International travel sucks these days. I remember the first time I flew and I could almost straighten my legs out in front of me without hitting the seat in front. These days even I feel cramped and I’m a very short petite female. It must be utter misery for anyone tall. On really long flights (four planes plus various stuff to the ass end of nowhere that takes 48 hours plus) you just have to zone out and see it as a process.
Coming soon to the west… urgh.
Yeah
it was honestly pretty much optimal but there were 9 seats per row. Even in the front row, which we had, was inconveniently narrow. Fortunately the plane was only 60% full so there were some places to hide and nap. It is my hope the return trip will be like that, but no promises.
As for the facial recognition; they put checkpoints for it in places you would not expect, like the entry to popular sightseeing parks, as well as obvious ones like the train station. My facial recognition fails like half the time because too much of my face is covered by sunglasses and sunhat and the attendant just waves me through anyway. Call it Orwellian security theater. It is said that Chinese citizens are subject to much more scrutiny within this system as compared to foreigners, but even for me I know the state is sort of keeping tabs on me.
Sightseeing part 2:
To conclude on Yangzhong, it is certainly interesting. We visited a commie block apartment owned by an extended family member, and I notice that the Kruschovka architecture seems poorly designed to handle the ambient humidity in this humid, southern part of China. Paint and wallpaper was peeling off the walls despite the residents’ efforts to keep the place ventilated. It was very dark inside as well.
The town square was full of the cheap Chinese goods you can get for significant markup through Amazon and Alibaba.com and co. The look was modern but the smell was horrible, like hot trash plus kebabs. I got a sunhat, sunnies, and some Chinese New Year decorations (red lanterns etc.) I was rather ill that day after visiting.
The Juntai hotel in Yangzhong had nice hardware but it was poorly managed. The guests were permitted to smoke pretty much anywhere except the in house restaurant, so the whole place smells of cigarettes. Calling the front desk yielded a dial tone lol. I went to the roof deck lounge and it was shut with a bike lock. I went to the lobby lounge and fortunately they were open and served four drink options: Coke, Sprite, Budweiser, and water.
I’m sure a Chinese National would find all this more accommodating but I’m partial to the American style heavily iced drinks and nonsmoking common areas.
After the ceremonies in Yangzhong we went to Nanjing by car. We stopped in Xinjiang as previously mentioned to see the Jinshan Temple. Upon arrival at Nanjing we went to what I’m gonna call the LARP district. Basically it was like the French Quarter but for medieval Chinese enthusiasts who enjoy Nanjing salt duck. Many shops were tourist traps: sweet shops with animatronic noblemen who bow to you on the way out, plus an old-peasant-woman animatronic who pretends to be engaged in stone-grinding five grain mix for confections. These were uncanny seeing them the first time. Other shops would rent out period clothing and add makeup and hairpieces to complete the medieval look. I might have gone for this but I am skeptical the shops would run to my size. I did see some other fat women in this district but their traditional costumes looked as if they’d bought them from elsewhere.
Nanjing is famous for duck blood tofu; which is rather inoffensive, the color of liver and the consistency of Jello. I neither like it nor dislike it. Nanjing is also famous for salt duck, which is a cold dish of duck braised in salty water. It has a very savory flavor that enhances the taste of the duck meat.
The next day in Nanjing we went to the tomb of the first Ming Emperor. This has been converted to a beautiful arboretum with symbolic animal statues lining the way to the tomb complex. Unfortunately, when you get there most of the goods are left to the imagination. The tomb has an offering house, which was ruined and rebuilt into a gift shop, but you can still see the foundation of the OG offering house. This was as far as most anyone could get to pay respects to the deceased emperor, but nowadays you can proceed to a large hall up the hill that serves as his tombstone. Beneath it, somewhere further uphill, there is an entire palace that was constructed unground and then buried after the Emperor and Empress’ interment. It’s similar to the layout of the Valley of the Kings. Some details of this underground palace are known from historical records and telemetry, but there is an ongoing moratorium on excavating these tombs. A handful were excavated in the 1970s and it was noticed that many of the artifacts within would crumble into dust once exposed to oxygen and light. The Ming Emperor’s tomb is thought to be the only tomb that was never penetrated by grave robbers, because subsequent emperors would keep guard on it as a way of shoring up their own legitimacy.
After going to the tombs in Nanjing we retired to the hotel, and the following day we took a car to Hangzhou. As previously mentioned, Hangzhou is another city important to the White Snake Legend, which I described previously. Hangzhou is known for tea production and silk production, so that the streets surrounding our hotel predominated with clothing and tea stores. (In China, tea is more than a simple commodity, and high end tea can be elaborately packaged in gift sets to give to others. That is the kind of tea I’m describing now.)
We stayed at the Wyndham Grand in downtown Hangzhou, walking distance from West Lake. Our main sightseeing venture was to walk around part of West Lake, which we did on our day of arrival. The following day we took a ferry to the center islands of the lake, which has functioned as a public garden for centuries. These areas are very beautiful, and I will share photos of them in a subsequent post. . An image of this area can be seen on the 1 yuan banknote. On the island there are many pools to reflect the moon, which are stocked with large koi fish, mandarin and wood ducks, and a bewildering number of stray cats. There were signs around reminding visitors not to feed these cats and warnings not to touch them because they could carry diseases. From my own experience, stray cats make me sad, because I know that if we see the sleek and hardy ones hanging out in public areas, there is a clowder nearby chockablock with unhealthy and malnourished cats and kittens living in filth. The examples living around West Lake in Hangzhou probably live off more handouts and garbage more than they do by hunting mice. I selected a custom bracelet at the gift shop with my name in Chinese characters, which took a long time to find the correct beads.
After seeing West Lake we went to the modernized district of Hangzhong. This area faces the Yangtze and has office and residential skyscrapers on both sides of the river. Like many Chinese cities, it has been ridiculously overbuilt. In the one neighborhood we went to, there is probably more office space than in the entirety of Boston. There were some very odd looking buildings on our side, one, a hotel shaped like a big bronze ball, and opposing it on the plaza was an opera house shaped like a giant silver crescent. These were designed to resemble the sun and the moon. Further away there was an incredibly imposing ring of black skyscrapers which were interconnected near the top with a set of pass-through bridges. The effect was that of a Sith Temple Palace complex, or a corporation for wizards of the Dark Arts, but it’s really just the government administration building for the city.
Many of these units sit empty, but construction on new stuff continues, a Xi policy designed to stimulate the economy and keep workers working. It only sometimes founders when the cities can’t pay back their bonds issued on credit, or developers run out of liquidity Evergrande-style leaving buyers with useless paper titles to apartments that are yet to be built. This hasn’t yet happened in wealthy Hangzhou, but it perplexes my in laws and husband that housing prices are so high when there is so much available inventory, and rents are still very cheap (compared to owning the same space.)
After seeing the skyline and the Yangtze, we went to the Museum of Cuisine for dinner with some local friends of my in-laws’. This was a fabulous meal, with fresh in season fava beans and bamboo shoots making prominent appearances. There was a fried sweet-and-sour eel dish that was about a thousand times more vibrant and flavorful than any sweet-and-sour chicken I’ve had stateside. There was also beggar chicken, which is a whole chicken encased in lotus leaves and clay and then slow-baked under hot coals. It tasted quite a bit like baked chicken prepared in a Dutch oven, tender and flavorful. Our private dining room opened out onto a glorious desk overlooking the marsh, and frogs were awakening from their winter brumation to chirp at dusk. More wood ducks flitted around the tall grass looking for food. After having seen so much urban development, eating with access to this beautiful outdoor scene was very relaxing.
From Hangzhou we needed to get the car back to its proper owner and we needed go back to Beijing. So we drove northwest to Jintan city, which is a tiny county town in the boondocks where one of my in-laws has a rich cousin who owns and operates an environmental remediation engineering firm. Basically their job is cleaning up the Chinese equivalent of superfund sites. They also get called to assist with spills of hazardous chemicals on the highway. The contrast was stark: for two hours we rode deeper into farm country, with rice paddies and rapeseed fields on either side and tiny villages of dilapidated concrete-panel homes built in the 80’s and 90’s. Our country cousin’s home was the opposite: situated with agricultural fields to either side and a canal to the back, his home reminded me of a new built conference hotel. This is mostly because the first floor of the house is office space for this business, but he also had an on-site conference room in a traditionally styled outbuilding, a room lined with straight back padded chairs and wee tables with ashtrays that reminded me of a hotel ballroom, and a series of small apartments kept empty so that certain business guests could stay there. There was a “chess room”, really more of a gambling room, with an overhead fume hood to ventilate the area of cigarette smoke. (As I said before, smoking indoors is commonplace in China.)
We were offered a very flexy dinner with most of the family who were with us in Yangzhong coming to see us off. An entire lamb was slaughtered, flayed, and then attached flat to a rack for roasting at high temperature. I saw one of the hired help preparing it. Do not cook your lamb this way. The different muscles cook at different speeds, so that by the time the inside is cooked the outside has hardened into lamb jerky. It was well nigh inedible, because it was cooked fast over high heat so what hadn’t been totally dehydrated was also very tough. However, a pair of locally raised chickens had also been prepared this way, and chicken is tender enough to be barbecued like this. Those were delicious and flavorful, and makes commercially raised US chicken seem like a pale imitation. We were also served a vast assortment of ripe fruits which are quite expensive in America: yellow mangoes, juicy mangosteen, lychees, and fresh sweet water chestnuts as well as more common ones like cherries and strawberries. Freshly toasted cashews also made a place on the table. The men drank white liquor (白酒) which is like vodka, but twice as concentrated and tastes like aircraft coolant. One is given a wee pitcher of the stuff (120mL) and you drink it in shot glasses for ants, each drink the volume of a thimble. I enjoyed a bit of beer and red wine, which are easier drinking.
We stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn Jintan, which surprised me as much as it probably surprises you to know there are Hilton properties in very obscure county towns of China. The following day I was fitted by a tailor for a couple of silk dresses. The service was top notch, though I’ve yet to receive the dresses. Basically I gave him a dress I own and fits me well as a template, and the next day he had seen a mock-up in cheap linen, which was marked with pins and chalk for alteration. I’ll get my dresses back in about a week; he will ship them to Beijing. The cost for three dresses (one fine silk, the other two cotton-linen cloth) was about $1000 USD, with the silk dress costing twice the price of the cloth ones. If I really like these, and I think I will as I’ve loved other custom dresses from China, I suppose I could even order more. I just hope they look nice and feel comfortable, we will see.
That afternoon we took a train from a Changzhou, which is close to Jintan, back to Beijing. It was the same route and the same kind of high speed train, but this one was sold out to the point of being overbooked. When this happens in China you have the option to buy a standing room ticket, meaning people are clogging up the vestibules. If you try this in America, I believe the conductors will make you purchase an actual ticket and sit in the cafe car until a seat opens up, as I’m told standing around unsecured is dangerous should the train need to make a sudden stop. Somehow the Chinese trains are moving twice as fast and the staff are unconcerned, but then again, the high speed trains have dedicated elevated railways just for them, so the chance of needing to make an emergency stop is much lower.
We got back to Beijing super late with three suitcases full of laundry needing to be done. I got on Kiwifarms because the air pollution outside is bad (at least to my spoiled lungs and circulatory system) and I hung out at the house for the last two days.
That brings us up to date so far. I’ll write more tomorrow - my 34th birthday - about Beijing and China in general. xx STAN
PS comprehensive pictures are forthcoming, but I’ll probably put them in at the end once I have the benefit of downloading all of them across all our different cameras and phones and redact whatever I don’t want you to see. In the meantime, here is a picture of a duck and a selfie from West Lake.
