Beijing, the City of Eternal Haze

I got off my overnight train in Beijing on 6/1, got onto the subway, and promptly realized I'd just gotten on the subway into downtown in a city of 22 million people during rush hour. At every stop, people literally flung themselves onto the train to force enough room that the door would close behind them. After that, I avoided rush hour subway rides with big suitcases!

I found my hotel, which was down a side alley (the side alleys of beijing, called hutongs, line the roads between main streets and are where the majority of the populations live) with relative ease:



They were very friendly and let me check in at 8am; I rented a bike from them (US $4 for the whole day!) and biked around the city - Beijing is the flattest city I've ever seen and that makes it extremely bikeable; they even have traffic lights specially for bikes, which I am here depicted running as I take a picture of it:




That brings me to a very strange thing about China: traffic laws. They seem to be optional here. Red lights can be run if there aren't too many people going the other direction, police and soldiers stand by and watch as cars zoom through intersections, playing chicken with one another, and all drivers are under the impression that honking gives them the right of way. As a bike or pedestrian, it's common to hear a blasting horn from right behind you or right next to you - that means you should stop, because there's a car coming and it's not going to. I've cursed at a few people, so it's a good thing most of them don't speak english.

I also caught my first glimpse of the Forbidden City, though I didn't go inside until later in the week:



All over the city, beautiful (and really old) buildings are plopped down in the middle of modern buildings and busy streets:



On my way back to the hotel, I ran into a fruit vendor:



The smiling gentleman in an american camo t-shirt smoking a cigarette like it was part of his mouth declined to be part of this shot, but he was thrilled that I wanted to buy his fruit!

I spent the evening planning my next few days - Look for the Great Wall and Forbidden City coming up!

I'm sorry, did you say five HUNDRED THOUSAND?!? And that's LESS than you were expecting?

Hi all! I have excellent news. I'm in Kunming, and I started my program last monday. After much difficulty and a lot of hoop-jumping (which included moving all of the students from the 9th to the 14th floor of the building we're staying in so we could be in rooms with ethernet connections), I finally have an internet connection! It seems to work roughly 20% of the time, which is a good 19% more than the internet we had before. Below is the description of my experience at the World Expo in Shanghai, which was a while ago now. I'm working on writing up all the exciting things I've done since then, so you should have more stories to look forward to! I hope you're enjoying the blog; I welcome any suggestions you have! You should also become a follower (to the left) so it looks like I have friends.


On Sunday, 5/31, I went to the Shanghai 2010 World Expo. It opened at 9am, we got there at 7, and the lines looked like this:




Note that this is one of 5 gates at this entrance, and there are 9 separate entrances. There were over 500,000 (yes, half a million!) people at the expo the day before I went (not sure how many on my day) and China's been pretty disappointed with the lack of attendance. I, on the other hand, was dismayed at the number of people - lines to get into the more popular pavilions (the individual country buildings) were absurd; for example, this is the Saudi Arabia Pavilion, with a four-hour queue built up less than ten minutes after opening:



The Germany, Switzerland, Canada, USA, and many other pavilions were like this - by my calculation, if you waited in those lines you could see at most three pavilions in a day! Not my idea of fun, so I skipped lines longer than about 15 minutes. Therefore, I can't tell you firsthand what was inside this pavilion, but the expo volunteer I was walking around with (conveniently the son of my hosts) said it was usually movies about the past, present, and future of the country, along with a medium-size museum about the country and some pretty impressive experimental/futuristic technologies.

The whole thing reminded me of a glorified version of Thurtene Carnival (for those of you who don't know, a student-run carnival at Wash U in which a bunch of student groups, especially Greek organizations, spend months building enormous (and awesome) buildings for a weekend carnival, then tear them down). Countries had poured millions/billions of dollars into building massive structures (many of which, to be fair, were beautiful architectural marvels) that will be seen by tourists for the next 6 months, and then torn down. The countries aren't making a profit (except, perhaps, China) and they won't have much tangible to show for it afterwords. That said, the entire thing was remarkable in many ways. Here's a little more about what we did and some more pictures:

As soon as we got inside, we were greeted by the impressive China Pavilion:



... and hundreds (maybe thousands) of Chinese tourists running towards various pavilions to try to beat the lines. Jake (the volunteer I was with), Dong Li (his mom) and I walked leisurely around, looked at most of the pavilions from the outside, and went inside a few that had short lines, such as the Nepal Pavilion:



Which had a lot of unbelievable wood carving:



And some pretty sweet gold buddhas:




The craziest pavilion we saw, in my opinion, was the UK pavilion - which, unfortunately, we didn't have time to go inside. The outside is just a bunch of outward-pointing needles, and doesn't look like a building at all!



Another cool one we went inside was Chile, which had a bunch of cool futuristic designs made of imported Chilean wood (that smelled really good) and a LOT of wine displays:



Many countries elected to choose a distinguishing feature to emphasize about their country. For Chile, it was wine; for Brasil, it was soccer:


You probably can't tell from the picture, but the screen on the left with the soccer players was actually really cool - it had a number you could call from your cell phone, and then you could use the key pad to control the players! Gave the people in line something to do.

And here's a shot of Jake and I in front of the Canada pavilion, which apparently had a Cirque du Soleil show inside!




I have lots more pictures but don't want to bore you, so I'll leave you with an image of the China Pavilion at night! Walking around at night was a totally different experience, because all the pavilions and landscape features that China installed light up beautifully, and the crowds thin out (if only a little). Feel free to ask me for more pictures if you want!

It all started in Shanghai...

Greetings from China! I'm going to do my best to keep up with a blog while I'm here, but the internet connections so far have been sporadic and very slow by US standards. So, if I don't post anything for a long time, it could be because I don't have internet (although more likely it'll be because I'm busy / lazy).

I got to China on Friday, 5/27, and took a bus from the airport (far outside the city) to a subway station downtown, where I was supposed to meet the people I was staying with (cousins of a friend of mine - thanks Qian!). The bus, as I understood was led to understand by one of the few people I could find who spoke English, would drop me off at Nan Jing Xi Lu - where I was supposed to be. I also asked a random passerby to make sure I was in the right spot. After waiting at the station for a while, I called Dong Li, the woman whom I was supposed to meet, who speaks limited English. I assured her that I was at the correct station, waiting at the service center where she said to wait. What I didn't know, however, is that Nan Jing Xi Lu is the name of a street (Lu means street), and that while there is a station called Nan Jing Xi Lu station, the street itself is very long and has several subway stops. So, I was waiting in the wrong station, convinced I was in the right place. Meanwhile, Dong Li was at the right station frantically looking for me - she even announced over the station loudspeaker "Peter Angell, I am waiting for you at the service center" and she had a sign with my name on it and everything. Finally, we talked on the phone again and I let her speak to the service center clerk at the station I was waiting in, and (in chinese) they cleared up all the confusion.

So. Dong Li and her husband, Yao Yong, found me, and we took a taxi to their house, where they fed me a delicious meal and we worked on overcoming the language barrier.

On Saturday, they took me to see the sights in Shanghai. It's a beautiful city, with an inordinate number of skyscrapers, crowded in touristy places but on the whole not so crowded as to be unpleasant, and very clean. A river runs through downtown, separating the old district of Shanghai (much of which has been restored) and the new district, where the tallest of the tall buildings reside. The first place we went was the bank of the river, where we could see the famous European district built in the 1930s (known as The Bund) across the river:



And behind us was the new district, with the tallest buildings in the city:


The building on the right, with the whole in the top (which is to reduce wind friction and keep it from blowing over) is the tallest in the city, and the one to the left is the second-tallest.

And here's the three of us with downtown in the background:



Next, we went to a popular, quaint old merchant district called Yuyuan Gardens, where the buildings were what you and I think of as traditional Chinese architecture, built before 1900 and restored more recently to serve as a tourist attraction.



Here we also had lunch at a well-known restaurant whose name escapes me at the moment (where Bill Clinton at some years ago, while he was president). They treated me to all sorts of traditional Shanghanese food, which was delectable.


The brownish stuff on the left is jellyfish (which has a strange slithery-yet-crunchy texture). The fish in the center and the stuff in the red pepper at the back (which was some sort of rice-bran hybrid made into a yeasted dough and cooked in strong sauce) were particularly excellent.

Next up, we drove across downtown to the Shanghai Museum, one of the biggest and best museums in China, with two added bonuses: first, it was free, and second, my hosts had never been there, despite living just a few minutes away. The museum had lots of cool stuff including 5,000-year-old jade carvings, 7,000-year-old pottery, lots of paintings and calligraphy, and some pretty awesome costumes from around China throughout history. There was also an ancient coin collection, which included these knife-shaped coins from a couple thousand years ago:

Imagine carrying around a pocketful of these! Makes me feel guilty that I get annoyed when I have too many ones in my wallet and it gets thick.

After leaving the museum, we walked around People's Square, a large open area right behind the museum and not far from downtown. I don't have a good picture that captures the scale of the square, but here's the closest I can get:


The building behind the square with the round middle and the arch above is the Shanghai Museum.

The 2010 World Expo was in Shanghai (I'll get to that next time) and there were adds literally everywhere in the city - every lamppost has a banner, every bus is painted for the expo, every billboard has an ad, and every store sells paraphernalia. This was on the lawn outside the Shanghai Museum:


Who knew landscaping could be even more elaborate than Wash U's???

After People's Square, we returned home, at the rest of our enormous lunch for dinner, and then went out again to see the night life. The Bund in particular was stunning at night, with lights on all the old buildings.



The newer part of downtown, across the river (the opposite direction this time), was also quite stunning:


The skewer-shaped building with two globes on it on the left is the Shanghai Television Tower; note also the blue-outlined building about 2/3 the way to the left, which is the tallest building I mentioned earlier (still has a hole in the top). Also, check out that crowd! Moving around was a bit of a trick, and we stayed just long enough to get a few pictures.

Last, we walked down Nanjing St., the main drag of downtown Shanghai, full of clothing stores (which look high-end but are infinitely cheaper than equivalent US stores), restaurants, and souvenir shops. Every shop on the street stays open (and busy) until at least ten o'clock.


Note the ever-present McDonalds and coke vending machines.

After seeing so much in one day, spending so long on my feet, and taking in so much new culture, I was exhausted, and proceeded to fall into a deep and peaceful sleep. I woke up on Sunday at 6am to go to the World Expo bright and early! And that's what you'll hear about next time! Time to get some shut-eye.