So, while a post regarding the trip to Yangshuo sits half-finished, I decided to upload some older pictures that I hadn't gotten to share. The first few are from last October's trip to Luoyang in Henan Province, south of Beijing. I took that trip to see the Longmen Grottoes with the other IUP students wrote a bit about it in an earlier post. The next set are from my trip with Mandi to Xi'an in November, where we toured the city and got to see the Terra-cotta Warriors. Finally, there are a couple extras from Tianjin. As always, click to enlarge.

So, the Longmen Grottoes. This area consists of thousands of carvings of Buddha, some as old as 1,500 years. It's suffered a bit through history but I still found it a very impressive and, in my experience, unique religious site. There are said to be over 10,000 hand-carved figures here, and I find it easy to believe (although some are quite small!)

A slew of empty niches. Many were stolen in the 19th century to fill Western museums, while a second round of destruction and defacement took place during the Cultural Revolution.



Some of the much larger figures in the largest "niche." Note the beheaded statues - the work of the Cultural Revolution.



A longer view from a bridge across the Longmen river. The niches extend all the way to the bridge in the distance.

Next we have a few pictures from Xi'an. Xi'an, along with Nanjing, is perhaps the most famous former capital of China having hosted numerous dynasties under its former name of Chang'an, Eastern terminus of the Silk Road. The city is notable for being one of the few in China to have retained the city wall that all major cities originally possessed, integrating it with the rapidly modernizing city and creating a second tourist draw besides the Terra-cotta Warriors. The Warriors were buried alongside the Emperor Qin Shihuang, first Emperor of China and the first to unite the various warring kingdoms in 244B.C. We took an hour long bus ride to reach the sloping fields in which they were discovered by a well-digging farmer.

The pollution was awful the entire time we were there. This view is from the wall towards the city center at the train station.



The wall extending into the smoggy distance. A park has been created in the space between the wall and the outer moat, and together the effect is to create a very distinct "old city" in the heart of Xi'an. I appreciate much more what Beijing lost during the 1950's and 60's, when the wall was destroyed to build subway line 2. We did get to ride around the entire circuit on rented bikes, which took about two hours and was delightful.



A vendor cooks up some delicious fried fare on Hui Min Jie (lit. Hui People Road). The Hui are an ethnic minority descended from Muslim traders who came to China in earlier eras, and today they are found throughout China. Xi'an, though, is something of a Hui capital, with a large mosque and entire Hui district. They make delicious food and wear distinctive white caps, barely visible in this photo. Mandi and I spent a long evening wandering this road and sampling every kind of (cooked!) snack.



A view of one of the smaller pits of Terra-cotta Warriors. Three main digs can be visited, and this is a small part of by far the smallest. We were disappointed not to be able to get closer to the figures, though a few are on display in cases around the viewing platforms.



The main, airplane-hanger sized dig. Truly incredible.

And last, lots of thing have happened in China besides travel. I've had a birthday, Christmas, Chinese New Year and lots of the daily occurrences that make life abroad interesting. Only two such pictures for today though, sorry!

This is a picture from my birthday dinner with Mandi at a Vietnamese restaurant in Tianjin :)



And finally, Tianjin at its showy best near the train station. Taken on a Fall evening some weeks ago.

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.