Onwards to Xi'an

Greetings from Xi'an, China!  Xi'an is located in north central China.  It was an ancient capital city (complete with city walls!), the seat of the empire for several dynasties.  It is most well known for being the home of the Terra Cotta Soldiers, considered the eighth wonder of the ancient world.

Sometimes it is hard to appreciate the fact that China has over one billion people.  When we were planning our trip, we considered going to Xi'an first.  But then we thought it would be a good idea to go to a big city first, before going to a small one.  Well - big and small are relative in China.  Beijing is huge indeed, with over 10 million people.  Xi'an is smaller - but it still has a whopping 3.5 million people!  I don't think there are 10 US cities (including their suburbs) that would be any bigger.


As I wrote earlier, Beijing was not what I expected to see.  So modern, so clean, so orderly - so dull.  I think the combination of Party HQ and the Olympics has made Beijing boring (or perhaps it has always been boring).  Xi'an, on the other hand, was exactly what I expected.  Xi'an is full of life.  Right outside my hotel room, you can see a busy intersection.  There are small vendors selling things like squid on a skewer.  There are clothing stores, cell phone stores, and restaurants.  When you walk around downtown, you don't really feel like a tourist.  You're just another person in a crowd. 

It's really nice to see so many people walking around all the time.  In the States, it seems that everyone cloisters themselves at home.  Once in a while, they may go shopping or out to eat, but they go right back home afterwards.  It seems that people spend more of their time outside in Xi'an.  You see lots of people just taking a stroll, hanging out on a park bench, grabbing a snack from a street vendor.  Perhaps it's due to tighter living quarters.  Or perhaps it's just culture.

Traffic is pretty amusing here (it's like this in Vietnam too).  The streets are full of cars, buses, mopeds, bikes, and pedestrians.  It seems like the rule of the road is "just do it."  People will turn left with oncoming traffic.  They don't stick to driving lanes.  While we were waiting for a train to cross yesterday, the drivers (including ours) queued up on the wrong side of the road so they could cut in front of everyone ahead of them.  As a pedestrian, it's a similar deal.  To cross the road, you just start walking at a steady pace.  Cars will avoid you.  You just shouldn't make sudden moves or hesitate.  And if you wait for traffic to clear, you may have to wait forever.

Photos available online here.

Last day in Beijing

Today is our last day in Beijing.  We've been here just for three days so far, but it seems like a whirlwind of stuff to see!  It was great seeing all the tourist things like the Forbidden City and the Great Wall.  But it was also great to check out local stuff like all the markets and restaurants.

I have to admit that I was a bit surprised about Beijing as a city.  Although I knew it was a huge city of over 10 million people, I didn't think it was as modern of a city as it really is.  It's full of large buildings - skyscrapers, office complexes, and high-rise apartments.  The streets are arranged in a grid pattern, with "Ring Roads" running as beltways around the city.  Aside from the smog, the city is very orderly and clean.  When I told one of my friends about this, she was shocked; everyone else seems to think it's a dirty city.  Perhaps they are trying to change their image for the Olympics. (check out the new Olympic stadium).   I didn't even see as much public spitting as I thought I would see (though it still happens).  One advantage about being a communist state is that you can choose to build anything or to clean anything up, and the people will comply...

Taxis are really cheap in Beijing.  You can go all over for just a few bucks.  This is amazing, considering the exorbitant fares I pay in Chicago.  One downside, however, is that traffic can be pretty bad (well, I guess it's bad in all big cities).  What's even worse is that the taxi drivers don't speak English.  Public service people speak English, so do market vendors, so do the local farmers who hang out with you at the Great Wall.  But not the taxi drivers.  You have to hand them printed names of where to go (or get the hotel concierge guys to talk to them).  We thought we were fine, but then apparently lots of taxi drivers either can't read or have such poor eyesight that they couldn't read our pieces of paper.  We've had to get out of at least five taxis because of this.  What a nightmare!

I'm proud of my non-Asian travel companions Mo and Ryan.  Not only did they eat funky foods, they were able to haggle successfully at the Chinese markets.  If you can haggle in China, you should be set for life!

Yesterday we went to the Great Wall.  What an amazing place!  The Great Wall is actually multiple walls, constructed at different times by different dynasties, and located in different places.  Most people go to the wall at Balaling, where it is fully restored and is very tourist friendly.  We were sick of the crowds and wanted a more natural view.  So we did a 10km (6mi) hike between the Great Walls at Simatai and Jinshangling.  It wasn't a long hike, but man was it tiring!  Up and down, up and down, along the countours of mountains.  It was the most strenuous hike I have ever done.  It was well worth it though.  The scenery was spectacular!

Now it's time to close out our visit to Beijing.  Tonight we fly to Xi'an and visit the Terracotta Army.

Photos available online here.

First impressions of China

Ni hao from Beijing!  I've spent what seems to be a whole day flying, plus a full day hanging out in Beijing.  It feels like I've seen a today already!  And I'm wiped out.  But I have to write a blog entry to get these impressions written down.

If you've never flown to Europe or Asia, it's quite the ordeal.  My nonstop flight from Chicago to Shanghai was over 14 hours in length.  Not to mention a 2 hour delay due to some plane problem.  Once we arrived in Shanghai, we had a 3 hour layover and then took a domestic flight to Beijing.  Long day!!!  The biggest thing to deal with is the time change.  Luckily (or unluckily), I had so much stuff to wrap up before leaving that I stayed up all night the night before.  This helped me fly, because it made it easier to fall asleep.  The other thing I like to do is carry a toothbrush on the plane so you can sleep/wake up with fresh breath.  Add your ipod and a good book and you're good to go!

One thing I try to do is understand something about the language of the place I'm visiting.  Three days before my trip, I started learning some Mandarin from the Internet.  There are some nice sites with free mp3s of spoken Mandarin!  Westerners find Eastern languages funky because they are all about intonation/inflection rather than conjugation.  Mandarin uses monosyllabic words consisting of a starting consonant-type sound and a "final" sound.  There are many  sounds, and the phonetic rules are different (but very consistent, unlike English).  Even though I understood the basic structure of the language in theory, I was still pretty useless in practice.  A 50-word vocabulary only gets you so far.  Funny thing was that everyone thinks I'm Chinese so they'd start blasting words at me and I'd stare at them dumbfounded.  I think they thought I was my friends' tour guide :)

A bad stereotype about Chinese people is that they are pushy and don't care for things like lines or personal space.  It never bothered me before.  But after just a couple days, it has annoyed the heck out of me!  People will just shove past you to get to wherever they want to go.  I thought it was just limited to markets, but I saw it at the airport, at tourist attractions, everywhere!  I didn't even bother to check out the most crowded parts within the Forbidden City.  Sheesh!

On the bright side, you can't go wrong with Chinese food.  Chinese food and Italian food are perhaps the only truly global foods out there.  Well, I guess you can count American chains like McDonald's and KFC too.  Everything has been so good.  Tonight we had the king of all feasts, Peking Duck, right in the heart of Beijing.  Yum!!!  It's super cheap too.  I think I've spent less eating out this whole time than I would have spent in one night drinking in Chicago.

One exception on the cheap front, however, is Starbucks.  In an effort to increase market presence, Starbucks has arrived in China in full force.  Are you surprised?  My grande vanilla latte cost me 33 RMB, which is almost 5 dollars with the crappy USD (7 to 1 ratio now).  In contrast, a whole plate of Mee Goreng at a Singaporean restaurant ran me 30 RMB!

My friends and I went looking for some good nightlife in Beijing.  Apparently, Beijing was a very sleepy city even just 10 years ago.  Since then, bars and clubs have opened up.  We stopped by a couple areas last night and tonight.  The bars are very touristy, and very quiet still.  Maybe we just aren't going to the right places?  But these strips are supposed to be the right places :(  Also, we were endlessly hounded by people on the street to come to "lady bar, lady massage" (for me, it was the same but in Mandarin haha).  It really turns you off from wanting to be in that area.  We did finally enjoy ourselves at a place last night, where it seemed like locals (at least Chinese people) hung out, listening to pro musicians sing cover tunes.  But now we are on a quest to find some hip nightlife.  Any suggestions welcome!

Photos available online here.

So I finally completed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

It's funny.  I pre-ordered the book, like many people.  Eager anticipation of one of the most highly anticipated books ever!  I started reading.  Got a couple hundred pages through.  And then it sat on the shelf.  I'm one of those people with the rare talent of being able to postpone anything.  I daresay it is related to procrastination.  But it's a step above, since you actually stop in the middle of something enjoyable.  It sat for many months, til last week, when I went out of town.  I am a much better reader when there are no distractions from home.

Anyways, it was a good book.  If you haven't read it and intend to, please go no further.  I will have SPOILERS!  Well not big ones.  But there will be some, oh yes.

Let me start with the bad side.  Unlike the Harry Potter fanatics, I actually don't blindly enjoy these books.  There were a few things that annoyed me.  First of all, it seemed that Rowling invented the last two books to pretty much stand on their own.  Yeah, there were some things the led up to them, but the horcrux thing plus the deathly hallows solely came out of the last two books.  In the first five books, it seemed as if You-Know-Who was more like that-bad-guy-you-could-never-get-rid-of in cartoons.  You know: Wile E. Coyote, Gargamel, Megatron, etc.  Then all of the sudden, Harry gets a clue and starts figuring out the bad guy.  In Rowling's defense, I guess she needed a way to wrap it all up.  Maybe it's because the first couple books were way too simple; she just didn't have much of a story arc to work with.

The other big thing that bugged me about Deathly Hallows was that there was too much explicit explanation.  Yes, everyone wants to understand what happened and see all the loose ends get wrapped up.  But do you have to make it so obvious?  Like the pensieve scene.  It just seemed that the plot got so complex that it needed a long-winded, complex resolution as well.  Maybe this one time, this story would be better suited as a movie, since you could easily do a  dream-sequence-that-reveals-everything.

Now that I've had a chance to whine, let me talk about the good things.  It was still quite an enjoyable novel.  Rowling did a great job tying all the components of the Harry Potter universe into the last book.  It seemed like every good guy and bad guy you met ended up in the book.   It incorporated parts of past books, like the Room of Requirement and Dumbledore's Army.  The final battle was epic and spectacular.  It was a true fight between good and evil, and everyone showed up.  Reminded me of the final battle in LoTR.  I can't wait to see a movie version of that battle.

Harry did a lot of growing up too.  And it was about time.  It got a bit annoying seeing him stumble about all the time.  He was like a wizardly Inspector Gadget.  But in this book (and the previous one), he and his friends actually think strategically.  Harry figures out the complex relationships and lore regarding You-Know-Who.  And he won over enough people through his actions and his defiance of the bad guys that they would come join him in the final battle.

So, a couple of annoyances aside, Deathly Hallows was a fine ending to a fine series of books.  The books are kinda strange as a series - they don't really fit together.  The first ones are simple and cater to young children.  The last ones are dark and complex, probably way above most 10 year olds' heads.  I guess they show a good transition from childhood to adulthood.  And thus it ends, with Harry walking away in the sunset.  Oh wait - there's an epilogue.... maybe it's not all over... JK Rowling is gonna make more money!!!