China

Just Hanging Out

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Yesterday an older woman from Ireland and I tried to find the Night Market at the end of the bridge over the Mekong River where you used to be able to get great BBQ meat cooked over coal fires. Not found.

Of the many uninterested Chinese we stopped along the way to get information, a young strolling couple with a few words of English helped us. The man called his old English teacher from school on his cell phone so we could explain what we were looking for. But after my simplified request, she kept asking “what do you want” obviously not understanding me. And she was his English teacher, I thought!

Finally we gave up the idea of the Night Market when they said “follow us.” They took us to an open-air shack near the new beautifully lit bridge. In the “kitchen” we pointed to a few vegetables and some pork. In a matter of seconds we were feasting…on delicious food so full of flavor but probably loaded with MSG. Turns out the woman is a doctor at the local hospital but her husband said he “lost his job” at the same hospital. I was curious as to why he “lost” his job but didn’t want to pry. She was six months pregnant. “I want a boy,” her husband said. Knowing the Chinese can pay a fine for a second child I asked how many children they intended to have. “I only need one,” she said with finality!

Later, back at the Mei Mei Cafe where foreigners hang out, a 45 year old good-looking adventure-hooked guy from Belgium who has lived here several years regaled us with stories…many of them dealing with corruption. For example, a few years ago he, through his girlfriend, rented a building to remodel for a cafe. He signed a contract for the rental for five years. But after two years he was informed by the police they were tearing down the building for a big high-rise. So he lost his investment. A contract in China means nothing, he said.

The Night Market is no longer, he says. The Chinese are glad to be rid of it…having been full of prostitution and the drugs coming in from nearby Burma.

Then we discussed the latest biography simply entitled “Mao” that is banned in China. “Yes,” he said, I have it locked up in my room!” “My god,” he said, “if only 5% of it is true…!” We talked about “The Coming Collapse of China” written by a Chinese Professor at an American university which I had mischievously passed on to a Swiss girl studying Chinese economics in Shanghai on my last trip to China a couple years ago. Steven agreed with the tenuous situation in China where the dangerous rate of growth of the GDP can’t continue indefinitely. But the book was written when Deng (who said it was “glorious to be rich”) was President. President Hu, Steven says, is trying to help China avoid a crisis.

Steven, the Belgian, is planning on taking his Dai girlfriend of three years to Belgium for a 12 week visit. He said he could hardly wait to see her eyes! Getting her a tourist visa will be very tedious because so many Chinese try to get into Europe using falsely filled out papers. “They all lie because all Chinese want out of China,” he said. Besides the bureaucratic red tape, they will have to travel to Guangzhou for an interview at the Belgian Embassy. She will only be able to visit with a “Schengen” visa while there. (If you don’t know, the Schengen countries are the ones in Europe (I think there are four) who no longer recognize borders.

Then we talked about the attitude of the dominant Han Chinese toward the ethnic “minorities” as the ethnic groups are called. About one third of the 800,000 people of this region are Dai. Another third are Han Chinese and the rest includes the Hani, Lisu and Yao as well as lesser-known hill tribes such as the Aini, Jinuo, Bulang, Lahu and Wa. These beautiful friendly self-sufficient intelligent people, who live in the mountains with views that Californians would kill for, have historically been viciously discriminated against and the attitude of the Han is that they are dirty and stupid. Consequently the minorities are turning against their own cultures…so Steven has been teaching his Dai girlfriend, Orchid, about her Dai history and origins including that fact that many years ago the huge Dai army once defeated the encroaching Han dynasties. Ironic that it takes a western foreigner to counsel his culturally bifurcated girlfriend. The 37 year old Orchid, who owns and manages the Mei Mei Cafe, is certainly not stupid. Also ironic that since China has discovered that Western tourists are interested in seeing the minorities, it is starting to help promote their welfare as a source of tourism.

With my Irish friend off to Dali, I had breakfast this morning with a lovely woman from Holland who has traveled all over Indonesia. Hmmm. Think Sumatra may be next after Thailand. This is a good time to visit there, she said, as it is not the rainy season. Good! We had a long discussion about China. We agreed that one does not “like” China so much as one finds it incredibly interesting!

Other travelers can be just as enlightening as the country one is visiting…

High Tech In China

Posted on by Laughingnomad

I have not been able to access Wikipedia or the external links to Blogspot and Bootsnall blogs since I have been in China. My daughter-in-law who lives in Beijing says that she often can access Wikipedia by going to Answers.com first.

Interesting.

As small as Jinghong is there are internet cafes every few yards on the street where I am staying…each filled with 50 to a 100 spikey-haired bed-head boys all playing video games. Internet usage is very inexpensive and China is very concerned about young people becoming addicted to computer games. I use the internet and they are there. I walk by hours later and the same ones are there! The internet places sell instant noodles and drinks so they don’t even have to leave to eat! At the request of parents China has even introduced “recovery” programs.

Related: The beginning of March, China is cutting the cost of mobile phone usage by 50%. Every other person already has phones almost permanently attached to their ears!

On To Jinghong

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Too cold to do anything in Kunming so am flying out today to Jinghong in the south of China where it is reportedly warm. Was in Jinghong in the tropical Xishuangbanna Region in December 2004 when it was much warmer than this year.  Lonely Planet says there are over 800,000 people  in Jinghong, the capitol, and the many surrounding minority villages. It will be fun to go there again. It is unusually cold in Kunming and nothing is heated…I mean nothing…not hotels…not restaurants…nothing… including my hotel room. During this unusually cold winter there is an energy crisis in China and President Hu has called on the people to conserve. But the heat pad under my bottom sheet is toasty and I can lie in bed and watch Channel TV Asia with information provided by Reuters out of Singapore…but am not sure.

Big deal on TV the last couple days is Spielberg’s resignation as artistic director of the Olympic games. President Hu (who?) says politics shouldn’t be mixed with the Olympics. But he doesn’t mention the fact that China is the biggest provider of arms to the Sudan, of course. Or that China is blocking a UN Security Council resolution against Sudan because China gets most of Sudan’s oil. Guess Spielberg et al figured it doesn’t do any good to talk nice to China and this was the only way to get it’s attention. A Chinese official says it is not China’s foreign policy to react to criticism.  BTW, China is very worried about the possibility that demonstrations will mar the games.

And then there is the case of the two spies for China that were arrested by the U.S. President Who says the accusations against China’s spying is a bunch of hooey. He didn’t say it that way of course. He says the U.S. is trying to start up the cold war again.

So it goes…

I plan on uploading pictures of Josh’s menu items when I get to a place where I can use my own computer.  He says that small groups of the Olympic committee have been meeting at the Hilton for the last four years, that during the Olympics the hotel will be 95% full with the entire Committee and that he is bracing for the walloping restaurant business.

Almost Didn’t Make The Plane To Kunming

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Hard to believe I was in Beijing for two weeks. But you know what they say about stinking guests if they stay too long. So today I flew to Kunming in Yunnan Province in the south of China. Stewardess announced that the flight would take 3.5 hours to go 200 kilometers. I figured there was something wrong there…think she meant 2000 kilometers. Warmer than Beijing but still damn cold…39 degrees F. Had hoped for it to be warmer this far south. Might have to keep on going.

But before I could get to the plane, I had an adventure! Got out of the taxi at the airport and walked around to the back of the car to get my backpack out of the trunk. Then I’ll be damned if the driver took off like a shot with me flapping my arms, running and yelling after him in the middle of the road…to no avail. A nice taxi was coming up behind me…told me to get in…he ran the first taxi down to get him to stop. Boy…woke me up! The driver was just stupid! Didn’t even know why we were pulling him over until we got him stopped and pointed to the trunk! My rescuer kindly refused money. Travel tip: don’t get out of a taxi, if you have baggage in the trunk, until you see the driver getting out too!

I’m in the Camellia Hotel where I stayed both in 2003 and 2004. Great buffet breakfast comes with the room…$28 a night. Couple bars, internet cafe…mostly lauwai (same as gringo only it’s what the Chinese call anyone not from China). There’s a hostel here too…but mostly with twenty-somethings and I want my peace and quiet so I have my own room in the main building. Channel TV Asia is the only English language station but I get most of the world news….as if I needed it. Announcers have a British accent…think it’s operated by Reuters.

Same cafe down the street but with a different name…Chinese and western comfort food…but now with free WiFi. Around the corner is MaMa Fu’s Cafe…hot and sour noodle soups. And next door is a big noodle shop with Over The Bridge Noodle Soup…platter of meat and vegetables comes to the table and you drop the food in and it cooks in the still hot broth…indigenous Yunnan style soup.

No colorful minority peoples selling things in the street now. Guess it’s either too cold or the government has banished them.

I really like the neighborhood here…with a market nearby. A group of crazy Europeans are biking China in this cold…bicycles all parked in the street in the front of a sports clothing shop while they make repairs…older Chinese men stopping by to peer at the loony western barbarians.

Almost Lost On The Subway

Posted on by Laughingnomad

This week Josh and I went to the Beijing Exhibition which is a miniature replica of the city in a huge building. Josh says they have one of these in every major city. Very well done! Then we walked through Tiananmen Square. It was full of tourists as we are still in the Chinese New Year season…one family asked to have our pictures taken with them. You know…we were a curiosity! I have had that happen before in rural China and other out-of-the-way places.

Then we were going to take the subway back to Lido…the neighborhood where Josh lives. The subway was packed of course. Josh says, “get on!” Which I did. Only there was no room for Josh! The doors closed and the train took off with Josh standing on the platform! As he receded from sight I hollered Josh! Josh! with my nose pressed against the door window! The Chinese on the train thought that was pretty funny! Stupid Laowi (foreigners)! I had just been following Josh around and had no idea where to get off. So I got off at the next stop and called Josh on the cell phone and told him where I was. What did we do before cell phones! So along comes the next train with Josh’s sweet face in the window!

2008 Olympic Venues

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The two most impressive Olympic venues are the National Aquatics Center or simply the “Water Cube” and the “Bird’s Nest.”

The “Water Cube,” a palatial structure with an area of 80,000 sq meters that is white in the daytime and blue at night, was completed January 28, 2008. Underneath a pure and simple facade, this translucent building embodies a complex and unrestricted framework as well as environmentally advanced technology that has become a landmark structure.
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According to the Official Olympic web site, the shapes woven within the steel framework of the “Water Cube” symbolize a membrane of water molecules…a “pure and natural beauty.” Josh says the membrane structure ‘cloth’ is made of translucent teflon. But the welding of the irregular steel framework was the most difficult part of the design and construction.

The web site goes on to say that the “designers created the steel structure of the “Water Cube” based on the so-called “bubble theory,” a somewhat controversial theory because of its many unsolvable problems. When the designers of the National Aquatics Center decided to practice the bubble theory, it drew great attention in the international architecture field. Almost all of the architects that have studied the bubble theory have come to visit the venue construction site.”

“It took only 10 months for workers to build the large-scale, irregular steel structure of the Olympic venue, which is considered a miracle in the history of world architecture.”

“The design and construction of the ‘Water Cube’ steel structure stunned the whole world,” the web site goes on to say. “The Guardian, a British newspaper, published an article calling it a masterpiece of theoretical physics.”

Leave it to the Chinese to wax ecstatic. But it IS impressive! But nowhere do the Chinese say that the architects were all from out of the country.

The “Bird’s Nest” lies adjacent to the the “Water Cube” and creates a nice design foil. At night the inside of the shell is lit up of course and the structure of the actual venue inside is beautifully illuminated. A man made “lake” in the shape of a dragon frames the building as seen blow in the model at the Beijing Exposition.

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Chinese New Year Of The Rat

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Chinese New Year’s Eve Wednesday February 6 2008. Words cannot do justice to the fireworks we viewed across the city from the rooftop of the Hilton Hotel at midnight. It was so cold Josh had trouble holding a camera. It will go on every night for a week,
Josh says!

Amy’s International School

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Last Friday I went to the Yew Chung International School of Beijing with Amy, my daughter-in-law.

Seventy five years ago an optimistic young woman, Madame Tsang Chor-hang, barely graduated from a teacher’s school, emerged from a calamitous time in China and founded Yew Chung in 1932. It grew into the Yew Chung International School in Hong Kong and then expanded to Shanghai in 1993 and later to Beijing in 1995. Now, Yew Chung International School Silicon Valley in Mountain View California emphasizes E-Learning which means that there are now no longer any geographical constraints to learning.

The director says that “Yew Chung has pioneered an exciting new paradigm in international education that leads students to an inner transformation whereby they become both Eastern and Western. There are now massive opportunities for improving the human condition but we need to develop new concepts, new instincts and new politics of decision-making whereby we are first a global citizen, second a national citizen, and third a local citizen.”

The web site goes on to say that global education emphasizes global awareness. Teachers and administrators, who are informed and committed, empower students to realize they can make a difference…to go out into the world with a “common purpose and a deep commitment to resolving global issues confronting the planet.”

Wow…!

Students have to have a foreign passport. The school offers the International General Certificate of Secondary Education affiliated with Cambridge to students in years 10 and 11. It offers the International Baccalaureate to students in years 12 and 13.

Amy teaches modern history to 9th, 10th and 11th level students…mostly children of business people, embassy workers and workers in other organizations. The students come from all over the world…her 11th year history class that I sat in on had an Indian, Singaporean, Korean, an Italian-Chinese, a Malay, an American Chinese, a Caucasian American, a French and a Thai.

I was truly amazed. Both by the students and by Amy. Amy is an excellent teacher…giving energetic narrative to complicated historical events…and the motivations behind them. The students were even more amazing. So well-trained…so eager and ready to learn. All classes are small and taught in English…not the first language for most of these students. Mandarin is a mandatory subject and all students become bilingual in Mandarin/English.

The staff is truly global. Examples: Dr. Sandy Pike is the secondary coordinator and biology teacher. Her father was a British Medical Officer who lived in Hong Kong, England and New Zealand. She got her degree in biology in Hong Kong, then did 18 months of missionary work and teaching English in the bush in Zimbabwe. She left the mission a few days before it was overun by rebels when all her friends, teachers and students were murdered. She stayed in South Africa for awhile after she met her husband (the physics teacher) and they have taught all over the world…Africa, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and now Beijing. One science teacher is a white South African who has been on staff for 4 years. One teacher is a Black from Ireland (not black Irish), another is a Chinese-Canadian, several other Canadians, a few Caucasian Americans, some from Australia and New Zealand, Koreans…the list goes on.

A dream job in a dream school.

Beijing

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In the airport, while waiting for my luggage to show up, I scanned the crowd of people in the waiting area and had no trouble spotting Josh…three heads above all others. Eye candy for me! This is the first time I have seen him since we left our sublet in Brooklyn in January 2006!

So now I am ensconsed in Josh’s high-rise two bedroom apartment in “Lido” which is a relatively new neighborhood off the 4th ring road (there are 6 ring roads) in the neighborhood of the Lido (Holiday Inn) Hotel on the east side…not far from the airport. Beijing has 15.4 million of China’s 1.3 billion people! But traffic is relatively minimal here and not much honking…and as in most of China (and most of the rest of the world for that matter) there are no lanes and we get a real kick out of watching the intersection below from our 11th floor windows. Turning from no-lanes into absolutely the wrong “lanes”, they are so hesitant…so careful not to bung up their new new cars. (Josh says that 6,000 new cars appear on the roads in Beijing every day!) Every few minutes all cars stop…tied up in the middle of the intersection…until someone moves and it begins to unravel. No road rage. No one is upset that someone has turned in front of them. There could be a lesson here for the U.S. where everyone expects the rules to be followed and noses get bent out of shape if not.

This part of the city where many expats live is a striking contrast to the hutong near Tianamen Square in the center of the city where I stayed last time I was here in 2004. I found french pastry and great coffee in the Parisian Baguette up the street and the citibank ATM was very generous with me.

Waiting for Amy to get home from teaching in her school, Josh and I discuss Chinese commodities. I had lugged a duffel full of bath sheets and body cream to Beijing. The towels cost almost a $100 each here. I bought six at a Macy’s sale in Portland for $89. Travelers expect luxuries to be ridiculously cheap here. But, Josh says, goods made in China are shipped directly to foreign markets. The locals don’t get them…unless they are traded back into China which results in a very high price…like the towels. Nuts.

Josh took me to a great Korean restaurant my first night here while Amy finished preparing for her last day of school before the Chinese New Year holiday break. Then he turned on the little green and white froggy whose ears blow steam next to my bed. We are living on the edge of a desert, Josh says, so we keep the humidifiers on.

Guangzhou

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Arrived in Guangzhou (pronounced guan-jo) from Hong Kong yesterday on a sleek new train. I had no idea where the baggage area was. Had paid as much for the baggage as I did my ticket! Then, as I emerged from the immigration check area, from out of nowhere came a man with my two checked bags. Then luckily headed down the escalators with a duffel, a backpack, a carry on and my personal bag without turning head over heels.

Hundreds of people with bags, buckets and sacks full of I don’t know what were sitting and squating on the dirty floor…trying to get to their families during Chinese New Year. Remains of food, paper and boxes were strewn everywhere. Apparently they had been here awhile waiting for trains further inland that had been canceled by the snowstorms. I had forgotten how the Chinese throw their garbage on the ground to be swept up by the next little old lady or man with a broom and shovel. Had also forgotten how loud and aggresive the language sounds. I fleetingly wondered how long it took Josh and Amy to get used to China.

No taxis to be seen. Apparently you have to walk down the street from the station to find the taxis but before I could do that I was approached by a man who offered taxi service. This little man took off, practically running, with my bags as if they weighed nothing. He never looked back as he left me scrambling to keep up several yards behind. But his car was no taxi. I suspect I paid handsomely for the cross town trip to the Hotel Elan. But I didn’t care. No way could I carry all those bags all the way down the street. And he knew it. Travel Tip:  Walk out to the street and get a normal taxi with a meter. On the way he pointed out all the places I could buy different goods. I didn’t tell him I wasn’t here to buy anything.

Guangzhou, in this southern part of China called Canton, where most people speak Cantonese-not Mandarin, is a comparatively rich wholesale marketing area. Huge multi-level buildings harbor the latest trade fairs with goods made all over China. Nice hotels abound for buyers from all over the world. Down the street from me is a 6 story building with nothing but underwear! I thought to myself that the market niche for designers could be unending in China but they just copy.  To get to the underwear building you cross the street through a huge underground tunnel with more underwear. Turn a corner and you can continue down the street, underground, for as far as the eye can see…all underwear! And that is just my neighborhood!

My hotel was listed in the Lonely Planet guidebook as a medium-priced one. No more cheap Chinese guesthouses with no heat for me in the winter! This is a brand new one, cheaply made, tucked in between noodle and tea shops on a busy side-street. It is a smallish boutique hotel, art deco style…roomy with all the latest bathroom fixtures…but best of all free WiFi. It has all the amenities…hot water kettle, refrigerator, safe, queen sized bed with 4 down pillows and blinding white sheets and comforter. I am going into some detail because this would be a 4 star hotel in the states. I am paying $40 a night with an elaborate buffet breakfast for no extra charge.

It is raining and yukky outside. Last night the ATM at the Bank of China around the corner was out of cash. Travel Tip: Apparently you have to go early in the day so this morning I scored some yuan. So aside from eating at an open noodle shop next door where I am starkly reminded how the Chinese spit their bones and other detritus out on the table beside their plates and bowls in front of them, or on the floor, I am staying inside to nurse a brutal dripping head cold.

I am discovering how much China has changed in the two years since I was last here. Where before there were maybe 4-6 TV channels there are now 70. One is listed as English language but only part of the time and then it’s full of propaganda. But you can watch dubbed U.S. sports events!

With luck I fly out to Beijing tomorrow night…30 miles to get outside the city to the airport.