Chengdu

The third stop for our end of semester trip was in Chengdu, a city famous for one thing and one thing only: pandas. This is not really true - Chengdu is a gateway for people traveling to Tibet and has great food, but because the Woolong Panda Reserve and the Chengdu Panda Research Center are located in the city, China's favorite furry friends are what most visitors to Chengdu come to see.
Our program made the trip out to the Chengdu Panda Research Center in the morning, and the day was not the most beautiful. It was cloudy, and it was drizzling when we left. However, this turned out to be a good thing, because it was cloudy weather the pandas all came out in the cool air. There were so many pandas, at all ages. Many people don't know that there are two different kinds of pandas - Red Pandas and Giant Pandas. Red Pandas look more like raccoons.

After exploring some of the habitats, Georgette, Molly, Cara and I decided that we each wanted to hold a red panda. The cost to hold a red panda is 100 Yuan, or about 15 dollars. We head over to the red panda breeding center, and they dressed us in plastic gloves and blue hospital gowns, and had us sit in a chair. I gave my camera to Jon so he could capture all the magic. Imagine my surprise when a very adorable baby red panda was placed into my lap, chewing on apples and seeming very unconcerned with where he was.
We each took turns holding him and petting him, and he never seemed upset or scared, he just kept eating his apple and staring straight at the camera. Jon decided that a red panda was not good enough for him. He wanted to hold a baby giant panda, which costs 1000 yuan, or 150 dollars. Luckily, out of our group, he chose me (for my camera) to be the one person who got to go in with him. It was the most amazing experience ever. Jon also had to wear the hospital gown and the plastic gloves, but we both had to wear blue booties over our shoes. They make us wear these to protect our clothes and to protect the baby panda from our scent.

When they brought the panda in, he looked like a marshmallow. He was sleepily slumped over the researcher's shoulder almost like a towel. He looked like he weighed about 40 pounds, and he was totally adorable. Jon was in his glory, holding the panda's paws and petting his head. The baby was so sleepy he just stared up at Jon and out at the camera, a little dazed.
After the baby panda adventure, Georgette, Molly, and I went out to look for more pandas. We hit the jackpot when we found four pandas munching on bamboo conveniently close to where we were standing. We took lots of pictures, and watched them play with each other for awhile.
The next day, 17 of us woke up and checked out of our hotel at 6:30 am, earlier than the rest of our group. We left our luggage at the hotel and boarded a bus to Leshan, a town about two hours north of Chengdu. We were determined to see the biggest sitting Buddha in the world before we left Chengdu, even though it was not organized by the program. The biggest sitting Buddha in the world, Dafo, is located outside the town of Leshan.

Dafo was built on the side of a river in 713 AD. A Chinese monk named Haitong decided that, if they built a Maitreya Buddha on the side of the river, the turbulent waters would calm and ships and fishing boats would be able to pass through unharmed. As the buddha was under construction, temples began springing up around the site, and villages moved closer in order to enjoy the benefits of such a big buddha. Haitong's idea worked, and all the rubble and stone removed from carving Dafo was tossed into the river, lessening the strong current and making the river sailable. The buddha took 90 years to complete, and the monk Haitong actually gouged out his own eye when Chinese officials threatened to pull funding for the project in order to show his sincerity. Consequently, there are Buddhist temples, Haitong's burial site, and memorials to Haitong dotting the area.

We explored the hills surrounding Dafo, and finally made it down the winding and steep stone steps to the base of his statue. His big toe is large enough for six people to stand on it, and his ear is 7 meters high. The area also includes a park commerorating the many different styles of sculpting Buddha, with originals and recreations of Indian and Chinese Buddhas. The park surrounds another giant Buddha, the gigantic Sleeping Buddha, which stretches across a rock face over several mountains. This one is not as famous as Dafo, as it has eroded quite a bit.

My favorite part of the park was an old fishing village that has been reconstructed in the shape of a boat. The men and women still fish for a living, and they displayed their live fish and turtles in buckets for prospective visitors. We decided, from looking at the quality of the river they were fishing from, that we were not that hungry.

We also visited many burial tombs, complete with stone carved dogs and horses, clay pots and beds. This used to be the biggest fashion for burying family members, and caves are quite deep. There I am sitting in somebody's previously final resting place.
While I was being disrespectful and picking a smaller reconstruction of Dafo's nose in a cave, I made a new friend who was not as happy about me being there as I obviously was. If you look closely at the second picture, you can see him on the right side of Dafo's neck.

Xi'an

Our first day in Xi’an, we went to a lecture on the Qin Dynasty. The professor was from China Normal University, which is a very prestigious school, and he only spoke Chinese, so one of our professors translated for us.

After the lecture, we went to a restaurant to taste some of Xi'an's finest. Xi'an is famous for its dumplings, or as we call them jiaozi, and we were brought 18 different kinds of dumplings in round steamed crates that stack on top of each other. There were dumplings with pork and chives, steak and onions, and odd ones like eggs and catsup. Each one was amazing, and I was stuffed once I had sampled all 18 of the different dumplings.

To burn off all that jiaozi, we went to Xi’an’s city wall. Xi’an is one of the only cities in China with a city wall that is almost fully intact. It is also the only city in China that will let you rent a bike and ride along the top of the wall for as long as you like. The top of the wall is about the size of a normal road on the street, so Cara and I, Jon and Jill, and Georgette and Molly rode on tandem bikes while Aaron and Richie both rode singles. We spent a half an hour racing up and down the wall, illuminated by red lanterns and city lights all around us. It was very beautiful, and probably the most fun I’ve had on the trip so far. And of course I had to freak out my professors and climb on the edge of wall, just to keep them on their toes.

The next morning, we woke up early to visit the Terracotta Soldiers. An army of eight thousand soldiers were constructed to surround the tomb of Qin Shi Huangdi during the Qin dynasty. They date from 210 BCE, and were only discovered in 1974 by some farmers. Every single soldier, each of the 130 chariots and 520 horses are different, with different facial features and adornments. The majority of the soldiers are still buried to protect them from air contamination, but about 1,000 of them are on display. It was overwhelming to imagine that each soldier was individually constructed and worked on, and the faces and positions were not created by simply filling a mold. This is one of the sites that is firmly on the tourist line, so we saw more white people than usual.

In the afternoon, we visited the Great Mosque in Xi’an and spent some time in the Muslim quarter, shopping and talking to Hui people, who make up the Muslim minority in China. The mosque was very beautiful and very distinct from both Middle Eastern mosques and Chinese temples, with colorful gardens everywhere. The shops and stands had cheap souvenirs, and reminded me of a more laid back silk market experience – they even sold North Face jackets and fake Pumas.

Luoyang

After a week of final papers, Chinese exams, and recovering from late nights and our very full day in Datong, it was time to pack our bags and prepare to leave Beijing. I packed my whole room, moved the suitcases into a designated hotel room and took my backpacker’s backpack and my laptop and boarded a train with 24 other people in my program. We were beginning a two week long trip that stops in Luoyang, Xi’an, Chengdu, Guiling, Yangshou, and Long Sheng.

I am, as we speak, on a train from Luoyang to Xi’an, recounting my exploits in our first city. Luoyang was very interesting, and as I mentioned in my entry about Datong, it was the second capital of the Northern Wei Dynasty after they left Datong. The first place we visited was the Shaolin Temple, the place were Kung Fu originated. Kung Fu is much more interesting than I every imagined, and I have learned a lot more about it since I came to China. The martial arts form began as an effort of the Shaolin monks to counteract the hours upon hours they spent in meditation with meditative exercises. They would study the way animals moved when trying to defend themselves or stalking prey, and they would spend hours hopping around like frogs or trying to imitate the way a leopard sprints on all fours. Watching the monks do some of their moves, it’s easy to see some of the animalistic origins of their movements.

These activities force them to be extremely flexible, and they are just as creative and talented as the acrobats I saw with my mom. They train for twenty years to achieve proficiency in Kung Fu, and they strengthen their body by punching hundreds of pieces of paper glued together on a wall. Eventually, the paper wears away, and they punch the wall. You can see people who are training in Kung Fu hitting their heads repeatedly against walls and trees. The end result is that they can break steel blades and pieces of metal with their foreheads. We got a chance to watch the Shaolin Monks perform some of their coolest feats.

Wandering the grounds of the Shaolin Temple, we saw a huge flock of white birds, and my friend Richie and I both bought some bird feed. The birds climbed all over us, trying to get the food we had, and at one point I had five white birds on my arms. It was crazy!

The one thing I was hoping to see but did not get to was Drunken Boxing. The monks get one monk drunk and study how the monk reacts to an aggressor. Because he is already a very good fighter, his reactions are still generally successful at avoiding the blows of the aggressor, but he is loose and more flexible. The monks study the movements and try to imitate them, and the end result is that they are able to fight sober fighters by avoiding each punch or stab by fluidly moving their bodies, bending at weird angles, and avoiding the hard, jerking movements of how they would move as a sober fighter. I saw Jet Li do it once, and I thought it was pretty cool.

However, for my brother, I picked up some weapons so that he can stop going back to the Asian Wonders store, which is a store that apparently sells Asian martial arts weapons but sounds like a brothel and totally irks me. I did try out the weapons on some of my friends, and an all out battle ensued.

The next place we visited was the White Horse Temple. This is one of the first Buddhist temples in China, and is still an active place of worship. The monks there adhere to a very simple life, and spend most of their days in worship and monitoring guests, though I swear I saw one of them talking on a cell phone. The temple complex is beautiful, and the monks grow exquisite flower gardens and fields of crops for self sustainment. I made friends with a few of them when I bought a purse (I didn’t bring one with me on the trip) and was able to answer their questions about Beijing in Chinese.

Our next day in Luoyang, we visited the Longmen Grottoes, which is a bigger version of the Yungang grottoes in Datong. The caves were very similar, mainly because they were built by the same people, just in a different location. We weren’t allowed to enter these caves, and we could only take pictures of the large sandstone Buddhas from outside fences, but I snuck over one fence and pretended to be a Buddha successfully, without getting in trouble. While I was more impressed with Datong’s caves, the location of the Longmen Grottoes was really beautiful, with the Yi River running past the caves and more greenery and gardens in the area. We spent three hours wandering the grounds, exploring the caves, and visiting a temple.

That afternoon, in search of something to do, a group of us headed over to a park we could all see from our hotel windows. We could see a Ferris Wheel there, and we decided it was worth a visit. The park turned out to be a zoo and an amusement park rolled into one. We all got into bumper cars and spent the next fifteen minutes ramming into each other. Then Heidi, Jon, Aaron, and Richie had a go-cart race, and Gill, me, Aaron, Jay, Georgette, and Cara rode a Chinese roller coaster. This roller coaster went upside down twice, was incredibly rickety, and my seat restraint that came down over my shoulders wouldn’t stay down by itself; the attendant wrapped a seat belt through the middle and fastened it to me. But I survived, and I get to say I rode a roller coaster in China.

The other part of the park was very upsetting. Lions and tigers paced back and forth in their tiny iron cages with no hope of proper care or exercise. The animals are poorly treated and have no where near enough room to move around or really do anything. Hundreds of birds are crammed into aviary cages, and grizzly and black bears loll around in small cages with filthy, polluted water. It reminds me that China has no animal rights policies except pertaining to Great Pandas, and the animals in China, whether they are domestic or wild, are treated with great disrespect and neglect.

That night we decided we’d like to all stay in and relax, and a group of five set out to get pizza from Pizza Hut armed with everyone’s money. We ordered four pizzas, and went out to wait outside for the pizzas to be made. The hostess came rushing out to tell us something, and Molly and I leaned in to hear what she was trying to tell us. She didn’t speak very much English, and Molly and I couldn’t really understand what she was telling us, but we were starting to believe she was saying that Pizza Hut had run out of pizzas. She kept pointing to our four different pizzas and telling us we could only have two. Meanwhile, a beggar decided that while we were arguing with the hostess and freaking out about the idea of Pizza Hut running out of pizzas, this would be an appropriate time to come over, push aside the hostess, and shake his bowl at us. Then, a woman walked by into McDonalds next door with a whole dead chicken. Finally the hostess gave up and showed us the picture of a stuffed crust pizza, and then told us we could only have two. She only meant that Pizza Hut had run out of the cheese used for stuffed crust, and we would have to get two stuffed crust and two normal pizzas. Whew, what a crazy 15 minutes of confusion and weirdness.

Datong

My friend Molly was making plans for me while I was hanging out with my parents. For a change, I did not plan the weekend trip, and she arranged for Jon, Aaron, and I to come with her to Datong for a day. We took the overnight train there, and an overnight train back to Beijing the next night.

We arrived at 6 am and visited CITS, one of the best Chinese tourist agencies, to pick up our return tickets for that night. The man who worked there offered us a 100 Yuan tour to both of the places we had planned to visit, which would take care of transportation at less than the cost it would have taken us to get to the two locations on our own.

The downside to the tour, which lasted all day, was that our tour guide sounded like she learned English from an answering machine, and a broken one at that. Luckily there were other people on the tour, so we were able to slip away and explore things on our own.

The first place we visited was the Hanging Temple, which is about 75 km south of Datong. The Temple was built over a river that was continuously flooding and destroying crops and livestock. Huge spikes were driven into the cliff to support a temple being built against the cliff face. The temple was very interesting, and while walking on the rickety walkways and starting down at the drop below me, I could imagine it was very difficult to be a monk there. At first, the temple was built just on the side of the river, but as the river continued to flood higher and higher every year, the monks moved the temple up higher and higher along the cliff face. Now there is a dam that keeps the river from running under the temple anymore, but churning waters below a rickety temple would certainly make it an unnerving place to live and worship.

After the Hanging Temple, we traveled to the Yungang Caves, which are a set of grottoes that were built by Buddhists in 400 A.D. The caves are amazing, and many of the Buddhas towering above us were still in tact and unspoiled. The sandstone they were carved in has been weathering away on the outside of the caves, so large building faces have been built in front of some of the caves to protect them from further weather damage. The acid rain from the mining and coal production city of Datong certainly doesn’t help the future of these caves either.

The Northern Wei Dynasty built the temples while their capital was in Datong. Later they moved their capital to Luoyang, and the cave carving in Yungang stopped. These caves are the best preserved, and there were 51 of them for us to visit.

Tired and exhausted from listening to our tour guide say “this is most beautiful Buddha, beautiful Buddha, beautiful Buddha…this is biggest Buddha, biggest Buddha, biggest Buddha…Buddha was born from his mother’s armpit, armpit, armpit,” that we decided we needed some Western food, and a place to hang out until our train at 11pm. We sought out the most friendly, welcoming restaurant in Datong, its presence signified to us by the presence of two, beautiful golden arches.

We sat in McDonalds for three hours, drinking coffee, eating mediocre hamburgers, and devouring hot fudge sundaes. It amazes me that in McDonalds in China, the advertisements and pictures on the walls are all of Westerners who are happy and enjoying their McNuggets, not Asian people. After we’d had our fill of fast food we walked over to a pool hall and played a game of pool, at which I am hopeless, before we headed back to the train station.

Mom and Dad come to Beijing

Well this is a very long update for a very long couple of weeks. To be honest, I’ve been too busy to write emails, talk to anyone, or even write this blog. So I’ll just start from the beginning and tell you about my last couple of weeks. The semester was winding down, and all the papers and final exams were looming in the next week, but I was very excited anyways.

My parents came! Mom and Dad flew in to Beijing looking neat and tidy as always, which was a definite contrast from what I looked like getting off a thirteen hour plane ride. They were tired, but generally in good spirits despite the fact that the airline lost my mom’s suitcase.

I took them to their new hotel, and after an altercation with hotel clerk about being in a smoking room rather than the previously requested non-smoking room, we walked down to check out my campus. I showed them my dorm, the Beida campus, and we got some dinner at a restaurant my friends and I like to call the Medicine House. Eating with them was actually surprisingly successful, which I had worried about. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to order more than five or six different things the whole week they were visiting, but I ended up getting lucky with picture menus and some English sub-menus.

The next day, I had to teach English, so I took my parents to Tian’anmen Square, showed them around, and pointed them in the direction of the Forbidden City, and rushed off to start my hour and a half trip to the Beijing suburbs. They survived the center of Beijing, wandering through the Forbidden City and Tian’anmen Square until I returned to retrieve them from curious Chinese tourists. That night, we went to a restaurant that serves Peking Duck, and it was really amazing. It was actually my first time have duck in Beijing, and it was definitely worth trying.

The next day I took them to the Temple of Heaven and the Pearl Market. Mom liked the Temple of Heaven, because the Temple of Heaven is not only made up of old temples and corridors from Imperial China, it is also a public park, where Beijing residents go to enjoy leisurely activities. They got to see Chinese people in action, fake working out on a metal playground for adults, singing together, ballroom dancing together, practicing calligraphy, playing musical instruments, and “sanbuing” an anglicized description of Chinese people walking slowly up and down the sidewalks with their hands clasped firmly behind their backs. Dad was in his glory, and he was like a kid in a candy store in the Pearl Market, bargaining for things I would never think of buying. We left him to the electronics vendors on the first floor while Mom and I headed up to the pearl section to buy pearls for all our family members and friends.

On Sunday it was raining, so I suggested we visit a museum in Tian’anmen Square, and since my Dad enjoyed the Pearl Market so much, I suggested we also go to the Silk Market, which is much larger and has more things for him to buy. Unfortunately, we got to Tian’anmen Square and the museum was closed. When I went up to ask the guard in front of the museum how long the museum had been closed, he said “I don’t know.” Then I asked him when the museum would open again, and he said “I don’t know.” So there’s not much information being passed around in China these days.

After the failure at the National Museum, we headed over two stops on the metro to the Silk Market. Dad just immediately wandered off, his face glowing with excitement at all the fake designer products, watches, and clothes he could buy, assuming that my mom would just carry all that stuff home with her. Mom and I wandered around upstairs, bought some more pearls, looked at purses, and fake Spyder jackets. We were there for about three hours, and we all came out with enormous amounts of stuff. Dad bought three suits from a tailor who measures his customers in the store and makes whole suits overnight for the price of one nice sports coat. During our time there, there was an ongoing contest between the three of us about who was the best bargainer. My mom has always been frugal, so I think she’s pretty good because she won’t spend more than a certain amount. I can speak Chinese, which helps a lot and the vendors always start lower, and Dad is just sure that he is the best bargainer. So we had some good natured competition when it came down to how cheap we could buy things.

The next day I took my parents to the Olympic Green, and we explored the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube. The architecture there is really interesting, and inside the Bird’s Nest I did a lap around the field just to get a feel for how the athletes felt during the Olympics. I’m pretty sure it was a lot more stressful for them; I just looked goofy. Everything about the area is new and athletic. Even the street lights look like golf clubs and the ground lights look like golf balls on tees. But the area, especially hotels in the area, have taken a serious economic hit this year, as not only are the Olympics over and the influx of visitors coming to watch even national evens have dwindled because of less spending power. Also the number of tourists coming to China is much smaller this year because of the financial crisis. However, unlike Athens and its athletic arenas from the 2004 Olympics, China has pretty stable plans to transform most of the Olympic stadiums and buildings into publically accessible athletic clubs and sports fields.

That day I also took them to my school, where I taught my 28 students the vocabulary for “family” and introduced them to my parents. I had the girls write out self-introductions that they would recite to Mom and Dad, and some of them said things like “my hair is black and purple and my sweater is black and purple,” and “my birthday is July 20, 1994” while others simply introduced themselves, talked about their school, and sat down. They also wanted to sing, so they sang a song, we played some games, and Mom showed them pictures of Marshall and I when we were a little younger. I think it was a good experience for Mom and Dad because it was a chance for them to see Beijing suburbs and see how some of the lower classes of Chinese people live outside the city. They also got to ride the bus, which is always an adventure.

On Tuesday my parents and I visited the Summer Palace, and they got to walk around the complex, explore the temples and read a little about Empress Cixi and the Imperial family. And on Tuesday, we made yet another trip to the Silk Market to pick up some more things and buy a dress for me!

On Wednesday, we finally went to the Great Wall. The nice thing is, there is a train that leaves from the North Beijing Station and takes visitors directly to Badaling, the closest part of the Wall to the city. It was very crowded, and pretty cold that day, but I warned my parents not to wear coats, because they would be warm enough after they hiked up the wall. We walked only about 1km, and then stopped and took pictures. Dad desperately wanted to call somebody in the U.S. and tell this lucky person that we were on the Great Wall, but Mom restrained him and reminded him that it was 1 am for Marshall, Grandma, and Nanny, and none of them would like to be woken up at that time in the morning no matter how great the Great Wall was. To get down from the Wall, we took a small rollercoaster that rambles down from the top of the wall down the mountain. The rollercoaster landed right in front of a bear exhibit, so we took pictures of the lazy bears, I ate some meat on a stick, or chua’r as it’s called in China, and we headed back on the train to Beijing.

That night, Mom and I headed out to watch the Acrobats at the Chaoyang Theater. The show was fantastic, and all the acrobats did amazing things. It almost made me scared for them as they balanced on each other’s shoulders or on a metal rod inserted into another acrobat’s mouth. I can’t imagine how painful it would be to mess up on one of the tricks. The coolest thing about the show: we were in the front row!

The next day, Mom and Dad were parting ways, and Dad flew down to Shanghai on business, while Mom had a few hours to wait in the airport. I met her there after my Chinese class and we had lunch and Starbucks together until it was time to board. It was so great having my parents visit in Beijing, and I got to show them so many things that I love about the city, and they seemed to enjoy them too. Dad’s favorite was definitely the Silk Market, and Mom lugged home a new set of golf clubs, a suitcase, and various articles of clothing and electronics from his exploits there.