Pretend that this was posted on about July 1st.

In June, after school was over for me and during Mandi's accumulated week and two weekends of vacation from work, we travelled to Sichuan province, in China's "southwest." Geographically it's really more comparable to someplace like Arkansas, but it's the southwest of the traditional Chinese heartland (i.e. not including Tibet and Xinjiang). Sichuan is known in China for the giant panda, spicy food, and "spicy" women (Chinese people have really funny stereotypes for everyone in their country, and share them in a matter-of-fact way that seems either offensive or extremely amusing to Americans). It's also the ancestral heart of the state of Chu from the Three Kingdoms period of ancient Chinese history, if anyone is into that. Sadly we had to save the museum of Chu artifacts for next time.

For this trip we really wanted to experience some of what China's natural wonders had to offer, and so we chose Sichuan based on the presence of perhaps the most famous national park in China - Jiuzhaigou. Of course, being who I am we didn't intend to go camping for nine days, so the trip was attenuated with some time in Chengdu, the provincial capital. Ultimately, though, we definitely found what we were looking for at Jiuzhaigou, and it would have to stand as one my all-time highlights.

With that said, I'm going to leave it for the next (or next next) post. For now I'd just like to cover some of the cool stuff we did in and around Chengdu during our first half of the trip.

Chengdu as a whole gave one overwhelming impression: oppressively polluted. Being located in China, it has a populaton approximately equivalent to New York City crammed into the footprint of Detroit. The entire time we were there was marked by gray clouds, smog, and heat, making it really unpleasant. Also, while the lack of a subway/metro (but under construction, of course!) did force us to get out into the city and be a little more adventurous, taking buses or walking for blocks is a sure-fire way to find yourself sweating through clothing in the constant 90 degree heat of southern Chinese summer. Fortunately I think that the experiences we found there made it (mostly) worth it, and the city as a whole seemed nice enough if the weather had cleared up. If I ever go back I'd aim for earlier in the spring.

Our hostel was located on the north side of town, just a couple blocks from the river that bisects the city. While the hostel was useful for arranging our activities, it was one of the less stellar experiences we had, culminating with a send-off (on one hour of sleep) from a belligerent drunk guy sticking his headphones in my ears at 4am. I laugh about it now...

Anyway, enough with the negative. Our first day there (we flew direct from Beijing, and I wish I had gotten pictures of the new airport to share) we headed down to the Wen Shu Temple since it was nearby and easy for us to handle. There are a few pictures below - very beautiful grounds, along with a still functioning monastery, Buddhist library and so on. Hundreds of Chengdu natives were having tea in a sort of open air tea house, while others just enjoyed the parklike setting and greenery. We also had a lunch in one of my favorite Chinese styles - monk-inspired vegetarian. Essentially, since Chinese monks had to be vegetarian, they mastered the art of imitating every (Chinese) food using different combinations of vegetables and tofu. It sounds terrible, but I would simply point you to anyone who has eaten it. Beef, pork, meatballs, sausage, fish, seafood - everything comes out looking, tasting, and feeling the way you would expect it to. Of course, it's generally pretty good for you in addition to being delicious. But to tell the truth, I love it because it lets me order things I never want to order for real - such as hui guo rou (returned-to-the-pot meat, basically a sort of fried pork that must be about 95% fat by volume in its non-vegetarian form). And that's not to mention all the great vegetable and tofu dishes that are exactly what the yare supposed to be. I was fortunate enough to live across from a restaurant serving this style of food in Beijing, and we visited with some frequency.

So the temple was an entertaining and delicious couple of hours. Check out the pictures below.

That evening we saw a sort of "Sichuan Opera," which was really more of a variety show for Chinese tourists than an opera. But given my tolerance for Chinese opera that was perfect, and being aimed at the Chinese crowd we didn't have to suffer through (much!) bad English or attempts to make things "accessible." Instead we just enjoyed watching some acrobatics, the sweetest erhu performance ever covering both classical and modern genres (erhu = two-string, that sort of thin violin-looking Chinese instrument), a comedy sketch that was a lot funnier to me than to most of the other five white people though it was fortunately a lot of physical comedy, and finally a brief demonstration of actual "Sichuan Opera," which is famous for the ever-shifting masks of the performers. They have headpieces which are rigged to allow them to change their mask, or even their entire wardrobe, in one sweep of a sleeve across their face or cloth in front of their body. Very cool to watch.

This is getting long so I'm going to leave you hanging after only one day, but I promise I'll just spend one more entry on Chengdu highlights before getting to Jiuzhaigou. It really will be worth the wait.

Walking along the outer wall of the Wen Shu Temple. Gotta love those roofs.




The temple-y part. Similar to a lot of other places I've been, though I always find it interesting that on balance more people seem to still be using it in a religious way than as a point of tourist interest. Contrast with the cathedrals of Europe, for instance.



I loved this elephant, both for its reminder of the importation of Buddhism from India, and for the small child tickling (?) its trunk. Sorry you can only see his hand.



Who wouldn't want to study in a library like that?



I love this picture - a very elderly gentleman and a young monk playing a game of Chinese chess while someone else looks on. Exactly what I hope monks do all day when not contemplating the spiritual.



A lovely rock garden on the grounds.



Mandi digging into the "sweet and sour pork." On the table we also have "lion head meatballs" and some vegetables as vegetables. No, I don't know if the sprinkles come standard or if that was because we looked like we needed a party.



Yes, Mandi was just an excuse to try and get a surreptitious picture of all these elderly folks hanging out in the pavilion. There is a real sense of public community that this age bracket gives off in China, but as an outside I'm sure I miss all the ways people are probably excluded. (Cynicism alert!)



I don't know why the central districts of so many "second-tier" Chinese cities end up looking so...broken. It's like a bunch of local officials each tried way to hard to cheesily prove how great their part of the street was. Anyway, you can see why we spent a lot of time getting out, though to be charitable this was hardly what the entire city looked like.



A pretty picture Mandi took of some waxberries? Lichees? Not sure.



An opening scene of drama at the show we attended.



The table is blurry because it's spinning really fast. Kind of silly stuff to be honest, but still impressive in a guy-riding-a-unicycle-while-juggling sort of way. Not that my roommate in Beijing could do that or anything.



This guy suffered many indignities at the hand of his "wife" for our amusement. It's hard to tell because he's lying down and it's Chinese, but he's also cross-dressing.



The "Sichuan Opera" troupe, with three of the performers fully unmasked.

I realize the futility of posting six months after I abruptly stopped updating this blog, but the two people getting email notifications of new posts might find it useful.

Anyway, I just wanted to have a post saying thank to everyone who read, and explaining the reason that I stopped updating in April. Basically, after the March unrest in Tibet, the Chinese government decided it would be a good idea to shut down access to Blogger. This made it very difficult and quite a hassle to update the site, and in between the end of classes and further travel I just never got around to it. So apologies for that.

I'd like to continue writing occasionally about China, and I might even post a few more pictures and stories here when I have free time over winter break so that the blog is a more complete record of what I did there. After that, I'm going to make an effort to get back into posting political science / China related stuff on one of my other blogs, probably here.

Thanks again for all of your comments and for paying me some attention when I was abroad - it made a really big difference. Zaijian for now.

Two weeks before last I had an awesome week of vacation from school. For once, I took advantage of my free time to really get around and see some of the sights that I'd neglected all year - of course, the fact that Spring has arrived also helped quite a bit.

To begin with, Dan and I rode our bikes over to the Olympic Stadium (Bird's Nest) and got tickets to walk through and on to the field. From our apartment it's about a twenty minute straight shot on our bikes, quite convenient. The stadium is a really impressive piece of architecture, especially in person. As we sat in some seats and just took a look around the lower bowl, a mother and her daughter ran up to us. "Do you know how to speak Chinese?" "Yes..." "Well you see, my daughter has this part of her English homework that she doesn't understand, can you help her read it?" So we got to spend about five minutes explaining a three wishes fairy tale to this little girl. At the end the mom asked us where we studied in Beijing, and when we told her Tsinghua she and her daughter exchanged a series of three or more "Waaa!"s which were continuing as we said goodbye and walked off.

The next day we took a bit of a marathon ride to the Military Museum, nearly an hour away by bike about due south of us. The museum was cool although we only got about an hour to look around and spent much of that in the first exhibit hall. Lots of weaponry and exhibits with varying degrees of pro-CCP historical gloss, ranging from surprisingly little to unreadably heavy. The building has something like four full floors and we only saw a sort of overview exhibit, so I plan to go back and see what they have to say about Korea and what, if anything, they have about the China-Vietnam war. I think they've stopped calling it the War Against American Aggression in Korea but I'm not sure.

Then on Sunday Dan, myself and three other students from IUP (Grace, Mariel and John the Brit) headed to the Yuanmingyuan park for a picnic on the grass. We bought cheese and found a decent French bread to munch on as we watched some Chinese college-age girls struggle with a baseball. But at least it was baseball! Anyway, Yuanmingyuan or the Old Summer Palace, is the ruins of a series of gardens and Western-style palaces built towards the end of the Qing Dynasty in the 18th and 19th centuries. The palaces were all destroyed by the predominately British and French allied forces after the second Opium War, and today the issue of relics which were looted and currently reside abroad is a major one in China. You might have heard of the bronze zodiac animal head that came up for auction in France and caused a bit of a stir when the winning bidder turned out to be a Chinese citizen with no intention of paying. The gardens are in pretty good shape and very pretty - even better, there are a lot fewer people here as it is much lower profile than the actual Summer Palace although it's located right next door. The ruins are also very much worth a look as you can see below.

I'll stop there and post later with all the other sights which Mandi and I saw. Really sorry but the stadium visit was spontaneous and I had no camera! I'm sure you've all seen it on TV, or there are some pics from outside it way back on the earliest posts in my blog.

First draft of the Shanghai Communique (joint statement opening relations between the PRC and the USA) and a moon rock and flag given by President Nixon to Mao Zedong.



"Setting up the basic socialist system: Building socialism in China is the inevitable outcome of the course of modern Chinese history. The central collective leadership of the CPC, with Comrade Mao Zedong at its core ..." and so forth. One of the more unreadable displays at the museum.

Postscript: Chinese people laugh when I tell them about the current furor over "socialism" in the US. Take it from people who've lived through it - a bank bailout just doesn't quite qualify.



Striking ruins at the Old Summer Palace.



An old pool and some schoolchildren. While I said it was less crowded here, school groups absolutely overran some of the former palace sites.



The upkeep produces an interesting effect, with trimmed hedges and decent paths running alongside heaps of rubble. It's quite a big site compared to what I imagined.

At least a couple times each month I take the train down to Tianjin to visit Mandi. Since I've spent so much time making this trip during my time in China I thought I'd post a bit of a travelogue from Wudakou to Tianjin and let you see what it's like on the best leg of the Chinese rail system.

This is my first decision: subway (station pictured above) or cab? 20 kuai or 50 kuai? 1 hour to the station or 30 minutes? I chose the cab this time since pictures of the inside of the subway car would get old fast.



The cab heads south on the expressway into Beijing.



We pass the gleaming oval towers of Xizhimen subway station / Beijing North railway station. If only this station had trains to Tianjin :(



The second ring road brings us into the "people who have money" section of west Beijing.



We pass one of the remaining fragments of the Beijing city wall and after a turn keep heading south.



When I pass this pagoda top I know that I'm almost to our exit. Still haven't visited this place on foot but I think it's the Tianning Temple.



Approaching the Beijing South Station, which doesn't look like much from the outside.



The inside is large and spacious, with a lot of capacity for traveler volume to grow. I'm sure it will, especially when this place gets hooked to the subway network.



Everyone boards in a civilized manner.



On the platform. I like how the awning looks like draped fabric.



The business end(s) of the Harmony series high-speed trains. These can run at up to 350+ kilometers/hour (218 mph), and on the way to Tianjin they cruise at 340 kph. 210 mph at ground level is fast.



The interior is nice and bright with a decent amount of space.



Thank goodness for in-flight entertainment (ty Sarah!).



The scene as we accelerate out through the southern suburbs of Beijing towards Tianjin.



Around halfway through the 30 minute trip we pass this large church in the absolute middle of nowhere. Would be curious to know its story. The majority of the landscape looks like this without the church.



For awhile we follow the newly built Beijing-Tianjin (Jingjin) expressway. More unused transport capacity that will probably be one solid traffic jam by 2012 or so. A blurry picture but not much I can do about that.



Ah, back on the platform in good ol' Tianjin again.



We exit the station through the open-air courtyard in early evening.



Looking south over the Hai River. Tianjin's crane index is fairly high.



One of the nice relief depictions of Tianjin's history on the light poles around the station.

So, that's the story. Here are some of the data: the rail line connects Beijing, a city of about 20 million people, to Tianjin's approximately 10 million. It's one of the first truly high-speed legs in China and runs around every 15 minutes on the dot. You can buy tickets up to ten minutes before the trains leave so it's quite convenient to just show up and go. And finally, this is the first leg of the currently-under-construction Beijing to Shanghai line, which will have trains every 15 minutes during peak hours and a total travel time of under five hours. To give you a sense of comparison, that's like leaving Kalamazoo MI at 7am and getting to Atlanta GA before noon, on a train. Not too bad if the ticket prices stay down - they cost a whopping $9 between Beijing and Tianjin.

Here's that long overdue account of my trip with Mandi to Yangshuo in southern China's Guangxi province. This was late in January.

We flew from Beijing to Guilin, with a layover in Xi'an on the way down. Our airline was China Air which I would rate at about Northwest Airlines level. Not awesome but certainly serviceable. We met a fellow foreign traveller on the way down who was here from Spain, so Mandi got a nice opportunity to use her Spanish in person for the first time in awhile. We got in around 9pm and then took a taxi from Guilin to Yangshuo, one hour away by expressway. Even though it was nighttime we could make out the outlines of the limestone karst landscape surrounding us.

To be blunt, it was cloudy the entire week and we had at least two days of rain. This resulted in some truly frozen wanderings around the town and a sub-arctic boat ride up the Li River. But on the other hand, we had a number of really amazing experiences that made the week more than worthwhile.

It was Chinese New Year to begin with, which meant constant excitement in the form of firecrackers, fireworks and lots of "Xinnian Kuaile" (Happy New Year) greetings from the people trying to rip us off. Our hostel was comfortable enough though it tended towards cold in the 45 degree weather. But this was more than made up for by our host's hospitality. The owner asked us to eat dinner with her and some friends on New Year's day which was not only a fantastic southern Chinese traditional dinner but also a nice chance to feel social with some other international guests and Hong Kong Chinese who spoke English. There were two French architects staying with us who were working on the restoration of a Ming-era village which was especially interesting.

Mandi and I took two long bike rides, both times renting nice Giant mountain bikes from our hostel. Yangshuo and the area around it is made up of a networks of streams, rivers and valleys flowing between the vertical karst peaks. This means that one can take some relatively easy, level bike rides while surrounded on all sides by mountains, a unique experience. The roads we biked were built from deep red earth, and they wound through the landscape connected the tiny outlying villages. We rode for hours, taking occasional breaks to eat some crackers or have a drink while shooting photos. Each village was filled with folks dying to say hello to us or at least have a look as we went by, though they seemed to see enough tourists that we didn't really phase them. I stopped and asked for directions quite a few times and, as we made our way onto a river ferry alongside a mass of Chinese without access to improved roads and bridges at the end of our second ride, I felt like I had almost escaped urban China.

Besides that we had some fun events on the side - a visit to a water cave that involved riding a boat in through about two feet of vertical space over the stream and then about an hour of walking inside a fairly large cave, a hike to the top of Moon Hill (a karst peak with a huge circular hole in the mountain) and some delicious if slightly pricy American breakfasts for the first time in ages. Our host always had a supply of "juzi" (Mandarin oranges) ready to be squeezed for juice each morning which made the most intensely delicious orange juice I've ever had. We also took a cooking class with her which was great as I have expanded my repertoire of Chinese dishes from fried rice to fried rice and kung pao chicken. Although, we did write down a few more interesting recipes that I've not yet tried to reproduce without assistance.

The town of Yangshuo itself was fairly packed with tourists, which made the odd looks and calls of "laowai" even more disconcerting - if they see hundreds of white people each day you would think the Chinese in Yangshuo might eventually stop noting it, but I guess not. But it also had some less frequented parts, especially across the river. Mandi and I spent one morning just walking past all the New Year's decorations and seeing how many characters I recognized and then could teach to her. The winding lanes, bridges, pools and parks all helped the rather small area of the city feel dense and full of things to see, and the views of the peaks overshadowing the town added to the borderline-claustraphobic effect.

Anyway, my apologies again for the delay - hope you enjoy some of the pictures below. Highly recommended if you are ever in China, especially during a warmer part of the year!

Moon Hill, where we took a good couple hours to hike all the way to the top above the "moon" and back down.



A fun house on the river in Yangshuo.



By far the prettiest part of the cave we visited.



This is how most of the countryside looked, though we saw all sorts of places where everything from cabbage to oranges were still growing. The rice paddies were taking a rest.



I consult the map on one of our all-day bike excursions.



Overused narrator introduction: "China, a nation of contrasts. Where the ancient and the modern exist side by side." etc.



We saw lots of oxen, still the animal of choice for these farmers.



At Chinese New Year, all the families decorate their doors like this. The banners just have wishes for prosperity and so on in the new year. Note the candles burning.



Oxen swimming across the river. I asked their owner where they were going as he stood and watched them swim alone out into the water. "The other side of course."



A picture from atop one of the peaks in town.



The sun only came out for two hours but at least I got this picture.



Delicious citrus fruit even in the winter.



Crowded West Street, the main drag for tourists and diners in Yangshuo.