Wandering Around Looking Up Cameron Hummels' Notes on Science and Travel

Learn, Play, Benign!

Pictures will be uploaded as I get better Internet access. Stay tuned.

For whatever reason, Chinese people seem to be fascinated with garments that have nonsensical English phrases on them. My favorite so far was a T-shirt with the three words: “Learn Play Benign” on its front. I’m not sure if the owners of garments like these actually know what they say or not. I suppose these clothes are equivalent to the tattoos that many Americans receive with some random Chinese characters. You know, the tattoos that we’re told mean something like “Awesome Dragon”, but more likely they say “I’m with Stupid.”

Tomorrow morning, Erika and I will head to Mongolia on a 31-hour train after having spent the last 9 days in China. We’ve seen a lot here in Hangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing from the Olympic Stadium (Bird’s Nest) to the Great Wall. Let me give you a list of highlights and a little history.

Shanghai, one of the largest cities in the world at ~20 million people, seems like a really cool place to live, but it doesn’t have a lot of sites to see. Considering its size, the city is to some degree lacking in history beyond a couple hundred years ago. I think the main reason for its wealth and size is, strangely, English drug dealers. In the 19th Century, the English declared war on China in the First Opium War. Essentially, they wanted to import opium to China to make a huge profit by getting the Chinese population addicted to the drug, but the Chinese government wanted to limit the amount of opium imported. Because the English had superior firepower, they won, and claimed “concessions” in several cities in China, one of them being Shanghai. The concession in Shanghai was a region controlled by the English called “The Bund” in the center of town. Throughout the next 200 years or so, violence would come into the country in many forms: peasant revolts, Japanese invaders, etc. Business owners from the provinces would flee the danger and come to international areas like the Bund because of the safety the English borders brought. Effectively, this concentrated a huge amount of people and wealth in cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong. Shanghai reminded me a lot of New York, with its modern stylings, skyscrapers, good subway system, and virtual indifference to foreigners.

Anyway, Erika and I spent two days in Shanghai visiting The Bund, the financial district called Pudong with its enormous Pearl Tower and a few of the tallest buildings in the world, the former French concession (yeah, the French were in on the concession business too), People’s Park, The Old City, and various different restaurants around town.

Traveling with a foody like Erika means food is going to be an important point of our day. Shanghai is known for its dumplings, so we made several visits to different dumpling stands: street carts and in restaurants. Generally they were steamed or fried and filled with pork and cost about 50 cents for 4-5 of them. Yum! Another specialty of the region is fresh seafood. In the evening, seafood restaurants will have their fresh catches alive in buckets and tanks on the sidewalk in front of their stores. If you want to eat there, you pick out whatever fish or animal you want to eat, they mark it somehow, cook it but leave the mark so that you know that you got your fresh fish. We went to one such restaurant, which was teeming with fish. They had about 10 different kinds of fish, squid, octopus, scallops, gooey ducks, razor clams, oysters, frogs, urchins and a bunch of things that I didn’t recognize. I ended up picking out something that looked like an enormous earthworm, because it looked the strangest, but the English translation for it on the menu was “intestine” despite the fact that it was some sort of wormy sea creature. E got a tasty looking fish, and the chefs cooked each up really nicely. Mine actually did have a similar consistency to intestines, so it will remain a mystery for the ages what I ate, but it was very delicious.

After a couple of days in Shanghai we went to Beijing for 4 days. Whereas Shanghai is a modern, international city, Beijing feels more historical and distinctly Chinese, and for good reason. It has historical buildings all over the place dating back to the 13th century and earlier. There is Tiananmen Square–location of Mao’s proclamation of victory for the Communists in 1949 and the student riots in 1989, The Forbidden City–home of emporers going back 8 centuries, The Summer Palace–an enormous park acting as an out of town getaway for royalty for centuries, Houhai–a series of artificial lakes constructed under Kublai Khan’s direction in the 13th century, the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube from the 2008 Olympics, and of course The Great Wall of China–the series of walls built along the Northern borders of China to keep the Mongol invaders at bay.

Most people (me included) believe that the Great Wall is one continuous wall defending the Northern border of China from Mongolia, but it is actually a series of disconnected walls built and rebuilt to keep out invaders. Erika and I spent a whole day walking along the Great Wall for about 6 miles at a section called Si Ma Tai, a relatively untouristed location 3 hours drive outside of Beijing. The only people on the Wall other than our group of 20 people who arrived together were Chinese locals waiting every few hundred meters to attempt a crummy t-shirt or cold water sale. Overall it was an amazing experience with beautiful vistas and a considerable amount of climbing (I clocked a net change of 600 meters of vertical distance on my altimeter watch–yes I’m a dork.) I want to look into coming back and doing a huge hike trekking and camping along all of the existing parts of the Great Wall, but I don’t know if the Chinese government will allow such a thing or just how long this might take. Badass!

The drive to the Great Wall was almost as exciting as the hike itself what with the crazy drivers here in China. Imagine if you will roads clogged with motorcyclists, bicyclists, buses, tractors, cars and trucks each carrying their respective loads. Now imagine that no one really cares about ideas like “right of way”, traffic lines or speed limits, they just care about getting wherever they are going as fast as possible, everyone else be damned. Now you have a good idea of how traffic is here. We saw constant situations on two-lane highways where drivers (like ours) would come up on slightly slower traffic and move into oncoming traffic or on to the shoulder to pass the slower vehicle accompanied by a honk to let the other driver know what was going on. The cyclists make everything seem more dangerous because they are everywhere, and one rogue move by one of the chaotic drivers could have devastating consequences for them. E and I were going to rent bikes at one point, but we didn’t find time and I was pretty nervous riding here even after lots of experience on New York City streets and riding the West Coast Highway from Portland to San Diego. I think it was a wise move not to join in the frenzy.

Well, it is late and I have to catch a train in 5 hours. I have loads more to discuss about the trip though, but I’ll leave you with a story.

In the middle of Tiananmen Square is an enormous memorial to Chairman Mao, which houses his embalmed body. Several days a week, people are allowed to briefly view his body in its crystalline tomb, so I coaxed E into going down one morning to check out old Mao. We arrived to find an huge line wrapping around the memorial mostly consisting of native Chinese. I approximated it at about 5,000 people. We queued up along with all of the other Mao-lovers and found that the line was moving at a good clip; however, about 30 minutes into the line we discovered that backpacks and purses were forbidden at the entry point. Erika, being the altruistic one she is (and not caring too much to see an old bloated Mao) was kind enough to take my backpack and wait for me while I continued in the line, but I held onto my camera as I was surreptitiously photographing the crowd and police who shouted at us to stay in line. I kept imagining that I was waiting to get a loaf of bread as one used to under communist rule in Asia. As I approached the security counter, now having waited about 60 minutes, I saw a sign in English that said cameras were prohibited along with backpacks. Oh no! Figuring that the jig was up, I started to leave, but then I realized that I could outsmart the Chinese officials. I stopped short to tie my shoe and I stealthily slid my camera into my sock (this is a little Canon elf, not some massive DSLR we’re talking about). When I got to the metal detector, I stuck my sunglasses in my pocket, so that when I beeped, I pulled out my sunglasses and they figured that was the source of the metal detected and pushed me along. Awesome! Of course, there were so many security around from that point on that I didn’t want to pull out the camera for fear of being arrested and sent to Chinese prison, but at least I didn’t get kicked out of line. Anyway, a few minutes later I got to see Mao in all of his discolored, waxy glory. He looks like a bright yellow, wax statue lying under a crystalline dome with a Chinese flag covering his body up to his chest. There is some speculation that his body may be fake, but the police usher you past him so quickly that it is hard to make any definite distinction. All in all, this proved an interesting experience to see so many reverent Chinese citizens cleary very somber about seeing this important historical persona. Maybe we should start embalming our leaders in the West and putting them on display to the public–first up, George W!