Having Fun All The Time

Arriving in the beautiful town of Yangshuo

(This is part 2 of a 5-part series.)

Yangshuo: Luck with tourguides, quitting smoking and a culinary experience

My uncle and I were the first to wake up the next day and we set off to find breakfast. My parents were still exhausted from their 48-hour journey from the U.S. and we wanted to let them sleep, and my younger cousin (14 years old) also just wanted to sleep, so we let her be. We walked down the main street of Yangshuo, which is extremely wertern and touristy, and found a place with a decent western breakfast and ate for a couple of hours. The rain had temporarily stopped and the peaks started to appear from the mist around us, and it reminded me of being in a ski town in Colorado or Alaska — you can’t really believe that the mountains around you could be so dramatic or beautiful; there’s just no getting used to it.

Quickly, though, it started raining again, and when my parents woke up after noon it was too rainy to do much. We settled on a raft ride up the LiJiang river (Jiang means river I think so maybe it’s just the Li River) and found a 2 hour ride on a rickety bamboo raft for about 120 RMB. The driver couldn’t speak English, but my Chinese was good enough to find out that the river is 6 meters deep and has an old, creepy sugarcane plant along it, which we passed.

The raft ride along the Li River

Yangshuo is in southern China just a few hundred miles north of Hong Kong, and the landscape there is some of the most beautiful I’ve seen anywhere. The town itself is fairly small. It consists of a street that runs along the main river (the LiJiang) where our hotel was located, and then several streets that spur off of that into town that generally consist of restaurants and tourist shops. It’s a great place for touring, especially if you’re new to China or don’t have a lot of time to see a lot of the country, because there are a ton of places to buy gifts where bartering is not only allowed but totally necessary, there are a million things to do and its very easy to find places to get western food and to rent motorbikes or bicycles to get out and explore.

After the boat ride we cleaned up and got ready for the Yangshuo night show that was designed by the guy who also designed the 2008 Olympics opening ceremonies. We bought the tickets in the morning; the tickets were about 150 RMB. There was an option to buy 250 and 350 RMB tickets too, but somebody told us that we didn’t need those, which turned out to be more or less true (would have been true if it hadn’t rained, but it did rain, and the only part of the stage that’s covered is the 350 RMB seats – but probably not worth the extra 200 to not get rained on anyway). The show consisted of about 300 performers singing, running around a huge stage that actually was the river’s surface – they used boats to move around on the water and crazy big moving platforms – and even though the story was impossible to follow I still thought the performance was beautiful and the music was good. The others in my group varied in their opinions – my uncle wished there was an English translation and my mom found the whiney singing a little annoying, and other people seemed to think it was just a little boring.

The night show in Yanshuo rocked my world, but others weren't quite as crazy about it -- although we all thought it was good. Those red things are people performing on a huge stage that is just water.

On the way to the show we were seated in a van with four of possibly the weirdest people I have ever encountered, and one very sweet and nice English girl. The English girl was of Chinese descent and teaching English in a nearby province, and she had run into the other four in Yangshuo. The four weird people were also all foreigners teaching ESL in China, two couples. One couple was American and one was English. The Americans guy was super mumbly and I couldn’t understand anything he said, and everytime I spoke to him directly he looked away; the American girl was super intense and seemed like she was burning a hole in my head when she looked at me; the English guy had huge bulbous eyes the color of pale green apples and spoke very slowly; and the English girl, after we had all got soaked at the performance, kept grabbing her breasts with both her hands, like full on titty-grabbing herself for no reason, and complaining about how her “knickers” were soaked.

I was, however, fascinated by the sweet English girl, and actually when I first spoke to her I thought she was Chinese so I spoke in a slow English. Then she started talking and right as I was about to compliment her on her excellent accent I realized that she was in fact British. She said she was staying in Yangshuo for three weeks studying Chinese before returning back to England to go to grad school, and I wanted to talk to her some more but there was no time; the show was over and it was time to head off to the next thing.

After the show we went out for dinner. We found a Chinese-style steakhouse and watched the World Cup game between Germany and England, and watched Germany kick England’s ass. Later that night I walk back with my parents as my mom did some last-minute shopping. We got a little lost in the winding streets of the little town after I stepped into a smoky open-air Chinese stall restaurant to buy some beers for us to take back to the hotel. The place stank of Chinese cigarettes and was loud and chaotic and dirty. It felt a little like being back in my home city and I felt more in my element there than I had felt in our expensive hotel in Hong Kong, in a way. I’ve never been able to afford nice hotels for myself and am still not sure if I ever will. I let a cigarette while the waitress wrapped up my beers, which I bought for 4 Chinese Yuan per can, or around 60 cents, which was 10 percent of the price we had paid for the same beer at dinner. Then I left the restaurant to meet my parents and together we headed back to our hotel.

On the way to the hotel we stopped at a McDonald’s to use the bathroom, and in the men’s bathroom, there was a completely drunk English guy who could barely stand, slowly and deliberately washing his hands, muttering, “fucking Germans”.

Thinking about not smoking

That night my parents asked me if I wanted to sit with them on the balcony looking out over the LiJiang river and have a beer or two, and I did. At first we just chatted and my dad and I smoked and we drank beers, and then my dad went to bed. Then my mom asked me about my smoking and I admitted that I was still smoking regularly, always at least several cigarettes a day. But that I wanted to quit, and that I had tried a few times but that I had always been foiled by basically nothing but a lack of resolve.

A view from the Yangshuo countryside

Then she mentioned in passing the story of how she quit, which she said I must have heard before, and when I said I hadn’t she told me about it. I guess that she decided to quit smoking after she got pregnant with me. She had tried several times before, especially after my sister was born, but had never been able to fully get there. She had been a smoker since she was 14, so anything – taking a drag at a party, getting into a car accident – could send her back into full-on two-packs-a-day smokerdom. So she finally managed to quit, while pregnant with me, by taking a full week off from work and deciding to do nothing but stay at home and focus on not smoking cigarettes. She asked my dad to smoke outside and put his cigarettes in his truck and she fully committed to not smoking. She cleaned the house constantly without taking breaks so that she would not get a chance to have a cigarette, and just basically wanted to smoke all the time until the week was over, and at the end of the week she wasn’t a smoker.

This story made me realize several things, but most of all it made me realize that being a smoker is more than just a habit or a feature of a person, not like liking chocolate or not liking broccoli. Being a smoker is totally something that shapes your persona and your routine and what your life is in so many ways. Once you have been a smoker for several years, your personality becomes the personality of a smoker, whatever that is. It may be only subtly different from the life and personality of a non-smoker, but it is different, and I realized that after smoking since the age of about 21, about five years, I could no longer remember what it was like to have the life and personality of a non-smoker. And I told my mom as much – that I couldn’t even imagine my life without cigarettes – and realizing that (after saying it, of course) was one of the bigger, kind of sadder things I’ve realized in a long, long time. I’m not sure why – I just realized that being a smoker and smoking is not just a matter of stinking and having ugly teeth and skin and etc, it’s also a huge conglomeration of things that pile up over the years and decades that you can never, ever measure or conceive of in one sentence or in one idea in your head. At least I can’t. It’s one of those cumulative things that you never fully realize that you don’t ever know you don’t ever know the full extent of. And after I really realized that, I realized that I have to quit smoking cigarettes, really. And the next day I didn’t want any. I did take a drag of my dad’s cigar halfway through the day, but I didn’t even know why, and after that I didn’t want any, and sometime after that I decided that I was going to focus on becoming a non-smoker, on overcoming my cravings and focusing on the long-term and giving it up. And that is what I did for the rest of the vacation – it was hard as hell at times, but that is what I did.

Also, at the end of the conversation I thanked my mom for deciding to quit smoking soon after she became pregnant with me.

A motorcycle trip through the mountains

The next day in Guilin we all woke up rather late, because we had all been up late the night before, and again we went off to a western breakfast. After that, my mother booked a cooking class to learn how to cook some Chinese dishes for the next morning, and I noticed that all the dishes the school was planning to teach were very weird, non-Chinese dishes that you don’t even find in Chinese restaurants in the U.S. The school’s facilities looked cool but they were obviously teaching how to cook some weird forms of non-Chinese food that sort of approximated Chinese food – in other words, they were realizing that a lot of foreigners are not comfortable with true Chinese food and trying to accommodate accordingly, but they were doing it badly. So instead, I suggested that my mom just asked them to teach her how to cook fried rice, fried noodles, and gong bao ji ding, three super common and usually delicious authentic Chinese dishes, and that’s what she did, and the next day I think it turned out pretty well.

We stopped to take picture on the motorscooter ride. To left is Nancy, our amazing tour guide.

After we left the school we realized that the rain had actually stopped for the first time in days and we immediately decided to rent motor scooters to go on a tour of the Yangshuo karst peaks. There were hawkers promoting tours on almost every corner in Yangshuo, literally, so we just asked the first one we passed. The first question I asked the vendor was if she had helmets, and she said yes. This was a good sign, as the vendor we had questioned the day before had laughed when I asked this question and explained that helmets were not really necessary at all, as though it were obvious. But this vendor had them, and she actually offered a reasonable price off the bat – 100 RMB for a motorized scooter for the whole day. She said she could add a tour guide for 150. I asked if we could get a discount on the bikes since we were renting 4, and she said yes, and I suggested 80, and she said OK. We agreed to the tour and said we would go rally the troops and return in an hour.

It sounded great – around 550 RMB (less than $100) for 5 people to scooter around the beautiful landscape for a full day, and it was great. It was ridiculously, ridiculously great. We completely lucked out on the tour guide. Her name was Nancy, and she was clearly a sweet, decent woman and was one of the few people in Yangshuo, besides the people in the cooking school, who did not appear to want to rip us off in the slightest bit. She smiled a lot and let us take as long as we wanted all day and led us on an amazing six-hour tour of the Yangshuo countryside, through obscure villages, over muddy obscure mountain paths, through back woods and into huge rice fields in valleys, and answered all our questions and even told us about her family and that they all grew up in farming families but were now working in the tourism industry in Yangshuo. About herself, she said early on that she was just a farmer, with a smile that flickered with an understanding of the negative connotations that word carries in China but also the fact that she had risen above that status by way of her use of English in the tourism industry.

I probably annoyed my family by speaking Chinese with Nancy, even though her English was much better than my Chinese, but she was accommodating with me and seemed to appreciate that I could speak the language. She told me that she had learned her English by taking a months-long (I forget how many months, I think 6) training course in English. She also said that often in China the children of a family take the man’s name (females in marriages in China don’t typically take the man’s name after marriage), but that her son had taken her name. “Because I am the most important person in my family,” she added, again smiling slightly.

This is the little dirt path where Nancy showed us the rice -- it was in the middle of nowhere and totally quiet, a nice contrast from the touristy busy-ness of Yanshuo

The motorcycle ride was a bit difficult for my mother, because she had only ridden a motorcycle once before and some of the trails we went on were very thin and very muddy, but for me it was very fun and reminded me of my days riding a dirt bike in the woods in New Hampshire when I was a teenager. About halfway through the trip one of the bikes broke down, and Nancy made a phone call to a person who must have been her dealer, and the dealer agreed to bring another bike out and take care of the broken-down one. It was about that time that I realized that Nancy didn’t own or hold any stake in the motorcycles we were riding, and I realized I could ride the hell out of mine and really have fun, so I started playing in the mud on the bike more and opening it up all the way when we hit open stretches. I was able to get it up to about 40 MPH on a paved road, which was as fast as I wanted to go anyway on a small motorcycle in China. Also while driving through the mountains in Yangshuo there was little reason to go fast – the slower you went, the more chance you had to look at the incredible mountains and valleys and streams and hollows. The place was amazing.

At one point Nancy stopped and showed us the rice growing in the fields. The rice was green and lush and stood about knee high or higher, and she explained how at harvest time the farmers would cut the clumps of rice blades with a knife and use a small threshing machine (the word “threshing” is my guess and not her descriptor) to actually get the rice out of it’s green pod-like container. She also knelt over a stream and showed me some snails and I recognized them as the kind that is so often fried up with a bunch of numbing hot sauce in restaurants in Fujian – the kind you can suck out of the shell in one slurping kiss – and when I asked her if she wanted the snail she said no, but if there were more she might gather them.

The tour went on and on and on, and by the end I was exhausted and everyone seemed to be hungry and the sun was red and hanging low. Finally I asked Nancy to bring us back and we skipped the final couple of stops she had scheduled, but she was still ready to bring us on another hour or two of touring. The woman was working hard and making sure that we all had a good experience – I noticed that she went out of her way to talk with each member of the group every once in a while, not focusing on any one person but trying to switch between people and make sure everyone heard something interesting – and she earned every damn bit of that 150 RMB, which is a good day’s work in China (even for me). As we pulled into the garage and put the bikes away I thanked Nancy and said the day had been perfect and we were all happy. “I am happy too,” she said, “because today I got a group of five. It’s a good day for me.”

(I got her card at the end of the trip – her phone number is 138-7837-4059 and her email is nancyzhang09@126.com)

Tasty meals in Yanshuo

We all wrote enthusiastic comments in her recommendation book and went to a big Chinese dinner nearby, which I enjoyed thoroughly but which everyone else only enjoyed a bit – they were still not used to how to use Chinese sevingware, the rules of table (in China you eat out of a bowl and never off a plate, for instance, and of course you use chopsticks and not a fork), and the completely different palette of tastes that comprises Chinese cuisine.

One of the last things we did in Yangshuo was a cooking class, which was a little expensive at 150 RMB ($20 per person), but was four hours long and included a tour of the local food market, instruction on cooking and a final meal, all with a translator, so I think it was well worth it. I missed it because I slept in.

I realized over the trip that Chinese things – the food, the compulsion to drink hot water and not cold water, the flavors and smells and sights and habits – they are all part of a very big painter’s palette that is just different, just fundamentally different, from the palette of the culture from whence I came. It’s not that the people are weird or that it’s impossible to get accustomed to Chinese life; it’s just that you have to come to understand the colors that underlie everything here, become familiar with the palette, and then things begin to fall in place. But you can’t mix the colors. Just as you can’t take a palette of earthy greens and browns and yellows and splash hot pink on top of it, you can’t really take an American diet and mix it in harmoniously with a Chinese diet. The flavors, the ingredients, the philosophies, start from different places and go in different directions. You have to choose one and stick with it for a while. You can’t sit down expecting a burger and fries and end up with fried snails and curdled duck’s blood. It doesn’t work that way. So, I think my family had a bit of a turbulent time, food- and stomach-wise, throughout the trip, and it was a bit tough for them to eat and appreciate the Chinese food. But I think that’s OK. You can’t get used to it and start to appreciate it in just two weeks; it took me a lot longer than that; it’s just too weird and different at first. But I did realize, a bit, how much I had changed since coming here. There are so many things I like now that I thought were freaky at first – drinking boiled water, for one; eating everything out of a bowl; spitting at table; eating snails; sharing all dishes with the whole table; eating cold chicken legs at the beginning of meal; weird-looking, generally unidentifiable meats; jellyfish; etc. The list goes on and on. But it’s just because I’ve had enough positive experiences with all those foods to understand what good is when it comes to those foods. If you don’t even know what good or bad jellyfish is, how can you know that the slimy thing you’re putting into your mouth is not poison?

As part of their cooking course, my mom, uncle and cousin went to the Yangshuo food market, where they got a glipse of the very different, definitely dirtier and more gruesome Chinese food-shopping process. The only substantiative comment I got from them on the experience was: "It was definitely real."

After dinner we all went home and cleaned up and passed out. The next day was the cooking class and then we would leave Yangshuo to go to my base city in Fujian. The cooking class was located near the end of town, near the food market in a building with the most amazing view of Yangshuo that we saw on our entire trip. For 150 RMB per person, the school provided a translator, a chef and a guide; they met at 9 a.m. and went to the food market in Yangshuo (the only thing I heard from my uncle about the market was that it was “real; it was definitely, definitely real”) and then went back and cooked. Everybody had their own wok and utensils and salt and spices, and around noontime my father and I joined them to eat.

As part of their cooking experience they also tried some Chinese tea with the traditional tea set...this method of brewing tea is extremely common, but usually with slightly smaller cups, which means that every two or three sips the tea server has to refill your cup for you

We sat on a deck on the sixth floor of the hotel the school was located and looked out over Yangshuo and enjoyed the food and a few beers, and then it was time to go. We went back to the hotel and packed up in the van and headed back through the karst peaks, this time in the daylight, to return to the airport and turn our path toward the little city in Fujian where I had lived for nine months, Sanming.

The family arrives in Hong Kong

(This is part 1 of a 5-part series)

Hong Kong: A delay, a rainstorm and a night ride through the mountains

The journey all across eastern China has just ended, so before posting pictures I’m going to try to recall everything I can about the 14 day trip here.

Leaving Sanming

My family’s visit to China took place at the beginning of summer, just a day after I wrapped up the last bits of my teaching work for the semester. My mother and father would be flying to Hong Kong from Boston, and my uncle and cousin (mother’s side) both flew in from San Francisco. I was pretty much flat-out busy for two weeks before they came, booking tickets and hotels at the last minute and administering final exams and giving grades. So when the time finally came to take a train to Hong Kong to meet my parents, I was exhausted and had developed a bit of a cold, but I was ready to go. I had been living in a small city in southeastern China (Sanming, Fujian Province, right across from Taiwan) for several months without leaving for more than a couple of days, and I hadn’t left Fujian since February, so I was ready to get out of the area for a little while and see what the rest of China had to offer.

Hong Kong

The first destination was Hong Kong. I left Sanming on the 23rd of June to go meet my parents, submitting final grades that morning and then buying a sleeper bus ticket to take me the 14 hours to Shenzhen, which is a major industrial city in the Chinese mainland just a few miles away from Hong Kong Island. From Shenzhen I could literally cross the border from mainland to Hong Kong by subway. I had originally planned to go by sleeper train, which is much more comfortable and in this case faster, but all across southeastern China over the past month it had rained, and floods and landslides had shut down the train route. So I boarded the bus in the afternoon and we set out west.

The only notable thing from the bus trip was that the bus’s dinner stop was several hours away from Sanming, at a broken-down-looking roadside restaurant where they served bad chicken soup and fried vegetables and rice and charged an outrageous 15 yuan for the meal (about $2 USD; normally this kind of meal would cost 7 or 8 yuan). But the place was obviously in the middle of nowhere and supported at least a few families, who appeared to be living in total poverty. Connected to the dining hall I could see their living quarters, which consisted basically of half a dozen beds crowded together and shrouded in mosquito nets. The place is hard to describe; it was just the kind of place that you know at a glance is inhabited by people who make no money and have very little, so it was easier not to feel cheated as I forked over my money. It was a bit of a racket; I took my food and they told me to pay later, and after I started eating they asked for the money; that was how I got tricked. But there was nothing to do about it; I had already started eating so I couldn’t barter. I paid my money and reboarded the bus.

As the sun was coming up I arrived in Shenzhen. Shenzhen is a huge manufacturing city that is full of modern, brand-new buildings, and it would look like a modern, well-developed city except that everything in it appears to be under construction, recently under construction or about to go under construction. There are piles of dirt, brick, metal, and other building materials everywhere — in parking lots, on sidewalks, in roads — and everything gives a feeling of being sort of haphazardly placed — as though the entire city were a sort of giant sandbox or playpen for designers and builders toying with the idea of a city. Buildings seem to not really line up in neat blocks; parking lots are incomplete; restaurants sit awkwardly next to factories and warehouses crop up next to shopping malls. The whole place seemed surreal as the bus drove through it, periodically stopping to drop off passengers, one at a time, until the bus was almost empty when we finally arrived at the station.

When I walked out of the Shenzhen station there were about 20 cabbies surrounding the exit, trying to usher me to their cabs. I didn’t think quickly and let one of the cabbies take me to his cab before I started to barter with him for a ride to the Shenzhen train station; I should have haggled cab fares when I was surrounded by 20 cabbies, but wasn’t sharp enough in the dazed blue dawn. So the 20 minute ride cost me more than it should have; about 70 yuan. The city started to redden as the sun came up and my cab approached the train station. After about 20 minutes we arrived at the main Shenzhen rail station and the cabbie told me that the subway would open in about 30 minutes, at 6:30 a.m.

As I was nearly arriving at the Hong Kong border crossing, where my cell phone would stop working (for some reason mainland China cell phones don’t work in Hong Kong), my mom called me up and told me that their plane had been delayed for reasons unknown, and that they would arrived at least 12 hours late; they were stuck in their connecting city, Detroit. This was fine because we had 36 hours in Hong Kong before we would fly to Guilin, to begin our travel in mainland, but it was a bit of a downer. She also told me that immediately before leaving San Francisco, my uncle had had to take his daughter (who was also coming to China) to the hospital because she had been complaining of strange stomach cramps, but that the hospital had cleared her to fly and they had successfully taken off. So I should still go to HK to connect with them. I wished my mom luck and said that I would try to find a calling card in HK so that I could get in touch with her and confirm her new arrival time later.

Arriving again

Arriving in Hong Kong was less dramatic than it was the first time I traveled from mainland China to HK, probably because this time I knew what to expect. I knew that I would suddenly find myself in a much wealthier, cleaner, more orderly, more familiar in a way and yet also unfamiliar environment. I knew that I would suddenly become more aware of my own body odor and clothing and that everyone would suddenly be better dressed and wealthier and just generally moving at a different pace (faster pace) than I had become accustomed to. So it wasn’t that much of a shock, and it felt really good to be back on the streets of Hong Kong (I spent 10 days there in the spring waiting for a new visa), cruising around on their super clean and efficient subway system and walking down the streets, digging the Western city vibe.

I only had the morning and part of the afternoon to get organized before I had to go to the airport to meet my uncle and cousin, so I immediately found an internet bar to search for the address of our hotel so I could check in and figure out how to get a calling card.

I settled on a calling card in one of the 711s that are all over Hong Kong (this is one of the major differences between HK and mainland; mainland really hasn’t figured out the magic of convenience stores, and it really does make life less convenient) and figured out how to check into our hotel, which was the plush and comfortable City Garden Hotel a few subway stops east of Central HK. I took a shower in the hotel’s bathroom and sat in the hotel room for 10 minutes and suddenly felt cleaner than I had felt in months. There is just something about being in HK that is that way — it’s the subtle noxious smell of mainland hotel bathrooms, or the dirty smell of the water, or the fact that laundry drying machines are not allowed in southern mainland — there is some indefinable way that life in mainland is dirtier than life elsewhere, inevitably dirtier, and once you are accustomed to it you don’t really feel it or sense it again until you leave mainland completely. And that is what I did in the hotel — just sat there and felt cleaner and fresher than I had felt in a long time, and then put on a fresh shirt and headed off to the airport.

Visiting the Night Market. It was so hot and sweaty and crowded, and we were exhausted, so we ducked out quickly after arriving

At the airport I met up with my cousin and uncle and then we headed back to the hotel pretty much immediately, and after about 20 minutes of walking around we ate at the best restaurant I have tried in Hong Kong yet: called Little Chili. It was a small Sichuan-style restaurant only a few blocks away from the City Garden Hotel specializing in (as the name implies) spicy Sichuan dishes including hot pot, shui3 zhu3 (I don’t know what that dish is called in English) and spicy fried meat dishes. We ordered Sichuan-style spicy fried chicken, fried Chinese greens, fried Chinese boiled dumplings and an eggplant dish and everything was ridiculously good, and way cheaper than you’d expect in Hong Kong. The 20-oz Qingdao beers were only 10 HKD! In the 10 days I spent in Hong Kong in the spring, I scoured the island for good food deals and I never found anything like this place. If you’re looking for good, cheap food in Hong Kong, Little Chili is definitely the place to go.

Unfortunately I screwed up ordering food and mistakenly ordered two orders of the spicy chicken dish, even just one of which would have been too big for the three of us. This was because I pretended to understand the waitress when I really didn’t understand the last question she asked me. After the confusion and the slight botching of what otherwise would have been an excellent introduction for my cousin and uncle to Chinese cuisine, I realized I would have to be stubborn and persistent in getting Chinese speakers to help me understand them through the duration of the trip, which would eventually result in me really getting much better at sticking to a conversation in Chinese, even when things got bungled or were difficult to understand. Which is of course essential for really making progress in the language.

The next morning, my parents came. It had been about nine months since I had seen them, which is one of the longest if not the longest period I’ve gone without seeing them. It was really joyful and almost tearful. In a way, I was almost nervous to see them again because it had been so long and I had missed them — I was nervous about the emotional ups and downs of seeing them for a good period of time and then having to say goodbye again. But seeing them again in person overwhelmed those worries and after a few minutes we got headed on our way to getting a taxi back to the hotel.

Connecting away from home

The next day, in Hong Kong, it rained, and it continued to rain throughout most of our time in the South. Our one day in Hong Kong we spent walking around — we went to the Man Mo Temple, and shopped for the necessities we would need for the rest of our trip, and did some antique-shop browsing. My cousin and uncle went to the old nunnery in Hong Kong and gave it great reviews, although I’ve never been myself. And for dinner we found an excellent and fairly cheap Chinese restaurant in SoHo, a little bit away from the escalator where all the overpriced food is. But it was quickly time to leave the expensive hotels and restaurants of Hong Kong — we only had about a day there, and then we took the bus across to the Shenzhen airport. I was a bit nervous to cross the border with my family — I knew everything would be fine, but I was anxious anyway — and then border crossing by bus was not as clean or easy as it is when you go from HK to Shenzhen by subway. But we all passed through mainland customs without a hitch, and after a delay of a few hours in the Shenzhen airport because of heavy rain, we took off for Guilin, our first destination in mainland China.

In the shuttle bus from HK to the Guilin airport, right after the border crossing, I encountered something of a major coincidence. There was another young guy on the bus, sitting next to my father and I, who I started talking to soon after we boarded after the crossing — a German guy a couple of years older than me who was also setting out with his mom to go traveling around China. The coincidences were this, in the order that I realized them:

1: He had also been teaching English in China, only he had been at it for two years and in Xi’an, and he had also been teaching German

2: He was also just starting out on a tour of mainland China with his mother

3: His mother had arrived in Hong Kong on the same day as my parents, and she would be leaving Beijing on the same day my parents would be leaving Beijing

4: They were also planning to travel to Guilin at the same time as us, and in fact had the same flight

5: They had been staying in the same hotel as us and the German guy, whose name was Jan (pronounced like “Yen” in English), had noticed us in the hotel

6: Jan was planning on traveling south through China after his mother left, just as I had planned to do, stopping in Xi’an and then continuing toward Taiwan

7: Jan and his mother’s seats on the airplane were actually directly behind my and my parents’ seats

There the coincidences (perhaps mercifully) stopped. Needless to say I ended up talking to Jan for about four hours straight and learned that he had spent about 3 years living in India studying Buddhism, that he studied sociology in university in Germany, that he was more or less sick of China and wanted to leave, and that he wanted to move to Taiwan to continue his study of Chinese, and that he was planning to go to Massachusetts in the fall to practice silent meditation for three solid months. He was a vegetarian and a non-smoker and I was able to identify with almost all of his views, except that he seemed to have been traveling and studying and meditating long enough to be far more calm and understanding of certain situations than me. And he was able to provide a lot of insight on life in China, particularly with respect to friendships, relationships and women — something I talked about with almost all the foreigners I met along our trip throuhgout the country (the foreigners who were living or had lived in China, anyway) since as I plan to sign for another year teaching English in mainland the reality of establishing and maintaining real relationships here becomes more of a necessity/reality.

Eventually, though, it got late, and I was exhausted, and I passed out in my airplane seat as Jan turned to his mom for conversation in German. My parents were already fast asleep on the plane; because of the delay, we wouldn’t make it to our hotel in Yangshuo, a small mountain town in the famous karst peaks in south-central China, until at least 2 in the morning.

Arriving in Yangshuo

I had booked a van to take us the hour and a half from the Guilin airport to our Yangshuo hotel, and when the lights of Guilin finally slipped behind us after the van reached the highway, we couldn’t see much out of the windows, except the occasional karst mountain floating by in the hazy dark like a phantom cloud. The karst mountains are plane mountains — they rise in great multitude from what appears to have once been a flat plane, not very tall or massive but sharp and jutting, like the image of a sound wave suddenly interrupted by a shout. They are so famous and beautiful that they are featured on the back of the Chinese 20-dollar bill. Everyone I spoke to who had seen them said they were one of the most beautiful places in China. But in the night they were just vague dark shapes moving slowly in the distance.

From our balconies in the hotel in Yangshuo we could see the nearby mountains and the river

We arrived in Yangshuo and checked into our hotel, and just as we were settling down to go to sleep someone set of fireworks in the park across the street from our hotel, and I saw the chrysanthemum-like explosions of fireworks outside at 3 in the morning. The next morning we woke up and stepped onto the balcony and looked directly out to the LiJiang river outside our balcony (we stayed at the Riverview Hotel, cheap, comfortable, with great service) and huge karst peaks to either side, towering over the little town and carpeted with green.

I traveled to Xiamen last weekend and stayed there for a few days. I left my base city by myself on Saturday evening and arrived in Xiamen in the morning, spent three days there and then came back.

Xiamen is a pretty city of about 2 million on the ocean.

I figured that for this trip, rather than inundating the blog with words, I would just post some pictures and some audio of walking through Xiamen.

So here goes.

Waiting in the train station, midnight.

The smoking room in the train station.

The sleeper cabin I had to myself, morning.

A Xiamen back alley, midday.

A Xiamen side-street.

A church on the same street.

Some wriggling prawns.

A shark moments after its head was cut off.

The packed ferry.

The ocean, afternoon.

Hong Kong is a very Western city dropped in the middle of Asia: When I arrived there by subway I had the reverse sensation from what someone coming directly from the West might feel: it seemed totally familiar to me, way more like home than mainland China.

I just returned from 10 days in Hong Kong. I initially went there because my tourist visa ran out and it wasn’t possible for me to remain in China without going to Hong Kong (“HK”) to switch to a working visa. But, my employer (a university in Fujian Province) hadn’t finished securing a proper working license for me. So off I went to Hong Kong, to wait for an indeterminate amount of time for the school to finish securing the working license and then mail it to me. I left mainland China on Feb. 3 and returned to my home on the 17th, so in all the trip was about two weeks long.

The view from the 43rd floor of the Bank of China building, next to the tram that goes to the top of Victoria Peak. The tall building at center is called IFC2.

One of the first sights I saw was this one. The Bank of China building lets you go to the 43rd floor viewing deck for free, which is not spectacular but I would say worth it, especially if it’s foggy and you’re not sure there will be much of a view from Victoria Peak (which was the case for me), which is the mountain next to HK that you can take a fairly expensive tram up to see the whole city.

I met some cool German folks and went to the Bank of China building with them. This is them.

And onto the next thing…

A gracious CouchSurfing host took me on a walk through the Night Market.

And then…

I'm not sure she wanted me to take her picture, but I took this one anyway. : ) I would highly recommend CouchSurfing to anyone even considering traveling, because it's awesome.

And then…

We crossed the harbor from Kowloon (the touristy peninsula north of HK that is still part of HK) to Hong Kong Island on the Star Ferry. The Ferry is quick, cheap, and nicer than the subway.

To have a beer and some tobacco…

On a pedestrian bridge on the way to the bar we saw a lot of these "No Hawking" signs, which were an amusing rebuke to the habits of mainlanders. As my host informed me, Hong Kongers take pride in being "different" from mainlanders. These signs were amusing evidence of that.

And to the hookah bar…

This tiny bar with outdoor seating was located right next to Lan Kwai Fong, in Central on Hong Kong Island, right down the road from a little Japanese barbecue shop. Highly recommended.

Hanging out, drinking beers and smoking hookah was one of the big highlights of the trip. That is something I could never do in Fujian Province. The tobacco was 150 HKD, which is roughly 140 RMB (Chinese money) or about $22 US, which, if you’re on a mainland China budget, is a lot of money (especially with $50HKD beers added in). In all, including travel expenses, visa costs, eating and hotel, I spent about 8000 RMB on my two-week foray to Hong Kong, or a bit over $1000 U.S. dollars. Considering that I make 4000 RMB per month in the mainland, somewhere around $500, every time I opened my wallet in Hong Kong, I cringed.

Hong Kong features what is apprently the "world's largest permanent light show", called the Symphony of Light, which shows right next to the ferry stop on the Kowloon side of the harbor every night at 8 p.m. Pretty, even if the music is weak.

Another reason to do CouchSurfing: the natives can tell you what to do in the area. My first host suggested this light show, which was a fun free thing to do that I checked out the next day after we hung out.

An alley just north of the "SoHo" (south of Hollywood Rd) area

The hostel I stayed in for my 9 nights in Hong Kong, in Kowloon (in the ChungKing mansions) was definitely, without doubt, the cheapest in HK (I had a private single room for 180 HKD, or about $25 USD, per night), but food in the area was no good, it was loud and Kowloon is generally not a fun place to hang out. So I spent a lot of time on Hong Kong Island around the “SoHo” area, which has a lot more charm and more eating options.

These guys were using a badminton-shuttlecock-like object to play hackey sack, and they almost never dropped it. I thought it was cool so I just snapped some photos.

Another…

Closest-up of the object as I could get

And then…

There's a temple in Central Hong Kong Island called the Man Mo Temple.

Incense…

These large burning incense coils filled the air with smoke such that it quickly became difficult to breathe or see. So I soon left, coughing and wiping my eyes.

And then…

Back to Kowloon each evening to go to bed. The hostel where I was staying, the ChungKing Mansions, featured a loud and chaotic Indian market on the ground floor, with lots of guys hawking all kinds of goods. Coming home late in the evening was a little sketchy only because the goods they were hawking became increasingly illicit as the hour got later.

Note the cool red Hong Kong taxis in the previous photo…

A shot from the Star Ferry Terminal, Kowloon side I think. The Star Ferry is great, cheap, and makes the outlying islands really easily accessible. And it runs frequently.

And then…

On my second-to-last day in Hong Kong I took the ferry to Lamma Island, which is a small, more relaxed and much cheaper island right next to Hong Kong Island.

The ferry was easy and cheap and took about 40 minutes to Lamma Island. And as soon as I arrived there I realized I should have gone much earlier in my Hong Kong trip (considering how long I was there and how I spent a lot of time just relaxing and trying to minimize expenses)…

Lamma was relaxed, comfortable, friendly, and cheap. And on the day I went it finally became sunny and warm in Hong Kong, which was a good feeling.

After getting off the ferry I met a guy from Switzerland who had just got his bachelor’s degree in medicine and was taking a year off to travel before going to medical school. He had been to Japan, Korea and Thailand, and was spending a few more days in HK before going to mainland China. He helped me find the beach and then we parted ways, I think both feeling a little awkward because we were both traveling solo and not totally accustomed to talking a lot. I kept meeting people like that in Hong Kong, travelers anyway, many of whom had been all over Asia or were starting out to go all over Asia.

A beach in Lamma. I didn't swim, but the water was nice enough to.

After sitting on the beach and reading the latest New Yorker (another commodity I’m not afforded in the mainland) I decided I had enough time to walk the mile or so across Lamma Island to the small mainland-style town on the other end of the island (the town was Sok Kwu Wan, and was nowhere near as cool as the town I landed in, to the north, Yung Shue Wan)…

...and I snapped this picture on the hike, which was fun and worth it...the town in the background is Sok Kwu Wan.

And that was my trip to Hong Kong. There were other things I saw that I photographed with my disposable film camera, such as the Big Buddha (cool, but if you go, take the tram; the rattly, nauseating bus ride is rough) and the tram to the top of Victoria Peak (it was too foggy to see anything). And there was the night on the town I spent with some Italian friends I met on CouchSurfing.com; that night and meeting up with the other person from CouchSurfing were the best parts of the whole trip. There’s nothing like meeting people from a foreign land. But after my day in Lamma, I picked up my visa from the travel agency and was good to go back to the mainland. So I said so-long to ample Starbucks everywhere, Western food choices and ubiquitous English speakers, and took the Hong Kong MTA back up to Lo Wu, where you can simply walk through Chinese customs within the Shenzhen train terminal (which is attached to the Lu Wo MTA station).

Of course, the day I returned to mainland China to travel back to Fujian was the eve of the Chinese New Year, which is the most hellacious time possible to be traveling in China. So all train tickets for days were totally sold out. Instead, I had to settled for a late-night sleeper bus back to a major city in Fujian, from where I would have to figure out another way to get the rest of the way to my home city, Sanming (this ultimately involved lots of waiting in the rain, waiting in the 24-hour McDonald’s, waiting in the hotel, riding another bus to another city that was not Sanming, and then getting picked up by a very gracious colleage from the college).

To get to the sleeper bus, I had to endure a very sketchy 15-minute ride in the back of a van, scrunched up in the trunk area with the luggage, not sure where we were heading because I had only understood a little of the Chinese the driver said to me. But we made it to the bus, and there was indeed a sleeper bed there for me.

The tiny bunk beds on the bus to Fujian from Shenzhen...back in the mainland. : )

And, last, the grainy shot of me in my sleeper bunk. The bus was definitely tolerable and fine for the 10-hour trip back to Fujian…I think I slept for a few hours.

Grainy shot, sleeper bus, around 9 p.m. Cost of trip from Shenzhen to Xiamen, Fujian: 305 RMB, or about $45 US Dollars. Good night and good luck.

Some pictures from recent trips to some towns / cities near Sanming. I need to make some changes to the blog, I think, before I can post these a bit bigger.

Taken from the side of XianJing Mountain in Datian.

About picture #1: We took a walk up the road along XianJing Mountain on my first afternoon in Datian — it took us about 30 minutes to drive there from Datian and we saw few cars or people once we arrived. There were old-style Chinese houses on the way to the top and a lot of rice fields. Near the top you could look down and see the laddered rice fields on the sides of a lot of mountains. These things look just like topo maps and you see them a lot driving through the countryside. They are really pretty. Note that on this mountain we were high enough so that a lot of the smog/pollution was below us, hence the rarely glimpsed blue sky.

Taken in Shaxian at a small hike / tourist attraction. A couple of different people told me this is China's largest "lying Buddha".

A not-so-old Buddhist temple in Shaxian, again mostly for tourists. It was pretty, though.

We took a meandering boat ride on QiXing (Seven Stars) Lake in HuMei (Beautiful Lake) near Datian. I learned (a little) how to play MahJong.

The city of Shaxian from afar.

An iron bridge near Datian. Getting there in a car involved asking multiple people to move motorcycles, piles of woods, driving over piles of dirt, etc. Clearly a car hadn't been through that way in a while.

Self-portrait in Shaxian