We woke up today ready to hit up the counter to the Summer palace. We were able to ride the subway to tiananmen Square but we weren’t exactly on the ball with figuring out which entrance we needed to go out of. Our first exit took us to the forbidden city, our 2nd try was on the side of Tiananmen but we couldn’t get across the street, so we went back down and across to finally get out the right side. This included several trips through the baggage scanners. Whenever you board the subway, when you purchase your tickets, you have to have your bag scanned. Well, at tiananmen, which also includes Mao’s mausoleum, you have to scan it on your way up to the square as well.
We wandered into Tiananmen square, and at least for me, it was really interesting to be on the spot where the demonstrations were taking place nearly 20 years ago already. Unfortunately, since it was New Year’s, the place was already getting pretty packed at 10am. From the square you have a great view of several huge buildings, that don’t seem to be quite as big as they are due to the immense size of the park. We guessed that Tiananmen to be probably 4 x 8 city blocks, potentially more. Including the entrance to the forbidden city with the huge portrait of Mao, the PRC Legislature building, and the National Museum (and all of it’s gorgeous propaganda) and towards the back Mao’s mausoleum with a monument to fallen revolutionary soldiers towards the middle, you just feel like it goes on forever. We decided we’d like to go to Mao’s mausoleum, but this included a trip out across the street to check our bags because you can’t take anything into the place. So of course when they were asking what we had we said we had a camera, which incurred an additional 5 yuan fee. Which is crazy because they say they refuse to take cameras, but then you have tons of people taking cell phone pics on their way in. We made our way along the long line on into the tomb, but noticed that they were selling flowers to place inside for 3 rmb each. This was pretty hysterical to us, because we figured that it would make perfect sense to have them gather up say, half of them every hour and just resell them. The entrance includes a huge statue of Mao sitting on a chair that seems a straight parody of Lincoln in his memorial. We were also surprised because this was one of the only times we’ve seen people quiet down in public here. We ushered through the burial area, but that’s misleading, because Mao was filled with embalming fluid so he’s preserved. So we made our way out and down the outside along a long sloping exit and took a look at the very communist statues they had on the outside here as well. We went back, picked up our stuff, and made our way over to the forbidden city. This place was funneling tons of people into it, and was just absolutely packed.
The Forbidden City really earns it’s name. This place exemplifies China again in the sense of scale. Once we had entered, we walked for oh, two blocks or so to get to where we purchased our tickets, oftentimes being pestered to see if we needed tour guides either for the Forbidden City or the great wall etc. We snagged our tickets (we again opted for the all-inclusive ones) and made our way through the huge doors. Lots of the doors here have numeous golden nubs on them. In China, 1,3,5,7,9 are all associated with yang (masculine) (while even numbers are with feminine yin) with 9 being pretty much reserved for the Emporer. So 9 sets of 9 is seen as particularly auspicious, hence the large doors. We spent the next several hours in the place, with still more things to see by the time we had finished. There are three major temple halls in a straight line on back, with innumerable buildings along the sides and such. We walked more or less straight back for nearly half an hour just passing one after another of these huge pavilions with a large temple in the middle. We started poking around the sides to see the museums and such they would have, hoping to catch several the major sights we wanted to see. We also purchased some tickets to go back into a ‘treasures’ section, with an additional bonus of weeding even more people out making it much more quiet and enjoyable. There were many different displays, including ancient rocks carved with poems talking about the activities of the Emperor, musical instruments, gifts given and received by some of the last emperors, and the like. There was also a huge marble and iron area that was filled with water and did something awesome, but we didn’t see any signs in English. One of the coolest factors of this whole experience was simply the walk. With these 20ft high walls everywhere, it made turning each corner like opening a present since you had no idea what you’d find. Furthermore, you could get anywhere even if it was off the beaten path in a sesne. For example, walking around the backside of a building would likely take you through a small door along a backway, but still allow you to continue on without having to double back. At one point we found our way to the three story opera performing stage, that included 8 trap doors (3 on the 2nd story). This place also had a fantastically intricate reproduction to showed all the specialties of the stage. We then continued on try to find our way to the north west corner to see one of the four arrow towers. We got fairly close and took a great picture of it but didn’t bother actually getting all the way there. Our walk continued on to the Imperial garden, but we had gotten to the north end and got the middle and just made a bee-line towards the south end where we had entered. This was actually really neat because we got to go through every single temple and such placed on the major north south axis. Each time we came through a doorway and saw yet another 200m long open pavillion with a huge temple, we asked ourselves “is this the last one?”. Seriously, there had to be at least 5 of these. We finally got back to the front though and made our way over one of the 5 bridges of Confucian thought and on out. As we were getting towards the exit we had the pleasure of hearing a little kid behind us puke. We walked a bit, then heard the poor guy get the rest of his food out onto the pavement. I made sure to note to bethany the potatoes and carrots I saw, which she greatly appreciated. The best part of this was that since people here are ALWAYS hacking up lougies, we often were joking it sounds like they’re throwing up.
As we were making our way to the subway, we starting chatting with two women who said they were visiting from other parts of China. We talked with them for a bit and as we were about to head down to the subway, they asked us if we wanted to grab some tea with them so they could practice their english and such. We said sure (whoops!) and we started walking to a place to snag some tea. Little did we know we were getting pulled into a tourist trap. I think our guard was down due to the adorable little boy from the previous day out at the Summer Palace who wanted to practice his English with us. Another clue should have been how they took us out to this tea place a ways away with no problem finding it. (again, hindsight is 20/20 eh?) So we tried some different teas, which were admittedly pretty awesome, and then had one pot of some great tea. Then the bill came: 385 rmb each. So, only 65$ each! So basically we got burned. We did get a free thing of tea on our way out (which has been the subject of many subsequent jokes: ‘free with 100$ purchase!’ or after dropping two little tea pieces on the floor and trying to put them back into the tin, bethany – ‘don’t, those were on the floor!! Although, at this price, we probably can’t affort to waste it!) So we made our dumbstruck way back to the subway, said goodbye to our swindlers, and were pretty much skulking the rest of the way back to our hotel. Live and learn though, right?
At 5:15 Andy came and picked us up for our dinner and Beijing opera event we were going to. Dinner was at a very nice restaurant and included several different dishes, along with peking duck, but admittedly the sweet and sour stuff was the best :-P. (bethany did love the duck though, ‘it melted in your mouth, tasted like turkey with crispy fat on it!”) It was kinda funny because andy and our driver were eating a couple of tables over and he would periodically come by to tell us something about the food and whatnot. It almost had a 3rd wheel / bad sitcom feel to it, but it was nice of him. Afterwards we went to the ‘opera’ house which was built very much like a dinner theatre inside of a hotel and was packed with foreigners. But whatever. It only lasted an hour, but had three short acts that had various traditional theatre styles to them. The first had a great acrobatic fight scene that was pretty humerous. The second act was a true ‘traditional theatre’ act. Which scared the bejeezus out of the french people in attendance, because after it finished, they began to leave in droves. Like, we had people sprinting for the exit before the third act’s curtain finished coming up. The third act was another acrobatic scence, but had quite possibly the greatest, most well crafted, magnificent prop I’ve ever seen in a theatre. Lemme just say you should check out the photo of it to see what I mean, as words can do no justice. Afterwards andy took us back home and we got ready to crash because we were getting up bright and early the next morning for our trip out to Mutainyu & the sacred way.
Day 3 Observations: outside of many places that require tickets for admittence, people camp out and wait for their (more affluent?) friends to make their way through along the outside gates. It’s a lot like leaving the secure section of an airport.
Getting sucked into tourist traps suck. Real bad. Unfortunately, it makes us really pessimistic about meeting people who are actually interesting in chatting etc.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Thursday, January 1, 2009
last bit on Summer Palace
We then spent some time checking out several exhibits in the ‘treasures’ section which, while intriguing, couldn’t really hold us because we were cold and feeling ready to wrap up our day. So after spending about 30-50 minutes looking around in that area, we finally made the way out to the main gate enterance to start our trip back home. As we were walking out to find a taxi, we saw one that was flashing its lights at us, so we went over and pointed out the station name we wanted to go to; this guy also gave us the no answer. Another taxi was pulling up, and we pointed it out to him as well, and received yet another awesome ‘no’. Sigh. We started walking around trying to find out where one of the buses we could take back to the station or just somewhere (but we really didn’t have any idea.) One more taxi was pulling up, so we asked this guy as well, and to our relief received a yes answer. We hopped in, took the taxi to the station, and took the station to our stop. After getting off at Dongsi, we spotted the restaurant that we wanted to stop and have dinner at (we had noticed it the day before). Since it was barely 5 when we came in, we pretty much had the place to ourself. This place also had an english menu (but a chinese one w/ pix as well, so either would have been fine :P) and got a huge selection of stuff since this was our one big meal of the day. We had sweet and sour pork, shredded pork w/ beijing sauce, a soup, and drinks. Grand total was like, 15$ (including drinks). We couldn’t believe we were able to stomache all the food we had!
We got home (after stopping at a grocery store and picking up oreos, dove chocolate, juice, and wine made from some chinese fruit. We had grand plans of having a great evening to celebrate our last night of 2008. Instead, by the time I settled on watching Speed Racer, Bethany had already fallen asleep; it was 9 (or just before :P). I watched the movie while Bethany napped, and I woke her up to ring in the New Year. Whee.
We got home (after stopping at a grocery store and picking up oreos, dove chocolate, juice, and wine made from some chinese fruit. We had grand plans of having a great evening to celebrate our last night of 2008. Instead, by the time I settled on watching Speed Racer, Bethany had already fallen asleep; it was 9 (or just before :P). I watched the movie while Bethany napped, and I woke her up to ring in the New Year. Whee.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Bejing: Day 2: Summer Palace:
We woke up just afte 8 and hit the snooze a couple of times, getting up around 8:15 to be ready for breakfast at 8:30. Our hostess had asked us at checkin yesterday what we would like for breakfast (and that it was included with our stay, and we said eggs, milk, bread, and any fruit would be great. So today we got up and saw they had some mini-clementines, and bread sitting out. We asked the hostess if it was for us and she said that it was and the manager was cooking us our eggs at that moment. Wowza! That’s service! She brought us some hot milk (weird, but great) as well as some fried eggs (fried in soy sauce I think) which were great as an egg sandwich. Afterwards we got our stuff together and left the hotel for our day out at the summer palace. Despite getting some directions from our hostess, we opted to take a different path in case we could walk from the subway stop (since our Beijing map made it look like it was only 2km or so from the stop.) We made it to our stop with little effort but after walking for just a bit we figured that since the other foreigners (and chinese) seemed to be opting for taxi’s, we should try the same. We hailed a cab and hopped in and showed him the map. He told us no to the stop, making us 0-3 on figuring out WTF is wrong with taxi drivers here and why they’re so feakin’ picky. Well, we asked the taxi behind him (because he had kinda pointed at it) and that guy said yes. So we took the taxi with him out there, and even getting stuck in some traffic it only was about $4.50 to get out there. The summer palace was about 8$ each, despite a sign saying that in the off season it was only 20 for us, but alas I didn’t press the issue and we payed 50 rmb each. (6 to 1 ratio fyi). We entered at the east gate and perused the south end first, which included a beautiful bridge that linked a small island, a bronze ox to ward off floods, as well as a large pavillion with 16 pillars. We went over to the island and poked around and looked at some of the buildings. They were nice but weren’t particularly eye-popping. It did give us a great view of the main complex area, which is where we headed to next.
A 10 minute walk got us up north towards the main complex area, which we went on into and began to look around at. This area included tons of courtyards, including the Jade pavillion which the last real Emperor of China was imprisoned in towards the end of his life while the Empress dowager was off being a tart.
Some of the woodwork here, while being restored, was still amazingly intricate and opulent. Some of the pictures really help do it justice in regards to just how vibrant and overwhelming it is. This was driven home by the walk along a causeway that’s roughly 2600 ft. long that contains over 10,000 original paintings within it. It’s practically impossible to take in and you end up just barely glancing at them as you walk by.
We finally started the trek up to the temples at the top of the hill, which included some scenic walking along the outskirts as well as some steep steeps along the front of the main temple. Again, the scale of this was extremely impessive and something that I’ll remember forever. Upon reaching the summit, we looked around inside and saw that there was a temple for Buddah, which we (I, ike,) accidently snapped a photo of when I wasn’t supposed to. It turns out that there was one final push to the actual top in another temple that is obscured / seems to blend into the first temple from a ways out. So we continued to walk up the rock pathways that were built while admiring the scenery. The final top was much more subdued on the inside (while being pretty imposing on the outside) and included another budda statue. Afterwards we made a long decent down through another pathway that was more sloping paths instead of strict stairs. While we had a general idea of where we were going, the simple fact was that it isn’t difficult to get lost on a 587-acre complex like this.
We made our way to a large pavillion/boat that has a wooden superstructure on top of a rock base that is painted to look like marble. The empress dowage Cixi made sure to use money to renovate the navy in the early 1900’s to build this. Mean, I guess technically it was for a boat, right?
Afterwards we started the hike back to the other side and just enjoyed the walk for the next 20 minutes. As we were nearing a special exhibit of some of the treasures of the Summer palace, we got an unexpected pleasant surprise. A little boy came up and started talking with us! In english! (Bethany and I both looked around when he first showed up thinking he may be one of those distractions while someone else rolls in and goes for a pickpocket) but it turned out he was just a genuinely awesome kid who wanted to chat with us in english! He was 8, and asked us things like “Where are you from? What do you do? What’s the climate like there?” He even asked us about the olympics and asked how many medals the USA got. I said, “well, I think we got 40 or so gold medals, but not as many as China” and the boy said “no no no, how many medals….*moving his hands back and forth*” “oh…altogether?’’ “yeah!” and proceeded to tell us he thinks America is awesome and he’s hoping to go there in two years to live with his Uncle in New York. Afterwards he said goodbye and shook our hands! Pretty much adorable, and we had most of this conversation near the entrace to the next exhibition, and the lady who was punching tickets chuckled after we finished chatting with the kid because she also realized just how darn cute he was.
Day 2 Observations: Chinese people are built bigger than Korean and Japanese (I’m guessing from their more robust diet) :-P
TBC
A 10 minute walk got us up north towards the main complex area, which we went on into and began to look around at. This area included tons of courtyards, including the Jade pavillion which the last real Emperor of China was imprisoned in towards the end of his life while the Empress dowager was off being a tart.
Some of the woodwork here, while being restored, was still amazingly intricate and opulent. Some of the pictures really help do it justice in regards to just how vibrant and overwhelming it is. This was driven home by the walk along a causeway that’s roughly 2600 ft. long that contains over 10,000 original paintings within it. It’s practically impossible to take in and you end up just barely glancing at them as you walk by.
We finally started the trek up to the temples at the top of the hill, which included some scenic walking along the outskirts as well as some steep steeps along the front of the main temple. Again, the scale of this was extremely impessive and something that I’ll remember forever. Upon reaching the summit, we looked around inside and saw that there was a temple for Buddah, which we (I, ike,) accidently snapped a photo of when I wasn’t supposed to. It turns out that there was one final push to the actual top in another temple that is obscured / seems to blend into the first temple from a ways out. So we continued to walk up the rock pathways that were built while admiring the scenery. The final top was much more subdued on the inside (while being pretty imposing on the outside) and included another budda statue. Afterwards we made a long decent down through another pathway that was more sloping paths instead of strict stairs. While we had a general idea of where we were going, the simple fact was that it isn’t difficult to get lost on a 587-acre complex like this.
We made our way to a large pavillion/boat that has a wooden superstructure on top of a rock base that is painted to look like marble. The empress dowage Cixi made sure to use money to renovate the navy in the early 1900’s to build this. Mean, I guess technically it was for a boat, right?
Afterwards we started the hike back to the other side and just enjoyed the walk for the next 20 minutes. As we were nearing a special exhibit of some of the treasures of the Summer palace, we got an unexpected pleasant surprise. A little boy came up and started talking with us! In english! (Bethany and I both looked around when he first showed up thinking he may be one of those distractions while someone else rolls in and goes for a pickpocket) but it turned out he was just a genuinely awesome kid who wanted to chat with us in english! He was 8, and asked us things like “Where are you from? What do you do? What’s the climate like there?” He even asked us about the olympics and asked how many medals the USA got. I said, “well, I think we got 40 or so gold medals, but not as many as China” and the boy said “no no no, how many medals….*moving his hands back and forth*” “oh…altogether?’’ “yeah!” and proceeded to tell us he thinks America is awesome and he’s hoping to go there in two years to live with his Uncle in New York. Afterwards he said goodbye and shook our hands! Pretty much adorable, and we had most of this conversation near the entrace to the next exhibition, and the lady who was punching tickets chuckled after we finished chatting with the kid because she also realized just how darn cute he was.
Day 2 Observations: Chinese people are built bigger than Korean and Japanese (I’m guessing from their more robust diet) :-P
TBC
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
China Trip: Shenyang and Beijing: Day 1
China Trip Diary:
Prelude: Ike: woke up nice and late (but still 30 mins before my alarm) on Saturday morning. Made sure everything was packed up and tooke off for the bus stop for my bus at 11:30. Caught it, got to Nagoya, and purchased my return ticket for when I get home on the 10th of January. Thanks to bethany, I had no problem finding the train station and catching my train on out to the airport. I then got my flight out to Korea with no problems, although it was either delayed (or the travel angency got it wrong) by 30 minutes, and I ended up getting into Korea about 8:25 and met up with bethany at 9. We then went to the hotel and got our room (which was actually really nice!)
Shenyang
We woke up at 5:30 the next morning to catch the first shuttle to the airport since our flight was scheduled to leave at 8:20am. Lucky duck us, our flight to Shenyang ended up being delayed by and hour, and then another hour. So we boarded just about 10:20 or so, which was when it was supposed to be taking off even after the delays. Since we hadn’t heard a ‘last boarding call’ yet, and had been grabbing a bite to eat with some vouchers we had been given by the airliine because of the delay, we hurried back to make sure we didn’t miss the flight. Lucky us, turns out that apparently everyone else was just taking their sweet time as well. We didn’t end up taking off until say, nearly 11 or so. The flight was still only about 1/3 full, so I’m not sure if people just bailed on their flight or it didn’t have many people booked.
Note on asian airlines: awesome. Metal silverware, a bit roomier, the vouchers, nice flight attendants (both in appearance, language skills, and overall demeanor), in flight meals on 2 hour flights, etc etc. Stuff like this makes the whole experience much better than flights are stateside.
So we arrived in Shenyang and immediately noticed that it was pretty blurry on the horizon, an ample combination of both the fog (that delayed us) and pollution. We met Brian at the airport and he took us back to his place to drop off our stuff. His apartment is fantastic! We were both overwhelmed by the scale of things here as opposed to our adoptive countries. The roads are huge, the buildings are huge, there’s just a much larger sense of space then as opposed to Japan and Korea. Oh, and the bonus was the weather up here in the NW part of China. On the flight, they said it would be -11 C, or a balmy 5 F. In other words, “Balls ass cold.” –Bethany.
So, Brian’s place is really nice, and it was very nice of him and his family to shack us up for a couple of days. We’re also big fans of the family portraits that are around the house, both because of the genuine cuteness of them and partially because of the LOL factor associated with them. The best are the portraits of brian, particularly in his room. Seems a bit narcissistic to have 3 large portraits (and 1 wall scroll) of yourself in your own bedroom. But I must say, I slept soundly with 4 pairs of brian’s eyes looking over me. “Diamond cuts diamond, indeed.”
After dropping off our crap at Brian’s apartment, we set out to find a travel agent. Well, it turns out the first place we went doesn’t sell train tickets. The next two places we went were “closed” but they still had people sitting there at the desk, lights and heat on. I mean, if they’re closed, why not just lock up and not pay any of those bills? After we gave up on the travel agents (since it was Sunday) we went directly to the train station and bought our ticket on an express 4 hour train to Beijing on Tuesday morning. Then Brian dropped us off on some main shopping district so he could go spend a couple hours with his girlfriend. Well, Bethany couldn’t last very long in the super cold weather since she didn’t have her long underwear on. We took refuge in a shopping mall where we got a popsickle to sooth our aching throats (from the pollution) and later in a McDonald’s where we got 2 peach pies to warm us up!! Finally we went back to meet Brian at 5:30, but he didn’t show up until 5:45, and we were pretty cold by that time! Then him and Camellia took us to an AMAZING restaurant and we ordered a million different dishes. I guess we had to order at least 400RMB worth of food for the big table that we wanted. It’s a good thing we had such a big table, because we filled it up with dishes. We tried frog, chicken, chicken head, chicken neck, fish, silk worm (you don’t eat the heart or the outer skin, and it was surprisingly delicious), pig kidney, aorta, beef “pizzle” (penis), taro cakes, delicious green beans, boiled dumplings, Ike had a super spicey chicken wing, local beer, and delicious plum juice, and many MANY other dishes. It was pretty amazing! And they were nice enough to treat us to the meal. After dinner we headed back to Brian’s house and after showering both of us pretty much crashed!!!
Today we got up and went the the Shenyang Forbidden Palace. It was built as a contemporary to the Forbidden palace in Beijing (both were built by the ruling Qing (ch-ing) dynasty that came out of Manchuria and were originally based in Shenyang. The palace was pretty even on a cold day like today (but luckily there had been a light dusting of snow the night before). The best part was probably either a few of the architectural features or the main courtyard area that had collections of weapons / armaments of the ‘8-banner army’ of the Qing, whom apparently Brian’s family can claim membership to. (The yellow banner section at least.) Afterwards we briefly looked through a little shopping/schmaltzy souveneir shop. We were all wrapped up by 1 and ready for Brian to pick us up.
But then he didn’t show up. Then it was 1:30, and we thought, maybe brian got the times mixed up (since he had briefly suggested 1:30, but we changed to 1), then 1:45 rolled around. And we were freezing. At ten til 2 we started to try and figure out where the hell we could call him from to figure out WTF was going on, as the public phones we had seen all required a card. Meandering around in the cold and bewildered state in a country in which neither of us could speak a lick of the language made for some frustrating decisions. We even tried the tourist information section at the palace but were just pointed to another card-phone. By pure luck, we spoted white guys #6&7 (yes, we’re keeping count) and asked if they spoke English, and by the grace of god, they did. And they had a cell phone we could borrow. We called Brian, and found out his car had broken down and he was 5 mins away. Whew.
Afterwards we went and snagged some food with him at another local place (which was again quite delicious, and cheap) and then proceeded to head around town for a bit. We snapped a couple of pictures of a Giant Mao statue in the middle of town and then made our way out to a museum about the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, but unfortunately it was closed so we didn’t get to check it out. Briant took us by Shenyang’s huge Mao statue on the way home. This is one of the perfect Mao statues not only for it’s embracing of Maoism but also because it was built to last and is huge. Next we proceeded to do was come back here and while Brian is out having dinner with his g/f for her b-day (with both sides of her family) we’re writing thise and just relaxing. We may be heading out for karaoke later if we feel up to it, but we’ll see.
Initial impressions of China:
BUSY: tons of people, everywhere, all the time.
Dirty: both bethany and I had sore throats after several hours yesterday from the pollutions, luckily the breeze today kept the place pretty clean and easier on our lungs.
Loud: first, there’s no nice way to put it: Chinese is an ugly language. Particularly in the advertisements. It’s like aural assault. Not a fan particularly.
Materialism in Asia, and China in particular, is rampant and seems to be the new diety of the area (and this will come home even more in Beijing and Shanghai.)
People here spit all the time, everywhere. In Korea this happens a lot and while isn’t polite, isn’t terribly out of order (while blowing your nose in public is….) Here though, it’s everywhere and including inside of restaurants. Weird.
No TP in the public restrooms, another WTF. Including at the palace today which had a really modern bathroom, but no TP. What’s that all about?
Bethany’s surprised by how many bicycles there are here, Ike not so much (reminds him of Osaka, but they’re very run down here.)
Driving in China is absolutly out of control. If there aren’t stoplights, there’s no signs at all. I haven’t seen a stop sign yet. Lots of places say no left turn and instead have you turn right and then flip a U-turn. Also, people cross the street any and everywhere. Frankly, I think it’s a miracle I haven’t seen more people getting just wrecked by the cars.
There is a HUGE variety of makes and models here, a large percentage of them are new as well. Since China has plants that built tons of different cars, we see all of these different brands, but with the local chinese plant also listed on it. So you may see a Ford that says it was made in Shanghai, or a Toyota made in Beijing, etc. Whereas in Korea you only see Hyandai or Kia and Japan you’ll only see the Mitsubishi, Toyota, Honda, Daihatsu, etc.
Beijing:
We woke up just shy of 6:20 to get prepped for our train to Beijing. Brian was kind enough to help us out by calling our hotel to make sure we could come a day early, as well as writing a couple of notecards so we can hopefully take care of the stuff to get to Xi’an. We then made our way to the train station. We bid farewell to Brian not far into the train station, as we had to get our tickets checked. We then hopped in line to catch our train, and boarded at about 10 til 8. It was an express train and was very nice. Pretty similar in design to the Shinkansen (bullet train) in Japan, and hit top speaks of about 250 kph (right around 150 mph). It was a four hour ride from Shenyang to Beijing. We dozed for the first couple hours and then watched part of The Golden Compass for the last bit. (fyi, that movie is pretty blech, unless you’re a fan of heavy-handed attempts to talk about how the Catholic Church is an evil entity that tries to stifle free throught, then go right ahead.)
We arrived in Beijing and got off the train and went on out. Brian told us to go ahead and try and take a cab to our place, so we got in line for the cabs and walked until we found a cab to get into. The guy put our stuff in and we hopped in and showed him our paper. He read it for a bit, then proceeded to ramble on in Chinese, which of course we can’t understand. So then he makes it clear that he won’t be taking us. We’re both pretty baffled as to why, so we find another taxi and point to the map and ask him, he says no as well. So now we’re both pretty flustered as to why the taxi’s refuse to take us to our stop, but we assume that it’s because it’s only about 3 KM or so away, and they only charge 2rmb/km so it wouldn’t be as profitable for them. We think. So we make our way back out of the taxi area and there are lots of people out there who bug you if you want a taxi, we figure, what the heck, if they’ll take us, and ask them. They say 200rmb (32$) and we laugh and say no, we’ll take the subway, the guy says we should name our price. So I said 50 rmb, and he says 50 each, 100 for both. I told him to forget it and we went to find the subway. We had some difficulty finding the subway but after wandering around for a bit we were able to find it. The tickets were 2rmb each (so all of $.75 total) and made our way to the subway. As part of the Olympic preparations, they have a brand-spankin’ new subway, and it’s as good as anything I’ve seen in Japan. We got to our stop and headed on up. We were able to use our map inside the guide book coupled with a map from the website for our hotel. Traveling along the large road we took all the turns we needed too and were able to figure out the roads we needed to take, but it increasingly got more and more secluded and a little more, lived-in shall we say. After walking down an alley (which was also a street but was called an alley) we passed the hospital that we new was on our map and turned at the next cross-alley thinking it was the route. Luckily it was, and we spotted our hotel and checked in. The receptionist gave us an option for for either a king-sized ‘single’ with two windows or the ‘standard double’ with no windows. The king one was much better so we took that. The hotel has a nice quant feel to it, along with a fantastic staff to lend us a hand. We then went out and found a place for lunch which was very cheap and the staff even spoke some english as well as having a menu in english for us. Our entire meal with drinks was $4 ahha. We also stopped by the convienance store next door to snag some stuff for our hotel, i.e. water drinks and fruit. We then went back to the hotel, fired off the e-mails to let people know we had made it, and then took off again, this time for the shopping section not too far from us (since it was coming to later afternoon.) The walk was a bit far but we had no problems getting there, which was a plus. The shopping district was pretty busy and had tons of upscale places as well as the more typical touristy places. We also stopped by a church that is out front and met a guy who told us he teaches at the Sunday school there. He showed us an art exhibition that they had in the Sunday school as well as some things they are selling as a fundraiser for the church. We bought a wall scroll they had there for a smidgen more than the wall scrolls they were selling out on the shopping stalls but have since noticed that the guy wasn’t entirely honest with us about the scroll. We’re on the fence on this whole thing because on one hand: it was in the church complex and was in the basement of the Sunday school area (the church’s area was all fenced off) and we’ll feel pretty bad if even the Churches are running scams here, but who knows. Live and learn huh? We picked up several red traditional chinese ‘tassels’ for lack of a better description. Bethany also got a pretty doll in traditional Chinese dress. By this time it was getting dark so we made our way back home. The rest of the evening we’ll be relaxing and watching a movie before we try and go to the Summer Palace tomorrow.
Interesting things for Beijing: Day 1:
Interesting mix of modern and traditional archetecture. Again, the sense of scale here is pretty overwhelming. In some respects, it’s almost like a large city in America multiplied by 6. So when you see a large building in America, here you see 6 of them all going up side by side. On the train platform we also saw a van driving, like, down in the station. We saw several nuclear plants on the way to Beijing from the train. Bethany noticed that there are many more corn fields here than in Korea. She also noticed that the greenhouses here have these mats made out of straw to cover the greenhouse or could be rolled up to let the sun in or down to help trap the heat.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Is it really Christmas?
Yeah, I know, I haven't posted in forever. sorry about that. :-p It's really crazy to think that tomorrow is already Christmas! The time has just been flying by, and without the traditional markers, I still can't really believe it!
I'll be making some cookies for them tomorrow though, which I think they'll love. When I asked the teacher today about it, he was like 'homemade cookies? really? that's ok?' and I was kinda chuckling and saying of course! I had volunteered after all!
Lets see: in the last week, some of the things I've done are:
1) set up christmas decorations around school. there's a christmas tree set up near the entrance with decorations and lights on it, and the presents i received in the mail are sitting underneath it. No, I don't have to worry about my students stealing them. Garland is on the main stairwell and looks awesome, and there are some christmas lights up in the hallway near the english teacher's lounge.
2) Made grandma's christmas wreaths with one of the advanced english courses. They had a blast doing it; totally awesome.
3) Met Kasuga's daughter Nanako. She just returned from her first semester at college at Central Arkansas U. I was laughing at her american accent. She's pretty cool.
4) finally got my China visa. I got stuck with a bunch of additional fees by the consulate and will end up spending nearly 250$ between the travel agent fees to get it ordered and the extra crap from the Chinese consulate. Bah.
5) contemplated purchasing a car one of my brazilian students family was selling since they are returning to Brazil in February, but found out the next day that they had already sold it. This country has hustle.
6) met my new neighbors, who finally moved into the house that was being built out in front of me.
7) did a christmas cards lesson with several classes. Students made postcards for many of you back home, so expect them in the mail in the next couple of weeks.
8) realized once again how darn excited I am for the Watchmen movie that comes out on Pete's birthday.
9) went to the dollar store and bought a bunch of socks taht are all totally worth more than a buck a pair.
10) got my haircut, finally! I had a cup that had the name of a local barber shop on it, and I figured Jon went there, so I checked it out. turns out Jon never did, but oh well! I got the whole shebang for 40$, cut, wash, conditioner, shave, hot towel, scalp moisturizer, even a massage! The barber was a young man who grew up in Iijima, cool guy!
Saturday I take off for China via Korea! How cool is that?! Whee!
I'll be making some cookies for them tomorrow though, which I think they'll love. When I asked the teacher today about it, he was like 'homemade cookies? really? that's ok?' and I was kinda chuckling and saying of course! I had volunteered after all!
Lets see: in the last week, some of the things I've done are:
1) set up christmas decorations around school. there's a christmas tree set up near the entrance with decorations and lights on it, and the presents i received in the mail are sitting underneath it. No, I don't have to worry about my students stealing them. Garland is on the main stairwell and looks awesome, and there are some christmas lights up in the hallway near the english teacher's lounge.
2) Made grandma's christmas wreaths with one of the advanced english courses. They had a blast doing it; totally awesome.
3) Met Kasuga's daughter Nanako. She just returned from her first semester at college at Central Arkansas U. I was laughing at her american accent. She's pretty cool.
4) finally got my China visa. I got stuck with a bunch of additional fees by the consulate and will end up spending nearly 250$ between the travel agent fees to get it ordered and the extra crap from the Chinese consulate. Bah.
5) contemplated purchasing a car one of my brazilian students family was selling since they are returning to Brazil in February, but found out the next day that they had already sold it. This country has hustle.
6) met my new neighbors, who finally moved into the house that was being built out in front of me.
7) did a christmas cards lesson with several classes. Students made postcards for many of you back home, so expect them in the mail in the next couple of weeks.
8) realized once again how darn excited I am for the Watchmen movie that comes out on Pete's birthday.
9) went to the dollar store and bought a bunch of socks taht are all totally worth more than a buck a pair.
10) got my haircut, finally! I had a cup that had the name of a local barber shop on it, and I figured Jon went there, so I checked it out. turns out Jon never did, but oh well! I got the whole shebang for 40$, cut, wash, conditioner, shave, hot towel, scalp moisturizer, even a massage! The barber was a young man who grew up in Iijima, cool guy!
Saturday I take off for China via Korea! How cool is that?! Whee!
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Up to Nagano for the day
So on Friday I made my way up to Nagano in the early hours of the day in order to get my re-entry permit to come back to Japan after China. So I hopped on the bus bright and early at 7:45 and spent the next couple of hours on my way up to Nagano. I got off at the last stop, asked a guy for directions to the place I was going (since it was only a 5-10 minute walk from the last stop) and then was nice enough to even get a map! I was a bit thrown off though becuase I was under the impression I would have to buy my round-trip ticket on the bus becuase of a problem Kasuga-sensei had when booking them for me, but I was told I wouldn't be able to buy them on the bus. When we got to Nagano I asked the driver where I could buy them and he told me at the bust terminal, which was about 2 km back. I called Kasuga and he told me I should go there, but then called back shortly after to inform me that actually he had booked both tickets, I just couldn't buy them at the same time. Lul.
I found the place I was going to with no problems and went on upstairs and began filling out the form. It only took a few minutes, but in true Japanese beaurocratic fashion I then had to go downstairs to the first floor to purchase a ticket to put on the form in order to finish my app. I knew this was coming though so it wasn't a big deal. After that, I was all done, it took me all of 15 minutes, which left me with about an hour and a half until my bus returned to Nagano. I had spent some time talking with a girl named Jessica who is working up in the Hakuba area (huge ski resort area of Nagano) and was getting her visa extentsion. We chatted for a while and then after she was done I meandered along with her to burn some time, making my way over to Zenkoji temple (the big one in Nagano) before we parted ways. Zenkoji temple didn't seem particularly interesting (at least the parts I could see for free) and was dreary becuase of recent rain, cold weather, and no snow. :'(
So after that I made my way back towards the bus stop (at the prefectural office) and was kinda looking around for a place to snag some lunch. Lo and behold, about 2 blocks from my stop was a Denny's! Pretty much stoked, I stopped in and had an absolutely awesome sandwich for lunch.
Rode the bus home, and was lucky enough to talk to several groups of my students on my way back. :-) I got a bunch of wide eyes to see me 1) after not being at school 2) outside of school in general and 3) in street clothes. Haha!
I then made my way to buy some stuff for dinner and such. I found a delicious Japanese version of souju that's fantastic.
Today I made the christmas wreath cookies as well as chocolate chip cookies. I feel awesome being a baker. Lol. The cookies are a bit brittle and I'm not sure what I did wrong, i think too much heat. :-/
This week I get to do some cooking at school with one of my classes which will be great! And hopefully I can get my christmas/new years cards lesson plan implemented, so I can send the good ones out! :-D
I found the place I was going to with no problems and went on upstairs and began filling out the form. It only took a few minutes, but in true Japanese beaurocratic fashion I then had to go downstairs to the first floor to purchase a ticket to put on the form in order to finish my app. I knew this was coming though so it wasn't a big deal. After that, I was all done, it took me all of 15 minutes, which left me with about an hour and a half until my bus returned to Nagano. I had spent some time talking with a girl named Jessica who is working up in the Hakuba area (huge ski resort area of Nagano) and was getting her visa extentsion. We chatted for a while and then after she was done I meandered along with her to burn some time, making my way over to Zenkoji temple (the big one in Nagano) before we parted ways. Zenkoji temple didn't seem particularly interesting (at least the parts I could see for free) and was dreary becuase of recent rain, cold weather, and no snow. :'(
So after that I made my way back towards the bus stop (at the prefectural office) and was kinda looking around for a place to snag some lunch. Lo and behold, about 2 blocks from my stop was a Denny's! Pretty much stoked, I stopped in and had an absolutely awesome sandwich for lunch.
Rode the bus home, and was lucky enough to talk to several groups of my students on my way back. :-) I got a bunch of wide eyes to see me 1) after not being at school 2) outside of school in general and 3) in street clothes. Haha!
I then made my way to buy some stuff for dinner and such. I found a delicious Japanese version of souju that's fantastic.
Today I made the christmas wreath cookies as well as chocolate chip cookies. I feel awesome being a baker. Lol. The cookies are a bit brittle and I'm not sure what I did wrong, i think too much heat. :-/
This week I get to do some cooking at school with one of my classes which will be great! And hopefully I can get my christmas/new years cards lesson plan implemented, so I can send the good ones out! :-D
Sunday, December 7, 2008
The Wall of Man and Nii-gata
I'm writing this during the teacher's meeting, something I find very interesting. Apparently the teacher's meetings are done so that teacher's can talk about various things, but the most importatn thing seems to be that it's from an old practice to allow the teacher's to practice their public speaking skills with people they are more comfortable with. Judging by the views of the majority of teachers in here (after Kasuga-sensei has been talking for about 40 minutes about several things, but mainly test scores) I can see why many places are phasing it out. Typically this is the time I run off to the english teachers room to do Japanese practice, but today I wanted to stick around and get some stuff accomplished online. :-P
So, Friday evening I made my way over to Komagane and to an Izukaya to celebrate Jessie's birthday with other ALT's. It was a great time, lots of laughter and fun. As well as getting to have lots of great food (mochi and cheese on toasted bread reminded me alot of goat cheese pizza in turkey, how i miss it :-P) I gifted Jesse a pack of my beef jerkey, no light present; I'm sure he'll enjoy it.
I left before everyone else to catch a train back to Iijima and because I had decided Friday afternoon that I was going to make it up to Nii-gata for the wall of man meet. I ended up getting home around 11:20-ish and got to bed just before midnight. I had to wake up at around 5:20am the next morning to catch the first train out from Iijima at 6:02. Ugh. Always a bad sign when you head out in the morning and you can still see stars. The mountains in the east as well as a few clouds above them left it pitch-black in Iijima. In fact, it I didn't see the sun until after 7. We still have two weeks until the shortest day yet. Crazy. I can't imagine if we actually used daylight savings time here. I had no problems making it up to Nagano city, but unfortunately, my late train in Matsumoto made me miss my train out of Nagano by just a couple of minutes. I went into the help area at Nagano to purchase my ticket to Kita-arai (where I was meeting Joe) and when I asked for help, the guy checked the book (leaves at 9:23) and then looks at the clock (9:24), looks at me, sighs and says "that's too bad, huh?" and i just chuckled and said yes. The next one was at 10:30, about when I was originally supposed to arrive, what a shame. :-P I got on the later train and got to Joe's without any trouble. It was a nice ride (good comfy train) as well as some very pretty views along the way. The last bit heading into Nagano was set up in a very rural area in the mountains and overlooking the valley far far below. The bit from Nagano to Joe's was full of rural areas that had lots of character and was through the wilderness as well. Absolutely gorgous. I met Joe and we headed out for Marshall's place, about an hour and a half away by car. The drive was also very pretty. We arrived at Marshall's town with no problems and met him and Marcus, then proceeded to snag a delicious lunch of soba noodles which his town is supposedly famous for.
afterwards we made our way over to a local store that had an international alcohol selection, which made me eccstatic. due to lack of liquer taxes in Japan, it's as cheap here for alcohol as it is in the states. We also grabbed a couple of Dr. Peppers, and I was a happy happy man later that evening as I got to drink a dr. pepper.
After that we went to a grocery store and picked up stuff to make burgers for dinner (as well as my now famous bloomin' onion, thanks again to bethany for that idea, i get requests for that almost weekly now.) After that, we retired to Marshall's place to spend the evening enjoying each others company, playing Wii games, and making dinner (which turned out splendidly.)
Although we were all ready for bed by about, oh, 7pm, we ended up staying up until about 3am with intermittent dozing going on. I woke up from my nodding off to join in with Joe and Marshall about the chances of Japanese being a unique language over the next several centuries, and if the spread of information will allow Japanese to persevere and never go extinct or if it will speed the fall as it becomes increasingly easy for a global lingua franca to be established (most likely mandarin and english).
The next morning Marcus was off by 10, and Joe and I waited around for Marshall to get back. Afterwards we went off to snag a delicous lunch at a fast food place(i had a bowl of curry rice, so good!). Sunday morning also saw tons of snow on the ground, although the warmer weather/ground was causing it to disappear quite quickly. While Joe and I made our way home (after bidding farewell to Marshall), we stopped to take some pictures of the beautiful scenery and Joe got to put his new camera to use (and boy it's a doozy.) We got back to his hometown and I checked out his apartment (and was totally jealous of his internet TV he has hooked up to his nice TV), then made my way back home. Took about 6 hours from when I left Joe's place to when i got back to my apartment (if you skip the 2 hours from Marshall's to Joe's), and the evening seemed to be gone all too fast. But in all it was totally worth the trip there. I had a fantastic time and hopefully we'll be meeting up again in the middle of January. I have to plan around Stephanie and her friends visit to Japan in later January though, but I'm so excited to see them!
So, Friday evening I made my way over to Komagane and to an Izukaya to celebrate Jessie's birthday with other ALT's. It was a great time, lots of laughter and fun. As well as getting to have lots of great food (mochi and cheese on toasted bread reminded me alot of goat cheese pizza in turkey, how i miss it :-P) I gifted Jesse a pack of my beef jerkey, no light present; I'm sure he'll enjoy it.
I left before everyone else to catch a train back to Iijima and because I had decided Friday afternoon that I was going to make it up to Nii-gata for the wall of man meet. I ended up getting home around 11:20-ish and got to bed just before midnight. I had to wake up at around 5:20am the next morning to catch the first train out from Iijima at 6:02. Ugh. Always a bad sign when you head out in the morning and you can still see stars. The mountains in the east as well as a few clouds above them left it pitch-black in Iijima. In fact, it I didn't see the sun until after 7. We still have two weeks until the shortest day yet. Crazy. I can't imagine if we actually used daylight savings time here. I had no problems making it up to Nagano city, but unfortunately, my late train in Matsumoto made me miss my train out of Nagano by just a couple of minutes. I went into the help area at Nagano to purchase my ticket to Kita-arai (where I was meeting Joe) and when I asked for help, the guy checked the book (leaves at 9:23) and then looks at the clock (9:24), looks at me, sighs and says "that's too bad, huh?" and i just chuckled and said yes. The next one was at 10:30, about when I was originally supposed to arrive, what a shame. :-P I got on the later train and got to Joe's without any trouble. It was a nice ride (good comfy train) as well as some very pretty views along the way. The last bit heading into Nagano was set up in a very rural area in the mountains and overlooking the valley far far below. The bit from Nagano to Joe's was full of rural areas that had lots of character and was through the wilderness as well. Absolutely gorgous. I met Joe and we headed out for Marshall's place, about an hour and a half away by car. The drive was also very pretty. We arrived at Marshall's town with no problems and met him and Marcus, then proceeded to snag a delicious lunch of soba noodles which his town is supposedly famous for.
afterwards we made our way over to a local store that had an international alcohol selection, which made me eccstatic. due to lack of liquer taxes in Japan, it's as cheap here for alcohol as it is in the states. We also grabbed a couple of Dr. Peppers, and I was a happy happy man later that evening as I got to drink a dr. pepper.
After that we went to a grocery store and picked up stuff to make burgers for dinner (as well as my now famous bloomin' onion, thanks again to bethany for that idea, i get requests for that almost weekly now.) After that, we retired to Marshall's place to spend the evening enjoying each others company, playing Wii games, and making dinner (which turned out splendidly.)
Although we were all ready for bed by about, oh, 7pm, we ended up staying up until about 3am with intermittent dozing going on. I woke up from my nodding off to join in with Joe and Marshall about the chances of Japanese being a unique language over the next several centuries, and if the spread of information will allow Japanese to persevere and never go extinct or if it will speed the fall as it becomes increasingly easy for a global lingua franca to be established (most likely mandarin and english).
The next morning Marcus was off by 10, and Joe and I waited around for Marshall to get back. Afterwards we went off to snag a delicous lunch at a fast food place(i had a bowl of curry rice, so good!). Sunday morning also saw tons of snow on the ground, although the warmer weather/ground was causing it to disappear quite quickly. While Joe and I made our way home (after bidding farewell to Marshall), we stopped to take some pictures of the beautiful scenery and Joe got to put his new camera to use (and boy it's a doozy.) We got back to his hometown and I checked out his apartment (and was totally jealous of his internet TV he has hooked up to his nice TV), then made my way back home. Took about 6 hours from when I left Joe's place to when i got back to my apartment (if you skip the 2 hours from Marshall's to Joe's), and the evening seemed to be gone all too fast. But in all it was totally worth the trip there. I had a fantastic time and hopefully we'll be meeting up again in the middle of January. I have to plan around Stephanie and her friends visit to Japan in later January though, but I'm so excited to see them!
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