Hotel in Xian
Tourists must sit in segregated area. They had american style food. Not sure where I can go to type my journal.
Today is the 15th AM. And we are suppose to see the stiles and the city wall in Xian today. I have probably just about had my fill of sight seeing. Not much academics involved in this trip. It is Mark's family vacation, and for the rest of the students an organized tour by CSU Chico for 3 units. These pitiful journals, one decent text and a paper will comprise of our grade. You would not think it that hard to find one business person in each town we've stayed at (but for Yichang as
we were only there one night) to speak to us. Even in Yichang, having an engineer talk to us about his personal experience in working on the 3 gorges dam would have been worthwhile. But that of course would have involved extra planning. And in my opinion the planning for the academics was virtually non existant. So now basically we are on the tourist junket. There is not much to differentiate us from a vangard or globus tour group. Nothing special, keep us in the american section of town and always have us escorted and guided. I have failed to make the connection between all the Chin, Han, Tan, and Quin dynasties and doing business in China today. That would be like knowing all the popes in the past and their crypts and churches constructed and how that is relevant to doing import/export trade. I suppose it is important to know the banking holidays which are religious based to close a deal. Ok, yes there is some sarcasism. But this is a blog, and my opinions and impressions are purely my own and I am sure no one else's.
But at least for this type of touring the company I keep are students who are much easier to deal with than a bunch of cranky crochety old adults. The students are flexible and flowing. Give them a beer and they think everything is great. I do however believe many of them are also discouraged with the lack of academics involved with this trip.
Ok, so to recap the tourist junket thus far. I think the last time I had to post in the journal ws the Monday before we left for Yichang. We left for Yichang on a bus. The bus was late leaving the hotel, the 8:30AM departure turned to 9AM. Then we went to the 5-star hotel where Mark
was staying with his family to pick them up. There was made calls to get one of the students a change in prescription medication as the student was having problems with his current prescription. We then went back to the Tongi Medical Center. They had warned us that the outpatient volume on Mondays during the tour was about 8,000. I have never seen such a traffic and parking chaos. Much less trying to take a tour bus into the parking facility. I feel for the people trying to get into the emergency room as all entrances were blocked with traffic. The hospital ambulances are simple toyota sized vans. The appeared to be no electronics on them. Basically a cot in the back of a very small narrow van.
I think once someone gets into the trauma center they would get state of the art, but good luck in getting there and into the facility. We group was there till a little after 12N. Then we were in traffic for probably another hour trying to get onto the toll freeway. Surburb after suburb extended for
mile after mile. Instant cities of high rise apartments are going up everywhere. We are not talking a few highrises but probably 25-30 simultaneously on one project. Multiply the projects by 100 or more. That is how they are trying to build one city the size of NYC every 4 months. Of course,
it is not happening at that pace, but it is incredible. The other phenomona is the lack of big big heavy duty equipment. This country survives on its manpower. Sheer volume of labor - not equipment. I would expect bulldozers, everywhere, and most of the projects just have a single crane.
They jokingly call the construction crane the new bird of China. It is however, not really a joke.
Ok continuing on. We stop at two different rest areas enroute and filled up the bus. The cost was 591 yuan for 121 or so liters for about 4.11 yuan per liter. One of the rest areas was very clean with western and eastern toilets, and one (which I fortunately didn't need to use) had the trough open
inside the women's restroom. No doors and a ditch with running water flowing through. Everyone does there thing over the porcelain ditch. This reminds me of the baths found in early Rome. One thing that is again interestly is the common thread between cultures. The decorative ornamention
on the temples and building both in cornices, roof shingles, and ceiling paintings reminds me much of some of the german tyrolean ceiling paintings. The bridges of the canals are like those in Venice. The small boats look like a simplified gondola. The noodles of course of Italy came from
China. So China's influance on the early western civilization is profound. I did not realize quite how much. Then again when looking at the earliest of pottery (2500-2000 BC) you could hardly tell is it was Mayan or Chinese in the black and terra cotta glaze colors and patterns.
This of course brings me back to the journey, which is life I suppose. We looked out of acres and acres of irrigated farmland. Houses are clustered by rural village. The structures looked much more modern than I would have expected. Farming is still manual labor intensive. The concession to automation is probably only the well pumps. All else is the water buffalo (aka the John Deere of China) and the expanded farm family. It appears as if they were working communally on the plots. That or there are extremely large families. Life of course takes on a differenct pace I am sure in those villages. It was like we were on a super highway (6 lane new tollroad) disecting through time. The only other concessions were the great power lines crossing the countryside. In we stopped and a small but important museum. In Jingzhou there was a small museum that had the fully preserved corpse of Sui, a western Han official, extracted from his burial tomb. The guidebook calls it gory, but I found it utterly fascinating. It was a short stop, but the best way to recover from missing the minority village we had been scheduled to see. But the three hour delay in getting started that day made it impossible to fit it in. So the museum was a good concession to still get some touring in.
We arrived in Yichang and had dinner. From there we went directly to our hotel room. The accomodations were very good, however, the room smelled of cigarette smoke. Ironic, it was a non smoking room and in the middle of the dresser was the no smoking placard, and ash tray and matches. Once again something was lost in the translation. Some of the students explored the area that night, but I went to bed. I was tired of travelling all day on the bus. It really was probably only 4-5 hours on the bus but we had been in transit all day. The next morning was breakfast
and off to the 3 gorges dam area. The landscape and scenary had changed to the eroded limestone mountains. The vertical rise on the remaining granite formations is eiree almost. Then the deep gorges of all the river tributaries all the while densely forested in bushes and trees. We came to the 3-gorges area and security is very tight as in the US. You can not bring liquids on the tour and must demonstrate that you will drink from your water bottle and they will let you bring that through.
China has taken advantage of the commercialization of tourism to the 3 gorges area. At every stop there are trinkets and things for sale and 5 -10 yuan for this or that. The guide did not speak english so we just read placards. To get the interesting statistics, you probably need to buy a guide book in english. A discovery channel dvd is being passed around the group to watch to get further information. The dvd hasn't made it my way, but maybe tonite on the train I can watch it. From the 3 gorges we went to board the train to Xi'an. This was a local train with one 1st class sleeper on it. Our group takes a nearly a whole sleeper car but for 6 beds. We travelled all afternoon and evening, night and did not arrive until nearly 8am in Xi'an. I slept off and on for about 10 hours. Each of us bunked into our rooms, talked, laughed, and had a good time overall. The real complaint with the train was all the stop starts of each little town we stopped at (This was not an express) and then the cigarette smoke. One Japanese tourist I don't think ever took a cigarette out of his mouth. They would not let us open the windows as it was an A/C car. But it was like being in a smoke bomb. All of my clothes reeked of cigarette smoke. But of course I realized that coming and have surprisely faired better than I would have expected. Many of the students are suffering from colds - which is making its round throughout the group. Cross my fingers that I stay healthy. I am however, sleeping well at night and sleeping probably 8 or more hours each night. Which I know the students are not getting that much sleep. So resistance is down and they are getting colds.
We crossed through yet again some beautiful scenary on the train. The tunnel construction is amazing. The country is also building a highway through the mountains. Almost all is elevated and going through miles and miles of tunnels. In building the road to the 3-gorges dam the gov't used the army to construct. The army may be utilized more than I realized in infrastructure projects for the country. I think of the great era of construction and of the US utilizing the CCC. We arrived in Xi'an and were so ready to shower and get into a change of clothes. The hotel is a tourist hotel, but of top quality. no complaints on the accomodations here. Truly the only marginal accomodations thus far were on campus.
Our first day of touring Xi'an involved the great goose pagoda of the tan dynasty. The architecture is simple clean and pure. The pagoda is used to show pilgrims where the buddist temples are located. Much like the west uses church steeples to identify the location of churches in the distance. From there we went to lunch and are introduced to more of the northern china cuisine. Almost rice and since they grow winter wheat more noodles. We had our first dish of what I call chow fun - dishes using the wide fat noodles. After lunch we went to the local museum. The main museum is under rennovation for the 2008 Olympics so we toured the 4 outer galleries. They have however, placed the best pieces in those
galleries on a temporary basis until the main gallery is re-opened. The museum was fascinating, however the smell of glue and lacquer from the construction was nearly overwhelming and there was basically no A/C on in the smaller gallery wings. So one really did not want to linger very long.
There of course were some prehistoric pieces in the museum along with examples of art from each dynasty. History and art in China is really defined by the dynasty period. Xi'an of course was the capital of over 11 dynasties. Xi'an is what I would call a mature city. The streets are all lined with very mature sycamore trees and the high rises in the museum area in minimized. The City of course is ringed by a fully intact medieval style wall. But was it really not the Chinese that built the city walls and the europeans that copied. I swear I could not tell the difference between the City Wall in Lucca and the City Wall in Xi'an. If the only thing you had to look at was the wall itself.
After the museum, we all wanted to get a foot massage. So they called a large foot massage center, next to one of the major hotels. And they were able to accomodate all of us. Not everyone got a massage, but for travel weary feet that have been in sandals most of the time, each student and even myself enjoyed the massage. I have not really been wearing sandals that much. But we all enjoyed the pampered treatment.
After that we headed back to the hotel, as it was after 7PM and had dinner at our hotel which is situated around the inner ring round that circles the city. There are two ring freeways that circle Xi'an. After dinner, I went with some of hte students to a large department store / grocery store across the street. We had hoped is was a Carrefour (the large french retailer operating stores in China). It was probably like one but is wasn't a Carrefour. The groups split up and I ended up finding Brandon and David in the grocery store. The escalators were of a gradual rise such that shoppers could put there carts on them. The escalators were never went into a step mode but more a elavated ramp. That was kind of different to see. We got back after David found a bottle of Chinese wine. I have not commented on the wine but thus far each students purchase of local wine has been non-drinkable. It is vinegar. David's wine at least smelled like a cabernet sauvengin. I declined a glass as the aroma didn't grab me. And I only drink wines I know will be good, otherwise you just end up with a bad headache. The beer however, has been excellent. A very light style lager. The germans of course introduced beer in Shanghei during the colonial period and the TsingTao beer style is found throughout the country. Beer costs just a little more than water, and the advantage of the beer is that they keep it cold whereas it is harder to find cold water bottles. They just don't refrigerate them.
We ended up in David and Brandon's room to talk, use the one internet connection in the hotel room that is working. I left around 10PM and did not wake up the next morning till nearly 7:30AM. That was a really long sleeping night for me. But I wasn't sure that I got a very good or deep sleep on the train as it was constantly shifting and braking.
Thursday the group was on the bus by 9am enroute to the clay pottery plant where they make molds for the terra cotta warriors and explain how they were made. It was basically 5 minutes of lecture and one hour of shopping. The shopping / tourist stops are state required stops for the tour guides. It is the way business is done here for tourism. At the hot springs we saw lovely gardens, ponds all set against the backdrop of the mountain side with the river to the south. This is very Ying / Yang (mountain male and water female) kind of harmonious design. This was the empororers pleasure garden. After lunch we toured on to see the terra cotta warriors. It was an amazing archelogical find. One the way we saw the hotsprings which was developed by the empororers as a pleasure garden. This was probably one of the most beautiful and tranquil gardens that we visited. Here also was where Chiang Kaishek (spelling) - was arrested. From there we had lunch and went onto the terra cotta warriors excavation site. At the site you can still see how the relics are found. In many pieces and then they have the restored areas. The light however, has damaged the paint and so there is no paint left on the clay warriors. I'll write more about the sight as time is running short. Amazing though are the brass chariots From the terra cotta warriors we went into the masoluem which has not been opened as the Chinese are waiting for better technology to open the tomb preservation of the colored dyes on the relics.
From there we went back to the Xi'an hotel (hotel where they foot massage place is) and had dinner. I had success in finding Darrell's acupunture chart. We then went down to the Tan Dynasty Las Vegas dinner / drink theatre style show. It lasted from 8:30 to 10PM. It was a very colorful show which had a live chinese orchestra using period instruments. The show however is geared strictly to the tourist trade. I don't think there was one Chinese person in the show that evening.
Time is running out so I am going to wrap up my journal till I can write later.
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