dh

I might have graduated recently, but I can’t find anyone to confirm it. I hope I graduated.

I’m done with exams now, too, and I should be done with undergraduate education entirely. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do between now and the 12th. There are some nice domestic airfares in China, and there’s always the train. But what about Japan and the Philippines? Tricky.

I completely omitted mentioning my trip to Yangshuo, near Guilin in Guangxi province on the weekend before last. I went up with Catherine, François, and Betsy. We stayed at a place called Yangshuo Culture House, where the wonderful Wei kept us well-fed and well-oriented. Yangshuo is famous for its limestone hill scenery, which you can see in my pictures. We went to the Water Cave, climbed Moon Hill, went bamboo rafting on the Yulong, and generally wandered around. Wei’s family supplied ridiculous breakfasts and dinners, including some stuffed chilis I’m still missing.

The trip included two sleeper buses: one from near Luohu to Guilin (we got off at Yangshuo and skipped Guilin entirely, on the advice of almost everybody), and one from Yangshuo to a bus station a good way west on Shenzhen metro line #1. The second was a bit nicer, but had a less flexible design which involved essentially trapping my feet in a box.

My Yangshuo album will get bigger after I steal some pictures from the others. 4558

After Yangshuo, I wrote another paper and took my final exams. I’ve also been getting to hit my local food favorites pretty hard (Thai from Gold Dragon, Vietnamese from Mini Paris, and South Asian from Tuen Mun Curry House). I will miss the HK$22 set lunch from the curry house and the HK$20 moan, but I’ll miss the crack-laced HK$30 red curry from Gold Dragon even more.

On Saturday my former co-worker and brief housemate Jeff arrived in Hong Kong, and I spent a couple days showing him around—not nearly long enough for Hong Kong, but better than most of you reading this are doing, right? Today I met him at Sheung Shui and crossed to Mainland with him, where I pointed him to the airport bus and picked up a cheap suit and shirt I’ve been having worked on at Luohu Comm. Ctr. The suit is definitely of lower quality than the one I had made in TST, but at a third of the price that’s to be expected. The shirt, though, is just fine: I might e-mail for a couple more, now that they have my measurements.

People are leaving. That’s really sad. I hope I get to say goodbye to more properly this semester, but the departure dates are even more spread-out: some are gone already, and many are leaving before we get kicked out of our housing on the 23rd.

Don’t ask me where I’ll be on the 23rd; I can barely answer for tomorrow. There’s this really cheap flight from Guangzhou to Xi’an I’ve got my eye on…

Sorry, I’ve been quite slack in my blogging for this trip. I’ll try to remember a bit here.

The flight Friday was a little late but nothing to complain about too much. THAI’s food was a pleasant surprise: the dinner wasn’t amazing, but the warm roll and metal cutlery were. The scalding hot towel was amazing too, in a different way.

My seatmate during takeoff and landing (guess he liked the window) was a pretty good picture, but since he wasn’t asleep near me my camera missed out. Picture: European traveler, ponytail, faded jeans cutoffs reaching just barely below his crotch, and the reddest skin I’ve ever seen. Wow.

ROK immigration controls and not figuring out the absurdly easy pay phones conspired to make me about an hour later into Arrivals than I’d expected. I caught an airport bus and was met by Mrs. Lee, a third of the Lee family (old family friends) who have been keeping me well-fed with a roof over my head for the duration of my visit. I’ve been sampling Brazilian and Korean classic foods and having a pretty good time.

Saturday I was walked around Ilsan and a little in downtown Seoul, seeing the Gyongbuk palace grounds, Insaedon (“Koreatown”), and Itaewon (“Americatown”) before a semi-wild English teachers’ night out in Ilsan. Sunday, I went into the city in the afternoon in time for an international festival, including “World Food Court.” I kept myself busy with samosas, juices, empanadas, cakes… and then went to the War Memorial, near Itaewon in Yongsan (Militarytown). It’s a very impressive museum with three main areas, the first covering ancient Korean wars, the second and largest covering The War, and the third covering the modern ROK military. The grounds outside have a couple neat sculptures and an incredibly impressive collection of military hardware that would make even the Vietnamese blush.

Today I came to Gyeongju, in the Southeast of Korea, by express bus. The bus was amazing: lots of legroom, huge seats, well-driven, announcements made by pleasant pre-recorded Korean and English voices, and so on. Even the rest area was impressively clean and modern. This evening, I’ll go back by train: the last direct one left nearly an hour ago, but I’m saving some time at not much expense (and being a train geek) by taking a commuter train to Daegu East and changing for the KTX (the Korean TGV). As for Gyeongju: I probably needed more time. I did get to see some burial mounds (shades of South Charleston) and a couple old, small, interesting pagodas, as well as the Bulguksa temple complex farther out of town.

I’ve been very bad with my camera this trip: apologies in advance. I’ll upload what I did shoot when I get back. I’m most excited about tomorrow, when I am to tour Panmunjeom (the truce village on the border of the Koreas, in the DMZ’s Joint Security Area) and the 3rd Tunnel (one of many DPRK infiltration attempts). To end on a cheerful note, a guide cheerfully notes that if anything untoward happens in the DMZ tomorrow, I’ll “probably be incinerated”—but I think it’s worth it.

I shouldn’t have checked the news before going to bed last night. I also shouldn’t have checked it this morning. How miserable.

On Sunday, I walked.  A lot.  I still have a relatively minor but annoyingly placed blister to prove it.

First I took the 20 minute walk and the subway to Tian’anmen Square where I forked over the RMB to go into the Forbidden City.  It was big and impressive and all—and I liked the garden—but the KMT really did take all the good stuff for Taipei’s National Palace Museum.  I really liked the garden at the northern end.

Of particular note (more than the imperial Chinese exhibits which, at this point, were starting to run together like one big wide ineffective wall snaking thousands of km across the Chinese countryside) was my visit to the Forbidden Store.  It’s not as big and gaudy as I’d half-hoped: it’s just a corner of a room shared with a standard souvenir shop.  If you’re a Tall or Venti (or, save us all, Short) aficionado, you’ll be disappointed: Grande only on this limited menu.  Cups still have the Starbucks logo; the storefront does not.  What’s truly remarkable is the willingness of people to pay standard Starbucks prices in a country where the hostel’s marked-up bottles of Tsingtao are 3 RMB/pint. 

If you noticed that I didn’t mention seeing Mao’s embalmed body on my trip, it’s because I wasn’t able to: the Maosoleum is closed for repairs for a few months.  Stupid Olympics.

After the Forbidden City I trucked my way down to Tiantan, the Temple of Heaven (catching a Peoples’ Armed Policeman climbing a tree to get his kite on the way).  The complex was big and rather nice, actually, probably my favorite “traditional Chinese” site.  This was another opportunity for the weekend’s fantastic weather to show off (maybe factories were down for Qingming): blue skies, warmer than Hong Kong, not a hint of rain.  Pictures are probably better than words (working on those).

After that, I ended up walking from Qianmen to one subway stop shy of the east side of the ring along Chang’an Jie, and then back to one stop west of the west side.  That’s a long way.

Sunday was a slow morning.  One of my roommates dragged me along to a local market where we laughed at tourist prices set for tea and took in the delicious scene of a farmer’s market sort of arrangement.  We bought food on the way back: some tasty baozi and a pineapple.  Good, of course.  After that it was off to the airport, on the bus to which I sat next to a 50+-year-old from Georgia who, at the suggestion of a mother in the States, had come to China to woo her Chongqing-based daughter.  Hope that works out well for everybody.

Arriving at the sparkly Beijing Capital Airport, I found that it doesn’t have Shenzhen’s talent for e-ticket check-in kiosks.  Shenzhen Airlines didn’t even open the physical check-in until 1h30m before departure: I kept myself busy at KFC “Select” in arrivals with a traditional Chinese “Zinger” burger, egg tart, and 7-Up “smoothie.”  It was overpriced for China, but so cheap compared to the rest of the airport’s offerings (and 2/3 the price of that sacrilegious sbux latte).

Sorry if I “scare quote” “too much”—I’ve probably picked up the habit from reading too many China Daily articles about Taiwan.

SZ Air was not terrible, aside from the normal queuing culture clashes.  Food was served (yes, on a budget airline flying one-class cabins domestically… such is Asia) with a drink before and after.  The meal wasn’t anything special but did include a baggie of four or five longan fruit, which were tasty.  ZH, like HU (a couple posts ago), is rocking the brand-new 737 models (a -900 for this flight).  One interesting feature was the obsession of the cabin crew with making sure the curtain at the front of the aircraft (concealing the galley, jumpseats, and one lav.) was closed for every second permitted by regulations.  There was some sort of raucous group stretch/prize drawing sort of exercise toward the end of the flight which would have been more interesting if I understood Mandarin.  One nice bit: I wasn’t expecting anything after the Chinese-language newspapers were paraded past, but I was handed a copy of the China Daily just before takeoff. 

Back in Shenzhen around 20:00 after a brief delay, it was easy to get to the bus for Luohu.  Lo Wu crossing was more crowded than when I’d left on Thursday, but after around 15 minutes I was through and fighting to squeeze on the East Rail train.  I took the minibus (44A) back from Sheung Shui for a change.  The extra HK$1 was worth it to fly by trucks and buses instead of the other way around, and I finally got to see a minibus speedometer over 100.

I haven’t been keeping very good track of happenings here, so I’ll dump some to this page before I lose more. Yesterday I took a ridiculously cheap Y1.5 bus to the Summer Palace (the new one, not the burned one) which is more of an outdoor attraction. Fortunately, I’ve found myself in a spell of spectacular, clear, warm weather this week (warmer and clearer by far than Hong Kong on Tuesday-Thursday). The palace grounds are mainly a gigantic lake, surrounded by paths and pavilions and towers and temples and you name it. When I came back, I puttered around Tian’anmen Square for a while, where I saw the big flag, the Great Hall of the People, lots of guards, and acres of concrete. A bit creepy. I didn’t go into the Forbidden City because it was too late when I arrived: more on that in a bit.

Today I went to the closest, super-touristed section of the Great Wall at Badaling. It’s as overtouristed as it’s cracked up to be, but I made it through easily enough. There are two ways to walk on the wall once you get up there (Y12 bus, Y25 student admission), and taking the one less traveled by got me out of the crowds quickly (after I’d gamely suffered through the more popular section for about three hours). It’s… hard to describe. In Nixon’s words, “This is a great wall.” I’m glad I went there, even if Nixon was there first.

It’s funny how tourist price inflation works. In the US, if you’re buying an overpriced hot dog at a game, the seller is going to use his government monopoly (or collusion) and refuse to serve you if you don’t play ball. Here, even at the Great Wall, a little walking away quickly gets that Y10 drink down to a more reasonable Y5 (where I stopped: I’m sure I could have gotten it to 3 or 4, same price as the city, but I’m willing to pay a little for convenience even when the shopkeepers don’t realize they can make me do that).

In a more classically East Asian treatment of the problem, I was presented with an English menu where my beef noodles from lunch were priced at a silly Y48. Comparing characters and prices with the local menu quickly found a local rip-off price of Y15: at least twice what you’d normally pay for that sort of thing in the PRC, but a lot more sane.

Now I’m back in the hostel and caught by Beijing’s early closing times (often an hour earlier in the “winter” which ends on the 15th). Getting back from the Wall around 3 or 3:30, it’s too late to try going to the Forbidden City or Temple of Heaven (my top two remaining sights here) because they’re immense and even if you beat the ticket booth to closing time (3:30 at the Forbidden City in this winter with which I’m discontented), you won’t see nearly enough to justify the trouble of getting there. I did enjoy a few blocks of street food to console myself, and it was a great idea: the supremely important Pineapple Price Index finds a new low in Beijing with a stick of fresh pineapple going for Y1. This beats Thailand’s B10 sticks, though those are much more flavorful. I also had some sort of clamshell meat/spring onion type bagged sandwich thing and some bread that smelled better than it went down. No complaints, though.

I’ll be going to both the Temple of Heaven and the Forbidden City early tomorrow, if all goes well. Traffic is frightening me so I’m going to be concentrating on getting to the airport early on Monday.