Keeping Warm

In frigid, plus five degree temperatures you can get a breeze on your hands when driving an electric bike. Many are equipped with these handle covers that keep the drivers' hands toasty.

Map of 加拿大

A friend pointed out a map of Canada (jiānádà) in the bookstore today. It was only ten yuan so I picked it up and have been figuring out the Chinese names of places I know and love. The map is a curious document, since some of the names are marked in English as well but many are not, and the Chinese names are definitely based on Mandarin pronunciation rather than Cantonese. Some towns, surprisingly, seem not to exist - Peace River is nowhere to be seen, though the associated body of water is labeled 皮斯河 písī hé. Grimshaw, or 各里姆肖 gèlĭmŭxiào, is on the map but Fairview (费尔维优 fèiĕrwéiyōu) is not. And some main highways are marked, but none are numbered.

艾伯塔 àibótă is Alberta, and of the many ways of translating Edmonton the clumsy 挨德蒙顿 áidémēngdùn is the most common. On a drive from the capital up to 曼宁 mànníng, a place name that slips quite easily into Chinese, you might stop at the A&W in 怀特考特 huáitèkăotè (Whitecourt), or hold on until 福克斯克里克 fúkèsī kèlĭkè (Fox Creek). Or you might decide to go through 奴湖村 núhú cūn - Slave Lake (village) instead.

Grande Prairie comes through as 大草原成 dàcăoyuán chéng, a translation, while further north we find 帕德尔普雷里 pàdéĕr pŭléilĭ - Paddle Prairie. Most lakes are not given the Chinese word for lake, but called láikè; for example, 威廉斯来克 wēiliánsī láikè - Williams lake. On the other hand, nearly every place name starting with 'Fort' translates it; Fort Mac is 麦克默里堡 màikèmòlĭ băo, Fort Sask is 萨斯喀彻温堡 sàsīkāchèwēn băo. I was curious to see the names of places like Medicine Hat and Moose Jaw, but they are just transliterated - 梅迪辛哈特 méidíxīn hātè and 穆斯乔 mùsīqiáo. Brooks is 布鲁克斯 bùlŭkèsī.

Waiting for the bus

I count seven ducks in two bags - pretty efficient way to carry them. Chickens are transported like this too; somehow they don't wiggle their way out of the bags.

Three Wheelers

Outside the market.

My area is well served by the independent drivers on three wheelers - the san lun che. They hang around the gates of large apartment complexes and outside markets and are about the same cost as a cab. When my foot was bad I used them a lot to get around for short distances and got to really like riding with the open air street's eye view as well as the way they efficiently navigate all the little side streets and shortcuts. During rush hour the san lun che are faster than cabs because they can travel in the bike lanes. They are great for covering short distances in a hurry or for when your optimal bus stop is a kilometer or more away.

A few weeks ago as I left the market there were several drivers waiting for customers, including a few of the faster electric powered trikes and one older woman on a pedal only model. I decided to give the older woman some business, and was about three feet away when I realized she had only one arm. I must have stood for a few seconds with a 'hey, she has no arm' look on my face because she repeatedly assured me the lack of arm was no problem and brought me home.

Cultural scenes

I couldn't resist posting another scenery picture though.



As far as I could figure out from the explanation, this woman is wearing not a scabbard, but a hook for holding a milk pail when a yak is milked.



Old mill.



Outside one of the temples.



Tib*tan sky burial area (where the dead are left for the birds).

It Really is That Beautiful

The name 'Jiuzhaigou' is often pronounced with a sense of wonder; it's said to have some of the beautiful lakes in the world. I had researched going there before but the more details I learned, the more I hesitated - 300 rmb entrance fee, an additional mandatory bus fare to ride between scenic sites once you get in, ten thousand visitors per day ... didn't sound like a good time. When a friend invited me on the tour I accepted because I wanted to see Huanglong and had lower expectations for our day in Jiuzhaigou. (Our trip was mid week and not during a regular holiday, so even though there were lots of people there it didn't feel too crowded.)

We arrived as the morning fog was burning off:



The squirrels here are adorable, with stripes and little tufted ears.



Water, snow, rocks, and autumn colours blend into some of the loveliest natural scenes:






This lake has fish, and is so clear you can see the light shining through their fins.



These are the tour buses that you ride between scenic areas. It is possible to walk, but it takes much longer to get through.



Waterfalls:




The shot every Jiuzhaigou visitor has to get:



Back in Canada I had heard Chinese people say that the Canadian Rockies are OK but mountains in China are way more beautiful. I'd always dismissed this as homesickness, but now am beginning to understand.

The tour package, Chinese style

Near Huanglong:



We spent 1800 rmb each for our tour which included flights, entry tickets, hotel and all meals except for one lunch for two days. The same level of tour but designed for foreigners I have seen for one to two thousand American dollars. It was well worth the cost but a tour designed for Chinese travellers has some unique features. For instance, along the bus route are mandatory shopping stops. The first was at a Chinese medicine store. They were selling the usual collection of unidentifiable things, and there was a guy with a tray of bloody, freshly hacked off antlers that could be bought by weight. They had several concoctions that could be steeped in alcohol. We tried this mixture which was supposed to be good for the brain:



Many places that sell Chinese medicine have the highly un-ecologically correct feature of a stuffed baby deer. (Just a guess, but I think it is related to the healing power of deer antlers.)



During the bus ride our guide who was local and spoke thickly accented Mandarin told stories, introduced features of the area, and taught us a few words in Tibetan. Before our first meal stop, he took some pains to explain that the food available was not going to be very good (short growing season for vegetables, and the earthquake had closed roads so tough to get things shipped to the area.) But that is no excuse for bad cooking.



Pelts of these long, sharp faced animals that I can't identify were in many stores, both winter and summer coloured.



Our first bus stop in Jiuzhaigou featured many local people with costumes for us to try on - they literally line up and surround you as you get off the bus. To try on a costume is 10 rmb, if you get them to take your picture it is much more expensive. I was basically dressed in a costume (my hat pulled off and replaced with a tib*tan coloured and fringed cap; my arms pulled into sleeves of the dress) before I could protest.



The hotels at Jiuzhaigou (our guide claims all hotels are like this) have hot water at certain times of the day; in the evening between 8 and 11:30 and in the morning from 6 to 10 or so. The morning of our departure, we got a 5:30 wake up call and had to be on the bus before six. Yes, before the hot water was turned on. My problem with this, is that the trip back to the airport included two more mandatory shopping stops (you are required to get off the bus) that took up more than an hour.

7 am shopping stop at a jewellery store. When was the last time you shopped for jewellery at 7 am?



The next shopping stop was at a yak meat store. There were many interesting preparations of yak meat and other parts of the yak. I was kind of disinclined to buy anything after having been woken up so early though.

The Yellow Dragon

The northwest, mountainous part of the province is mostly inhabited by Tib*tan and Qiang people. I spent a couple of days sightseeing in the area with a tour group and will do a few posts about the trip.

Huanglong (yellow dragon) is so named because from the air it looks like a yellow dragon stretched out in the valley. This usually booming tourist area has been very quiet this year since the earthquake closed the roads, but visitors can still fly in.

The limestone terrace ponds filled with blue-green glacial water are the main draw here.

It's a good hike with beautiful scenes all around you. I think waterfalls are at their best when frozen.


My visit comes slightly after what is considered the best time of year to go there, but the weather is perfect (about ten degrees C) and there is still plenty of autumn colour on the trees.


At these heights, some people have trouble with altitude sickness. There are a couple of these oxygen stations on the way up. I did quite quickly feel a higher heart rate/shortness of breath even though it was a pretty gentle climb of only 3 km. But those who often climb with me (you know who you are) probably think that is de rigeur anyway.



The sand waterfalls.



Five flower pool at the top of the climb:

Barbecue at the Park

You pay for pits, trays, and charcoal and then cook up anything you've brought either on grill trays or on a rack over the flames. There are lots of people selling grill-ready, skewered and seasoned food at the gate too. There is only one park in town with a barbecue area; I think we need a couple more!

Nouvelle Cuisine

This is the tableside preparation of a shaken salad at a place that serves 'new style' Sichuan cuisine. The server came with a tray and a baggie full of chopped cabbage and fruit, then emptied the produce into a tall jar. He then added the other ingredients, introducing each one - salad dressing, strawberry jam, apple jelly, white pepper, other seasonings. He then put the lid on and shook everything together in the jar, and added some croutons at the end. It ended up tasting like a sweetish coleslaw made with Thousand Island. We did eat every morsel of it.



Mashed potatoes (土豆泥 or potato 'mud') should be ordered whenever it appears on a menu; the Chinese versions are fantastic.



We were pretty puzzled on receiving our fish and had to ask the server how to eat it. She explained that the cooked fish was already in the bowl, but we could also nibble on the breaded and fried skeleton. It was one of the best fish dishes I've had here but very numbing/spicy from hot pepper and Sichuan peppercorns.

Injury

I sprained my ankle last weekend playing soccer and was reminded of how something that is a small problem in your home country can be a much bigger problem when you are abroad. For one thing, you can't just go out and buy ice - corner stores don't stock it and I was not about to make a trip to the big foreign-run supermarket in my condition. Because I had just moved in the only thing in my freezer was a box of mooncake, so I ended up holding frozen mooncakes against my ankle to keep the swelling down. Friends graciously contributed medicine and a pressure bandage, which helped a lot. Every Chinese person I met told me I needed something called yunnan bai yao to get the circulation going and so I ended up applying some dark, strong smelling Chinese medicine that made my foot tingle.

The bus has a regular announcement, roughly translated: "Caring for elderly and weaker ones is a traditional virtue of Chinese people. If there are old, weak, lame, pregnant, or child-carrying passengers please let them sit." So by the time I hobble onto the bus usually someone has cleared their seat for me. When I went to my regular Chinese TCM place for a massage yesterday, they strongly suggested I 'bao yao'. I had no idea what that meant so I agreed just to find out and it was a poultice. They mixed some brown powder (also very smelly) with water and bound the stuff in a cloth against my ankle, then told me to leave it on until the following day. The swelling and pain are nearly gone and I am back to my normal routine though might not be able to play for a couple of weeks.

Storms

Even last year I noticed that storms seem more violent here, but the last two days have been on a whole new level - lightning so frequent it's like having a strobe light in your room for hours and the constant thunder over your head. It was storming two nights in a row and late into the morning today. I've never been through anything like it, and it knocked out the elevator in our building this morning. Thankfully the elevator service was restored tonight and the weather has calmed down to drizzles, but the news reports coming in about storm and lightning damage are pretty alarming.

House Hunting

Apartment hunting here is mainly legwork; there are many real estate offices with ads in the windows and if you walk in they will start showing you around immediately. There are good online listings as well. People often see many, many places before they find an acceptable one though.

Lived-in apartments, both high and low end, are often a horror of grime since people here don't seem to clean out houses when they move out. You need to learn to see past the initial dirt to the place's potential. Newer places, on the other hand, can be really attractive and come with a landlord eager to rent and willing to buy whatever furniture and appliances you want, but also are full of strong new-house chemical smells, which are a scary prospect here. Newer, high-end places also often have multiple cameras at the entrances and hallways, hawk-like guards who think nothing of interrogating or barring your guests, and pass cards to access the front gate and the floor of your building in your elevator. It was tough to find a place that was nice enough to live in but wasn't set up like a prison.

The apartment I ended up taking was lived in and needed lots of work - there was dried food on the walls which no one had wiped off which left greasy marks on the paint. (I ended up hiring a cleaning service, then cleaning again with friends' help before getting the place repainted for a few hundred yuan out of my own pocket.) To turn on the light in the kitchen you not only flick the switch, but you open and close a cupboard door. The kitchen has no hot water - hadn't thought to check, but the hot water heater outlet only goes to the bathroom. There was writing on the walls, and the door of the shoe cabinet was kicked in. ("What's the problem? You can still use it!" said the agent when I pointed it out.) Despite the quirks I love the apartment - it's very well ventilated, which is a huge concern in a place this humid, and has light on three sides and air conditioners in all the rooms.

Besides being one of those intense, sink or swim Mandarin learning experiences that all expats have, I learned tons about the city. Some of the the more memorable house hunting episodes:

-Going into an enormous complex above a high end shopping mall with high expectations, and seeing many roaches skittering across the floor
-Seeing lofts decorated in a very Chinese style.
-Going to a large, slick real estate office where the uniformed agents insisted on speaking to me in terrible English and told me the building I was interested in was far out of my budget.
-Going around the corner to a tiny office where a guy who spoke mostly his own dialect (not local) chatted about his family and flipped through a folder to find places for me, managing to find something to show me in that same building.
-Realizing that this guy lives in the little eight by five foot space behind his desk, and feeling a little self conscious about all my requirements
-Meeting a landlord at one place, and having the agent invite me to take a look at the bathroom, then realizing the landlord is availing himself of the facilities
-One agent's utter disbelief that I wasn't interested in one of the prisons
-The long suffering agent I did use, who was one of the first ones I contacted and who showed me the place I finally took, negotiating rent and payment terms as well as helping me with a bunch of extra stuff and finally waiving his agent's fee for me (agent fee is usually half a month's rent, give or take)

An Eye on China

Direct translation of the title of this amazing expat blog with great photography that explores life in China. Currently there is a series of vignettes about the life of several Beijing locals and how their lives have been affected by the Games. (The blog's posts earlier this year contain some of the most direct pictures I've seen of earthquake aftermath.) Tout en francais, and worth it for the photos even if you don't understand French.

BTV

Jet-lag induced early morning TV:

The Beijing TV station showing the weather forecasts at each Olympic venue.
Chinese gold medal triumphs replayed many times. (They don't care much about the other medals - the medal stadings on Chinese TV are all listed by gold and you would never know that the US has, at the moment, a ten medal lead over China.)
Moving stories of athlete's lives and interviews with their families from whom they've lived apart for years in many cases.
A feature on the design of Olympic broadcasters' clothes.
Security guards saying 'Welcome' in multiple languages.
A moving music video of Olympic tears, rage, and disappointments led by Liu Xiang's heartbreaking withdrawal from the hurdling event
Another moving music video about 'mama yundongyuan' - Olympic athletes who are also mothers performing their events and a few of the Chinese athletes with their children. (The age of each mother is shown.)

Since I've been back, the 'Beijing welcomes you' song is being played even more than the Happy New Year songs during Spring Festival - and on the airport shuttle, people were singing along.

Luodai Ancient Town

The ancient street area of Luodai is a very neat place to hang out though it is quite touristy. There are several stores where you can play dress up in almost any kind of clothes.



What these guys are acting out, I can't even imagine.



A woman stretching out silkworm cocoons:



There are water channels along either side of the street, very handy for rinsing one's feet.



Since it is the evening, most of the people on the street are locals.



We didn't have time to visit all the old buildings, but this is the Guangdong Meeting Hall. These chairs are a distinct style. We ran into a Hakka girl who was guiding us around for free and she said they keep this kind of chair for guests.



There is a definite sense of distinct identity for the Hakka people in Luodai - our guide explained that Hakka (客家, 'guest people')just means people with no homeland of their own. They speak the Hakka language (客家话, though our guide called it Cantonese) and also Sichuanese.

The Wall at Luodai

We went out to Luodai, a nearby town whose residents are 90% Hakka. One of the main attractions there is a replica of the Great Wall. You can see the grey camo over the red bricks, which are made locally. This wall is about eight years old but looks a lot like the original.

We tried to save money by busing it (a total of 5 kuai for the three buses we needed to take) but it took over two hours to get there and so we were climbing the wall in the hottest part of the day. There ain't much shade there and the sun was killing us - near the top I was taking twenty steps, then lying down, then taking twenty more. They did have periodic shady spots where you could buy water and incense for the temple at the top.



Gate to Jinlong Temple at the top:



The teahouse at the top was breezy and very refreshing after the climb.



Even though it was built strictly as an attraction I enjoyed this wall better than i would have liked the real one. We had close up views of rural life on either side.



We asked at the top for an alternate route and they directed us to the old way down the mountain - a trail through the forest of mostly rock stairs. (I wish we had ascended this way.) There were birds, enormous butterflies, and what sounded like cicadas chirping constantly. We passed some abandoned farm houses and a huge cistern.



Somehow, people used those steps on the side to climb down and get water.