kun shan

I stayed two extra days in Xi'An, doing nothing but sucking in the pleasant atmosphere of the aesthetic parks, the bustling downtown, the kited ancient courtyards. When I finally left, it was on an overnight train heading east, back towards Shanghai.
I decided to make an impromptu stop in Kun Shan, which, thanks to a new high-speed train making it a mere eighteen minutes' commute from Shanghai, has now been resorbed as a hefty addition to Shanghai's tumescent metro area. Thomas Friedman called Kun Shan one of China's four or five Silicone Valleys in The World Is Flat; it's a wealthy little suburb of about a million people, boasting miles of manufacturing plants and factories, in which a significant hunk of the world's semi-conductors, computer peripheral parts, cell phones, fiberoptics and solar energy panels are being churned out by propsering Taiwanese-owned-and-operated companies looking for cheaper land and labor than available in flourishing Fomosa. The Chinese nickname for its downtown, rife with business owners' expensive-looking spawn and Taiwanese cuisine, is therefore 'Little Taipei'.
My aunt and uncle, themselves both Taiwanese, own a pair of companies that profitably make and manufacture industrial scales and computer gaskets. They moved to Kun Shan nearly a decade ago to save on operating costs, and, due to the area's rapid growth, have prospected land and labor options in rural China and Southeast Asia. I spent a couple of nights recuperating from satiated wanderlust in their gated community, quiet save for the patter of two boisterous golden retrievers.

xi'an, continued.

Xi'An's other major ticketed tourist spots are the old Bell Tower (a traffic roundabout bedecks it now), the complementary Drum Tower (across the street, behind a bumpin' Haagen Dazs), and the Big and Small Goose Pagodas. The Towers mark the axis of the downtown area, around which spiral unpretentious live music venus, neat coffee houses and bars, and, most notably, the Muslim Quarter.

I spent about two days wandering through that delightful maze, tasting (lots) of local delectables - kicky, garlicky shredded pork, sandwiched between lettuce doughy, baked starch; lumps of sweet gluten sprinkled with candied dates and sugar, skewers of glazed fruit, heavy twists of cinnamon-laced bread. Open-air butcher shops buzzed with flies and smelt of blood and hooves, tourists, hawkers, children packed the narrow streets. Further down, Muslim women swathed in linens sold apothecary curiosities, brocade, lacquered treasure boxes, incense holders, jade and ivory jewelry. Less exotic stands resembled any American Chinatown, offering faux designer scarves, handbags, sunglasses, luggage. Overhead, kites flown by children in the Tower courtyard drifted lazily through a cloudless sky.
Negotiation is an integral part of the culture of Chinese commerce. Nepotism and networking dominate a disproportionate amount of white collar business. Western taboos like bribery and insider trading are more or less standard practice, although the recent influx of wholly-owned foreign enterprises, international joint ventures, and multi-national corporations setting up shop in China have curbed these tendencies, or at least brought them into question. I have mixed feelings about these deeply unegalitarian but firmly-rooted cultural practices being slowly strained out by globalization, but after business hours, on the streets, and particularly here, in the heartland, it’s clear that the customs’ spirit is still routinely exercised. Haggling, which frugal I had swiftly adopted and polished in urbane Shanghai, is a procedure that resembles a courtship. It goes something like this:

Customer: How much is it?
Vendor names price
Customer: What’s the lowest price?
Vendor names price typically at 20% discount
Customer names price up to an additional 50% discount
Vendor laments the economy; redacts price to a 30% discount
Customer restates desired price
Vendor laments current operating costs; redacts price to a 40% discount
Customer states desired price a third time
Vendor acquiesces; transaction transpires

Three times a charm; incredibly, buyers and sellers in open-air markets are almost always able to come to an agreement. It’s a fun little dance, if you’re up for it. Unfortunate are the ignorant who don’t know the standard script; unenlightened are the meek who back down at the first sign of obstacle.
I picked up some souvenirs (and man, was the haggling fierce in touristy Xi’An – the first bad sign was that the hawkers spoke English), and then sat down for a traditional entrée – a thick, hard slab of bread grated into a savory lamb broth – for dinner before retiring.

xi'an.

I so anticipated the impending trip to the States that I failed to venerate, in a timely manner, the nicest few days of my travels.
On the morning I left Tibet, I was starting to feel a little weary of the road. Two days spent retracing bumpy tire tracks from the Nepalese border back to Lhasa and the prospect of another fifty hours in a hard sleeper train were, together, draining. I decided to break the trip into two segments - a thirty-six hours detour to Xi'An in small ShaanXi Province, chased by two days of recuperation before taking a sixteen-hour train from Xi'An to Shanghai.
Xi'An, the ancient capital of terracotta-warriors-fame, can be analogized to the American Pacific Northwest, in that everybody in China loves it, but nobody (relatively) actually lives there. It's famously livable - a sleepy two million neighbors keep it cosmopolitan to a practical, but not overwhelming degree. An independent artistic stronghold, its film and music scenes are singular in a country where Taiwanese-imported hip-pop blare monotonously from every stereo, iPod, nightclub, commercial break. Easy access to the same bordering mountainous zones that made Xi'An an attractive capital for eary emperors maintain its people's modern-day reputation for being adventurous, athletic, environmentally-minded. Centuries of Muslim influence are evident in Xi'An's architecture, and, more eminently, its renowned cuisine.
I knew about all this in a vague sense from living in Shanghai, and, more explicitly, from the last few weeks of travel. Xi'An, for most backpackers, is the east-west prelude to Chengdu, which is the gateway to Tibet, XinJiang, YuNan. Still, I thought of Xi'An as just another Chinese city - a convenient rest stop, as opposed to a destination.
As it turned out, I ended up lingering for four full days in Xi'An. It was a place that, upon first viewing it from the train station situated underneath the Ming-dynasty parapets that defined Xi'An's first proper borders (the city has since bled out from under them to over twice its original geographic size), it was impossible not to like. Some of the sentiment was admittedly relief - neon lights, fruit vendors, bus stops and a panoply of drug stores reassured me that I was in China proper, again - but the rest lay in the ineffable sense of comfort I felt as I boarded a south-bound bus to my hostel. It wasn't dauntingly exotic or sophisticated. It was clean, bustling, well-lit, amiable. I thought of individuals who I had liked on impact; Xi'An was the first place to exude comparable charm and warmth.
It was Friday night when I arrived. My hostel was located near to the Big Goose Pagoda, one of Xi'An's four major tourism spots. It was only a short walk from the local bus station, but it took me nearly thirty fascinated minutes to cross through the Pagoda square and the adjacent park. Dim, tasteful paper lanterns lined elegant, well-preened walkways. Sporadic streams of water illuminated by subterranean colored bulbs shot up in grass and concrete clearings, to the delight of shrieking children. Late-night vendors sold steaming paper cups of cilantro-flavored stew, glazed candied fruits and roasted chestnuts. And music! I passed a live garage band of teenagers playing at a small crowd with no discernible age demographic. An old woman chortled falsetto Chinese opera, while a make-shift band of tired saxophonists and drummers swayed around her. I was most amazed, when, following the sound of traditional xun and flute melodies backed by thumping bass beats, I discovered, like some fairy bacchanal, a packed plaza of middle-aged Xi'Anese doing the electric slide in time to the music, which was coming from a stereo set duct-taped to a bicycle.
I was in high spirits when I checked into the Square Youth Hostel, and in even higher spirits when it became evident that the owners didn't have a strong grasp on the concept of a hostel, and had instead built a brand-new, luxurious hostel-priced apartment complex. My six-bed 'dorm', for instance (which remained unoccupied by anyone else during my stay) boasted a balcony, washing unit, and fluffy feather comforters. It was nearing midnight then; I strolled back through the park, sat down, and enjoyed the warm night air, full of fragrant scents and music.



After a restful night's sleep, I spent my first day knocking off the terracotta warrior museum, situated about an hour outside of Xi'An. Here, stoic stone figures stood guard in menacing formation in vaulted showrooms (just like in my seventh grade textbook insets!) The tomb of the megalomaniac Qin ShiHuang, China's self-declared first emperor, located about twenty kilometers from the warriors, remains unexcavated.

zhangmu: nearing nepal.

From through the broken window of the internet cafe, in this charming mountain hamlet overlooking the Nepalese border, I'm watching (smelling) a man cauterize the bloody stump of a yak head with a small flame thrower.


Nepal's a funny country, geographically (and geologically) speaking. The northern half incorporates the better part of the Himalayas, making it the most mountainous country in the world. The southern portion slopes towards India, and its eastern neighbor is the enigmatic Bhutan. To reach the border meant rappelling, by dilapidated van, down through the Tibetan Plateau. We rested in Zhangmu, a bustling (really!) border town laid out vertically along the slope of a misted mountain.

Here, Han, Tibetan and Nepalese folks sold batteries, knock-off Northface coats, Pringles chips, turquoise jewelry, Tiger Balm. It was the first city we'd seen since Lhasa, and we were ecstatic to drink beer, eat fruit, take showers, use the internet. Five or six different languages were being exchanged out in the streets; it was a relief to be able to communicate in Mandarin again, and, for my companions, in English.
At night, we clinked Lhasa beers (full, foody) to wish two of our group safe travels through Nepal and India.

EBC.

By the time we made it to Rongbuk Monastery - four bedraggled days later - we were a little dispirited - by the long, lonely roads, the tiny, impoverished villages, the lack of sustenance. (Tibet, for all its blue skies and beauty, is terribly inhospitable in nearly all other respects. Nothing grows; food is imported from China proper, and, as such, is costly and generally non-perishable. The trip's diet consisted mostly of plain chapatis and soda crackers.)But then, almost suddenly, there we were, at the world's highest monastery, looking, on an unusually clear, cloudless day, at the world's highest mountain.


We settled into one of about fifteen tents nestled in the rocky valley running perpendicularly toward Everest.


"The Yak and Yeti" was indistinguishable from its neighbors; a stove, which also served as a furnace, was wrapped around a support pole in the center of the tent. One continuous bench marked the periphery, where we'd sleep head-to-toe. Two flaps cut into the tent's slopes let in frosty sunlight.

The trek to the Base Camp - 5km from the Yak and Yeti - felt like walking across the imagined terrain of a strange moon. The roads was full of clefts and dips, framed by igneous boulders and small valleys of purple and green pebbles. The sky was very blue; it was frigid and windy and the air up here - 5,200m high - was noticeably thin. In the far-off distance, Everest loomed like castle. Progress was therefore slow; we paused more than once for water and to rub some circulation into our raw ears and noses.

Finally arriving at the Base Camp - frantic prayer flag streams and a small cluster of Chinese foot soldier tents - felt like a mighty achievement. We were lucky, we were told; the weather had been particularly forgiving, and afforded us a brilliant view of the mountain.

We returned to the Yak and Yeti, and picked at oily noodles and played cards until the sun set (Everest blushed soft pink), after which I skipped outside to stare at the brightest sky of stars yet. The next morning, we would continue on the trickiest bit of the trip - the drive to the Nepalese border.

gyanste to tingre.

Leaving delusionally pretty Nam-Tso and Lhasa behind, we forged onward to the south and to the west, where we'd eventually hit the Nepalese border. First, however, there was the matter of a few more monastaries, the most notable one being the Tashilumpo in Shigatse, a city-shrine to the scholar-politico, and lama Tibet's second-in-command, the Panchen Lama. Here, symbolic offerings of pens and pencils, alongside the usual flutter of paper money were squished into walls, taped to pillars, buried in the vats of yak butter that served as candles.
The food in Shigatse was a welcome reprieve from stale, oily yak meat noodles on account of Shigatse's being Tibet's second largest city after Lhasa, as well as a strong Han presence.
We took a night in the significantly more provincial Gyantse as well, where traffic was a function of local goat-herding timetables.

Next was Sagya, the first in a line of smaller and increasingly rural townships along the so-called Friendship Highway (where the boulders havebeen shoved aside to make room for goatcarts or suvs or our dusty, banged-up Chinese van).

The ride was peppered with dry, dismal patches of shelter where no roads or running water, or electricity visit. Squalid, which means that the occupation of every single villager living in these remote, beautiful huddles of huts is beggar. The children - all smiling, dirty, friendly - tried to sell us pebbles and gum. A pair of urchins in yak-less, dismal, garbage-infested Tingre - one, still in the crotchless onesie of pre-potty-trained Chinese kiddies, offered us cigarettes for 3RMB. His friend, no more than 5 or 6, swung a makeshift switch of broken bungee cord and rocks and sticks maliciously toward anyone who refused.

the empty road.

Most of Tibet looks just like that - beautiful and boring as hell. Turqoise lake, gaping gorge, snowy, cloud-laced mountains. . . for hundreds of miles. It gets a little grueling, particularly if one lacks even a rudimentary working knowledge of geology (by day). By night, distant galaxies become pronounced. For city-dwelling I, it was all fascinating; I stood outside for as long as I could bear the cold each night, neck craning, eyes wide.


Glacier-gazing:

A photogenic bathroom (a loose term) break near Shigatse-

Mountain villages en route to Kathmandu-

nam-tso

Nam-Tso is one of four 'holy' lakes in Tibet (still don't understand quite what that means, except 'holy shit, it's beautiful!'), and, at 4,700 meters above sea level, holds the obscure superlative of world's highest saltwater lake. 'Lake', however, seemed to me an off-putting description of a body of water beginning under a startlingly near snow-capped range and extending to distant horizons, where the light and its reflection on the emerald waters became altogether indistinguishable.





Prayer flags in Tibet are everywhere. At Nam-Tso, they formed rippling, rainbow hypotenuses from high, craggy rock cliffs down to the water's foaming edge. I read that the colors symbolize the ancient elements, which was a particularly fitting correlation here, where white light cast by a crimson sun illuminated the skies, the seas and the earth.



After sundown, we watched the stars - of the entire, shimmering Milky Way and beyond. From this (numerically insignificant but visually soul-changing) vantage point, we counted about a hundred shooting stars, before bundling up and falling asleep to the persistent howl of mastiff mongrels.

the bends.

"The symptoms of altitude sickness," wrote my worried father, "are brought on entirely because of the elevation and thin oxygen content in the air. As a result, the brain tells the body to hyperventilate (unconsciously) to bring in more oxygen. Don't push yourself. If you don't feel well, find the quickest way to descend."
Tibet lies somewhere in the ballpark of 4,000m above sea level. I had virtually no context for regarding altitude prior to this trip, only a mounting sense of paranoia towards a condition I assumed (like just about everything else) could be shrugged off with a hot shower and a long nap. The fear was chiefly brought on by the assiduous preparations being taken by a couple members of my young, fit, globe-trotting group. They ate, beginning three days prior to arrival, exclusively fruit and bread. They took their daily Diamox; they drank water perfunctorily and obsessively. And, perhaps as a result of too much preemptive mental stress, which can increase the heart rate, which at high altitudes can induce additional oxygen depletion, they got sick.
The rest of us escaped with mild headaches, which evaporated after the third day.

lhasa.

It's good to be king, before 1959.

Tibetans, we realized immediately, are much, much better looking than Han Chinese. They're also quite a bit sweeter. The children ran up to my (Dutch and German) traveling companions to practice their English. Everybody smiled; nobody hollered. It was warm, and the sky was a magnificent shade of blue. Lhasa, at first glance, seemed suspiciously perfect. Portola Palace, like a luscious, strawberry layer cake-in-the-clouds, holds an impotent, innocuous court over white picket pedestrian fences, perfectly-hemmed hedges, outdoor fruit vendors, cheerful cookie shops. Pretty, subtle Jankhor Temple, with its bastions of smiling pilgrims, sits swathed in brightly-colored prayer flags, amidst the hustle of the large, outdoor market, in which turquoise trinkets and furry hats are being gently hocked to an amalgam of Han, Tibetan and Western passersby. Pleasantly-voiced public service announcements, aired over sporadic gold megaphones affixed to bright white lamp posts, reminded us that dental care was a personal priority.

(I was glad, presently, that I hadn't emptied my pockets on outdoor apparel in Chengdu, the more loosely regulated Lhasa economy was host to plenty of handsome, knock-off North Face goods. Gortex + soft shell = 100rmb.)

We spent our first day touring the immaculate Portola Palace and strolling the manageable surrounding areas. It's a rather young, liberal American attitude, I think, to suspect religious politicos. In contemplating the China-Tibet issue, of which I really have very little information, I was trying to get a sense of why, to teach and observe a religion who preached immaterial absolution, the venerable lamas should reside in some severely bejeweled, five thousand rooms. The gigantic gold stupas, encrusted with egg-sized coral and turquoise hunks - which we would see throughout Tibetan monasteries - were being visited by Tibetans hunched with poverty. Alms were being shoved in the stupas' foundations. Paper money meant for the exiled lamas rained down from the upper levels of the Portola and rotted, untouched, in the gutters. Meanwhile, smaller alleys revealed a grittier Lhasa, where toothless men and dirty children begged anybody who didn't look Tibetan, presumably for more alms to stuff into the ostentatious altars. Hunks of hooved, raw yak meat hung from bloodied butcher counters. Flies gathered, nested. The stink of the yak butter smeared on oily prayer flags and altars clung to our clothes. And long parades of soldiers - with shields and automatic weapons and loads of cigarettes and bad teeth - trampled on withered fruit and loose alms that had presumably rained down from Portola.
Our motley band of five bilingual strangers hailing from a combined total of four countries and possessing, in addition to those passports, four additional unrelated ethnicities, afterwards dined together on spicy lamb chops, fried momos and Lhasa Beer.

the qinghai-tibet railway photolog.

Views from the top of the world-

We left Chengdu at 8:30PM, September 18

Dusty Gangsu Province by dawn. . .

. . . becomes an afternoon of reading, backed by occasional waters.

Evening ascent towards the Tanggula Pass (~5,000m high!)

We wake on the second day to. . . snow!

The bluest skies I've seen all year. . .


Ice-cream mountains roll by for listless hours. . .

. . . until finally, at 5:27, September 20-!

a little r&r

I enjoy traveling alone for all the normal reasons - I like to arrange my own itinerary, it's always easier with one, etc. Then there's a whole pastiche of personal reasons, which can largely be summed up as I'm anal-retentive. I think most folks prefer a little leisure and extravagance when on holiday. I'm agreeable, to an extent, in company, but when I have my own way, I go into what my laptop calls Better Energy Savings mode. I'll live in the same clothes for days, and take on one meal per day. I can function relatively well on relatively little sleep, and I'll put this advantage into overdrive when I'm on the road. Frugality is as much as habit in life as it is an obsession while traveling.

To top it all off, I'm impatient as hell. Timeliness and speed are important to me. I hate waiting on others. I'm judgmental of people who can't keep up physically. I'm cheap. When avoidable, I don't eat or sleep. So, I suppose the bigger reason I enjoy traveling alone is that I'm terrible to travel with. Of course company can be nice - it was good, for instance, to bounce would-you-rathers off Candace, Joyce and David during the (infinitely) long hike up Huang Shan; Stephanie's welcome presence enlivened Nanjing considerably; I wouldn't have gotten so down and dirty in Shanghai nightlife had it not been for Phil & co. But, generally speaking, there it is.

Having time to kill, however, before taking off to Tibet and reminding myself that relaxation is the catchword of the Sichuanese, I wandered down to the southern end of Chengdu, and, as if by magic, stumbled upon a gem of an English bookstore, The Bookworm.

The bar / cafe / library / bookstore, with branches in Beijing and Souzhou, lent me one of its leather couches for the afternoon. I went a little wild; I ordered chocolate cake and port, and spent several hours curled up with a few different volumes, plucked from high mahogany shelves that seemed to go on forever. It was entirely excellent.

jiu zhai go

The Valley of the Nine Villages is populated largely by Tibetan and Qiang minority families, and sits just to the north of the epicenter of May's big earthquake. It was not known until the 1970's that the Min Mountains were host to a fantastic, almost mystical series of lakes - undisturbed for so long that the water takes on a deep aqua-purple color under the right light.
It was overcast, however, when I spent the day trekking from lake to lake, realizing that, despite my predilection for creature comforts and cultural sight-seeing, that being alone, in the mountains, by the water, in the cold, can fulfill on a completely different level. The water, anyway, looked like this:



And like this, a little higher up:



And like this, when it's serving as a reflective plate for the vain vegetation surrounding Mirror Lake:

huang long.

I was starting to feel a little apprehensive, prior to landing in mountainous northern region of Sichuan Province - a slight shift north-east of the epicenter of the big earthquake - were these two days of hiking going to take the wind out of Tibet? Do I even like hiking? Were the dreamy photographs of the area's two principle reserves - Huang Long and Jiu Zhai Gou - to be believed? And, it looked bloody cold out there!

I realized in Chengdu that a lifelong aesthetic distaste for athletic wear and gear had left me woefully unprepared for three weeks in the mountains and the cold. I'd wandered idly and ignorantly into a couple of trekking apparel stores only to discover that-! This shit was expensive! And unwarranted, because the same puce-toned fleeces and body-bag backpacks that I'd shuddered at in Amherst apparently hadn't yet gone out of fashion. I had left in a huff, and instead spent 114rmb (about $16USD) instead at a Chinese supermarket on two pairs of shiny waterproof pants and two breathable "bamboo" jumpers. If I was going to look like a moron, I was going to do it on the cheap.

The sight that greeted me upon landing in Jiu Zhai Gou swept away all stresses and grumpiness. We were high up in the Minshang mountain range, where snowy peaks and stratus clouds reigned. And rained (but only a little). It was surprising and beautiful.

The Huang Long peaks - at an altitude of about 3,200km - would be a respiratory appetizer for Tibet. I began to feel a little light-headed during the ascent. I met and chatted with the only other lone hiker in sight, Yan, who, at 22, was about to enter his final year at Durham University in England. He talked a lot, and was pretty funny. He also bore the burden of a whopping SLR with a little cache of lenses, spare batteries and memory cards.

Huang Long's travertine basins are its pride and glory. And stunning they were! - all smoke-lit and luminescent, the color of swimming pools :

Lovely, right? Apparently, Yellowstone's got a famed collection of travertine terraces as well. . . which I might have known, had I ever bothered to get nature-y in the States.

Yan and I commiserated over the timing of our trip - just about two weeks too early to catch the ripening autumn colors rippling red and gold frames all around the exquisite aquamarine pools. To our disappointment, we found that another section of basins were blocked off due to earthquake-related damages. When we finished the trail, Yan took my arm and marched us into the ticket office, where he insisted on getting our reserve admission tickets refunded because of the inaccessible areas. The woman shrugged him off.

Yan then asked to use her phone, and dialed the recreation area office. He demanded a sit-down with somebody in charge. It was getting late; I was feeling a little restless and hopeless about the whole operation. To my surprise, the recreation office sent two managers out by Jeep to the ticket office. Yan went on a pursuasive and hilarious little diatribe, weaving an intricate story of crushed hopes and blown savings, in which I was cast as the confused and litigious American, and he, the poor but patriotic college student.

In the end, we didn't get our money back, but they loaded us up with a ton of crap from the gift shop. 'Not bad, Durham.' I offered him my hand. 'Nice work being my bitchy American girlfriend,' he returned, handing over the bag of DVDs, books and keychains.

hot! pot.

The sallow cheeks and strikingly small stature of the Sichuanese do not betray the culinary peculiarity associated with the region an experience in which traveler's curiosity, coupled with ignoble hubris, led me to partake. It was by far the most unique dining experience I'd ever had.
BiXia, precisely eight years my senior (by curious coincedence we share a birthday) was seated across from me. Between us, straddling the diameter of the large hole cut into the table, was an igneous cauldron of mephestous, red oil and lard, bubbling and foaming like rapid, predatory jaws.
This was the infamous Sichuan hotpot. At the core of the metal basin rested 'the chaser', a cup of clear broth into which some sparse-looking herbs and a quarted cod carcass had been tossed for flavor. Flanking the viscious conconction wa a bowl of minced garlic and a dish of diced cilantro.
To the left of all that, we lined the three bottles of water we'd preemptively purchased across the street.
Our meal, bland and ecru-hued, soon arrived. Cabbage blooms, raw tofu, sprigs of mushrooms and bean sprouts, gluton cakes and heavy udon were ceremoniously sacrificed into the volcanic pit. Each morsel surfaced momentarily, bloodied, before going limp and falling back into the hot pot's molten depths. We waited for the food to cook, and following my companion's approval, began chop-sticking steaming, zombified food onto our plates.
Sichuanese fare is typically described as 'ma la' - 'la' being the obligatory 'spicy' and 'ma' indicating a hyperbolic (or so I thought) 'numbing'. After a few intensely spicy, but more or less manageable, bites, all oral sensations of taste and temperature had been replaced by an uncanny tingling sensation. It spread out across my lips, up through the cavity between my nose and mouth, and down into my throat, where it seemed to melt the flesh away, like carbonic acid.
Soon, eating was a solely purfunctory activity. We mechanically scooped floating bits of fibrous carrion into our mouths. We chewed, eyes, noses and brows running. We swallowed, paused to afford our ravaged pipes the courtesy of water. Rinsed; repeat.
"I don't reckon Sichuan men try to drink one another under the table," I remarked (gasped) to BiXia, an ecology professor from Fu Zhou. She pointed out that it wasn't tenacious dudes, drunk off cabbages that dined all around us that Mid-Autumn Fest eve, but families. Babies and geriatrics, I supposed, were all busily numbing out there digestive systems to simaltaneously facilitate the feeding. To my mind, it all required a certain degree of madness. By the time we settled our check, we looked as though we'd been sobbing for hours. I thought that we'd probably consummed a little less than a quarter of the veggies we'd ordered, leaving the rest to float and bloat.
I imagined my stomach to be a vat of hot oil and fire. I could feel it roar when I stood up. The lower half of my face had lost sensation altogether. BiXia cheerfully walked and steered us hostel-ward.

sichuan, baby!

Feeding time (every three hours, or so) at the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Facility




"I'm so cute, I exist despite my species' staunch proclivity toward extinction."




"Is there a carbon monoxide leak in here?"

The rail station at Chengdu resembled every other rail station I've seen in China. The Chinese, I later proposed to friends newly made, haven't suffered the luxury of metropolises long enough to internalize the need to escape, to nature, to solitude. Shopping malls are still a novelty. The surrounding area, too, was generically Chinese. Dusty, dirty commercial centers, lots of cabs and cars. Only this was Sichuan, and not Shanghai - Chengdu, while a junior Chinese cosmopolitan of eleven million strong, still lagged behind its coastal counterparts in many respects. There was no subway system. Squatter toilets would be the norm.

Chengdu - and Sichuan at large - is notoriously care-free, to the point of scornable laziness, to the mind of the typically type-A, fashion-forward, money-driven Shanghainese. (Fitting that the giant panda, mind-blowingly lazy/cute spetial leech makes its home here.) It's also, I discovered, a backpackers' haven. Chengdu is the gateway to a number of attractive adventures - the last big Chinese city before the mighty Tibetan Autonomous Region to the west; exotic XinJiang to the north, and the splendid southern Yangtse River regions of Yunnan and Guangzhou.

Sichuan itself is famously beautiful. Magical, mist-shrouded mountains and mirrored lakes line the northen region. Cultural minorities and their farms and ponies and snow-capped pilgrimages can be found in pockets along the southern and western borders. I decided that Jiu Zhai Go, a picturesque reserve 330 km north of Chengdu was a must-see; the Shaolin mountains nearer to Chengdu would make good day trips; Tibet, if accessible, would be a treat.

the long grift.

The train ride from Shanghai to Chengdu, the centrally-situated capital of Sichuan Province, takes thirty-six hours. I'd harbored some real, rose-colored projections regarding this transport - sunrises searing a changing landscape; lamp lit nights tucked into a soft sleep bunk with a book while the host locomotive jetted west-ward through the night; refreshment trolleys loaded with Hogwartsian sweets. In my fantasy, foreign love and paternal porters lay just beyond the next cabin.

The dream, alas, was speckled with fallacy. Hard sleepers were economical, not to mention the only available way to travel. Hard sleepers, from what I understood, resembled concentration camp bunk beds. There were no walls; just head-to-toe layers of thinly-mattressed cots. 'Locomotive', also, was a romantic mental euphemism for a rusted train with paint-splattered walls, dirty linoleum, and two squatter toilets per car. I decided almost immediately to volunteer myself for thirty-six hours of unconsciousness, which I achieved, more or less, successfully. I polished off a light and appetizing novel and one apple, and commenced with coma. I was roused periodically by porters vending instant noodles or gruelly rice porridge ladled from a wooden cauldron on a cart, but rather successfully staved off nutritional, excremental and conversational activities until we neared Chengdu, one-and-one-half days after boarding the train.

The woman occupying the adjacent bunk immediately offered me bread and fruit upon my awakening, perhaps thinking that I was gravely ill for not having eaten or stirred much since Shanghai. We conversed in the way I parlay with everybody I meet in China: I let them do most of the talking, and lie in the convenient direction when asked about myself or nod in agreement. I surmised immediately that she was a working class lass - most likely somebody's hired help. She was returning home to Chengdu for the first time in three years. The thought of a three-year absence from anywhere - the States or New England or New York or home-home in California still makes me nervous, although time began to pass more anonymously and smoothly somewhere around the eight-month mark. In July, loneliness crested; desperation reared. Today, however, newly arrived in Chengdu, I felt good.

interrupting. . .

. . . regularly-scheduled nothingness to pen pensives re: the following itinerary:

9/13 - Chengdu
9/16 - Jiu Zhai Go
9/18 - Tibet
9/30 - Kathmandu OR Chengdu
10/3 - Xi'an

小 資 .

There are lots of ways to blow dough in shanghai. There are German cars and Italian leathers that line big, glassy boulevards. You could book the private bower at the Cupola, and have dinner and champagne for two in the ballpark of $2,000. You could have a *really* wild night on the Bund; you could buy art (if this is your fancy, you should call me). yYou could spend a wad of cash to get out of shanghai - to Hainan, to Yunnan, Xinjiang if you're a culturally adventurous, Japan if you're a baller, Singapore if you're corporate.

Pretty much everybody, though, who spends any significant time here, has chosen at one time or another flash cash at the Pacific Digital Mall at Xujiahui. Xujiahui, be noted, is a fantastically futuristic nexis of consumerism. The subway stop has sixteen distinct exits, each pumping queues of Chinese people into separate shopping havens. On one end, resembling a silver layer-cake, is Grand Gateway Plaza, a high-end mall so glamorous it has its own cab line. On the other, the giant chrome globe of Metro City lords over the steroidal intersection of three major avenues. Dwarfed by this sensation is the demure, but never forgotten PacDigital Mall.

I'm not a big techie, but it's hard not to get excited at the sight of the entrance (itself an extension of Exit 10) - the first of eleven floors of electronic fantasies, each one with possessing the inviting, solicitous gleam of the floor-sized cosmetics counters of any major department store.

The first two floors alone are devoted to cameras and photography accessories, which is where I first jetted, to haggle for a new telephoto lens in anticipation of this week's trip to Sichuan and Tibet. (For the record, I'm now the happy owner of the 55-200mm Nikon VR.) The third floor is digital storage. Memory cards, external hard drives, thumb drives the size of thumbnails fill display cases like silicon candy. I took the escalator up past floors of palm-sized laptops, wall-sized flat screen televisions, technicolored MP3 players, and stopped at the fourth floor to pick up a cell phone, as my old one had unceremoniously bit the dust a week before. After a bit of window shopping and a good deal of haggling, I settled on the clean and tasteful Nokia 2680.

I skipped out with my packages, and crossed over to Grand Gateway. Costa Coffee pours out onto a terrace over looking Xujiahui, and it was a seasonably perfect afternoon to people watch from that quiet height, between reading and sipping designer coffee.

sorry for the hiatus, folks

I've been recently busy settling into a new job, receiving visitors, traveling and scouring the six hundred CCTV channels to catch swimming events. Once I catch my breath-

-The new job
-The Bund
-The Olympics, duh!

nanjing.

After two days of socialiting in Shanghai, Stephanie and I took the train to Nanjing. It would be both of our first visits to the historical capital, located 300 kilometers west of Shanghai, in neighboring Jiangsu province. ('Jing' is Chinese for 'capital'; Nan-jing = 'Southern Capital', Bei-jing = 'Northern Capital, and the Chinese word for Tokyo is Dong-jing - 'Eastern Capital'.)
We booked two nights at a hostel perched on the periphery of Fuzi Miao , an ancient site of Confucian worship turned, like so many other Chinese historical temples, into a glitzy nighttime bazaar.
We spent the afternoon first noshing on street meat, and then checking out the expansive, dauntingly, -almost inappropriately- hip Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum. A modern sculpture garden snaked between the stylized, industrial edifices that housed everything from Japanese wartime propaganda to excavated mass burial sites.


Following the museum, we scooted to the ancient city wall ruins to the north. Each brick - dating back ~600 years to the early Ming Dynasty - is engraved with a seal bearing the name of the bricklayer and the supervising inspector, allegedly so that should invading marauders break down the wall, the emperor could punish the responsible parties. My personal partiality towards accountability enjoys this story.


From there, we walked to Hunan Road, near Nanjing University, for dinner.


We took a break from Taiwanese fare - ancestral inclinations ruled Shanghai dining decisions - and opted for a more traditional mainland meal of stewed melons, noodles, salt-water duck, and a piquant peppercorn chicken dish that caused Stephanie to chug her tepid soda.



We strolled along the bustling pedestrian lane, sipping mango blackcurrant milk tea, until late, and dutifully retired.
We spent much of the next day taking one long, paved hike along the Purple Mountain Scenic area. Here there were temple courtyards and nine-layered pagodas offering vistas of various reserves:





It also featured several Sun Yat-Sen museums and memorials (including a hilly mausoleum), the founding father of Chinese democracy.


We'd just about had enough of sightseeing, but the promenade along the Ming Dynasty imperial tombs too fun to pass up. Stone effigies of impish dragons, lions, camels, elephants, unicorns and horses had been erected some six hundred years earlier to guard the deceased royalty, although we agreed that the visages were too cute and smiley to ward off any evil spirits.





We settled in for an earlier dinner of Taiwanese diner staples - you tiao (resembling a salty churro), shao bing (sesame flatbread), niu ro mien (spicy beef-flavored broth noodles) and xiao long bao (itsy soup dumplings) - before calling it a day and catching an early train back to Shanghai.

huangshan.

The great outdoors and I have never been on intimate terms, broadly speaking. A matter of upbringing, I suppose; despite growing up steps away from the expansive splendors of the Northern California's woods and waterfronts, I've still never been camping, and, only atop the Puerto Rican Yunque, at the un-tender age of eighteen, learned that 'hiking' was simply what white people termed 'walking', when practiced away from cement curbs and crosswalks.
In the years since moving away from California, I've rubbed shoulders with Mother Nature more frequently, though I still struggle to grasp the sense of - reward, is it? accomplishment? - that hikers seem to educe from an elevated vantage point following miles and hours of tromping through mud and insects. I'm always a little puzzled, internally, when folks stand back to take it all in, breathe a sigh of exalted satisfaction, appearing to have found God.
Still, I enjoy the exercise, if nothing else, and I do feel that there are certain things I ought to see before leaving China. So when friends from high school, on a pre-grad school vacAsian, invited me to Huangshan this past weekend, I agreed immediately. I thought vaguely that six months of loafing and chain-smoking in Shanghai could be cured with three days of mountain air and strenuous exertion.
We set off on Friday morning (after Thursday night's brief and violent ravaging of De La Coast's frat-astic open-bar). The five-hour bus ride from Shanghai took us to Tun Xi, about thirty kilometers from the foot of the mountain. Candace, David, Joyce and I checked into our hostel, and spent the reminder of the afternoon exploring the village, before turning in early to catch a 6AM bus that would take us to the base.
Wikipedia says:

The Huangshan mountain range comprises many peaks, 77 of which exceed 1,000 m in altitude. The three tallest peaks are Lotus Peak, nearby Bright Summit Peak (Guang Ming Ding, 1,840 m) and Celestial Peak (Tian Du Feng, literally Capital of Heaven Peak, 1,829 m). The World Heritage Site covers a core area of 154 square kilometres and a buffer zone of 142 square kilometres. The mountains were formed in the Mesozoic, about 100 million years ago, when an ancient sea disappeared due to uplift. Later, in the Quaternary, the landscape was shaped by the influence of glaciers. In many cases, stone pillar forests were formed.

So it wasn't going to be easy. Fortunately, I had packed my cousin's hip outdoor gear (for lack of my own); looking like a NorthFace ad does something for one's confidence in times of athletic apprehension. It was still cool when we set off. We started off with three small, warm-up hikes of about two kilometers apiece on the eastern side of the range. A rather charming tourist tradition, we learned, is to purchase a padlock, engrave it with your and yours' names, and affix it to the chain-link guardrails lining the highest peaks. Thousands of preserved romances greeted us upon reaching each destination:



The first small hike ended at a lovely freshwater stream, where we soaked out feet:


The second hike was Lovers' Gorge, originally made famous for its seamless series of beautiful streams and waterfalls, and currently known (and named) for being the natural backdrop of the 2004 film 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'. We were not, however, able to take any reprieve from the hot mid-morning sun in the water:


I love this. Analogous advisories: 'No eating the hot and delicious food'; 'No fucking the loose and limber Brazilian pageant queens'.
After Lovers' Gorge, we stopped for lunch. We sampled five local teas, and some ambiguous mountain vegetation swimming in grease, before continuing on.
The third warm-up hike was the Nine Dragons Falls. Nine slim columns of rapids, descending vertically, proved to be a challenging ascent, but we finished without the aid of external manpower.


I thought, 'if I had such a job, I'd never solicit customers and would attempt to appear as disagreeable as possible.'


Caution, commie-style

Four hours of moderate trekking was the prelude to a three-hour long stretch up the remainder of the east side of the mountain. The first stretch was shaded in bamboo forests:



As we ascended, the air grew cooler, and the foliage changed. Strange, cropped-top pine trees resembling tropical drink umbrellas grew staunchly out of rocks. We began to catch glimpses of granite pillars, cascading steeply towards treacherous precipices. We eventually reached our accommodations for the evening, situated in a clearing high (1,650 meters!) enough to see smatterings of distant lightning storms, illuminating patches of far-off forest pink and purple against the otherwise still and silent night sky. Our private July 4th fireworks spectacular, we mused.
We were exhausted, from an early morning and many hours on foot. After a brief dinner and a seemingly brief but peaceful slumber, we rose to watch the sun rise:



It, too, was brief, and subtly spectacular, to the delight of the spectators. We jostled to the convenience store and picked up hard-boiled eggs and chocolate bars for the rest of the day.
We hiked down the western side, which we discovered was a sprawling Geopark, on account of its pretty special display of geological curiosities. Prehistoric fault lines had evolved into verdant valleys. I feebly recalled my rudimentary college geology class vocabulary -intrusion here, bedding there, I think that's some coarse-grained granite- and wished a lot that I'd been better equipped to understand the landscape, which was really quite special. The weather was inarguably perfect; clear, temperate blue skies allowed us panoramic views of the area (although we admitted that we'd hoped for a little morning mist, for art and drama's sake).
We returned to Shanghai by bus that afternoon - a cramped, five-hour, air-conditioning-less ride with forty other proud and sweaty Huangshan conquerers. It was a familiar relief to see the smog and skyscrapers of Shanghai; I enjoyed myself, but am (I reluctantly suppose) conditioned to the city. I hailed a cab, and rode it pointedly to a late-night massage parlor, where I treated myself to a luxurious ninety minute rubdown and rosewater bath.

it's strange, but. . .

. . . lots of locals have not yet internalized the Chinese diaspora (or the white or black diaspora, for that matter). Visual cues are the sole determinant of ethnicity, and ethnicity is the sole determinant of cultural identity. It is presumed that white people are from Europe or the Americas, speak English, and exist within that ethereal caste of Western power and politics under which scuttle and cower Eastern features and feet.
Prior to arriving in China, I'd always felt like a bit of a black sheep physically in Asian communities. In Taiwan, local vendors looked upon me as an American. I was too tall; my shoulders were too broad and too dark from too many swimming seasons; my hair was cut funny because I'd insisted on cutting my own hair in college. I wore the wrong clothes. Taiwanese girls, despite living in a sweltering, tropical climate, didn't wear tank-tops, didn't wear flip-flops, and definitely didn't wear college-issued running shorts.
Shanghai, however, seems to have less exposure to ABCs. They're more familiar with Europe and Europeans than Americans, and China has that whole chip on their shoulder about being at odds with the West. If your face - as mine - is Chinese, it's assumed that you are from China. If you give yourself away - as I frequently do in vernacular - it's assumed that you are from Greater China.
Cabbies can generally tell that something's a little off about my speech. It confuses them because it's not in the accent or in my ability to express and converse. One shrewd driver commented that I articulated myself perfectly (he concluded that I wasn't Korean or Japanese) but that my choice of wording was too peculiar to be local (He eventually correctly guessed that I'd be reared in a Chinese-speaking household in the States).
In any case, people rarely, if ever, guess that I'm an American. When it is revealed, they ask me if my English is any good. I clarify that I was born and raised in the States also, so yes, I'm a native English speaker. This frequently perplexes people, as they consider the apparent incongruity between my appearance with the information I've just supplied.
What Chinese people have internalized though, is the glass ceiling. Racial profiling, therefore, gives foreign visages an incredible advantage. I'm full of confidence when I'm in the company of white people; I feel invincible alongside a white man in Shanghai. (No reservations? No problem! Don't want to pay the cover? Don't have to!) Chinese people, through commitment to some obstinate pride, are embarrassed of communicating in accented English, and will readily adhere rather than attempt to argue in non-native English. I've started this dirty habit of speaking in veryfast and pronounced English when I'm not getting my way. It works like a charm; the language of oppression (sadly?) is more cogent than articulate Mandarin.

summer.

Summer descends like a thick, wet fog. Monsoon season extended through late June, providing daily acid rain relief from the heat. Everything was filthy, but relatively cool. On this, the first day of July, it's blindingly bright, hazy, and humid. The women here, perpetually concerned with their skin, da (what's the English verb that means 'to use an umbrella'? Is there one?) parasols and don sundresses and espadrilles. It's a charming sight. The parks are abandoned - my handsome skateboarders no longer skid along the curbs outside work - and even the streets seem emptier.

I'm thinking about how much of American culture revolves around the summer months. We populate beaches and swimming pools, slim down or tone up for bikini season, play sports, attend concerts, and picnic in the sun. I came home from work each day to cold beer and ice cream, and collected a sun tan that would last me well into late autumn.

The Chinese, with their aversion to sunlight and cold beverages, probably don't get the same kick out of summer. I'd like to move my weekly badminton outdoors, although I doubt that Flora (in effort to become the fairest bride in China) will agree. The heat takes away my appetite for heavy, greasy local foods, but salads and sandwiches are rare and expensive. It's a good thing I'll be heavily distracted this month with visitors and trips (Tibet, Lijiang, Xi An and Qing Dao are in the line-up), else I'd miss the sun and the sea too much. . .!

come again?

Tianmu and I went to pick up takeout for the team on Wednesday afternoon. our lunch spot of choice is always a frenzy of activity. the kitchen and the dining areas are packed with busboys and patrons, and everybody is shouting orders and it's all very fast and efficient. we watch as our six set lunches are delivered almost immediately from the kitchen to the young man working the counter. he appraises the food for a moment, carefully selects a plastic bag, and, one by one, begins to relocate the meals from the counter into the bag very slowly and with great consideration. about halfway through, he appears to realize that the bag is too small, chooses a new bag, and carefully repeats the process.
for reasons unknown -TM and i are observing very closely and curiously- he decides that the second bag is inadequate, and repeats the process again. when he presents us with our order, i very seriously ask him if i could trouble him for a new bag; this one isn't comfortable for me. he, with no irony, apologizes, retracts the food, and begins to slowly dissemble and reassemble our package before presenting it again for my inspection. TM's in stitches by this point, because, because, she gasps, while everybody else's name tag is in Chinese, his reads Nicole.

cocktail culture.

I attended the opening of BarHuLu on the Bund on Saturday night. It was, as almost everything in Shanghai is, gorgeously outfitted, glimmering with mirrors and opulent to outrageous degrees. I sipped on the free-flow champagne for a couple of hours, schmoozed with locals, browsed the cocktail menu (nothing too innovative) and (more than) sampled the salmon rolls and took in the luminescent Pudong views and exquisite decor. It was a nice night.

I'm pretty certain I've been to more bars in the past six months than in the last six years combined. I nothing bars, generally speaking. In New York, the frugal homebody in me hated the idea of paying supermarket-bottle-price for one glass of red wine, and bemoaned the near, inevitable future: holding back the reemergence of buffalo-flavored finger food in the back seat of a cab while groping for loose bills in my purse. I hated how crowded everything was - a stupid complaint for one who opts to reside in Manhattan, and then China - but, really, does anyone enjoy waiting in lines for the bathroom? Elbowing one's way to the bar? Being denied the option to sit? There was a time in my life - I think I was nineteen - when I really enjoyed screaming drink orders over a sea of strangers and tripping, laden with high-ball vases, back to some dank corner to rejoin my group of idle, silent sippers, arms sticky with overflowed liquor and soda. (Must have been the novelty. Or something.)

That being said, I do like cocktails, and being served one under the right circumstances (which, for me is almost always a matter of ambiance), can be quite relaxing and luxurious. I like in a bar what I like in a cafe, ultimately - qualities that are readily available in Shanghai bars, but seem to be painfully elusive in New York. I like reclining, in a nice chair. I like lots of room and interesting decor and enough noise to fill uncomfortable silences (bars are, after all, primarily meeting places for strangers and new acquaintances), but not so much that it makes conversation an endeavor.

The unsavory pubs on one particular strip of JuLu Lu are bookended by two excellent bars by these standards - the retro boudoir Velvet Lounge and the cyclopean concrete fortress People 7. The latter, supposedly two seasons passe, still appeals to me more than Face (regrettably, of 'Shanghai Baby' fame), whose contrived Orientalism (brocade, red, silkscreen) evokes the that NYU hipster hub in Alphabet City where I fell asleep sitting up that time. People 7 is cold by contrast - a vast, ghostly greyscale lined with sterile silver votives and a mile-long, mirrored bar. I liked it immediately; I take everybody to People 7.

I checked in with worldsbestbars.com to take a look at their Shanghai listings. A few I agree with (People 7), a few I don't (Face!), but some others worth noting are described below.

Cloud 9 holds the title of the world's tallest bar. Situated on the 87th and 88th floor of the Jin Mao Tower in PuDong (which, from the 55th floor up, hosts the grandest Grand Hyatt imaginable), it feels a bit like an airplane. The ceilings are awfully low, and the drinks are awfully expensive, but when you're surrounded by the panoramic floodlights of the Bund skyline, you will forget that you're hunched over in your booth, and that the carpet smells suspiciously of shrink-wrapped wool.

I'll indulge in any chance to plug the singular, terrific Yongfu Elite, to which the web site wisely gave a nod. Just. . . check it out in you're ever in Shanghai. It might be the best food / beverage venue I've ever stepped food in. Period.

WBB also heralds Aqua, the sexy addendum to that posh waterfront Japanese restaurant Sun (with Aqua), TMSK XTD, which I popped my head into the last time I was out that way (no patrons, at ten on a Thursday), Attica, which is really a club (and a filthy, sinister one at that), Sugar, at which women may almost always drink, eat cake and receive ad-hoc facials for free, and The California Club, which I, upon visiting during my first night out in Shanghai, vowed never again to step foot in.

cafe couture, or, nice places to sit with books.

I've, regrettably, become quite dependent upon coffee. An addiction born out of loneliness, chiefly - I'd front-end my workday with an hour at the adjacent Starbuck's, and frequently top it off with a book and a carafe of good, hot, black bean-blood. I will unabashedly plug cafes in Shanghai. They simply have everything one in search of a cafe could possibly want. Free wireless internet is a given at most places, as are ample, cozy seating, and hours of uninterrupted reading and writing and sipping and smoking. (My favorite Manhattan cafe, DTUT, required a minimum hourly purchase, and was always, noisily packed to the brim.)
The most recent favorite flavor is the Shanghai branch of the Filipino chain Figaro's. Formerly, I'd been rather content with the gigantic XTD Starbuck's, which features two floors, a sprawling outdoor patio, and several living rooms' worth of plush upholstered seating.
I discovered Figaro's while ambling down the XTD east-side promenade, window shopping for bathrobes and bassinets. It's got two stories, the second of which is home to BookCrossings, an international English language "library" of sorts, governed by the honor system. This warm space is host to several floor-to-ceiling shelves novels and my favorite reading room aesthetic - antique-styled, mahogany-colored trunks and rich brown and dark green leather sofas.
For some astonishing reason (my only guess is that it's overshadowed by its boasting, branded neighbor) Figaro's is almost always entirely empty. I may singly occupy a nook of the upstairs all evening. The coffee, too, is actually delicious (though I really can't say the same for the limp paninis and bland pastry selection.)
The French Concession darling Vienna Cafe is nice, to my mind, for two reasons only - its free Thursday night movie screenings, and its chocolate-banana-rum-raspberry-puree-torte. Coffee is pricey in China, but the 28rmb Americano here more closely resembled an espresso shot. I suppose I should redact - it's also worth a look-see for its proximity to the Old China Hand Reading Room, which is down the block on Shaoxing Road. It's got a quaint museum aesthetic, many, many books in many, many languages, armchairs, smoking tables, sofas, and a view of Fuxing Park.
Worth a mention is Citizen Cafe, also set unassumingly in an alley in the French Concession. This place reminds me of the bar The Dove in New York City. . . sort of an old-world, almost Gothic decor. The highlight is the terrace, of course, although the impending summer weather makes it less pleasant.
LaBella, which moonlights as a live music venue / bar in the late nights, makes up with comfort food what it lacks in ambiance. It's not so pricey, and has a nice college coffee-shop sort of feel to it, a set of wealthy bohemian regulars to occupy its booths and a pretty little terrace.

la vie boheme

Five Fantastic French Concession Foods Spots:
For preemptive hangover cure: Charmant
For -Jesus- all-you-can-eat-teppanyaki: The Donghu Hotel
For form over function: The Youngfu Elite
For English pub slop: Oscar's
For chocolate-rum-banana-raspberry torte: Vienna Cafe

The tree-lined French Concession is my favorite district of Shanghai. The cafes are unassuming, sprawling, elegant; the stylish galleries, bars and restaurants (set in grand French former consulate mansions) have the added allure of being tucked on dark and quiet tributaries of the steroidal boulevard Huaihai Zhong Lu.
Late last night I wandered down through some of the choicest little blocks in the area, and finally settled in at lovely LaBella Cafe. Friday evenings feature a live jazz trio. I lounged around with vanilla cake and gin until near closing whereupon I found myself in the eclectic company of the Australian bassist and Austrian vocalist, two French photographers, a few assorted leisure writers and models, the cafe's charming owner, Isabella, and a tattooed mixologist. We moved out onto the terrace, and I spent the early morning listening to occasional jazz riffs, dragging from cigarettes, sipping a brand new smoky sweet cognac brew (courtesy of Mister Mixologist) and listening to this band of motley artists converse in prettily accented English peppered with French and German about art, life, freedom, New York City, Paris, California, Vienna, Tokyo. Pretension aside, I felt as though I'd zipped back to some bygone beatnik era. I thought of my friends in America - lifelong Americans who weren't chiefly concerned with expression or creating subcultures or paving the way for new generations of self-proclaimed 'artists'. They seemed to be universes away from this crowd on the terrace of LaBella.

family values.

I have this completely untenable theory that China's relations with and perception of the West would be far improved on a micro-social scale if Shanghai's male expat population didn't have 'FETISH' engraved on their leering countenances.
The trend - of overweight, aging French, German, Spanish and American geriatrics- setting up shop in China - has spawned a market for unsavory and beautiful young female companions who conflate sipping on Bar Rouge cocktails and toting Italian handbags and expensive coifs - Western-conceived material wealth, in other words, for status.
These couplings (ubiquitous!) draw secret sneers from everybody not involved in this strange little economy, which is contained almost entirely within nightclubs and Western eateries. It's sad and funny to watch the women force-adjust their Chinese palates to salads and sandwiches, which don't go down easily for a variety of cultural reasons. The not-uncommon sight of bony, overdressed, overpermed Chinese twenty-somethings and fat, happy retired bankers parading one another around encapsulates far too many sad stories and Western and Eastern stereotypes for the educated mind.

Reinforce, reinforce, perpetuate, perpetuate / makes it hard to find a date. . .

In other news, met a retired UMass Amherst poetry professor at Vienna Cafe last night. Ran all aforementioned risks by accompanying him to a(n actually delightful) sushi dinner, where we reminisced fondly about the Pioneer Valley, the PVTA, etc.

holdover.

For now, an interesting article on Chinese politics.

To be sure, we have no choice but to continue to engage with China in the hope that continued economic reforms and rising prosperity there will eventually lead to political reform. But we should reject the blind and deterministic logic that a rising China will inevitably become a democratic one. Even if we believe that authoritarian China is on the wrong side of history, so far it is doing a good job of defying it.

a bad day

Every once in a while, I hate Chinese people. I hate their apathy, close-mindedness, their ignorance, their steadfast belief in outdated notions of health, their rudeness, and, perhaps most of all, their indifference to rudeness. Yeah. It's been a bit of a bad day.
Every morning I participate in a twenty-minute long, four-subway-stop commute from Zhongshan Park to People's Square. I can't really describe what it's like to ride one of two operating lines during rush hour in a city of fifteen million. I thought about photographing the scrapes and bruises incurred during a typical week and about snapping pictures of the escalators between 8 and 9AM, but neither would really accurately capture the terror and frustration of being shoved and swept along in a sea of faceless commuters.
The most incredible aspect, to me, is that nobody seems to mind being jostled and mobbed and trampled upon. I realized long ago that my automatic 'excuse me' was a waste of breath, and that, similarly, I must not expect others to beg pardon. My uncle hypothesizes that it's all an angry chain reaction resulting from one or two unapologetic patrons of the public transport system, but I don't agree. I have three excellent pieces of evidence for believing that people simply don't mind being pushed in the train:
1. Internalization. Children ride the subway; children learn to push and shove without apology and be pushed and shoved without consequence.
2. I experience the same phenomenon at the mall, where leisurely shoppers carelessly push each other bodily, despite having lots of room to maneuver, and no apparent reason to wreck vigilante vengeance on others.
3. The Chinese aren't vigilantes. The first rule of living in Shanghai seems to be that everybody minds their own business. Folks are terribly reluctant to assume accountability for anything - or hassle anybody else for anything.
(I, for my part, try to instill a little social consciousness by appearing extra pained - groaning, grimacing, glaring - at the fifteen or so men and women bumping and tromping me at any given moment in the subway.)
To avoid the madness to as much of a degree as possible, I leave for work at about 7:30 each morning, which puts me in the People's Square vicinity a little over an hour before business hours begin. I kill this time with a book at the Starbucks adjacent to my office. I place the same order every morning - a tall Americano no milk or sugar (the default is to sweeten your beverage) to the same barrista, who not only cannot anticipate my order, but, two days out of the week will invariably mess up and add milk to my coffee. This morning I felt particularly mean; I dumped the brew out, and stonily re-placed my order. She apologized profusely (of course), whereupon I, having worked in food service for much of my adolescent years and having no patience for inadequacy in this sector, said 'I come here every morning and ask for black coffee. What can I do to make this easier for you?' She, flustered (of course) turned on the defensive and asked why I didn't drink milk - didn't I know it was healthy? I keep telling myself I won't return to the Starbucks, but there's simply nowhere else to go at 7:50 in the morning.
After an hour of fuming and reading, I cross the street. My office building - Shanghai Times Square - is rather beautiful. There's a sprawling marble lobby connected to a sprawling marble shopping mall, in which string quartets and French handbags are found. Said lobby is overstaffed (of course) with ten or twelve suits ready to take your umbrella, open the door, wish you good morning, push the buttons on the elevator. As I walked in today, I could see that the elevator doors were open, and picked up pace, making frantic eye contact with the lobby attendant guarding the Up button like a beardless bridge troll. He (and everyone in the elevator) ignored me, and the doors shut in my face. I threw my hands up, at a loss for words. The kid shrugged, turned and belatedly pushed the button.
* * *
Chinese attitudes towards other races and cultures stems from (I'd like to believe) a simple lack of accessibility. Most of China's population is contained in rural, land-locked areas, and has been for many generations. Foreigners and foreign cultures are a rarity. Shanghai, despite being an "international" city, is, from a mere visual perspective, much less diverse than what I'm accustomed to seeing in California, in college, in New York. The expats self-segregate - language being the primary barrier, followed by social culture, which is much more family-oriented among the Chinese. My colleagues - with curious and not malicious intent - ask me what I think of blacks, Indians and the Japanese. When I say - a little huffily - that there's not much to "think", the line of questioning inevitably becomes more objectionable (to my politically-tuned sensibilities, anyway):

'What do Americans think of black people?'
'What do Americans think of Chinese people?'
'What do Americans think of China?'

I try demonstrate that these types of questions are silly, by retorting with equally inane inquiries that generalize the Chinese:

'What do Chinese people think of George Bush?'
'What do Chinese women like in Chinese men?'
'What do Chinese people want?'
* * *
Seriously outdated notions, I guess, exist in every country that isn't America. Chinese people have some curious ideas about health and nutrition, no doubt passed down uninterrupted and unquestioned through generations upon generations. One that irks me in particular on this sweltering summer afternoon is their aversion to cold drinking water. Cold water is bad for the stomach, my colleagues tell me whenever I complain that our water cooler (I only just noticed the irony) dispenses only hot and room-temperature liquid. That's not true! I want to say, but it would be a moot point. I've noticed that the Chinese are strangely stubborn about certain traditional beliefs, an observation which seems to be at odds with their reputed highly-tuned technical skills and a lack of religion. I calmly remind myself that tepid water hydrates more efficiently, and silently down a glass.

food and some verses

One does not need one's own expense account, if one is in possession of friends with expense accounts. Here's a rundown of the most recent stakes (steaks?) settled in my culinary conquest of Shanghai's finest on Wall Street's dollars:


Xiao Nan Guo (that's 'southern country' and not 'grief') - The boys wanted some local flavor, so I suggested the Huanghe Lu branch (at Beijing Xi Lu) of this Shanghai staple - a modern, minimalist space, with two stories of buxom booths. I, as in all cases when each Chinese menu item isn't illustrated, asked the waitress to select some zhao pai cai - signature dishes - for us. She returned with a savory selection of Shanghainese fare: spongy gluton cakes, "lion head" meatballs (taste like childhood), soup dumplings (taste like goodness), sweet roasted pigs' knuckles (singularly responsible for atrocious CNY weight gain) and a thick pumpkin chowder.

M on the Bund - It was unanimously confirmed by poll respondents (read: the six people I know in Shanghai) to offer the very best view of Pudong, and additionally, to be "the most popular restaurant in Shanghai" by Zagat. Certainly, it boasts a swanky waterfront address (Bund 5) and a seventh-floor terrace above its lieutenant-in-noveau French sex appeal, the notorious Glamour Bar. We opened with an artistic foie gras triptych (the caramelized pineapple pate taking the cake) and lamb dumplings (Turkish, I believe) in a kicky yogurt. The service was sadly unimpressive (particularly in overstaffed Shanghai), and I and my poor jet-lagged guest wandered out onto the terrace to kill time, taking in the Pudong skyline (looking, that night, as God intended) before commencing onto continental fusion entrees - the zhao pai salt leg of lamb, and stuffed garfish. I dare to say that the food was tasty, but somewhat boring.


Ding Tai Feng - Somebody had the brilliant idea to put an epicurean spin on soup(dumpling)to (ginkgo)nuts Shanghainese street food. The flagship establishment is in Taipei, and it's nightly booked - lines of coiffed couples and businessmen waiting to pay a pretty penny for gourmet-style dumplings. We lunched at the Xin Tian Di branch in Shanghai (unfortunately, less lovely before dark) on ma la mien (noodles swimming in meaty, glutinous sauce), crab meat and the zhao pai pork soup dumplings.

Sun with Aqua - Our second dinner on the Bund - a sultry Japanese affair - pwnd the experience at M, in my humble opinion. S with A sits pretty across from M on Guangdong Lu, on the second floor of newer, sleeker Bund 3. We were greeted by a large live shark tank at the entrance, and led to the spacious seating area, where we ordered an eel hotpot, a spider roll to share, kobe beef marinating in a bubbling caramel-miso concoction and hot, dry sake for two. Following dessert (a decadent white chocolate apple creme brulee and a seriously spot-hitting mango sago pudding), we explored the bar. We sat, digesting with cocktails in a dimly-lit booth sheathed in translucent black silk curtains, watching the ferries pass on the river and the changing lights of the Pearl Orient, small carnivores pacing the luminescent wall-to-wall shark aquarium behind us. Fireworks sprayed unexpectedly over the Pudong skyline then, as if to confirm that Yes. This is money.

Herbal Legend - The South Block of Xin Tian Di on a warm spring night particularly evokes the faux-Paris the architects no doubt had in mind when they build it. Herbal Legend is dwarfed by its more prominent neighbors, namely, ZEN, Nice Paris, and the Belgian Beer Garden. The gimmick is "medicinal nourishment", and the fare was surprisingly light for Chinese food. Here, the zhao pai cai featured mushrooms, white meat, and several bamboo shoot varieties.

Yongfu Elite - A certain glamorous jet setter has been pushing this name on me for weeks. I foolishly put it off until last night, and am regretful that I've not tried harder to rendez-vous at this turn-of-the-century-French-estate-turned-British-Consulate-turned-restaurant. Yongfu Elite is nestled in the Concession district, and boasts a couple of acres of stylishly unkempt wild fruit and rose bushes. Antique sofas are scattered throughout the moonlit garden space, among the charming koi ponds, the elegant slouching willow trees and the romantic climbing ivy. The mansion itself has been largely preserved, and what might have been considered gaudy at one time - crystal pillars, dusty jade lions, mahogany archways - appealed to our shared view of charm. We dined on the first-floor terrace overlooking the grounds and under a clear sky. The food wasn't spectacular ('yi ban' is the fitting descriptor) -coconut beef, a buttered spinach dish, standard Shanghai glazed lotus roots, red wine and two awfully strong martinis - but the dining experience more than made up for any shortcomings on the flavor front.

labor weekend - 5.1 - 5.4

China's got a lot of national holidays (thirteen? I believe?). Shanghai, conveniently, has a wealth of weekend getaways within a two-hour radius. I booked a train ticket and a room in a hostel on the edge of the mythically iconic West Lake in Hangzhou for Labor Day (commemorated ironically with two labor-less days), and left the city on Thursday afternoon. The seventy-eight minute ride was disappointingly devoid of scenic counsel, and I was a little jarred to find, upon arrival, that this, the capital of Zhejiang Province, wasn't the idyllic isle I'd imagined, but rather a cosmopolitan that so strongly resembled Shanghai, it was difficult to feel that I'd left. Following a couple hours of directional mishaps (there always are), I found myself in the bustling shopping district that passerbys alleged to be near to the lake. Following a couple more hours of meandering through glitzy WuShan park and bar-studded QingBoMen, I located the hostel, and was informed that my bed had been reassigned, on account of my missing my check-in appointment by, let's see, five? hours. I opted to sleep on the sofa in the lounge, beside two collie puppies for the night, and was permitted to do so free of charge. I'd been on my feet for many hours, and slept quite immediately and soundly.
The following morning, I packed books and bikini and strolled the fifteen kilometer periphery of the lake, pausing at pleasant-seeming grass patches to progress in my reading, or to nap. It was lovely:








After sundown, I found a cafe and a blind massage parlor, and indulged appetite, shoulders, respectively.
I took a bus on the third morning to Lingyin Temple. The Temple itself is scattered along the down-slope of North Peak (sadly, the Chinese never name with pizazz). I followed the signs, unaware that an hour-long uphill hike would be there to gauge my commitment to seeing the sixteen-hundred year old Buddhist "soul's retreat".
The view from the top:



By the time I began the descent, my desire to tour a temple had waned, so I instead lunched in the surrounding village before returning to West Lake.



The last evening was spent like the one before it, sunbathing and reading, interspersed with the occasional dip. It was lovely, and by the time my sunburned, urban return rolled around the next morning, I was sufficiently brown and drowsy; weakened from a terribly relaxing weekend.

on corporate culture and customs

Our New York fund manager (J.) spent this week working out of our office. He seems like a likeable-enough fellow, mid-forties, or so, jocular, gregarious, generous, in that way that I'm starting to believe are unique to Americans and Australians. He insisted on taking us all out to dinner last night, and we obediently reserved a table at Simply Thai in expat-heavy XinTianDi, because J. professed a weakness for Thai food (Manhattan's best, he insisted, was Wondee Siam. James, if he's reading, feels vindicated.) J. first wanted to scope out the Tourneau shop across the way. I accompanied him while he (naturally) scoffed at expensive golden ticking goods. At dinner, he ordered two pitchers of mango mojitos, taking a lot of pleasure in explaining a mojito to the girls, and pouring out generous glasses to Donna (the unanimous cute one) and Qiang, our new VP. Everybody sipped politely, not really enjoying it, but saying that they did.
I understood what J. wanted at dinner. He would have liked nothing more than to see one or more of us get a little soused, loosen up a bit, tell some crazy office stories. He wanted to hear about our boyfriends and our social lives. He wanted us all to become friends. It was very American of him. He wanted to go to a karaoke bar following, not understanding that the girls' understanding of karaoke differed significantly from his and mine. He asked Flora what she liked to sing, in that insisting, aggressive American way that borders on flirtation, in an effort to put her at ease. ("You're a karaoke fiend. I can tell. You're trouble.") I could see that he wasn't really putting anyone at ease. Flora gave the response that Chinese people often give because they think you're looking for a particular answer - that is, the safest, vaguest, most uninformative response. (-In this case, "I like to sing everything." This condition is still endlessly frustrating to me. It makes information near-impossible to extract information.) J. pressed further, to no avail.
Afterwards, J. asked if anybody would like to grab a drink following dinner, as I suspected he would. The girls declined. They thought it was the polite thing to do. J. insisted. I wasn't sure what to do, because I understood that the actual polite thing to do would be to accompany him, but felt it was a little weird for me to go alone. In the end, after much negotiating, I dragged Flora, Donna and Michelle along. J. wanted a bar recommendation; again, the girls were painfully reluctant to give one. In the end, we sat at ARK for a couple of quiet rounds. I tried to be as fun as I thought appropriate. I drank whiskey to accompany J.'s tequila order, while the girls tentatively sipped pink and blue cocktails. I indulged his questions about everybody's marital status.
At one point, J. sang the praises of some ice-blended beverage at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. He happily said he'd buy one for everybody the next day, because we "had to try it." The girls chorused "no thanks, it was much too kind of him." Another uncomfortable disconnect, where each party was trying their best to be nice in best the way they knew how. "I'd love one," I declared, even though a frappachino would be a seriousset back to my current commitment to minimize love handles via minimizing artificial sugars. "Let's all go in the morning."
All in all, a bit of an awkward evening, although I cannot deny the satisfaction of paid-for designer Thai food and neat whiskey and speaking about New England and New York.