Coming Soon

I've been told that if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. Hence, the lack of postings recently...

But I'm trying to take a look at the bright side of things here, so new posts will be coming shortly. My job has finally officially started... it only took four and a half months. So I've got a few classes to call my own and we've got some mini trips to Beijing to keep us occupied. Check back soon!

The Great Wall

Chinese people have a saying "He who has not been to the Great Wall is not a great man." I'm guessing these days this includes women too... so I'm happy to report I am now great. Or, at least a little better than I was last week.

Some quick facts about the Great Wall... It's about 500 years old, that is, the Wall as we know it. Various versions were built thousands of years ago, but the structure that we're used to seeing is more recent. It is not one continuous wall either... it's several different sections that stretch from the Yellow Sea on the East across the northern border. It was meant to keep out the Mongolians.

The mountain the Wall is built on is extremely steep... It seems like the mountains alone would have been enough to keep out intruders. But the Wall is impressive and snakes across the tops of the ridges.

This time of year, there isn't much color on the mountains, so things looked a little bit grey. But a few cherry blossoms were starting to show and I'm one shade darker than white now for having been in the sun for the afternoon.

Easily the best part of the Wall.... the toboggan you can ride back down the bottom. Not entirely a Chinese cultural experience, but still amazingly fun.

And on the way home, we got a quick trip to see the Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium. It's not used for anything these days, but it still looks pretty cool.

Anything on a Stick

One of the stops we made in Beijing was to the Night Market that opens around 6:00 each night. This is the place to be if you're an adventurous eater.

Basically, anything you can imagine is put onto a stick and cooked for you. They have your every day meats like beef, chicken, or lamb. But they branch out a lot further too.... a lot further.

Among the many skewers we saw were snake, squid, eel, whole birds (head included), beetles, scorpions, and sea horses.

I decided that my experience of the Night Market would not extend beyond taking pictures, but Gary was up for trying some of it. He went with a grasshopper-ish insect. They fried it up and drizzled a spicy sauce on it.

His verdict... "Doesn't really take like much of anything. Just crispy."

Beijing Sites

Last weekend, Gary and I took the bullet train from Tianjin to Beijing. It's just under 100 miles away, but the train got us there in only 30 minutes. There's so much to see in Beijing, so we decided to just stick to one area this time and see the major tourist attractions.

First up, the Forbidden City. The "City" is a huge expanse of various royal buildings where the emperor and empress would have stayed... some structures were for housing, some for political meetings, some for resting and entertainment. And while the buildings are beautiful and the intricate decorations are impressive, the actual sites to see are underwhelming. What we actually toured was just a series of large open plazas, surrounded by the newly-renovated ancient buildings, none of which we could actually enter.

Highlights included the huge red doors with golden knobs you are meant to rub for good luck, and finding out that even though the palace walls stretch only half a mile from North to South, the emperor had a "resting" room in the middle. The lazy old man...

So after a few hours of making our way around the palace grounds, we headed to Tiananmen Square. Let me start by saying any and all references to Tiananmen Square's moment in history are completely blocked from the Chinese internet. Most Chinese people know it as nothing other the location of several gigantic political buildings and museums. There are security cameras and guards everywhere, and you get the overwhelming sense that you shouldn't talk about anything too scandalous while you're nearby.

So, we just quickly saw some of the enormous shrines to Chairman Mao Zedong and moved on. Everything we would have seen, heard, or read would have been carefully constructed anyway.

Tianjin Eye

I really didn't expect Tianjin to have a tourist attraction like The Eye. They've shamelessly ripped off the London Eye, but I think it's safe to say Tianjin takes in far fewer visitors. Most of the foreigners I've talked to here have never been on it... but I thought it might be worth a try.

Gary and I went around 6pm and had to wait out dusk. It was yet another foggy, smoggy Tianjin day, so the only way to get any good views would be after sundown when we could at least see the city lights.

The Eye is built over a bridge, so as we entered the cable car, we were just underneath the traffic. As the Eye turned, we came up to street level, and eventually all the way above it and back down under the street.

There wasn't much to see out one side of the car, but the other side had a decent view of the Hai River that snakes through the city. But what you see here is about the extent of the "breathtaking" views that these tourist attractions promise.

I think the location could have been better and maybe offered more to see from the top of the wheel... but all in all, not a bad excursion for a Tianjin visitor.

Calligraphy

Being a good writer is a difficult skill to perfect. Starting from the very beginning, you have to first learn the shapes and letters... then comes spelling and grammar, and later you're expected to have well-constructed thoughts that deliver poignant messages to the reader.

In English, I think I can hold my own if I really try. As a newbie to Chinese calligraphy class, I'm back in my kindergarten days, making barely-legible letters on lined paper.

But, writing the Chinese characters with a brush and ink is much more fun. It's much harder than it looks, getting the paint strokes to look just right and sizing everything out. Today was Day 1 of the weekly class for Gary and me, so hopefully in a few more weeks/months, we'll be dazzling the masses with our Chinese writing.

Good Luck Charm

In a taxi the other day... I saw this huge cricket-type insect on the dashboard. For the first 5 minutes of the 20 minute ride, I thought it must be a mechanical toy. It was making a really repetitive chirping sound, and only seemed to be moving one leg over and over. It gave me the creeps, nonetheless.

After a few minutes, it started walking from one side of the dashboard to the other. I nearly jumped out of the moving taxi. I swear it was watching me, and getting closer and closer. It started to crawl up the edge of the window, and I could barely keep it together.

The taxi driver laughed, and told me it was for good luck. The incessant chirping didn't seem to bother him at all.

At one point, the insect fell from the dashboard onto the floor of the passenger seat. I was in the back and just kept praying it didn't crawl under the seat and into my personal, non-cricket space. Eventually, the driver just picked it up in his hand and plopped it back on the dash. And it just kept on chirping... and being kind of gross in general.

I really hope this isn't a common thing among taxi drivers.