Our last evening in China

We walked around downtown near our hotel, which is surrounded by high-end stores. If there is any remnant of econmic communism left in China, it is hard to find. For luxury car buyers there is this selection:


There were few customers in those stores, but many of the shoppers in others are clearly locals. We walked to dinner from through an area filled with hundreds of vendors selling street food. We had been warned by our guide that it is inadvisable for "foreigners" to eat from the market because the food might not agree with them. Although all of it looked fresh and clean and most of it edible, there were an amazing assortment of questionable comestibles like starfish, snake, sillk worms, scorpions, and bugs.

We instead ate at an east/west "fusion" restaurant situated on the moat surrounding the Forbidden City. This was the view from our window table.

There were no worms or bugs on the menu, and the food was wonderful. It was a perfect end to a great first trip in China. Donna and I head home this (Sunday) morning; Lev and Galina are staying for a few more days for an alternative energy conference.

-- Len

The Lama Temple of Tibetan Buddhism.

Donna taking a spin at the Buddhist prayer wheel.

Our pedicab ride through the hutongs (narrow alleys) of old Beijing.

Inside Ms. Wong's house.

Lunch in the feudal-period restaurant.

The half-mile long decorated corridor at the Summer Palace.

The olympic "flame" hotel with giant embedded display screens.

The four of us with the "birds nest" stadium in the background.

For our last day in China, we started with a tour of the Lama Temple, an elaborate complex for Tibetan Buddhism. You walk through one building, with one to three Buddha statues, only to find a courtyard and then another building behind, then the same, again and again. It’s a bit like the Twilight Zone. Finally, we arrived at the last building, which was created to house a giant Buddha, almost 60 feet tall, made from a single tree. The statue was so large that the toenail alone seemed to be almost a foot across. There seemed to be as many Chinese people lighting incense and praying as those touring.

Our next stop was to see the hutong area of Beijing. Hutong means alley or small street, so this is the old section of the city. Beijing used to be entirely hutongs, before the skyscrapers, and they have preserved one area so you can see what Beijing used to be like.

We took pedicab rides, ending up at the house of a retired 52-year-old lady. The idea was to show us a “typical” Beijing old-style hutong house. The lady was very welcoming, and was there with her sisters-in-law, who were cooking, her niece, who was doing inside-bottle painting (an amazing craft where they use a very narrow brush and paint on the inside of a bottle), and her poodle, who had yellow and orange fur ears.

The house consisted of one long room that was divided into living room and bedroom, and a small alley kitchen. It was comfortably appointed with several modern appliances, although very sparse on furniture because apparently she holds small dinners here for tourists, so needs to use one large table in the center of the room. There is no bathroom, but the public restroom is right across the street.

Our lunch was at an amazing restaurant that was renovated in the style of the feudal princes. The staff wore spectacular costumes, dressed up as concubines and eunuchs. The women wore those funny wooden shoes on narrow platforms, and very high headdresses. For some reason, Lev just couldn’t stop taking pictures of those concubines!

There were small buildings and pavilions scattered through a lovely garden with ponds. These were all small private dining areas. You definitely felt like royalty eating at this place.

We then went to the Summer Palace, where the emperor lived during half the year. There is a large man-made lake, and an equally large man-made mountain using the earth from digging the man-made lake. There are exquisite gardens and buildings, including a half-mile long corridor decorated with thousands of Chinese paintings.

We took a short ride on the lake on a private flat boat, seeing the marble boat, multiple graceful bridges, and the dragon island in the lake’s center. Next to one of the pavilions was a large projection TV screen showing sports, which seemed like quite an ironic juxtaposition to us!

Our final stop was the Olympic site where we saw from a distance the “Bird’s Nest” stadium and the water cube. They don’t let you near the site today, but we took a few photos from afar. Next to the site is an amazing building that was the hotel for the dignitaries. It is shaped like the Olympic flame, and had multiple giant TV screens that apparently showed Olympic events, but now seemed to be showing commercials.

We’re now back in the hotel getting ready for our final dinner out. We return home tomorrow, but Lev and Galina are staying for a few more days of a green-tech conference.

-- Donna

Donna opening the "coffee cup" door (filled with beans) of a cafe in the 798 contemporary art district of Beijing.

Today our main activity was a trip to the great wall. This truly is an amazing site. There are many different segments of the wall that can be visited – we went to the Mutianyu section. This part of the wall originally was built during the Ming dynasty, about 600 years ago, and was restored in modern times.

The drive itself was interesting in that it was our only view of rural China. We went by small villages with old buildings and narrow streets, having courtyards piled high with Chinese cabbage being dried for future use. As we got into the mountains, the area started to remind me of the Catskills, i.e. a mountain weekend getaway for city folks. There were small resorts and riverside restaurants, and the area apparently is very popular with Beijing residents who want a taste of the rural life.

At the parking lot for the great wall, we found dozens of tour buses. Our guide had told us that this was the less-visited part of the wall, so we were surprised to see so many tourists. Once we were on the wall, we had no idea where all those people were – while there certainly were other tourists, it didn’t feel crowded.

We took the cable car (like a ski gondola) to the top. You can walk up on a trail, which I would have preferred, but we didn’t have time. Instead, we took an hour-long walk on the top of the wall. You walk along a relatively wide path on the top of the wall, passing through watchtowers every few hundred yards. The wall runs along the ridge of the mountain so that the soldiers can see out both sides. They looked out over a beautiful view of craggy mountains that seems to go on forever. It helped that we also had gorgeous weather. The wall continues on in both directions as far as you can see, for thousands of miles.

It was hard to imagine the building of this wall, which took about a million people. It also was hard to imagine the life of the soldiers living here – how they were provisioned, how they kept warm, how they kept their sanity.

I should note that coming and going to the wall also requires you to go through Souvenir City, a group of stalls with aggressive shop people hawking their wares. In spite of them all saying “t-shirts, one dollar”, Lenny couldn’t convince them to actually sell him one for a dollar.

After a country lunch featuring chicken with chestnuts and roasted local fish, we stopped at a cloisonné factory. This is the art technique of creating patterns on copper using copper wire, filling it in with enamel paint, firing and polishing. The end results are brightly colored and richly patterned objects. I realized I had some faint recollection of my childhood from seeing these pieces – perhaps my parents had brought back some cloisonné pieces from one of their trips when I was young (mom/dad, well?).

We were supposed to go from here to see a Ming tomb, but we four caucused and decided to change plans. We had heard of a contemporary art area in Beijing that we otherwise would not get to see, so we asked our guide to take us there instead. This kind of change is one of the advantages of individual travel instead of group travel!

The area is called 798 and is near the Beijing airport. It consists of a bunch of factories and workshops that have been converted into artist studios and galleries. The area was very lively in that it was the end of the day, and many people were moving around as they prepared to leave for the day. The area also is full of small cafes.

It was a little hard to figure out the good places to go, and our guide didn’t seem to know it that well, but it still was fun to just wander in and out of the shops and galleries. There was a real hodge-podge, from weavers showing traditional dress to high resolution photographs of Chinese factories, to avant-garde sculpture and painting. Lenny and I thoroughly enjoyed the visit and could have imagined spending several hours there. Both Lenny and Galina pointed out that they could not imagine such freedom of expression in the old Communist days.

For dinner, we went to Club Lan, which is known for its eclectic design by Phillip Stark as well as its good food. The strangest part of the décor was that the ceilings were full of randomly sized, framed paintings hung in random patterns. All the light fixtures were different, as were the chairs and chargers. The place was a bit reminiscent of Bucks Restaurant in Woodside, but far more elegant!

-- Donna

At Tiananmen Square, the largest public plaza on earth.

The Forbidden City, where the emperors hung out from the 1400's to 1911.

The special "low fat" Peking Duck being carved at our table.

The "Pearl Market", with one floor of genuine articles, and three floors of knock-offs: jewelry, clothing, watches, iPods, cameras, etc.

The Temple of Heaven, where the Emperor came to give thanks that he was the Emperor.

The Monkey King (right) in conversation with Buddha's henchman in the Peking Opera.

On the Great Wall. It really is. Great, that is.

Watching Cloisonne copper vases being made.

We started the day in Tiananmen Square, the largest public square in the world. Everything in China seems to be super-sized; I guess when you have a billion people, you need lots of room. The square was filled with tourists, predominantly Chinese. In fact, I’ve been amazed at how many Chinese tourists there are. Then I asked myself why I was so amazed. After all, when you travel in the US, you meet lots of other American tourists. I realized that it seems amazing because it is a true sign of a growing middle class that so many Chinese have the ability to travel in their own country. Many of the tourists we see are “country people”, some in regional dress. From the south, they’re very short. From the north, they’re much taller. Our guide says that this is the difference between growing up eating rice in the south vs. wheat in the north.

Surrounding the square are many public buildings, including Mao’s mausoleum. You see no signs of the student protests of 1989, of course, and we are instructed not to mention this subject when in the square. There were lots of police around – the first time we have seen this in China.

I was amused by our guide referring to Mao has having “liberated” China. I pointed out that usually liberation means from foreign powers, such as being liberated from the Japanese occupation. In Mao’s case, he prevailed in the civil war with the Kuomintang, who were exiled to Taiwan. This seems like “unified” China rather than “liberated” China to me. However, the guide explained that the country was liberated from the bad guys, so that’s that.

It’s been fun to travel with Lev and Galina, who grew up in Soviet Russia. Over and over again, they see similarities to their experiences. Much of Chinese communism was copied from Soviet Communism, so this makes sense. I particularly like Lev’s Soviet jokes!

After Tiananmen Square, we toured the Forbidden City. This walled city was the place where the Chinese emperors lived for 500 years before being overthrown (“liberated’) by Dr. Sun Yat Sen (remember him from your history lessons? I actually studied this stuff in college, so am struggling to remember!). The Forbidden City is unbelievable. It is huge, with building after building, all of which are exquisite. There are magnificent marble terraces, meant to look like clouds, with the emperor sitting on top.

Everything is recently restored. Our guide refers to this as the “Olympic effect”. We had thought this would be a good time to visit China, and we were right. It seems like everything is in top notch shape having been fixed up for the games.

I also should mention that the weather is beautiful. In addition, the air pollution here in Beijing is much less oppressive than in the other cities, which have been grey and smoggy. The guide points out that many factories were closed to make the air better for the Olympics. It is a noticeable difference. The guide also confessed that they are told to tell tourists that it is fog, not pollution!

Lunch was Peking Duck - one of the best meals we have had, which is saying something because the food has been terrific. The ducks are slow roasted and carved at your table into very thin slices. They have perfected roasting the duck without it being oily and fatty, and the effect is delicious. The guide showed us the three ways to eat Peking Duck, each one with different condiments.

We then went to the Hongqiao Market. We figured this would be a quick stop, but we ended up having trouble leaving. This is a four story, indoor market. The top floor is very nice jewelry, particularly pearls, at reasonable prices (Joan, you would LOVE this place). The third floor is fake jewelry. The second floor is designer knock-offs, very cheap (Ann, you would LOVE this place). The first floor is electronics knock-offs, including loads of copies of brand name cameras, iPods, binoculars, etc. I’m sure you all think Lenny went wild here, but all he bought was a pair of clip-on sunglasses.

Our last stop was the Temple of Heaven. These wooden buildings in a lovely park were a religious spot for the emperors. Today, it is full of senior citizens doing lots of activities. They are dancing, playing cards, playing music, etc. It was very active and a lot of fun. We had a short Tai Chi class with a “private Tai Chi master”. The master was young, called himself Howard, and had an Adidas sweatshirt and backpack slung over his yellow Tai Chi outfit. I did okay learning the hand movements. And I did okay learning the foot movements. But I will admit that I found it pretty difficult to do the both at once!

After dinner (we’ve been having dinner at “happy hour” in our lovely hotel, the Peninsula, where the munchies are perfectly sufficient for a meal!), we went to the famous Peking Opera. Pretty much everybody there also was a western tourist. Subtitles were provided in Chinese and in English. The first part was classic Chinese opera. Even though the music is strange to our ears, I enjoyed it very much. The second part had no singing, but was mainly Kung Fu and acrobatics. The costumes were spectacular. We also got to see the actors applying make-up beforehand, which was great.

Does this sound like a lot of stuff for one day? Do you think we are exhausted at the end of a day? Yes, we are. We will need a vacation when we return.

By the way, I saw a piece of trash today – a candy wrapper on the path in the garden. I swear this is the first piece of trash I’ve seen!

-- Donna

We started the day touring Xi'an's city walls, which are in the process of being fully restored. These walls are about 600 years old. They have small square holes for firing down on intruders, as well a moat surrounding them. From the top, you have a view both into the old city of Xi'an, which seems to be not-so-old, and the modern city on the other side. Again, we watched with amazement as street cleaners mopped the pathways and plaza in front of the gate.

Our next step was a jade "factory", which actually was a jade carving demonstration along with a huge jade store. As always, we enjoyed watching the demonstration as well as learning how to distinguish hard jade from soft jade from glass fake jade. And we actually didn't buy anything (much to the dismay of the dozens of shop attendants who following us around, commenting on every piece if we stopped for more than two seconds). We were there at the same time as a busload of Israelis, which prompted one shop lady to apologize, since the "Israelis are always the noisiest".

Our last stop in Xi'an was at the brand new Han Yangling Museum, a museum of a tomb of a Han emporer. This museum was amazing, both for its content as well as for its display technique. This tomb dates from about 200 years after the ones we saw earlier, and by then the emporer had decided that the large terracotta warriors were a bit extreme. So his solution was to do as many, but in a small, toy-like size. I'd say they were about a foot tall each. There were thousands and thousands lined up in pits, again only partially unearthed. There also were hundreds of miniature animals, vessels, etc. The interesting display technique was that again they built the museum over the archeological pits, but this time with see-through floors, and you actually walked over the site, seeing the artifacts, as they were found, below. It was a bit dizzying, but very impressive.

Our flight to Beijing was uneventful, and Len already wrote about our evening. I will second his comment that the "egg" is the most incredible building I have ever seen.

-- Donna

The excavations of small figures in the "Underground Museum" outside of Xi'An.

Lev and Donna learning how to judge Jade.

The city wall of Xi'an, shrouded in smog like everything else.


Donna with with a new friend.

Our final dinner in Xi'An, with Umang and Ruth.

It would be hard to overuse superlatives in describing our experience last night at the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing. It is by far the most impressive performance venue I have ever been in.

The building is a titanium ellipsoid dome surrounded by an artificial lake, often described as looking like an egg floating on water. Inside are three halls that seat a total of 6500 people. The contemporary interior is made of wood, glass and steel and soars up hundreds of feet, with multiple staircases and escalators crossing to different levels of the three halls. The lighting is dramatic, and the total effect is stunning.

The concert hall is large but seems intimate because the audience surrounds the stage. We heard a performance of the Amsterdam Orchestra, led by a Latvian (!) conductor, doing symphonies by Dvorak and Mendelsohn, and a piece by Ravel. The musicians were world-class, the acoustics were superb, and we had the best seats in the house -- 6th row center. It was unforgettable. Most of the audience, incidentally, was Chinese.

Unfortunately they don't allow cameras, and a written description doesn't do it justice. I felt a pang of jealousy; why don't we have something like this?

-- Len

The amazing "Terracotta Warriors and Horses" of Emperor Qinshihuang, ca 200 BCE.

Dumplings for lunch

The entry courtyard to the Great Mosque of Xi'an.

The Wild Goose Pagoda

The ladies with their names written in Chinese calligraphy

The Terracotta Warriors

I’m writing in the evening so that I can watch TV tomorrow morning. We’re hoping that when we wake up we’ll be able to see the first results from the east coast.

We started our day with one of the most amazing archeological sites in the world, the terracotta warriors and horses of Xi’an. Over two thousand years ago, these sculptures were created by an enormous workforce conscripted by the first emperor of China for his mausoleum. It is hard to convey the scale of this site. There are thousands of life-size men and horses, only a very small number of which have been excavated and restored. Many still lie in the pits in pieces, waiting for archeologists to carefully uncover them.

The Chinese government built huge structures around the archeological pits so that the site is both a museum and a working archeological site. Just one pit would cover many football fields, and people standing on the other side look like little ants. Where restored, the statues are lined up, standing, staring ahead as if on the march. Each face looks different, and they are believed to be representations of actual people of the time.

We spent several hours visiting the three pits, a few half-size bronzes, and – of course – the gift shop. It truly is spectacular!

We then returned to Xi’an to have dumplings – the local specialty – for lunch. We had dumplings in every possible shape. Often they were formed to represent the filling, i.e. the walnut-filled dumpling was shaped like a walnut, and the duck-filled dumpling was formed into a duck shape. The waitresses came over each time to tell us in their best English the contents of each dumpling, but we pretty much only understood “vegetables”.

After lunch, we walked through the Muslim quarter and into the Mosque. This actually was a group of pavilions and gardens leading up to the Mosque, all very lovely and peaceful. There is still an active Muslim population in Xi’an who pray here the requisite five times per day.

Our last stop was the Wild Goose Pagoda. It was built about 1400 years ago, and is a Buddhist religious site. The pagoda was damaged by several earthquakes and only partially restored. There were demonstrations nearby of calligraphy, so Galina and I had our names written (you now can call us Glina and Tana, since that’s how they seem to pronounce our names).

We’re now back at the hotel getting ready to meet with some other friends for dinner who also are travelling after our group get together in Hong Kong.

-- Donna

Diapers, Chinese style...

Lenny joining the revolutionaries.

The Ohel Moshe synagogue in the former Jewish section of Shanghai.

Old buildings with laundry.

The Pudong (east) area of Shanghai as seen from the "Bund".

The Maglev train arriving at the station.

Our cruising speed during the 7-minute trip.

Learning about tea.

Election day! Well, not exactly. It’s the day before election day for you. We are on pins and needles waiting for results, which we figure will be about noon here tomorrow.

I forgot one story from our dinner with Griff and Sissy. For some reason, it was very complicated to order dinner at the restaurant. It took an intense negotiation with the waitress … first with Griff, then Sissy, then back to Griff, and so on. We never quite figured out what was going on, but the whole process took about ½ hour!

To complete our last day in Shanghai, we started with a ride through the “tourist tunnel”. This has to be one of the goofiest tourist attractions I’ve ever seen. They dug a tunnel under the river – seems like quite an expensive thing to do – then decorated it with flashing lights. You ride through the tunnel on subway-like cars to admire the beautiful lights. Since the cars don’t go through the tunnel, our driver drove through the regular tunnel and met us later in the day. The big advantage of this was not sitting in the tunnel traffic, but we couldn’t imagine that this project made any sense financially.

We walked along the Bund, the name for the embankment along the river where the former British concession was. It’s very reminiscent of Europe with its architecture (other than the red Chinese flag flying from the top of every building).

Our next stop was a tea shop where we did a tea-tasting and received some instruction in the art of tea-serving. We all enjoyed this stop very much – although we struggled to tell the difference between the finest cuts of tea and the second to finest (which cost about half of the finest). We bought some tea and tea cups, of course, in the finest gift shop.

After a stroll through a jade “museum” (where everything coincidentally was on sale), we continued to the old Jewish quarter. In the 1930’s, Shanghai did not require entry visas, and it was one of the only places in the world that welcomed Jews escaping from the Nazis. Over 30,000 Jews came here, often with the help of Chinese consulate officers based in eastern Europe.

There really aren’t any Jews left, so there is no sign of a Jewish neighborhood. However, the government recently created a lovely museum in honor of the refugees at the site of one of the Ashkenazy synagogues called Ohel Moshe. It was quite touching to see the photos of this refugee community, and to see how generous the Chinese were in welcoming them.

The caretaker of the museum, Mr. Wong, gave us some explanations in barely-understandable English. Much of what Mr. Wong said was a recitation of Jewish words, i.e. “Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashana, Kippot, Yarmulka, Matzah”, etc.

We stopped by a park near the museum where we saw people playing cards, a woman embroidering, and one of the funniest sites on our trip so far, a child with pants with a slit in it. At first I assumed that the pants were just torn. But then we witnessed the reason for the slit when the child squatted by the bench, and happily peed without the inconvenience of pulling down his pants! Lev was quick on the old camera shutter, and deviously snapped a photo of Galina with the boy in the background. Unfortunately we don’t have his photo to post right now, but perhaps we’ll do it later.

One of the most noticeable things in our travels through the city today is laundry hanging everywhere to dry. This is not just out of windows – although indeed it seems like out of every window – it also is on fence posts and strung on racks on the sidewalk. You might think that every house has a used clothing store in front of it, but it’s actually clothes drying.

After a nice western lunch (our first non-Chinese meal in a week!), we drove to the Maglev Train. This is a train built by the Germans using magnetic levitation that allows it to go extremely fast. We got a real kick out of this experience. It takes 7 minutes and 20 seconds to the airport (quite precisely). You can watch the speed on a display. Our top speed was about 250 miles per hour. It’s very smooth – you don’t really feel the speed except if you look out the window. Then you realize that the speed of the countryside flying by is unbelievable. I felt it was like watching a train ride in fast-forward setting. When the train passed from the other direction, I jumped (in spite of being warned by the tour guide). It comes and goes in an instant.

We had a delayed and bumpy flight to Xi’an, so arrived quite tired, but settled into our very nice hotel here, the Shangri-la.

-- Donna

Griff and Sissy

The gondola.

The Jacquard silk loom

In the Master of the Nets Garden

The Humble Administrator's Garden

The silk spinning machine