Friday was a long day for us. We were picked up at 7am and didn't get home until around 7pm. A full twelve hour day. We hadn't had one of those in a while. Long as it was we had a really good time. We went to the Ming tombs, the Jade Factory, the Great Wall and the Silk Factory. The weather was not the most conducive to seeing the sights and distances that the Wall is known for providing. I was pretty excited that it was a nice cool day and that we even had some rain. The thick fog made for a bit more of an adventure as we were walking from tower to tower. As we couldn't see more than 50-100 meters ahead of us we never knew what was up ahead until it was right in our faces.
Yesterday we went to the "dirt" market and to Wangfujing Street. The street market was a HUGE flea market with pretty much anything and everything that you can imagine. From Chairman Mao paraphernalia to jewelry and Chinese antiques. It's fun to walk around and listen to the bartering and haggling going on around. Wangfujing Street is a pedestrian mall lined with large department stores and various other shops. Just behind Wangfujing is a smaller backstreet, called Wangfujing Snack Street, lined with noodle restaurants and a bit further down with souvenir shops.
After spending the day at the flea market we were famished so we sat down and ate some delicious noodles and beef stir-fry. As we were picking a place to eat the server at the place we chose was asking if we wanted noodles. His English was not very good though and we were having a hard time understanding him. In order to help us understand he pointed up to the banner hanging above the tables and said what we gather to be "You want noodles?" The funny thing was that he was pointing to a sign in Chinese to help us understand his English.
Everyone in the area was walking around with food on sticks. Those sticks held everything from grapes and haw covered in a sugary coating to starfish, beetles and scorpions. Quite a sight to behold. The most popular food-on-a-stick items seemed to be the haw and something that looked like it might have been the legs of a tiny little octopus. Couldn't really say for sure.
Well, here we are on our last evening in Beijing, our last night in China, our last night of the trip! My how these six weeks have flown by! We fly out tomorrow evening at 8:30 and will arrive in L.A. almost three hours before we left. Weird. We'll then be down in Palm Springs for a few days before actually heading home, Elizabeth to Pasadena and me to Portland. We'll be sure to let you know how our travels home go.
We're about to head out to celebrate an incredible journey. And so I will leave you with a quote I saw yesterday and think it is quite fitting in the last 24 hours of this trip: "It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end."--Ursula LeGuin.
Take care..
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Pretty Prices
Hello all,
Well, Elizabeth and I have made it to our final stop on this trip. Beijing. Last night we said goodbye to Matt and headed to the Shanghai Train Station. I have no idea where this last week went. It's hard to believe that we will be flying home in less than a week!
Our stay in Shanghai was great. We were able to take it easy and still see a fair bit of the city. We spent one of the days visiting the Eastons (for those of you who know them). The Eastons are family friends who I have know for 10 years believe it or not. Anyway, Elizabeth and I went out to visit them at their apartment and experienced expat-land in Shanghai. They live in a beautiful area, a resort really, that in no way lets on that it is in China. It was an interesting contrast to where we were staying.
A couple of days ago we went to the Yuyuan Gardens. They were beautiful! And surrounding the gardens are markets selling anything and everything you could ever want. It was fun to barter with the merchants. They very much enjoy the interactions and are disappointed if you don't get into it.
My favorite tactic by the merchants was them taking one of us by the arm and saying, "You are beautiful. Very pretty, I give you pretty price." They then made an offer and when told it was too expensive they said, "You give me your high price." So we made an offer (generally 1/4 to 1/2 of their original offer, but sometimes lower) and then they would stick out their bottom lip and say, "Oh no, too low. What your next high price?" If you are persistent with your price you can generally get it or at least something close to it. And if not, you walk away and they say, "okay, okay I give you good price." At which point they will make another offer, not quite as low as you had stated. If you shake your head and continue to walk away they more often than not they will come after you and say, "okay, your price." As you pay (your price) they continue to look at you with that pout and might even say "and 10 just for me." Meaning they want you to give them 10 yuan ($1.25) for them to pocket.
Also fun has been trying to pick up a bit of Chinese. It's not anything like other languages that I have studied. When I was in Russia staying with Elizabeth's family way back when I was able to piece together the Cyrillic alphabet as well as start to understand some of what was being said (mostly vocab, not so much the grammar), it just doesn't work that way with Chinese. There is no figuring out the alphabet like that- there is no alphabet. Instead there are characters which represent words and can be put together to make compound words. The crazy thing is that written Chinese is uniform throughout the country while the spoken language vary greatly. So a Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker could read the same book with no problem, but should they try to read it to one another they wouldn't understand each other at all! And then there are the tones, so one word said with the four different tones can mean four completely different things.
One of our train bunkmates taught me about ten words which proved to be quite useful and we have used those as well as a few others that we have picked up along the way, but Chinese is definitely a language that requires more than a passing interest in learning to get very far.
Well, we didn't get much sleep last night so I think I will be heading in to take a nap.
Well, Elizabeth and I have made it to our final stop on this trip. Beijing. Last night we said goodbye to Matt and headed to the Shanghai Train Station. I have no idea where this last week went. It's hard to believe that we will be flying home in less than a week!
Our stay in Shanghai was great. We were able to take it easy and still see a fair bit of the city. We spent one of the days visiting the Eastons (for those of you who know them). The Eastons are family friends who I have know for 10 years believe it or not. Anyway, Elizabeth and I went out to visit them at their apartment and experienced expat-land in Shanghai. They live in a beautiful area, a resort really, that in no way lets on that it is in China. It was an interesting contrast to where we were staying.
A couple of days ago we went to the Yuyuan Gardens. They were beautiful! And surrounding the gardens are markets selling anything and everything you could ever want. It was fun to barter with the merchants. They very much enjoy the interactions and are disappointed if you don't get into it.
My favorite tactic by the merchants was them taking one of us by the arm and saying, "You are beautiful. Very pretty, I give you pretty price." They then made an offer and when told it was too expensive they said, "You give me your high price." So we made an offer (generally 1/4 to 1/2 of their original offer, but sometimes lower) and then they would stick out their bottom lip and say, "Oh no, too low. What your next high price?" If you are persistent with your price you can generally get it or at least something close to it. And if not, you walk away and they say, "okay, okay I give you good price." At which point they will make another offer, not quite as low as you had stated. If you shake your head and continue to walk away they more often than not they will come after you and say, "okay, your price." As you pay (your price) they continue to look at you with that pout and might even say "and 10 just for me." Meaning they want you to give them 10 yuan ($1.25) for them to pocket.
Also fun has been trying to pick up a bit of Chinese. It's not anything like other languages that I have studied. When I was in Russia staying with Elizabeth's family way back when I was able to piece together the Cyrillic alphabet as well as start to understand some of what was being said (mostly vocab, not so much the grammar), it just doesn't work that way with Chinese. There is no figuring out the alphabet like that- there is no alphabet. Instead there are characters which represent words and can be put together to make compound words. The crazy thing is that written Chinese is uniform throughout the country while the spoken language vary greatly. So a Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker could read the same book with no problem, but should they try to read it to one another they wouldn't understand each other at all! And then there are the tones, so one word said with the four different tones can mean four completely different things.
One of our train bunkmates taught me about ten words which proved to be quite useful and we have used those as well as a few others that we have picked up along the way, but Chinese is definitely a language that requires more than a passing interest in learning to get very far.
Well, we didn't get much sleep last night so I think I will be heading in to take a nap.
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Teradactyls, rhinos and more!
Hello friends! Here we are in Shanghai. We arrived in Beijing on the train on Monday (a full 20 minutes early!) and were very pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to get down to Shanghai. In the last hour or so of our train ride Elizabeth and I were putting together a plan (rather plans- plan A, plan B, plan C, etc.) for accomplishing all we needed to in order to get down to Shanghai. Get off the train, change some money, find out where the airport is, get to the airport, buy plane tickets, and finally get on the plane.
Well as we came out of the train station I noticed a "Air Ticket Office" sign. So we walked up to the counter and told them where we wanted to go and bought tickets for a 5pm flight (it was just before 3pm at this point). They even wrote down the name of the airport for us in Chinese so that we could give it to a taxi driver. So we got a taxi, went to the airport and caught our flight down here to Shanghai.
We are staying with Matt, one of Elizabeth's friends from college while we're here. He has been in Shanghai for about six months teaching English. Right now Elizabeth and I find ourselves sitting in City Diner with the full repertoire of Michael Jackson's career playing somewhat loudly in the background. I seriously haven't heard this much Michael Jackson in well over 15 years! It's cracking me up.
So what have we been doing for week since we last posted? Traveling. Lots of traveling. Traveling in the form of sitting on a train. After nearly a week on the train I thought I might never want to see another train in my lifetime. That is not at all how I feel though.
The train ride was absolutely incredible. We saw so much! From Moscow through various cities and villages in Russia, past the beautiful Lake Baikal, into Mongolia and through the Gobi Desert with wild horses and camels at watering holes and yurts dotting the landscape to the corn fields and sunflower patches and enormous canyons and gorges of China. Standing at the window staring out at the incredible sights hours could pass by without seeming like more that a couple of minutes.
The first couple of evenings were filled with games of Scrabble and Monopoly with our three British friends who we met at our hostel in Moscow. Generally not a fan of Monopoly because of the sheer ridiculous length of the games I was pleasantly surprised to find that we had finished a six or so hour game without having felt like we had spent a whole day playing. Somehow time on the train disappears as the thousands of kilometers pass by. Changing about an hour a day due to time zones has an odd effect on one's sense of time as well.
We are heading out, enough Michael Jackson for one sitting, but we will report back soon. Perhaps more on the train ride as well as our very interesting bunk mates (and their snoring and toenail clippings) next time. Definitely more on our Chinese experiences though. Be sure to ask Elizabeth about spitting food on the floor in the nice restaurant we went to on her birthday!
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