China Favorites

Shanghai

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Dinner at LuLu’s Shanghainese Restaurant

Tonight was our last dinner in China; tomorrow we fly home. Over watermelon (the traditional post-meal dessert), Mimi asked everyone to name their favorite things in China. I wrote them down and will include a few photos of each place. I still have much to write about our trip but this is all I have time for now.

• Michael: Pandas, Great Wall, Yellow Mountain, Lion Grove Garden
• Eric: Yellow Mountain, Yangtze River Cruise, Pandas, Basketball
• Nick: Pandas, Basketball, Great Wall
• Melissa: Oasis Pool at Beijing Grand Hyatt Hotel, Panda babies
• Michelle: Oasis Pool, Yellow Mountain, cousins
• Chris: Pandas, Yellow Mountain, Yangtze River Cruise
• Paul: Yellow Mountain
• Bubba: Great Wall, seeing China’s progress, the porters carrying loads up Yellow Mountain
• Alexa: Great Wall, village in Xian, Yellow Mountain
• Doober: Yangtze River Cruise, Yellow Mountain
• Julie: Grampy holding the panda, Yellow Mountain, Lion Grove Garden, Great Wall, Silk Factory
• Frank: everything
• Mimi: Pandas, Yellow Mountain, Lion Grove Garden

Yellow Mountain (Huang Shan)

Yellow Mountain, continued

Yellow Mountain, part 3

Pandas

Chengdu

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Qing Chen Mountain, page 723

These photos are from Qing Chen Mountain in Chengdu. The first couple are from an open air teahouse showing a woman getting a Chinese massage and a group playing mahjong. Chengdu is where the pandas are so the figures on the roofline are not the traditional dragons and immortals; instead they have pandas. Figures of pandas are all over this city, even the road dividers have pandas on them. I'll post more about our visit to the Panda Research Center later.

Mimi is reading a book that she recommends Between Heaven & Earth: A Guide to Chinese Medicine by Beinfield and Korngold. It uses the analogy of caring for a garden to explain the philosophy of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

Our guide is Shelly and our bus driver is Mr. Liu. Shelly was a very informative guide, so we learned a lot of history on the bus. But she was not as personable as Miranda, our guide in Beijing. Some of the facts I learned included:

• Chengdu’s name comes from Cheng (becoming) and Du (capitol city) but I forget why this name was chosen. Beijing means northern (bei) capitol (jing).
• Real estate costs about 6000 Y per square meter in Chengdu and about 9000 Y per square meter in Beijing. A typical 3 person apartment is 125 square meters.
• Chengdu has 3 ring roads to Beijing’s 5 ring roads. The 3^rd Ring Road is only three years old, but they are having to repave many sections. They residents call it the Tofu Road because it is soft inside, thus necessitating all the repair work.
• The cities with the most cars in China are Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu in that order.
• A car costs about 40,000 to 70,000 yuan, plus another 1000 Y per month for things like gas, parking, and insurance.
• Chengdu is also known as the kingdom of bicycles. A bike costs about 300 yuan for a single speed or 1000 Y for a racing bike. More and more people are buying “electronic” bikes, so they don’t have to pedal. The speed limit for an electric bike in the separated bike lane is 15 kph, but there is no limit for a pedal bicycle. (In Suzhou I saw many electric bikes and also lots of Vespa-style scooters. The plain pedal bicycle is not as popluar anymore.)
• Chengdu is known for brocade, hibiscus, agriculture (rapeseed or canola).
• Chendu is subtropical, with only 3 snowfalls during Shelly’s lifetime.
• Shelly often described things as “since liberation” to refer to after 1949, terminology we did not hear in the more cosmopolitan city of Beijing.
• Shelly says the city is divided as follows: West for the government officials; South for the rich; East for the poor; North for the bad people (this is where the railway station is and I guess thieves prey on the passengers disembarking.)
• Chengdu has a thriving teahouse culture. There are three types: open air teahouse, modern teahouse, and cultural (or traditional) teahouse. Green tea is the specialty. The spring tea is the best and is called daughter tea. The summer tea is second best and called daughter-in-law tea. Autumn tea is the least favored and called grandmother tea. (Of course, our family would call the best tea the grandmother tea.) In a traditional teahouse the server is called a “tea doctor,” as in PhD, because they are so learned about tea. The tea service includes a saucer, a cup, and a lid and there is a code used to communicate with your tea doctor. If you lean the lid against the side of the cup it means you are letting the tea cool before you drink it. If you put the upside down lid on the table, it means you are ready for more tea. Right side up on the table means you left the table for just a moment and will be right back. Upside down on the cup means you are done, so bring the bill soon, or you will leave without paying and it isn’t your fault. Finally, if you put all three pieces, the lid, the cup, and the saucer, separate on the table, you thought the service was bad.
• The farmers near the city are doing okay because they can supplement their income, but more remote farmers are poor, earning about 1000 yuan per year. They have no electricity and the children walk an hour to school. Public school is mandatory for all children through 6^th grade and paid for by the government. The three years of middle school and three years of high school cost 1000 yuan per year, but the teachers are not very motivated. Many parents send their child to private school which costs 20,000 Y per year. The cost for raising a child plays as big a part in limiting families to one child as the government rules. Just last year the government changed laws so that farmers don’t have to pay for school or pay agriculture tax. Another rule change is that if two people marry and both were only children, then they can have two children instead of one.

Mt Qing Chen photos, cont

Hutong

Just to make sure everyone slept this night, we added an evening event to our itinerary: a tour of the hutongs, the small alleys that remain from ancient Beijing. We rode around in pedicabs, a sort of bicycle rickshaw and took some time to learn how the doorpins above the courtyard door along with the stones on either side of the door signified the status of the family that lived there. We also entered a courtyard and saw some of the rooms of one hutong family. Each room was built around the perimeter of the courtyard and you had to go outside to move from one room to another. At one time the courtyard would have been a central garden for the complex, but during the Cultural Revolution, they built additional rooms in the courtyard so now there was a maze of smaller alleys and leading to those additional rooms.
For dinner we ate at a food court in the mall below the Grand Hyatt hotel. For 14Y to 25Y you could get a large dish of Chinese food from any of 30 or so vendors. I had calamari in fiery pepper sauce and it was delicious.
As expected, there was no need for midnight tai chi this time. I fell asleep as soon as I crawled into bed around 10 PM and slept soundly until 5 AM.
In China I weigh the same as Nicholas, about 75. Of course the scales are in kilograms and Nick weighs 75 pounds, so it's sort of cheating. I am going to have to go back on my one serving per meal diet because I'm eating too much good food, and contrary to Grammy's assertion, you can get fat eating Chinese food.
4/11 72.3 (after time trial)
4/13 75.2 (after first dinner in China)
4/14 73.3 (before breakfast)
4/15 73.9 (after dinner)
4/16 73.5 (before breakfast)

The Great Wall

After an excellent lunch at The Sports Club (fixme) where we enjoyed a great winter melon and egg white soup, we took our private tour bus to the Great Wall in (fixme). The mountains are beautiful with wildflowers blooming. Rather than hike up the mountain, we rode up to the wall in a tram cable car like at a ski area. There was still plenty of hiking to do on top of the wall, with the final section being so steep we had to stop and rest a couple of times.
The path to the tram is lined with vendors selling t-shirts, table runners, and all sorts of knick-knacks. On the way back down, an older man lured me into his booth and blocked the exit until I bought something. I got a black "silk" table cloth embroidered with golden dragons and phoenixes for 100Y. The starting price was 450, so I think I got a good price. The negotiations took 10 or 15 minutes and the vendors from neighboring stands were watching closely and laughed when we finally settled on a price. While he was wrapping the table cloth up, he kept muttering under his breath in Chinese like he had gotten cheated in the deal. Then he demanded a souvenir from America to help ease the pain of selling so cheap. He suggested that an American coin would be a good souvenir, but not having any I gave him my Livestrong wristband instead. At first he didn't know what it was, but I explained about Lance Armstrong winning the Tour de France 7 times in a row and recovering from cancer of the brain. He seemed to recognize the story and happily accepted the Livestrong band.

Great Wall photos, continued

Great Wall photos, continued

Forbidden City

The day started with an excellent breakfast buffet of Chinese dumplings, rice soup, fresh fruit, lox, smoked fish, chocolate croissants, coffee... No wonder I'm gaining weight on this trip. Then we went to Tiananmen Square and practiced "boggling" (Nick's word for bargaining and haggling). My first success was a Chairman Mao watch for 40 Yuan, down from an initial asking price of Y300. Nick also picked up some really excellent "rattlesnake rocks"--two magnets that you toss in the air and they click together with a rattling noise.
Then we walked around in the Forbidden City, where we learned that the the little figures on the ends of the roof line denote the prestige of the building. Nine figures is for the emperor. The nine figures, in order are the dragon, the phoenix, a lion, heavenly steed, heavenly seahorse, then four mythical animals with complicated Chinese names. Flanking these figures is an immortal riding on a phoenix at the front and a dragon at the rear.
The highlight for many of us was the beautiful garden in the Forbidden City. The tree branches were twisted and other trees and knotty trunks.