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.