an in Shaanxi, which I believe is Bo's hometown. That'd be only a quarter or so of the way to Lhasa, but still decent progress for one night's sleep.
Fortunately, there is an outlet on the train, so I can document everything en route. I forgot to mention that we got tickets on a bed car. Each room has 4 bunks in it. So some random teenager got the 4th bunk. Between his questionable background story and the natural suspicion with which Chinese treat strangers, I think my parents were pretty wary of him. He got off at Xi'an. We'll see if someone replaces him.
One thing'll I'll note about China -- bathrooms are dirty. In general, public and shared places are dirty. It's like no one cares to clean them. So even our friends' nice new apartment complex -- the lobby and outside areas were just filthy. The same is true of the train bathrooms. No one really respects the cleanliness of the space so it gets nasty fast. But, because everything is so dirty, you don't see many people loitering about, so there's not much graffiti. Between the smell of ammonia and some colorful remarks by bored stall sitters, I'd rather take the graffiti.
On the topic of water -- fresh drinking water is a precious thing in China. It's not something that a restaurant can readily serve for you. You could certainly get some bottled water, at a huge markup. But it's something you should bring with you. On the train, each car has a boiled water faucet, and each room has a pitcher that you fill up. The water comes out close to boiling, so you have to fill up at intervals and let it cool off before you can drink it. Even now, it is still customary to drink hot tea at restaurants and warm boiled water at home with meals. I can live with it, but I'm still pretty used to having drinking water at hand at all times.
Now we're riding through Shaanxi. It's a very hilly country. As we get out of the urban areas, all you are the insides of tunnels, and emerging from them, swollen streams and wet riverbeds. There's steep hills lining the countryside, and nestled between them, by the waters are small and extremely rustic villages. There's plenty of houses without windows even doors. The people seem to be making a living off of farming and mining. While the urban centers of China have made a marked improvement toward middle class, I don't think much has changed here. 50% of Chinese people are still farmers barely making a living selling their crops.
That said, the country side is extremely picturesque. There's fully green hills, terraced hills, dirt cliffs that look like they would collapse at the first hint of heavy rain. In a few spots, I even seen primitive dwellings dug out into the hillside. These would were probably occupied in modern times before Communism liberated and modernized the country. I suspect the view won't change much in the hours and hours until we hit the high plains. Just millions of average northernr Chinese leading a lifestyle that hasn't changed much in decades. And yet progress is still coming. You can see various projects being built up. The buttresses of new highways being poured from concrete, and earthen ramps leading to new developments on the hillsides. I'd like to see what happens to these places in another 10 years. I've got a few pictures and videos, but I don't know how representative they can be. It's best to remember that China is a big country, and that much of it is like this, and not like in the cities. Any scene you can picture, I probably saw -- a boy playing by himself on rocks in the middle of a turbid stream; a broken down 3-wheel truck on a dirt road; a few cows grazing on the slope of a hill; railworkers piling up bags of fertilizer to be shipped eastward; a peasant girl taking a piss just outside of her village; a stone-lined drainage ditch plunging down a hill at 70 degrees, leading rainwater into an irrigation canal; a cemetary not but 5 meters next to a small cornfield; a huge trashpit fire being tended by a few locals; a precarious wooden suspension bridge.
All of this linked together by the Chinese rail system. I can't imagine how things would be further out from the rail.
Apparently, the railroad through to Lhasa was only completed in 2006. The high elevation made it hard for the railworkers to maintain a decent pace of progress.
Another anecdote -- my dad still remembers his college student id: 776307. 1977 for his entering year, 63 for his submajor -- uranium geology, and 7 for his number in his class (everyone in a submajor is in the same 'class').
3:36pm
We get off for a 30 min break at the Lanzhou station. From the architecture and landscape, we've definitely moved further out west. I get some food, since the lunch in the dining car was so expensive (discussing it would be beneath me). One of the items I get is one of my fave hot dogs, the Shuanghui brand hot dog. It's just a very mild a familiar taste. I would say in between a regular American hot dog and a vienna sausage. We also got some cucumbers, which I'm not so hot on eating. We'll just wash them a lot with boiling water, I guess.
Now's a good time to talk about class. The meal I had on the dining car was only $4, but that comes out to a lot of money in China. On top of that, my family is comfortably ensconced in one of the soft bed cars. Obviously it's worth the extra cash for us to have something resembling privacy and being able to sleep on a bed. For a fraction of the price of our ticket, you could get to Lhasa in the same 46 hours in one of the hard-seat cars. Imagine living, eating, and sleeping for 2 days from the same spot. You'd have access to a nightmarish bathroom shared among 50 people, and, to save money, whatever food you brought with you to last the trip. Instant ramen is a gimmick quick meal for the average college student in America, but it's very nice convenience for the typical poor Chinese rail traveler. It's fairly compact and light, and all you need to do is fill up your mug at the boiling water faucet to prepare it. Of course, the poorest travelers wouldn't waste their money on instant ramen. Most of the cars in the train are hard- and soft-seat cars. I wish I could take a photo of how people are seated in those, but it'd be a bit rude to run back there and snap a shot.
8:26pm
An uneventful afternoon. Both my parents fell asleep, unable to cope with the jetlag. I was way ahead with my 4am sleep schedule from back home. I spent most of it reading and watching the scenery change a bit over the miles. The conductor came by to drop off what amounted to a liability waiver for passengers entering the 3000m+ elevation of the high plains. I puzzled out how to fill it out with my limited reading and writing capability. Hopefully I'll remember how to write Lhasa
From the cultural tutorial playing over the PA: "...Tibetans do not look kindly upon killing cats, frogs, turtles..." I guess the stereotypes are true about us Han Chinese. The tutorial also advises against drinking, as the high altitude is a conduit to getting incredibly wasted (as well as incredibly hung over the next day). The altitude sickness is getting preached a lot. With lots of old people on this train, I can't say I'm that worried about it. It ranks somewhat higher than seeing a Yeti on a mountain pass. Which according to Uncharted 2, can definitely happen. But I am curious where in the spectrum I'll fall. I'll just pretend the whole first day that I'm between rounds in kickboxing and try to gulp down recovery air.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_5?authkey=Gv1sRgCPPPovr7-aGzZQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIf3FEzhtJo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvaf8sYM-So
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yo8ZRyX1QI
Woke up on the train. We're probably an hour outside of Xi'an in Shaanxi, which I believe is Bo's hometown. That'd be only a quarter or so of the way to Lhasa, but still decent progress for one night's sleep.
Fortunately, there is an outlet on the train, so I can document everything en route. I forgot to mention that we got tickets on a bed car. Each room has 4 bunks in it. So some random teenager got the 4th bunk. Between his questionable background story and the natural suspicion with which Chinese treat strangers, I think my parents were pretty wary of him. He got off at Xi'an. We'll see if someone replaces him.
One thing'll I'll note about China -- bathrooms are dirty. In general, public and shared places are dirty. It's like no one cares to clean them. So even our friends' nice new apartment complex -- the lobby and outside areas were just filthy. The same is true of the train bathrooms. No one really respects the cleanliness of the space so it gets nasty fast. But, because everything is so dirty, you don't see many people loitering about, so there's not much graffiti. Between the smell of ammonia and some colorful remarks by bored stall sitters, I'd rather take the graffiti.
On the topic of water -- fresh drinking water is a precious thing in China. It's not something that a restaurant can readily serve for you. You could certainly get some bottled water, at a huge markup. But it's something you should bring with you. On the train, each car has a boiled water faucet, and each room has a pitcher that you fill up. The water comes out close to boiling, so you have to fill up at intervals and let it cool off before you can drink it. Even now, it is still customary to drink hot tea at restaurants and warm boiled water at home with meals. I can live with it, but I'm still pretty used to having drinking water at hand at all times.
Now we're riding through Shaanxi. It's a very hilly country. As we get out of the urban areas, all you are the insides of tunnels, and emerging from them, swollen streams and wet riverbeds. There's steep hills lining the countryside, and nestled between them, by the waters are small and extremely rustic villages. There's plenty of houses without windows even doors. The people seem to be making a living off of farming and mining. While the urban centers of China have made a marked improvement toward middle class, I don't think much has changed here. 50% of Chinese people are still farmers barely making a living selling their crops.
That said, the country side is extremely picturesque. There's fully green hills, terraced hills, dirt cliffs that look like they would collapse at the first hint of heavy rain. In a few spots, I even seen primitive dwellings dug out into the hillside. These would were probably occupied in modern times before Communism liberated and modernized the country. I suspect the view won't change much in the hours and hours until we hit the high plains. Just millions of average northernr Chinese leading a lifestyle that hasn't changed much in decades. And yet progress is still coming. You can see various projects being built up. The buttresses of new highways being poured from concrete, and earthen ramps leading to new developments on the hillsides. I'd like to see what happens to these places in another 10 years. I've got a few pictures and videos, but I don't know how representative they can be. It's best to remember that China is a big country, and that much of it is like this, and not like in the cities. Any scene you can picture, I probably saw -- a boy playing by himself on rocks in the middle of a turbid stream; a broken down 3-wheel truck on a dirt road; a few cows grazing on the slope of a hill; railworkers piling up bags of fertilizer to be shipped eastward; a peasant girl taking a piss just outside of her village; a stone-lined drainage ditch plunging down a hill at 70 degrees, leading rainwater into an irrigation canal; a cemetary not but 5 meters next to a small cornfield; a huge trashpit fire being tended by a few locals; a precarious wooden suspension bridge.
All of this linked together by the Chinese rail system. I can't imagine how things would be further out from the rail.
Apparently, the railroad through to Lhasa was only completed in 2006. The high elevation made it hard for the railworkers to maintain a decent pace of progress.
Another anecdote -- my dad still remembers his college student id: 776307. 1977 for his entering year, 63 for his submajor -- uranium geology, and 7 for his number in his class (everyone in a submajor is in the same 'class').
3:36pm
We get off for a 30 min break at the Lanzhou station. From the architecture and landscape, we've definitely moved further out west. I get some food, since the lunch in the dining car was so expensive (discussing it would be beneath me). One of the items I get is one of my fave hot dogs, the Shuanghui brand hot dog. It's just a very mild a familiar taste. I would say in between a regular American hot dog and a vienna sausage. We also got some cucumbers, which I'm not so hot on eating. We'll just wash them a lot with boiling water, I guess.
Now's a good time to talk about class. The meal I had on the dining car was only $4, but that comes out to a lot of money in China. On top of that, my family is comfortably ensconced in one of the soft bed cars. Obviously it's worth the extra cash for us to have something resembling privacy and being able to sleep on a bed. For a fraction of the price of our ticket, you could get to Lhasa in the same 46 hours in one of the hard-seat cars. Imagine living, eating, and sleeping for 2 days from the same spot. You'd have access to a nightmarish bathroom shared among 50 people, and, to save money, whatever food you brought with you to last the trip. Instant ramen is a gimmick quick meal for the average college student in America, but it's very nice convenience for the typical poor Chinese rail traveler. It's fairly compact and light, and all you need to do is fill up your mug at the boiling water faucet to prepare it. Of course, the poorest travelers wouldn't waste their money on instant ramen. Most of the cars in the train are hard- and soft-seat cars. I wish I could take a photo of how people are seated in those, but it'd be a bit rude to run back there and snap a shot.
8:26pm
An uneventful afternoon. Both my parents fell asleep, unable to cope with the jetlag. I was way ahead with my 4am sleep schedule from back home. I spent most of it reading and watching the scenery change a bit over the miles. The conductor came by to drop off what amounted to a liability waiver for passengers entering the 3000m+ elevation of the high plains. I puzzled out how to fill it out with my limited reading and writing capability. Hopefully I'll remember how to write Lhasa
From the cultural tutorial playing over the PA: "...Tibetans do not look kindly upon killing cats, frogs, turtles..." I guess the stereotypes are true about us Han Chinese. The tutorial also advises against drinking, as the high altitude is a conduit to getting incredibly wasted (as well as incredibly hung over the next day). The altitude sickness is getting preached a lot. With lots of old people on this train, I can't say I'm that worried about it. It ranks somewhat higher than seeing a Yeti on a mountain pass. Which according to Uncharted 2, can definitely happen. But I am curious where in the spectrum I'll fall. I'll just pretend the whole first day that I'm between rounds in kickboxing and try to gulp down recovery air.
Monday, September 27, 2010
note on Picasa pics
Some of the pictures, especially the panoramas, may be done more justice at resolutions higher than 1600. If you want the full res versions, just email me.
9/4
9/4 1:25am Beijing Time aka China Standard Time
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_3?authkey=Gv1sRgCIHb0YmxwIC9JA
Landed. Pretty wild to be back in China. Weather seems good. We got two meals on the flight, which I wasn't expecting. As we flew in, I also noticed what seemed to be a two exit roundabout. Which seems like the most wastful thing. I'm gonna go get my luggage and meet up with my parents.
A note about the airport: at 1am local time, the international wing is eerily quiet. We are the only passengers milling around in the empty building. The lights are all cut low (or maybe they're like this all the time). For a nation as frugal as China, it's easy to be green. I hear a couple of crickets coming from some of the potted plants. Not sure exactly what that says. When I walk on the jetway from the 777 to the terminal, I see below a squad of airport employees, each smartly wearing a reflective uniform and actually mustered in rows, standing at attention. A foreigner might liken the sight to that perceived stereotype of Japanese orderliness. I'm sure it's not to the same level, but already I can tell I'm in a different country and a different world.
Right before customs are signs advising us to walk slowly, through these infrared scanners. I can see that the machines are set to 35 degC, where 37.4 is body temperature. I imagine 35 is pretty hot for a scanner measuring the skin or just below. Obviously an anti-SARS/flu measure, but there's a very 28 Days Later feel about it. I pass through customs with the slip handed out during the flight. I wrote down in my 4th grade penmanship that I was visiting my Aunt in Tangshan. It doesn't really let you get specific, so I don't think I could have written it any better. After that, I go out the No Customs Declarations line (not that anyone was doing inspections) and find my dad and some other Beijing acquaintance at the terminal exit. They've been there a while since the delay had only been posted at the last minute. We take a taxi and head to our hotel. The roads are pretty deserted at this hour, but I still spy a riced out red and black Saab 9-5 with no plate and a Tahoe, of all things.
Apparently my parents had booked 3 rooms at this place. It must be kinda cheap. One for me, one for them, one for our friends who'd be helping ferry us around. I take a couple pictures of my room just for flavor. I didn't realize this beforehand, but my iPhone is tuned for 60Hz light, and China is on 50Hz. So that buzzing may show up in indoor shots.
The computer is charging up nicely, so at least I know my adapter works. I had a bit of trouble getting my travel adapter to work, though. Who knows what the situation will be as we ride the train to Tibet. Hopefully I'll manage.
Going to check out the hotel room's computer a bit. It's on a network.
Well, without reporting anything else, it seems that Gmail works from here. Handy.
9/4 8:47am CST
Couldn't sleep. It's like being inside of a conch shell. The hot water heater component of the water dispenser in my room roared up a few times. I had no idea what it was at first, but it kept waking me up. The voices outside the paper-thin walls started up early in the morning, and I got sick of trying to tell if any of them belonged to my parents. Jeez, some rooms away there's a pop song playing. There should be morning light, but urban packing the way it is in Beijing, it still looks like midnight out my window.
We'll be doing some quick visits around Beijing today, and leaving some luggage with friends. Later in the afternoon, we're boarding a train bound for Tibet. The weather's about to get dry and cold, over a 2-day train journey. The first memory I have of riding on a train is going down to my Dad's hometown. He was teasing to keep quiet, telling me about an upcoming geographical feature called "Rooster Mountain." So I piped down and kept looking for it out the window. It never came up, of course, so when I finally broke down and asked, he looked outside and picked 3 mounds in a line on the ground passing by, and said, "there, that's it!" I might have have been 4 at the time, but I knew it wasn't even a mountain and got angry and sad. The point here is that this time around, I'll keep my eye out and look at everything. Not sure when I'll be back online. On the outside, probably a few days.
My parents are up. To give you an idea of the quality establishment we're at, I go over and the handyman is trying to figure out why power is not working for the room. It seems to be going in and out. Can't shower in complete dark, so a hotel employee brought up a single candle to light the room up.
9/4 9:30am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_4?authkey=Gv1sRgCJ-zqoTsoprmyQE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9VPLn0wC6A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZEOuzKrCVI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOo6t-s_H38
We go to our old family friends' new apartment in Beijing. Hugely assisting us is my mom's cousin, who had a Buick Regal of his own. Beijing is built around its concentric Ring Roads, sort of like Detroit. When we left Beijing in 1989, the outskirts of the city were just passing 3rd Ring Road (which is about where our apartment home was), which is about a 5km radius from the center of the city at the Forbidden Palace. Now in 2010, the city is developing between 6th and 7th Ring Road. So it's certainly gotten much bigger. Anyways, the problem with travel is that outside of the ring roads, nothing is regularly laid out. So if you're looking to avoid public transit, the only way to get around is to spend quality time on the ring roads, and the only way to do that is to have a friend with a car.
So we pack all of our luggage into Uncle Biao's car and head out. While I'm sure a lot of new buildings have gone up, there are still two traits to the Beijing landscape that haven't changed much. The first is the "small flats" that still crop up here and there. These are the original buildings that made up the city. They're one-floor buildings with walls surrounding them, built of stone, look pretty handmade and are very worn down. A lot of these walls are finished with upright glass shards as a security measure. So these small flats are the oldest parts of the city, and some of them are historically meaningful and may stay around for some time. I should find a picture of one, but it's pretty much like where Jackie Chan lives in the new karate kid. The other are the Communist-style block apartments. They don't look much different from a project apartment, but are still very characteristic of a Chinese city. Every floor has the windows and balconies and AC units in the same position. The regularity and lack of flair are in a way, charming.
Driving around the city, you see a mix of the above and some taller business buildings. The tallest building is only 330 meters, as Beijing is no longer interested in getting into any sort of famous building race after the Olypmics. I have some video of us driving around, partially to illustrate the unruliness of traffic, and partially to illustrate the look and feel of the city. I never got any of the crazy 3-way melees we had with other cars, bicyclists, and pedestrians on film, but they wouldn't be for the faint of heart anyways.
So eventually we get directions from our friends on how to reach their new place. They'd only been there a month so they weren't that familiar with their surroundings yet. This was a nice big apartment, but still utterly typically Chinese in its styling and upkeep. I think my photos will tell the whole story there. These friends I had known since my childhood in Beijing, and they are our oldest and closest friends in China. We didn't get to visit with them for long before we had to get on the move. Of course getting going starts off with eating, so we just go over to a local restaurant. Not a good one or anything, but I don't think anyone is concerned about the quality of food. Inside the place, blown up pictures of the specialities dont the walls. Every other dish is covered in diced red peppers, as the restaurant's specialty is apparently Chongqing food. But my mom and one of our family friends are both avoiding spicy foods for health reasons, so we stick to more traditional foods. We order among other dishes sliced donkey meat and a steamed fish. I thought the donkey meat was interesting and distinct, but probably no worth trying than deer meat. But I had to have it. The steamed fish was very good. Some average restaurant in China with no effort had handily destroyed any steamed fish dish served in any American shop. It was just a combination of freshness, flavoring (which was very subtle), and tenderness. As a side note, the Mao family style red-roasted meat was superb, but I wasn't really surprised by this.
We say goodbye after eating and head out to visit the Olympic site. I don't have too much to say on this. The buildings looked about as they did on TV, and it was as I expected a big-time tourist trap. It shouldn't surprise anyone that even two years after the Olympics, people are stil pouring in from all parts of China to visit the place. The shorthand for referring to the Bird's Nest and Water Cube in Chinese is Bird Nest - Cube, and all the signs and parking referred to them in that unit. I thought the buildings themselves still looked good, but it wasn't worth the 50 yuan to go look at empty stadiums inside. One thing I'll note is that things are getting run down and dirty looking, which is a little quick but again what you'd expect in China.
After a quick runthrough of the Olympic site, we get back into Biao's car and head to our final Beijing destination -- a dinner at the famed Quanjude Peking Duck restaurant. This is pretty much in the heart of the city, and thus is packed away in some serious traffic, even on a Saturday afternoon. Biao comments a bit on the 10-day traffic jam that had only just happened in Beijing, talking about a street food vendor that had made over 6000 yuan thanks to it. We don't face anything nearly that bad, but it still took 2 hours of stop-and-go traffic and circuitous navigation of the ring roads. I spy just a couple elite cars on the road. Beijing is not really the city for that. Anyways, we finally get to Quanjude and sit down at the table my cousin and her boyfriend have already reserved for us. I wouldn't say there's anything to-die-for at this place, but because our home has been in Beijing, and we'd already eaten there once in 1995, it's become a family tradition to come back here when we can. The experience has certainly changed over the years. When I last ate there, it was a sedate affair. You went in there, ordered, the chef came by with the duck and sliced it up for you. This time, there are guards helping you park the car, several hostesses in matching red dresses and white gloves, waiters in gold and black frog shirts, and even a steward in the bathroom handing you paper towels with tongs. I don't know if it was a gradual change to reflect the changing times, or a conscious decision to upgrade the experience, but I can tell everything has been revamped with Westernized marketing. There's a moment late in our meal, after we've already eaten half of it, when our waiter comes by and says, "let me explain briefly how the duck is prepared at Quanjude. The ducks are hand raised to 70-80 days, cooked for 60 minutes, until the color is golden brown and the skin is crisp." That's the sort of pump-up line that you wouldn't have heard in China in the past, at least not at the table.
Anyways, the food is great. We just order a 6-person set meal for the 6 of us. Among the appetizers are: duck liver (almost pate quality), fried duck hearts, and sliced duck gizzards. I liked all of those organ meats. The chef wheels his cart out and starts slicing up the duck. He expertly lays out slices of meat and also separates out the special bits of skin. These are places where most of the fat is rendered out and only a scaffold of tissue remains under the crispy skin. When you bite into it, it melts like a foam would. That's the specialty around which the whole experience is based, and that is certainly something that's hard to get right elsewhere. So the key dish is hoisin sauce, green onions, a dough wrap, and the slices of duck, put together like a burrito. In addition to that, some of the other main course dishes were duck soup (a side dish made in preparing the roast duck) a mushroom soup, a sea cucumber salad, and fried duck liver. The mushroom soup really stood out. There was no ginger, which I like, and an incredible extraction of mushroom flavor. The pictures should do this meal more justice.
After the whole meal was wrapped up, we give the leftovers to my cousin to keep and hop into the subway (another reason we ate at Quanjude -- it is very close to a subway station). We leave some gifts with Biao and are thus able to ditch a bag this way. Getting to the Beijing West train station was a bit arduous with all the stairs and luggage, but we eventually make it into the station and wait. After about 30 minutes, the harpy station announcer screeches out the call for the Lhasa train. They switch up at the last moment where they want people to file through, so there is a massive human wave rushing from one side of the hall to the other. My only complaint is that the station is not organized in any way to smooth out human traffic. There are some ridiculous bottlenecks that could be fixed, but probably costs too much. The station was also where I catch my first sighting of indoor spitting. It would be too much to hope for that that could have been civilized out of China so soon.
On the train, I really want to drop dead asleep, but there's some paperwork run by the conductor, as well as some important recorded announcements. The big thing about Lhasa is that it's very high elevation. Some people do not adjust well, even when the altitude increase is smoothed out by a train ride. So the train cars are equipped with oxygen outlets that people can use in an emergency. In addition, they'll start pumping in oxygen as part of the air conditioning. When that happens, people are not allowed to smoke on the train anymore. We'll see if that happens.
Two interesting alliterations I saw: The Killers: The Kai Le Si Band. I suppose actually translating The Killers would be a bit extreme. Citroen: Xue Tie Long, Snow Iron Dragon
The best Engrish: someone was wearing a shirt that read Qiaodan Basketball, in the Battlestar Galactica font. Qiaodan is the transliteration for Jordan.
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_3?authkey=Gv1sRgCIHb0YmxwIC9JA
Landed. Pretty wild to be back in China. Weather seems good. We got two meals on the flight, which I wasn't expecting. As we flew in, I also noticed what seemed to be a two exit roundabout. Which seems like the most wastful thing. I'm gonna go get my luggage and meet up with my parents.
A note about the airport: at 1am local time, the international wing is eerily quiet. We are the only passengers milling around in the empty building. The lights are all cut low (or maybe they're like this all the time). For a nation as frugal as China, it's easy to be green. I hear a couple of crickets coming from some of the potted plants. Not sure exactly what that says. When I walk on the jetway from the 777 to the terminal, I see below a squad of airport employees, each smartly wearing a reflective uniform and actually mustered in rows, standing at attention. A foreigner might liken the sight to that perceived stereotype of Japanese orderliness. I'm sure it's not to the same level, but already I can tell I'm in a different country and a different world.
Right before customs are signs advising us to walk slowly, through these infrared scanners. I can see that the machines are set to 35 degC, where 37.4 is body temperature. I imagine 35 is pretty hot for a scanner measuring the skin or just below. Obviously an anti-SARS/flu measure, but there's a very 28 Days Later feel about it. I pass through customs with the slip handed out during the flight. I wrote down in my 4th grade penmanship that I was visiting my Aunt in Tangshan. It doesn't really let you get specific, so I don't think I could have written it any better. After that, I go out the No Customs Declarations line (not that anyone was doing inspections) and find my dad and some other Beijing acquaintance at the terminal exit. They've been there a while since the delay had only been posted at the last minute. We take a taxi and head to our hotel. The roads are pretty deserted at this hour, but I still spy a riced out red and black Saab 9-5 with no plate and a Tahoe, of all things.
Apparently my parents had booked 3 rooms at this place. It must be kinda cheap. One for me, one for them, one for our friends who'd be helping ferry us around. I take a couple pictures of my room just for flavor. I didn't realize this beforehand, but my iPhone is tuned for 60Hz light, and China is on 50Hz. So that buzzing may show up in indoor shots.
The computer is charging up nicely, so at least I know my adapter works. I had a bit of trouble getting my travel adapter to work, though. Who knows what the situation will be as we ride the train to Tibet. Hopefully I'll manage.
Going to check out the hotel room's computer a bit. It's on a network.
Well, without reporting anything else, it seems that Gmail works from here. Handy.
9/4 8:47am CST
Couldn't sleep. It's like being inside of a conch shell. The hot water heater component of the water dispenser in my room roared up a few times. I had no idea what it was at first, but it kept waking me up. The voices outside the paper-thin walls started up early in the morning, and I got sick of trying to tell if any of them belonged to my parents. Jeez, some rooms away there's a pop song playing. There should be morning light, but urban packing the way it is in Beijing, it still looks like midnight out my window.
We'll be doing some quick visits around Beijing today, and leaving some luggage with friends. Later in the afternoon, we're boarding a train bound for Tibet. The weather's about to get dry and cold, over a 2-day train journey. The first memory I have of riding on a train is going down to my Dad's hometown. He was teasing to keep quiet, telling me about an upcoming geographical feature called "Rooster Mountain." So I piped down and kept looking for it out the window. It never came up, of course, so when I finally broke down and asked, he looked outside and picked 3 mounds in a line on the ground passing by, and said, "there, that's it!" I might have have been 4 at the time, but I knew it wasn't even a mountain and got angry and sad. The point here is that this time around, I'll keep my eye out and look at everything. Not sure when I'll be back online. On the outside, probably a few days.
My parents are up. To give you an idea of the quality establishment we're at, I go over and the handyman is trying to figure out why power is not working for the room. It seems to be going in and out. Can't shower in complete dark, so a hotel employee brought up a single candle to light the room up.
9/4 9:30am CST
http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_4?authkey=Gv1sRgCJ-zqoTsoprmyQE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9VPLn0wC6A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZEOuzKrCVI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOo6t-s_H38
We go to our old family friends' new apartment in Beijing. Hugely assisting us is my mom's cousin, who had a Buick Regal of his own. Beijing is built around its concentric Ring Roads, sort of like Detroit. When we left Beijing in 1989, the outskirts of the city were just passing 3rd Ring Road (which is about where our apartment home was), which is about a 5km radius from the center of the city at the Forbidden Palace. Now in 2010, the city is developing between 6th and 7th Ring Road. So it's certainly gotten much bigger. Anyways, the problem with travel is that outside of the ring roads, nothing is regularly laid out. So if you're looking to avoid public transit, the only way to get around is to spend quality time on the ring roads, and the only way to do that is to have a friend with a car.
So we pack all of our luggage into Uncle Biao's car and head out. While I'm sure a lot of new buildings have gone up, there are still two traits to the Beijing landscape that haven't changed much. The first is the "small flats" that still crop up here and there. These are the original buildings that made up the city. They're one-floor buildings with walls surrounding them, built of stone, look pretty handmade and are very worn down. A lot of these walls are finished with upright glass shards as a security measure. So these small flats are the oldest parts of the city, and some of them are historically meaningful and may stay around for some time. I should find a picture of one, but it's pretty much like where Jackie Chan lives in the new karate kid. The other are the Communist-style block apartments. They don't look much different from a project apartment, but are still very characteristic of a Chinese city. Every floor has the windows and balconies and AC units in the same position. The regularity and lack of flair are in a way, charming.
Driving around the city, you see a mix of the above and some taller business buildings. The tallest building is only 330 meters, as Beijing is no longer interested in getting into any sort of famous building race after the Olypmics. I have some video of us driving around, partially to illustrate the unruliness of traffic, and partially to illustrate the look and feel of the city. I never got any of the crazy 3-way melees we had with other cars, bicyclists, and pedestrians on film, but they wouldn't be for the faint of heart anyways.
So eventually we get directions from our friends on how to reach their new place. They'd only been there a month so they weren't that familiar with their surroundings yet. This was a nice big apartment, but still utterly typically Chinese in its styling and upkeep. I think my photos will tell the whole story there. These friends I had known since my childhood in Beijing, and they are our oldest and closest friends in China. We didn't get to visit with them for long before we had to get on the move. Of course getting going starts off with eating, so we just go over to a local restaurant. Not a good one or anything, but I don't think anyone is concerned about the quality of food. Inside the place, blown up pictures of the specialities dont the walls. Every other dish is covered in diced red peppers, as the restaurant's specialty is apparently Chongqing food. But my mom and one of our family friends are both avoiding spicy foods for health reasons, so we stick to more traditional foods. We order among other dishes sliced donkey meat and a steamed fish. I thought the donkey meat was interesting and distinct, but probably no worth trying than deer meat. But I had to have it. The steamed fish was very good. Some average restaurant in China with no effort had handily destroyed any steamed fish dish served in any American shop. It was just a combination of freshness, flavoring (which was very subtle), and tenderness. As a side note, the Mao family style red-roasted meat was superb, but I wasn't really surprised by this.
We say goodbye after eating and head out to visit the Olympic site. I don't have too much to say on this. The buildings looked about as they did on TV, and it was as I expected a big-time tourist trap. It shouldn't surprise anyone that even two years after the Olympics, people are stil pouring in from all parts of China to visit the place. The shorthand for referring to the Bird's Nest and Water Cube in Chinese is Bird Nest - Cube, and all the signs and parking referred to them in that unit. I thought the buildings themselves still looked good, but it wasn't worth the 50 yuan to go look at empty stadiums inside. One thing I'll note is that things are getting run down and dirty looking, which is a little quick but again what you'd expect in China.
After a quick runthrough of the Olympic site, we get back into Biao's car and head to our final Beijing destination -- a dinner at the famed Quanjude Peking Duck restaurant. This is pretty much in the heart of the city, and thus is packed away in some serious traffic, even on a Saturday afternoon. Biao comments a bit on the 10-day traffic jam that had only just happened in Beijing, talking about a street food vendor that had made over 6000 yuan thanks to it. We don't face anything nearly that bad, but it still took 2 hours of stop-and-go traffic and circuitous navigation of the ring roads. I spy just a couple elite cars on the road. Beijing is not really the city for that. Anyways, we finally get to Quanjude and sit down at the table my cousin and her boyfriend have already reserved for us. I wouldn't say there's anything to-die-for at this place, but because our home has been in Beijing, and we'd already eaten there once in 1995, it's become a family tradition to come back here when we can. The experience has certainly changed over the years. When I last ate there, it was a sedate affair. You went in there, ordered, the chef came by with the duck and sliced it up for you. This time, there are guards helping you park the car, several hostesses in matching red dresses and white gloves, waiters in gold and black frog shirts, and even a steward in the bathroom handing you paper towels with tongs. I don't know if it was a gradual change to reflect the changing times, or a conscious decision to upgrade the experience, but I can tell everything has been revamped with Westernized marketing. There's a moment late in our meal, after we've already eaten half of it, when our waiter comes by and says, "let me explain briefly how the duck is prepared at Quanjude. The ducks are hand raised to 70-80 days, cooked for 60 minutes, until the color is golden brown and the skin is crisp." That's the sort of pump-up line that you wouldn't have heard in China in the past, at least not at the table.
Anyways, the food is great. We just order a 6-person set meal for the 6 of us. Among the appetizers are: duck liver (almost pate quality), fried duck hearts, and sliced duck gizzards. I liked all of those organ meats. The chef wheels his cart out and starts slicing up the duck. He expertly lays out slices of meat and also separates out the special bits of skin. These are places where most of the fat is rendered out and only a scaffold of tissue remains under the crispy skin. When you bite into it, it melts like a foam would. That's the specialty around which the whole experience is based, and that is certainly something that's hard to get right elsewhere. So the key dish is hoisin sauce, green onions, a dough wrap, and the slices of duck, put together like a burrito. In addition to that, some of the other main course dishes were duck soup (a side dish made in preparing the roast duck) a mushroom soup, a sea cucumber salad, and fried duck liver. The mushroom soup really stood out. There was no ginger, which I like, and an incredible extraction of mushroom flavor. The pictures should do this meal more justice.
After the whole meal was wrapped up, we give the leftovers to my cousin to keep and hop into the subway (another reason we ate at Quanjude -- it is very close to a subway station). We leave some gifts with Biao and are thus able to ditch a bag this way. Getting to the Beijing West train station was a bit arduous with all the stairs and luggage, but we eventually make it into the station and wait. After about 30 minutes, the harpy station announcer screeches out the call for the Lhasa train. They switch up at the last moment where they want people to file through, so there is a massive human wave rushing from one side of the hall to the other. My only complaint is that the station is not organized in any way to smooth out human traffic. There are some ridiculous bottlenecks that could be fixed, but probably costs too much. The station was also where I catch my first sighting of indoor spitting. It would be too much to hope for that that could have been civilized out of China so soon.
On the train, I really want to drop dead asleep, but there's some paperwork run by the conductor, as well as some important recorded announcements. The big thing about Lhasa is that it's very high elevation. Some people do not adjust well, even when the altitude increase is smoothed out by a train ride. So the train cars are equipped with oxygen outlets that people can use in an emergency. In addition, they'll start pumping in oxygen as part of the air conditioning. When that happens, people are not allowed to smoke on the train anymore. We'll see if that happens.
Two interesting alliterations I saw: The Killers: The Kai Le Si Band. I suppose actually translating The Killers would be a bit extreme. Citroen: Xue Tie Long, Snow Iron Dragon
The best Engrish: someone was wearing a shirt that read Qiaodan Basketball, in the Battlestar Galactica font. Qiaodan is the transliteration for Jordan.
9/2 and 9/3
9/2 5pm, EDT
I haven't written any sort of travelogue since I went back to China in 97. Even that was mostly backfilled from memory. This time, I've got a little netbook to write things down, ideally, the night that it happens. It'll let me spew the thoughts out freely and edit them down the road. The final version you get to read will be nice and cleaned up.
I've got adapters that are China-compatible, and a travel plug converter that should plug into Chinese sockets just fine. So when I am indoors and next to a socket, I'll try to charge this netbook up. No telling what the battery life is, so far.
I get into Logan and check in a bag. I was at 35 lbs before I packed in the two bottles of wine and whiskey for relatives and friends. The scale at the desk showed 45 lbs, which maybe was closer to 50 lbs than I was comfortable with. Man, the last time I traveled with serious luggage it was 78 lbs free per person.
As soon as I get out of the scanner I see two state troopers and an interpreter walling off some middle aged Hispanic man. Laid out on the desk before them was stacks of folded bills and various pills in bottles and ziploc bags. I'm sure it was all legal, as they were conducting the investigation right there, but what X-ray tech wouldn't flag that as it rolled by? As I put my shoes back on, I overhear one of the troopers saying the bills amounted to $10,000, for what the man claimed to be a one-month trip to -- I didn't catch where. The trooper was recommending that they tell the man to "about-face" out of the airport, without any hint that they'd arrest him or penalize him in any way.
So that's an anecdote to kick this trip off.
I'm not looking forward to the flight. 2 hours to Chicago, then god knows how long to Beijing. Probably 14, 15 hours. I brought two books to read. I figure I'll toss them if I finish them.
9/3 1am, EDT
We finally departed from Chicago. There was at least an hour delay as a thunderstorm hit just as we all had boarded. One thing I learned is that bigger airplanes have accessory ports every few rows for inverters, so you can use your laptop, etc. Look for a lightning bolt or the like next to the row numbers. I dunno how late we're gonna be. Looking forward to airline food.
And the feared right hand of The Greek from The Wire has some minor bit role in Curb Your Enthusiasm, in this episode I'm watching out of the pretty extensive in-flight entertainment. It's weird to see him.
I haven't written any sort of travelogue since I went back to China in 97. Even that was mostly backfilled from memory. This time, I've got a little netbook to write things down, ideally, the night that it happens. It'll let me spew the thoughts out freely and edit them down the road. The final version you get to read will be nice and cleaned up.
I've got adapters that are China-compatible, and a travel plug converter that should plug into Chinese sockets just fine. So when I am indoors and next to a socket, I'll try to charge this netbook up. No telling what the battery life is, so far.
I get into Logan and check in a bag. I was at 35 lbs before I packed in the two bottles of wine and whiskey for relatives and friends. The scale at the desk showed 45 lbs, which maybe was closer to 50 lbs than I was comfortable with. Man, the last time I traveled with serious luggage it was 78 lbs free per person.
As soon as I get out of the scanner I see two state troopers and an interpreter walling off some middle aged Hispanic man. Laid out on the desk before them was stacks of folded bills and various pills in bottles and ziploc bags. I'm sure it was all legal, as they were conducting the investigation right there, but what X-ray tech wouldn't flag that as it rolled by? As I put my shoes back on, I overhear one of the troopers saying the bills amounted to $10,000, for what the man claimed to be a one-month trip to -- I didn't catch where. The trooper was recommending that they tell the man to "about-face" out of the airport, without any hint that they'd arrest him or penalize him in any way.
So that's an anecdote to kick this trip off.
I'm not looking forward to the flight. 2 hours to Chicago, then god knows how long to Beijing. Probably 14, 15 hours. I brought two books to read. I figure I'll toss them if I finish them.
9/3 1am, EDT
We finally departed from Chicago. There was at least an hour delay as a thunderstorm hit just as we all had boarded. One thing I learned is that bigger airplanes have accessory ports every few rows for inverters, so you can use your laptop, etc. Look for a lightning bolt or the like next to the row numbers. I dunno how late we're gonna be. Looking forward to airline food.
And the feared right hand of The Greek from The Wire has some minor bit role in Curb Your Enthusiasm, in this episode I'm watching out of the pretty extensive in-flight entertainment. It's weird to see him.
China trip
I'm gonna be publishing a series of blog posts documenting my trips to China.
The format will be as follows:
Link to Picasa album for pictures on that day
Links to any videos from that day
Long journal post and commentary for that day's trip
Go ahead and subscribe now. I don't care.
The format will be as follows:
Link to Picasa album for pictures on that day
Links to any videos from that day
Long journal post and commentary for that day's trip
Go ahead and subscribe now. I don't care.
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