The End

This past week we wrapped up finals (written Chinese, spoken Chinese, a final Chinese essay, and a research paper written in English) and since then have been doing all the Nanjing things that I was supposed to but had not yet done.  Pictured here is Sun Yat-Sen's mausoleum at Purple Mountain, considered by Guomindang and Communists alike as the father of modern China.

In addition, we spent 6 hours over the last two days at the same tea shop, buying wonderful tea after discussing everything under the sun with the owners.  Apparently our Chinese is now good enough to banter on with natives about Chinese class relations, the owner's hopes for his new son, why Americans are excited about Obama, and social mobility in our respective countries (in addition to the simpler things in life, like jointly making fun of Canadians and Britons).  I'm having a rough time telling all my program mates good-bye (you know those war-buddy kinds of friendships forged in adversity), but am pretty ready to return home.  

Home Stretch

Sorry for the gap in posts; it's been pretty busy around here as we gear up for our final two weeks.  I have one week of class left before a week of finals, then I head home on December 14.  That flight should be a fun one--I'll be spending around 20 hours in the air while only moving around 8 hours forward in time.  In fact, I'll be landing at LAX one hour before I left Nanjing.

A couple weeks back I finally made my trek into Shanghai to see the sights and smell the tea.  While a beautiful city, I'd still recommend Nanjing or Beijing as a better locale for getting the "feel" of China.  While you can still find some jiaozi dumplings on the street in Shanghai, they're always going to be right next to a McDonald's or a Starbucks.  That said, we went to a giant tea market with open-air barrels of the stuff all around.  I picked up some amazing wulong partially-fermented tea that I'm trying to make last back to the states.  No promises. 

The Shanghai Museum is an especially cool spot.  My favorite exhibit was the collection of foreign currencies exchanged on the silk road, ranging from Assyrian to Greek to Roman to kingdoms that don't seem to exist in any other historical records.  

Pictured are The Bund in Shanghai along the Huangpu River and some tea from the Datong Tea Market.  

Shangrila, Songzanlin Temple, Potatso National Park, Stone Card Mountain

After rising several thousand feet in elevation from Tiger Leaping Gorge, we found ourselves in Shangrila ("Shang Ge Li La"), renamed as such after the mystical city from Lost Horizons.  We first visited the Songzanlin Buddhist temple upon a hillside overlooking the city.  Filled with the uniquely cool Tibetan Buddhist iconography and monks aging from 14 to 80, it was a good dose of a quieter, more peaceful China before diving back into the city.

Luckily, we wouldn't have to stay in the city for long.  In what was easily the most beautiful portion of the trip, we headed into Potatso National Park, reminding us again that China wasn't all polluted and still had natural beauty.  Blue water, green grass and trees, and a brilliantly clear, blue sky raised our spirits ever higher.  Heading back to Shangrila for the night, we tra

veled out to the edge of town to join a Tibetan family's quasi-dinner party, a fascinatingly ethnic affair with dancing, roasted whole lambs, and lots and lots of singing, laughing, and chanting.  To top the night off, we walked outside to find a sky almost untouched by light pollution, for the first time in months being able to see stars so clearly that the Milky Way was a visible band from horizon to horizon.

The next day, we took the "Longest Cable Car in Asia" to the various elevations (including the summit) of Stone Card Snow Mountain outside of Shangrila.  Offering a gorgeous view of the Himalayas (and setting me a new elevation record at 14,600 feet), the mountain capped off what was a great last travel break before we settle in for the final month of classes and finals here in Nanjing. 

You can find the album of these adventures here.

Lijiang, Blue Moon Lake, Tiger Leaping Gorge

We left Sichuan Province for Yunan (in southwest China, bordering Tibet), eventually settling in at the old canal town of Lijiang.  We were housed and spent most of our time in the Old Town, notable for cobblestone streets that snaked over canals and between long boulevards of wooden ships and squares.  So began several days of consistent rain, leaving us over the next few days in various stages of dampness.  It was there that I picked up the purchase of my trip--a hand-made Tibetan leather hat for $2.  Thank you, artificially devalued Chinese currency.

The hostel we stayed at was nestled in the middle of a courtyard in Lijiang.  Though gorgeous and composed almost entirely of carved, stained wood and stone, the only source of heat it had was electric blankets under the sheets of our beds.  As Lijiang is beginning to near Tibet and the Himalayas, its elevation and weather conspired against our thermal security.  Luckily, the hostel's giant dog, Beckham (a real dog, which are more common out in the west of China than the overbred little toys that dominate eastern China), provided us with warmth and entertainment in our comings and goings over the next couple days.

We ventured outside of the city first for what proved to be a bizarre and over-produced performance commemorating the many minorities of China (non-Han minorities make up around 7% of the total population).  Outside of Blue Moon Lake, a giant stage equipped with smoke machines, artificial waterfalls, and gigantic hidden speakers played host to dozens of "minority performers" that demonstrated 90 minutes of exquisitely coordinated and synchronized dances and demonstrations with occasional narrations.  By "occasional," I mean very occasional and often nonsensical, vague, and offering no real information about said "minorities."  I guess I went into a performance about fostering understanding of China's minorities expecting to know something more about China's minorities.  Who knew? 

Luckily, the next few sights saved the day.  Blue Moon Lake was a quick but gorgeous park we stopped by, reminding us that natural beauty did indeed still exist outside of China's big cities.  Some (hopefully) sure-footed yaks were available for rent to ride across the fairly fast-moving waters that cascaded down from the mountains.  Despite there being hundreds of Chinese tourists present, of a dozen yaks available, it was only one of my fellow program participants that took the yaks up on it while we were there.

We later arrived a the big one: Tiger Leaping Gorge.  As the Yangtze surges through the area's river valley, it is particularly violent and majestic at the location of the Tiger Leaping Gorge.  A half-hour of sometimes-rickety steps both down to and back up from the precipice of the rapids, the Gorge continued to provide us with some much-needed and long-awaited reminder that there is still a China that isn't caked in smog and filled with aggressive, honking drivers. 

You can find the whole album here.

Chengdu

Just got back from my whirlwind adventure through Sichuan and Yunan provinces.  As I got some space to cover between Pandas and the Himalayas, I'll break the trip into a couple bite-sized pieces.

After flying from Nanjing to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, the first thing we saw was a traditional tea show at a nearby Buddhist monastery.  Each variety of tea had different but strikingly complex methods of preparation, including stylistic cleansing of utensils using boiling water down to the intricate multi-pot steeping process, each stage punctuated by prayers.

After sampling some of the local cuisine renowned for its spiciness (it wasn't that spicy), we hit up the Panda Base Breeding and Research Center.  The utterances of "awww" quickly became innumerable as we toured adult, adolescent, and youth enclosures.  While we usually would have had the opportunity to pay an obscene amount of money to hold a panda cub, we were luckily relieved of this temptation by the cubs too thoroughly incensing themselves in a rather vicious-looking two-on-one fight.  It was, however, the cutest vicious two-on-one fight I've ever seen.  

That night we sampled the local Sichuan Opera, which, as it turns out, is actually a very brief opera interrupted by an extended (and at times bizarre and atonal) talent show composed of marionettes, trumpet and erhu players, and shadow puppets.  The actual opera was equally bizarre, featuring what appeared to be an old woman forcing an old dunce to perform various difficult tasks with a burning basin lamp balanced on his head.  The woman yelled a string of sentences at the dunce as he crawled backwards under a table while balancing said lamp, causing the Chinese around us to burst into laughter.  Upon asking one of our Chinese program mates what the woman had said, she replied (between further bouts of laughter) simply that the woman had told the dunce to crawl backwards under the table while balancing the lamp.  Chinese humor continues to elude me.

The next day we went to the Jianchuan Museum cluster outside of Chengdu.  I visited The Hall of the Sichuan Army in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, which housed photographs and artifacts from the Sichuan branch of the Chinese army in WWII.  One photograph's caption spoke of a convoy of Sichuan "supply ships" heading to the front lines (the photograph was of a line of donkeys).  The just-completed Chengdu Earthquake Museum housed "relics" from this past spring's catastrophic earthquake, ranging from a boat used to rescue victims from the nearby river to a grandfather clock that stopped at the exact moment the earthquake hit. 

We next visited the San Xingdui Museum, which housed artifacts from the still-shrouded-in-mystery Shu culture.  Predating the Yellow River Valley civilization that many originally thought was the birthplace of Chinese civilization, the place is filled with strikingly unique bronze-cast figures, resembling few other image motifs found in primary Chinese history. 

Finally, we visited Chengdu's excellent Daoist temple before setting out for Shangrila. 

You can see the complete Chengdu album here.  The brief videos below are of the traditional tea show, a giant panda at the Panda Base, and one of the San Xingdui statues. 

In Chengdu

Things were a bit rushed in the past week as we wrapped up midterms and shipped out for Chengdu.  I'm now here in Sichuan province, where we're touring the sights and surviving the exceptionally spicy food for a few days before shipping on over to Yunan province (to stop by Tiger Leaping Gorge and Shangrila, among others).  I'll be on the road for the next 8-9 days, but should have some fun photos to put up at that point. 

Part Three: Finishing up Beijing, Luoyang

Beijing Part 2

Beijing Part 1

Our next stop was the one absolutely-positively-must-see sight of Beijing: The Great Wall.  It did not disappoint; we decided to swallow our language-cred pride and went ahead and visited Badaling, the most touristy, but most scenic segment of the Great Wall in the Beijing area.  It was indeed great and gorgeous--but the proximity to National Day meant we were enveloped by masses and masses of people.  At several points we were literally in a people jam; shoulder-to-shoulder pressed up against thousands of other Chinese, unable to move for 10 minutes at a time.  Luckily we were able to jump out over an exit to the outside of the wall and double back to another entrance on our way out.  While on the outside of the wall, we spotted a few scraggly-looking hikers coming up the mountainside, presumably so they wouldn't have to pay the admission fee.  The hillside leading up the wall is pretty steep--we were impressed.

That night we patroned the well-reputed muslim night market in downtown Beijing.  Amid the hustle and bustle of hundreds of other hungry citizens, we squeezed our way to the front of the crowds around the stands and yelled our order until it was acknowledged and given to us, while other stands called after us for our attention.  We stuffed ourselves full of numerous delicious things, many of which we couldn't readily identify, before heading home.  I passed on skewered scorpions and silk worms, but in retrospect I regret not giving them a try. 

On our last day in Beijing we went to the Summer Palace complex, a giant and beautiful park where the imperial family could escape their hordes of subjects and find refuge.  Apart from the fascinating hillside Buddhist temple, it was primarily an homage to imperial excess and isolation, including the stone boat that Dowager Cixi built to justify misappropriating naval funds for the expansion of the palace complex.

That night we set out on a night train for Luoyang (getting there, we happened to hail the Cab Driver from Hell; he weaved and careened down pedestrian thoroughfares, narrowly avoiding killing dozens of people, even concluding with a maniacal cackle as we stumbled terrified out of the car).  Unfortunately, this consisted of a 10-hour "hard seat" train ride, due to the sheer masses of people traveling that week.  The seats consisted of a bench with a vertical board behind you as a seat rest; there was no moulded headrest to lean against, no ability to recline, and no walls to rest one's head against.  It was the most hellish experience I have had yet while traveling, though I am kept from wallowing too long in self-pity by the memory of the "no-seat ticket" holders who stood in the aisles--literally stood, as they had been packed in like sardines--for those 10 hours.  A small man was seated next to me with his young child on his knee; a couple hours into the ride, they got up and squeezed their way underneath the bench we were seated on, laying on the floor beneath me as a brief rush ensued among the standing passengers to take his now-vacant seat.

Natan and I arrived in Luoyang exhausted, sore, and irritable.  After trying to call our hostel, and then hunting down an internet bar to email them, we found that both the phone number and email address for the hostel we had been booked to stay at no longer existed.  Combined with a walk around Luoyang revealing it to be a very sorry little city, we were convinced to get right back in line and bought a train ticket home for that very night (this time, a hard sleeper--so we would have beds).  We condensed our stay on Luoyang to one day rather easily, catching a bus out to the Longmen Grottoes by mid-morning.

The Longmen Grottoes proved to be worth it all.  Thousands of caves, nooks, and cliffsides were filled and covered with buddhist statues, carvings, and sutra inscriptions.  They ranged in size from thousands of thumb-sized buddhas adorning a cave's interior to the dozens-of-feet-tall Fengxian Temple cliffside, sporting a dozen gigantic buddha and bodhisattva statues.  

You can find a complete album of my last couple days in Beijing and our trip out to the Longmen Grottoes here.

Pictured below is me and the Great Wall, Dowager Cixi's stone boat (pronounced roughly "tsee-schee," Mr. Harms), Natan and I in front of one of the smaller stone Buddha statues at the Longmen Grottoes, two giant bodhisattvas at the Fengxian Temple part of the Grottoes, and a brief video of said temple. 

Delay

Sorry for the delay in getting my final leg of Beijing and Luoyang up.  The intertubes around here have for the past several days become cripplingly slow and reset all connections every few minutes, leaving me unable to upload or access any meaningful amount of media.  They say it should improve in the next few days.

A brief anecdote until then: iTunes, mercifully, allows one to pause and resume downloads, resulting in us being able to, over the course of a couple days, download the presidential and vice presidential debates.  It's been a pretty good source of entertainment as we crowd around someone's laptop for an hour and a half, and many of our Chinese roommates have also been enraptured by the show, never before having seen these kinds of things happen, much less be televised.  

Beijing, Part 2: Forbidden City, Jingshan Park

Beijing, Part 1: Tiananmen Square, Temple of Heaven

As we ventured into the Forbidden City (be sure to devote most of a day to its exploration), its sheer size and scope is the most surprising part.  The iconic image of the Forbidden City, one of its inner gates towards the Palace Museum, is a very, very small part of the entire complex.  The City is filled with dozens of nooks, crannies, parks, and mini-palaces designed to allow its royal inhabitants ever-greater peace and isolation from life on the outside.  

It's easy to get lost or never make your way to the main points, as Natan and I wandered through corridor after hall after walkway, leading to ever more numerous courtyards covered with intricate and beautiful ceramics and stone carvings.  Feeling a bit overwhelmed we finally exited through the rear of the palace only to see Jingshan Park towering above us.  Looking forward to a bit of open air with some actual vegetation in place of towering marble or exquisite ceramics, we leisurely made our way through the historic park to the hilltop pavilion.

After meandering through north-central Beijing (where we encountered the Most Idyllic Scene Ever), we called it a night before preparing for the Great Wall the next day. 

Below are images of me at the Forbidden City and Jingshan Park as one exits said City, as well as a brief video from inside one of the major pavilions.  The full Part 2 gallery can be found here.

 

Beijing, Part 1: Tiananmen Square, Temple of Heaven

I just got back from my amazing/hellish independent travel break to Beijing and Luoyang.  I'm going to be splitting my journaling into multiple easily-digestible (for you and me both) chunks, and will hopefully have all of them done in the next day or two. 

My program-mate Natan and I, warned of the difficulty of traveling during Golden Week in China (when roughly the population of the United States will all be using the national rail system at the same time), purchased our tickets from Nanjing to Beijing well over a week ahead of time.  As with Chinese rail you can 1) only buy tickets in person at the train station or post office and 2) can only buy tickets departing from the city in which you are buying them, we knew that this would be this would likely be the most comfortable leg of the trip during Golden Week (indeed, it was a "soft sleeper," with beds stacked 2-high to a berth) and cherished it as such.  We were very right.  But more on that later.

Upon arriving early in the morning on Saturday in Beijing, we observed the train station and its surroundings to be describable only as "epic," especially as by extraordinary happenstance, our first day ever in Beijing turned out to be one of their rare and valued "blue sky days" (thank you Olympic pollution crackdown!).  We meandered around downtown enjoying the wonderful weather before catching the subway to Tiananmen Square.  We gawked at the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall, the Monument to the People's Heroes, the Great Hall of the People, and of course the largest public square in the world's namesake, the Gate of Heavenly Peace (adorned with a 20-foot-tall portrait of the Chairman himself).

After locating our hostel (dramatically closer than we thought it was--a mere 15 minute walk from Tiananmen!) and dropping off our things, we hopped on over to the Temple of Heaven.  A great old Taoist temple from the 1400's, it underwent a $6 million renovation ahead of the Olympics, and is now in gleaming, tip-top shape, having seen its original colorings ruthlessly stripped away and reproduced as accurately (and sealed as thoroughly) as possible.  The resulting feeling is a bit odd--while it is glimmering and beautiful, it looks far too new and superficial for its age and stature in history.

We then went on to sample a couple of Beijing's signature dishes--a fried leg of lamb and, of course, Peking Roast Duck.  The mistake made was doing both at the same meal, resulting in far too much food. 

In addition to the pictures below (Great Hall of the People,  lamb of leg/Peking Duck, Temple of Heaven) and a brief video of Tiananmen Square, you can view the rest of the pictures from our first day in Beijing here.

Chinese in Space, Golden Week

Recently a few of my classmates and I have taken a liking to a local cafe owned by an outgoing Buddhist man, Mr. Zong, for studying and tea.  He loves talking about religion, politics, economics, and anything under the sun, and it seems like he's discussed these things with many a patron over the years.  Tonight we watched the launch of China's third manned space mission (this time to feature the first Chinese spacewalk).  The patrons, and especially Mr. Zong, were very excited, and it was a very cool experience to share with them as they all waved goodbye to the astronauts on the screen.

Tomorrow we begin our 10-day independent travel break (5 of which occur during China's Golden Week holiday, during which roughly 300,000,000 people will be traveling; this should make things more interesting).  My friend Natan and I are hitching a night train to Beijing, where we'll be seeing the sights and sipping the tea for four days or so.  Then, after consultation with Mr. Zong and the internets, we'll be heading on down to south-central China to visit Luoyang, a several-thousand-year-old city and former capital of China (Eastern Han dynasty, if you were curious), and a site famous for a network of thousands of caves and rock faces filled with ancient Buddhist stone carvings (around 470 C.E.) , ranging in size from an entire cave full of fist-sized buddhas to a cliffside with stories-high bodhisattvas.  Natan and I are both somewhat of Eastern religion enthusiasts, so we're pretty psyched.  

I'll probably be more or less out of contact for a while (though Natan and I are making every effort to see the Presidental Debate in Beijing, if it happens), but should have some great pictures for my next post.  

Culinary Adventures

Today we went to the Jiangsu New Eastern Culinary School for an introduction to Chinese cooking.  We made a variety of dishes, pastries, and soups, and almost nobody got hurt in the process.

Upon arriving, we saw dozens of young Chinese men doing military drills outside the school in camouflage uniforms.  Upon inquiring about this, we th

en learned that freshman recruits for the culinary school must first undergo 4 weeks of military training before touching a wok.  These cooks are pretty intense.

Afterwards, the recruits drilling outside were taking a break around some outdoor ping pong tables.  Our local ping pong champ, Daniel, showed them how it was done in the USA and thoroughly embarrassed the Chinese army.

Next week (starting Friday the 27th, in fact) we have our 10-day independent trip.  A friend and I are trekking out to Beijing for the first three days and then are going to wander around somewhere, more likely rural.  We're looking at Inner Mongolia, but it has crossed our minds to head on up to the North Korean border and ask them if they've seen their authoritarian dictator lately. 

Pictured below 1) The head chef having me learn how to make sweet-and-sour sauce, 2) the culinary school's militaristic intensity on display and 3) a brief video of Daniel kicking Chinese butt at ping pong. 

"Your Health Rests With Your Civilized Behavior," or Suzhou (not Wuzhen)

This weekend we originally intended to head out to Wuzhen, a scenic, 7,000-year-old canal town (known as the "Venice of China"). Despite its beauty, it is a town of only 6,000 people, where which we intended to spend a quiet few days around the Mid-Autumn festival. Fate had other ideas.

Upon arriving at the Nanjing train station, we booked a train to Suzhou, a regional hub from which we would then take a bus to Wuzhen. Upon arriving in Suzhou we booked our bus ticket and rode a bit over an hour to Wuzhen. Looking around and seeing no scenic canals or thousand-year-old bridges (rather, strip malls and highways), we figured this wasn't our intended destination and soon found out it was a different, but similarly-pronounced Wuzhen. The bus driver encouraged us to try out Tongli, another canal town that happened to be nearby. We boarded another bus, rode another hour or so, and then arrived in Tongli. Much larger than Wuzhen, Tongli was not the quiet getaway we were hoping for, and matters became worse when we discovered that we had to pay 80 kuai to even get into the city center (though from the gate we could see it was intensely touristy). We opted to cut our losses and boarded another bus alllll the way back to Suzhou.

We spent the night visiting Suzhou's own canals nestled among a rather large and bustling city before crashing at an unusually nice local hostel. The next morning we went through some shops in a surprisingly old and beautiful part of town before going on to visit Hushan (Tiger Mountain), scoping out its gardens and 1,100-year-old leaning pagoda. We FINALLY found a nice little tea shop in the Hushan mountain to sit down and read for a while sampling the regional tea that had been picked literally not more than 50 feet from the teahouse. We then made our way home to Nanjing, having salvaged a pretty darn good weekend from a pretty big travel mishap. Thankfully, all of our wanderings cost us around $10; even the largest of mistakes in China are pretty darn cheap.

Pictured below: 1) Nighttime canal viewing in Suzhou, 2) morning canal touring and shopping (primarily antiquing, very cool stuff), 3) a rather threatening piece of tourist signage and 4) me in front of the 1,100-year-old Yuyun leaning Buddhist pagoda.

Fuzi Miao, Zhengshen Lake

Fuzi Miao is Nanjing's premier Confucian temple. Big, old, and stunning, its majesty is well complimented by the county fair that surrounds it (including a children's archery course right outside the entrance for 10 yuan). Of course, beyond this fair is a beautiful and pleasant pedestrian commercial area (in fact, the first pedestrian commercial area I've been to yet in China). It cost us a total of around two dollars for cab rides to and from the Fuzi Miao area on a Saturday night, so it is a great candidate for multiple returns.

One of the first things an American notices during an extended stay in China is that you will eventually encounter many Chinese people who want their picture taken with you (especially if you are tall and/or blond). Apparently the spectacle of a "Lao Wai," or "Old Foreginer," is just that entertaining. When I originally declined the first request I got for a photo (back at the Dai Temple), the man looked absolutely heartbroken, so I relented. This past weekend at Fuzi Miao, a friend of mine turned the tables and requested random Chinese people pose for a photo with him. Awkward hilarity ensued, as not a single person agreed unhesitantly. America: 1, China: 0.

Yesterday, all of us program participants and our roommates whent out to Zhengshen Lake ("Pearl Springs Lake") for barbecue and bamboo rafting. After learning we would only be supplied with wood and a firepit (no charcoal of any kind), we quickly discovered that the vast majority of Amerian and Chinese students had no idea how to construct a sustainable fire. Luckily, there are three Philmont alums in our program, and we successfully saved the day.

Pictured below: 1) Part of the Fuzi Miao commercial center 2) the Fuzi Miao temple illuminated at night 3) a mistranslated sign I prefer to read as "Take care--off the kids," and 4) me steering a bamboo raft at Zhengshen Lake.

Attention Your Head, Pandas with Guns

Brief picture-post. Today we jumped the metro down to Xinjiekou, one of the trendy new downtown shopping areas of Nanjing (which is simultaneously deeply under- and impressively above-ground). It provided ample opportunity for us to ogle at further examples of entertaining mistranslations and hilariously odd cultural imagery.

Below are two mildly funny signs from Xinjiekou, a Pepsi bottle sporting a teenaged Shredder, and a Beijing Olympics panda-ish kind of character who happens to have a gun.

Lingual improvements

Coursework have finally begun in earnest around here, and it's fairly intense. Out of four classes, I ended up testing into the highest one, though I am the most inexperienced member of said class. Everyone else there with me either just finished a separate summer program or has been studying Chinese since high school, so my participation is usually stumbling and halting in comparison, but improving. In fact, my speech recognition is getting better by leaps and bounds; the first week I could barely understand maybe 10-15% of what my professors are saying. Now, I'm easily catching closer to 60-70%, on par with most of the others in my class.

Our Chinese roommates moved in this week; mine, Fentong, hails from a rural areal northeast of Nanjing, has a very, very heavy accent and speaks very little English. While I despaired over this to begin with, I have again been surprised with how quickly I've been able to get used to it and start to understand him these past few days. We still can't have a real basic conversation without the aid of a dictionary, but at least I'm starting to be able to understand what syllables he's saying. My own peaking and writing are still very much works in progress, but at this rate I feel by the end of the program I'll at least be greatly improved in recognition.

Many Chinese people will tell you: the vast majority of Chinese cuisine is the same from restaurant to restaurant, and it is largely true within a given region. The greatest variation (and flavor, I've found) comes from street vendors. While there are definitely moments of "I don't know what this is, but it's on a stick so it must be edible," the stuff is often mind-blowingly good. This isn't to say that all is sunshine and roses--I definitely spent most of the afternoon today in bed writhing in abdominal pain, but such things are common for foreign students and pass quickly enough.

Three-day weekends and an upcoming 10-day independent travel break are providing us with ample opportunities for adventure. After last weekend's Shandong province escapades, most of us are taking it easy this weekend, planning on exploring Nanjing a little more (the city is deceptively huge, and many of us have yet to travel to the primary downtown shopping and cultural districts). Next week a few of us are thinking of spending the weekend in Shanghai (which will hopefully become something of a monthly adventure). For my independent break, I'm thinking I'll hike around Beijing, Xi'an, and (don't tell my mom) explore the practicality of venturing into Tibet and snapping some photos of angry-looking Chinese military police.

Pictured below is a shot of my group and I doing our weekly scavenger hunt, an assignment that forces us to go out into the city and interact with people in Chinese instead of just sitting in our rooms doing homework. Here we're in front of Nanjing University's other campus cafeteria. Exciting, I know.

Also, I happened to run into a Grinnell graduate in the elevator. On Friday we're having lunch.

Taishan Mountain, Fascist Plums [Updated with Link to Full Gallery]

Edit: The full GrinnellGallery of my Dai Temple, Mount Taishan, and Kong Li adventures can be found here.

For the past four days, my program participants and I traveled to Shandong province, visited the Dai Buddhist Temple, climbed Mount Taishan, and stopped by Confucius's tomb at Kong Li. The Mount Taishan adventure was particularly cool; not only was the view from every direction breathaking and the temple complexes built onto the top of the mountain really cool (they are pictured on the back of the 5 RMB bill), but many of us opted to climb the stone staircase to the top of the mountain to earn the view (as opposed to taking the cowardly cable car up). The 7,500-step, 2-hour journey provided validating proof of the comically-long-stone-staircase-to-Asian-mountaintop-temple stereotype. Also, we got to get up ludicrously early to witness the sunrise from atop Taishan.

Of course, all of this adventuring also meant a fair amount of time spent on a charter bus. Rest stops allowed us to encounter such roadside delicasies as Dog Jerky and Fascist Plums (judging by the characters on the package, mistranslated from "French Plums"). While street vendors still try to catch our attention by yelling over and over "Hallo!" and "Coca Cola," my bargaining skills in Chinese have improved. One vendor walked up to me brandishing a bottle of water, asking for two RMB. I stopped walking, stared him in the eye, and firmly replied, "One." He blinked for a moment and relented. Victory was indeed mine.

The pictures that follow are 1) Part of the Dai Temple complex, honoring the Goddess of Mount Taishan, 2) the staircase we climbed up Mount Taishan, 3) Part of the temple complex on top of the mountain, 4) me in front of the sunrise atop Mount Taishan, and 5) Dog Jerky.

Hilarious Cultural Differences

As we have no meal plan (and, indeed, no kitchen with which to make food), we pretty much have to dine out around twice a day. Luckily, due to Chinese artificial currency devaluation, this typically costs between $0.50 and $3, depending on whether it is street food or a sit-down meal (the former being fast and delicious but at a greater risk of "la duzi," or "spicy stomach," afterwards).

After touring numerous restaurants, a few patterns emerge. First, the staring. Chinese people have little concept of personal space, physically or visually, and a group of Americans eating (be it quietly or raucously) often attracts gaping mouths and wide eyes. One recent night we sat at an outdoor patio and ate as a middle-aged man walked up to us and stood, 5 feet away, staring at us and grinning for 3-5 minutes. Second, because the majority of the menus are still illegible to us (one can usually pick out that such-and-such meal is somehow composed of, say, beef, though today we discovered a way-too-weird dish that tasted of barbecued beef and burnt coffee), even though we ask the restaurant owners or waiters what's good, they never tell us. Time after time, we ask what dish or dishes are their favorite, and time after time they say "I don't have a favorite dish" or "it's not on the menu," and attempt to avoid the question as much as they can. We find this very odd and vaguely troubling.

On a side note, while walking home last night a toothless old man approached us and asked us what country we were from. Upon learning we were American, he grinned broadly and gave us a thumbs-up, said he hated the Japanese, and thoroughly thanked us for "pounding them into the ground" while making violent downward-pointed punching motions.

The media below are from yesterday's bicycle shopping. Once one leaves campus one quickly finds that Nanjing is, as one of my classmates put it, "perpetual downtown." Note that every stop light has a countdown timer to better tempt motorists to run down pedestrians.

Preliminary Adventuring

Classes don't begin until tomorrow, so the last couple days have been mostly spent wandering around campus and the surrounding city both with some of my fellow program participants and by myself. This afternoon I went exploring Nanjing a bit alone, and while I have most of the vocabulary down for fairly complex lunchtime transactions, I'm sure I was quite a pain for the attendants at the post office and when purchasing a temporary cell phone.

While I could make a whole other blog about signs that are poorly-translated or make entertaining attempts at English (and indeed, I'm sure there are many such blogs), there are just a few that stand out. I failed to heed the first sign pictured, and paid for it in detergent (the culprits pictured second). The last sign is for a place that is literally called something like "Cat Space Coffee," which kind of works with the picture.

Nanjing is somewhat warm

Academic and municipal orientations began today, with placement exams in the morning (I'm hoping for the middle, not-too-hard but not-too-dumb class). Rhetorical nuggets from orientation include "Every time I lock my bike, I say good-bye to it in my head," and "If you are a little drunk, kind of argue or fight is easy to happen."

Below are pictures of the Nanjing University gate, a couple of the university's old (as is, so old we're-not-sure-how-old) buildings, and one of the nicer street-shop thoroughfares. Note the haze in almost all the pictures--unfortunately not fog, though.

As far as posting time listed by Google, I believe it is still CST. So the time at which I'm actually posting these updates is really 13 hours into the future.

Seoul's international airport is comically large

Spending the day (er, half-day? Morning? My concept of time was dropped out of the 747 somewhere over the North Pole) in Seoul's international airport, which is built as to accommodate 30-foot-tall people.

Use the woman next to the mechanical walkways for a sense of scale.


I'm gonna cram some Chinese for a few hours and try to stave off complete chronological disorientation.

A Word Regarding Batman

While I'm awaiting a connection...

To the right you can see a picture of a snow-dusted Batman under the "About Me" heading. This particular Batman, whom I won 7 years ago in a restaurant-claw-machine duel-off with a friend on the way to Philmont, has been strapped to the side of my pack with me on most of my major adventures (Backpacking the Rockies, bushwhacking in the Appalachians, gallivanting around Italy-England-France-Germany-Austria-Hungary-Czech Republic, college, hiking Utah's snowy Canyonlands, and now China). Even though my claw-machine skills bested my friend and won me the coveted Batman, he did go on to win The Flash has his consolation prize.

Psh. Who cares about The Flash, anyway?

Blog Post One: The Phantom Menace

While I adore my friends' "Day One" entries regarding their arrivals, my "Day One" (and, in fact, most of Day Two) will be consumed by travel alone. I'm driving to Omaha, where I will then fly to Chicago, where I will proceed to sit for 6 or 7 hours, then fly across the rest of the country and over the Pacific (which will also involve significantly more sitting for significantly more hours), sit around the Seoul airport for another 7 hours, and then take a 90 minute flight to Nanjing. I've equipped myself with an Economist, my Chinese textbook, a few movies, Watchmen, Team of Rivals, and the admission that I'll likely be buying several airport wi-fi memberships.

Presumably Not Blocked

I've tested this blog's URL in a Shanghai-based web browsing proxy against the Great Firewall of China, and it looks like for now Blogger and my blog specifically are clean. If you don't see any updates after August 20th, that likely means the government caught on and blocked me!