Aneel's Travelogue

The plan for today was to head over to Shanghai South Train Station and hop on the first train to Hangzhou and spend the day admiring West Lake there. This would probably have worked out better had I found a way to pre-book a train ticket. When I arrived at the train station, I found that the earliest train I could get a ticket for wasn't for hours, and it didn't make sense to spend 5 hours in trains and stations.

So I headed back to town and visited the Old Town instead. The bazaar area of Old Town is heavily restored, with lots of improbably grand buildings, entirely covered with souvenir shops of various price ranges. Hidden in the middle is another famous garden. I had the good fortune to visit in the rain, which I think deterred a lot of would-be visitors.

I took a short train ride over to Suzhou today to check out some of the famous canals and gardens of the "Venice of the East".

The first stop was at the Humble Administrator's Garden. The adjective refers to the Administrator, not the Garden, which is huge and filled with ponds and pavilions. It was quite pleasant, particularly when the sun broke through the clouds.

Next, I visited the Suzhou Museum. I found the permanent collection mostly uninspiring, but there was a temporary exhibition of the brush painting of Ya Ming. His technique is very good, but what I liked best was his choice of subjects. While there was no shortage of traditional landscapes of mist and mountains, there were also modern and foreign scenes. There was a landscape of an oil refinery in Nanjing, several of the Sahara and of Scandinavian fjords, and cityscapes showing the Danube region and Moscow University.

Finally, I visited the Lion Forest Garden. I don't know whether I timed the visit poorly (just the right time for tour buses?) or whether the garden is just so much smaller than the Humble Administrator's Garden that it can't absorb many people. It was a seething mass of humanity. There was practically no view that wasn't full of people. Not very tranquil.

On the walk back to the train station I had my first good pearl tea of the trip. The others have generally been too milky and have had undercooked pearls, but this one was just right.

It's amazing how tired I am this evening, considering I spent pretty much all of the day sitting on a boat. I suspect the 90F+ weather and the high humidity are sapping some of my energy.

I took a tour boat down the Huangpu river to (barely) see where it empties into the Yangzi. Touring along the river really brings home the history of Shanghai. We passed mile after mile of loading docks, ship repair facilities, and navy yards. We got to see huge container ships being (re?)built from the hull up, tugs guiding ships into port, coal barges being loaded, and ferries full of people and motorbikes crossing from one shore to the other. The trip started and ended on The Bund, where we could see the old and new buildings that all of this shipping has paid for.

Shanghai is crawling with tourists. Weirdly, a lot of them want me to take their pictures for them with Shanghai landmarks in the background. They're all in town for the Expo (they all agree that all of the good pavilions have multi-hour lines to get in, so I may end up skipping it), and they are all heading to the Tea Culture Festival which just opened. I met people from Beijing, Xi'an, and Hangzhou. There was even one Shanghai native, who was showing his out-of-town friend around.

I had a good, touristy day. Strolled up The Bund and took pictures of the old European-styled buildings on the left (Puxi) and the shiny glass-and-concrete Chinese skyscrapers on the other side of the river (Pudong). I passed under the river through The Bund Sightseeing Tunnel, a cross between a tiny subway and a drive-through-screensaver (featuring visual effects announced as things like "Shooting Stars", "Nascent Magma", and "Paradise and Hell"). I took a few pictures of buildings in Pudong and then took the normal subway back to People's Square.

I wonder if People's Square has the most exits of any subway station in the world. It's a transfer point for three lines and has 20 numbered exits. It took me a while, but I eventually found the exit for the Shanghai Museum.

The Museum had some great historical overviews of different kinds of Chinese art. I particularly liked the exhibits on Seal Carving and Scroll Painting.

In the evening I headed to the Shanghai Circus World subway stop (yes, that's the name of the stop) to see Era: Intersection of Time. The show was much more like Cirque du Soleil than the show I saw in Beijing: more focus on individuals and small groups doing hard tricks rather than large groups synchronizing medium-difficulty tricks, thematic interludes, musical pieces, large apparatus acts. There were a couple of acts (shooting stars, plate spinning) that seemed like they were just there because they were expected standards, but most of the acts were quite impressive. They closed with a motorcycle act where they had 8 bikes going at once inside a metal sphere.

After the circus, I headed back to The Bund to see the buildings lit for the evening.

Man, I need to start reading the "Getting to and from the airport" sections of the Lonely Planet guidebooks before I'm on the plane. Preferably before booking the flight. Then I wouldn't find myself in situations where the best way into town is about to shut down when I arrive.

My flight was delayed 20 minutes because the plane was late getting in to Qingdao from its previous stop. When we landed, I rushed off of the plane and followed the omnipresent signs to the Maglev, making sure to hit all of the moving sidewalks along the way. Luckily, the Lonely Planet was wrong about the last Maglev. It left at 21:42, not 21:32, which meant that I arrived with 3 minutes to spare (they stop selling tickets 5 minutes before the last train).

So, anyway, hello from the future, where you can ride a Maglev (!!!) at 301km/h into a city, then transfer to a subway which gets you within sight of the glowing neon sign for your hotel, and you can pick up individually-wrapped rice balls at a convenience store for dinner at 10:45pm.

Qingdao is the home of Tsingtao beer (The same name in an old transliteration system. It's said like "Chingdow"), so my first stop today was Beer Street, a district of bars and restaurants centered on the brewery. I had some tasty pork skewers and the unfiltered Tsingtao beer. It's surprisingly good when it's very fresh.

After lunch I toured the Beer Museum. Lots of neat artifacts from the period when the Germans controlled Qingdao and established the brewery. It was interesting to see the brewery floor from above. I've never seen beer being made on such a scale before. One of the exhibits said that Tsingtao beer accounted for 98% of China's export revenue at one point.

I had planned to see some historical sites, but my legs are still tired from Tai Shan, so I just walked to the beach instead.

Someone was setting off fireworks on the beach right in front of my hotel around dinner time. It didn't seem to be anything organized, just someone with some of those instant-fireworks-show packages.

The classic thing to do on a mountain in China is to watch the sun rise. Sadly, it was so cloudy that all we saw this morning was a gradual lightening of the gray.

After going back to sleep for a while and then having breakfast, I headed down the mountain. While my quads had taken a beating pushing me upwards yesterday, my calves bore the brunt of the downward climb. Exhausting. At least it's a different set of muscles.

My train wasn't until 7pm, so I had lunch at a tasty dumpling restaurant and poked around the Buddhist temple in the center of Tai'an. The highlights for me were their collection of miniature trees.

The train to Qingdao was pretty hassle-free. There was a bilingual scrolling display so that you knew you hadn't missed your stop and were suitably impressed when the train hit 200km/h. At one point it even smiled (^__^).

I'm at the summit of Mt Tai (Tai Shan) in a surprisingly nice hotel. I'd even have Internet access if I'd brought my laptop, but I left it at the Left Luggage counter at the train station. The iPad doesn't have a plug for the Broadband Access Hole in my room.

This hotel isn't the only surprisingly developed part of the mountain. The guidebook mentioned that there would be no problem getting food along the path, but I had no inkling of the scope of what's here. The path itself is stone stairs the whole way. There are little restaurants, souvenir shops, and people with coolers selling drinks around half of the bends in the path. The other half are occupied by temples, inscriptions on the rock, and historical markers calling out which trees sheltered which emperors from the rain.

Amazingly, I had almost no rain fall on me here. It was overcast the whole day (perhaps for the best, considering all of the climbing), but it barely sprinkled. One of the things I'd hoped I'd see in China was the mountains in the mist, like in all of the scroll paintings. I think I get to check that box off. Unfortunately, that probably means I won't get much of a sunrise tomorrow.

Actually getting here added to my set of authentic China experiences as well. I finally took the subway at rush hour and was part of a crowd so thick that it would have been impossible to fall over. My train (a fancy new express train leaving from a sparkling new station that was more like an airport than any other train station I've been to) had the wrong type of cars, so we used the bottom bunk of a sleeper car as a bench. And then there was the rickshaw driver...

I was supposed to take Bus 3 from the train station to the entrance to Tai Shan, but couldn't find it. There were plenty of Bus 11s and some Bus 18s, but no 3s. Eventually I got tired of waiting and accepted a ride from a rickety four-seater moto-rickshaw. I suspect it had a problem with its clutch, because the driver never let it stop. Traffic backed up at a red light? No problem, just drive on the other side of the road. Red light telling us to stop? It's fine if you just weave through the traffic! Pedestrians? Bicyclists? They can navigate around us as we cross their path! Some of the traffic seemed annoyed, but none of it seemed surprised.

What to say about Beijing? It's huge. It's crowded. It's amazing.

It's funny, coming from Ulaanbaatar, where the State Department Store (a five story mall, basically) is considered a tourist attraction. In Beijing, there's something much bigger around every corner and nobody would think to mention it. Distances that look trivially walkable on the map ("Oh, that's just one big block away...") turn out to be thirty minute hikes.

The place is so big that even the locals don't seem to know their way around. We learned early on not to trust people when they gave us directions. I suspect that there's a pressure to give an answer, rather than seem like you don't know. As a result, people often seem to point you in the wrong direction. We had one taxi ride that should have been about two big blocks and should have involved no turns, but the taxi driver managed to squeeze in several turns and a u-turn before setting me down one alley off of where I should have been. It's possible that he was just running up the meter, but, if so, he's a good actor. He seemed genuinely confused.

You've probably notice that I've been using the plural pronoun above. It just so happened that my friend Dave (Gumbo) and his fiancee Amy were in town. We saw a lot of the sights together and generally had a great time.

We started things off right: with a meal. Beijing-style dumplings filled with shrimp, duck, and donkey. We then did a walking tour through Tian'anmen Square to the Forbidden City.

The Forbidden City seems almost like a punishment, in retrospect. It's full of giant, tiled courtyards, which were blazingly hot in the midday sun. We only discovered the cool, tree-lined gardens late in our visit. The architecture was also strange. I had expected much more variety in a complex so large, but each area was very similar to the next, and it was hard to keep track of which was the Gate of Supreme Harmony and which the Gate of Preserving Harmony. We did see some great examples of the interrelationship between the development of Chinese calligraphy and brush painting in one of the museums. Sadly, we got to the other museum area after they'd stopped selling tickets for the day.

On our second day, we focused on neighborhoods, rather than monuments. We browsed Liulichang Cultural Street, where we saw lots of shops selling calligraphy supplies (brushes, ink, paper) and art (brush paintings, paper cuts, leather puppets, sculptures, chops). We visited the Donghuamen Night Market, where they sell every food that you can skewer on a stick (beef, lamb, squid, snake, cricket, cicada...), and then headed over to Ghost Street for dinner. One source claims that Ghost Street is called that because once there was a night market there and the lanterns gave it a ghostly aspect. Today there are so many red lanterns that it's almost as bright as day. We ended up at a Sichuan place and ordered way too much food. It was spicy, but tasty.

I visited a couple temples on Monday: the Lama temple, which was devoted to Tibetan Buddhism in 1722 to attempt to strengthen ties with China's conquered provinces of Tibet and Mongolia; and a Taoist temple which had a great many displays depicting various departments of the underworld, where the dead might be judged. There were scores of life-sized dioramas depicting the wicked bemoaning their fates while judges looked on sternly and bureaucrats stamped official documents.

We had dinner with Amy's high-school friend, who happens to be working in the US Consulate in Beijing. I now have a card telling me who to call if I get into trouble while I'm in China. The dinner was in a district that fit my preconceptions of Hong Kong, rather than Beijing. Lots of glass, posh restaurants and bars, and an Apple Store. We had drinks afterwards at a bar with 100 imported beers on the menu. We had to have another round because there was a downpour, complete with lightning. Happily, it let up enough for us to get a cab.

On Tuesday we visited the Temple of Heaven. We'd meant to see the Underground City, a complex of tunnels under Beijing that was originally planned to be able to house 40% of the city's population in the event of a war, but we found the entrance was closed. The Temple of Heaven was much more pleasant than the Forbidden City. In addition to the rectangular halls set around square yards, there were some circular buildings. The whole complex was full of trees, making the temperature much more pleasant.

We had our first Beijing Duck for dinner. This was the "Ultralean" creation of a famous Beijing chef. It turned out to be good, but not great. So much of the pleasure of eating duck is the delicious grease that it seems a shame to deliberately make it lean.

After dinner, we saw a acrobatic performance at the Tiandi theater. It was a lot of fun, with a wide variety of acts (juggling, balance, umbrella juggling with the feet, diabolo, shooting stars, plate spinning, hoop jumping, and a finale featuring a dozen girls on a single bicycle). When the acrobats came out after the performance, I was amused to note that even their burly bases were about 5'6".

Wednesday was our Great Wall day. We'd met a taxi driver named Liu earlier in the week who spoke good English and offered to hire his car out by the day. He picked us up and drove us out to the Mutianyu section of the Wall, which was less heavily touristed than the closer sections, but still fairly close to Beijing.

The weather was overcast and misty, so most of our pictures from the wall are... atmospheric, rather than spectacular. But it was great weather for hiking around: not too hot. We took a cable car up to the wall itself and then walked to the furthest tower in one direction. Beyond that point, we could see more wall stretching off into the distance, but it was unrestored, so trees were growing up through the middle of it and the towers were crumbling.

We continued back past our starting point to discover that we'd chosen the hard direction to start. We'd clambered up steep, uneven steps (some were knee high, some were an inch), but in the other direction it was largely smooth, rolling flagstones.

After a couple hours, we headed down. Instead of the cable cars, we took toboggans along a metal chute. It was lots of fun until the minders started yelling at us to slow down, and then it was quite a bit of fun.

Liu took us to a Beijing noodle restaurant for a late lunch. It was the best tastiness-to-cost ratio of the trip to date, so we got some more restaurant recommendations from him.

Our last night in Beijing started with dinner at his recommended duck restaurant. Dave brought along a half dozen astronomers from the conference he was in town to attend, and we ordered a couple of ducks. We wanted to get the "Duck" and the "Imperial Duck" to sample the whole range of what duck can be, but the waitress warned us off of the "Duck". We went with the "Choice Duck" instead. The waitress asked us if we were okay with waiting, because the Imperial Duck would take a while to prepare. It sounded like she said 8 minutes, so we shrugged and said sure.

We polished off a lot of side dishes: scallion pancakes, dumplings, eggplant, spinach with peanuts. Then three plates of duck slices appeared. One with just meat, one with just skin, and a third with skin still on the meat. It took us a while, but we ate it all. We were congratulating ourselves for ordering a good amount of food when we noticed that they were carving another duck. It turned out that all three of those plates were the "Choice Duck", and we had yet to start on the "Imperial". The waitress had said 80 minutes, not 8. Luckily, the "Imperial" was delicious. Far and away the best Beijing Duck I've ever tasted. Very greasy. Very flavorful. Excellent with the mint and scallions provided.

We rolled out the door, stuffed, and hopped in a couple of cabs to a bar district north of the Forbidden City. It fronted on a beautiful lake, and was covered with bars and clubs. We ended up having outrageously-priced drinks on a rooftop bar overlooking a bridge under which boats were being paddled.

Most of the story about my escape from Mongolia is here.

I was dropped off at the Erlianhot bus station. The French woman in line in front of me warned me to make sure I didn't get put on the 3:30pm bus to Beijing, since it was scheduled to arrive at 5am. It turned out the soonest bus they were selling tickets for was the 4:30pm anyway. Since 6am is beginning to be a reasonable hour to arrive somewhere, I went ahead and bought it. I tried to get a message out to my friend Dave, who I was planning to meet in Beijing at 10am for brunch, letting him know that I might actually make it in time.

I spent the next couple hours before the departure trying to get money from an ATM (Failure. The Bank of China branch there would only accept chip cards, not swipe cards), to find some internet access (Failure. The only Internet shop I found didn't have enough power to run most of their computers and the teens running it were too busy playing some game on the three machines that were on to allow anyone else to use them), and to get something to drink (Success!).

I've never seen a bus like this one before. The sleeper buses I've seen elsewhere have fairly normal seats that just fold down really far. This one had three rows of bunk beds made from metal tubing. Each person's feet rested in a wedge-shaped sheet metal box that also served as the pillow rest for the person in front of them.

My "seat" was a top bunk. I noticed that most of the top bunks had a metal triangle sticking up on the side of the frame that prevented the foam mattress from sliding sideways as the bus lurched. Mine was missing that little detail. Over the course of the ride, I had to repeatedly push the mattress back into place because it was hanging several inches off of the bunk.

The roads were wildly variable. Often they were beautifully paved divided highways. At other times, there were roadblocks for construction, accidents, or no apparent reason, and the bus had to trundle off into the dirt by the side of the road for a short detour.

We made a couple of stops at roadside rest areas for bathroom breaks (though the men's room at one of them was non-functional). I think most people grabbed food, but the combination of not knowing how long the stop was and not wanting to deal with ordering in Chinese convinced me to just stick to the snacks I'd bought for the train ride.

After the last food stop, I took some Melatonin and went to sleep. I woke up around 6am to find that the bus was stopped in the middle of a cluster of trucks and the drivers were asleep in a couple of the bunks. It seemed like between us and the trucks, the highway was blocked. I don't know if this is a regular thing, or if it was the tail end of the huge traffic jam that has gridlocked Northern China.

Eventually a driver woke up and traffic started moving again. I fired up the GPS (though without any really useful maps) and tried to figure out where I was. We got within 5 minutes driving of the "Beijing" dot on the Garmin world map, and since my hotel was fairly central, I hoped we'd be stopping at a station nearby. However we continued on for another hour (Beijing traffic is not the speediest) and were eventually set down in a street (not a bus station, as far as I could tell).

I hopped a cab to my hotel, checked in, and called Dave's hotel and was put through to his room. The time? 9:30am. We did end up having brunch after all!