China 2008

Before we left, Ray arranged a road trip to several places:

• Qinghai Lake, the largest lake in China, whose western edge has a site called “Bird Island”.
• Chaka Salt Lake
• Golmud, where one previously would go to catch a bus to Tibet.  Now people can just take the train directly from Beijing, which started running fairly recently.
• Dunhuang, where we are now

Our driver knew a few dozen words of English and basically didn’t try to talk to us the whole time.  But the vehicle was a good Toyota Land Cruiser, and he was quite competent at Chinese driving, which is to say, using your horn as you pass a truck on a blind curve to alert anyone that might be coming the other way (and to encourage the truck to stay in the lane).  In the first three hours of the trip, we saw the remains of two massive truck accidents.  Perhaps it just takes them a really long time to get them off the road.  And the roads don’t have shoulders — if people stop, they usually just stop in the lane.

The guidebook suggested that there were places to hike around Qinghai Lake, and the plan was to spend two nights there.  But once we got there, we were pretty much funneled directly to Bird Island, which consists of a “blind” at a place called “Egg island” where you can watch various waterbirds through your binoculars and see several large unattended egg shaped objects of dubious validity, and a hillside next to two large rocks where hundreds of common cormorants nest.  It was a nice enough afternoon, but one’s options were pretty limited.  And it didn’t really look like there were any hikes to be had — certainly no information in English about any — so we decided to just spend the one night and continue on.

The guidebook suggested that the tour at Chaka Salt Lake included a ride on a freight train, a visit to a “salt house”, and an optional cruise.  But after paying the 20 yuan ticket price, we were dropped off at the grimy outskirts of a salt factory.  There were micro train tracks amid industrial detritus.  We wandered out on the train tracks a ways, watching several small trains hard at work bringing out huge buckets of wet salt.  Nobody offered to let us ride any.  No ferries or salt houses in evidence.  No stunning vistas, just a lot of the usual strange colors you see in dense saline water mixed with litter.  Our driver did not seem to know any more about the site than we did, so we continued on.

This entire portion of the trip was on the northern Tibetan plateau, in Qinghai province.  It looks a lot like Nevada — a large empty space punctuated by the occasional ridge of mountains — but it all happens at 11000 feet (instead of 3500 for most of Nevada).  The temperature was pleasant and the air was dry (as it had been in Xining as well) instead of the sweltering mugginess of Beijing and Xi’an.  Not long after leaving the salt lake, we were on roads which would go on for 40 miles without a curve, then shift to a different bearing for several more miles to avoid the nearby mountains.

Golmud still seemed to have quite a bit going on — perhaps there were lots of people going to Tibet before the Olympics.  We were turned down at the first two hotels we tried, but got into a third which was cheap but didn’t have air conditioning.  The dry air let us do some laundry even though we were only there one night.

The original plan for the tour supposed it would take two days to drive from Golmud to Dunhuang, and the driver estimated “10 hours”.  But it all happened in seven hours.  There was not a single town  in between Golmud and Dunhuang which was large enough to support a hotel in any case.  The only accommodation evident was tent cities for the workers who are rebuilding the road.  It looked like they might make it four lane.

The first five hours or so continued along the Tibetan plateau, passing another salt lake with an even more gigantic factory, crossing long dusty flat deserts and occasional ridges of mountains.  But at one point we crossed a pass, and descended to about 3500 feet and completely different scenery, including lots of sand dunes.  Someone walking by the side of the road had distinctly Mongolian heavy clothes (he must have been very hot in them).  Also the temperature became a lot more like Phoenix.

Between the skipped day at Qinghai Lake, and getting to Dunhuang in one day instead of two, we’ve gotten two more days to spend here — it’ll be nice to be in one place for four days.  There are said to be a lot of interesting things to see and do around Dunhuang, and we’ll let you know how they turn out.

For the past few days, we’ve been on a road trip to tiny places without internet access, much of which seemed to Ray like the China he remembers from 1986.  Now we’re back in Touristia, in a nice hotel which has wired internet access in every room.  But, like all of the other places, it Didn’t Just Work.

In Beijing, it Didn’t Just Work because there was no DHCP server — someone had to come up and type manual IP information into the Network preference pane.

In Xi’an, it Didn’t Just Work because we needed a name and password, both of which turned out to be our room number.

In Xining, it Didn’t Just Work for awhile, but they fixed something on their end and then it did.

And now, here in Dunhuang, it Didn’t Just Work because I didn’t realize, and they didn’t know how to tell me, that it required using PPPoE on the in-room ADSL modem, something I’ve never had the opportunity to bother with before.  Once that got straightened out, things were fine.

So now that we’re connected, we’ll be able to post impressions of our road trip, and whatever touristy things we end up doing here.

(pronounced “shee ning”…)

We’ve been spending a few days in Xining in Qinghai province.

Things continue to get less and less Western as we continue west from Beijing.  For a fixed $50-$60 a night, as we progress from Beijing to Xi’an to Xining, the hotels get fancier (i.e. providing “more services”), but the actual quality goes slightly down.  This trend will definitely continue — our next two nights will be in a “tent hotel” by Qinghai Lake, and then we’ll be staying in some small towns as we drive towards Dunhuang, a small city.  Presumably the hotel rates will subside as well.

China has four kinds of accommodations on their railroads, literally called “hard seat”, “soft seat”, “hard sleeper”, and “soft sleeper”.  The Qinghai Hotel in Xining is definitely a hard sleeper — the bed is pretty equivalent to the floor.  On the train, we’ve been in a “soft sleeper”, a compartment with four people.  We got stuck with a snorer the first night, but Ambien solved that problem for me.

All of the hotels we’ve stayed in have had wired internet in the rooms, something I haven’t really ever seen anywhere else.  None of them “just worked” — some kind of service call has always been required to get stuff set up.  But it has been nice to be able to communicate.  I expect that this, too, will be our last opportunity, probably until we get to Urumqi in about a week.

There’s a great restaurant, Ming Hao Seafood Restaurant, right next to the hotel here in Xining with no English menu, but with a picture for pretty much every item.  Uncharacteristically, we’ve been eating there each night instead of walking twenty minutes into town and gambling on finding a good one.   One of the head waitresses (in black, not red or yellow) knows a lot of English food words, and has been very helpful to our picking stuff out.  It may be our last opportunity to have fancy city food for awhile — we’ll probably be having Muslim Uighur street food most of the next several days (actually, we had a little this afternoon in a market we were walking through).

Yesterday, we arranged for a tour of the Ta’er Si Lamasery and the North Mountain Temple.  In Xi’an, our three-day tour included an enthusiastic young guide and a driver with a car.  His English was pretty good, and he encouraged our corrections to his pronunciation.  We got along so well that he hung out with us an extra three hours after the tour was over, and had dinner with us.  Our guide here in Xining, Niu Xiao Jun, was a “recommended by Lonely Planet” guide/interpreter, but the experience was much different.

He showed up at our hotel with no transportation, and suggested that it would be cheaper to go on the bus.  We walked a few minutes to a bus stop, and got a bus which was leaving to stop and wait for us.  There weren’t enough seats, and though people got up so Ray and I could sit down (we look “old”) our guide stood in the aisle.  They’re not supposed to do this — three times they saw a policeman up ahead, and had everyone in the aisle get out and walk or something while we zoomed ahead.  It took an hour and a half to get up to the lamasery.  It struck us as odd that a tour guide would place such little value on travel time.

When we got to the lamasery, he pointed out that the $11 for his ticket wasn’t included in his price, but he was willing to wait if we didn’t want to pay it.  Gee, what’s the point of having a guide?  Telling us where the bus stop is?  We bought the tickets and he showed us around.

Inside, there were lots of little temples with various Buddhas and arhans and other dieties and demons.  By far the highlight was the 10 x 30 foot double-sided sculpture mural made out of yak butter, kept in a refrigerated room.

The guide came in handy when Ray took a picture of a statue, which angered some monk; he insisted that Ray “cancel” the picture.  Ray told the guide to tell the angry monk that he had.  While all this was happening, a couple other monks gave us the “we love your beard can we get a picture with you” gesture that we’re pretty used to now, which made the angry monk even angrier.

We took a taxi back to town, which went directly on the freeway, and went to the Northern Mountain Temple, a Taoist temple built into the base of the mountain next to the city.  It had plenty of interesting images, and unfortunately is crumbling in many places — we weren’t able to go to the most precarious areas.

Today we decided to visit the little provincial museum, and the great mosque.  On the way to the museum, we noticed that the road we were walking along had ropes strung along it, and that it was closed to traffic, and people were lining up.  What was happening — a parade?  The next clue was a sign mentioning a “race”.  Soon after some VIP cars drove by with spare bicycle wheels and Trek logos.  OK, so it was a bike race.  Actually, it turned out to be the Tour of Qinghai Lake, a multi-segment race like the Tour de France except that it all happens at an average of 3000 meters above sea level.  We hung around and watched about the first 50 riders complete the stage, which was probably about 30 km or so.  Then we visited the little museum, which has many more English labels since the guidebook was written, and the mosque, which indeed had a mixture of Arabic domes and Chinese eaves, but which was pretty opaque to non-Chinese non-Arabic speakers like ourselves.  There was a guy with a fabulous three-color beard, and a kid visiting from near Shanghai who was the only one who could speak to us in English.

Tomorrow we get picked up at 8 in the morning for the drive to the lake.  It may be awhile before you hear from us again.

It’s important to make sure that the top of the water bottle in the pack is screwed on tight.  We almost ruined some Archival Souvenirs when it spilled.  The Rough Guide was partly soaked; but pulling apart each of the last two hundred pages gently by hand in the parking lot in the sun is a pretty good excuse not to go into the Silk Demonstration Factory Store and listen to the story of how silk is made and how you can take some home for a few hundred yuan per meter.  They could have made a sale if they had had a couple of yards of the right color but there wasn’t that much of a selection of fabric bolts, compared to stores in the US.  I assured the lady that all the silk I would buy at home would be from China so they would get their money.  Why they want US currency instead of silk I don’t know.  The silk is a lot prettier.

It seems that if you have two worms in a cocoon it is used for quilting, but if there’s only one worm, it becomes thread.  A single cocoon makes 1200 meters of 8 ply thread.  Unbelievable that a little worm can spit out so much.

The excuse I use never to buy shirts is that the pockets are never sewed on so that the pattern of the fabric on the pockets lines up with the pattern on the rest of the shirt.  People usually take some pains to make the pattern line up where possible on other parts of the shirt, but almost never on the pockets.  It’s weird.  You take this fine expensive silk and then make it look stupid by having a randomly positioned pocket pattern.  It really doesn’t matter but you can put the onus on them for your not buying things, and they can’t put it to cheapness.  I like that the Chinese word for “stuff” is “dongxi”, i.e. east-west.

The practice of wrecking nice material with bad workmanship extends to the gift shop of the Terra Cotta Warrior museum.  There you can purchase, for $50,000 US or more, a full size jade replica of a terra cotta warrior, but the delicacy of carving is no greater than you find in the little clay creatures in every shop in town.

The unexpected highlight of the trip to see the Terra Cotta Warriors was getting our souvenir book signed by the farmer who originally discovered them while digging a well in 1974.  The guide book indicates that he doesn’t show up all the time.  You aren’t allowed to photograph him, in case you should discover that he is a stand in.  He has great big glasses that make him look like a Pixar character.  His calligraphy is done with a magic marker.  He must be tired by now.

The hall in which the warriors have been reconstructed is impressive in itself, particularly when you consider that they didn’t really have the option of sinking any part of the foundation into the funerary structure itself.  Also, most of the tumulus has not been excavated.  The air pollution generated by coal fires and exhaling tourists could well end up destroying the statues that have been put on display, it is good that some are being saved for a future, cleaner time.

After the Terra Cotta Army visit, and the water damaged silk factory visit, we were taken to Hua Qing Hot Springs, another site (like the Ming Tombs) which would not be nearly so famous if it were not within easy reach of a site with genuine tourist pull.  The Hua Qing Hot Springs are a Tang Dynasty imperial resort.  It has intermittent history.  In July of 756, the powerful concubine Yang Guifei was sacrificed to put down a rebellion, and in December 1936, Chiang Kai-shek was prevailed upon by his own generals to suspend his war against Mao and unite in an anti-Japanese front.  In between those dates, the springs maintained a constant temperature of 43°C.  For one yuan you can run your fingers in it.

After a rush hour drive back to town, and a brief rest, Tom got us ringside seats at an after dinner theater of Tang inspired dance and music.  The dinner was dumplings, somewhat worse for wear owing to having to be carted up four stories and distributed among hundreds of foreign tourists.  The theater is the sort that I found intolerably stupid when I was little and merely find stupid now as my intolerator is worn out from Yahoo News.  The feathered hats would not be out of place anywhere on the Strip, and I doubt that there were flashing lights in the eyes of monster masks during the Tang Dynasty.  Maybe there were.  Directors have always been creative.  When the musicians were in front it was interesting to hear them play.  They are not unskillful.  But the dancers were accompanied by music that reminded you that even during the Tang Dynasty, factory presets were the easy solution.

Whenever I hear a singing commercial, I visualize the recording session and the doo wop girls singing the praises of Washington Mutual Bank or OnStar.  What did they think they would attain, when they were 14 and entering upon drama club?  I feel certain they imagined themselves at the Lincoln Center, not singing the blues about Coffee.  These dancers, they realized a while ago they wouldn’t be on the A list of Olympic cheerleaders and acrobats.  But still they manage to make a career of it, like the farmer-painters who never became Grandma Moses, and they must be happy for that.

The next day the tour called for biking with Tom around the top of the City Wall (13.7 km, not all the bricks are smooth, and the bikes have one gear), and being taken to the Shaanxi history museum, and later to the Wild Goose Pagoda.  The Shaanxi museum has a collection of artifacts from the Tang Dynasty, when Xi’An was capital of various fractions of China.  It is well captioned in English.  Solid gold bowls and perfect celadon pots are described as having been found in hoards in fields and in villages.  The whole place sounds like Rome, where every gardening project is in danger of being suspended while an inventory is made of a newly discovered imperial bedroom.  The museum itself is the project of Zhou En-Lai.  Wikipedia says it the style is evocative of Tang Dynasty architecture but it looks more like a state college with a couple of flourishes.

The Great Wild Goose Pagoda is closed since the Sichuan earthquake.  This afforded more time to explore the modern temple which surrounds the base of it.  There’s an incredible carved jade mural of the life of Buddha, carved wood murals of the life of Xuanzang, and modern buildings to house Buddhist scholarly functions.  It’s nice to know that people are still building and carving fancy stuff for future generations to tour the ruins of.

Xuanzang traveled from Xi’An to India in the 7th century A.D., 600 years before Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, 1200 years before Richard Burton, 1300 years before Tony Wheeler.  He brought back loads of Buddhist texts, whose translations put Chinese Buddhism on a much firmer foundation than it had previously been.  He also wrote a story of his travels, which really puts into perspective the ATM machine that stole $300 from me in Beijing; although it’s hard to know how I could have applied to the machine the Buddhist precepts with which Xuanzang dissuaded robbers in the Gobi Desert.  Non-attachment, I guess, but that seems so flip.

We had signed up for a three day tour of Xi’An, which included four meals.  Most of the meals our guide did not eat with us, which is a shame; but I have to keep reminding myself that hanging out with tourists is overtime for him.   But the last day, after the tour was over, we met up with another guide friend of his named Phoenix, and had noodles and kebabs for dinner again in the Muslim quarter, at a place which was somewhat less observant and served beer to several parties of noisy locals.  And so to Xining.

The place that you can’t go except in your imagination is back in time, so you must close your eyes and pretend that you are in The Rickshaw restaurant on Pacific Avenue in Stockton, California, about 1958. Unless you were an overseas Chinese or the friend of one, or lived in a big city on an internationally recognized coast, this is what your first impression was of Chinese Food: gray bean sprouts and bamboo shoots tasting of tin, weird crunchy curlicues tasting not even of salt, but leaving a coat of grease on your lips, fried rice interspersed with reddish ham and Bird’s-Eye frozen peas and carrots, omelets with the bean sprouts in them, Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice, and most famously, hunks of breaded pork infecting a vermilion cornstarch organelle that tasted of white sugar and Heinz white vinegar.

This food had to come from somewhere. It was in imitation, or maybe even a memory, of some dish in some province that a real ancestor of the restaurant owner had eaten, and it was what all of them in the collective wisdom of the imitative market had decided Americans wanted to eat when they went out for Chinese Food in Stockton, or in St. George, Utah, as recently as the 1980’s.

Now everything is simultaneous, self-referent, nostalgic, and ironic and you can get this sauce at Jing Jing in Palo Alto under the name of “American Sweet And Sour Pork”. But last night in Xi’An, we were served it in its home.

There is a lot of sugar here. Our hired guide for Xi’An, whose American name is arbitrarily “Tom”, ordered for us the food that he grew up on in Sichuan for breakfast (even though it was dinner), which is a porridge of rice kernels floating in a glossy rice starch clear broth, with fruits and nuts. Also, as we wandered through the street, we were instructed to try dried persimmons, fried and stuffed with liquefied dates, and something that tasted like warm flat Dr. Pepper. As you can tell, we aren’t being very tourist-halal.

Speaking of halal, the sweet and sour red sauce had chicken bits in it. We were at a Muslim restaurant in Xi’An, so much so that it didn’t serve beer, on the first day of a guided tour we contracted for over the Internet some weeks ago. So far it’s been pretty successful. Tom is a nice guy whose English is good enough. In the course of the afternoon, he took us to the Bell Tower, the Drum Tower, and the medina, a total distance of about 800 yards. We aren’t moving fast.

In the medina is the Great Mosque of Xi’An. Islam came to China along the Silk Road in the first century A.H., and has been reinforced by periodic invasions. There are a lot of things to note about Chinese mosques. The Arabic script in some places gets wadded up into little squares that look from a distance like Chinese. The dragons on the floor indicate the approval of the emperor. You can’t walk under the main wooden gate because it was damaged in the Sichuan earthquake in May. (There are also cracks in the Bell Tower and the Drum Tower). The imam says “Allahu Akbar” with a Beijing “r”. (We were there at the time of afternoon prayers. Xi’An, like all China, is on Beijing Time; we are far enough west now that it feels like Daylight Time and will get even weirder later.)

The curiosity that our guide repeatedly noted was that any of these monuments existed at all. Tom carefully explained under what ruse the three places that we went had been preserved from the Red Guards, China’s Taliban during the Cultural Revolution.

China’s Gen X doesn’t even remember the Cultural Revolution, let alone Tom, who is 23. The line taken on postcards of Mao is that it was a mistake. A lot of it is recycled as kitsch. We have Dick and Jane, they have Thinking Of The Consumers As We Grow Vegetables. If we wanted to come back with a suitcase full of bronze Mao busts we could, except, excess baggage. They won’t go up in value; there are hundreds of millions of them.

The Red Guards systematically destroyed everything older than 1949. It’s an old trick — the founder of the Qin Dynasty did the same, the Taliban did the same with the Buddhas, the Americans made it illegal to speak Indian languages and in many cases to physically survive: one must not underestimate the effect that having a 25 cent bounty paid on the scalps of Indians can have on relations with indigenous people, and this was the official US Government policy for a long time. Maybe the Chinese will try it in Tibet, since we seem to be taking pages from each other’s torture manuals these days.

What is with the Indian masks in the shops in the medina? I saw several, with feathers and stuff. Where are we, Germany?

And so, as with every facial representation that survived in the museums of Kabul, and every Albigensian relic that survived the Middle Ages, there is a story behind each surviving Chinese building. The ones in Beijing were too close to the seat of power. The Chinese government was not about to have rowdy Hitlerjugend of any nominal opinion rampaging in the actual capital. In Xi’An, the Bell Tower and the Drum Tower were both converted to office buildings. The Great Mosque became a warehouse. The warehouse was used to store furniture stolen from Chinese kulaks when they were sent off for re-education, and in the case where they didn’t come back (Nazi art collectors will recognize this part) the furniture is still there, and forms a substantial collection which is on display in the secular parts of the mosque.

In the mosque we were asked our religion. Outside we got a Santa Claus (a man ran up to sell us Santa Claus trinkets), a couple of Marx-Engels which in the local pronunciation take some processing to get, and a Leonardo da Vinci, which I hadn’t heard before but Dave said he had.

“Star Ferry” (24 hour dim sum restaurant) across from McDonald’s at the Drum Tower.

later edit…..the GPS reading of 34.26071 N,108.93935 E is what I read on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, where the old lady offers to sell you a city map.  Mapquest puts this reading on another street.  But Star Ferry actually is on the south side of Xi Da Jie across from McDonald’s.  No wonder Rough Guide has such a tough time keeping current.

Two entries ago I suggested that various traveling bummers could be made less bumley by the use of a mantra indicating to yourself that all of these things were new and exotic experiences, even if they weren’t the new and exotic experiences that you had in mind, or even paid for.

At my personal stage of enlightenment, I can’t experience with that equanimity, being robbed of $300 by a Chinese ATM machine.

I have already had problems with the local ATMs not echoing my keystrokes, which leads to my having an incorrect idea of the machine state.

The ATM at the corner of Wusi and Shatan Beijie was informative and consistent, all except for the part where it spit out 300 Yuan instead of 2500.  It printed out a receipt for 2500.  It caused Wachovia to take $365.52 out of my checking account, which is 2500 Yuan at the day’s exchange rate.  Just, I was holding three 100-yuan notes instead of 25 of them.

So…the next half hour spent in the bank talking to the intern who spoke the best English even though she was not of high rank.  Then I couldn’t find a large supply of pretty post card stamps.  The Rough Guide had the post office location wrong.  Then it started to rain.  We stayed in the hotel room most of the afternoon, venturing out when it stopped raining to the parks north of the Forbidden City.  The Park with the White Pagoda is open until 10 PM but you don’t find out until you’re inside (and paid your 10 yuan admission fee) that the white pagoda and all the other attractions close at 6 PM.  And they cost another 10 yuan to get in, when they’re open.

About 4 taxis in a row refused to take us to the restaurant we’d chosen, even one hailed by a local pair who had stopped to get their photos taken with us.  One certainly can’t blame this on anti-foreigner prejudice: the taxis pull over when Dave waves his hand, and it’s pretty obvious from some distance that we aren’t Chinese.  The current theory is that they don’t know how to get to where we are going (the address is written on a piece of paper) and they don’t want to lose face by asking directions.

The GeGeFu Restaurant is perhaps the Chinese version of one of those places where knights joust.  Very good food.  The whole place is a piece of performance art: one is supposed to be at the house of an elder princess.  The elder princess character is so prominent in the script, that when the dancers come out, which they do several times in the course of the evening, they face her, who is sitting upstage in the courtyard, with their backs to the diners, who are in the main house.  The rest of the time she pantomimes playing Go with other princesses, or just promenades about.  Hers is not a speaking part.  One is invited to tour the rooms of her house, a small town museum of old stuff.  The rooms also have tables and utensils set up.  I suppose that on busier nights than a rainy Tuesday, it’s possible to rent the rooms for your party.

The menu consists of soup.  A prix fixe depending how many of you there are.  We were “2 to 4”.  Dinner begins like a Korean meal with a lot of stuff on the table: sausages, tiny sweet bones with a bit of meat on them, a tasty tofu paste whose recipe is indecipherable, celery sticks boiled in stock, I’m forgetting about half of them.  For the soup, you have the choice of Duck or Deer, and a general direction for it to take, such as Mushrooms or vegetables.  We chose Duck and Chinese Medicine Vegetables for 700.  When the soup bowl got low the costumed waitress would come around with a large teapot filled with duck stock, and an excellent duck stock it was, too; top off the tureen, and add a few different things: meatballs, new vegetables.  Finally you had to say no more, at which point they brought out a plate of watermelon and what might have been Elizabeth melon.  You see a lot of fat Chinese on the street these days.

When we got back to town, two taxis in a row refused to take us to our hotel so we trekked a mile and a half from Tian An Men to Shatan Houjie.  It is widely noted that occasionally Chinese tourist people refuse to deal with foreigners.  Most of the tourists here are from China.  I am not used to being turned down by taxi drivers.  I think that it was rush hour and they were looking for clients who wanted to go to the airport, not spend an hour in traffic for a 13 RMB fare.

The walk gave an excuse to order way too much food at Na Chia Xiao Guan, which is not Xiao (small) at all, but nothing like McJade’s.

It is in an old wooden house with an unlit wooden door and the label was so slight that our taxi driver from the hotel stopped and asked the doorman directions to the restaurant, unaware that he was parked in front of it.

Beijing taxi drivers are not to London standard.  They spend a lot of time leaning out the windows and asking other drivers directions, or on the cell phone with workers at their destinations asking where they are.  Dave suspected our two refusenik drivers of being illiterate, and not able to understand the mandatory pieces of paper that all Westerners have in China, with maps and Chinese characters showing destinations.  Hotels and Restaurants all give them out.  It’s the main function of a business card, the map on the back.

Considering the number of taxi drivers who must have been pressed into service for the Olympics, which the countdown clock informed us was 32 days 1 hour and 45 minutes away, we are part of a learning curve.  The doorman who rescued our first driver from loss of face, also spent about 15 minutes after dinner telling another taxi driver how to get to Sha Tan Bin Guan, which is right by the Forbidden City.  Learning Curve.  I think they were just being social.  SoCal.  Ever notice how Angelenos love to recite routes to each other?  Interspersed with the definite articles?

We ate:

• pickled fish aspic, gelled in the shape of a fish.
• matchstick mutton liver in chrysanthemum leaf salad.
• a giant slab of braised bacon in Chinese date sauce, my goodness, I thought that the prices were high because everything was delicate and overwrought, but the prices were high because the portions were supersized.  The dates were huge too.
• a whole sea cucumber stuffed with minced pork kidney, sheep kidney, and deer kidney, served in a chopped mushroom brown sauce in a two tier basket, and get this, in the bottom basket, completely unmentioned on the menu, were ten shrimp and chopped pork dumplings, arranged lollipop like so you grabbed the shrimp tail and ate the dumpling off it, which was molded on the shrimp.

The last Qing empress dowager used to routinely order over a hundred dishes made for her. for every meal she ate alone.  Most of them she probably never even looked at.  It’s a way of showing off.  The result, since the Cultural Revolution was rolled back, is that Chinese waitresses won’t warn you if you are ordering too much food.  They figure you might just feel like a bite of it, or even a look.  Hau chr, hau kan.

I grew up with the thought that people were starving in China, and 12 hours later I am not hungry again.

We also had Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice.

Which of these entities do you think a guidebook is unlikely to heave heard of?  Yet the Rough Guide managed to completely mislead us.  The Rough Guide, which I bought only because I wanted to support Kepler’s Bookstore in Menlo Park rather than Amazon and they had the Rough Guide and not Lonely Planet — enough of doing good for the little guy.  From now on I am stealing konjac gels out of the mouths of little babies on the bus.  These candies were banned in the US because certain parents thought it was their constitutional right to ignore what their infant children were eating, and the FDA has agreed with them on the implication that everything sold in the leader of the Free World should have the consistency of Gerber’s.  After the kid was done choking down the konjac cube, he used the plastic cup as a pacifier.  The Chinese have the resources and imagination to be the next world leader and I hope some of you will be around in 2080 when their parents think they are entitled to permanent child neglect and ban chopsticks.

Anyway, yeah, Rough Guide.  Never buy Rough Guide.  They are stupid and disorganized and don’t know if they want to be Young Lonely Planet or Fat Lonely Planet and they told us that the public tourist bus to the great wall, bus 1 or 5, leaves from the McDonalds shown very clearly on their map at the southeast corner of Tian An Men Square.  The McDonald’s isn’t there, the bus isn’t there.  The Number 5 bus is a local.  The Rough Guide is stupid and I think there ought to be consequential damages permitted for EVERYTHING, even Konjac,  I have the right never to think.

After we spent a precious hour looking for this bus, and of course being invited onto other tour buses for three times the price, we gave up and bought a package tour of the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall.

I will be a Tourist Guidebook for you right now and tell you what you may expect from every packaged day tour from Gray Line San Francisco to the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe:

• Triple the price but some extras included (in this case the ticket to the Great Wall itself — topologists will wish to note that a wall surrounds the Great Wall so you just don’t go look at it without paying)
• A Lunch Stop at a Gift Shop that lasts way too long.
• A visit to the place you wanted to go to that is way too short.
• A tour guide who will not stop chattering ever.

And that’s what we got for our 160 RMB apiece.

There is a city bus, number 919, that leaves from far north of town.  It is also mentioned in Rough Guide and had we trusted them we could have attempted that, but we wouldn’t have seen the Ming Tombs, which are actually a lovely park and considerably more pleasant than the Great Wall.
We were permitted two hours at the Great Wall.  It is enough, on a crappy day for pictures, which it was; the smog from Beijing had got visibility down to a couple thousand meters, pure Los Angeles 1959, there isn’t a lot to do at Badaling but be photographed with tourists who admire your beards — Dave was talking to some fellow from Ankara who did not admire his beard, Turks got beards of their own — he was here for an imaging conference of some sort and when his work is done and you can search on flickr for “beards Great Wall Forbidden City” you will find more photos of us than we ever post.

We rode what amounts to a slow-motion roller coaster up to the wall.  That was an additional 60 RMB but, I can’t really say it was worth it in any sense, but it is a mode of transportation I have never heard of before and there isn’t much to actually do at the Great Wall but look at it and say, look, it’s the Great Wall.  Then you walk as far on it as you feel like, amid crowds that make Downtown Disney seem as deserted as Simon Stylites’s back 40, and then you walk back and you are no longer at the Great Wall but you have been.

A mental trick that keeps you from feeling like you have been terribly cheated in travel, which you always are, is to view the tourism in this way, as a Destination.  Let us consider the Lunch Stop at the Jade Emporium.  Did you know they sell jade trinkets to tourists near the Ming Tombs?  But they weren’t real souvenirs made by local craftsmen, they were all from China.  This jade shop was by far the most enormous room of trinkets and tourists I have ever been in.  There must have been twenty buses out front.  I can pretty much recite the arrival halls at airports I’ve been in that were larger than this room, and they are all at International Terminals for major cities and SFO’s is only barely one of them.

And when you hike through that without making eye contact (there is enough residual Communism in the culture that the touts are at least a little bit subdued) you get to the Lunch Room Of Deer Penis.

Imagine a gigantic room serving free lunch to several hundred people at round tables — and this was not Horrible Chinese Food, either, this was very simple and good worker-cafeteria Chinese food made fresh by the jade lunch brigade: tofu, braised fish, turnips, several greens, onions, broth with noodles — and imagine the walls of this room are stacked about twenty feet high with dried and preserved deer organs for sale in bright red boxes, with posters describing the virtues of deer placenta and deer cauda and of course deer penis, there can be no life without deer penis and we have the photos to prove it.  And stuffed deer, who never enjoyed the benefit of long life promised by their being born with such salutary viscera.

What have I missed, really?  Here I am in a room I never imagined existed, which is utterly weird and exotic, being cheated out of an extra hour at a place which is a great cliché and looks exactly like the first Dicomed test image you saw of it in 1979 and all the subsequent ones except smoggier.

I wish we had more time at the Ming Tombs.  I recommend them.

If you don’t know the reference, go to leisuretown.com and memorize everything on it until you get to the phrase “Horrible Chinese Food”.  When this has been successfully tattooed on your back, you are in a position to talk to Boris.  I wonder if Leisuretown is blocked by the great firewall:  it doesn’t have any sex or talk of human rights.

So far this trip we have eaten:

• United Airlines meat loaf and chicken with rice from about the time the flight attendant told me that FAA policy forbids using GPS on board (it doesn’t but arguing with flight attendants does not give a satisfactory result.  They haven’t got the memo from the TSA that absolute power means you can be funny at times, like the agent in Denver with the Burning Man badge who said he couldn’t wait to get out in the desert and blow stuff up; or Chris at SFO who was so cheerful so early in the morning that I commented on it and he said, Well I’ve had my cocaine this morning!  I suppose that’s gen Z slang for coffee, just like Molesting is slang for spooning, all culturally defined evils end up as commonplaces once you consent to talk about them and if you don’t, they get forgotten and you’re back in the 1950’s.  It’s a real conundrum for Ms. Grundy.  But imagine if I had said anything about blowing stuff up and taking cocaine in an airport.)
• some special airline top ramen over Alaska, made with super thin noodles that theoretically can soften in the safe and sane hot water served off the carts, but, not.
• turkey and cheese sandwich and lasagne just before we flew into an hour worth of thunderstorm remnants coming into Beijing.
• a set of satay-like sticks from a street stall on Shatan Houjie, the small street where the wonderful Shatan hotel is, including seaweed, oyster mushrooms, an undocumented sausage, and tofu, followed by noodles in a hotpot cafe that were a slightly elaborated version of what we had on United Airlines.
• a wonderful breakfast buffet at the Shatan Hotel.  They are highly recommended by TripAdvisor and it’s easy to see why.  It’s a three star hotel (I still haven’t figured out exactly what that means, but it has to do with services offered rather than how well they deliver them).  If you need a gym or room service or a pool to make staying at a place worthwhile, then you can’t be happy here, but if you don’t use those services anyway, you will find that Shatan Binguan is about the best deal in town.  In addition to having a nice room where everything works including the Internet and the sunflower showerhead in the white lizardskin tiled bathroom, the front door is 600 meters from the north gate of the Forbidden City.  That’s closer than the South Gate is. The breakfast buffet has about thirty items and they are all interesting, including two colors of congee and a rack of shredded things to put on them before you even get to the wall of steam tables.  And a bunch of Western stuff but who wants that.  The only bad thing about the buffet is that we don’t get to sample the jiaozi and wrapped things at the defacto buffet running the length of Shatan Houjie.
• The Big Duck Tourist Restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf, Da Dong.

There are a lot of ways for restaurants to cut corners.  Just for today’s example, they can specialize only in main dishes and be perfunctory about sides.  This does not make a restaurant automatically bad.  Think of Duarte’s over in Pescadero.  A small menu but great.  But also one must think of The Olive Garden and Harris Ranch and a whole lot of chains where everything comes with sliced green beans and slightly undercooked carrot sticks and your choice of three reconstituted potato dust configurations from S.E. Rykoff, or, these days, Costco.

Da Dong makes a great show of their Peking Duck.  The chef wears a mask and gloves and carves at the table and the Evian Water costs only a little bit less than the water at the French Laundry, I kid you not.  Difference is, you have to drink bottled water and this was the only brand they had left.  The waitress trainee showed me how to fold the duck-make using chopsticks only, which is a knack right up there with the YouTube video on folding t-shirts, the mysterious East at its Eastiest.  YouTube is not blocked.  I found several videos ot “The East Is Red”, not all of them satirical.

But you know, the Peking Duck at the restaurant of the same name on El Camino and Cambridge in Palo Alto is just as good, maybe even better.  Peking Duck is not that variable, it’s like a fried egg, it can be bad but even a diner can do it perfectly.  And Peking Duck’s other dishes are even better.  Not even to mention Hunan Garden, where a lot of friends came to see us off last week.

The thing about charging by the tablespoon for duck tongue and morel soup is, it had better be really stellar.  It’s one thing to make stock from a Maggi cube if you are a United Airlines supplier or a corner bar charging $4 for a full meal for 2, but you should really think about these things if you are trying to impress the tourists.  No shredded cabbage in soy sauce and vinegar.  The watermelon slices over dry ice had better be perfectly ripe.  The pear juice should not be brown and diluted, if you can’t get anything but cheeku concentrate then take it off the menu.

Best thing: a fruit juice from some unknown entity called Elizabeth Melon.

It wasn’t bad, it was only 335 RMB, we just haven’t found yet the circuit that Michelin will give stars to when they come to Beijing.  All this sightseeing gets in the way.

And what gets in the way of sightseeing?  Being a sight, that’s what.  We must have been photographed a hundred times yesterday at the Forbidden City by Chinese tourists who wanted to pose with our beards.  (Most of the tourists here are from China).  It really gives a glimpse into what it must be like to be Angelina Jolie.  We would be mobbed for 15 minutes at a time and end up disappointing people when we actually tried to go into a building at the Imperial Palace museum and use the tickets we’d spent $10 apiece for.

The Forbidden City is, what can I say, it’s forbidding.  Exhausting.  Go there at dawn on a nasty day in winter unless you are into people-watching.  I saw one Che t-shirt.  At least as an American I am taller than most of the others.  That is less true of the young people.

Scam of the Day: touts who say they are art students and invite you to see their Graduation exhibitions.  I thought the first ones might be telling the truth but after hearing the same line from a variety of middle aged hustlers, I doubt them in retrospect.  It is an OK diversion to see what’s being sold in the way of non traditional art.  The ones who approach you inside the Forbidden City are wasting ticket time though.  Forbidden City needs to sell three day tickets, like they do at Petra.

SCAM TWO: holy cow.  you know how ATMs don’t echo your key strokes when you type in your PIN code?  The ATM outside the clock museum doesn’t echo your keystrokes when you are typing in the amount of money you want to withdraw!  And the keys behave strangely!  My first try it told me I was trying to withdraw too much, probably because I hit 2-0-0-0-00 trying to say 2000 and that’s how you would say it at Wachovia in Palo Alto, and the next try it skipped a keystroke and I ended up withdrawing 200, for which $30 transaction I will pay the usual $1.50 fee.  AMP.  Don’t use an ATM if it doesn’t show you what you’re typing.

Well, the East is getting Red somewhere behind these buildings outside our windows, time for another day of hard driving tourism.