Hot and Spicy in Sichuan

Since I last wrote, I have spent the last of my full days in Chengdu and the surrounding area. After I arrived, I took a two-hour bus to Leshan, site of the world's largest carved Buddha at more than 20 stories tall. Luckily, I encountered two Israelis during the eighth month of their Southeast Asian romp, so I spent the day exchanging stories with friendly strangers rather than becoming bored by my own thoughts. Perhaps the strangest aspect of the site was the lack of Chinese tourists. It was actually possible to take pictures around the Buddha, and I only had to pose for a few pictures with the Chinese tourists. Normally, the place would have been packed beyond belief, but tourism in the area has been severely depressed since the earthquake, up to 90% off last year's levels, I am told. Certainly this will not help the area recover quickly, but it does make for nice vacationing.

Ride that tiger:



Big Buddha, Big Buddha, Big Buddha Big Buddha Big Buddha:




The girls with whom I'm couchsurfing had invited 1-2 more surfers to stay at their place while I was there, and they arrived later that night. This proved to be a fortunate development, as it provided me with travel companions for the ensuing few days.

Jordan, from Arizona, went with me to view the Panda Research Centre outside of Chengdu the next day. Unfortunately, many of the pandas have been moved to Beijing as a result of the earthquake, so we only saw about 15 total pandas, as well as preserved parts of dead pandas. Truthfully, I don't understand how pandas are not yet extinct. They sleep for about 21 hours per day, making them incredibly vulnerable to attack; they essentially only eat one kind of vegetation, meaning that they are incredibly dependent upon only the most ideal living conditions; they aren't sexually mature until they're around 6 years old, meaning that there's a significant chance they won't even survive to reproduce; if they do survive that long, they don't seem that interested in mating during the 3 hours a day they're lucid, so much so that zoologists often have to show panda porn in order to get them interested in one another; they normally only raise one offspring, leaving the others to die; and they often decide to kill and eat this offspring if they don't like it or want to raise it. With 1000 or so left in the wild (meaning nature reserve in remote Sichuan), don't expect them to ever fully recover.

Just munchin':


I'm pretty sure this quotation didn't originally refer to pandas:


Reproductive organs:


Rare shots of pandas willingly mating:


A museum exhibit in the panda museum about other museums (you might even say, a meta-museum):



After getting back from the panda reserve before noon, since they've all passed out from bamboo ecstasy by 11, Jordan and I made our way to the central square, dominated by an enormous Mao statue, and then continued on to People's Park to relax in one of the teahouses made famous by Sichuanese dwellers. If I were to move back to China, I would not consider living anywhere other than the provinces of Yunnan, Sichuan, or Guangxi in the south. The life here just seems so much more relaxed. Locals young and old spend hours chatting and playing cards and mazhong with one another, with nothing more than a $0.60 cup of tea required, and I don't think they're bothered at all by the decrease in productivity.

The next day we ventured to the Sichuan Science and Nature Museum that we had noticed behind the giant Mao statue, and it was glorious. Just like its equivalent in Chicago, it featured decades-old computers and exhibits. Unfortunately, they also had toys that apparently weren't suitable for grown-ups, as another couchsurfing friend, Thomas, decided to stick his finger in one of the apparatuses, which promptly resulted in a fractured finger that had to be numbed by tubs of ice cream until he eventually made his way to the hospital. Jordan and I continued on to the Tibetan area of the city (parts of Sichuan and Yunnan were previously considered Tibet before China gained control of Tibet in the mid-twentieth century, so that current political lines do not accurately incorporate Tibetan areas in Tibet with those in other adjoining provinces) to look for some of the food that had been so delicious when Tyler and I traveled to Yunnan. Unfortunately, no yak cheese dumplings were to be found, though I suppose the yak meat was tasty enough for the trip to have been worth the effort.

Mao in front of the museum:


Inside the museum (notice the UFO on the right):



Tea house:



Gross 1000-year old egg:



NICE!



As I wrote in my initial post this year, I planned to spend some time on this trip in areas affected by the earthquake. As I anticipated to some degree, this has proved difficult. The government, understandably, does not want foreigners to circumvent its control. Pictures of areas that have not yet been adequately responded to, and pictures of foreigners providing support instead of the government, are to be particularly avoided, I imagine. This, along with the more-than-sufficient manpower enabled by a country of 1.3 billion people, meant that I certainly wouldn't be hoisting bricks or painting newly built walls. I thought my year as a teacher might be of some use, and indeed I had lined up a gig teaching for about a week in a rural township, only to have those plans fall through. I had also found a foreign organization needing help putting together medical kits, but that project was dependent upon the supplies arriving in a timely manner, and this did not happen at a time when I was free. Fortunately, an organization formed by expats after the earthquake has been traveling to a more remote, devastated village each Sunday simply to provide a break for the kids and families. I was invited to accompany them this Sunday, and I assumed I'd be teaching some English classes to the schoolchildren. This, along with song and dance, crafts, recreation and sports, and preschool, form the groups the organization plans each week to support the kids. After it was discovered that I had spent time in Nashville, though, I was quickly placed on the song and dance team to teach some line dances and see if I could get some boys interested in that activity. I thought about some of the different moves involved in line dances, and even some that normally aren't (per Tyler at the Wild Horse), but ultimately I sort of just made them up on the spot when we arrived in Loushui. Never have I been so tired after only half an hour! Russian leg-kicks, hops, slides, steps, spins, heel kicks, twists, and turns in sunny 90-degree heat can really take it out of you. When we first arrived at the village, I was concerned that our presence was a bit self-indulgent and unhelpful to the community, as locals stared at our bus and police refused to let us enter. But after some wrangling with the authorities and spending a few hours with the kids, I know that they were glad to have us there. The town is pretty devastated, with people living in tents and few buildings safe to inhabit or enter, but it has seen a pronounced increase in local commerce this past week, according to some of the more consistent volunteers, so hopefully that is a sign that life is beginning to return to normalcy.

Playing games with the kiddies:


Standing in rubble:


Temporary housing for the army and relief workers:



Today, I made my way to Huanglongxi, one of the sites used for the filming of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". It was a fairly touristy Chinese site, but I did sit for three hours in a tea house and read through most of one of the books I brought. I was also reminded again of why I hate minibuses. I took one this morning without much trouble, though the 90 minutes it took to travel 40 kilometers were a bit excessive. As I departed the bus, I was told by the attendant that the bus would be leaving at 3:00. I made it back to the bus by around 2:30 and ate a quick lunch, and I was on board by 3:00. Well, 3:00 doesn't mean 3:00 in China, but rather "whenever the bus is full of people and live chicken after 3:00, or, more precisely, 3:50. This wasn't too bad, since I was just having a relaxing Sichuanese day and wasn't feeling rushed, and the bus would be taking me directly to a bus station right on one of the local Chengdu bus routes back to the apartment I'm staying in. Well, I dozed off on the bus, only to be awakened by some yelling that we had arrived at the stop, when in reality, we had arrived a few blocks away and the bus wanted to continue on a different route. If I hadn't woken up then, who knows where I would have ended up. And if I couldn't speak Chinese, I never would have known that the plans were changing in the first place. Oh, China.

Huanglongxi:




Tomorrow, I head to the last frontier in China, also known as Xinjiang. It's mostly desert, so I'll just continue sweating from sun-up until sun-up.

Where I buy all of my underwear in Chengdu:

The Perfect Storm

So, as it turns out, living in a secluded village on an island isn't ALWAYS that awesome especially if there's a typhoon (er even a tropical storm) in the area. ANd extra expecially if there's only one road to the village and it's impassible due to fallen trees and you have a flight to catch that's a 3-4 hour bus ride away. ANd super extra especially when fish from the ocean are blown into the village by the strong winds and left to flip flop and die.

A few days ago, I noticed a few signs posted with the message T-1, or Typhoon 1 (similar to our hurricane scale, though the typhoon scale goes up to 10). Nothing major, I thought. It was just a bit cloudy, but otherwise just a hot, muggy day. Te next day the signs said T-3. Again, nothing too alarming, I assumed. (I hadn't been checking the news at all, since I have to pay for my internet access, so these assumptions rested on little apart from my hope that my travel plans would not have to be altered.) Then, last night, after we had gotten back to the village, and as the winds started whipping up and rain started falling more heavily, this was bumped up to a T-8. I obviouly didn't sleep too well, and when I woke up, there was no public transportarion operating between the vilage and the rest of HK, and even private cars were unable to get out. Clearly, I would miss my morning meeting, and indeed when I called the office no one was present, as most of HK apparently took a day off, juding by the eerily empty metro. Eventually, one lane of the road was cleared, and I hopped on a (price-gouging) minibus to rush to the bus station to make it to the airport.

Because my cell phone was dead and my host did not have internet access, I had no idea where I would be spending the night, but luckily I have arrived in CHengdu with only an hour delay, and I was able to find another person via couchsurfing to host me. I'm still not sure how the volunteering will work out, but I will keep you updated. So far, I really like the city. As it's in the South, it has a natural tendency to be more relaxed, and this certainly holds true for Chengdu. It's a large city (5 million or more), but it has such a small-town feel that it's really not too intimidating at all.

I'll leave you with a quotaion I heard last night:
"He's the least Italian-looking, Japanese person in the world." Uh-huh.

Comings & Goings

Since last writing, I have taken a train to Hangzhou, flown to Guangzhou, and taken a bus to Hong Kong.

I met an old friend from Weihai, Neill, in Guangzhou. I'd heard good things about the city's nightlife, but Neill perhaps most aptly described its as a "Chinese Los Angeles." The city is sprawling and polluted, and it takes forever to get anywhere. Needless to say, I was not disappointed that I had only allocated one day in the city.

Guangzhou, with the second-most expensive rent prices in China (average around $2000/month):



The next day I planned to travel to Hong Kong. Anyone who has been to China or read about my experiences in the country knows that transportation is the most brain-hemorrhaging experience you can imagine. You almost always have a huge delay/layover (of multiple days) associated with trains; buses take 3x as long as they should due to their frequent stops and constant appeals for additional passengers; and flights deliver you to airports 60km from your intended destination with no cheap way to get you there. I read explicitly in my guide book that it was possible to buy direct bus tickets to HK from the Guangzhou main and east stations, but both times I've tried it, I've been laughed and looked at as thought I were an intelligent President Bush. Somehow it's more logical to have said buses depart from random hotels scattered throughout the city, and thus make them impossible to know about unless you're a soothsayer or encounter the uncommon travel agent who's willing to provide help even though the relationship is by no means symbiotic.

Similar things can be said for booking flights. One of the major travel websites recently began allowing foreigners to book flights online, but in order to do so, you have to fax or email copies of your passport, credit card, and travel agreement. If I'm going to have to travel to an internet cafe of business shop to use faxes, scanners, and copiers, why wouldn't I just eliminate a couple of stops and go to the travel agent directly?

And while we're on the theme of travel headaches, I witnessed another first a couple of days ago I've seen grown women and little babies pee and poop on the street; dogs urinate on bus floors; a baby uncontrollably expel diarrhea all over her mother on a bus; but I had never before seen a mother hold her child up, intentionally, willfully, and doodee-fully, over the middle of the train floor, so that the child could relieve himself. And then let the remnants flow around everyone's feet and belongings. Yay.

So, I'm already sick of the transportation aspects of travel, even though I'm otherwise having a fine time.

Moving on. I'm currently staying for a few days in HK. Last year I got out of the way most of the tourist stuff, so this time I decided to couchsurf with a guy who lives in a little village called Shek-O on the edge of Hong Kong Island (couchsurfing.com). He lives in the tiniest house I have ever been inside of; the kitchen is no larger than 15 square feet (this is for you, Jenna; pics will come soon, as promised), and we have to move all of the furniture to the perimeter of the living room in order for me to sleep. He sleeps on the floor upstairs and is unsure if there's room for a bed. Anyhow, the village might as well be situated on the Portuguese coast, because it doesn't feel anything like the hustling and bustling heart of HK.

I've had several; meetings today and have a couple more tomorrow with people with whom I might collaborate on future research, and they have been incredibly helpful It was a bit of an expensive detour to come to Hong Kong, as the city is more comparable to the West in prices than it is to the Chinese mainland, but it has been time and money incredibly well-spent.

Tomorrow I'll take a bus back up to Shenzhen, just across the China/HK border, and then fly to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, site of the recent earthquake.

I'm still not sure what I'll be doing, but at least part of my week or so in the province will be related to relief work. I've been invited to teach for a few days in a tent village, but nothing has of yet been confirmed. I also hope to find a day or two to see the largest carved Buddha in the world, visit the Panda Research Centre, and walk around the city used as a set for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

See/write to you in a few.
--Neal

Arrival

I didn't bother with deodorant today. 1) The temperature is so hot, and the air so humid, that I'm sweating again even after I shower and before I leave to go outside, and 2) I locked myself out of Rory and Julie's bathroom this morning. ALso locked in said bathroom were items like my contacts and glasses, so I spent the better part of the day not really able to tell where I was going. It did make for the first adventure of the trip, though. After Rory and I spent about an hour this afternoon trying to jimmy the lock and in the process nearly breaking off a key while still in the keyhole, we went to look for a locksmith. I looked up the word in my dictionary before we left (suojiang), since I hadn't used it before, and off we went. I also learned another word during the search process, apparently the word used to refer to "man on little blue bicycle with lots of tools," because that's the person we came upon after asking for directions a few times. I have since forgotten said word, and I hope I never have to use it again. He walked his bicycle and tools with us back to the apartment and about 5 minutes and 60 yuan ($9, or way too much money) later, the door was open, my contacts were retrieved, and the bathroom was ready for business. (The internet I'm typing on right now, by contrast, costs about $0.37 per hour).

Let me back up a little bit. I arrived in Shanghai yesterday. On the flight over, I still wasn't sure where I planned to spend my first night, but I decided to stay outside of Shanghai with friends and fellow bloggers Rory and Julie, in order to gather my bearings before moving on. So, I took a two-hour bus from the airport to the Shanghai South Train Station, then another 45-minute train to Jiazing, before I showed up much to the surprise of Rory and Julie (well, Rory at least, as I had indicated to Julie that I might be spending a night). After two nights here, I head out to Hangzhou tomorrow, to fly down to Guangzhou, near Hong Kong, site of a few meetings with professors. Let me also add that Delta' standards seem to have lowered considerably, as the only snack separating the 12-odd hours between meals was a bun with mayonnaise and a hard-boiled egg. Yuck.

When I say Jiaxing is outside of Shanghai, I mean only about 60 km, but I also mean devoid of any white people not working at the English school where they teach. Jiaxing probably has about 3 million people, but I was certainly the only white person on the bus, and I had to read a book in order to deflect stares for the entire trip. It reminded me a lot of Weihai, and I actually prefer these places to the larger cities of Shanghai and Beijing, because people assume you're not simply a tourist and therefore try to sell you less crap. The city itself offers nothing remarkable, but it would be a comfortable place to live. The weather is quite warm, but also free of the snow that I don't want to see more than once a year, anyhow. Palm trees can grow and are indeed abundant. Tolerable beer can also be located relatively easily.

Round Two

When I returned from China last year, I really did not expect to go back for at least several years. Life in China had simply lost its luster-- pollution, corruption, cultural differences, exhaustion-- all made me long for the trip home. About a month after I returned home, I got the urge to go to Germany, but within a few days of arriving, I knew that I was not yet ready to begin another short-term life in a foreign country. I was blessed with a job at Oglethorpe University immediately upon returning from Germany, and I am thankful for the experience.

Sometime around the thaw of the spring, though, I begin to yearn again for the relative simplicity (not to be confused with ease) of my life in China. Eventually, I made the decision to return to school and started thinking about how China might be involved in my future studies. Certainly, the development in China was something to be awed, but I also wished I could have had more of a hand in directing, or moderating, that development. China's rapid development means that millions of workers, mostly voluntarily, become displaced as they follow the manufacturing and construction jobs around the country. Often, though, their children are left without an education, as they lack the proper paperwork and permits to study away from their natural home. Just as we value the cheap goods afforded by illegal workers in America, so, too, are the migrant workers valued in China only as long as their work is required. Any desire for social support on the part of the migrant worker is mocked as pipe dreams, as another migrant or illegal worker is always ready to step up to fill the need, without wish for rights and fair or appropriate compensation. In addition to an interest in education and development, I also hope to examine housing, poverty, homelessness, and racial/immigrant prejudices. All are problems in China, but so, too, are they in America. Thus, my hope is that a comparative approach will allow me to address issues in America and learn from other contexts how me may improve our own social support systems, awareness, and development.

Naturally, as I thought about going back to school and conducting research in China, with this trip I hope to establish a few connections with professors, researchers, and NGO leaders to support that research. I also plan to visit a few friends across the East Coast.

Unfortunately, around the time I was formulating these plans, the earthquake in Sichuan struck. Initially, I was quite disappointed, for I have wanted to travel to Sichuan since I first arrived in China, and I thought the earthquake would again prevent me from doing so. But, upon more thought, now is the perfect time to visit. I hope to become involved, if possible, with relief effort. This has been no easy task; it seems to be easier to acquire a paying job than it does to simply volunteer in China. I have made a few contacts, but any volunteer work will likely result from simply traveling to the area and inquiring about specific needs. I may be able to help, but I may not. With China, nothing is ever certain. To friends back home, this often comes across as a daredevilness or a lack of preparation, perhaps, but I try to view it more as a realization that flexibility in the most important trait to carry with oneself in the country.

Even if I am unable to lay brick and mortar on a new home or participate in other manual labor, I think the trip will be incredibly worthwhile. If nothing else, I hope to observe the work community organizations are doing, observe how people are coping, and consider how the response may more adequately support the needs and redevelopment of the area.

This blog will apparently forever be reserved for postings from/about China. I will do my best to keep it updated over the next five weeks.