Backlog 1: The China Chronicles

China Part 1

hi everyone,

i'm in china and it's been absolutely weird since the moment i entered. but in a good way. i took the subway from hong kong to Shenzhen, which is a Special Economic Zone that borders hong kong, so i went through customs in a subway station and they took my temperature with a little temperature wand that they pointed at my ear (i passed....no swine flu) and i got out the other side and it was chaos. chinese and chinese people everywhere, which i suppose could have been predicted, but after hong kong it was insane. and i had been advised to spend the night in something called the Queen Spa and Dining, so i went around looking for a cab to get there and no one could understand me and then some cops came and all the taxis scattered, so that was slightly unsettling. then finally i found a friend who helped me find a free shuttle to the queen spa and dining, and then the real fun began.

the queen spa and dining is the most surreal place on the planet. it's five stories and lit up like a casino and there are at least 500 poeple on duty at any one time to cater to your every whim. you pay about $16 to get in and they funnel you into these plush locker rooms where you take a shower, using a body wash called 'Living Skin Almightiness Washes Noodle Milk" which I think is obviously a quality product, and then they outfit you with really cool stripey pajamas and you wander around the five floors eating free fresh fruit and ice cream and coffee and swimming in the hold, cold, and lukewarm pools and there are saunas and steam rooms and rest areas and a sleeping section and it's just nuts. i had a 90 minute full body massage and dinner and spent the night in a sleeping room and i paid $40 total for the whole experience. highly recommended.

then i flew literally all day, first to zhengzhou which was a surprise stop along the way, and then to the destination I was actually scheduled for, urumqi (the city whose main distinction is that it's farther from the ocean than any other real city in the world) where i met my friend and the two other people i'm traveling with and now we're in kashgar, silk road stop, where it gets dark at 11 pm because beijing won't let them have the time change they deserve being 2000 miles west of the capital. anyway the plan for here involves horses, camels, yurts (YURTS!), the karakoram highway, a sunday market, and lots of little men with mustaches (like his).

more on all that once it occurs. miss everyone and talk to you all soon!

China Part 2

hey team,

so here's what i've been doing the last few days (and for those of you who weren't in on china part 1, it was weird):

we got to kashgar friday night and spent saturday wandering around the city, part of which is going to be razed by the chinese government any minute now and replaced by basically plastic houses made to look like the old ones, and that was cool. the people here are Uigher (weeeee-ghur) which is fun to say, and they're really un-chinese and more turkish than asian anyway. they also make some pretty good noodles which chicken and garlic, so they come out on top in my book.

anyway from kashgar we took a day trip to the desert to ride a dune buggy (and I DROVE IT across some dunes and anyone who remembers the days of bumper cars at disneyland is probably glad they didn't have to witness that) and then we went to a livestock market to watch Uigher men bargaining over how much a donkey costs (which actually comes back into the story later in such a bizarre twist of fate), and then the famous Kashgar sunday market where i wanted to buy carpets but couldn't fit them into my backpack. sorry pat i guess the twelve you have in your matchbox house will have to do for now :)

then the real fun begins. we get a driver to take us for a three day trip up the karakoram highway (highest in the world, goes up to 5000 meters) all the way to the border with pakistan. the day begins well except for the small detail that i vomit three times before breakfast and we're about to spend six hours in a 1914 honda crackerbox which won't turn on the first 7 times the driver tries. we end up pushing it, a lot. and apparently i had food poisoning that day so i don't remember much except the periodic pulling over to let me jump out of the car right on time to throw up and then get back in and curl up into a ball and wince, but they tell me it was nice.

we spent that first night in a hotel in a town called Tashkorgan and then the next day drove to pakistan. seriously. we just put our feet in and took pictures and came back, but even just putting your toe in you start to grow a beard and feel like a rebel. it's wild and wooly over there.

the best night was the second night. we wanted to stay in a yurt, so our driver took us to some friends of his who had some yurts on the shores of a lake. we arrived, they took us in, made us yak tea and noodles from scratch (as in, from flour and water and eggs all the way into hot steaming noodle deliciousness) and then sent us off to bed in another yurt down yonder. we were just dozing off to sleep when we heard a commotion, someone came in and told us to hide and be silent, and then moments later our driver, our entire yurt family and 6 chinese police men with guns barged into the yurt in one big heap and informed us we had to leave. apparently we were staying in an illegal homestay and had to move to the chinese hotel down the road.....ok, fine, what’s a little forced relocation between friends. but how the chinese police found us there at 2 in the morning anyway? well, our driver had gone on a little joyride to buy cigarettes and, while trying to answer his cell phone and drive and smoke a cigarette, had collided with a donkey in the road and killed the poor thing. so the family of this unfortunate donkey woke up and demanded compensation, which our driver didn't have, so he had to come get us to ask us to lend him money (and we knew exactly how much to give! 1500 kwai not a penny more!) and because it was taking so long the family called the police and reported both the donkey-slaying and the illegal foreigner-hiding. overall, just completely absurd.

but we got back fine and now we're in Turpan where you sit under grape leaves and drink fresh watermelon juice and life is sweet.

that's all for now, more soon from normal china. love molly

China Part 3

Friends:

I´m finally in a quiet, civilized place long enough to create a proper email group list so I can send these updates to everyone I mean to. The last two were written on the run, my recipient list was a little spotty, and some people got them late or not at all. But the chaos is all over now: you guys are my email group and you will be bombarded with random stories from Asia for awhile. I hope everyone´s ok with that.

So we finished our tour through the wild west of China, and although there really will is not much to tell compared to the Night of the Slain Donkey and Shamed Cherfu (which means either driver or master, which to me seem more opposite than the same, but what do I know), we did have an interesting time in Turpan, too. The attractions there are legitimate but not mind-blowing: we visited a traditional village with some kind of special life-giving tree (perhaps the fruit of which is used to make Living the Skin Almightiness Noodles Washes Milk?), some mediocre ruins that we elected to ignore in favor of tasty noodles in a nearby roadside shack, the Flaming Mountains (who earn their title I guess for being sort of red? I don´t know, I thought they were boring), a pretty mosque and minerat that really could have just been a bigger version of your standard islamic-influenced sand castle, something called a Karez that has to do with irrigation technology but looks suspiciously like a dirty stream by the side of the road, and then finally some actually real cool ruins on top of a plateau that used to guard....the surrounding sand? Something.

Anyway so that was a fun tour, but it was actually not exactly what we had agreed upon with the nice man loitering around our hotel who had arranged it for us. He promised special back roads to avoid entrance fees (the chinese simply adore entrance fees and charge them everywhere from pretty neighborhoods to photo spots along the side of the road) with special vistas, and English. We got neither. So when our non-English speaking, non-backroad knowing driver brought us back to the hotel and requested the second half of our payment, we asked instead to speak with his boss, the man who had arranged the tour. And then it was really a funny scene: the guy came along with his boss, who is some kind of local tourist-lord, and the two of them, the driver, and the three of us took seats around the lobby and calmly discussed our concerns, in inside voices, until the tourist-lords graciously accepted our offer to pay only half of what we still owed since we had been slightly dissatisfied with the service rendered. I mean, I was expecting an angry commotion, at the very least some impassioned arm gestures, maybe even some "death to these stingy infidels!"s. But these guys, for all their sleaze and sketchiness, were totally rational and reasonable. They just wanted us to be happy. So we paid $3 less each and we absolutely were.

Now I´m in Shanghai which is all smog and high heels and grimy old buildings and ostentatious new ones, and I´m hoping to leave soon. Next stop: into the bamboo forests and the open arms of a Giant Panda. Yes, I will receive a Panda Hug in this country, and no, no one will tell me otherwise.

Love to everyone and I will talk to you all from Pandaland.

China Part 4

Hey there,

I haven't had a chance to write in awhile, but not because I was mauled by a giant panda. I only clarify that point because, amazingly, some people seemed to be genuinely worried. And really I'm touched by those who felt compelled to send warnings of panda brutality my way, just in case I was in serious danger of hopping the panda fence and going on a hugging rampage that would leave several furry friends feeling violated and me a heap of bloody panda-bitten sadness on the bamboo floor. But no---I read about Gugu. I read about Knut (who is not strictly a panda bear, but seems to share their hatred of hugs and cuddling), and I wanted nothing to do with it, mostly because (let's be honest) I'm not really in an emotional position to suffer any more rejection at this moment in time. So I actually didn't even hug a giant panda, I hugged a red one, because they look like fox-cat-chihuahua-racoons and they're much, much easier to hold.

For this I received a Certification of Love for the Red Panda, which I will treasure to my dying day.

From there, armed with this confirmation of my enduring love for the panda race, I took a day trip a few hours south to see the largest carved buddha in the world, which was, predictably, gigantic, and I felt satisfied that it probably really is the biggest buddha out there. I was ready to move on.

My next stop (via a lovely overnight train whose loveliness was only slightly marred by the huge snoring chinese man who shared my sleeping cabin) was Xian and the roughly 10,000 terracotta warriors and horses that a chinese peasant found buried next to his well one day--hello, giant army of angry soldiers hiding under my tomato plants, what are you doing here? But there they are, and they're really unbelievable. More unbelievable though was the fact that the chinese government felt compelled to create a 30 foot marionette of a terracotta warrior to display in the exhibition hall, holding hands with a 20 foot marionette of a creepy chinese girl. I know you can't automatically picture how funny that is, but try.

I have to go because the classic film Ghosts of Exgirlfriends past has just been put on and there's not a lot I can do to resist. I'll finish this later, maybe from Beijing which is my next stop.

Certification of Love for all of You,

Molly

China last one I promise

Hi friends,

Sorry I left you for a really bad Matthew McConaghauy movie (I''m not going to pretend I know how to spell McConaghauy, not for second), but I'm back now. I'm in Beijing and I have a few things to report.

The first is a scene from Xi'an that I didn't have time to get to the other day, and this is it: One night while in Xi'an, we go out to a Belgian beer bar that a friend of my host's is opening with his Fulbright money while in Xi'an (thank you taxpayers, you've funded a very nice little joint in the dust belt of China. Fine work). Anyway we get there and realize we're starving, so we take the guy's five-month old bull terrier puppy, Ricky, and we head out in search of what most people in the world are searching for: dumplings. We find a late-night dumpling joint and saunter in with bull terrier puppy in tow, which no one seems particularly concerned by, because after all, there just are no health standards in this country except when it comes to swine flu, in which case there are lots, so why not invite a puppy into the meat-grilling area? The waiter does mention something about a cat also being in attendance that night, but the dog's owner, the Fulbrighter, Pierre, waves him off with the assurance that Ricky is totally ok with cats.

If only it were that simple. Within seconds of us entering this restaurant--literally about 8 seconds--there is a flying, hissing, spitting mess of a cat throwing itself all over Pierre and Ricky, evidently because said psycho cat also had a kitten stashed away in her corner of the dumpling restaurant, and anyone who hasn't been in a cave for their entire lives could have predicted how a mother cat would react to a big dumb bull terrier invading her kitten-zone, and so it happened. The cat tore into Pierre's corduroys pants and the leg underneath, Pierre snatched Ricky up and clutched him to his chest while shouting at the top of his lungs "I will kick this fucking cat! I will totally kick this fucking cat right now!" and the poor unfortunate waiter scurried around his feet wielding a stool and trying to either hit the cat with it or maybe trap it under the stools legs, unclear. And finally some other waiter grabs the mama cat by the scruff and throws it out the front door, which she obviously would not settle for only partially because it means separation from her kitten, and the scene just goes on and on for probably a full five minutes of kicking, hissing, biting, and general panic and frenzy. So, because I was apparently the only member of this shitshow who had actually been exposed to the wonders of the domestic cat before, I finally go over and pick up the kitten, take the kitten outside, and lure the mama cat down the street to be reunited with her terrified offspring. Those two traumatized little beings promptly scurry under some lumber, Pierre and his dumb dog keep jumping around for a few minutes and screaming vengeance, and the thirty or so chinese dumpling-eaters who witnessed the extravaganza sit in quiet, pertifried awe which I have to assume was followed by copious tears moments later. Needless to say, we left in disgrace, dumpling-less and humiliated.

Anyway, then I came to Beijing and I don't really like it but I'll tell you what might be the one redeeming factor: old people dancing in the park. After the obligatory Forbidden city/Temple of heaven circuit today, I found myself sitting in a park watching these old people get down and wondering why I had ever bothered to do anything else with my time. Seriously, the degree of sweetness involved in this dance spectacle cannot be overstated. If anyone can think of a cuter scene than 50 old people dancing with each other in a park on a Saturday afternoon, please let me know and I will seek it out.

I notice that this email has become very long and slightly pointless, so I'll stop. And remember that you're all free to unsubscribe at any time should you not wish to hear more stories about old people or cats.

But unless I hear back, get ready for the next installment of rambling stories from my next destination: Japan!

I look forward to it.

Love, Molly.