Eric's Beijing Diary

Charley and James and I went out the Fragrant Hills this afternoon to look at a place. I had called Mary earlier to see if she knew of any place close to her. I first checked into this last spring when I was living out there part time. At that time, I was looking at places like the one Mary and her husband live in. This evening, we went to another place run by her landlord that contains very small apartments. It's tiny, but the location is good.

Afterward, we were having dinner, and James mentioned that his roommate was leaving at the end of the week. He told me I could move in with him if I wanted to. James lives down by Jinsong, the southern terminus of Line 10. Six years ago, when I first came to China, the idea of living that far south and having to be in Wudaokou on the upper west side for an eight o'clock class would have been out of the question. But Line 10 changed all that. It's an interesting idea.

Got back from shanghai yesterday. I am supposed to be out of my apartment in a couple days, but I haven't figured out where I am going to move yet.

This evening, I got a call from Jean. She asked what I was up to, and I told her that I was packing up to move. She asked me where I was moving to, and I told her I didn't know.

When the floor lady left this evening, she told me that she was going to be off the next couple days. At first I wondered why she told me that...she is always gone on Saturday and Sunday. Then it dawned on me that she was telling me that because she assumed that I would be moving out over the weekend. I put her fears to rest.

Moving. I hate moving. But for me, it is pretty much a fact of life. It should be easy. I came here six years ago with one large suitcase, and John's army bag, both pocked and marked by the airline as "heavy." But that was it. Well, that and my old Toshiba laptop. Now? A few more clothes--that's understandable, I guess. The large quilt I bought from a lady up in the mountains of Shanxi Province--clumsy, but very necessary once I leave the foreign teachers' dormitory, because that kind of thing is not supplied when you rent. Cooking utensils--I didn't have that when I came. But it isn't that much, really. Just a box or two. But the ten boxes of books. Where did they come from? What I have now definitely could not be put in two suitcases. Amazing how much junk one can accumulate in six years!

People's Square. Found the Foreign Language Bookstore on Fuzhou Road. Lots of books, and the paperbacks are cheap (unlike the Bookworm in Beijing). If I bought enough books I could pay for my trip. But I am not in the mood for spending lots of money right now.

I am going to spend a few days here in Shanghai before heading back to Beijing. Amy was able to find a very low cost hotel on the campus of Fudan University. I had originally told her that it was no problem for me to stay at the youth hostel, but she wanted me to be closer to her place. Now I am glad I let her make the arrangements. It's a very clean hotel, and I have a private room.

Augustine's Confessions, The Diary of a Madman, and an anthology of the works of Milton--which one would you pick? I chose Augustine, because it's the one out of the tree that I would not want to do without. And, after all these years, I've never gotten around to reading it. Such choices are never easy, though. Augustine is important, to be sure. Hard to find a theological statement of any import from any theologian throughout the centuries of church history, that is not a paraphrase of something Augustine said first. Protestants and Catholics both claim him as a church father. Twenty kuai for a paperback edition. Not a bad price for an imported book. I don't know how these guys are this stuff over here so cheaply. As I said, if I bought all my books here, I could easily pay for the round trip ticket.

I have seen several road signs indicating the distance to Nanning. Nanning is the capital city of Guangxi Provinvce to the south. So we must be heading south for awhile, and then heading east into Hunan Province.

This is an old bus. Nothing fancy. But the seats are comfortable. And there is an expressway running all the way across China from Guiyang to Shanghai. I find myself getting bored or frustrated with this long ride, I will just have to spend a few minutes thinking about what this trip would have been like on gravel roads in old China. Times have changed.

For an average person, travel by car across China does not really compare to what it would be for an average person in America. This is because in America, a car is a necessity, so most people have one of some kind. But also, I have never seen a freeway in China that wasn't a toll road. This is frustrating, but it is also fair. It wouldn't really be right to pay for highways by taxing millions of poor farmers who don't drive and will probably never have a car. In China, the roads are paid for by the people who use them. Result: Traveling by car across China doesn't really save the average family money the way it would in the United States. In America, unless you are traveling all by yourself, you can just about guarantee that travel by car will be cheaper than any other method. Mind you, I am saying this based on my own American experience, which ended when I moved to Beijing, before the gasoline prices in the States went sky high.

No train tickets. No plane tickets. I finally decided to see about getting a bus ticket to Shanghai. I have friends in Shanghai, and it has always been easy to get a train ticket from Shanghai to Beijing. I was walking to the main long distance bus station when I met a dog who was dressed to the nines. He had a little walkie-talkie strapped to his head so that he could get instructions from his master. Reminded me of something Bob Hitt, an executive with McDonnell Douglas used to say, "Every day in China you see something you don't see every day." In China, people don't take buses because they are so much cheaper. They take busses because it seems like you can always manage to get a seat. For long trips, it is certainly not as comfortable as having a hard sleeper, and the ticket price is about the same. But it is much easier to get a ticket. There isn't really a black market on bus tickets, because they are more instant. People usually buy them on the day of their trip or perhaps the day before. I don't really like buses. But I have ridden them quite a bit, because I really do like the mountains of Western China, and you can't get very far in the mountains without taking buses. This trip is going to take 24 hours. Twenty-four hours on a bus is not something I look forward to. But it would be oh, so much better than 24 hours on in the hard seats on the train. That's because the buses do not allow standing passengers who don't have a seat, and because they stop every few hours. I still much prefer a sleeper on the train, but I do need to start heading back. I had assumed that I might have to take a bus to Changsha, then try to find another bus going east. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I can go from Guiyang to Shanghai on one bus without changing. Twenty-four hours seems like a long time. But for a trip across China, it is really much shorter than I would have expected. A local guy told me the ticket would cost me 300 some. It was actually 560. I am sure that is because of the Spring Festival rush.

Labels: Animals, Travel Guizhou

Yesterday afternoon, I met an American chef from Shanghai who has recently moved to Guiyang. He said he could not stand the summers in Shanghai. If they are anything like the summers in Beijing, I don't blame him. But I don't stay in Beijing in the summer. In his line of work, he probably didn't have a choice. At any rate, he told me he just decided he had had enough. He is busy getting ready to open a restaurant here in Guiyang, but he took time to give me some tips on where to find really good Guizhou food. Ordering Guizhou food is not that easy if you're not a local person. There is an art to cooking, but there is also an art to ordering. One thing I do know, and that is that Guizhou people like spicy food. Sichuan, Guizhou, Hunan..you can expect to find lots of spicy dishes in those areas. Oh, I left out Chongqing. Can't forget Chongqing, the source of the Chongqing hotpot. But I have always thought of Chongqing as part of Sichuan Province, so I sometimes forget to mention it. Chongqing is now like Beijing. It is a separate municipality. Sort of a province in and of itself. Similar to the "city" of Tokyo in Japan.

Yesterday morning I took a bus to the train station to stand in line for a ticket back home. No luck. I wasn't surprised. This is Spring Festival, and train tickets are at a premium. There are several reasons why buying train tickets can be so troublesome. Trains are the cheapest form of cross country transportation, so they are the preferred choice for the common people. Long distance buses are an option, and tickets are easier to get, but there are not that many long distance buses that go all the way across the country. But the main reason train tickets are so hard to come by, is that they are not personalized. If you want to buy an airline ticket in China, you have to supply the information on your passport when you buy the ticket, and then show your passport so they can compare it with your ticket when you board. If the names don't match, you don't get on. One time the guy who printed my ticket had looked at what I wrote down for him and written a "u" instead of a "v" in my middle name. Dauid instead of David. I had to sign a special document in order to get the airline to accept the discrepancy. But train tickets have no name on them. They are essentially currency. This leads to two problems. One is counterfeiting, which does happen, but is not as big a problem as the main issue: Tickets with no name on them tend to encourage a black market. Scalpers buy hoards of tickets, then sell them for inflated prices.

Not being able to purchase a ticket, I decided to head for Qianling park. I walked outside the train station and saw a guy sitting on his motorcycle. I asked him how much to take me the park. He said, "Thirty kuai." I argued with him a little, but not much, because I just wasn't interested in trying to bargain down from 30 RMB. In the countryside towns in Western China, I usually pay 3 kuai for a ride on a motorcycle. Guiyang is a city, but still, that's just too much. Probably more than twice what a taxi would cost me. Fortunately, I remembered that I had one US dollar in my wallet. I took that out and put it in his hand. He looked at it very carefully. The more he looked at it, the more he wanted it. Finally, he put it in his pocket, and I got on the back of his bike.

Click picture for larger image.
Qianling Park is actually a pretty place. It was quite crowded yesterday, because this is New Year week, but the park is a big one, so there was still plenty of room to roam, just not too much solitude.

One thing did bother me a little. I don't think it is a good idea for people to give junk food to the monkeys. There are many monkeys in Qianling Park. You don't see them everywhere, because they tend to congregate where tourists are giving away food. Guizhou is known as the "Park Province." There are lots of trees and hills, and, for wildlife, the demarcation between country and city is more or less invisible, so the monkeys Tarzan in from the countryside quite easily. Once they are here, they tend to stay, because there is a ready food supply.The monkeys are very grabby. If you set something down, they will definitely take it. But most of the food I saw them eating was not something they had stolen. It was thrown to them by the tourists. I did see one lady who seemed to be a local woman giving them bananas. That's OK, I guess. But most of the monkeys were eating surgary junk. That can't be good for them.

I did see some signs discouraging people from feeding monkeys. And there were several signs warning people not to get too close to them. Popular opinion notwithstanding, monkeys are not human. They are wild animals. But they are generally not aggressive. They are violent fighters, don't get me wrong. But if you don't attack them, or try to take food from them, they really won't bother you. I walked among them freely, and they just ran back and forth around me. I was holding a camera, and not threatening them in any way, so they pretty much ignored me.

I also saw several signs encouraging people not to litter. That's really unusual. It is very rare to see anti-littering signs in China. When you ride the trains in the hard seats, there are no waste baskets. People just open the window and shove their garbage out. The sensitivity toward the environment that I saw in Qianling Park was encouraging. China is a very populated country. There are lots and lots of people here. Even so, if a general sense of conservation prevails among the people, this park could manage to sustain a lot of use without too much trouble. But a park like this could deteriorate quickly if people are not taught to be considerate of the environment. The consequence of taking earth randomly is desert everywhere.

Michael and his parents kindly brought me to Guiyang (a two hour drive) this morning. We met Xia Fei, who took us out to the future site of Faith Hope Love College, which is near a little town about 50 Kilometers south of Guiyang.

After that, Michael and his parents returned to his home town, and Xia Fei helped me find the youth hostel. I was a little apprehensive, because I could tell from the China youth hostel website that the one youth hostel in Guiyang was actually in a hotel. I always cringe when I see that. Sometimes third-rate hotels pay the fee to list on the youth hostel web site, because they need all the customers they can get, but when you get there, it is quite obvious that they don't have the slightest idea what a youth hostel is supposed to be like. I took one look at the place and told Xia Fei I wasn't going to stay there. My book said there were some beds in the Post Office hotel, so I told Xia Fei I was going to hike over there. I had stupidly forgotten my phone charger at Michael's place, so Xia Fei offered to pick up a generic one for me. I had offered to go with him, but when he said he could do it for me, I didn't argue, because I knew he would probably get one for a much better price if I was not there. I told him to go ahead; I could find the Post Office hotel by myself. I strapped on my backpack and started hiking toward the location on my map. I had gone a couple blocks and had decided it might be a good idea to find a taxi, when Xia Fei came running up behind me, all out of breath. I had assumed that he had gone to find a charger, but in fact, he had been worried about leaving the poor foreigner to fend for himself, and had desperately tried to find a place for me. He told me he found a place. I was not enthusiastic about staying at a dumpy small hotel--youth hostels are actually a better deal. But Guiyang doesn't actually have a real youth hostel, and I felt sorry for Xia Fei for going to all that trouble for me, so I went with him. Turned out to be a small family run hotel. Tiny rooms. Really tiny. Jut enough room for a bed and shower. Flat panel TV hanging on the wall. But it was very clean. Sixty kuai a night. I said, "I'll take it." That little act of kindness saved me a lot of trouble.

Last night was New Year's Eve. Not quite as wild as my community in Beijing, because the local folks here probably don't have the money for the kind of high dollar fireworks I have seen in Beijing. But it was plenty loud. There is not that much to say about local traditions, because the Han people are not local. As in other areas of Western China (and Taiwan in the mid 19th Century), Guizhou was inundated with Han people who migrated here from the east. They were not necessarily welcome, and the local Miao in Guizhou fought a series of wars to try to keep them out. China never really had control over the Miao people throughout the Ming and Qing Dynasties. But the Miao actually helped Mao as he was moving through Guizhou Province on the long march. Perhaps they felt that the Communists were a good antidote to the established Chinese government. At any rate, today, communities in Guizhou are now largely Han. Pretty much like the rest of China, except that there seems to be more of the old tradition of cooking by coal.

The standard family activity on New Year's Eve in China is a national variety show that lasts four hours, from 8 pm to midnight. Perhaps the idea is to keep people occupied so that they are less likely to cause trouble. Of course there are always some who are not dissuaded. As midnight approaches, the fireworks increase, culminating in World War III just as midnight approaches.

I have never been able to determine which meal is the main meal. There is usually a big meal on New Year's Eve, with lots and lots of food. But during the New Year's Eve dinner, I heard people talking about the "big dinner tomorrow." Today, we had another big dinner. And this evening, a follow up dinner. All of them were characterized by lots and lots of food. I would be hard pressed to tell you which one is significantly more abundant than the others.

Michael's uncle picked us up in Kaili last night, and drove us to Duyun, Michael's home town. Michael's mother is a really good cook, so she pretty much cooks for the whole tribe.

In Guizhou, the typical kitchen dining room configuration is a coal fired cook stove in the kitchen with a flat top that serves as a table. I have said before that one of the main myths of China is that the South China is warmer in the winter. It is warmer outside, but not inside. Hot water radiators are standard north of the river, but in South China you rarely see them. So people in South China generally wear the same winter clothes inside as they do outside.

But that cook stove you see in the picture is a furnace. I had a sweatshirt on, but I had to take it off, because it was too hot. I wouldn't go so far as to say that homes in Guizhou are warm in the winter, but the cook stove which forms the family center really makes a difference.

Michael's father is a driver. His uncle works for the railroad, and actually goes to Guiyang during the week and comes home on weekends. So we are having Chinese New Year at Michael's uncle's place, which is where we are both staying. Duyun is a pretty typical river town, with the hills of the city along both sides of the river. Lots of hills in Guizhou. But not much sun. In Guizhou they have a saying, "No three miles without a mountain, no three days without rain, and no three coins in any pocket."

Lincoln's birthday. Nothing more about that--just happened to think of it. Night is fading. The gray haze of dawn is preparing for the sun to come up over Hunan Province.

Michael managed to get soft sleeper tickets, which is really hard to do at this busy travel season just before New Year. The lunar New Year falls on February 14th this year, and, as always, it is virtually impossible to get tickets. Michael had talked about getting tickets from a yellow cow, but I told Michael that if God is in this, we will not need to get tickets from yellow cow, and if God is not in this, I don't want to go.

The contact that Dr. Sun gave me sent me a text message saying that he would be available all next week. That's good news, because most people are tied up with their families in the days right after the (Chinese) new year.

Michael, one of his former classmates, and I boarded the train yesterday afternoon. The dining car was packed last night, because people who didn't have a seat were coming into the dining car to sit down. Usually they don't let them do that, but the guy in charge was quite definite in telling us that there was no place for us because people with no seats needed a place to sit. Strange. It looked for all the world like somebody was paying somebody a really large tip.

But many of those people have left the train by now. We are sailing through Hunan Province, and we will be in Kaili (near Guiyang) about 7 this evening.

There are four kinds of train tickets in China. Soft sleeper, hard sleeper, soft seat and hard seat. Actually five, because after they have sold all the hard seat tickets, they sell a certain number of no seat tickets for each car. This is the main reason I hate riding the hard seats for any distance. The cars are packed to the gills. You literally cannot move. It's really quite unpleasant, as I have detailed previously.

But the soft sleepers are nice. Definitely the best train ride for the prlce anywhere in the world, I think. Not opulence, mind you, but quite comfortable, quiet, and not crowded.

Personally, I think the best place in Beijing to see the Super Bowl is the Goose and Duck Pub. Sunday afternoon in the States is Monday morning in Beijing. Live feed from ESPN. Game starts at 7 am, and breakfast is on the house. When I got there, they were roasting a pig for the feed after the game, but I didn't stay for that. Not much of a sports fan, but I usually do take in the Super Bowl. I generally go online the night before to find out who the teams are so that I am not totally ignorant, but beyond that, I really don't put that much effort into it.

The first thing I noticed this morning was the extensive coverage of the quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts. I didn't know the name of the New Orleans quarterback until sometime in the third quarter. Most of the people I talked to thought Indianapolis would take it, but most of the people I talked to also said their sympathies were with the Saints ("Does Peyton really need another one?"). And Peyton Manning, quarterback of Indianapolis, was born and raised in New Orleans. Ironic.

It really is quite a show. And viewed from the perspective of history, the amount of money that is poured into this once a year show is mind boggling. But there is something about the whole thing that troubles me. The Americans have become very good at winning football games, but they can't win a war to save their lives.

In Ancient times, athletic events existed for the purpose of training warriors. But in a morally exhausted society like America, the athletic event has become the war. It is the grand event that everybody watches and everybody celebrates, because we are simply not capable anymore of winning real wars.

The Constitution of the United States stipulates that wars must be declared by Congress. The President does not have the authority to enter into war on his own. Anybody remember the last time the Congress of the United States declared war on another country? It was World War II. Anybody remember the last time any country signed documents of surrender to the United States? Again, World War II. Coincidence? I don't think so. It's fitting, really. No country deserves to win a war that it doesn't have the guts to declare.

In 1951, after he had been fired from Korea for insisting on victory in a war the Americans had decided they didn't want to win, General MacArthur gave his farewell address to Congress, in which he said the following:We have had our last chance. If we will not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature, and all material and cultural developments of the past 2000 years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.Can you imagine a modern American military leader making that kind of statement? It's a different America now. Wars aren't supposed to be won.

But it's different with football. In football, it is still acceptable to defeat the other guy. Statements like "there is no substitute for victory" would be perfectly acceptable in a football game. But it got MacArthur in a lot of trouble. Cost him his job. So the Americans can't win wars anymore. They have to settle for winning preliminary training exercises. With lots of fanfare and a big show. Oh well. Might as well have fun while the ship is going down.

After the Super Bowl, I stopped by the Bookworm, since it is pretty close to the subway station near the Goose and Duck. Books there are expensive, because they are mostly imported. I didn't have that much money with me, and I wasn't about to go to an ATM and draw out more money just to buy something that looked interesting.

But it's never a good idea to leave a bookstore empty handed. So I decided to play a game I sometimes employ for moments like this (usually at used book sales). I decided to match the book to the spending limit rather than the other way around. Tough challenge in this case, because the prices for books I was looking at were running about twice what I had in my pocket. So I wasn't having much luck. I was about to give up and resign myself to a life of ignorance and sorrow, when I found it. The Wiles of War 36 Military Strategies from Ancient China. It was tucked behind another book. But the price was right. I think that's because the edition I bought was published by the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, so it is not imported.

Busted my belt buckle, so I had to make a new one. I'm running out of coat hangers. I have plenty of hangers, but I mean the old steel kind that you can use for fixing your bicycle or something. The hangers you buy in China are OK for hanging a shirt on, but that's all they're good for.

I am going to go to Michael's home for Spring Festival. I finally decided to go to Guizhou Province and check out the new school that Dr. Sun is building there. In all my trips to western China, I have never been to Guizhou Province, and I have never been to western China at all in the winter time. Winter is when the western mountains get all the snow and rain that make them such a beautiful place to be in the summer. I have always felt that going to the western mountains in the summer, and living in Beijing the rest of the year gives you the best of both worlds. If I move to Guizhou, I will be living there, which will be quite a bit different from a summer trip. China south of the river does not have the default hot water radiators that are standard in buildings in the north, so there is no heat in the winter time. Dr. Sun's plan for compensating for this deficiency is to reverse the schedule--have summer vacation in December, January and February. That might take care of it, because Guizhou is in the south. By March, it should be warmed up quite a bit, or at least getting warmer.