As promised, a (first?) post with a bit more depth about my time in Oliver's hometown of Sunwu, Heilongjiang Province.

I'll begin with the material. The apartment was fairly average as Chinese apartments go - two bedrooms, a small living room, one bath and a kitchen with two-burner gas stove. While I was there, Oliver and I shared one bedroom while his parents and grandmother shared the other. The running water was out of wack meaning the bathtub was in service as the main reservoir for the house, but other than that it was great. You can check out the pictures below. And as I said before, his mom made us some great food. A typical day began with a breakfast of zhou (rice porridge, better than it sounds) or soft boiled eggs alongside the abundant leftovers from the previous day. For lunch and dinner we had food that ran the gamut of Chinese cuisine - spicy doufu, small meat+veggie balls called wanzi, peanuts, doufu skin (sort of a noodle consistancy) stir-fried with vegetables, chicken dishes, dumplings and so forth. All of this eaten with a big mantou bread roll in the left hand, much better than the rice those southern Chinese like so much :) In the evening, I sat around watching Chinese TV dramas while talking with his family and munching sunflower seeds. All in all I couldn't have been happier.

The first thing you might notice upon walking out of Oliver's apartment building would be the huge pile of coal directly beside you, being shovelled towards the burner by a middle-aged Chinese guy caked in black dust. Walking between a local noodle shop and another apartment building, one emerged onto a street lined up and down with folks selling their wares - fruit, meat, doufu, mantou (bread), and a dazzling array of Spring Festival fireworks and decorations. The town of Sunwu was, like most places I've seen in China, a microcosm of the country's rapid devlopment. Here stood about eight to ten main blocks with multi-level buildings, apartments, restaurants and businesses, and then right across the street (inhabited) wooden shacks slanted sideways from the wind. Oliver told me how he had lived in one such home for most of his lifetime, only moving into their small but comfortable apartment about eight years ago. As I walked past the alleys leading between these dwellings towards the edge of town, I inhaled air thick with the taste of coal-smoke from each family's individual coal stove. Within hours wiping my nose left a black streak on the tissue.

One of the things that strikes an American suburbanite is the definition found in many cities abroad. After a ten minute walk, we literally reached an edge to the city - a last row of houses, a fence, and then fields and forest beyond. Here was no lingering infection of farmland and forests by occasional housing developments or newly minted retail strips, but rather a stark demarcation of town and country. The landscape reminded me a bit of Michigan, with low rolling hills and lines of trees breaking up the fields, but a farmer driving his herd of oxen across the snow quickly dispelled the image. We made our way up a low rise no more than a kilometer from town and I looked out upon a path in the snow that continued to the horizon. Turning back, I was faced with a simple memorial to those Chinese who died fighting Japan during the Second World War, dedicated in both Chinese and Russian to the heroes who fought "for socialism and to liberate the nation." The squat obelisk stood over a handful of weatherworn tombstones. At the foot of a second nearby marker commemorating the dead of the Chinese Civil War, a few scattered ashes of paper offerings mixed with the snow. Even with Oliver and some other Chinese students nearby, it seemed a lonely place.

That came out longer than I expected so I'll wrap up here with an intent to finally get around to viewpoints and what people were like in a future post.

Oliver models the living room.



Dinner, though sadly this picture is of the one meal we ate at his house that was takeout. Some sort of egg casserole in foreground with doufu behind.



On the streets of Sunwu.

The edge of town.



The long and winding road.

After a long absence from blogging, plenty to report.

In China the main holiday of the year is Spring Festival (or Chinese New Year), falling sometime in January or February according to the vagueries of the lunar calender. In practical terms this means that I have a month off, from January 10 to February 10. The Chinese certainly know how to take a vacation. This is also the big traditional family holiday, when hundreds of millions of people overwhelm all available transport trying to get home. It's like a three week Thanksgiving with four times the people.

I had two great opportunities during this break - the first, and subject of the post, was a trip with my Chinese friend Xu Fengming (Oliver) to his hometown of Sunwu. It's a town of about 70,000 people way up in China's northeastern Heilongjiang Province, part of the Manchuria region, and only around two hours from the Russian border. Other than being my esteemed friend's hometown, it also has the distinction of being incredibly cold and a long way away by train.

We started off with no-seat tickets (Spring Festival's influence) on an eight-hour train from Beijing to Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang and the main city of China's northeast. We took a couple "dunzi's" to sit on and blocked the doorway for the rest of the trip. Harbin is an interesting place - it was originally developed as a modern city under Russian control in the early twentieth century, and the influence still shows in architecture, especially the lovely exterior of the St. Sophia Church in the middle of town (picture below). There are also plenty of Russian goods stores around, selling various imported or purported-to-be-imported items from military binoculars to Russian chocolate. Anyway, the main draw in Harbin besides signs of Russia is the annual ice festival, with ice sculptures around various parts of the city and a huge "Ice & Snow World" set up across the river with scaled down recreations of things like cathedrals, castles, famous bridges etc. Impressive and a lot of fun if you bring enough warm clothes.

After two nights in Harbin we got on an evening train bound for Heihe on the Russian border, with a stop in Sunwu at 4:50am. Originally we had hard-seat tickets which were a recipe for disaster - people crammed six to a row on plastic bench seats, bi-level, sort of like a bad public bus but one in which everyone has luggage and the racks can only hold one third of it. Add to that all the no-seat ticketholders who are standing in the aisles or between rows of seats and it gets very uncomfortable very quickly, much less when one's schedule is 9:30pm - 4:50am under the flourescent lights. Just about the time I had started to sweat through my t-shirt a stewardess came by offering upgrades unused bunks in the sleeper cars which Oliver nabbed for us, making things a lot more comfortable. Deus ex machina.

At 5am we stumbled out onto the absolutely deserted streets of Sunwu, temperature about -10 degrees Fahrenheit, and made our way to Oliver's family's apartment. His mom and dad were waiting for us with the door open at the top of stairwell - gotta love Chinese hospitality. My stay there was a highlight of my time in China so far, a chance both to experience a side of China that I had never seen in Beijing, Tianjin or Shanghai and my first opportunity to really spend some time with a Chinese family. And besides all of that I got to eat real homecooked food for three days - I have never experienced such deliciousness in China, and let me admit that I have experienced a lot of deliciousness here. I also got to meet some local English students that Oliver tutors, play basketball with some of the locals at the town gym and walk out into the countryside to "snow-battle." Very fun. Oliver's family was great, and once I got a bit more used to the northeastern accent we were able to communicate reasonably well. My thanks though to my friend for occasionally translating (native) Chinese to (simple foreigner) Chinese!

So, there's the narrative part of the story. Enjoy the pictures below. I will post more with some of the more interesting thoughts and events from that trip soon (I swear!), along with some info about my recent trip with Mandi to Yangshuo down south in Guangxi Province.

St. Sophia Church in Harbin.



Awesome Chinese shaokao (barbecue) - wings, kebobs, grilled bread etc. And Oliver texting.



Ice festival at night.



Another nice ice sculpture.



Our awesome "seats" on the train from Beijing to Harbin.

An update. Obviously, I fail at regular updating so I'm just going to give a rundown of what's new. I'll try to post pictures sometime later.

About a month ago (can't believe I haven't posted since then!) Mandi and I went to Xi'an, one of the capitals of some of the ancient Chinese dynasties and home of the famous terra-cotta warriors. We spent three days there, taking the overnight train both ways, to and from Tianjin. The city itself was totally shrouded in pollution during our time there, which was unfortunate and grey, but we did enjoy biking around the entire old city wall and visiting the Hui minority section of the city. Xi'an is a good ways south and west of Beijing nearer the geographical center of China, and so it has a long history of different ethnicities from east and central Asia mixing together. The warriors were also really cool, though disappointing in that you can't approach them other than the very small number that are in museum cases. I will definitely get some pics up of these eventually.

That break marked the end of my first quarter of classes here at IUP. I've moved up a level though the format is largely the same until next quarter, when I'll have more freedom to pick individualized classes. The language is going really well, though. It's a joy to be able to actually carry on a decent conversation with somebody. And, for the first time in my life, I sat down on the train on the way to see Mandi and was able to pick up a magazine and simply read an article - which was neither highly complex nor interesting, but a new experience in Chinese nonetheless.

Immediately after coming back from Xi'an I had the joy of hosting my parents here in China as my dad had some business at the Beijing Language and Culture University, just up the road from Qinghua. We had an awesome time together, enjoying a beautiful day at the Summer Palace, eating some great Italian, Korean and Chinese food, and just generally showing them around my part of Beijing. I thought it fitting that one day was among the most polluted I've seen, giving them an "honest" view so to speak - but the rest of the time was blessedly clear. I was sad to see them go after only three days but they had a busy itinerary in Hong Kong, Taiwan etc.

So, those are the big events of late. Again, I'll post pictures in a follow-up. At the moment I'm applying to various Political Science Ph.D. programs and will find out in March how that went, so if you had any questions about my future you now know as much as me :) Thanks to everyone who sent a birthday wish on facebook or email! I'll miss being home for Christmas but the elf hats on the Chinese clerks at Carrefour almost make it worthwhile.

About one month ago, Mandi and I visited the Great Wall of China about 75 miles north of Beijing and spent an entire afternoon hiking a nine kilometer length. While I had visited the wall once before, this was Mandi's first time to actually walk on the wall, and we chose what has to be one of if not the most spectacular part of the entire 4,000 miles. 

The Great Wall has various sections that are open to tourists and hiking, the most commonly visited being the Badaling and Mutianyu sections near Beijing. Previously, Adam and I had gone to the Mutianyu section, which was really amazing and totally upended my conception of the wall. Mutianyu is in very good or even restored condition for most of its length, however, and overall only had one really steep climb. Since I wanted to see something new and Mandi is apparently part mountain goat, we decided to head to the Jinshanling and Simatai sections of the wall, which are farther away, mostly unrestored (that is, collapsing) and extremely treacherous.

The trip began with a bus ride to a mountain near the center of the Jinshanling area. From there we made the relatively short ascent to the wall and then turned east to hike to Simatai. As you'll see in some of the pictures, the surface of the wall was often in a state of utter disrepair, and the battlements were missing for a lot of its length. After lots of pictures, two bottles of water apiece, a whole host of Europeans and countless thousands of steps, we crossed the river gorge that marked the end of the line. On the bus ride home we watched the entirety of Casablanca on my PSP :) Anyway, a great day and a bunch of pictures to share. If you're ever in China, don't shortchange yourself - for all the hype, the Great Wall really is well worth your time.

The view as we began our walk up to the wall.

Us! And a KAFI shirt makes it to the Great Wall.

Mandi in front of the serrated landscape.

Looking west along the length of the wall.

Looking east - it was uphill nearly all the way to the end of the hike.

Approaching a steep climb, and note the lack of battlements.

Perhaps the steepest part on the day, along with pretty degraded steps.

Behind us after conquering the summit.

Some of the bricks are missing.

The river gorge and end of our hike is behind me - note the wall climbing back up at Simatai.

Very authentic :)

Seeing the wall run straight along the highest ridge of the mountains, I decided that it tends to follow the path of most resistance.

Iowa + Peru = Terraced corn fields of China

The river snaking below us as we dragged ourselves towards the end.

After descending. Zoom this picture and check out the wall running along the top of that ridge.

Not much to say, just thought I should take the opportunity offered by the good weather to share a corresponding night shot from our window, facing south over Beijing. The daytime shot is in the Sept. 12th post. Sorry, my photography skills are lacking! Wish Adam or somebody were here to do it justice.

Some pictures from the Temple of Heaven, which Mandi and I visited a few weeks ago. The temple is located in south central Beijing, and is filled with people doing all sorts of fun things - playing games, dancing, Tai Ji, etc. Historically, it is the place that the emperors would visit to pray for good harvests.

Water calligraphy on the grounds, very cool to watch.

Looking south towards the main gate. A smoggy day but not even close to the worst.

The beautiful ceilings. Per my post below, I'm very glad they chose to repaint these as they were intended to be viewed.

Mandi in front of the temple.

Some Tai Ji practitioners towards the north end of the temple grounds. It was a lovely morning even through the pollution.

Authenticity is an issue that I run into frequently here in China. For one thing, China is certainly known the world over for its fakes - fake DVDs, fake name-brand clothes and so on. Even the recent tainted milk issues were based on the idea of producing "fake" milk - that is, using filler to trick quality control and get the poisoned milk onto shelves. But authenticity operates in a lot of ways in a place changing as fast and with as long a history as China.

For instance, many of you are familiar with the hutongs or traditional style of housing in Beijing - four or more families arranged around a courtyard, each courtyard opening through an arch onto the alleyway or street. These dwellings have been rapidly demolished, especially in the run up to the Olympic Games this year. Two years ago I travelled through a Beijing in which entire blocks were marked with "chai," the Chinese character for "demolish." This year I haven't seen a single "chai," but I have seen plenty of widened avenues and newly built commercial complexes named after the hutongs that previously stood in their place. Is the Beijing I see today less authentic than that which existed two or twenty years ago?

Another example is that of the traditional tourist sights and their restorations. The Forbidden City has been totally repainted in the last couple years to look like it was built yesterday. Large sections of the Great Wall have been totally rebuilt since their destruction, which sometimes was as recent as the Cultural Revolution. Tourists can walk along a Great Wall that is only twenty years old. Are these things diminished by their newness?

In most cases I don't think they are. The Temple of Heaven has been rebuilt something like thirty times over the past six centuries - wooden construction lends itself to frequent fire / rebuilding cycles. Each time, that place remained the place where Emperors offered sacrifices for the harvest. Today the thirty-oddth Temple stands as a center of Beijing tourism, Beijing history and Beijing's civic life as a park space used daily by thousands of residents and visitors. Similarly with the Great Wall and Forbidden City - the particular wood or bricks aren't as important as the form and location.

The hutong situation is definitely more difficult, partly because other cities have done a much better job of preserving their ancient core while still modernizing. Xi'an and Luoyang are two cities in China that managed to entirely preserve or at least reconstruct the old city walls and gates, with the areas insides reflecting the traditional architecture, dwellings etc. while the high rises go up outside. Given their success, Beijing has certainly failed - but I have trouble declaring this inauthentic. Beijing is the capital and a symbol of where China is and is going, and while I mourn the fact that so much history has been wiped out, the Beijing that exists right now is as authentically turn of the century urban China as anyplace else.

Anyway, these are just a few of the thoughts bouncing around my mind as I visit the sights and live day to day in a place with 3,500 years of recorded history.