Archive for March, 2008

Cuandixia, Beijing Municipality, China

I kept saying that I was going to find a ‘village’, but I never imagined I would end up somewhere quite so small as this. According to the signs, Cuandixia has 76 old courtyards. I can’t believe it’s that many, but I have not tried to count:

Cuandixia is located 90 km west of Beijing’s urban area and covers an area of 5,33 square kilometers. Conservative development and construction has been carried out here since 1995. Established 500 years ago in the Ming Dynasty, the village boasts the best-preserved historic folk dwellings. There new remain 76 courtyards and 656 houses built during the Ming or Qing Dynasty.

The village faces the south. It is established by the mountain, taking Longtou (dragon head) Mountain as its axis, and extending in a fan shape. The layout is compact in picturesque order looking like an ingot, and forms the hilly country courtyard dwellings which show unique features. The style is unrestrained, delicate, and exquisite with unique decorations which are rare cultural classics of historic villages in northern China attracting numerous domestic and foreign tourists. It has become a qualified shooting base for movies & TV programs, as well as a base for still-life painting. The tourism resources of Cuandixia are abundant. The green valley, clear spring, old roads, and divine ponds all add to the natural aura to the historic village. After fully enjoying the style and features of the historic vilalge, you can also stay in the old residences of the Ming and Qing Dynasties for some days, experiencing their richly tasteful charm. The four seasons of Cuandixia are beautiful. You can feel the spring charm of the historic residences in the spring, enjoy the mellowness, freshness and coolness in summer appreciate the red leaves in autumn and welcome the Spring Festival with auspicious snow in winter. The village is now a historical site under national protection, a national grade-A tourist attraction, the most valuable historic village of tourism, and one among the first group of famous villages of Chinese historical culture. [muy sic.]

Cuandixia, established by the mountain.I have been here for ten days and only plan two more. When I first set out to study somewhere smaller and less Anglophone than Dalian, I never really had a ‘village’ in mind, to tell the truth. I more had in mind a small city. Regardless, this village was recommended to me, so I decided I had to try. Its proximity to Beijing was a selling point – it is, in fact, still in the Beijing municipality. When I realized that this was listed in the Lonely Plant China guide (just barely a mention, but its there!) I worried that it would be too touristy. I’ve found that it is nothing but a tourist village. While many tourists do come, they are all coming from Beijing and all on the weekend. I’ve barely seen more than a handful here on each weekday. The most immediate benefit of this being a tourist town is that it is clean and beautiful. Really, very beautiful, which is something not to be said about most of well, all of North Eastern China. Courtyard homes, most of which are now guesthouses. The other benefit is that, as far as lodging, these old courtyards have mostly all been turned into guesthouses. Within one minute of arriving in town, an old man was making head-on-hands-as-pillow motions at me, and beckoning. I followed him down an alley and found myself in a gorgeous little old courtyard. For 50RMB I got a room with a giant bed (intended for four people, in fact) and, of all things, a computer with DSL (on which I now write this). I told the mother and daughter who run the guesthouse that I was thinking about staying for a while if I could find a teacher. They told me no way, there are no teachers here, sorry. I went for a walk that afternoon and asked a few of the random old locals I saw the same thing. They all said no. I decided I would at least stay the night and then think about trying another town in this region.

The next morning, I slept in until ten-ish to hear a knocking on the door, “wake up, your teacher is here!”

Turns out, the mother and daughter had made some phone calls and found a friend of theirs in the bigger town about 5 miles away whom they thought up to the job, a woman of about 30 years of age. I, groggily, went out and met her. She said she’d never taught before, but if I wanted to, I could try a lesson that day. So I got out my books and spent a little while getting ready. The lesson went decently and I thought, whatthehell, I’ll give it two weeks.

And now its been two weeks and I’m ready to go.

I don’t dislike it here. The mother here made a deal with me that I can eat what they eat when they eat, rather than ordering food from the guesthouse’s menu, and I’m getting three meals for 35RMB per day. And it is absolutely some of the best food I’ve had in China. I honestly cannot remember the last time I’ve eaten regularly like this – my edges are softening by the hour. The room I’ve got is very comfortable, with the big desk to study and all the internet access I want for 5RMB a day. The studying has been very productive. While I’ve not added to the wixicon hardly at all, as I swear someday I’m gonna get doing, I have been practicing a fair amount, and I’ve been really hitting the characters hard. I must have stuffed a good few hundred more up there by now.Temple, mountain. Finally, the hiking around outside town is wonderful (and the only thing helping counteract all this the regular home cooking). Into the mountains that shoot up on every side, the stone-paved paths pass old temples as you leave town but then become windy foot paths that pass little caves and lead up – much scrambling later – to wide the views of the tops of enormous cliff faces.

Painting new bricks old.All these great things aside, I can’t stay here. For one thing, I’m not really practicing much Mandarin outside of my 2 hour lessons each day. The ladies of the house are busy all day, and everyone else in town, well, I don’t really have anything to talk about with them. If they’re not workers busy with rebuilding ancient Qing courtyards with red bricks then painting those red bricks grey to look like stone, then they’re too old and so don’t speak proper Mandarin and I can’t understand a word they say.

If there’s anything these past few weeks of travel in Northeast China have shown me, it is that Dalian really is a very nice city, and I’m tempted very much to go back and study there. If I did that, I would be hard to do it right, but it could be done. In the meantime, I’m meeting my parents in Hong Kong in a month, and I don’t think I can resist taking the scenic route to get there. First I have to go back to Dalian to shuffle my snowboard and other associated crap to Beijing so it’s ready a month later to force upon my poor parents on their way home. After that, maybe I’ll go to Hohhot in Inner Mongolia, check it out to see if it’s a good place to study, and then I’ll start journeying south towards Hong Kong. So, if you enjoy reading me blag on and on, the good news is you should have a lot more to read than if I were to stay here in Cuandixia writing characters all day.


View Larger Map

2008-3-11, Aboard the Dandong to Shenyang Express, Liaoning Province, China

There’s something about Dalian that I just can’t write anything while I’m there. I didn’t write once in the four months I studied there last year, nor once in this last week that I very well did not study there. When I feel that things are familiar and routine, I don’t feel like I have much to say. I know that this is a mistake, as just about anything I could write about China would be neither familiar nor routine to my loyal readers (all four of them).

It is impressive how little I can achieve in a week. I arrived in Dalian Monday morning off the sleeper train from Harbin, a ride that was quite a bit more comfortable than the train I now ride (but twice as long and ten times the price). I had grand plans to figure out a way to ship my snowboard back to California, to buy a new camera – continuing my long series of finanicial contributions to Canon corp. – and to get lots of work done on this website (you’ll notice I’ve started importing my Central American travelogue and soon my Indian one as well), and to get something onto my and Chris’s yet-incubescent (why is incubescent that not a word?) grammar-wiki, wixicon.org, as well as get some financial stuff in order and maybe look into planning the rest of my life. Some of those things I sort of did and some not all. I blame the smokiness and slowness of the various net-bars at which I attempted productivity. My current plan, to study in a “village” somewhere, involves a good deal of use of an internet connection somewhere, but what I’d failed to realize was just how depressing Chinese net-bars can be. The have a policy of putting them in basements or else covering the windows, lighting them poorly, and encouraging smoking. What’s more, many of the other customers are engaged in networked video gaming with each other, and as such must, in all reasonableness, shout insults at each other across the room. And don’t you forget that shouting in Chinese is a special kind of shouting. I won’t need a good internet connection, most of what I plan to do is entering text, but I’m very much realizing that if I’m going to be at all productive at doing so, I’m going to have to search well for the least terrible of PCs to use.


Orange Hmong in her Orange Home

As far as the other things I wanted to do in Dalian; I found out that private shipping companies would only be a reasonable deal if I was shipping one thousand snowboards to California, and China Post won’t accept something so long. So, the board, along with various other junk, I’ve just left in Dalian. Luckily Shinji and Nali have a new big bright orange apartment and have agreed to store it for me (even after storing my body on their big orange sofa for a week). Buying a new camera I did achieve, but disappointingly so. Canon, and other non-Chinese, non-crappy brand cameras are quite expensive in mainland China. The basically equivalent camera to the one I just lost would have been more than US$100 more than what I paid on Amazon.com. I just couldn’t bring myself to spend that much, so I bought a lesser model for only sightly more than what I’d paid before. While it’s a fine camera, I’m starting to think I should have just bit the bullet and paid for the better one. But now it’s too late. Better to not lose things at all!

From Dalian I grabbed the bus to Dandong on Sunday (after failing to get up early enough and pack fast enough on Saturday). I decided to try something I’d never done before, namely surf a couch listed on couchsurfing.com. I first heard about this website a year and a half ago, while hiking the John Muir Trail. The idea is that welcoming people list their couches, or spare beds, or floor space, or whatever, and before coming to their town one can contact them and possibly stay at their house. The more people whom you successfully host, or the more times you stay with someone without any trouble, the more references you get on the network, theoretically assuring your trustworthiness to random strangers.
Xiaxu and Hui / Brain and Anna
I had my place in South Korea listed, but no one ever came there, so this time in Dandong was my first experience using the site. I stayed with Xiaoxu, a.k.a. Brian, and his eleven year-old daughter, Hui, a.k.a. Anna. Brian is fluent in English, and extremely kind. He said he’s never stayed with anyone on couchsurfing.com, and has hosted people once before, reportedly and American, an Estonian, and a Pole all traveling together. He was very keen on practicing his English, and it seems he wants to expose his daughter to English and to make foreign friends. In the bargain I got a really good experience of staying with his small family and he and his daughter walked me all around town.


One and a half bridges to North Korea

Dandong (and I’m not sure what all Chris sees in it) is itself not very exciting. My main motivation to go there was, to be honest, my obsession with North Korea. Dandong lies on the Yalu River, and sports one and a half bridges to the DPRK. The half bridge is thanks to long-ago American bombers, and rather than tear it down, the Chinese have left it as some kind of political statement. One can walk out to the end of it – but only after paying 20RMB. Brian, Anna, and I ate lunch at one of a few restaurants in Dandong owned by the North Korean government. Moral questons aside, the food was quite delicious, and the Kimchi was, reportedly, Made in the DPRK. And besides, who am I to miss a chance to talk to some North Korean waitresses. Also at the restaurant was a man claiming to be Chinese, live in Italy, and to have studied in Pyongyang 20 years ago. He said he was in town to sell raw materials to the North Koreans, and asked my held deciphering the English on a poorly imprinted Chinese customs stamp. There was also a Spaniard and his hisponahablante Chinese associate, with whom I did not speak, and whose shady business with Kim Jong-il I can only imagine.


Into the darkness

As far as North Korea itself, all I could see across the misty river was some old docked boats, some buildings that, for all I know, aren’t even real, a still Ferris wheel, and absolutely no movement with the exception of periodic Chinese trucks rumbling back across the bridge. At night, The Chinese side of the bridge is brightly lit with colored Christmas lights. Then the lights stop, and there is all but darkness. The North Korean riverbank had perhaps 20 dim lights, spread out, and a truly eerie lightening-like flickering, illuminating the low clouds from behind a hill. Brian suggested it was a malfunctioning transformer. He should know, as when he was “my age” he worked in a transformer factory.

This morning I visited the Cenotaph of the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea, a large museum and monument built on a hill overlooking downtown Dandong and the Yalu river.
Panoramic diorama to show The Volunteers heroically defeating the Imperialists and their Running Dogs.
The bilingual exhibits venerated the courageous Chinese “Volunteers” Army, and offered many interesting distortions of history. But the opening up of China seems to have lessened the ability to brain-wash. Brian for his part refused to go into the museum “because it’s all just propaganda” and when I asked Anna, who accompanied me through the exhibits, if she believed everything, she told me “oh? Sorry, I wasn’t reading the signs.”

2-27-2008, Vladivostok, Far-Eastern Province, Russia

Vladivostok is not a shithole. Yes, it is a dirty old city. It has very few sites to lure a tourist into the cold winds. It’s strangely expensive. On the boat from Korea I was told that getting around, eating out, buying drinks, were all as expensive as Seoul, and I would now say perhaps more so. Ten dollars for a modest lunch and four dollars for an espresso were pretty standard. Some bread, cheese, sausage, and a small tub of various things suspeneded in mayonaise (the Russian idea of salad) from a small deli could be over eight dollars for two. (Perhaps this price difference is why there are about ten times as many little groceries as there are restaurants and cafes.)

I find it hard to imagine where the money from these high prices goes. According to my young Russian friends, a normal twenty-something’s salary could run from about ten to fifteen thousand rubles, or, four to six hundred dollars. And the twenty-somethings I know seem to like to go out at night, having nice cell phones, buying snowboards at twice their U.S. prices, etc. Even sometimes hosting strange foreign boys pro bono.

Another strange contrast, particularly stark in Kamchatka, is between the inside and the outside of the buildings. Most everybody lives in old apartment buildings clearly built in the Soviet era. The interiors of the apartments that I visited were very clean, modern, and nice. If not terribly large, cerntainly up to Western standards. But the exteriors of these buildings look like some seriosly ghetto shit. Not a one has been painted, sophmoric graffiti aside, since Gorbachev at the very latest. Many have metal siding on the ends, rusted to such a degree as to give a strangely ship-wrecked yet boxy appearance. The stairwells are littered with junk and have recieved much more piss then fresh paint for many long years. Whoever is in charge of these buildings, and I failed to inquire most are publicly or privately owned, feels no need to maintain them. Admittedly the price of shipping building materials cannot be cheap. In respect to the maintaining of public placses, Ulya, a friend Harold met on the way to Kamchatka, explained that all the money meant for public works gets invariably detoured into corrupt pockets.

While the streets and public squares are indeed falling apart in Vladivostok as well, the buildings in the old downtown are very beautiful. It’s clear these were built before somebody had the idea that the proleteriat liked ugly buildings. Walking around the colorfully painted almost baroque banks and shops of downtown it’s hard to agree that this is still technically Asia.

* * *

Our first night in Petropavlosk, somewhere into perhaps the second bottle of Vodka, Harold and I were discussing early impressions of Russia. One of these impressions was strongly shared by the both of us, but I can’t possibly phrase it better than he:

“I didn’t expect that in Russia most of the girls are hot.

“And the rest are super-hot.”

I must admit I as well did not expect just how rediculously ubiquitous the whole being hot thing is in this suddenly very appealing of countries. The girls are a bit like heli-boarding season: I had been warned but realistically can’t expect to have known better.

I have long been familiar with the suggestion that bright pigmentation, such as blonde and red hairs, blue and green eyes, developed in Northern European peoples as a result of sexual selection. Lack of tanning salons made for pale, Vitamin-D friendly skins and light pigmentation in general. This allowed interesting colors to show up on various parts of some lucky genetic freaks’ bodies.

Before much of Northern Europe became today’s high-taxed, clean, well-run industrial democracies with boringly high standards of living and boringly low levels of gun ownership, life up there actually really sucked pretty bad. According to one theory (which I either read somewhere or just made up somewhere else along the way) a very high proportion of men had a habit of dying, and women with brilliant full-bodied blonde hair and bright blue bedroom eyes were better at winning the seminal affection of what hardy men were left. A few milenia later and my own blue eyes are not even so special among my pasty kin.

What was once Sweden is not so far from Russia today, as far as recent figures on young male death rates here are concerned (somewhat different causes aside). A friend of mine, long before I planned on coming here, contended that the same evolutionary forces that gave me my nice blue eyes didn’t stop at the eyes with the Russian ladies. Russian hotness is the result of plenty of selective pressure for nice other things too, he insisted. When he then admitted to recently having broken up with a Russian girl, I disregarded him as biased.

Turns out his knowledge of physical anthropology was only so true as my own in situ research could prove. I feel a little apprehensive to quit such studies, given that I will be heading to a country with a long history of an opposite gender imbalance, and thus an aesthetic physical philology open to many theoretical interpretations I’m not quite ready to publish. Nevertheless my current (self-administered) grant is to fund studies of the Chinese language, and so I’ll be getting on the 6:00am direct bus to Haerbin tomorrow. Even if Mandarin is also sounds less pretty than Russian.