China: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles…and a canoe.

People have been saying that China is the port that surprised them the most. I’m not sure that any port really surprised me in that I was picturing something completely different from what I encountered. I would say however that if there was a port harbor that I envisioned incorrectly, it was Shanghai. From our ship we had one of the best views in the city.

The two days we spent at sea in between Vietnam and Hong Kong were some of the worst so far. It was like being back on the Caribbean. There was a storm over Japan that we caught more than the edge of. The ship started to rock that first morning and didn’t stop until we hit the harbor two days later. The movement was so much that they closed the elevators, canceled events and made an announcement telling us to “secure our cabins and proceed with caution.” I was terribly seasick but still one of the lucky ones. Ilana was so bad that she had to get a shot of anti-convulsive medication. I mostly stayed in my room at the bottom/back and watched TV and tried to sleep. I skipped most of my classes and did no work or journaling. I cannot satisfyingly explain how insane the ship’s motion was. Nothing was safe. The magnets couldn’t hold things to the walls, our drawers wouldn’t stay shut, and neither would the classroom doors. Things were flying off of shelves and Sara’s bed came up off its tracks and she fell out. The sound was also very intense. Not only was the engine noise super loud but the waves were crashing against the ship and the ship would hit the sea so hard that the whole thing would shake and it sounded like a symbol crashing. Each time a particularly large wave would hit and everything would screech and shake all we could do was laugh at how absurd it was. I wished for one big storm. I got it – and it wasn’t nearly as much fun as I thought it would be.

We were advised to get up early and watch the ship pull in to Hong Kong and it was totally worth it. Hong Kong is a bunch of small islands and we navigated them slowly and saw the skyline emerge. It was a little foggy but with everyone out there at the front of the ship it was one of the more fun port mornings. That day I bought a plane ticket to Beijing and then had Japanese food and went to the top of something called “the peak” to see the whole city, which was still unfortunately largely obscured by cloud. Hong Kong is known for its fantastic laser and light show that goes on 364 nights a year. From our ship, you could see the whole city and I rushed back to it to get a good view. As luck would have it, once a year the whole world celebrates something called “Earth Hour” where for one hour you are supposed to use no electricity. My one night in Hong Kong was Earth Hour day, which fell right at the time of the light show. Go figure. It was still a beautiful sight before the city lights started to go out at 8:30.

The next morning I was up at 6 for Tai Chi at Sunrise, an SAS trip that I signed up for for one of my psych classes. Only about 7 people showed up and we walked down to the pier and learned stretching and a tai chi sequence from a man that looked like Mr. Miyagi. It was very relaxing and I’m glad I kicked myself out of bed for it. One of the most interesting parts, for me at least, was noticing the other people on the pier’s reactions to us 7 Americans. There were a number of other people that may have been tourists or Westerners abroad that joined in with us. One guy got really into it and after some stretching lay down on the ground presumably in meditation. This made security really uncomfortable and it was a riot to watch him try and figure out what to do. Many of the Asians stopped to watch us and most took photos. They had no shame about doing this and it was odd to be on the other side of that situation. Actually, all week we were stopped by Chinese for photos. They wanted to be in the photos with us. I remembered this phenomenon from Israel where it also surprised me. According to a professor, it is a status thing for them to have a photo of themselves with a Westerner. It is like how we want photos with celebrities. It was fun but slightly awkward to be a celebrity for a week. After Tai Chi we went for tea Dim Sum that I ate and enjoyed and then I rushed to the airport. I was traveling alone, but it is impossible to be alone when you are on a Semester at Sea voyage. There were SASers all over the airport and a huge group of them on my plane; I got to sit next to a friend. Upon arrival I exchanged currency and got my hostel’s name translated and headed to the taxi line where I ran into another SAS friend. Her name is Anna and she was headed to the same hostel that I was so we rode together and shared a room. It was a good thing that I found her because the other girls I was supposed to be meeting at the hostel never came.

sunrise in beijing!

 China is the first place we have come to that is experiencing a season other than summer. It was cold enough for a coat and the trees were bare. It looked a lot like New England actually and the temperature was invigorating. On the way there Anna and I talked about the transition into countries that look more like home. We were thrown into poverty and then slowly worked our way back into the first world, making our transition home much easier than if we had gone around the other way and ended after Ghana and Brazil. We agreed that even though we have two more stops, China feels like our last port and that it will be smooth sailing from now on (hopefully literally). The International Youth Hostel where we stayed was a fascinating place. It was on the bottom floor of a hotel, you would go into the elevator and push “-1” and be taken down away from the gold trim and fake plants and into a college dorm.

the hostel

hostel bar

 The walls of the hallways were covered in painted messages from former guests. There were sayings of inspiration, art, and the classic “Joe was here summer ’08.” The hostel rooms were bare bones to the extreme, just four beds and a locker. We shared our room with a Ugandan family that didn’t like us and that we didn’t like. One of the women was 8 months pregnant and she and another woman and a man stayed in the other beds and had loud conversations when Anna and I were clearly sleeping. Also in the hostel/hotel there as small “dining hall” that had the best spring rolls I have ever tasted and a beautiful bar that looked a lot like the Lyon’s Den. There was a piano and also an Asian harp and a pool table and a ton of book and movies on shelves. There were also a ton of fish, in tanks, bowls, and in flower pots. Anna and I went there each night and talked to the other guests. We met some Danish teachers who were traveling with their high school students in China for 10 days. Denmark seems like a great place. The hotel had a tour operator that we used to buy tickets to the Beijing Opera, the Great Wall, and an overnight train to Shanghai. That first morning there we asked the front desk how to get to the Forbidden City. “You go light, then reft,” she told us and we laughed about it for a good long while on the way. We got a little lost on the way and finally found ourselves in a giant open space. I started to cross it as quickly as possible because we needed to get to the Forbidden City to meet our professor who was acting as tour guide when Anna suddenly stopped and said, “I think we are in Tiananmen Square. Indeed we were. I got chills looking around and realizing where I was and what had happened here 21 years ago. We did make it to the city where we ran into 200 or so other Semester at Sea students and faculty including three friends that we ended up bringing back to the hostel with us. It was great to the in the Palace but after the first three archways leading to courtyards, it gets a little repetitive. It was odd to see how many Chinese tourists there were. Beijing was the first place we have gone that has had tourists from its own country. The same was true in Shanghai.

 

anna and I

The Opera we saw was definitely a tourist version of the Beijing Opera, it was in a hotel and only 90 minutes long. It was very impressive and a lot of fun nonetheless. We got to see the performers putting on their make-up outside the theatre and the songs were translated into English (hysterically poorly) on screens over the stage.

putting on male-up

We were up early our last morning for our 3-hour trip to JinShanLing, the section of the Great Wall we decided to explore. We saw the sunrise on the way and then I fell asleep. When I woke up a few hours later my first glance out the window won me a spectacular view of the Great Wall off in the distance, winding its way along the tops of the mountains like the crooked backbone of some giant creature. We took a cable car to the top where we spent four hours hiking over the crumbling stones and stopping to take photos in the towers. We had picked this part of the wall because it is one of the oldest and farthest so we assumed it would be the least crowded. For the first hour or so we were alone but on our way back to explore the other side, we ran into a SAS trip of 60 people, including Jason.

 Being on the wall was one of my favorite parts of this whole experience. It is so majestic and so impressive that I didn’t know what to do with myself. A lot of it has been restored but it still feels as old as I know it is. I remembered as we were hiking (and it really is a hike) along it that as people died building it, their bodies were put into the wall. A fact that became even more eerie a day later when we were hit with some terrible news.

A very large number of students signed up with a tour company called The China Guide, which takes people onto the wall to spend the night. One of the dozens of groups that were on the wall last Tuesday night went for a walk after dark and two students fell down a treacherous stairway. It was not their fault, it could have happened to anyone anywhere, even in ones own house. One girl, a close friend of my roommate’s cut her leg and ended up with 30 stitches and crutches. Another girl was not so lucky. She hit her head and we later found out was bleeding into her brain. She had knocked out several teeth and was unconscious all the way to the hospital. She is still alive and able to move her limbs and breathe on her own but according to our doctor this is a true miracle. Her survival is due to a number of smart pre-med students who acted with perfect grace and timing and got her down the wall. One of the heroes, an RA from my floor, ripped a 70lb door off the nearest tower (woah) to use as a stretcher to carry the injured student 45 minutes down a completely unlit and horrifyingly treacherous part of the wall. It took 30 students to get there, 8 to hold the door straight while picking their way up and down the many staircases and a dozen more to shine flashlights and find the easiest paths. A few students and a tour guide who acted as a translator brought the girls to two hospitals, the first could do nothing, not even for the girl with a cut on her leg and the second was 2 hours away. They learned first hand the mess that is the health care system in China. The Beijing ER was so understaffed that the students had to lift the girl on to a gurney themselves and take her to her CT scan and lift her on to that as well. They reported that the doctors were in jeans and sandals and refused to even touch the student until the group proved that they could pay. The SASers were on the phone with Charlottesville trying to work out how to pay, which eventually did get worked out. My roommate was there for this whole thing and stayed in the hospital until 8am. I have left out the details of her report of all of this to me because I am hoping to forget them. For all involved that night will remain a nightmare for decades to come.

our overnight train

 Anna and I took an overnight train that night to Shanghai. I had heard horror stories about the trains in India so I was nervous. But my luck in China held and the trip was fast and easy. Our compartment even had a 4 TVs, one for each bunk, so we watched Ice Age in Mandarin. I slept 7 out of the 10 hours and then we took the subway to meet the ship, which had traveled at sea from Hong Kong to Shanghai. As we passed through security we heard everyone’s favorite phrase, “The ship has been cleared!” We boarded and no shower has ever felt so good.

 If Shanghai were an animal it would the hare from the tortoise and the hair fable. Instead of saying, “moving at the speed of light,” the phrase should become, “moving at the speed of Shanghai.” Shanghai has the 3rd tallest building in the world and is in the process of building the 2nd. Its 15 daily trains from Beijing are not enough, they are currently building a high-speed rail that is going to put the airlines out of business. It is toppling over itself trying to climb financial and technological ladders but it feels young and fresh. Everything in it is beautiful, every building has a ton of personality but they all fit together. It looked a little like Manhattan but much cleaner. Perhaps the best parts of the whole city are the signs for tourists. They are written in both Mandarin and English but the English is pretty poor in the best kind of way. I started taking pictures of the signs all over the country and the funniest ones said things like, “Tourist! Please be self-restraint. Be a good tourist in order for a well-mannered imagination.” Or, “A healthy environment is on all of us, please omnivorously divide your rubbish.” For one beauty salon they offered what I assume was waxing but it was translated as “lose hair.”

 It took me 11 countries to figure out how to get street vendors to leave you alone. You can’t be polite or rude and you can’t just walk away. What you need to do is speak to them in German. Learn one sentence, the translation is irrelevant, and then you can add in any inflection to convey that you are sad you can’t stop or just appear much more badass. They get really confused because they are expecting English and that gives you enough time to get away.

In Shanghai that first night I went to see an acrobatics show called ERA. Since I’ve seen Cirque in Vegas I wasn’t expecting to be blown away even though I’d heard that it was the number one show in China. I was totally taken by surprise, if not as beautiful as love, it was certainly just as impressive. I had to hold my breath all the way through because the stunts were so intense. On the way there the guide told us that all the acrobats are our age and most of them don’t come from Shanghai. The one child policy only applies to city people and rural farm workers are allowed to have multiple children. Since most families want a boy, they will keep having children until they get one and they sometimes send one or two of their daughters to the acrobatics school, which provides the children with food and an education while the parents get small compensation. The training sounded horrible. The guide said, “One time I went there and I saw a little girl trying to put herself into a box. She was crying and also a little bit bleeding. But when I came back 2 years later she could do it without any pain.” We could choose to see the show as child slavery, or as art. Even though they are worked very hard, they are getting care and attention that they wouldn’t otherwise be getting, and they do get two holidays during the year.

The one child policy creates a lot of stress for young people these days. Since China has become so much more advanced people are living much longer than they used to. That means that children not only have to care for their parents, but their grandparents as well. Since they are only children, the burden falls solely on them. I was talking to one woman about the stresses in her life and I learned from her that in China people prefer to deal with stress by working harder rather than taking time off. They believe that if they work hard and get ahead then they won’t have stress in the future. I thought of that as the equivalent of a student choosing to deal with the stress of writing a long paper by sitting down and powering through it rather than avoiding it and doing yoga and creating more of a time crunch. It is treating the cause rather than the symptoms.

I lucked into a free trip one of my days in Shanghai and got to go a bunch of gardens in a beautiful place called Suzhou. When you see paintings of gardens in China, it is usually this place. Perhaps even better than the gardens was a place called Tiger Hill that we stopped at before we headed home. The only way I can describe this place is by comparing it to Candy Land. There were literally places called “Hall of Crisp Clean Autumn Air” and “Sugar Plum Palace.” There were hundreds of thousands of tulips of all colors and colorful parasols hanging from trees and people in odd clothing everywhere. At the top of the hill (which used to be an island in the Pacific before the ocean receded) there was a tall and leaning old structure that is only open to Chinese and only once a year. If I didn’t have photos to prove it I would say that I made the whole place up in a hallucinogenic trance – but there really were giant flower balls lining the paths and a woman in a costume playing a mandolin from her balcony.

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Our last day I went to Eue (sp?) garden and ate at a gourmet Pizza Hut where I sampled wine, btw – if you ask for white wine in Asia they bring you whisky or some other hard alcohol. P.s. if they tell you it is “spicy,” beware. The shopping was good so I made my first totally indulgent purchase, a traditional Chinese robe-dress that looks great on me but that I don’t foresee and occasion to wear. We decided to walk back to the ship instead of taking a cab and cut on ship time as close as I ever have. 23 minutes to spare.

dumpling drink

 I’m a world traveler now. I figured out the secret of speaking German, I alone navigated a country that I could not speak the language of and I’ve been on planes, trains, automobiles, boats, canoes, motorcycles, rickshaws, bicycles and I’ve crossed every ocean and sea between Florida and Taiwan and became a shellback in the process. We arrived in Taiwan tonight; we are here for 3 days and then an 11-day pacific crossing to Hawaii where it is just a short hop back home.

hong kong harbour