Beijing was cold. I’ve spoken to many other people about this, and whenever the question “How was Beijing?” was asked, the immediate response is “Beijing was cold.” This is unfortunate, because all of the things we wanted to see happen to be outside. It put something of a damper on our exploration. Still, the cold did come with some advantages- there were no crowds anywhere. All the places that the guidebook said should be packed elbow to elbow (the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Summer Palace) simply weren’t.

We stayed in the Redwall Hotel, which was a perfectly serviceable tourist hotel just a few minute’s walk from the Forbidden City. So, this is where we went on the first day.

The Forbidden City was the imperial palace for the Ming and Qing Dynasties. For five hundred years, entry into the forbidden city would have cost you your life. Now it’s only about six dollars.

Inside is a mazelike tangle of corridors and huge pavilions. Some of these halls have been converted into small museum galleries, displaying everything from ancient clocks to precious gems to two hundred year old medical prescriptions. The biggest building in the Forbidden City is the Hall of Supreme Harmony (not to be confused the the Hall of Middle Harmony or the Hall of Preserving Harmony), which is found in the middle of the complex.

Also within the Forbidden City were a number of small parks, with rock gardens, gazebos, and beautiful flowers and trees. Or, there would have been beautiful flowers and trees, if we hadn’t gone in January.

Overall, the Forbidden City was a very cool place to see, but it actually got kind of same-y after a while. After you’ve seen one Chinese hall, you’ve seen them all- and I’ve seen a lot of them. So, we went out to Tienanmen Square, where you can see the famous portrait of Mao hanging over the entrance to the Forbidden City.

Tienanmen Square is the largest public square in the world. And it’s big. Would be bigger, but they put Chairman Mao’s tomb in the middle of it.

You can see his mummified body inside there. People line up to lay a flower on it.

The next day, we saw some of Beijing’s hutongs, which are a confusing labyrinth of extremely narrow passageways leading to people’s homes. We also saw the drum and bell towers, which are a couple of towers once used to sound out the time of day.

The following day we went to the Great Wall.

Normally, this section of the Great Wall is packed with tourists. I’m told it’s absolutely hellish on the weekend. In January, however, we practically had the wall to ourselves.

There’s really not much to say about visiting the Great Wall. The thing about the Wall is that there’s nothing surprising or unexpected about it- everyone has seen a million pictures of it, and that’s exactly what it is.  It’s impressive, of course, but if you go there, don’t let its legendary status build your expectations too high. Anyway, we got there on a fine sunny day, and spent a very pleasant afternoon hiking along the Great Wall of China.

We went to a small Great Wall museum afterward. Now, I’ve been to a fair number of museums in China; and one of the things that makes Chinese museum crawling so special is hunting down the propaganda. If you have even a smattering of Eastern history knowledge, it’s pretty easy. For instance: the Great Wall has been called the “Monument to a Million Workers”, because it’s estimated that that’s how many people died making it. Disease and starvation killed rural laborers by the thousands, and it’s a common (though unsubstantiated) belief that many workers were buried inside the wall itself. Now, here is the Great Wall museum’s exhibit on this chapter in Great Wall history.

No, I’m not cropping anything out. That’s the whole exhibit.

The next day, we went to the Summer Palace. Several times larger than the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace was the royal getaway home during the hot Beijing summer months. Now, of course, it was frigid, and the beautiful lake it was built around was frozen solid.

The summer palace was probably my favorite place in Beijing. Though I’m sure it would have been much better when everything was green, you could still get a sense of the incredible beauty of the place. There was the enormous Buddhist Temple of the Sea of Wisdom, which could be seen from anywhere in the Palace, and could be reached by the Long Corridor, a covered corridor painted with hundreds of small portraits. In the center of the palace is Kunming Lake, which is crisscrossed by scenic causeways and the famous Seventeen Arch Bridge, a marble bridge lined with 544 carved lions.

Normally, a ferry runs across the lake allowing you to quickly cross from one side of the palace to the other. Of course, the ferries don’t run when the lake is frozen, so we walked across it instead.

After the Summer Palace, our time in Beijing was pretty much over. It was time to get to the airport and head to our next stop: Kunming, the capitol of beautiful Yunnan Province.

All right, well, I went to Guilin last weekend. It was beautiful. To quote “Lonely Planet China”, “Mention you’re going to Guilin to any Chinese person and you’ll almost certainly received longing looks of jealousy. For many it’s a dream destination, and it’s easy to see why.”

Well, here’s why.

We planned the trip to Guilin at the very last minute, buying train tickets and hotel rooms less then 24 hours before we left. Everything seems to operate at the last minute around here, though, and since it’s not the tourist season, it was pretty easy to get there and back.

We took a sleeper car for the nine hour train ride, and got to a delightfully cheap and modern hotel. Then we took long cruise down the Li River, which runs through Guilin.

The Li River is sort of the main event of a visit to Guilin, and rightfully so. It’s so beautiful, China painted a scene from the Li River on the back of the 20 yuan bill.

Once the cruise was over, we were in the delightfully touristy Yangshuo. ‘Delightful’ isn’t a word that is usually applied to touristy things, but I think we were a special case. When most Americans go to China, I’m sure they soak up as much Chinese food and culture as they can. Zhanjiang doesn’t have much American food, so when we went to touristy Guilin, however, we tried to soak up as much American food as we could. I had pizza in Yangshuo, and it was wonderful. My hotel room had a real shower! And for breakfast, I had French toast. French Toast!

So, when we went to Yangshuo, I didn’t mind the rows and rows of touristy little kiosks that lined the streets. It was sort of nice to get so many interesting things so cheaply. $20 Rolexes were everywhere. Too bad I’m not a wristwatch person.

We saw a cave in Yangshuo. It was by far the coolest cave I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen my fair share. It was all lit up in different colors to very nice effect.

Also, when we left the cave, we were rewarded with a very nice sunset over the karst peaks.

The next day we walked around Guilin. We saw an old university, and climbed a couple of those hills. Those peaks were everywhere around the city. We also saw a nice pair of pagodas, called the Sun and Moon Pagodas.

The moon pagoda, on the left, and the sun pagoda on the right are connected by an underwater tunnel. Near the top of the sun pagoda there was a line of Chinese people, waiting to ascend to the highest level. We waited in that line for a half an hour, curious to see what was up there. When we were admitted, though, we found a sort of miniature Buddhist temple, with a pair of monks saying prayers. Awkward.

We took another night train back to Zhanjiang the next morning. While the first train had been quite comfortable, this one was like an army barracks on wheels- three dozen beds in one car, questionably dirty sheets, a single muffled speaking blasting Chinese music at uncomfortably high volume for hours at a time. Still, we slept, or played cards, or read, and the time went fairly quickly. We’ll just have to be more careful about picking our trains from now on.

When I got back, I had barely stepped into my apartment when I changed clothes, ate some dinner, and went to the closing ceremonies of Crazy English, a language learning program for which I had recorded some English pronunciation earlier in the semester. There I said a few words to the audience of about 3,000 people. It wasn’t much of a speech, but it still sets a new personal record for public speaking. Then we cut a couple of cakes for the student leaders, who smeared frosting on each other in celebration.

All in all, a very good weekend. I cruised down the Li River, saw some pagodas, a cave, talked to an audience of thousands, and I ate delicious French toast.

Shenzhen Civic Center

It's tough to really show how big this thing is. The roof covers an entire city block.

Shenzhen Children's Museum

Shenzhen Concert Hall

Shenzhen has a beautiful city park. I spent a lot of time hiking trails in a forest so thick you could forget you were in the middle of a busy city.

Anyway, after a very relaxing few days, I now find myself in Hong Kong. There is milk here, dryers, and for breakfast today I ate toast!

Tomorrow I’m leaving for Beijing. After a week there, it’s off to beautiful Yunnan Province for eleven days. Then I’ll come back to Hong Kong for another week of dryers, Facebook, and sweet, sweet, toast.

My friend Peter came to visit from Japan this weekend, so I got to spend Xmas with him, which was wonderful. On Xmas eve, we went to Techung Island, all expenses paid, where I had been hired to co host a Christmas Eve party/concert. They paid for the boat, a trip to the hot springs, two really great meals, and they gave us both Christmas presents. The party in the evening was nice; the performers were students from the music school so there was some really great talent on the stage.

I opened my presents on Christmas morning. I got a surprising number of presents from my students. Most of my classes gave me something. One class gave me a diary with little notes from each student inside.  Another class gave me a hand-painted card with notes inside. I also got one of those wall clocks in the shape of a cat that looks back and forth with every second. A good Christmas morning.

Then the power went out for some reason, so Peter and I went shopping for some cheap Chinese clothes (Peter’s going to Beijing next and needed a warm jacket). I bought a zip up sweatshirt that looks classy in the front and has unintelligible Chinglish on the back.

For Christmas dinner we ate Pizza Hut, which was the first time I had been there. There was a 45 minute wait. Pizza Hut is a classy restaurant here. The pizza was tasty though. Then we went to bar to cap off the night. Overall, a very enjoyable Christmas.

Chinese people wear funny T-Shirts. English shirts are all the rage over here. I’ve asked my Chinese tutor why that is; she said that only tourists buy shirts in Chinese. I think it’s because the market here is flooded with the manufacturing errors of American companies. If you take the time to read an English T-shirt or hoodie, you will almost certainly find it to be misspelled, complete gibberish, or simply bewildering. Here’s a sampling of my ever-growing list of favorites:

Nestle Quik Checolate Malk

Super Lovers

Love Rabby Skull Rabbit, Love is all you need

Blood in my eye

Fetishism: Sexual Confidence Enemy Equals Myself (Repeatedly worn by one of my students. I’m sure she has no idea what ‘fetishism’ means, and I’m certainly not going to tell her.)

Slightly Perverted

Porn Star (Worn by a sixty-year old woman)

And my all time favorite:

Life is Better Blonde

In ascending order of weirdness:

Rice Porridge: Blander than water

Fried Tofu with Eggplant: Tasty

Sweet and Sour Squid: Tasty, though the gummy texture and suction cups are a turn-off

An Indonesian Dessert: Cooked by a generous Indonesian coworker, this thick soup was apparently 10% overripe bananas and 90% sugar.

Big Head Fish: A delicacy, this appx. 1 ft. long fish was delicious. The fish’s head is half the length of its body, hence the name. Chinese fish are not filleted, but simply cooked whole. Bones are not removed. The ultimate chopstick challenge, made harder by the fact that you should not flip a fish over in the dish, as this is considered bad luck for the fishermen.

String Mushrooms: pale, skinny mushrooms that look almost exactly like noodles. In fact, this is the only reason I’ve eaten string mushrooms. They’re kind of good, actually.

Durian: A vegetable so stinky that it has been banned from several major subways. I surprised my Hong Kongian friend by not hating it completely. It tastes like very strong onions, and is for some reason eaten in desserts.

Chicken Foot: The severed foot of a chicken, fried and doused in sweet and sour sauce. Not worth the effort and mental fortitude required to eat it.

Fish Soup: Not what you think of when you think of fish soup. This is a whole fish, five inches of skin, eyes and fins, submerged in a thin broth.

Donkey: tastes like pastrami

Jellyfish: Absolutely terrible.

Fried Snails: Dozens of snails, each the size of a nickel, fried and served on a platter. The proper way to eat fried snails is apparently to first try to blow them out of their shells from one end, then suck them out of the other. It’s harder than it sounds, because you’re trying to hold the tiny, oily snail shell with chopsticks. You can also use a toothpick to remove the snail, but either way, your efforts only get you a chunk of meat the size of your smallest toenail.

Sand Worms: A pale, rubbery tube slightly shorter than your pinky. I don’t know much about them, except that they have to turn them inside out before cooking them in order to remove all the sand from their bodies. Bland.

And the #1 weirdest thing I’ve eaten in the last two months:

Chicken Brains

Yes, I’ve eaten chicken brains. I ate them inadvertently at a fancy restaurant last week. They prepare chicken here by plucking the feathers, then chopping the whole thing into pieces and cooking it, bones and all. I did not identify the piece that I was eating (the back of the head) until I had already scooped out what I thought was an exceptionally tender -and tasty- cut of meat.

“But wait a minute, Steven, I’m reading this on your blog right now!”

That’s because I’m using a different kind of proxy: my dear, accommodating friends, Greg and Afton. They will be publishing posts for me until I can get the internet figured out.

Also, I’ve decided to make a change in the way I write this blog. In the past, I wrote long blog posts about my travels. That won’t really work anymore, because I’m not traveling. I’ve pretty much settled into my life teaching here. I haven’t even left the city of Zhanjiang in two months, except for one brief episode when I was in a commercial. So I think I will write more, fewer posts about the interesting things I’m learning about China.

That said, I have a lot of catching up to do. Here are the Spark’s notes.

Hurricane Megi: Complete dud. Flew north of us at the last minute. We had a beautiful day. I went for a walk in the park. I’m actually a little disappointed, though I’m told there will be more hurricanes in the future.

Halloween: Halloween costumes are hard to come by. I dressed up like a pirate, using a borrowed hat and a plastic sword I found at the 1 yuan store. We had a party at an English corner, and some of the students dressed up. It was the most enthusiastic Halloween party I’ve ever seen, there were witches and ghosts and a real scarecrow and a cross-dressing Egyptian. The students got really excited. Also, all of my students were very impressed when I told them how much candy you could pull in during a night of Trick or Treating.

I did my good deed for the day in early November when I recorded the audio for a small section of a textbook for a nonprofit English learning group. The group is called Crazy English, and they all get up ridiculously early to shout English pronunciation at the top of their lungs. The head of Crazy English took me to a shabby recording studio where I read the pronunciation out loud into a microphone that appeared to have been constructed out of two other microphones and a camera stand. I also read Obama’s victory speech, which was kind of fun.

Two nights ago, I saw a student dance competition, and it blew me away. There were 18 acts, 7 of which were done by dancing majors (and they were great), but the other 11 were done by different schools within the University (humanities, physics, biology, etc.) It was unreal. Each team had about 20 or so students on it, all volunteers who practiced during their free time, and it looked fantastic. I would even go so far as to say it looked professional. They had all sorts of different dances and costumes, and I even got to see some Chinese guys break dance.

One more thing: when we were waiting for it to start, they were playing the Star Wars main theme over the speakers as background music. When I asked my Chinese friend why they were playing Star Wars, she asked, surprised, “You know this song? What is it?”

I’m enjoying the teaching thing. Learning some Chinese. Practicing some ping pong. Might go to Guilin this weekend; that should be pretty cool. That’s about it. Talk to you all later.

I'm in a painting!

The other American teachers and I volunteer once a week doing English Corner (basically a short, informal English lesson) at another university in Zhanjiang. When we got there, this was waiting for us. The students painted it for us! Now I just need to find a white shirt with a black collar, a red tie, and a blue cardigan…

On Saturday I did a TV commercial. Apparently, this a pretty common thing for foreign teachers; since there are only about a dozen white people in this city, they’ll take anyone they can get.

The commercial was a local Chinese propaganda film promoting international cooperation. They took me to the banquet hall of a five star hotel (it was really very luxurious) and gave me a suit jacket. I was to play a foreign businessman who signs a contract with a Chinese businessman. Apparently the fact that I was about ten years too young to credibly play this part was not a problem. I sat at a long table with the Chinese man surrounded a dozen other Chinese actors and an older British man who was supposed to be my boss. I ‘signed’ the contract, shook hands, drank some fake wine, and it was done. We took a short tour of the studio, met the boss, took some photos, and within about two hours I was on my way back to the University.

They’ll send me a copy of the final product when it’s done. I promise I’ll find some way to get it onto YouTube in the future.

The other big news just now is Typhoon Megi, which is slowly working its way to my corner of the globe. It’s a category 5 Super Typhoon, meaning that’s somewhat more powerful than Hurricane Katrina. Also, it’s tied for the 9th most powerful storm in recorded history. That said, it’s taken a sharp turn to the north in the last 24 hours, so it looks like it will pass Zhanjiang by. It’s sort of a bummer really; after all the excitement I wanted to see a good typhoon (I have, of course, never seen one before), but I probably wouldn’t be saying that if Magi blew my windows in.

That’s all that’s going on in my neck of the woods. I look forward to hearing from you all in the future!

Zhanjiang Normal University is a midsized university of about 20,000 students. The word “normal” is not used as the opposite of ‘abnormal’; for anyone who was wondering. It means the University is a school for teachers. On a related note, the word “university” is also a little misleading: there are no graduate students at ZNU. China doesn’t have the same conventions for naming colleges and universities that America does.

And now, after several days of wrestling with my internet connection, I can finally show you pictures of ZNU.

This is the main gate to ZNU

This is sort of the main street in ZNU, it runs across the entire campus.

This is one of the buildings I teach in.

This is a student apartment. Note the clothes hanging in every balcony. There are no driers in China.

This is the library. I haven't been inside yet (it keeps odd hours), but I hear they have some books in English.

This is the gym. It's very modern and stylish; it was built just a few years ago when ZNU hosted an intercollegiate sporting competition.

This is my apartment building. It's an older building on campus (much of ZNU is quite new, it went through a building boom a few years ago) but on the inside, it's quite comfortable.

This is a building for Chinese teachers. They don't all live there, but I think the ones with families do.

There is a clock tower in the middle of a small park on campus. It's surrounded by roman arches and benches; it's quite nice. I have no idea what's written on that wall.

This is North Street, a public street that runs through the two halves of campus. I like North Street a lot; it's lined by street venders selling fruit, noodles, and strange pieces of meat.

This is Banyan Grove, a pavillion surrounded by six old banyan trees. Each tree is over a hundred years old; they stood during the French occupation of Zhanjiang.

On Monday, I went to a banquet. Now, over the last six weeks, I’ve said “this is the fanciest meal I’ve ever eaten” more than once; our bosses and program have taken us out to some pretty nice places. But Monday’s was was the first meal I’ve ever eaten that was video recorded for posterity.

It took place in the best hotel in Zhanjiang, which had a coy pond the size of a swimming pool in the lobby, all granite masonry, and white gloved waitresses who always refilled our glasses within about fifteen seconds. Like most of the food I’ve had in China, I can’t very well describe most of the things I ate, but I do know the suckling pig was delicious.

The banquet was the celebrate National Day; basically the Chinese Independence Day. It was hosted by the city of Zhanjiang, who invited every foreigner in the city to attend. (Zhanjiang is a city of approximately seven million people. There were about 30 non-natives at the banquet. We foreigners are a rare breed). At the head table was the upper crust of Zhanjiang’s socitey- university presidents, hospital directors, and CEOs. The Mayor was the host- hence the camera crew. There were three men with video cameras taping the whole evening, and another half a dozen taking stills. I’m quite sure that somewhere in Zhanjiang there is a tape with a solid minute of a close up of me watching the mayor speak. It was a little bizarre. Later our table toasted with the mayor, which was kind of cool.

On Wednesday, our cooperating teacher from the Foreign Teacher’s Office (sort of a liaison between our boss and us) invited my coworker Rob and me to a ping pong lesson. We went to the ping pong practice floor- a room filled with dozens of ping pong tables- and met our teachers, a junior and a senior ping pong major. You read it right- ping pong majors. In about a half an hour they had me playing ping pong like I never would have believed. No matter where I hit it, and no matter how hard, they always returned it to the same spot on the table, meaning I could practice the same shot dozens of times in a row without a break. When we were done, my tutor told me that I had impressive skills and that I was better than some of his real students, which was flattering. I’ve played a little ping pong back home, so I was glad to see I didn’t embarrass myself in front of China.  Then I got to see the two ping pong majors play against each other. It was incredible! Everyone’s seen Forrest Gump, so you know was professional  ping pong looks like, but seeing it in person was so much better.

On Thursday I got a badminton lesson from a badminton major. It lasted about an hour and a half, maybe two, but I am pretty sure that I can count on my fingers the number of times I’ve been that tired.  It didn’t help that I was playing in Zhanjiang, A.K.A. God’s Own Sweat Lodge, but still… Anyway, the lesson was a lot of fun, and I’m sure I got much better over the course of those two hours.

I saw a Cantonese Opera the other night. It was playing in an outdoor theater to celebrate National Day, so we watched for a couple of minutes. There were two women on stage in elaborate costumes, singing in a very high soprano that seemed to cut off every word half formed (not that I knew, of course; I had no idea what was going on). They each wore face makeup the color and thickness of a hockey mask, and they both always had the same blank, wide eyed expression the whole time. I thought it was fascinating.

That’s how my week’s gone. It’s National Day Break here at Zhanjiang Normal University, which means eight days of no class. We foreigners have had a good deal of bad luck with this break: our earlier visa troubles are still haunting us. Since it took so long to get our single-entry visas, we are still waiting on our work visas. This means that our passports are still with the government, which means we can’t travel anywhere during the break because Chinese hotels require you to present a passport when you check in. This means I had to scrap my plans to see Beijing this week, and instead I have to stay on this empty campus for eight days. It’s quite a bummer, especially since I will have relatively few opportunities to travel during the rest of the year. So if you see me on the Skype in the next few days, I’m sure I’ll be willing to talk.

The upside to my situation is that it gives me plenty of time to catch up on my blogging; so check back in the coming week. I’ve got some beautiful pictures I can’t wait to show off.