Journey to the Center of Hainan

It is SOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT here!  And the Internet has been really annoying, so I have been unconscionably behind on blogging.  A lot of normal things (school, dissertation writing, frisbee) have been happening lately, which I’ll hopefully talk about in a few days but first I wanted to tell you about this amazing whirlwind trip we got to take a few weeks ago.

To preface, let me show you this map of Hainan.

Hainan

We live on the northern tip of the island, and Sanya (the other large city) is on the very southern tip.  The train runs in a circle around the island and, as you can see, the center of the island is pretty mountainous and there aren’t any big cities.  I’ve heard about the center of Hainan for a while and its jungles and little towns and mountains.  It sounded awesome, but I thought we would never be able to visit because 1) the transportation is a bit unreliable because the only good options are buses, which aren’t all that great, and 2) the center of Hainan is the home of the Li and Miao minorities, and they speak mostly the local dialects.

So when our friend Hanna invited us to go with her to Wuzhishan (the largest mountain in Hainan)…in her CAR…with her boyfriend Asong who is NATIVE HAINANESE and has traveled all over the island doing agricultural projects…we jumped at the chance!  A local tour guide with a car? So much more than I could have hoped for.   And the center of the island was just as awesome as I thought it would be!

We drove from Haikou through the center of the island to the mountain, and then down to Sanya, where Asong and Hanna had to go to a meeting and we took the train back to Haikou.

We started off with a little hike around the mountainside – Asong knew all the best places. Saw this picturesque little farm on the way.

Found an awesome rope bridge that was deliciously scary and fun.

Asong and Hanna by a creek that looked exactly like a Missouri crick!

First view of Wuzhishan! Wuzhishan literally translates as “Five Finger Mountain” because it looks like a hand.

We stopped at an…interesting…restaurant on the way back from the hike. Montana or China? You be the judge.

We accidentally crashed a party of hotel workers who were taking an early May 1st holiday. They invited us to join them, so we hung out for a bit and ate some bbq. The restaurant was a series of these little campsite places and little huts.  One of which was a karaoke hut (a loud karaoke hut).

We got to try a traditional Hainanese dish – sticky rice cooked inside a bamboo stalk. Quite delicious but it is super hard to cut open bamboo!

A lot of the buildings in the little town we stayed in had these interesting designs on them. Asong said they were traditional Li and Miao designs to make the town seem more touristy. But they looked quite cool!

 

The next day we hiked up Wuzhishan for a bit. We didn’t have time to go all the way to the top, but got about 1/3 of the way up. Also, the mountain is so steep that the trail is actually a ginormous staircase! Yikes.

Amazing views on the way up!

Alex by a huge tree!

I took so many pictures of the countryside as we drove through, but I just limited myself to one here. It was so lush and green and jungly.

We stopped at a local outdoor restaurant that was kind of neat.

We got to pick our own vegetables in the kitchen. Hanna takes it very seriously. We tried some interesting new greens on this trip – pumpkin leaves, sweet potato leaves, and ferns.  We also got to pick our own fish back in the back…but I skipped that part.

There was also a really adorable puppy that wanted to say hi to us. His master told him to stay so instead he crawled very slowly over to us. Oh puppies. Also, this amazing flower wall!

Sanya! A touristy beach city. I felt compelled to visit Sanya because it is very famous and such, but we like Haikou better.   It is pretty epic looking though.

There is a neat pedestrian bridge over the river that Alex was excited to walk across. It is a wavy bridge!

Dadonghai beach. Nice beach, lots of foreigners!

These are traditional fishing boats. I’m fascinated by them because they are really colorful and the fishing families live on them. What would it be like to live on a boat?

Cool guys!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ultimate Frisbee and Nanjing

We did it!!! We won!!!!  Well, we won the B division anyway.  They divide the teams into the good ones and the not-so-good ones, and we were the champions of the not-so-good ones.  Also, we had some help.  There were seven of us from Haikou (plus one friend from Nanjing) but three of our girls went to another team that didn’t have enough girls (you have to play 5 boys/2 girls on the field most of the time) so we didn’t have enough for a full team ourselves.  We were the “traveling” team, which means we added any random people who came to play by themselves.  Luckily, all our add-ons were fast and tall and awesome!

We also got to look around Nanjing and Shanghai a bit.  All in all it was a great trip.

The world’s fastest train!!

We flew into Shanghai and then took the train to Nanjing.  Part of the way we rode the Maglev – the world’s fastest train! It runs on magnets! It felt like a roller coaster, it was so fast.  If you are into that sort of thing, you can read more here.

That’s right…300 km/hr. Too bad our ride was only 8 minutes long!

Michael, Jiaojin, Alex, and Daisy are soooo excited! World’s fastest train!

When we got to Nanjing we went to our hotel to check-in only to find out that they didn’t allow foreigners (i.e. me and Alex, and our Czech friend Michael) to stay there.  We already had a reservation, but when they saw our faces they seriously back-tracked.  Quite a weird feeling…  Apparently up until 10 years ago, it was a national law that foreigners were only allowed to stay in special approved hotels (usually the really nice ones in order to keep up appearances).  However, that law has been changed and now it’s just a few random places that don’t allow foreigners.  We eventually found another hotel and settled in.  Also, Alex and I brought our hiking backpacks filled with tons of changes of clothes and layers because it was supposed to be rainy and unseasonably cold in Nanjing.  All our Chinese friends brought one normal sized backpack that was half full, and the two who were going to continue traveling for nine days brought a full normal-sized backpack.  They made fun of us a lot, but they changed their tune when it was cold and windy out on that frisbee field….  Also, only two of our Chinese friends even own athletic shoes, and a few of them wore jeans to play during the tournament.  I am SO confused by that. Ah well.

We also met up with a friend of a friend from Nanjing who showed us around. She took us to an interesting pedestrian street with cool restaurants.

There we all are – you’ll just have to imagine what we look like up close. We had Indian food here! It’s the first I’ve had since leaving America in August and it was soooo good.

This is another picture of that same street, and if you can’t see it, that big black and white sign on the building says “Lion King Dainty Community.”  Love it!

Lion King Dainty Community!  What does that mean?  Who knows?!?

The next day was cold and cloudy and windy and yucky (naturally) but we met our teammates, played our five games rather well, and didn’t get hurt!

Yeah traveler’s team! Back row l-r: random guy (Mossi), Jade, me, Jiaojin, random guy (Neil), random amazing guy (Bob), Michael, random guy (Nick), Yuanyi. Front row l-r: Daisy, random guy (Pavel), Alex. So our friend Michael that we know from school here in Haikou is from the Czech Republic and he ALWAYS complains about how he never meets any other Czech people in China. And then the random guy who joined our team, Pavel, was also Czech! They had a little Czech love-fest all weekend. (Pavel works for a company that makes ginormous chandeliers…like 20 m across. Weird.)

Alex making an awesome and somewhat hilarious looking catch. We were playing the team from Nanjing Sports University.  No one that I asked could tell me what people learn about at a sports university.  They weren’t good enough to be in some kind of pre-Olympic training program (unless they were champion swimmers or equestrian riders or something just pretending to be frisbee players), so we eventually settled on physical education teachers. We lost the first game to them, but soundly trounced them the next day.

Alex did really well in the tournament with some very impressive diving catches and D’s.  He also did such a good job leading the team and getting everyone involved and excited.  He won the much-deserved sportsmanship award for our team too!  One of Alex’s goals this year was to start a frisbee club…and he did!  And that team went to a tournament!  The people who came with us seemed to really enjoy the experience, even though they were all very intimidated by their first experience with real ultimate games.  But I was so impressed with how positive everyone was and how hard they played.  So great.

My personal favorite play was a terrific throw I made to Daisy (who’s only been playing for a few months), who caught the disc in the endzone for the game-winning point!  I also made two pretty impressive D’s myself, as the other team threw the disc right into me while I was standing still – once in the bum and once in the back.  I win!

Chillin’ out – eatin’ some bananas and some ALOE VERA juice. Yeah – I stuck with the pineapple juice. Suyi, Jiaojin, Jade, Daisy, Yuanyi, and Alex.

After the tourney, we spent a day looking around Nanjing.  It’s rather a tidy city, and less tropical-ly than Haikou.  Here’s a few pics of random parts of the city.

Ran across an adult playground while walking around. These are all over China, but this is a good example of one. They are always just on the street, usually near residential neighborhoods. Daisy and Alex on the see-saw.

A tiny fruit shop. Those tall stick looking things are sugar cane. They cut it into foot-long pieces, peel it, and sell it like that. I haven’t tried one yet, but apparently you chew each bit for awhile, like gum, and then spit it out.

We also went to a really neat park on a bunch of little islands in the middle of a lake.  It was pretty rainy, but very lovely.

Park place.

Daisy and I and the view. That tall building in the background is the 7th tallest building in Asia. Random fact of the day.

Michael’s magical long arms actually got everyone in the pic! Suyi, me and Daisy on the bottom – Yuanyi, Alex, Jiaojin, and Michael on the top.

The next day we headed to Shanghai and saw a few friends.  This building is famous and we saw it, but I’m too lazy to look up what it’s called.  We ate lunch in the financial district and it was SOO fancy-schmancy. Everywhere we went in Shanghai seemed to be fancy and super nice and full of foreigners and amazing food.  Pretty unlike Haikou!

Yeah, it was actually as foggy and yucky and this picture makes it look like.

It was also Alex’s birthday! He got to pick the restaurant for the celebratory lunch and of course he picked a tomato restaurant. It was called Celeb de TOMATO : The specialty store of the selected tomatoes.  Literally all the dishes had tomato in them.  We had a “set lunch” with pureed vegetable soup, salad with tomatoes, and margharita pizza or spaghetti bolognese.  A couple of our friends got the dessert course too, which turned out to be a tomato/caramel mousse.  That was just about the weirdest food I’ve ever tasted. 

Pengyao!!!

We met our friend Pengyao there for lunch.  We know her from IU, where she got a master’s in the same program as Alex.  She now has a fancy job in Shanghai, and our friends (who are both college students) were really impressed with how sophisticated and successful she was!  Hehe, you rock Pengyao! But we knew you when…:)

Also, if it looks like I have something weird on my nose, it’s because I do.  It’s a band-aid.  We got sun-burned really bad on Sunday during the tournament, which hurt enough.  Then, that night, (because our twin bed – yes, we both had to fit on a twin bed- was in the corner of the room) I rolled over and scraped my sun-burned nose on the wall.  I felt very sad about it and it was very gross for awhile, but now I am better.  But I still appreciate some sympathy, because really…that is the weirdest way I’ve ever gotten hurt ever.

Pengyao got some cakes for Alex’s birthday lunch and I couldn’t resist a picture.  China is full of bakeries that make these beautiful and delicious cakes, and because it’s China they are so cheap!  They also aren’t as sweet as they would be in America and they use a lot of fresh fruit, especially in Haikou.

Sooo lovely. Of course, Alex’s was the chocolate one and mine was the fruit one.

We also went to visit some of the Burches’ family friends who moved to China for work about the same time we did.  (They are also Alex’s brother’s wife’s family.   They live in a super nice area of Shanghai and have an amazing 24th floor apartment.  Their view was better than ours!  They also have a dishwasher!  And a bathtub!  Our minds were blown.  It was great to catch up with them though!

Alex, Scott, and Sharon. This is proof we were all in China together!

 

A really amazing trip altogether, but now we’re back in Haikou.  Looking forward to another national holiday next week though!  But national holidays are really a double-edged sword, because we get off school Monday-Wednesday, but have to go Saturday and Sunday to make up for it.  Also, because everyone gets those holidays off, all the vacation spots are super crowded and busy.  So we have to go to school on a weekend and then don’t want to go anywhere during the holiday.  Weird.

This and That, Here and There

Got a new camera! Turns out the average point-and-shoot camera they make these days is WAY better than our old camera.  Score.

Especially good because this weekend we are going to Nanjing for an ultimate Frisbee tournament and want to take lots of pictures.  The frisbee club Alex started here in the fall has really taken off and there are seven of us going this weekend.  We’ll join with another team and play for two days!

I found some random old pictures that I never put on the blog, so thought I would update!

When our friend Grant came to visit us we had some scooter trouble, and had to take it to the fix-it shop. But how to move an electric scooter that doesn’t work? We finally convinced a bike taxi to come down into our parking garage and pick it up for us. So yes, this is a picture of a scooter on a bike taxi. They really can carry anything!

Can’t believe I never posted this! Here is Alex with his 1st grade class he taught last semester. I have some more group pictures of both Alex and I’s classes, but I can’t find them right now… But here Alex is playing “Alex says” (his class’ favorite game). The girl in the yellow shirt up front is his teaching assistant – they were mostly there for discipline.   Also, Alex’s kids were “Simon says” whizzes!  They really couldn’t have a conversation with you at all, but they knew really complicated things like “touch your right shoulder” (as they are doing here), and “lift your left knee” and knew the difference between “jump” and “hop.” Ridiculous.

One day, on the way to the canteen for lunch after class, we ran into an art/calligraphy contest. So we got our ballots and perused the various submissions. It was pretty cool actually, especially because none of us know enough about traditional Chinese calligraphy to understand what’s good or not! Unfortunately, our lack of involvement in normal college activities prevented us from ever learning who won. Still neat to look at all the artwork though.

A close-up of some of the submissions. There were very big and very small calligraphy examples, and lots of anime artwork. Also some really neat architectural drawings you can see in the far top right corner.

A random picture of Alex in the pool in our apartment complex. I have more pics to put up from around our neighborhood, but this one just caught my eye. It’s a really huge pool, and there is almost always someone swimming even when it is freezing.

If you are unlocking our front door and look to the right, this is what you will see, including our balcony! It looks like we are surrounded by apartment buildings, but it actually a lot more open than that. Also, our building is taller than most of those around us, so we can see really far from our front door, including the big famous bridge far away in the distance. When we first saw the apartment this view really sucked me in – especially because there was an amazing and wonderful-smelling breeze that blew through the entryway (a rare thing in China!). I was hooked. Unfortunately, they have since glassed in this part…so no more breeze.

If you cast your minds way back, you may remember one of us mentioning our participation in the school-wide Olympics. Here is Alex carrying the flag for the international students department! He’s so famous. We all marched in during this big (and of course weird) ceremony, followed by three days of track and field events.

We all got flags of China and our home country to wave during the parade. You can see in this pic some of our friends from England and Germany (with some Russians in the background). The girl who is actually looking at me here is from the Czech Republic (along with the guy to her left) and the guy to her right is from Rwanda. It was pretty fun actually. Unusual, but fun.

Hey, its me! I’m so triumphant! I ran the 3K! But what this picture doesn’t show you is that I came in dead last – waaay later than everyone else. It was also absurdly and mind-numbingly hot and I was only last because everyone who was behind me had already dropped out of the race. But the bystanders were so encouraging! They all yelled Jia You! to me all the time. That basically means “you can do it!,” but literally translated it means “add oil” so we’ve had some pretty funny conversations with Chinese friends when trying to translate it.

Alex ran the 5K! He also suffered through the excruciating heat and finished near the end too. But he’s so happy at the beginning of the race! The neon guy next to him was one of the pro runners, so Alex was excited to talk to him.

The stands during the sports competitions. I love the sea of umbrellas. Chinese girls HATE the sun because being pale is considered more beautiful here. So they carry umbrellas with them all the time, and you see way more of them out on sunny days than on rainy ones. It’s really pretty great actually, I quickly adopted that custom!

 

I leave you with a picture of a bird. A weird bird that I saw on campus and have never seen before. Maybe all you ornithologically inclined people out there can tell me what it is…

That’s all for now, folks.  Looking forward to having lots of interesting stories after this weekend though!

Two Random Things That Happened Today

A note: Turns out I accidentally left our camera in America.  Bummer!  So my posts may be picture-less until we can remedy that situation.

 

1.)  The Flight of the Food Carts

Apparently, some of the hundreds of food carts around Haikou are illegal.  Naturally, all the ones we go to regularly.  We think there is some kind of permit that they have to buy in order to have a legal food cart, but we’re not sure why no one wants to buy them or how they get them.  Sometimes, the police come around and then all the food carts have to leave.  Which is quite sad because it always seems to happen right when I am the most in the mood for a bing.  But they’ll be back in a few hours or the next day and then all is well. I’ve never seen the police myself, but we hear about it the next day from the bing and vegetable ladies.

Well today…I SAW IT HAPPEN.  We were waiting at the East Gate for some friends and there were about 8-10 food carts sitting around.  All of a sudden, I see the guy closest to me unplug his extension cord and start booking it (with his cart) toward the campus.  (In other news, as far as I can tell, his extension cord was about 50 feet long and plugged into a stone wall…) Then I see all the other carts running as fast as they can after him.  I mean, it was an Olympic free-for-all, and they were outta there! It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. A real ‘gone in 60 seconds.’  Then maybe 30 seconds later the police truck pulls up and a grouchy policeman gets out of the truck and kicks some trash around on the ground.  Then he confiscates a hot pink plastic stool someone left behind and throws it in the back of the truck.

Mind you, we can see all the food carts hiding out around the corner of the gate inside the university campus, presumably still selling their food.  So we’re unclear about whether campus is some kind of “safe” zone or what, but the police didn’t try to follow them in.  It’s a weird experience to be standing quietly on the side of a big driveway and then to suddenly have a bunch of food carts blow by you at mach speed.  Brilliant.

 

An additional story about extension cords:  Today Alex told me that one of our friends recently bought a custom-made extension cord.  The on-campus scooter and bike parking lot/re-charging station mysteriously closed for good over the winter break, so our friend was forced to run an extension cord out the window of his dorm room to plug his scooter in.  Of course, he lives on the 5th floor, so this posed something of a problem.  Not in China though!  He got a 60m extension cord custom made.  They tried to charge him 120kuai for it (about $20), but another friend had gotten a 50m one made and it only cost him 50kuai.  So our friend haggled the price down to 68kuai (about $10).    Everything about that story so exemplifies China – literally anything you want can be made by anyone you meet on the street; they will try to over-charge you, but you can ultimately get it ridiculously cheap; no one wonders why you need a 60m extension cord; things close for no reason with no notice; you need a 60m extension cord in the first place.

 

2.) The Most Amazing Taste Experience of All Time

We went to dinner tonight with some friends, and afterward they introduced us to chaobing (literally “fried ice”) and it changed my eating life.  First you choose your scrumptious tropical fruit (I picked watermelon and pineapple – the other three got mango/orange, guava/cantaloupe, and mango/kiwi….but mine was totally the best), they blend a bit of it, along with coconut water, sugar, and something creamy which may very well have been sweetened condensed milk, and then they flash freeze it on something that can only be described as the opposite of a frying pan.  It looks exactly like a giant wok, but instead of making things hot and crispy really fast, it makes it cold and crispy really fast.  Then the crispy fruit smoothie is scraped off the bottom and put into a bowl.  And it is the most creamy and fruity deliciousness I have ever tasted.  The opposite frying pan was a little paradigm-shifting I must say, but it was truly a delight.

And yes, to answer the question I know you all are dying to ask – Alex and I naturally now have aspirations to go on the road and win over every state fair with our newest food sensation from the far east – Fried Ice!!

Harbin – the Coldest Fun Place on Earth!

Our second stop on the epic 2013 China trip was Harbin.  It’s a city in far northern China, very near the Russian border.  It’s super duper cold, but also super duper interesting.  We went because it is famous for a huge Ice and Snow Festival, but I ended up being fascinated by the city itself.  It’s a really new city – started in 1898 when the Russians built a railroad there.  Within the first ten years, it became a destination for Russian Jews, who built much of the city’s economic and cultural infrastructure.  So it is now an interesting mix of Russian and Jewish influences with a lack of historical depth.  In a country as areligious as China, this is quite unique.

We went to three attractions while we were there – the Jewish New Synagogue (to satisfy my nerdy religious studies self), the Ice Festival, and the Snow Festival.

The Jewish New Synagogue was the main temple for Harbin Jews finished in 1921. It was recently turned into a museum that covers all of Harbin’s Jewish history.  It was a small-ish museum, but was very interesting and well-done.  It was also super interesting because it was all written from a Chinese point of view and they often described Jewish traditions so they would make sense within a Chinese context.  For example, they talked about the Jewish rituals of ancestor worship – which I think was merely the act of placing flowers on graves.  If you want to know lots more about Harbin’s history you can go here.  Okay, done boring you for now!

the Jewish New Synagogue in snowy, icy Harbin!

A lovely building and an interesting understated collection.

She was so good at “Jewish FORK songs” that she was easily accepted into Harbin society.  LOVE IT.  There are so many examples of English mistakes like this in China, but this one is by far my favorite.

Ok, so it was also totally freezing cold, windy, icy, and snowy the whole time we were there – something Harbin is famous for.  But we were totally prepared, thanks to Aunt Sue!  I wore four pairs of bottoms, and at least three tops under my enormous puffy coat I bought at Salvation Army before we left America (that was such a good idea!).   My two pairs of socks and two sets of gloves weren’t enough, but luckily we had Hot Hands/Feet, and boy were they a life saver.  Also, my balaclava was quite nice….except I knit it a bit too tight and it smashed my face the whole time. Oops!

Everywhere we went in Harbin there were little sculptures and decorations made out of ice and snow.  There were a lot of lovely ones along this pedestrian street famous for Russian and western architecture, but this next one was definitely my favorite.

This was also Aunt Sue’s first introduction to Gangnam Style…so glad we could be there to share it.

Now to the headliners!  Turns out that the Ice Festival was only open at night and the Snow Festival was only open during the day, so that’s pretty convenient.  The Ice Festival was a truly amazing sight.  Acres of ice buildings/slides/arches/staircases made of ice and lit from within by colorful lanterns.  We went down as many ice slides as we could find, and watched the horse drawn carriages and dogsleds and even caught some of an ice skating show that apparently had something to do with skiing communists, snow fairies, and dancing trees.  I think I kind of missed the plot of that one.

An ice tower!!

Aunt Sue takes a ride on an ice slide. We all felt like small children bundled in our hundreds of layers, so it made an ice slide really fun.

Princess land!!!!

The view from the top of the ice slide.

Alex and a car made out of ice.

It was a wonderland! Most of the structures were made out of huge blocks of ice, and you could see wires running through them for the lights.  We saw some posters on one building and were amused to discover that they were stuck to the wall with tiny blocks of ice…really cool!  And then, just as we were about to leave, we discovered the chair-skating and bike-skating!  Funnest things ever.  Riding a bike on the ice was fairly difficult, but Aunt Sue and I really took to the chair-skating.  You sit on a small, kindergarten-size chair and push yourself around using metal poles.  We may or may not have left Alex in the dust on that one.

Ice-biking! It was really hard to turn them, once you got going, but luckily there was a big pile of snow in the middle of the frozen lake/river we were on that you could just run into.

Seriously. Ice-chairing.

AWESOME!

The next day we went to the snow festival.  What an incredible place! We just kept saying to each other…”how did they make that? how did they get all that snow piled up?”  We were actually in Harbin kind of late in the season, so some of the details of the ice/snow sculptures were already melted, but it was still unbelievable nonetheless.

We made it!

A sculpture commemorating the previous years of the festival.

Yeah, we probably weren’t supposed to do that.

It was soooo big! This was only the middle section. There’s tiny us!

Aunt Sue on a snow tractor!

The Snow Festival took place in a local park.  It seemed like a really nice park that would also be really fun in the summer.  The next two pictures are vestiges of summer…

Chillin’…or something.

All of the park buildings were covered with snow and made into snow buildings! It kept them nice and toasty. You can see how thick the walls are where Alex is standing by the door.

Snow shark!

Someone had made a tiny snowman in the park. I loved the juxtaposition.

An amazing winter-time adventure!! Alex had wanted to go to Harbin to the festivals for a long time, but was afraid of the cold (very legitimately of course), so this was a great experience!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mutianyu – the Great Wall

Just awesome.

The Great Wall is so amazing!!

The earliest parts of the Great Wall were built in the 7^th century BCE (what?!) but the majority of what is standing today was built during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644).  It started off as a bunch of tiny walls, and then the Ming emperors connected all the pieces and made it huge and snazzy.  Apparently the length of the Ming-built wall is about 3,889 miles (miles!) but altogether (with old crumbly parts and natural barriers like rivers) it is over 13,000 miles.  I guess keeping out the Huns was a pretty big deal.  [Also, did you know there is a marathon on the Great Wall?  I can’t decide if that is cool or unbelievably crazy.  If you go to this website you can see a REALLY crazy picture of people crawling up the super steep wall during their marathon.]

So the Great Wall is about 1-2 hours outside of Beijing and there are 4 or 5 different sections of the wall that have been rebuilt and made safe and turned into a national park like place and are equipped with bathrooms, gift shops, food, and cable cars (which were actually ski lifts) to take you up the mountain to the wall. (Confusingly, it never occurred to me that the wall was built on the top of a mountain range.  Obviously that makes military sense, but it’s kind of a trek getting there.) The most popular site is a place called Badaling, but because Alex had already been to that area three times we decided to try for a different place called Mutianyu.

A tangent about cable cars:  I am not a great lover of cable cars.  If they are totally enclosed it is okay, but any kind of ski lift type thing gives me the willies.  Turns out Aunt Sue and Alex feel somewhat the same about them.  And yet, our trip was plagued…PLAGUED I TELL YOU…with cable cars/ski lifts.  You could take a ski lift to the Great Wall, you could take a ski lift across a frozen river to get to the Ice Festival, you could take a ski life over a bay and a fishing village to get to a monkey island in Hainan.  Seriously, China? No one likes those things!!  Okay, tangent over.

Most foreigners who come to Beijing go see the Great Wall as part of a tour group.   There are a million different ones and they always also take you to a couple other sites (like the Ming Tombs and the Summer Palace), as well markets of traditional goods.  Of course, we decided that because we had Alex, we didn’t need to take any of those tours and have to follow someone else’s schedule.  We could maneuver the public transportation on our own!

So we researched and read and asked our hostel (some help they were…see last post), and couldn’t find any conclusive information.  We wanted to go on Thursday, but instead we spent all of Thursday morning wandering around Beijing – the train station, the bus station, the ticket station – trying to find out how to get to Mutianyu.  The train couldn’t guarantee seats, the direct bus only runs during the summer, and a taxi would be super expensive.  What we did learn was that it took about 2.5 hours to get to Mutianyu, and according to information compiled from the bus drivers, ticket sellers, corn peddler, and security officers we asked, we found out that a few buses probably went there some time during the morning. Gee, thanks guys.

To cover all our bases we decided to just get to the bus station as early as possible and see what happened.  We arrived at 6:45, got on a bus and left at 6:50, went to the city nearest the Wall, took a taxi to the Wall, and got there around 8:30.  Two and half hours eh?

But it turned out to be AWESOME.  We accidentally got there so early that there weren’t even any workers there yet.  The gift shops weren’t open and the ski lift/cable car wasn’t running (not that we minded…this was a cable car free trip after all!), so we climbed a huge flight of stairs, and reached the top of the wall just as the sun did! It was glorious.

Aunt Sue alone on the wall.

It was an unbelievable experience to be on the Wall by ourselves.  Epic and awesome.  For at least an hour, the only people we saw were workers.

I also didn’t anticipate the fantastic views of the mountains from all sides.

Me and the wall…just chillin’.

Another thing I didn’t expect about the Great Wall was how steep it was and how many uneven staircases we would have to climb.  It was certainly a challenge! And how did those Chinese soldiers ever fight off the wall without tripping themselves and falling half a mile down the wall?

Alex demonstrating some ridiculous angles.

We meet our first tourist competitors, but I guess it’s okay to share.

We were seriously climbing up the wall on all fours. On the way down we actually just sat down and scooted down the wall. All the people coming up were laughing at us, but I was like “laugh away! you’ll be changing your tune soon enough, friends!”

We hiked for a few hours on the Wall and we made it to the end!  Well, to the end of the refurbished part, but it certainly felt like an accomplishment.  After this the wall was overgrown and crumbly, but it was pretty magnificent to see it even in that state.

Aunt Sue and Alex at the end of the wall!

It just keeps going!

Proof that we were there! And that it was cold.  And that the Cat Cat Shirt put in an appearance.

It’s just…wow!

So I guess by now you can tell that I REALLY liked seeing the Great Wall.  I really can’t put it into words, but it was just so big and so intense and even though I’ve seen tons of pictures of it before, in real life it was just mind-blowing! Definitely in the top 2  most amazing places I’ve ever been (along with hiking down the Grand Canyon with my dad).  Even looking at the pictures now I really can’t get over how breath-taking it was (both figuratively AND literally)! And to be there all by ourselves was such a treat.  When we left there were quite a few other tourists, but it was nothing compared to what it’s like in summer apparently. And if you want to see a really scary picture, you can go to this article and see what the Great Wall is like during the holidays!

On the way back down the wall we discovered something else pretty amazing. A toboggan!!  Instead of taking the ski lift (terrifying) or the huge flight of stairs (exhausting) back down to the entrance, you can take a very long toboggan ride!  Alex convinced us to try it and it was AWESOME!  They said in the summer there is almost an hour wait to take the toboggan, but we just hopped right on.

You could control the speed of the toboggan with a lever, and you could get going pretty fast!  You can also see the ski lift in the background here.

The track was REALLY long, so you totally got your money’s worth. It was one of the most fun and most bizarre things I’ve ever done! If you look closely you can see Aunt Sue in the distance here.

I liked it.

What a great day!

Beijing-a-ling-ling!

We are officially back in Haikou (today was the first day of school), but via super-exciting adventures in Beijing and Harbin!  I’ve decided to cover the journey in three parts: Beijing, the Great Wall (because it was soooo my favorite), and Harbin.

We got to Bejing just a few days after the start of the the Chinese New Year, which meant we were met with a lot of red – red lanterns, red firework debris (more on that later), red posters, red things hanging in trees, and tons of red decorations on the doors of every house.  Here we are on Ghost Street, which is famous for having tons of restaurants and tons of red lanterns. So festive!

Aunt Sue and Alex looking peppy.  Ironically, most of the restaurants were closed because everyone gets a two week holiday for the new year!

We unintentionally ended up staying right around the corner from Ghost Street, about 50 m from the Lama Temple, and 100 m from Ditan Park, both of which are New Year’s hotspots (which we could tell from the swarming crowds).  We stayed in a hostel in a hutong, which is a one or two story courtyard house next to a million other courtyard houses divided by tiny alleyways.  Beijing is famous for these old neighborhoods, although many of them have been torn down.

The indoor/outdoor hostel.  Also, somewhat hilariously, the walls to the bathroom in our room weren’t *completely* opaque, so we had to rig a wall divider out of the clothes racks. Also, while we had western style toilets, we had a Chinese style shower, which consists of a showerhead sticking out of the wall next to the sink. There is no shower stall or curtain or anything so the whole room becomes your shower.

This is a hutong alley outside our hostel. They are really interesting types of neighborhoods. Because they are so old, many of the hutong houses don’t have indoor plumbing, so the government has installed a lot of public bathrooms throughout the hutong that the residents are (we think) responsible for cleaning. Alex went in one and said it looked pretty good. Mmm, I think I’ll still pass.

 

Naturally, the first day we wanted to see the main event, so we headed to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.  Aunt Sue found out that you could go and see the flag raising in the mornings and afternoons in the square, and since we were still waking up super early with jet lag, we went for what we thought would be the less crowded sunrise option. . The flag raising itself was pretty underwhelming (some guards march across the street from the Forbidden City to raise the flag in Tiananmen Squre), but the super excited Chinese tourist crowd was quite funny.

Aunt Sue and I in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, the entrance to the Forbidden City. It was really trippy to be there. It looked exactly like all the pictures and I was right there! Pretty cool to see it, although it was super foggy that morning.

A Tiananmen Square lion. We asked a guy to take our picture, then, of course, the two girls with him wanted to take a picture of all five of us together. Chinese people always want to take a picture with us at tourist spots. They never come up to us at restaurants or in the library, but at touristy places it’s like we are part of the attraction. I always wonder what people who take our picture say about us. Look Ma, a foreigner!

 

We weren’t sure about the exact time to go see the sunrise flag raising, so we asked our (ultimately Eeyore-like) hostel workers.  They told us the flag raising was at 4 am.  Four am? That doesn’t sound like sunrise.  They seemed pretty sure, and were skeptical when we left at 6:30 to catch the raising (which we did easily…at 7:10).  Turns out that was only the beginning of their pessimism and unhelpfulness.   The restaurant they told us to go to was closed.  They were quite  certain that there was no way for us to get to the Great Wall by ourselves and had never really heard of anyone doing such a thing without a tour guide. (More on that in the next post.) They were VERY certain that we would never be able to find a taxi at that time of night to take us to the airport (even though when we walked outside we found six taxis immediately).  They live in Beijing! They run a hostel! They think the flag raising is at 4 am? I finally concluded they lived in an alternate tourist universe.

In spite of our lack of encouragement, we found many interesting things to do.  We followed the crowds on our block and went to the Lama Temple – so named because the Dalai Lama used to live there a long time ago, not because they raise llamas there (a distinction I had to spell out to myself in my head a number of times, but no one else seemed to have trouble with).  The New Year is apparently a very important time for Buddhists to burn incense at the temple, so there are TONS of people selling incense on the sidewalk and TONS of people going to the temple to burn it.  So we awkwardly also went to the temple and watched other people performing their religious rituals.  But it was a beautiful place – very colorful and majestic.  There is also an enormous statue of the Maitreya Buddha that is over 85 feet tall and made out of a single sandalwood tree.  Crazy!  According to the plaque outside, it holds the Guiness Book of World Records for largest statue made out of a single tree.

That is all made out of one tree! I really don’t understand that.

Folks burning incense. And me taking their picture. But I saw some other Chinese people taking pictures too, so I felt less bad.

We also went to Ditan Park, which is just down the road and is famous for its New Years Temple Fair.  The Fair included a lot of lovely red decorations, a huge amount of stalls with people selling all kinds of random fun stuff (as well as food), small carnival rides, and karaoke.  A friend told us that Ditan Park also has a sort of blind date field, where people go and hold up signs with information about themselves to try to woo a mate.  Apparently, many of the young people get their parents or grandparents to actually come hold the signs though.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t find that area when we were there!

Yeah, it was a bit cold there.

We also spent one lovely afternoon at a tea shop!  It was a tiny two room store, with all the walls lined with tea and teapots and tea cups.  A very nice family (mom, dad, little girl, and baby) ran the shop and they made us tea for hours – at least eight different kinds.  You can request what kind you’d like to try or they will make a variety.  It was quite fun, even for me who doesn’t like tea that much.  We tried white tea, a few kinds of green tea, a few kinds of oolong, and I think a red tea.  The family came from another province in China that is famous for growing tea.  When they first came to Beijing they opened a restaurant, but the man said they didn’t know anything about restaurants so it closed after six months.  They decided to open a tea shop instead because that was thing they knew the most about, and they’ve had the tea shop now for ten years. It was a really cool place.

Those round things on the back wall are bricks of pu’er tea, which is apparently better the older it gets, like wine. It also gets more expensive, and in other places in China they have pu’er tea for sale that is over 100 years old. (This guy only had about 20-year-old tea I think.)

We also went to an acrobatic show one evening (which I unfortunately didn’t get any pictures of). This time we did use the tour service connected with our hostel, and boy is it a good thing we did!  The show was at 7:30, but we had to leave the hostel at 6:00, which seemed ridiculously early to me.  Turns out that we had to leave that early in order to get to the theater before the doors opened so we could stand in this mad crush of people to wait for the doors to open and then rush in as fast as possible to get a seat.  It was definitely a you-snooze-you-lose situation.  If you didn’t get there half an hour early you probably didn’t get to sit with your friends. We also didn’t know that you were supposed to leave about 5 minutes before the show ended.  By the time the curtains went down on the performers, we were the only ones sitting there.  There were really quite a few theater attending rules that we weren’t aware of.   The show was spectacular though – the ending act was five motorcycles zooming around (and upside down) in a giant metal sphere.  Heart-stopping!

 

All right, enough for now.  Next time I’ll tell you about our accidentally perfectly planned and super awesome trip to the Great Wall!

 

Back We Go!

As most of you know, the almost two month blog silence has been a result of our tenure in the bosoms of our loving, good-cooking, fun-having, interesting families and friends in America.  But tomorrow we head back to China, via a wintery vacation in northern China, and I really feel that I should go back to the blog.

My aunt Susan will be joining us for this excellent excursion.  Her intrepid nature encouraged us to follow one of Alex’s longtime travel dreams and go to Harbin, China for the International Ice Festival. Buildings and sculptures and slides and towers made out of ice and lit with neon lanterns.  Awesome!  However, as one would expect with an ice festival, it is located in a very cold place.  Harbin is almost as north as you can get in China…which means it is essentially Siberia.  The forecast for the days we’ll be there is High 10, Low -17. Yikes!  We’ll also be staying in Beijing a few days, and going down to Haikou (where it is currently High-75) as well.

But we’ve packed our long undies and wool socks and are feeling brave (enough)!  In anticipation, I knit myself a balaclava.  When I wear it by itself I mostly look like a tiny-headed snow burglar, so I am going to tone it down a little by wearing my great puffy hat I bought in China.  I’m so ready!

Cute burglar alert!

Off we go again…hope you all are well. See you on the flip side!

p.s. When we left China they were cracking down on VPNs (the thing we use to let our Internet pretend we live in America so we can get to websites like Facebook, Youtube, and this blog) and were updating the Great Firewall…so there is a possibility that once we get to China I may have some trouble updating the blog.  Hopefully not, but I will let you all know!

Shengdanjie Kuaile! Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from the States!

At the last minute, we got to come home for the holidays (yay!) so are extra full of Christmas cheer! This is some adorable (and fairly inexplicable) Christmas graffiti we found at Hainan University.

There are actually quite a bit of Christmas decorations and such in China, but its very haphazard and a bit mixed up.  Also, there’s no religious component and no one gets off work or school or anything.  Most of our Chinese friends had finals on the 25th.

I had some pretty hilarious conversations about Christmas as well.

Suyi (my language partner): We always eat apples on Christmas Eve.

Me: Why?

Suyi: Because it’s traditional…like in America.

Me: What? Actually, it isn’t. I’ve never heard of that before.

Suyi: WHAT? Ohmigosh, REALLY?

(Later, I talked to my two 13-yr-old tutorees, who both said they ate apples too.  One girl didn’t know why, but the other said it’s because the Chinese word for apple (ping guo) sounds similar to the words for “good health and wealth,” or something like that.)

Me: Here’s your Christmas present!

Suyi: What’s this?

Me: A candy cane.

Suyi: Oh, I’ve heard of those.

Me: You can eat it.

Suyi: Oh!

I decorated our apartment on a budget this year. Toilet paper roll stars, paper snowflakes and banners, and a toilet paper roll nativity scene.

We also found a real life Chinese Christmas tree!  It is stalks of bamboo tied together in a pot of water.  So cute!

Before we left Haikou we had a Christmas party for all our Chinese friends…to give them a taste of some American holiday traditions.  We managed to acquire cookies and icing (a big deal in China) and sprinkles and could decorate Christmas cookies! There was a hick-up with the red hots, though.  None of them knew what cinnamon was…  We served American-y foods – pb&j, Jello Jigglers, carrot sticks, and cheese and crackers.  It took a bit to get our guests to try the foods, but once they did everything seemed to be a big hit.  The most confusing part was actually the Christmas napkins.  My mom sent me some from the States, so of course I put them out for the party.  But no one understood what they were for!  Chinese people use tissues for everything, they don’t really have separate napkins.  I tried to explain what they were and encourage people to use them, but instead a number of people picked them up, opened them all the way up, looked at them, the folded them back together and put them back in the stack.  Eventually, at the end of the evening someone asked me if they could take one home and when I said, “oh, of course!” there was a mad rush and EVERYONE wanted to take them home. Oi.

We played Spoons (using chopsticks) and some party games, and also did a White Elephant Gift Exchange.  They brought awesome gifts and once we got the stealing part started they were really into it.   It was also nice to be able to do something nice for all the people who have been nice to us and helped us out a lot.  A perfect Christmasy evening.

Before the guests arrive.  I meant to take pictures all night and COMPLETELY forgot.  So just one before and after.

Apparently half of us thought we were supposed to hold up our gifts, and half thought we were supposed to do the sign from a game we played.

L to R: Zhongpin, Larry (in the plaid shirt), guy we can never remember his name who we play frisbee with, Daisy, Pearl, Yemei, Yemei’s date and frisbee guy’s date (I can’t remember their names either), Jade in the pink sweater in front of them, Chris (an English teacher at the university we play frisbee with), Chloe (a British classmate), and Alex.  Then kneeling, Suyi, me, and Jojo.

As you can tell by the time of this post, we are still jetlagged and wide awake in the middle of the night. But it’s time to pretend to sleep now.

Merry Christmas everyone, we hope it is a blessed and happy one!

Bad Habits

I’ve been picking up some bad habits in China.  Habits that are COMPLETELY unsustainable in America.

1.)  Not recycling – I often do put my recycling in the recycling cans around the city.  But sometimes I just put my empty plastic bottles on the street.  I just leave them there! In the middle of the street!  Since I would NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS do this in America, I feel very guilty and ashamed whenever I do this in China.  But here, most recycling is done by individuals who collect bottles and cans as their source of income.  So if there is no recycling can handy, the best thing to do is just leave the bottle in some very visible location.  It will get picked up soon, and probably by someone who needs it.

But I still feel so guilty about it!

2.)  Driving on the wrong side of the road – Most streets in Haikou have designated scooter/ebike/cart lanes.  They are a full lane space, separated from the car lanes by a barrier, or a row of trees.  Because it is sometimes difficult to cross the street (few crossing places!), the scooter lanes are all two-way (or at least everyone uses them as such).  Much of the time we drive on what is technically the wrong side of the road, and even when we do drive on the right side, we are usually the only ones going in the right direction!  Oh Chinese traffic rules…

3.)  Saying whatever I feel like saying in English – I’ve gotten into the extremely bad habit of saying anything I want in front of Chinese people, because they can’t understand it.  Even with our Chinese friends who speak English well, if you speak fast enough, they can’t understand you.  Of course, I’m not using this as an opportunity to hone my snarky criticism skills, but I do often say things like “Look at that person’s crazy shirt right next to us!” and  (I just said this yesterday to Alex) “can you please make that shop attendant stop stalking me through the store!” (At the time she was standing about a foot away.  I hate it how shop people often follow you around!) It does make it easier to talk about purchases in front of sales people though, because I can say what I really think.  But as with most things of this nature…it is only a matter of time until I get caught!

I still feel very anxious and rebellious whenever I do any of these things, so I am hopeful that means these habits are not ingrained enough to follow me home.