And the Reason I Came

One last thought from Huangshan: here's how it supposed to look at dawn...well, maybe sunset. Funny how it's hard to tell beginnings from endings. This is actually a photo of a picture hanging in the bathroom of the hotel where I ate dinner. Yes, the bathroom had the best view ; ) ...not that I wanna brag...

Onward to the south, to Guilin and Yangshuo and the reason I came to China!

After landing in Guilin at midnight, I catch a cab to my online-booked hotel. Sweet mercy, it's nice. By the time I shower and snack it's 2 am. I decide I am not getting up at 6 am to do an all-day boat ride down the Li River. I'll sleep in and catch an afternoon bus to Yangshuo. There was a minor adventure catching the bus as described in an earlier entry. But, drama behind, I finally see the mountains that brought me to China.

I had begun to dread arriving. Arriving means that I have to "battle" my way through a new place. Eventually, I realized that *I* was making it a battle: a change of perspective, and my reality changed. But now, I'm on the bus from Guilin, looking at a city street, wondering when we'll get to Yangshuo - the street does not look like I expect Yangshuo to look (based on what...I have no idea). The bus driver's wife yells to me "Yangshuo! Yangshuo!" and motions for me to come forward. Uh, OK, I'm in denial, but this doesn't look like the bus station on the map of Yangshuo. Well, the hotel is near the river, and the river is east of the city. So for the umpteenth time, my compass saves the day. Eventually, I match up the map and the streets I'm walking. I find Xi Jie (West Street). The hotel is near the end, down an alley. Thank God the guide mentioned that - I don't know how you would find the place otherwise. It was a narrow, narrow alley. The receptionist is ridiculously nice, speaks excellent English, and here is the view from the roof of the hotel (with a table and a few chairs to relax in).

Arriving late in the afternoon, I decide to go to the light/dancing/singing show recommended in the guide book, Impressions by San Jie. The mountains are lit up! It's really fantastic and not at all captured in this picture. A great dinner in a vegetarian restaurant, and a full night's sleep for I am feeling a scratch in my throat.

An uncle of mine recently passed away, and at his funeral my cousin read a prayer in which God, speaking to us, says, "You are utterly secure." I have been living for 35 years. I have been traveling in China for about a week and a half. I've arrived at Yangshuo three or four days past when I thought I might first arrive. I pick a hotel out of the guide book. I schedule a 9 am kayaking trip the next day. I get up, feeling unwell, cancel it. I watch the morning from the roof and feel better. I reschedule for 10 am. This chain of being has brought me to: sitting outside my hotel in a narrow alley in a small town in China at 9:50 am on February 21, 2009 as reckoned in an arbitrary calendar proposed by an Italian doctor and ratified by a pope a half-millennium ago. Also in this interstice: a Chinese couple is picking out bikes to rent for the day. What chain of being has brought them together and, together, to this alley in China? Our lives intersect for maybe three minutes. Except..she asks me a question. And all else follows.

There is absolutely, entirely, and in all certainty, no way I could have planned this, expected this, or in a wildest flight of fancy, dreamed this meeting and the days that follow. Those who believe in Intelligent Design are mistaken, but in the subject of their attention, not the process. They should have applied it to the beautiful complexity of human interaction and the myriad chance choices in a life that create love. It is easier to believe that physical law, thermal vibration, and geologic time bring order out of chaos than it is to believe that the trajectories of three lives out of six billion, each traveling through a few billion seconds, by chance, intersect. An earlier age called it the Fates: spinner, weaver, and shearer, with us as threads in a tapestry. Post-industrialization, it became the Clockmaker with us as cogs in a pre-determined machine. Leaving aside the quandary of omniscience and free-will, I prefer the image of an orchestra's conductor: you must still play your song, but there is an underlying order, a melody that unifies.

We kayak. We stop at a small village, and I mean "village." There is electricity, but the homes are four walls and a concrete floor. Water pressure for the toilet is provided by collecting water in a cistern and placing the toilet gravitationally below. The lanes are roughly cobbled. The village has been here 200 years. We sit on a patio overlooking the river as millions? have before us. Children play as millions have before. The people are just people. I'm not sure what I was expecting, it's just that I had never seen people living like this before. I suppose you can find the same in parts of Appalachia, but in the countryside in the Midwest, a small town is just a small copy of a big town.

A young couple who owns the restaurant we stop at also guides us around. She is maybe two months pregnant. They are dressed as I am used to seeing people dressed. They smile at each other as I am used to young couples smiling at each other. It's almost as if I were home, except of course I understand nothing of what is being said, the technology and housing are a mix of pre-industrial and modern - heavy on the pre-industrial, but with the trappings of the latter - and the surroundings are otherworldly.

The house on the right its noteworthy because it looks like a person ;p Click on the left one to see a child following her father on the day's chores.

Before resuming the river, we go for a short hike, to an overlook. Damn it's cool when a dream comes true. You really have to click on the panorama to see the detail.

Here's a nice group shot. We put-out in another village famous for its rice wine. It's another adventure strolling through life and the by-now-treasured rides home in rural buses on back roads. While waiting for the bus, I realize we're in front of a school - and I can actually read the sign out front! I start to take a video to capture the sounds of school kids in China, but manage to startle some kids doing chores who don't want their picture taken.

We clean up and go out to dinner on Xie Jie. We find a nice balcony seat overlooking the main intersection. Here's a pic and a movie to give you some of the atmosphere. These descriptions are brief since I covered them in earlier (picture-less) posts.

Tomorrow - well, tomorrow back then - biking through the mountains!

Dan

Flashbacks

My camera card was infected my night on Huangshan. So, as the screen gets wavy, we travel back to February as I fall asleep in a rough dorm room on the summit, ready to get up at 5 am to make a fool's attempt to see the dawn...

...well almost. Here's a movie from yesterday evening, when I hiked through the summits of Huangshan in wild weather, alone and content.

I wake up when one of my roommates goes to the bathroom. It's 4:50 am. Close enough. I put my outer layers on, having slept essentially in my clothes for warmth. Again, the map and guide signs are only kind of helpful. In the dark and cold, headlamp my guide, I make a choice at a "Y" in the path.  Instead of Refreshing Terrace, I end up at Dawn Pavilion. A good wrong turn ...no, a right wrong turn? I am glad since, as I was leaving, a group of tourists was behind me: I still want solitude. On my chosen path, it's magical: a world coated in ice, bone cold, the air still under the white pines but filled with the tinkling of iced needles, the creaking of branches, and the howl of the wind beyond the cliff's edge. Since the rocks are coated in ice, I get on my belly and inch out to the edge. I am lost in an elemental land, tolerated for a moment by raw spirits and small gods.

The grey around me brightens until I am sure the Sun is above the horizon. There's no chance of seeing it though: the world beyond the edge is lost to cloud. Having seen nothing beyond the cliffs for two days, it is almost as if the world beyond has ceased to exist, like in The Neverending Story. To explore, I head to Refreshing Terrace, the other branch of the "Y." There, is no Sun there either. But I do find my roommates from the night before. We talk and exchange numbers in the cold. And I find more wind, and more ice...

I had wanted to hike up Beginning to Believe Peak, but my leg hurts too much. I start towards the nearer of the two cable cars down from the summit. Of course, there's a sign giving hours for the new cable car. New one? After debating for a while (with myself), I decide to follow the piece of paper taped to a sign rather than the map and guide signs. I debated, because even walking/hobbling the mile from Refreshing Terrace to this point had really aggravated my injured tendon. Decision made, I proceed...up more stairs. But soon I hear inappropriately loud people, and then see them, ill-dressed for the weather - Ah ha! I chose wisely, they must have come up the cable car.

I take the cable car down. Between one moment and the next, I leave Otherworld, and see what may be seen in another season - I will be back in the summer.

Here three peaks give a hint of the glory of summer. Having been around for several thousand years, the Chinese have named every rock, peak, hill, depression, chasm, tree, gap in the trees, etc. that looks like something else or remotely reminded somebody of something else, possibly while drunk. I'm not sure what the outcrops on the right are called, but "Brothers fighting" popped in my head, the two people looking away from each other, sulking.

As I get closer, I see Yongu Monastery, where the hike to the top Huangshan began. I've told the the story of getting back to Tangkou on the not-a-minibus and taking a less expensive hotel room near Mr. Hu's. Here's the view from the window.

I clean up before heading out to lunch. As I do, CCTV9 (the English language channel) tells of a couple getting married with a scandalous age difference: she is 72, he is 97. !?!? The West has aging all wrong. Maybe it's that no matter what, everyone over 60 does morning calisthenics? Maybe it's that Confucianism, the underlying fabric of Chinese society, honors, really honors, its elders? Maybe it's being valued by society? Maybe it's eating fresh, unprocessed food? I've never seen a 97-year-old walking, laughing, falling in love. Makes you kind of believe those stories about 250-year-old monks. 

Guess I'll have to do a few flashbacks; this one has gotten long.

Good night,

Dan

Teaser

The pictures survived on the infected memory cards!! (Per Amy's confident prediction.) The virus makes the MS file structure disappear in the GUI. Macs access the data fine, and I've read that using command line DOS also works. I'm sifting through the days in Yangshuo, kayaking, biking, hiking, and the morning on the summits of Huangshan. I've also been putting together the panoramas. Another day or two, and I'll be posting lots, including movies: yes, now you too can feel like you're riding a bike in China...at night, one-handed, while trying to take a movie and not drop your $300 camera, simultaneously avoiding pedestrians, motorbikes, and motorbikes headed the wrong direction on your side of the road. Ahhhh, fun times.

Dan

Homeward Bound

Baozi again for breakfast. Also, a liter of orange juice. Orange juice is my ambrosia; it always makes me feel better. I am more than an aficionado, more than a connoisseur, more than a person dropping big words, of orange juice. China has the best orange juice I've ever had. Short of importing it, I think I'll have to start hitting farmers' markets and making my own. In a discussion of this riveting topic the night before, the hypothesis was forwarded that fruit in the US is usually picked before it is ripe, maturing as it ships. However, ripening on the vine is completely different. Ripening in a truck, the fruit has no nutrients but itself.

I catch the Metro to the Lama Temple, the largest and oldest Buddhist temple in Beijing. I wanted some Buddhist accouterments. After sticking my head in a few gift shops, I find one with a large assortment of what I want. And the haggling drama begins. Well it would have, had I not thought the initial offer reasonable and so did not immediately counter offer. Again, I probably overpaid by a factor of 3-5. I tried some haggling at the end and got a couple extra gift boxes and some terse yelling in Chinese. The only way to haggle is to be able to walk away, which I didn't want to do since I had to catch a flight. I paid for the convenience. The haggling was successful, I realize. There is no optimal, just what works for both parties. This is an incredibly deep realization for me: there is no optimal in life. In math, sure, but math is only ever an approximation. Huh, there is no optimal. So what have I been killing myself over all this time, thinking I should have made that choice or that other one would have been better, no, no that one. If it works, let it go.

Walking back to the Metro station, I decide to buy some incense. An old lady runs the next stall. In Mandarin: [Pointing at incense] How much? 30 yuan. [Out of pure spite from my previous experience, I say] 20 yuan. [She] 30. [Me] 20. We do this a few more times. She concedes. Great, I just got uppity about $1.50 from an old lady. Well, I haggled a little at any rate.

I next catch the Metro to Wanfujing Street, a major pedestrian way with shopping galore. Having figured out the metro stops have maps of how the their exits fit into surface streets, I take the northeast exit, which places me right on the corner of Wanfujing. Well, it actually places me in the depths of a shopping mall, which is very disorienting. Figuring the street is to the west, I head west (thank you again compass). Success. Once outside, there is no sign for the metro. Some routes can only be discovered traveling in one direction, but I'm in the know now.

I hit a few chopsticks stores, a few tea places. I've realized the only way to get a feel for what the actual price should be is to build up a database of correlations. I've also realized that when prices are clearly posted, haggling is not expected. I try on a nice set of chopsticks and get an apologetic, "I'm sorry, but there are no discounts." At similar stores in Yangshuo, one had a sign that said the same and another just took 20% off everything (the person working the store hit 0.8 * price for another customer on her calculator, and then did the same for me)...presumably, after having marked them up 20%. Better social engineering.

Now I'm late. I notice on my hostel address card that I can catch a shuttle to the airport. I spend 10 minutes trying to find the actual shuttle stop. Then the shuttle is late (not every 15 minutes). And I'm thinking, there's a reason the shuttle was cheaper than the metro...by $1.50. Should've just taken the known option...yadda yadda yadda for 10 or 15 minutes before I realize the die is cast (another 5 minutes and I was hopping in a cab) and I'm just doing the useless "beat-myself-up"-routine (...perhaps seeking non-existent optimality). The shuttle gets me to the airport two hours before my flight. There is no line at the Asiana check-in. She speaks English. She gets me a SAH-weet seat from Seoul to Los Angeles.

For my last hour in China, I get a latte (I was curious. Result: stick with tea in China) at a nice sit-down place, looking out at one of the control towers, and journal, trying to sum up or at least put down everything racing through my head. Eventually, I head to the gate and board. The pre-flight announcements are made in Korean, Chinese, and English. We taxi, the throttles go to full, and I've left China.

Now I'm in the reverse position: I'm headed home, into the known - although, it's beginning to feel unknown - while many around me are heading into their personal unknowns. I see a Chinese business man taking pictures as well. It's the big business trip to Korea, presentations to be given, deals to be worked. Projecting again.

I've been in China three weeks. In Seoul's Incheon Airport, at the transfer security screening, I reflexively say "Xie xie" to the guard. Whoops. "I am not Chinese; I am Korean!" This was a pretty bad faux pas on my part. I am suitably apologetic. She seems to understand...and to be used to it. Doh! Also, I stop to look at some of the historical art pieces on display. The English translations are as bad as if they were from Chinese. So maybe it's not unique to Chinglish? Something is going on here at a deeper level of language. Have to get a linguistics book when I get home. Damn interesting stuff.

Then it goes very wrong. I board for home. I am sitting on a Boeing 777 airliner about to cross the world's largest ocean in 11 hours at 35,000 feet and over 700 mph through air temperatures of -40 degrees Farenheit with 300 fellow souls in such comfort the emperors of China could not have dreamed of. I am sitting in arguably one of the pinnacles of human achievement, with indirect lighting and the soft strains of Pachelbel's Canon suffusing the cabin. All the worse then, as the paper tells of a woman in Kenya who, as a rival ethnicity boarded up her church and burned it down with everyone inside, tripped, her child rolling into the flames as she, the mother, was trampled, listening to her child scream, "Don't leave me! I don't want to die!" as she was burned alive. What. the. fuck. How do you deal with this as immaculately-dressed women bring you drinks and Pachelbel's plays?

I try to sleep, and by the middle of the flight I have forgotten about it. I don't know which is worse.

The US immigration officer, after asking a few questions, says "Welcome home." I'd like to say I felt elation or relief or sadness. Mostly, I was just numb. This could be from four hours of sleep in the last thirty-six. I get home and go to get groceries around 5:30 pm. I run into some folks from work, shopping after their days are done. It's weird talking to people from another life, as if this is what I do. It's not clear to me anymore. In ultimate irony, I get home, realize I keep the house at 65 and that feels fine after being in China, and that my "comfortably-appointed" retreat is just four walls, a roof and a floor, and some stuff inside. The same thing that was causing me trouble in China. Huh. It's all projection.

This got depressing. But it's enlightening to watch me put on identities to talk with this person, or do this chore, or interact with the bank teller. It's so different from what I've been doing the last three weeks (God, it feels like years), that I can see it as a choice, like putting on a heavy set of clothes for this situation and a different set for that one. I guess I'm feeling lost because all these identities are clearly not me, just roles. And I just seem to switch between roles. What's behind all this? I don't want to just settle back into "my" life. Traveling in China changed my patterns enough - I had only two pairs of clothes and would wash one set every night - that I see them as patterns now. Patterns can be helpful, if used conciously, but I hadn't been doing that. Every day in China, I wasn't sure how it would turn out. I'm realizing that's true at home too.

And that feels kind of good. I'm still traveling.

Dan

The "Need a Ticket to See"-City

The Forbidden City is an ideological problem. It's clearly class-based and so not in line with Communism. On the other hand, after the Great Wall, it is one of the most iconic pieces of history extant. I read in the guide book that the government calls it the "Palace Museum." Fair enough. I admire a euphemism if it solves an otherwise thorny issue. As another example, my flight to Beijing was delayed. The reason announced (in both Mandarin and English : ), "Flight xxx is delayed due to aircraft delay." You have to admire the brazenly tautological.

I sleep in again. My body is reaching the end of its limits for now (I can feel being on the edge of sick). Being in a hurry, I stop by the baozi (stuffed bun) stand some folks mentioned last night at hostel happy hour. Ahhh, even more local. Each bun is 0.6 yuan. Four fill you and then some. So for 2.4 yuan (about 37 cents), you can have a decent, healthy meal. The spicy bean paste (tofu) is really good and has the texture of egg: it's like a little spicy omelette in a bun. I am a huge fan.

I take the Metro to Tiananmen East. It's about 11:30 am on a Sunday and the trains are packed. As we are about to do our boarding surge, I hear a Chinese guy behind me say, satirically, "Welcome to China." Next, as I ascend to northeast corner of Tiananmen Square, I brace myself mentally for the vendors/gambits. The big one is otherwise fine art students invite you to look over their artwork at a neighboring studio with a lot of social pressure to buy something. Also, people offering guide services.

I make it about 100 yards when a woman a yellow coat asks me if I speak English. I ignore her. "Where are you from?" she ventures again. Somewhat coldly, I say, "I just want to see this alone." Somewhat hurt, she says, "I just want to practice English." My shields are up - even if she is the one in a million that actually just wanted to practice English - I repeat, "I'm sorry, alone" without making eye contact. She leaves me alone. I get two more offers to view artwork and two offers for tours, but both are very polite and I am happy to smile and say, "Bu yong. Bu yong." Which reminds me that the "practice English"-shtick is more of a lead into the karaoke bar/$100-bottle-of-wine scam, not the artist soft-sell, which would account for the difference in emotional tone. A fellow traveller I met fell for the "practice English"-one. Two girls, end up at a bar, suddenly it's her birthday, a couple of bottles later, they give him a bill for ~4000 yuan (~$600). He doesn't have that much, but two large and helpful guys escort him to a cash machine. Back at his hotel, he mentions this to the receptionist, she immediately calls the police, they raid the place, and get him his money back. I mention this so you know how the scam works and that the Chinese government is very serious about tourist safety.

The first time I went to a game at Notre Dame football stadium, my first thought was, "Huh, looks bigger on TV." Tiananmen is a big square, I think the biggest, it just, well, kind of, looked bigger on TV, you know? To the north of Tiananmen, is the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which leads into another square that eventually leads to the Forbidden City. Guards in military uniform line the bridges into and out of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, under the gaze of Mao's portrait.

The Forbidden City, on the other hand, is huge, looks huge, and feels huge to your feet: about a square kilometer. Narrowing it down for my first visit, I wanted to see the main palace, from where China was ruled for 500 years, the Clock Hall (I'll explain), the Well of Concubine Zhen, and the Room of Three Rarities, the three being extremely rare works of calligraphy.

The City is awesome in its breadth, detail, and beauty. Every tiny corner is ornamented. Here is the square before the main square with the Gate of Supreme Harmony in the distance, which is the entrance to the main square before which court was held, and a detail from the Gate.

After crossing the first square, resting at base camp, and continuing on, you reach the main square: and beyond the Hall of Supreme Harmony, from which China was ruled for 500 years ...mostly. It turns out that there are like three or four sub-throne rooms, which certain emperors preferred, and so held their day-to-day courts there. Guess they wanted to avoid the walk...no, they would have been carried everywhere...who knows, megalomania must have set in pretty early. One cute story on the automatic tour guide was an emperor, who when 16, walked into the City library, took a fancy to the librarian, checked out her "books," and made her a Consort of the 5th Level. Wait a minute, they have levels!? And enough consorts to reach down to a fifth level? A favorite, she was unfortunately unable to conceive. Trying to block others, she would order the eunuchs to preform abortions on consorts who had. One eunuch secretly snuck a pregnant consort-in-question out of the City, told the librarian cum consort (sorry) the girl had died, and had the emperor-to-be raised in secret. When five years old, he was returned to the City. And then, in a much sadder story to follow, a consort, murdered, was posthumously promoted to Concubine of the 3rd Level in a show of honor. I mean it worked for 500 years, but when you have that many consorts, concubines, etc., clearly governing is not your first priority. But here is the literal seat of power of the last age of the imperialistic Middle Kingdom.

The Clock Hall, per the guidebook, has a lot of clocks from Europe in the 1800s that were given as gifts (tribute?), and they are rung at 11 am and 2 pm. Eh, I thought it would be cool. I was hoping there would also be exhibits on time, as in how it was kept, but the only old, old clock was a huge water clock. The science of time-keeping was not the point of the Hall. However, I did learn from observation that clocks are what led to computing machines: these things, while gilded beyond all belief, are amazing works of miniature mechanization and early robotics. This one, which was rung at 2 pm, had a drummer whose arms would move to hit bells of different pitch, while all other sorts of things were spinning and dancing. The tour de force, however, was this clock that would write eight Chinese characters automatically. The 200-year old forerunner of robotic assembly lines... Of course, my personal favorite: the clock with a working model of the solar system on top of it. I forgot to check if it had Neptune (not discovered until 1846).

Next, the Well of Concubine Zhen. (The picture is from wikipedia - it's clearer than the one I took at Zhen's shrine.) She was, according to the material provided, a vivacious, progressive, and well-loved Concubine of the Guangxu Emperor. She encouraged contact with the West and even wore men's clothes at times. Her final mistake, however, was to encourage her love to be independent. The Empress Dowager Cixi (mother of the emperor and with whom real power resided) did not take kindly to this. There is debate as to what actually happened, but when the Eight-Allied Powers invaded in 1900, in one way or another, Zhen was murdered before the Imperial Court fled Beijing. The current belief is that she was thrown down this well by eunuchs on the order of Cixi. For some reason, I was really torn up by all this.

From the tiny courtyard of the well, I step into a small courtyard, bordered by two story buildings with open balconies. The late afternoon sun paints them and the tall pines in the pale gold only seen in winter. This is a good place, a peaceful place. The small hall in front of which I take my rest was built by a retired emperor as a study to relax in when tired by state affairs. I'm projecting, but I can see people calling out to each other on the balconies, day-to-day work going on, servants cutting across the small courtyard with laundry and food. I sit a while in this refuge, far in the northeast of the Forbidden City, away from the centers of power and pomp.

Quieter, I proceed south, into the Treasure Galleries. Jade, gold, and gems: from delicate plants carved entirely of stone, to life-size gold statues of Buddha, gem-encrusted, to huge pieces of jade carved into landscapes. My favorites are a malachite scene of a teacher and student and a gold celestial globe, held aloft by four painfully exquisite dragons, each star a pearl. The names of constellations are inscribed in Chinese. I try to identify a familiar constellation, but it is too hard: I can't ignore the lines forming the Chinese constellations, different from the shapes picked out by ancient Greeks and Romans. Although, much of the Chinese astronomical knowledge came from the same root as the Greeks: the Byzantines and then the Arabian world. Many, many stars bear Arabic names.















It's getting late, and the City closes at 4:30 pm. I make my way back to the south gate. I am going to see an acrobatics show and I'm trying to fit dinner and shopping in beforehand. I give up on shopping, and take the Metro home - I've created too much drama in the past by trying to do too much to attempt it in a foreign land. Some views as I leave...














As I pack a little and prepare to head out to see the Beijing Acrobatic Troupe, I realize I'm missing my last sunset in China (for now). I run up to the roof and the catch the very end. Goodbye, China.

If my motto for the Great Wall is "Defies superlatives," my motto for the Beijing Acrobatic Troupe is "No really, you haven't seen crazy yet." My God! Okay, we'll lie on our backs and kick large drums around like riding a bicycle upside down, spinning them, hitting the beats, reversing them, kicking them end-over-end in different diretions. Cool. Now we'll kick the drums between each other. Now we'll kick them really far between all of us simultaneously, while keeping them spinning and hitting the beats. Whew - what a show. NOW we'll balance people on our legs who are balancing running drums on their legs. Now we'll kick drums between people at different heights. Wow. NOWWWWW we'll kick people and drums simultaneously between people. Oh for the love of God!

Every time I tried to take a picture I would catch them between one level of craziness and the next, which didn't come out well. So here are two in the early levels of insanity. A woman gripped a glass with her foot on which shot glasses with fluid were stacked in tiers, four high. She started on her belly with the balanced shots on one foot. She then proceeded to this position, handstand with one leg in the air and the other wrapped around her head. She went through all manner of amazing contortions, adding more and more stacks of glasses to each extremity (one grasped in each foot, one in each hand...ahhh, you're getting it, and of course, one with a bite post so she could hold it in her mouth). All the while moving, moving, moving. In the other, what to call it: pair dancing acrobatics? It was beautiful. This one is actually at a middling level of insanity. She's doing a back bend on her belly so that her hands and feet meet. He then balances on the platform of her feet and eventually does one-armed handstands with a full split. He's working up to it here. It was an hour and a half show and utterly amazing. I will be going to yoga much more regularly.

After the show, I take the cab home. At one point, it looks the night sky is full of kites with LEDs. Back at the hostel, I pack. Tomorrow morning, some last minute shopping, and then I need to be at the airport by 12:30 for my 3:20 flight home. Just like that, it's coming to a close.

I don't know how I feel.

Dan

Ittttttttttttttt's Great!

I went to the Great Wall today, doing a tour where we hike 10 km from Jinshanling to Simatai, a stretch of some of the wildest and least touristy Wall.

Many more poetic and descriptive things have been said of the Great Wall than I can hope to write. So I will suffice with this: it defies superlatives. It's a three hour drive to Jinshanling, and we left before dawn, so I caught up on sleep and met some of my traveling mates: an Australian spending a year or so traveling around the world, an Englishman on his way to Thailand to winter somewhere sunny, an international executive for J&J, a Canadian couple, a Belgian, an incredibly handsome American (ha ha ha), another American engineer from Phoenix, and a...you know, I never got Max's nationality. Quite a group.

It was a great hike under sunny skies in 50-degree weather. I'll post a few pictures - sifting through them all to find the best will take a bit longer and social hour just started in the hostel bar.
On the way back, a lunch buffet was included in our tour. Either the coke can or this lunch led to my first experience with *ahem* "gastrointestinal difficulties." I ask the driver to pull over and sure enough, only squat toilets. I had until this point avoided them, but fate had now decreed otherwise. [WARNING: Content of a scatalogical nature follows.] The first challenge was to figure out just how far to drop your trousers. The answer: to the knees - going farther leads to irreconcilable geometries, as I discovered. And you know what, it's actually quite a comfortable way to go, assuming clean facilities. The only odd thing is that your "product" is not disappearing into an unviewable area beneath you. You're kind of stuck looking at it (at least the beginning stage where you still have to conciously aim). I suddenly feel kind of free - the fear is gone. I am a Veteran of Squat!

On the rest of the drive, we all swap travel tips, horror stories, and favorite places. I am beginning to feel a little under the weather - six hours of sleep (again), a long hike in the sun and wind, and an off stomach. I nap a little and think I might call it a night after a hot shower. But the shower reinvigorates me, and so I decide to hit one of the vegetarian restaurants.

A cab ride later, I am somewhere near the restaurant. I acknowledge but don't mind that I'm going to spend a half-hour feeling lost trying to find the place: the distance from the taxi to the actual front door is always longer than the taxi ride. The guide book says it's in a housing complex. I spend the next 20 minutes walking around, asking strangers for help (I swear, unless you ask someone in direct sight of your destination, you get vague waves), and finally find it. (How the hell did the Lonely Planet guy find this place!?) Ahhhh. I decide to splurge - my second to last night in China, ack! - and get the prix fixe. Discreet Buddhists decorations, absolutely amazing music (I asked the waitress to right down the name of one), and great food. I must have a Beijing accent (not a lot of "r's" but strong ch and sh), because more people seem to understand me here.

Tomorrow, the Forbidden City and Imperial Archives, a little shopping, and then finish up with a Chinese acrobat show and a dinner at the even fancier vegetarian restaurant in the guide book.

Ack - my second to last goodnight,

Dan