China: A Whirlwind Tour

After midterms a month ago, I had a one-week break, so my parents decided to come and see the most they could of China in the least amount of time. In the two weeks that they were here (they arrived half a week before I got out of classes, and left half a week after I started back up again), we made it to Beijing, Xi'an, Guilin, Shanghai, and then back up to Harbin. Phew!

In order to get to all of these places, my parents had booked everything with a travel agent before they came. At first I was not a big fan of the idea of being escorted everywhere by tour guides and staying in big, foreign-owned hotels the whole time, but after midterms I was just glad to stay in comfortable rooms and let somebody else worry about where we were going.

The first leg of the trip was Beijing - my parents had already been there several days when I arrived, recovering from jetlag and doing all of the touristy stuff (Great Wall, Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, Ming Tombs, etc). Instead of joining them, I spent most of the weekend haggling with electronics dealers and trying to get a hold of things that were hard to come by in Harbin. What should have been relatively simple transactions turned into a hassle - every time I think something should be easy, I just have to remind myself that I'm in China, and there usually is no easy, convenient way of doing things. For example, my first day in Beijing I bought an external hard drive, only to go back to the hotel room to find that it doesn't work with my computer, my camera, or my mp3 player. So I went back the next day and tried to get them to let me return it. After walking fifteen minutes to their company headquarters with the salesclerk (who calmly explained to me that they do not under any circumstances accept returns, even if the merchandise does not do anything it is advertised to, and even if she said the day before that I could bring it back if there were problems), I then spent the next three hours demonstrating that the frikkin thing did not work in any way. And then once they admitted that the thing didn't work, it still took them another hour to agree to give me a refund, because apparently it is against their company policy to give refunds even if a customer can conclusively prove that their product is a piece of junk. A nice and relaxing start to the vacation...

After that I tried to refrain from running errands (although I must admit that I looked in every town for a good electronic dictionary), and instead just tried to focus on enjoying the vacation. When I wasn't yelling at salespeople, the time in Beijing was more relaxing - on Saturday we went out to dinner with Christy and Matt, who used to work with my mom and who now works in Beijing (they were also the ones who let me stay at their house on my occasional stays in Beijing). On Sunday we wandered around the lake at Beihai Park near downtown, ate Peking Duck with my friend Pat (who is studying in Beijing this quarter) and then went out to see some Beijing opera, which was a bit screechy for my tastes. On Monday we flew out to Xi'an in the afternoon. First, though, we took a pedicab tour of the Hutongs, Beijing scenic back-alleys. On the way we stopped at the home of a family who had decided to make some dough by opening up for tourists so that we could see what life along the hutongs is like. The mother was good company, and had some funny responses when my parents asked about her family and whether it was really all that great to have her mother-in-law living with them all the time.

We were only in Xi'an for two days, but it definitely had some good sites. Our tour guide was also pretty entertaining; my dad likened her to the Chinese version of a valley girl. She was a bit ditsy, but in an amusing way, and we didn't get stranded anywhere so I guess she did her job. The first site we went to was the Big Goose Pagoda, which was originally built to house the 1,335 volumes of Buddhist scriptures brought back from India by Xuan Zang, a Chinese monk. Next door was the Tang Dynasty Arts Museum, which had some interesting exhibits on the original layout for Xi'an, the symbolic meaning of the dress and makeup of Tang dynasty concubines, and examples of the brightly colored "farmer paintings."



[Me and my parents at the Big Goose Pagoda]

That afternoon we made it out to Xi'an's main attraction, the Terracotta Warriors. The Terracotta Warriors were commissioned over 2,000 years ago by the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, Qin Shihuang, who united the country and, as it usually goes, also massacred and enslaved lots of people. The main focus of the site was the three vaults, which contain over 7,000 terracotta soldiers, all lined up in formations of officers, bowmen, infantrymen, and cavalry. In addition to all of the terracotta figures, they have also found two life-size chariots with accompanying horses made out of bronze. The largest vault was discovered in 1974 by a farmer digging a well - now that same farmer still sits in the gift shop and gives signatures to people who buy his book. He doesn't seem particularly happy with this arrangement, as tourists are constantly trying to get his photo and he's taken to holding a fan in front of his face at all times to prevent them from doing so. I wonder why he doesn't just leave. Anyway, despite the unhappy ex-farmer and the hordes of tourists and hawkers, the place still managed to maintain a historic and even kind of mysterious atmosphere. I think I can say it was my favorite sight on the trip.




[1&2- The Terracotta Warriors, 3-One of the bronze chariots]

We still had another morning in Xi'an, so we spent it downtown, banging drums at the Drum Tower and attempting to eat slippery dumplings despite our limited chopstick skills, which gave the locals a kick. Then we went on a scavenger hunt to find the Great Mosque, only to find that it was right behind the Drum Tower the whole time. It was a pretty interesting place, with more historical artifacts than they seemed to know what to do with, but we ended up spending a lot of the time there cursing the guidebook's completely inaccurate directions and our resulting sore feet (especially my Dad). Then it was a quick cab ride back to the hotel (after a protracted attempt at actually finding a cab that wasn't trying to charge us about 5 times the actual rate), and we were on our way to the airport to go to Guilin.

Guilin is in southern China, in the state of Guangxi. It is known for its natural beauty, although that reknown has ended up turning most of the place into a tourist trap. The whole town was accustomed to having foreigners around, and had figured out how to best use us, either for our money or for our language - we didn't wander outside once without someone coming up and wanting to shepherd us somewhere in order to practice their English with us. But I was just grateful that we were in the south, where the weather it was much warmer than in Harbin, way back up by Siberia. Anyway, we spent our first full-day on the Li River cruise. The Li River is famous for it's big, dramatic limestone peaks. One particular landscape even made it onto the back of the 20 yuan bill, which we found out as we saw everyone pulling out twenties at once and running to the back of the boat to take pictures. The cruise was cut short because the river level was extremely low - we could see the river bottom for most of the trip, not to mention hear it when the boat scraped at certain points. But I suppose it was a good thing that we only went along part of the river, as our abbreviated cruise still took about 5 hours (not to mention the bus trip to even get out there). Despite the general haze, it was still pretty scenic, although not as scenic as the coffee-table books that they kept trying to sell us (which must have been photosphopped pretty severely, having seen the actual place). At the end of the cruise, we got off in the tourist town of Yangshuo. Walking around Yangshuo, I realized we could have just as easily been in Panajachel in Guatemala or in any small town that has built itself up to host the backpacker traveller types who are willing to shell out for brightly-colored souvenirs and chocolate pancakes.

On the way back, our guide tried to convince us to stop off at Shangrila, some tourist-trap of an island where you can see "native life" or something like that, but nobody on the bus was having it. Yet an hour later, despite our clear collective grumpiness, she stopped the bus and announced matter of factly that "Now we all go see the peh-ting zeer." Nobody knew what she was talking about, but the couple next to us wagered that we were at a petting zoo. Turns out it was a painting museum. At first we all mutinied and refused to get off the bus, but then one German lady got off and spoiled it, so we all figured we all go ahead and get it over with. The result was that we got to sit through the exact same presentation on Chinese calligraphy and freestyle painting that I have seen in every other city I've been to, and then walk around pretending to look at all the paintings on display. We eventually got home, but not nearly soon enough.




[On the Li River Cruise]

The next day we spent touring some smaller sites. The main focus was the Reed Flute Cave, which is an underground maze of stalactites and stalagmites with multicolored lighting added for effect. It was pretty cool, and we managed to fit ourselves in between the large tour groups so that we could see the formations without 100 people in front of us, elbowing for a view. We also saw some interesting smaller parks around town, including one with a big elephant-shaped rock which is apparently quite well-known. It was a nice, relaxing half-day, and we even had enough energy that night to go see a song and dance performance by some of the local indigenous groups at the theater next to our hotel. The whole thing was set in the countryside, and most of the song lyrics were about farming and nature and traditions, but most of the actors were teenagers or young adults who looked like they couldn't bale hay for the life of them and had probably grown up in the city. It was a bit strange - I tried to imagine the indigenous residents of the town I lived in in Guatemala going to the city to start a show where they sung about how happy they were to work in the coffee fields, and that made it ever stranger. I guess I can't really make a social commentary on it, considering I was in Guilin for all of 2 days, so I really don't have enough of a grasp on the situation to say anything insightful.



[The Reed Flute Caves]




[The indigenous groups' performance]

After Guilin we had about a day in Shanghai. I hadn't really wanted to go in the first place, as I'd already spent 5 weeks there over the summer, but it turned out to work well as an overnight stop on the trip. We walked along the Bund (the bank of the river in the old German concession), ate at a nice restaurant (M on the Bund, which I'd been to once over the summer for a heavenly brunch), and enjoyed the view from the hotel. Then the next day, Sunday, we flew up to Harbin. My parents were staying at the Longmen Guibin Lou, an old European-style building where the last emperor of China had apparently lived for a bit while he was being used as a puppet by the Japanese. It was a huge, empty place, and my parents remarked that it was just right for Halloween. I started classes again on Monday, but my parents managed to find their way around just fine without me and without speaking any Chinese themselves. I spent most of my time with them going out to eat, and we had a couple of good meals with my roommate and suitemates. Then on Wednesday morning they were on a flight back out to Beijing and then the states, and I was back off to the daily grind.

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