B sites continued

On Sunday, I managed to catch up with a few friends and family members before heading off for some more sightseeing in Beijing!  First, I went to the Zhihua temple, which was built in 1443 by a corrupt eunuch as his personal ancestral hall, but has since been converted into a Buddhist temple.  Its a great example of Ming architecture and is more real in its faded beauty than some of the more modern, touched-up temples.

 There were also some unique points about the temple, like the gigantic sutra cabinet that apparently revolved as well as a hall filled with tiny niches on the wall with little sutra figures in them - supposedly 9,999, but I didn't count!

The temple also hosts live Buddhist monk performances of music from the Ming dynasty, using instruments that were all unknown to me, including little pan-sized gongs, a flute, a tiny tiny reed instrument that looked like an oboe but only 4 inches long with no keys, something with many bamboo rods of different lengths, and a drum.  It was pretty impressive, and also impressive that the monks made no attempt to look interested in what they were playing.

After getting my fill of Buddhist temple, I headed to the Ming Dynasty City Wall Ruins Park, a 1.5 km stretch of wall refurbished with many of the original bricks (but which in the interim have served as houses, air-raid shelters, and toilets).  The wall itself was pretty boring, but little did I know that the Plum Blossom Festival was just starting in the park, and there were many amateur photographers focused on the beautiful flowers.  I might have joined them just briefly... ;)

At the end of the wall was the Dongbianmen Watchtower complete with guards in period costume, with a modern art gallery inside.  I climbed up onto the wall near the watchtower, and except for the banners, it looked like any other ancient Chinese city wall I've seen, similar to the ones in Xi'an and Pingyao.  Or perhaps it was just the grey sky that was the same...

The art gallery though, was pretty cool, here is my favorite painting, called 'Traffic' or something like that.

And the building itself was a neat example of how the Chinese built multiple-story buildings in years past - with gigantic columns and beams, always always painted red.  

And that wrapped up my weekend of Beijing-tourism-lite: look forward to more hardcore sightseeing adventures when my cousins Judy and Lisa arrive on Saturday!

B sites in Beijing

Having exhausted the major tourist sites in my host city, I have turned to the deeper pages of my Insider's Guide to Beijing in search of interesting places off the beaten path.  I've got a short list of places I'd like to hit before I leave, and now that I have a better idea of transportation here, I can go to 1 or 2 places in a weekend afternoon and still have plenty of time for sleeping in and relaxing!

I started this weekend with lunch with some people at Wangfujing, previously famous for its night market of 'pretty much anything on a stick' including slugs and scorpions that are still wriggling, but more recently well known for its attempted anti-government 'protest' several weeks ago.  There were rumors that the government erected a fake construction wall in front of the McDonalds, site of the supposed demonstration, and I saw it on Saturday, certainly taking up a lot of potential protest room in the plaza.

After lunch, I headed off to the Beijing Tap Water Museum, which intrigued me, I wanted to go so I could say I had been!  They are very proud of their achievements in China, and it seems like signs at touristic places are always touting that they were the first to do this or that.  I was curious what they could be touting at the tap water museum since you still can't drink the tap water here for fear of bacteria and heavy metals!  The museum started off with a courtyard that was the site of the old water collection and pumping facility: check out this ginormous pipe!  It brought water to Beijing from somewhere far away.

There were several ground wells that were built in the 70s when the authorities realized they didn't have enough water for the swelling population, including one adorned with a water goddess of some kind, bizarrely kept behind a locked door.  I took this picture through the crack in the door, that's why its so skinny, but its a shame that its kept out of sight!

The signs around the campus were all very inspirational - its amazing how even a defunct water processing plant can be made to sound grand!

There was also an old watchtower for the premises, although the signs didn't say what exactly they were watching for.  It looks a little sad now though, as the view from the top has been truncated by modernity:

Inside the museum building itself was a little disappointing as the English signage didn't cross the threshold...but there were still some interesting exhibits.  I translated one sign to learn that there is a water network node for checking pressure close to my apartment - good to know!  There were many modern pictures of people in official-looking white coats peering at test tubes, and several of men in suits shaking hands at the sites of new water towers.  There was also a Handbook for Water Security, something I would never have thought of needing for the Olympics:

And the oh-so-necessary 'chop' or official stamp - in fact, apparently many of them were needed for the water company.  If every company and institution has this many stamps, no wonder its an effort to get anything approved here, it must take them a while to figure out which stamp to use!

Sorry for the bad quality, the lighting and glass case were impossible.

As I was relaxing after my excursion with a coffee, it hit me just how citified I have become in Beijing, because it took a while before this view became unnatural looking:

Any guesses where, Beijingers?

Beijing with Andrew

After we arrived back from Yangshuo, Andrew hit some of the major tourist attractions in the mornings and then I joined him in the mid-afternoons after work.  On Wednesday he started with Tianenmen Square and the Forbidden City, and I joined him for a walk around the Temple of Heaven, which no matter how many times I return is always a relaxing part of the city.  As in so many places in Beijing, the juxtaposition of old and new is sometimes startling, as in this view from the Round Altar where the emperor committed sacrifices to heaven.  Afterwards we got Beijing-style hotpot, which was good but slightly embarrassing since neither of us knew exactly how to eat it and the waiter kept having to show us!

On Thursday, after having yet another stressful trip to the police station to register him in Beijing (who knew they would ask for his tickets to Guilin!) he accompanied me to work to get the grand tour.  In London, Andrew works in a radiotherapy department in a hospital, so he was interested to see the radiotherapy department at my hospital.  I'd never seen it either, so it was an interesting tour.  We just hoped to poke our nose, accompanied by a student, but in typical over-the-top Chinese nice-ness, my boss called the head of the radiotherapy department who arranged a tour for us.  Andrew soon lost me in questioning the resident about detailed radiotherapy things.  At the end, he said that my hospital (the best cancer hospital in all of China) is about at the level of your average hospital in the UK, with some things better and some worse, but lagging in technology to the US.  Interesting.  We had dinner with Adam/Alison and then went to an event with a expat group called 'ChocoJing' that basically involves chocolate.  We had several Belgian chocolate and beer pairings...mmmm, so good!

On Friday, Andrew went to the Great Wall while I went to work and then I introduced him to some of my friends afterwards at dinner followed by drinks in the Houhai area of town, around a beautiful lake.  We slept in Saturday morning (thank goodness!), then went shopping at the Pearl Market and to get Dim Sum at an awesome restaurant a little north of town.  We just missed the Yonghegong Temple closing, which I regret, since it really is a good introduction to what a buddhist temple looks like.  On his last day in Beijing, we did some more shopping, and went to the Ancient Observatory, which is where ancient emperors observed the heavens and stars and predicted the future.  There were also many instruments on display from more recent times, fabricated by visiting Jesuit priests in an attempt to woo the Emperors over to Christianity.

The Chinese astronomical regions.

My favorite astronomical instrument; it was a water clock of sorts called a 'clepysdra' - but i just liked the rabbit!

We ended out the day by enjoying savory Peking Duck at Da Dong Duck Restaurant, which was the perfect end to a great visit!

These are the duck chefs tending the hanging ducks in gigantic wood-fired ovens. The rack in the middle is for hanging the ducks after cooking to drip the fat away.

Updates from Beijing

Just a few random updates from my life recently:

--The government heat just went off for the spring.  In areas of China north of the Yangtze River, the government supplies heat to most apartments and other buildings, and it turns on and goes off on set dates, changeable only for extreme weather conditions.  There was talk back in November that the heat would go on early because of extreme cold, but it didn't, only coming on November 15th, to everyone's extreme relief.  And it went off right on schedule on March 16th, when I was struck by a chill sitting on my couch next to the window and realized the radiator was cold.  This is actually mostly a good thing for me, however, as I was unable to control the heat at all in my apartment and it was mostly SO HOT that it was sometimes difficult to fall asleep.  I could have opened the window, but the pollution outside made me averse that option, so mostly I have walked around scantily clad and slept with no sheets.  Now, since it is warming up outside (60 F today!) it is slightly chilly in here, but manageable!

-- I took 4 successful taxi rides yesterday (more than I normally take in a month)!  'Successful' means that the taxi driver understand my pronunciation of my address and managed to get me to the right place. In one of the taxis I even managed to have a (albeit limited) conversation with the driver that included him asking me if I had a boyfriend (yes) and if I had any kids yet (no, thankfully!)  I'm not sure where he was going with this line of conversation, but as I didn't understand what came next, I was spared!

--And I have just been published for the first time in a scientific journal!  It is actually a paper from my work in France at the Institut Laue-Langevin on my Fulbright year.  More papers from China are in the pipeline, but this was especially exciting as it is my first ever!
Link to paper: http://scripts.iucr.org/cgi-bin/paper?S1744309111002351

Rest of Yangshuo trip

First, a few updates on world news as it affects China and me:
- The government crackdown in China has intensified to affect many aspects of the internet, which is now pretty slow all the time.  The only way I can get gchat or other normally-unaffected things is through my vpn, which so far is holding up.  Adam's vpn service was cracked by the government and he was unable to access blocked sites for several days.

- So far, wind around Japan is still heading out to the Pacific ocean and not towards China.


And now, a return to travel blogging :)  Our last full day in Yangshuo dawned surprisingly sunny and warm, since it had rained all the previous day.  We decided to venture out to a nearby mountain/rock formation named Moon Hill, so named because of a round hole in the mountain.  Really it is a natural bridge, but with more on top than just a bridge.  We biked from the guesthouse to the park, raced past the touts guarding the entrance, and headed up the (what seemed like) miles of stone steps.

When we got to the top, a really old lady sold us Coke and postcards and we had a spectacular view of the surrounding rock formations.  I'm afraid the pictures don't do it justice because there was some lingering mist from the rain the day before, but I'll include a few anyway.  We stayed on top of the mountain just to gawk for quite a while, we had almost a 360 degree view.

Afterwards, we biked into Yangshuo proper and found a hidden gem - the Lotus Vegetarian Restaurant. Its hard to find truly vegetarian Chinese food since so many foods involve at least broth or fat, but this place was amazing.  We had fried and battered eggplant, pumpkin soup, a peanut/cracker/veggie mix with spectacular carrot flowers, one other dish that I'm forgetting (eek!) as well as ginger tea.  We were so full!

The spectacular peanut/cracker mix ala carrot

We got slightly lost on the way back to the guesthouse but managed to run into some other guests, one of whom luckily spoke Chinese, and we eventually made it.  We spent the evening hanging out in the hotel restaurant, playing Monopoly Deal and chatting with other guests.  The next day we left Yangshuo to head back to Beijing; more on Andrew's Adventures in Beijing soon.  See below for some pictures from our time in Yangshuo, including days I've already talked about in the blog.

View from the guesthouse courtyard

The bamboo boats on the Yulong River

The view from our raft - complete with trigger happy tourists like us!

A farmhouse on the bike trail

Yangshuo on the rainy day we visited

On the Li River in Yanshuo

At the cooking class - yes, that is the biggest knife i've ever used

The formations at sunset

Department Meetings

Every Friday afternoon around lunch time, the Epidemiology Department has a meeting.  Everyone involved with the department goes to the main conference room on the 2nd floor around 11:30 (lunch time for many of the department), and gathers around the big table.  Important people sit at the table and students sit in the chairs around the wall or in the back of the room.  Most of the meetings start with the distribution of snack food (since its lunch time) which can vary from chocolate to crackers to dried fish and squid to beef jerky.  The dried fish is very common, which I have learned to politely decline. 

Then the meetings normally start with Dr. Qiao (my boss, and the head of the department) giving updates on research activities being done by members of the lab.  He might let students talk, or not, depending, and normally he'll talk for about 30 minutes.  Then one of the older staff members (whose name I can never remember) normally gives an angry diatribe about random things that the students can do better.  She always seems so annoyed that its almost funny, the students tell us that no one likes her.  Topics range from how the students don't clean the bathroom enough to not properly clocking out to washing your own desks…basically all silly mundane stuff that could be handled by email or in about 5 seconds in a meeting, not in 30 minutes of angry-sounding lecturing.  I've personally named her 'Angry Lady' and my friends know exactly who I'm talking about.

Of course, since the entire meeting is in Chinese, Adam and I are pretty bored during these meetings, which can stretch anywhere from 1-1.5 hours.  At the beginning of the year, we would both try hard to at least look attentive, looking at whoever was talking and sounding out Chinese words in our heads.  However, its hard to look attentive for hours when you can't understand a thing, and we both kind of resent that we have to go at all, since its obvious to everyone involved that we can't understand what's happening.  Its more of a show of interest in the department, and acceptance that since we're part of the department we have to go no matter what, than a mode of information exchange.  SO, Adam and I have developed different modes of coping with the boredom -- he plays Snake on his cell phone, and I read classics on the book reader on my iPod.  (only classics are free - right now i'm in the middle of the Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe).

The meeting last Friday was slightly more interesting than normal, however, as the diatribe by Angry Lady was focused on warning the students away from the 'protests' that are scheduled in Beijing in coming weeks.  There is an anonymous person posting somewhere abroad (or perhaps in Beijing with a VPN) who is urging Beijingers to gather in a different shopping district each Sunday for a protest against the government and for human rights.  So far, each protest has been attended by more police in riot gear than by demonstrators, but the government has shown signs of nervousness, including building a huge fake construction wall in front of the site of the first scheduled protest, deploying street cleaners to clear the street, and posting policemen every 5 feet.  And apparently they've unleased the fury of local officials in the Communist party to lecture members to stay at home; Angry Lady is apparently an officer in the hospital's communist party, and so was authorized to lecture on the subject.  Interestingly, all the students I asked during the meeting (in whispers, of course) did not know what the protests were about and felt that the government would be willing to change to make itself better, but that protests were a threat to stability.  They sounded exactly like the propaganda coming from the government and Angry Lady herself, so I think she was preaching to the choir already anyway, but it made for an interesting meeting. 

Yangshuo Chefs

Andrew and I can officially make edible Chinese food! - at least with a Chinese instructor hanging over our wok and our every move ;)  Yesterday we went to a cooking class to learn how to make some specialties from this area.  It was a happy combination of interest on our part and rainy weather.  The lesson started out with a visit to the market in town, and our instructor pointed out many types of food we had never seen before.  There were buckets of eels, snails, turtles, and frogs, huge concrete baths full of live fish, and cages upon cages of live chickens and geese.  There were plenty of dead poultry as well, lying on the tables, stiff and steaming with more organs than I care to see associated with something I'm going to eat.  Sadly, there were also dogs and cats at the butcher stalls, some dead and hanging on hooks and others still alive in cages.  I don't have a moral problem with people eating cats or dogs, but seeing them in tiny cages waiting to be slaughtered was very sad.

After the market visit, we headed to the cooking school, which had a huge room full of woks, supplies, and pots and pans.  We were the only scheduled pupils for the class so we had a private lesson for the cost of a shared one!  We made pork-stuffed vegetables, wok-fried greens, cashew chicken, Yangshuo-style eggplant, and the local specialty, beer catfish.  Surprisingly, our renditions of the dishes turned out pretty well, and we were stuffed after eating our own creations for dinner!  You might want to give us another go-around to practice before you ask us to cook for you though!  I need to try without the instructor correcting the heat under my wok!

First Day in Yangshuo

Andrew and I both managed to get out of bed yesterday and after a breakfast-at-lunch-time, decided to take advantage of the lack of rain (despite the forecast) and explore the area.  Our hotel is really close to the Yulong river, and we rented a bamboo raft and poleman to take us down the river.  We sat on the raft for an idyllic 1.5 hours, slowly poling down the calm shallow river, with the famous mountains of this area protruding majestically on either side.  I am having trouble describing the 'mountains'  because they are not really mountains as I normally think of them, with huge gradual ascents and really  high peaks with snow on them, or whole communities tucked away on the moutainsides.  The ' mountains' here are much smaller, and more sudden, like some gigantic hand dropped a huge pointy boulder down on a flat landscape...multiple times, in close succession.  They are clearly rock, with sheer limestone faces, but much of them is covered with green vegetation, because they are not really that high.  They provide a really beautiful scenery, especially floating down a river in between them, and with the mist here due to the rainy weather it is quite atmospheric.

This is not the best photo I have but you get the idea...expect more photos soon!

After our bamboo rafting trip, we biked back to the hotel along the river.  We passed tiny villages with farmyards and threshing platforms abutting the road, and peasants  working in the fields or at machinery.  There were HUGE fenced in chicken coops, with hundreds of chickens...clothes hanging out to dry blowing in the wind...dirty exhaust-producing trucks blowing by us with stacked bamboo rafts...running children...water buffalo and cows grazing... in short, very rural scenes which look peaceful but are in fact anything but.

In the evening, we went to a famous light show on the Li River in town.  It was choreographed by the same man as designed the opening and closing ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics, and everyone here seems very proud of the fact.  It was quite impressive, we don't seem to have the same skills with choreography on a massive scale using hundreds of people as the Chinese do.  It would have been better if we'd understood the Chinese in the speeches and songs, but there were still dazzling ethnic minority costumes, bright spotlights and dancers, and a really neat sequence where men in bamboo rafts pulled themselves along the lake in big rows with huge red sheets, all in tandem to make patterns.  All-in-all it was a good first day in Yangshuo!

Trip to Guilin

My friend Andrew from London has just arrived for a week and we took a redeye flight from Beijing to Guilin last night.  We were met by a taxi driver at the airport at 1:30 am (nothing like seeing someone waiting for you with your name held high!) and drove for an hour to get to our hotel in Yangshuo, a small town about 70 km away from Guilin.  I'm glad that Andrew was there because it would be been slightly sketchy riding for an hour so late at night with a driver I didn't know...especially when we got off the main road and started bumping along a dirt road full of potholes and surrounded by dump trucks and old buildings!  Even though it was so late at night, however, we could see through the window the huge karst peaks which make this area so famous.  They were like sudden looming giants next to the car, making the trip seem even more surreal.  We arrived at the hotel at 3 am, were let in by a very nice guard who handed us a printout explaining that he didn't speak English and we would check in today, and then let us to our room.  It is super-cute with wood floors, a loft (minus the ladder, but hey), mosquito netting, and two very Chinese (i.e. very HARD) twin mattresses.  We collapsed and even Andrew fell right asleep despite being 8 hours behind due to jetlag!  Today we are hoping to go on a bike exploring trip in the area (if I can ever convince him to get up!!)

Young Educated Chinese Students Know...

Nothing, as it turns out, at least about the unrest happening in the Middle East and northern Africa.  Twice over the past few days I've asked various people in my office what they know about the recent news, the successful government ousting in Tunisia and Egypt and the current upheavals in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Oman, etc.  For the most part, they have responded with blank stares and questions.  One girl vaguely knew about Chinese citizens being safely returned home from Libya (Thousands of Chinese citizens worked in Libya, mostly in the oil industry, and China was one of several countries to run citizen-rescue campaigns in the first days of the unrest), but she didn't know the reason for the rescue.  How did she hear about it?  The Chinese version of Twitter, which is heavily government controlled, it seems people were just rejoicing about safe returns without going into any detail.  Yesterday I asked students in my office what they knew about Libya, and they had no idea anything was happening.  

Equally scary, they had no idea the recent steps the Chinese government has taken to suppress the news.  I don't know extensive details either, but apparently the government was nervous that news of the protests against single-party rulers and oppressive regimes would galvanize Chinese who are unhappy with the system here (which has does have remarkable similarities with some of the toppled  or toppling regimes: single party rule, oppression of expression of free opinion, blocking of access to information, diminished human rights).  There are several parts of China where large minority groups have formed nexi of discontent for decades, like TIbet and Xinjiang (in northwest China) where they were particularly worried.  But apparently there has also been massive government action to suppress the news, and crack down on known humans rights activists and anti-government voices in the rest of China as well.  Seedling protests and demonstrations were quashed before they could get off the ground, and apparently there have even been attempts at some protests in Beijing, which were more heavily attended by police in riot gear than any protesters.  Many activists have been placed under house arrest or are being trailed, and the wife of the recent Nobel Peace Prize winner from China, Liu Xiaobo, has 'disappeared'. (and the students didn't know about him winning, either).

At least from the perspective of a regular resident in Beijing, the government has succeeded - which is just wild!  Imagine the scope of the effort necessary in a country with 1/5 of the world's population!  When I search for 'Libya' on Google (which automatically uses Google Hong Kong anyway due to Google's departure from China on human rights grounds), the first nine hits were pages like 'Libya - Wikipedia' and 'Libya - International Factsheet'.  Only 2/3 of the way down the page did any news surface, and it was a week old.  Similar search results came up when I searched for the other countries experiencing unrest.  Nothing has been mentioned that I know of on the national TV channels (which are the only ones available) and no one is talking about it.  Educated, intelligent young students who own computers have no clue.  And if they don't know, then you can guarantee that your average Chinese bank workers or fruit vendors or farmers have not the faintest idea of any type of political unrest anywhere in the world.

It makes me wonder that the government is so worried.  To me it seems there's something self-incriminating in the immediate reaction for intense 'stability management' as they call it - why the need for such extensive efforts unless there is something wrong with the way the system is currently structured?  I feel like people inherently want freedom of speech and religion and thought and are often willing to fight for it, something which seems confirmed by recent world events, and despite the Chinese government's success until now with suppression of any of the above, their very need to block even the whisper of other societies' successful and ongoing attempts at change highlights problems at home.