Is it worth the risk of Avian Flu?

I’m not sure if I’ve written about them before or not, but scattered around the city there are what we foreigners like to call ‘Muslim noodle restaurants’. They’re mom-and-pop operations run by Chinese Muslims, and specialize in noodles made from scratch. Out in front, sometimes right out on the sidewalk, they pull the dough into long, thin strands and boil them in a big pot. Inside the small shop, you sit on a stool at one of five or six tables, often with strangers when it’s busy, and eat with cheap disposable chopsticks. They all follow this same format, and are sometimes so similar that you might even think that they were a chain.

My favorite Muslim noodle place is right around the corner from the dorm, and I often go there for lunch. I don’t really like Muslim noodles very much, but this place makes really good stir fry as well, which I usually get with some white rice. It’s good food, a perfect distance for a good walk if I’ve been inside all day, and usually not much more than 10 kuai for a meal. On top of all this, they have printed menus (many of these places don’t) with characters, pinyin, and the English translation. It’s great to be able to know what you are ordering and say it to the person in Chinese instead of just pointing at the menu and saying “I want this.” So all in all, it’s a really great place for lunch. Until today.

Today, they got a pet canary.

Another interesting NYT article

This one features a Fudan professor... we're famous.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/22/international/asia/22xu.html

Odds n Ends

So I haven’t been keeping up with my blogs so much recently, and for that I am sorry. I guess it’s a sign of how much I really am getting used to life here, as things that would have been so remarkable before I barely notice now. As I said before, since the trip through the northwest, Shanghai has felt much less foreign.

Last Saturday Professor Ferry took us to a school of Traditional Chinese Medicine, where one of the professors gave us an introductory lecture. TCM differs from western medicine in that it is much more aimed at solving the root problem of an ailment, rather than the symptoms. Because of this, it is not so fast-acting as western medicine, and requires patience. It was interesting to hear about the ways in which a patient could use both disciplines of medicine for their respective strengths to fight a sickness.

On Sunday, we went to the Shanghai Museum, where the curator, Professor Zhou (one of the guest lecturers of our culture course) gave us a personal tour. Besides being very friendly and hospitable, he was very knowledgeable about the exhibits. So instead of just walking through a room full of very old looking clay pots, Professor Zhou told us the where, when, why, and how of many of the pieces, which added a degree of significance to what would have been (to me, anyways) just a bunch of really old stuff. It was also nice to hear the inside stories about how the pieces were acquired by the museum. One of the more interesting acquisitions was a set of 11 ancient bells. Apparently, though they are thousands of years old, modern high-tech tuning equipment found the bells to be perfectly in tune. They come from a set of 14, found somewhere in the west of China, where a local museum holds the other three. Despite Professor Zhou’s best efforts to get these to complete the set, the curator of the other museum insists that it is fact the Shanghai Museum that should give up their bells, so that the full set can be together nearer to its original location.

On Wednesday afternoon, we met with a group of Fudan University students for a sort of cultural exchange discussion. We had given them questions beforehand, so they could prepare for them, but it ended up evolving into more of a give-and-take discussion. It was very interesting (and many times surprising) to see the ways in which our lives and experiences were different in some areas and similar in others. One of the Fudan students was Taiwanese, which added yet another facet to the conversation, as his views almost always differed from the mainland Chinese students.

Last week, we started a new textbook in the language class. Except for the new vocabulary words, it has no pinyin (transliteration) in it. The thing about Chinese characters is that if you don’t know it, you don’t know it. There’s no way to sound it out and pretend you know the meaning, and you would very seldom be able to tell by looking at the radicals in the character itself. So my new motivation for studying is to save myself from embarrassment when I’m called on to read in class. My favorite teacher is the listening/speaking teacher. She’s 24, which is about the average age of the people in my class, so it feels a lot less formal when she teaches. We almost always manage to get her off task, and talk about something entirely different and more interesting than whatever grammar technique we should be practicing. In my opinion, this is a far better way to learn Chinese, speaking about something that you are actually interested in and saying things that you want to say, instead of acting out some hypothetical situation. And when we have these casual conversations in Chinese, I find that I can communicate a lot more than I would have ever imagined. On Wednesday, the other American student and I invited the teacher out for KFC after explaining to her about the rumor that KFC chicken doesn’t actually come from live chickens. I could have never imagined explaining that in Chinese until I tried. I’ve gotten very good at talking my way around vocabulary that I don’t know.

Yesterday afternoon our Japanese friend Mai invited Nora and I to play a very international game of basketball. I’m not very good at basketball, and I usually don’t like it much, but it was a great time. It’s a co-rec group of students of varying ability that plays 5-on-5 three afternoons a week. It reminded me that I should try to get a lot more pickup games (of anything) going back at Union in the spring. It’s really the best way to get exercise. One of my teammates was a Chinese policeman who just graduated from Fudan and lives nearby. He offered to be my “language buddy”, to help me with my Chinese. My hope is that we can just hang out and speak Chinese, since that’s what I most need practice with.

Somebody must have found out that I loved Urumqi’s night market so much, because at some point in the last few weeks, a small piece of it started showing up at the Fudan University gate. Every night, the food vendors come with fresh fruit and stir fry, calling “Chaofan haishi chaomian!” (fried rice or fried noodles) at passing students. For three kuai, they will make it for you on the spot, offering a choice of rice or noodles, chicken or beef, and spicy or mild. Another kuai gets you a fresh apple, and it’s a meal. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the best food in China comes from a vendor’s cart on the side of a street. 

More evidence

In case you didn't believe me when I said that Shanghai is growing...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/18/business/worldbusiness/18bubble.html?hp

20th Birthday, Shanghai style

Wednesday evening, after class, Professor Xie took us out to dinner. Since she didn’t have a bike with her, I gave her a ride to the restaurant on mine. We had a good 15 minute conversation in Chinese. Getting better all the time.

After dinner, we went and got a cake. Since my Chinese zodiac is an ox, we got a cake with a frosting ox on it. We watched the girl make it, it was pretty cool.

After cake, we went out to a place downtown called Zappata’s, where they had free margaritas for the ladies (and therefore anybody that was there with women). Apparently it was also 80s night, so naturally the DJ played songs from the 60s, 70s, and early 90s.

Now for the question of the day: Do you tip a bathroom attendant in China? This question is an absolute puzzle no matter which way I look at it. First, I had only once before been in a bathroom with an attendant, so I don’t even know what the standard is anywhere. It was at a fancy restaurant in Rochester and I was on a date, so I had nobody but the attendant himself to consult on the matter. I knew what his opinion on the matter was, so I didn’t bother asking, and I don’t remember how much I gave him, or if I gave him anything. Now take that unfamiliar situation, and add in the China factor.

In the States, you wouldn’t tip a bathroom attendant more than you would tip a waiter or waitress, would you? After all, it’s not quite as demanding a task to hand somebody towels and soap as it is to remember specific dinner orders for several tables. And besides, it’s a bathroom attendant. Most of the time I’d rather not have somebody stand awkwardly while I take care of my business. So it’s settled that you tip a bathroom attendant less than a server. In China you don’t tip servers.

But then again, this was a bar. At a bar in Shanghai, western culture rules. 90% of the few Chinese people that are in a western bar at any given time are employees, friends or wives of expats, or prostitutes. The rest are all white, and speaking a European language. What determines tipping rules, geography or demographics?

Anyway, I gave the guy the change I had in my pocket, 2 kuai. 

Grasslands, back to Shanghai

The final tourist spot of the trip was to the grasslands. We were the first tour bus there, so it wasn’t too noisy yet, which I was infinitely grateful for. Nora, Tara, and I walked out into the field and listened to the silence while the other tourists got horseback rides. On the bus ride back to the city, I watched out the window and saw herds of mountain goats, sheep, camels, and cows grazing. Some were domestic, others were not.

Then it was time to fly home. Home to Shanghai. We had pizza hut and beer when we got back, after a week full of sub-par food (besides, of course, that which was bought from streetside vendors).

Professor Ferry has another trip planned for us at the end of the term, to Sichuan province (famous for spicy food) and Xi’an (famous for the terracotta army unearthed in the 70s).

Nora and I are still working on the plans for travel before we leave in December, but we have decided to go to Hong Kong and Beijing.

I had classes this morning (Saturday). Apparently a week-long holiday is only allowed to be exactly a week long. You can have the week, but not both weekends… that would just be too relaxing.

Urumqi night market and Heaven lake

There are many words in Chinese that don’t have a good direct translation into English. “Renao” is one of them. Breaking the word up into its two sylables, renao says "hot noisy". My textbook says it means “prosperous”, but that’s a poor translation. Renao describes liveliness, a sort of energy in the air that gets people excited. I think Roy described it best when he said the closest English equivalent would be “bumpin’”. A baseball stadium in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded is renao. The stock market floor on Wall Street is renao. A packed frat party is renao. The night market in Urumqi is renao.

You can feel it from a block away, looking at the smoke rising through the Christmas lights and Chinese lanterns that light the street. People everywhere are laughing, yelling, and haggling. Vendors cook food out of their carts on the street, selling nan (another regional specialty, a sort of fried circular bread, very delicious), and proudly displaying goats and lambs cooked whole (sometimes with a red bow on their head to make them extra appetizing). Men run around with platters of cantelope slices, yelling like peanut sellers at a ball game: “aaaayyyyyGuaGuaGuaGuaGuaGua!” All the food looks, smells, and tastes delicious: homemade yogurt, fresh roasted chestnuts, pomegranate juice, dumplings, nan bread, fried rice, Muslim noodles, lamb kabobs, and dozens of different varieties of fruit. Like the Uygur population that inhabits the city, Urumqi is a mix of every culture in Asia, and they all come together at the night market.

I didn’t have my camera with me either time we went to the night market, so you’ll just have to use your imagination. It’ll probably paint a better picture than my camera could capture anyway.

I did, however, have my camera when we went to Heaven Lake Wednesday morning. It’s like Lake Tear in the Clouds (for those of you who have hiked the Adirondacks), but multiplied by a factor of about a hundred. I’ll let the picture describe this one.

Now I hate to ruin it for you, but I feel that I must once again remind you of the incredible ability of the Chinese to take a place that could be so perfect and grand and silent on its own, and fill it with tourists, noise, and megaphones. It took me twenty minutes walking along the lake to get around a bend in the shoreline and out of the noise. It was worth it though.

On my way back, as I was hiking along the water, a man on a horse yelled to me from the grassy hill above. I looked up, and he motioned for me to go to him. Figuring it must be a park ranger or something, and that maybe it was another unposted rule that you had to walk on the road that ran along the lake, I walked up the hill to him. A few minutes and 100 feet of elevation later, I reached the road, and started walking back on it. The man called me again. I looked back at him, and he motioned for me still to come over.

“Shenme?” I asked (Chinese for “what?”).
“Qi ma.”
“Huh?”
“Ride horse.”
“…ahhh you bastard… Bu yao.”

I turned and walked back down the slope to the water’s edge. The guy had made me hike several minutes up a steep hill, just to ask if I wanted a horseback ride.

In the afternoon, we went to a Silk Road museum. Yawn. But another trip to the night market in the evening made it worthwhile.

Dancing Uygurs and Raisins

Before lunch we went to a Uygur (wee-gur) household. Uygurs are the Chinese Muslim minority population who make up most of the population of Xin Jiang. Their physical appearance is a cross between every different kind of people in Asia; Chinese, Turkish, Mongol, etc. They served us watermelon and grapes, danced for us, and then told us that we all had to dance, and they would be offended if we came to their house and did not. So we all walked/skipped/danced in a circle for a little bit. After a while, the circle stopped, and the Uygurs danced in the middle of the circle for us. Then my worst fears were confirmed, and they began picking people out of the crowd to dance in the circle with them. Of course I got picked; I always get picked. I danced with the Uygur woman for a little bit, following the man’s demonstration as he did the moves one by one. Depending on what he made me do, I may or may not currently be married to the woman… each move had some sort of meaning, but I’m not sure exactly what they were.

Once I had been sufficiently embarrassed, the dancing ended. They brought out the raisins (a regional specialty), and told us about each different variety. They were all very good, and each supposedly have their own medicinal properties; a raisin for the women to boost their yin energy, a different one for the men to boost their yang energy, and so on. After letting us sample them at will and get sufficiently addicted, they kindly let us buy bags of the raisins to take with us.

We went to several more tourist spots in the afternoon, but nothing of much note. All had other tour buses and gift shops, and most sold raisins. In the evening, another bus ride through the desert to the hotel in Urumqi.

Stressful trains, mean little girls, and ancient cities

On the train to Turpan, I slept like a rock. When I woke up Tuesday morning, we were 20 minutes from our stop, and the conductor was waiting by my bed asking for my card. You see, when you get on a train in China, you give the conductor your ticket, which has your car and bed number on it. In return, she gives you a plastic card the size of a credit card, which has your car and bed number on it. In the morning, before it’s time to get off, the conductor (conductress? conductrix?) comes down the train, you give her the plastic card, and she gives you your ticket back. Why all the trouble, you ask? Well, it’s simple. All of these extra steps are in place to make sure that the absentminded American student loses his little plastic card, so that they can scare the shit out of him in the morning when he can’t find it. I did find it, about 30 seconds before I had to get off. It had slid in between the pages of my Chinese-English dictionary. When I got off the train, the conductor was waiting there for me with two uniformed men, ready to take me off to the interrogation room. I gave her my card (much to the disappointment of the uniforms, I’m sure), and she gave me my ticket. Nothing gets the blood flowing like a frantic search first thing in the morning.

At the first tour stop today, the poverty was immediately apparent. When we got off the bus we were immediately bombarded by little girls selling trinkets and bells. They were very charming, so long as you didn’t touch their merchandise. For these girls, you touch it, you bought it. Once it was in your hand, you owed them 10 kuai, and no way in hell were they going to take back little bell. You hold it out, and they cross their arms. When you put it down on the ground, they would turn nasty. We saw one hitting a tourist for not paying up. Luckily we were warned ahead of time, so we didn’t have too much trouble with them.

The site itself was really cool, an ancient, ruined city on the Silk Road that was once one of the world’s greatest centers of commerce. Of course, once we got our tickets and walked through the turnstile, I immediately realized that we had been swindled again. The city was vast, again with an unlimited supply of alternate entrance points. The tour guide had once again paid (with our money) for us to walk through a gate.

This man’s job was to sit and yell at people for climbing on the ruins where they shouldn’t. Of course there were no signs saying where you should and shouldn’t walk, but I suppose life would be boring for him if people knew the rules and followed them. He yelled at me more than once.

Dunes, Camels, Buddhas

Monday morning we took the bus to the desert (different desert) to see the sand dunes. We rode camels to the top of the dunes, which were much bigger than I had expected. I had always envisioned a sand dune being 50 feet high at the most, like a big wave. The bigger ones at this desert were probably 500 feet. So that was cool, except for the Chinese tendency to find a place that could be absolutely stunning in it’s own silence and grandeur, and fill it with tourists, megaphones, gift shops, and other forms of noise. Also, I noticed that the desert is very large. Huge, in fact. There’s an unlimited amount of other places we could entered the desert from. But being tourists as we were, he had to buy tickets, go through a turnstile, and crowd together on one noisy dune. Why not just park anywhere on the roads surrounding the desert and walk in on your own, you ask? Because that would make too much sense.

An old man sweeping the desert. Can't you just hear him? "F-ing sand. I'll never get this place clean."

In the afternoon we went to see the Buddhist grottoes that were carved out of a mountainside, not unlike those that our friends in the Taliban were so intent on destroying a few years ago. They were really grand, but I didn’t really find them that interesting, for some reason. Maybe it was the crowds and megaphones.

Another bus ride through the desert, and we were at the train station for another overnight train to Turpan, in Xin Jiang. These deserts were actually pretty interesting to see as we drove through, because every one was different. Sometimes it would be light brown, and flat, with no sign of life or civilization as far as the eye could see. Sometimes there would be little shrubs poking out of the dry earth. Other times there would be small dunes, or the sand would turn a darker, blacker brown. Every time it was a different variation on the same theme.

Desert Fortress & Bus Ride

We got off the train and met our new tour guide, who would take us for the next couple days until we got on the train to Turpan. The bus, nicer than the first one, took us to Jia Yu Guan fortress.

The fortress was the far western end of the Great Wall during the period when it was most extensive. One of the common myths about the wall is that it was a continuous wall across the country. In fact, the vast majority of it was made up of these fortresses and outposts built at the empire’s edge. If the emperor was having trouble with one of his military officials, he would banish them to man this outpost, in the furthest, harshest land under the empire.

The fortress was very impressive, especially for something so far out in the middle of nowhere. I can only imagine how remote it must have felt in a time where there were no overnight trains. It was fun to walk around on top of the 50-foot walls and look across the desert. For 10 kuai you could stand on the wall and use a bow and set of arrows to pretend you were defending the fortress against the nomadic tribes from the north. I’m proud to say I positively slaughtered the 2-man army of hay bail men, hitting one twice, in the chest and neck, and the other once, square in the face. After a camel ride and a little more exploring, we left the fortress and got on the bus for a 9-hour ride through the desert to Dun Huang.

The bus ride was horrible. It started off as expected, on a 2-lane road that was a little bumpy, but bearable. I tried to get a little sleep but it was still too early, and I wasn’t very tired. After a while, we turned onto a dirt road that ran along the side of a smooth platform that was clearly going to be made into a new road, maybe wide enough for a 4-lane highway. The road was dusty, bumpy, and filled with construction vehicles. For us, sitting in the back of the bus, every bump was amplified, bouncing us off of our seats frequently. In one especially bad section, Roy hit his head on the ceiling after the bus had thrown us all two feet out of our seats. For the first half hour, I looked for the end of the construction zone, waiting to get back on the paved road again. But the end never came. The construction project went on for what must have been 150 kilometers, 6 hours of driving on deeply rutted roads through the desert. By the time we reached Dun Huang, I could feel the grits of dust between my teeth and barely see to the front of the bus. The shower at the hotel in Dun Huang was barely a trickle, but a well appreciated trickle nonetheless.

Sleep on the Train

Overnight train is by far the best way to travel, ever. Trains in general are great, but an overnight train is absolutely amazing. For the price of a train ticket, you get the transportation, a bed for the night, and no time wasted in transit. I’m sold.

I slept intermittently through the night. Before I fell asleep I heard the horn of another train, and thought that it sounded a little bit odd... a little bit higher pitched than most. I thought about it for a few seconds, and a split second before the words "doppler effect" occurred to me, the train on the other tracks rushed by my window with a roar that sounded like a windy lion (What, you've never heard of a windy lion? Just think of the lion at the beginning of a movie, and add wind). The windy lion passed by 3 or 4 more times in the night. Another time I woke up to the boy in the next berth having a nightmare and waking up his sleepy and confused father. When I was asleep, I had a dream that I was at home. It was late and my parents were in bed, and I had the stereo on downstairs, but the bass was too loud. When I turned it down so they wouldn’t wake up, the knob turned but the stereo stayed the same volume, pumping out bass loud enough that I could feel the bump as it played. I woke up to find that it was the click-clack of the train on the tracks.

This all makes it sound like I didn’t get a good night’s sleep, but when I awoke in the morning, I felt well rested. We had stopped about an hour before our final destination, and I sat up and peeked out of the curtains. There was no evidence of civilization besides the station itself. Outside the station wall, a man stood on top of a large mound of dirt, watching the train. Over his shoulder, mountains of brown rose out of the desert. Over their shoulders, rocky, snow-capped peaks rose above the few clouds that hung in the sky. As the train pulled out of the station and continued along the foot of the mountains, I noticed that they began to glow a pinkish orange. I got up and went to the other side of the train to watch the sun rise over the desert. That’s probably one of the reasons I had such a positive reaction to the train ride.

Lanzhou

At 6:40am on Saturday morning, we met outside our dorm where Professor Ferry had a driver waiting to take us to the airport (Hongqiao, not Pudong… for those who absolutely had to know). As expected the airport was mobbed, but things moved pretty smoothly anyway.

A little bit of information about the national holiday: It’s a week-long, nation-wide break. That is, a break for everybody that works outside of the tourist industry. The government highly encourages people to travel and take vacations during the holiday. Not having a Christmas season, this week and another holiday in the spring are the biggest chances to boost the Chinese economy. So everybody with money travels. One of my Chinese teachers says she doesn’t leave her apartment for the entire week because of the crowds. She doesn’t have the money or ambition to leave Shanghai, and the city itself is one of the most popular destinations, which makes the crowds unbearable. So she just stays inside and catches up on her studies for the week. Luckily, we were headed to the middle of nowhere, so the crowds weren’t such an issue.

Another detail you should know before I continue: Chinese vacations are nothing like American vacations. Instead of going to a resort or a beach for some R&R, the vast majority of Chinese vacations are taken with tour companies. As I briefly described before, the goal of these tours is to see as many different places and things as possible. They stop at many different sites per day, giving the tourists half an hour to an hour at each site to walk around and snap a few pictures before being herded back onto the bus to the next site. Every site consists of the following: a parking lot packed with tour buses, a ticket window next to the entrance to the “attraction”, hundreds of tourists following guides with megaphones, and vendors selling the local specialty along with the same carved buddhas and jade necklaces that can be found at every booth in China. There are no exceptions to this formula. On a Chinese tour, you don’t just feel like cattle, you are cattle.

Here’s a decent map of the northwest:
http://www.backtojerusalem.com/images/nw-china.jpg

Our trip started at Lanzhou, on the Huang He (Yellow River) the Gansu province. The northwestern provinces are the most impoverished in China. The tour guides don’t exactly focus on this, but riding the buses and trains from one place to the next gives you a sense for the poverty, which was apparent before the plane even touched down at the airport outside Lanzhou. The land is brown. Everything. Brown. As the plane descended, we could start to see individual farmer’s fields. I’m not sure what crop they grow, but I assume that it had already been harvested, since the fields didn’t look like more than mud. The plane descended further, and still all that was visible was brown fields separated by brown roads with brown hills in the distance. Now we could see peasants in the fields (brown skin, brown clothes, brown hats). Still no sign of anything more. At this point, an image pops into my head. Brown runway. They can’t possibly land a jet airplane on dirt, can they? Can they? At the last second the concrete appeared, and we landed safely and solidly on it.

The first thing I noticed after getting off the plane was cool, dry air. It was very refreshing, after being in the heat and humidity since May. We met our tour group, and got on an old bus, which would take us to the first of many tourist sites.

The closest we ever came to seeing what the people in rural China really live like was on the bus rides across the countryside. Here we’d get one-second glimpses into the life of the peasants, living in their dirt-floor homes, washing in the irrigated ditch that ran along the road, and working in the fields. The most notable thing about the 40-minute bus ride from the airport to downtown Lanzhou was that every inch of arable land was used for farming. This is true of the entire country, which has the world’s fourth largest land area, but an alarmingly small portion of arable land off of which to feed an enormous population. There were feeble attempts at terrace farming on the hills, but the terraces had all washed out and run together, further adding to the image of the place as a poor, depressed, and just plain crappy place to live.

When we got to the city, the touring began. The bus dropped us off at one spot after another. The tour guide spoke in Chinese, so the sites themselves (especially the historical ones) did not have much interest for us. By the end of the day we had visited a big old-looking metal post, a water wheel on the river (where pigskin raft rides down the Huang He were offered), and some sort of a temple built on the steep hillside across the river from downtown. I found the street-side food vendors much more engaging. As the tour walked through town, we would stay toward the back and get homemade yogurt, hot sweet potatoes, spicy homemade potato chips, and roasted nuts. All were cheap, all were delicious. From now on, I’m going to try to eat my meals out of a cart on the side of a busy street.

View of downtown from the hillside temple.

After the touring was over for the day, we had 2-3 hours to kill before our overnight train left for Jia Yu Guan, so we went to a hotel for foot massages. Foot massages are awesome, but they can sometimes be hit or miss. The one I had in Lanzhou just so happens to be the best I’ve ever had.

Triumphant Return

We’re back. A trip like that makes Shanghai feel like home. And that, my friends, is really weird.

Exciting tales of adventure to follow.