Adventurasia Community

It is difficult to imagine China as a communist state, I think they define themselves as socialistic these days. Capitalism is apparent everywhere, China has Haagen Days, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Pizza Hut, KFC, as well as brand name goods like Nike and Adidas, and we stayed in a Days Inn in Beijing. China is the first, second, and third world all in the same city. Beggars living side by side with factory workers, and business magnates in luxury cars. People live in shacks that are in the shadows of towering skyscrapers. Everything seems so large in scale compared to Japan-legions of taxis and bicycles, people walking everywhere, wide streets, sprawling cities-even Nanjing and Hangzhou had populations over 6 million people.

The People:

Generally people can’t speak much English, but we managed to run into English Professors, college students, self-taught English speakers, and people eager and willing to communicate as much as possible with limited vocabularies. We spent an hour talking two a guy and his brother in law that ran a pot sticker food stall in the first floor of their house. We learned that they were from the northern province Heilonjiang-also known as the manchurian Plain-apparenlty a desolate place. One guy’s wife was an English Professor, the other’s wife was a doctor and they had come to Shanghai to make money to support their families. They managed to communicate their displeasure with Bush, support of the current PM in China, and an admiration for Clinton, all with an English vocabulary of like 50 words-amazing. All the cabbies were characters and quite friendly. I usually wrote down the Chinese characters for destinations or pointed to addresses in the guide book to get around, but basically we didn’t have any problems going anywhere or doing anything. Sometimes we resorted to pointing at food in restaurants if they didn’t have English menus. A lot of places in Beijing and Shanghai had English menus. Shanghai in general is a very international city and had the largest number of English speakers. Middle aged Chinese businessmen were the worst behaved smelly, disheveled, rude, and loud. They were continually snorting phlegm and spitting on the streets in the trains, etc… Even saw a few older women do it as well. Lorenzo and I fondly call it the sound of China. You couldn’t walk 5 paces without hearing someone hawk a loogie on the sidewalk. There is no cell phone etiquette either. I got stuck sitting next to a guy shouting into his cell phone for most of a three hour train ride-Thank God I brought my MD player or it would have been unbearable. Of course most tourist sites were over run with beggars and people trying to sell cheap souvenirs.

Driving:

Every taxi ride was an adventure. Traffic rules seem arbitrary as drivers usually merge without signals, do illegal u-turns at the drop of a hat, swerve around stopped cars, speed, pass on the shoulder, and NEVER yield to pedestrians. They acknowledge them by honking or swerving, but NEVER yield. The pedestrians and cyclists are no better, they cross from the middle of a block, on red lights, on highways with little regard to oncoming traffic or basic traffic rules. I am surprised that I only saw three accidents while I was there. On one memorable ride a taxi drove so closely to two men loading a refrigerator onto a truck that it scraped the refrigerator, later he almost collided with a moped. Another time a taxi driver in Hangzhou tried to pass a tour bus with oncoming traffic.

The Food:

The Chinese are famous for eating anything that moves. Generally we were Ok, with a few mistakes. Once at a hot pot restaurant I let Lorenzo order turtle. So out comes the boiling pot and a pile of freshly slaughtered turtle complete with black skin and a complete flipper. It actually tastes a bit like chicken, but it was most impossible to get at the meat after separating it from the skin and bones, which was sparse to begin with. I made the mistake of pointing at what I thought was vegetables and beef, it turned out to be liver and intestines with vegetables. Regrettable indeed. We ate a lot of great dumplings, noodles, soup, shrimp, vegetable dishes, and so on. Every now then we went western as we do in Japan as well-after all we were on vacation. There was a famous street in Beijing which had a bunch of food carts with snacks from all over China this meant, I kid you not, skewered scorpions, grubs, what appeared to be cockroaches, grasshoppers, beetles, baby sparrows, squid- among other more mainstream snacks. The last night we ate some excellent Sichuan food, very spicy and cooked with chili peppers.

Beijing:

Beijing was way more modern than I thought. Everything is on a large scale with proper communist architecture from the Albert Speer book of fascist architecture. The streets were widened to look more impressive during parades of the military which took place in Tianamen Square, which is also massive in front of Mao’s mausoleum. The Forbidden City was also quite impressive, there is a lot of similarity between ancient Chinese and ancient Japanese architecture, the influence of China is easily drawn form such structures. We made a mistake and went to the “old” Summer Palace, which is less than impressive, the “original” Summer Palace is also impressive, a green area, with a lake it is beautiful and impressive. Beijing is like Tokyo, flat and sprawling. There are some old neighborhoods called hutongs that are on their way out with all this modern planning. We only spent three days here, but I wish we had spent a few more days. The Great Wall is just outside Beijing. We decided to go to a section called Simatai, which is know for it’s steepness. It is two hours outside the city. After climbing form the 5th tower to the 9th I was exhausted. You can’t see where it starts or where it ends, amazing really.

Nanjing:

We decided to stop off at Nanjing on the way to Shanghai, because I wanted to visit the nanjing Massacre Memorial. Nanjing is famous for the atrocities committed by the Japanese there in 1937, estimates say that between 200,000 and 300,000 people were slaughtered. The memorial was quite an eye opener, some people in Japan say it didn’t happen like the Holocaust deniers. We also visited Sun Yatsen’s mausoleum outside the city, a very impressive memorial on the side of a mountain. Nanjing is less modern than Beijing and much dirtier and in the process of development as well.

Shanghai:

Shanghai is like the New York of Asia,a very international place with the most foreigners that we saw. A nightlife comparable to Tokyo with great restaurants and it still has some old hutongs among the modern high rises that dominate the skyline. The Bund is an are near the river that has several old European buildings remaining, many are regrettably being destroyed to make way for the new Shanghai. I could imagine living in Shanghai. Unfortunately it was raining during a lot of our time in Shanghai.

Hangzhou:

We decided to stay over night in Hangzhou which is two hours south of Shanghai and a favorite vacationing place for Chinese. It has it’s own famous cuisine and the West Lake, a beautiful lake that many people take boats to see and walk around. It has a very laid back atmosphere and people were very friendly. This is another place I wish I would have stayed at longer.

China was a fascinating place to see, in the midst of development. I felt as thought I didn’t really see much of the rural China, but we only had two weeks and actually saw quite a bit, there are parts of old China in the cities, but they are disappearing fast.