So says Emperor Kuzco in the Emperor’s New Groove after he morphs into a variety of different animals and returns to the familiar llama form he’s been trying to escape for the whole movie. Well, I’m safely back in Japan, and I kind of feel like that, feeling relieved to be back in familiar old Kyoto after my trip to China, despite how alien it felt when I arrived here five and half months ago.
My trip basically had two very different parts: for the first week I was in Shanghai with my friend Ding (a former Zumbye who graduated in 2006) and Nanjing with my friends Joe and Kris from Wellington, Joe’s wife Yuran and her parents. For the second week I traveled on my own detouring inland to Xi’an and then up to Beijing. They were both really great and I’m really glad I both had the chance to challenge myself to travel completely on my own, but also get to visit friends and see how much more rewarding it is traveling with locals and not just doing all the generic tourist things.
I’ll try to limit my descriptions to what’s relevant and use mostly pictures, but it was a very action-packed and eye-opening trip and unfortunately this will be very long ☺
PART I: STAYING WITH FRIENDS
Shanghai – Feb. 11-13
11/2:
I arrived in Shanghai and was soon very glad Ding was enjoying the tail-end of the New Year’s holiday and could show me around, because I hadn’t really prepared myself for how helpless I would be in China without speaking the language or having any experience in a developing country and without any electronic communication tools.
After I dropped my single carry-on sized suitcase (I became very glad I’d traveled so light by the end of the trip) at Ding’s ritzy apartment, we hit the streets for some good cheap, street food.
The cheapness of everything here would become one of the major lessons of my trip, as I got my first chance living in a developing country and also got to experience for the first time what it’s like to have way more money than the local people and afford to throw it around. I also learned how such a system infallibly means that the locals will harass you endlessly for the money they know they can get from you and people who look like you, and realized how easy it is to get fed up with it and resent the harassment, and can see how easy it would be to form racist attitudes like my noh teacher, who warned me about the “sneaky/crafty” Chinese. In a way, she was right, because they did act really craftily towards me, but it’s an obvious result of the economic inequality between the relatively poor locals and the relatively rich foreign tourists.
It also explains why foreign companies are investing so much in China, because you can get so much more for your money here.
That night we went out to karaoke with Ding and some of his friends and had a great time.
Ding and I sang the one Chinese song I know, Wang Chung Feng, which we learned in the Zumbyes. Afterwards, we went to a local club and partied until 5am, returned and slept through pretty much an entire day of daylight, waking up around 3pm. It was cool meeting his friends, especially because they all spoke great English so I could actually communicate with them.
12/2:
The next day we wandered around, saw some sights and checked out some jazz, then had a much quieter night.
Nanjing – Feb. 13-17
13/2:
I woke up the next morning feeling horrible but had to get ready to take the train to Nanjing (my first venture into interacting with locals without Ding’s help). Just before I left for China there had been a big scandal in Japan about tainted frozen dumplings from China and the Japanese were all warning me about Chinese food. I thought they were just being paranoid and a little racist as the Japanese are wont to be, but in fact I did get food poisoning and it could well have been from the plentiful dumplings I ate. I spent the whole day with diarrhea and vomiting, unable to stomach more than a few mouthfuls of rice noodle soup at dinner. I felt bad meeting Yuran’s family and crashing in their place in such a state, but at least I scored some brownie points by bringing them some yatsuhasi souvenirs and having Joe think of getting me to buy my own slippers to wear inside. When I returned to Japan Sawa couldn’t believe how skinny I was (not sure how much I weigh, but I think even less than my low of 71kg last time I was sick) and I think a lot of it is due to that day of sickness. I missed out on making dumplings with Yuran’s family and couldn’t even think of eating them at dinner.
14/2-16/2:
I felt much better the next day, and for the next few days we wandered around Nanjing, saw the crazy sometimes surreal sights of the Chinese streets, like these random drying animals
and this stew with what appears to be the head of a goat sticking out
went to some touristey things like the Ming tombs and museums, climbed on these cool statues
saw some music performances, like this one at the Confucious temple
where we laughed at Kris as he got conned into paying 120 yuan for a poem by a “famous calligrapher” turning his name into Chinese characters
or this performance where Kris got chosen randomly from the crowd, led on stage and was “married” on-stage, much to our delight (Kris was a source of much amusement).
We also went to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum from when the Japanese invited and committed their worst atrocities of World War II. It was very intense, but it was something I had really wanted to see. Seeing photos, newspaper articles and even actual skeletons in a mass grave from the massacre made it real for me in a way that reading about it never could. Everything involved was horrible, but from both this museum and at Yasukuni Shrine in Japan I noticed how the Japanese government emphasized that war was never officially declared against China, thus the Japanese claim that the rules of war didn’t apply. Although everyone involved had a lot of responsibility, to me the Japanese government deserves most of the blame for trying to shirk the responsibility for controlling their soldiers with semantics about whether or not it’s a “war”, something which is disturbingly similar to the US government today and their anti-terrorism policies.
We also did some cool not-so-touristey things like climb around the city walls (largely rebuilt after the Japanese bombed them)
drink cheap (2 or 3 yuan), incredibly strong white rice wine
and play basketball with some locals.
Here’s me about to slam it down.
When we weren’t out and about, we hung out at Yuran’s parents house and her parents were super-nice, making us delicious meals, driving us around, letting us stay there for free, etc.
I really wish in retrospect that I had learned a little Chinese, because it would’ve been a great chance to practice it and talk with them, but as it was they didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak Chinese, which, let me tell you, makes it pretty difficult to carry a conversation. We did play mahjong together, though and I got super-lucky and won one match on the first tile I picked up.
It was all really nice, but it had to come to an end, so on Sunday morning Kris and I went on our own to Shanghai.
Shanghai pt. II – Feb. 17th-19th
17/2:
Our first day in Shanghai was really a lot of fun. It was here Kris introduced me to the joy of just wandering around, not trying to follow a specific itinerary but just seeing what happens.
First we ended up wandering down a street full of musical instrument shops, which I bet Kris regretted because I kept on stopping in and looking around. I bought this cool gourd pipe thing, which I kept trying to learn how to play for the rest of the day.
Here, on the Bund, this random Chinese guy approached me and actually showed me how to play it without trying to get me to buy anything, greatly surprising me since most of the rest of the time we’d be constantly harassed by people trying to sell us crap. Later on, we accidentally wandered into this art gallery and this nice girl talked to us while we wandered up and didn’t try to make us buy anything either! I started thinking I was just being paranoid and had just been imagining that everyone was trying to take advantage of us, thus later on when these two women approached us and wanted us to come see their free art exhibit, we thought “why not?” and went along. Then they took us into this slightly sketchy room in the basement and showed us their work and very skillfully started pushing us to buy stuff. Some of it was quite nice, and it felt like it would be a shame to bargain for it when they were so nice and had put so much work into, so we both got some.
I read later that apparently it’s a common ploy in China for people to pretend to be art students to sell overpriced art to tourists!
In general, I was pretty terrible at bargaining (which you should do pretty much everywhere in China besides restaurants and some places with prominent price tags displayed). It was easy to get them to offer lower prices for stuff I didn’t want, but I didn’t have the self-control to feign disinterest or bluff them out when there was something I really wanted, and it was easy for them to tell. For example, when I was trying to make my own way out to the Great Wall, as I approached the long distance bus station several people tried to get me to let them drive me out. When I asked one how much and she said “200 yuan one way”, I thought it was way more than I’d need to pay and laughed her off and she was like “OK, how much?” but I didn’t bother with her any more. Then, I realized I couldn’t read the signs on the buses or figure out in the slightest how to get out there, I walked back trying to find someone to take me. I went up to this guy who had a sign saying “if you’re lost, talk to me, I’m a volunteer”, but then he actually was just trying to get me to pay him to drive me out. He offered the same price, and I tried to bargain him down and then got out of the car when he wouldn’t budge, but then eventually gave up and went with him for 200 yuan each way because, let’s face it what was I gonna do, not go to the Great Wall to prove that I’m not a sucker? That would make me even more of a sucker. I guess the opportunity cost was just too high.
Anyway, we continued to wander around in Shanghai and had some dinner. After the dinner rush had calmed down, a bunch of the waiters were sitting around smoking and one was singing and I got inspired and brought my gourd pipe over and tried to do the charade thing to signal to him that he should sing and I’d play the pipe. In a minute, someone went off and brought back an erhu (cool Chinese bowed instrument) and played a little and we jammed together and it was awesome, exactly the kind of experience I’d wanted to have.
In retrospect, though, I think that even though it seems like that’s the kind of thing I could easily have done when travelling on my own, for whatever reason I only really have the courage to do it when I’m with someone else, like I was with Kris. It’s fun to laugh about with someone else if it doesn’t work out, but if you get rejected on your own it’s just kind of lame.
18/2:
The next day we wandered around some more with much less success. First, we went to this Museum of Science and Technology, which was basically the sole reason Kris wanted to come back to Shanghai before going home to NZ. Unfortunately, it was closed.
We also ate this awful food, and Kris thought the lady said “chicken corn soup” but she actually said “chicken claw soup” and he let out a yelp when he put his spoon in and this chicken foot leaped out at him. Then we tried to go to see this Jade Buddha, but ended up lost on what was definitely the poor, slummy side of the railroad tracks and drowned our sorrows with the cheapest, nastiest white rice wine ever.
The night was much less of a failure, though. We finally managed to connect with Ding (we hadn’t seen him despite staying in his apartment for those two days) and went to a delicious restaurant with him and his girlfriend, where Ding and I ended up reminiscing about our great times in the Zumbyes and probably boring the others to death. Then we went to a bunch of bars and clubs, coming back a little early than the last time, but not much.
19/2:
In the morning Kris headed back to NZ safely (at least I hope he made it back safely…) and I said goodbye to Ding and made my way to the train station. I had really enjoyed the first week, but at this point I was still hungering for a real independent rugged solo traveling experience and was excited about starting off on my own solo adventure!
PART II: SOLO TRAVELING
Xi’an – Feb. 20-21:
My first stop on my solo adventure was a 18-hour overnight train ride inland to the ancient capital of Xi’an Shaanxi province, which gave me a lot of time to think. I actually slept really well because I had a “hard sleeper” with a bed, blankets and pillow, unlike another traveler I met who had to do the whole trip on a “hard seat” and said it was miserable.
The nearby area was the birthplace of Chinese civilization, the capital of the first unified Chinese empire and several other dynasties, including the Tang, China’s “Golden Age” and the one which influenced Japan the most. Kyoto’s N-S-E-W grid structure and feng shui geography were all taken directly from the old capital. I had been considering cutting out this part of the trip to give me more time in Beijing, but I’m really glad I didn’t because it was really cool, especially given my sudden recent interest in anthropology and geography and the development of human civilizations.
20/2:
I had only planned for a day and a half in Xi’an and had only a kind of vague idea in my head of getting to see the Terracotta warriors and checking out a bunch of other random places. By good luck, the people at the hostel I booked actually met me at the station (I tried several times to shoo them away, thinking they were trying to get me to go to some other hostel, before realizing it was the one I’d booked), took me to the hostel, showed me where to get a hard sleeper ticket to Beijing for the next day (which apparently I was very lucky to get on one day’s notice), and booked me on a day tour to the Terracotta Warriors and the Banpo Neolithic Village that left in about 20 minutes! I just had time to grab a brief snack before heading off.
I was somewhat ambivalent about hopping straight onto a tour group with a bunch of other tourists on my first day of my “solo adventure”, but really it probably would have been nearly impossible for me to do it myself, especially given the limited time I had. It was a little limiting being on a tour with others, because at times I felt like I wanted to stay longer in some places but couldn’t and at other times I wanted to move on but didn’t want to push the others. However, it was cool meeting the others and hearing about their lives and their own travel experiences. The terracotta warriors were really amazing and the Banpo Neolithic village, although less visually impressive, was even more impressive in some ways because of how old they were (over 6,000 years, I believe!).
Both of the sites were my first time actually seeing archaeological sites firsthand, which was really interesting, especially after reading a lot about them in Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse.
That evening a couple of the younger people on the tour who I had had good vibes from were planning to go check out this fountain festival thing and invited me along. It was about 4 times further than we had thought, but after a frantic hour and a half walk we actually made it just in time to see this very impressive show with all these water fountains spurting perfectly synchronized with several classical pieces and several Chinese ones. It was really cool, and apparently they do it every night! I wonder whether they change the music each night…
It was really quite fun hanging out with them and I could see the attraction of that kind of lifestyle of a traveler going about the world, meeting other travelers in youth hostels, but I’m wary of that because I’ve seen so many foreigners in Japan who spend all their time with other foreigners and never immerse themselves in the culture, so I decided to make sure to do stuff on my own for the rest of the trip.
21/2:
I didn’t get to do nearly all the things I wanted to do, but I did manage to make my way by bus to the Shaanxi museum thanks to a nice local who helped me out, and practiced the few phrases I’d learned and felt good about actually interacting with someone. The museum was incredibly cool, the best I’ve ever been to. For one thing, the area has such a rich history, with all of the significant events in Chinese history happening here, but the best part was the way the materials were grouped by themes and in each room there was a video explaining the theme of interest showing reconstructions of the actual ways the exhibits would have been created and used, which made everything so much more interesting than the way they’re just kind of dumped there in many museums and left to your imagination or expertise to really see their significance.
One of the coolest things was seeing the evolution of writing. Back at the Banpo Neolithic Village I saw actual shards of pottery on location containing drawings, mostly of fish, which were very important to them. I saw how these drawings moved from realistic to stylized drawings
Which gave birth to these simple stylized symbols
Which gave birth to these more complex characters which are easily recognizable as needingonly a couple small tweaks to make them into the modern characters the Chinese and Japanese use.
Seeing those thousands of years of development under my eyes was pretty impressive. It also made me think: if art led directly to writing, maybe singing led by a similar process to the birth of language?
Later that day I hopped on another overnight train, this one “only” 16 hours to Beijing. That night was the night of the Lantern Festival – the official last night of the Chinese New Year period, when everyone hangs up lanterns and blows up HEAPS of fireworks. Unfortunately, I missed almost everything because I was on the train, although I did see a lot of fireworks out of the window as I rode.
The station was sooooo crowded, if there was a fire or something I’m sure many people would have died in the ensuing stampede (in fact, people were stampeded to death about a week before I came down in the south when heavy snow cut suspended train service while millions of people were trying to make their way home for Chinese New Year)
Between these two overnight trains and the trains back and forth between Shanghai and Nanjing, I spent a lot of time on trains and this picture is a pretty good example of what I saw: lots of houses, factories and new construction, with a lot of pollution. Sometimes it was strangely pretty, able to look directly at the sun and see it as a bright red glowing circle as it was about to set, my eyes protected by a layer of smog.
Beijing – Feb. 22-25
22/2:
I arrived at Beijing for the last part of my trip at 6am. After making my way to my hostel, I rented a bike for Y20 and spent about 7 or 8 hours wandering with my bike throughout a huge chunk of Beijing – through narrow old hutong, around the moat of the Forbidden City, then way the hell up to the Olympic arenas, then to one temple, trying to get to another temple but giving up in frustration, tiredness, hunger and my need to be back in time to go to the Peking Opera tour I booked in the morning as I fought with my out of date guide book, the insane Chinese drivers and my hunger from eating only a slice of plain, dry bread for lunch after some confusion with a local boy who I thought was going to sell me some succulent roasted meat and tastily seasoned bread. It was a great way to get a feel for Beijing, though.
I had been really excited because there was a pre-Olympic diving competition that just happened to be going on and I thought I might be able to check it out, but couldn’ figure out how to get tickets online, so I just thought I’d wing it and see if I could buy them at the spot. One thing I learned from this and many other failures in Beijing was that I should try to call ahead for these kinds of things, at least if there’s a chance I can communicate with the person on the other end.
When I got there, I wandered around for a while trying to figure out how to get in before I finally found someone who spoke English who explained that all the tickets were sold out. I briefly contemplated trying to bribe someone, since I hear that works pretty well in China, but gave up because I didn’t have the nerve, not to mention I’d probably just give him my money then be stopped at the next check point and be turned away with less money in my pocket. Maybe if I’d been with someone else it would’ve been fun just to try bribing him for the experience, but I didn’t have the motivation to do it on my own. I found that a lot in Beijing that, despite all the world-famous sites they had, it was pretty lonely and not nearly as fun without others to share in the experiences, both good and bad.
The Peking Opera was pretty interesting, although extremely oriented to tourists and I think that the quality probably reflected that – I certainly wasn’t incredibly moved by the performance. This, combined with my ambivalent experience with the tour stuff in Xi’an made me decide to try the rest of my touristey stuff in Beijing on my own without booking tours through the hostel. As it turns out, that actually ended up being much more expensive and frustrating when I went to the Great Wall, but I think it was definitely worth it for the experience.
23/2:
The next day I got up at 6am to go to Tiananmen square at dawn for the flag-raising ceremony.
Afterwards I went to stand in line with a whole bunch of others to wait for Chairman Mao’s Mausoleum to open. I waited in the freezing cold for over an hour, only to find when I tried to enter they sent me away to check my camera and come back. I knew I couldn’t take my camera, but I thought I could check it there and not have to check it and come back.
I know Chairman Mao did some horrible things in his life, but at this point in time I was more angry with him for making me stand in the freezing cold for an hour for nothing. Thoroughly pissed off, I bailed out on that plan and went over to the Forbidden City, rented an automatic tour guide thing and wandered around. It was really cool, but being in a bad mood and not having any one to share it with made it a little less cool, as did the fact I didn’t have much breakfast and was getting really hungry after wandering around there for 4 hours. I was moved by this sign, though – it was so poetic!
Both the Forbidden City and the Terracotta Warriors impressed upon me just what a ridiculous life the emperors led, that they had huge tombs built for themselves and buried servants alive with them and had entire palace complexes devoted almost entirely to their own leisure and entertainment. There may be plenty of problems with the current Chinese government and plenty of corruption, but it seems like there must have been a lot more of that under the old imperial system.
That night I looked through my guidebook and found the one place that seemed to have performances of Chinese music. Luckily enough, they had it every Saturday night, and it was a Saturday, so I set off to try to find it. I eventually did, but there was no music and I was the only customer there. The owner said they might start doing the music next month. Oh well, she gave me some little tea biscuits free of charge and I just drank tea and read my book. Oh yeah, during the trip, I read three books with all my free time on trains and whatnot: Jared Diamond’s “Why is Sex Fun?” Machiavelli’s “The Prince” and Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”.
24/2:
On my last full day in China I headed off to the Great Wall on my own. As I said before, I ended up several times more than I would have with a tour, but it was a good experience and my driver was quite a character. He cranked on some cheesy Chinese techno and drove like an absolute fiend. I was very surprised by how few accidents I saw, given that the drivers in China all drive like maniacs. They pass other cars on two-lane, two-way roads on the left or right, sometimes one car passing on the left while another car passes on the right, whether or not there’s oncoming traffic or not. If there is, the oncoming cars just swerve onto the shouler, although if there are one or two cars trying to pass at the same time going the other way sometimes they have to pull out and try again. They honk all the time just to let people know they’re there and are coming through, never stop for pedestrians even when they’re turning right on a red light and the pedestrians have the little green man.
When I got to the Great Wall, this woman with extremely broken English said something about “local farmer, no job” and started following me as I climbed up. I wasn’t sure what was going on until I gradually realized she was trying to pester me until I bought some stupid souvenir. I was just getting really sick of being harassed and refused to give in on principle and eventually she left, but other “local farmers” also kept trying to sell me souvenirs and drinks at various points along the wall.
In another bad mood about constantly being harassed, I was a little underwhelemed when I first got on the wall, but after I got rid of the local farmer women and started walking along and started to appreciate the majesty of just how huge the wall was and the beautiful scenery, I started feeling more at peace with the whole trip and China and putting everything in perspective and realizing what a good experience the whole trip was.
Later on that night, I tried one last time to see some Chinese music, getting the woman at my youth hostel to call this place I found out about and give me directions. The directions were horrible, both incredibly vague and completely incorrect and I wandered around for about an hour through a completely unpromising section of Beijing full of banks, flagged a couple of taxi drivers who shrugged their heads when I showed them the Chinese characters the woman had written. Eventually I had the bright idea of using my pantomime skills to point at the phone number of the place and make the international hand symbol for phone and get the driver to call the place and take me there. When I finally arrived, here is what I found:
A white guy playing the guitar.
That about sums up the trip.
THOUGHTS:
Here’s a photo of me on the Great Wall the day before I returned.
I think it was here I achieved the best perspective on my trip, as can be seen in my enigmatic expression. I think this trip was just what I needed, a great success, despite being a failure in many ways. Or rather, it was a success BECAUSE it was a failure in many ways, because I think you can learn the most from failures, and I wanted to go on this trip to learn, to be challenged, and to put myself outside of my comfort zone, all of which I definitely did.
First off, you can see from my scruffy beard and messy hair I haven’t shaved the whole trip, and only got to shower a few times, mostly at the beginning, so although you can’t smell the photo, you can rest assured that this is a good thing. I smelled awful. I also had no cellphone the whole trip, minimal internet access, didn’t speak a word of Chinese when I arrived and was using an old guide book left in my possession from a previous Doshisha Fellow 5 or 6 years back, and was trying to use this to navigate around, among other places, the most rapidly changing city (Beijing, in its pre-Olympic frenzy) in the most rapidly changing country in the world. But I made it through with all of that with only a few problems, and I’m very glad I got the chance to do that, if only to prove to myself that I can do that in this age where we’re constantly connected to up-to-date information and can’t go a few hours without checking our email or cellphones or Wikipedia or Facebook. That being said, it was so nice to come back and have all those things again!
Basically, that was the best thing about my trip: I proved a point to myself and got it out of my system. I’d been thinking a lot lately about how I wanted to go traveling around the world and have all these crazy adventures and meet locals and see wonderful sights, but now that I’ve tried it a little I realize some of my ideas were unrealistic or just not as grand as I’d thought. Most of all, I realize that it’s all well and good to visit foreign countries, but if I don’t speak the language and/or have friends or connections living there to show me around, I’m never going to actually get to engage with the people living there and have a meaningful interactive experience beyond the shallow, typical tourist experience of going to the famous sights and checking them off on my list of “places to casually mention in conversations to impress others with my worldliness and life of leisure”.
For the first part of the trip I did get a little taste of the local life and culture, but without the language I still felt removed from the reality of the city. For the second part I got a taste of the life of the many travelers who travel all over the world and yet remain an outsider in the places they visit, creating community only with the other travelers or just being alone, and although there’s a certain charm to that, that’s not what I want to get out of these kinds of trips. So, in the future, I want to try to travel as much as possible to places where I have friends and absolutely make at least a half-decent effort to learn some basics of the language before I go.
Finally, although it was good to not use the internet for most of the trip, I’ve also learned that if I want to keep a blog as detailed as this, I should really do it as I go, because it took forever writing this all up at once!
