Last Day in China

Wendy and Susie have arranged our airport transit, have given us papers with the time of our vans, the name and license plates of our drivers and have made sure all our flights are still scheduled as intended. And they have left us on our own. Groups with similar flight times (or actually on the same flight) are leaving throughout the day, in waves. Here's the 12:30 group:

My flight doesn't leave until 8:30 tonight so I have the whole day to kill.

First I tried to retrieve the laundry I left at a window near the hotel. Turns out that it won't be ready until tomorrow afternoon, long after I'm back in Portland. I hope they enjoy my American sized undies and jeans. I doubt they'll fit anyone in this country.

I tried to walk the neighborhood around the hotel, but gave up after walking almost an hour got me only deeper into the luxury-goods-stores part of town. I've already told you about my relationship to designer goods, real or fake.  I came back to the hotel and lay around in my room til I had to check out, and now have been in the lobby for about an hour watching a movie on the iPad. The lobby, like all the lobbies of all the hotels we've stayed in [except the one in the Yellow Mountains] is all decorated for Xmas

(apparently even the non-Christians among Shanghai's young people celebrate the secular gift-giving holiday), and full of people doing buisiness deals. Some Israelis discussing medical podcucts in Hebrew, a German guy talking about financing a deal in English with a Chinese man and his interpreter. Everybody else on their cell phones. 

I'm ready to come home, though perhaps not yet ready for the arduous journey to get there. I will have at least 2 hours in the Shanghai airport. And then 4 hours at LAX, but I'm hoping to see my cousin Rachel and her daughters Golda and Romi. I get into PDX at about 10:30 tomorrow night. Which will still be Wednesday, as it is now, because I'm recrossing the International Date Line, regaining the day I lost on the way here. 

I hope you've all enjoyed traveling with me through this blog. It was fun to share the adventure.

Back in Shanghai

On our last full day of the tour we managed to make it to the bus absolutely on time. The guides have been increasingly vocal, if good humored, about how long it takes us to do everything. I guess it's not surprising that a group of 30 opinionated people with an average age in the high 60's are not swift or nimble. This morning we made it to the Shanghai museum before opening, so we could be let in the VIP entrance (June, of course, has connections).

The museums are free here, and apparently lots of people come in to get out of the cold and to use the facilities. Sort of like public libraries at home. The assembled Chinese people in the regular line definitely gave us the hairy eyeball as we strolled in ahead of them.

I spent an hour looking at ancient (16th century BC!) bronzes

and the collection of costumes and artifacts of ethnic minorities (all collected in the 20th century).

After shopping the museum store (not to be missed!) I left the building, went down in the subway station under the adjacent People's Square and found a vast, sprawling shopping mall. (Wendy had clued me in.) I was on a quest for a cheap duffle bag, as my shopping has led the volume of my belongings to exceed the volume of my original bags. Ahem. The mall looked very much like one at home: lots of brightly colored clothing, kiosks with cosmetics and jewelry, pop music blaring in all the stores. And lots of young people in pairs and groups roaming around. All Chinese. This was noticeable to me because Shanghai is a very cosmopolitan city, especially in the neighborhood we've been parked in.

 It was good to get out from under the thumb of the tour, to walk around and explore on my own (though one of my fellow travelers, Karen, accompanied me on my foray). We saw beggars, people picking through garbage cans, transit workers taking a break by sitting on the stairs down to the Metro and eating lunch, and lots of other scenes we missed being driven from Ming dynasty mansion to historic walled city to ancient temple. And I did get a bag, for very cheap. Made in China.

Our lunch was in a massive restaurant, "approved for tour groups" with traditional Shanghanese fare, including very very good fried rice, and boiled fresh water shrimp with a vinegar dipping sauce. 

And tonight was the farewell banquet, at a very fancy residence that has been turned into a boutique hotel. With nearly the same food as lunch.

Speeches were made,

including repeated mentions that none of us will know what to do without Wendy giving us daily directions and planning ahead for us. She, when given the chance to speak, assured us that if we get home and can't find our suitcases, or if we have other issues, can still use her card and call her for assistance. If only that were true. 

Also at dinner everyone who'd had  tailor made jacket made modeled for us. I wonder how these pieces will fit into everyone's real lives back home?

And then we walked on the Bund in the freezing breeze. This is the river walk on the the Huangpu River,  in the old British Concession. The other side of the river, now site of the tallest building in Asia, was a mere 15 years ago, all farmland. It hurts my brain to think of such rapid, extensive development. I can't image what it must be like for the residents of this city.

The building with the green roof in the next photo used to be the Peace Hotel, the only hotel for foreigners in Shanghai (my parents stayed there in the early 1980's when they visited). Twenty years ago it was the tallest building in Shanghai. Now it's not even the tallest building on the block!

Another thing we saw all over China was beautiful lighting on all the bridges. This one, like most of them, changed color every few minutes, from blue to purple to green to red to orange and so on. Just lovely. 

(Sorry about the quality of the photos at the end of this post, I forgot my camera and all the ones from the evening were taken with my iPhone.)

Suzhou Day Two

I have just about had it with standing around historic cultural sites with 30 other Americans, shooting photos of picturesque vistas. And that was what today was all about. Oh, and standing around in artisainal  workshops with the same herd of tourists, watching young Chinese do some amazingly painstaking task. We had that today too. I probably shouldn't complain, since the theme of this trip was made clear from the beginning, and looking at old things and workshops is the whole point. This is one of the compromises of group travel: you get to go places you could never go on your own, but you have to match your pace to the group.

First, another garden. I can't even remember whose it was, or why we were there.

Then, an embroidery workshop. They do amazingly detailed "thread painting" type embroidery on fine silk, some of it double sided. They lay in millions of individual stitches in fine gradations of color. It takes years to be proficient, and then as you age the eyesight prevents a very long career. Of course these masterpieces were available for purchase. For 10's of thousands of dollars. All of these photos were shot on the sly, as they warned us not to take any. I'm bad at following rules.

The next stop after a forgettable lunch was another garden. I stayed on the bus. 

Then we returned to Shanghai, and the local guide "Susie" took us on a very modern Chinese adventure. Cab to a random street corner, then through a literal back alley,  up stairs past a truly terrifying assortment of illegal electrical connections to makeshift subpanels. Then into locked rooms full of high quality fake designer purses, scarves and watches. There were young Chinese seated in the hall on stools, eating strong smelling food out of rice bowls, coughing and spitting on the floor. All the merch was still overpriced for me, being a non-designer type. A fake Channel bag is still overpriced at $200. Some of my fellow shoppers did fall for the hard sell techniques, and purchased a number of faux designer goods. I abstained, having my kind of plebe aesthetic. I mean, I shop at Penny's and Target!

Dinner was again on our own, and I ate at the soup dumpling restaurant next to the hotel. It is a chain, and apparently there's on in LA, as well as in Taiwan, Bangkok and a number of Chinese cities. I kind of flubbed eating the first one, forgetting that a soup dumpling is full of .....soup. Bit into it and spilled hot pork broth all over the table, my shirt and my lap. OK. Next one was popped into my mouth whole. Very delicious, especially dipped in hot sauce. And none of the locals caught my initial mistake, so aside from more laundry, no harm no foul.

I shopped for snacks in the "City Supermarket" on the basement level of the hotel complex, where they had lots of imported goods from Europe and the US. Barilla pasta, Haagen-Dazs ice cream, Organic Valley boxed milk. All with labeling in Chinese on the back. I indulged in some sweet desserts, the one thing you never get in China. And a huge bottle of sparkling water. After all the rural travel, I kind of enjoy being back in an cosmopolitan city. 

Suzhou Day One

I don't know quite what I expected, but I didn't really think I'd spend this much time being so very cold during this trip. I'm always underestimating the amount of time we will be spending outdoors, as well as the coldness of the temperatures. Therefore I dress too lightly, don't bring my gloves and hat off the bus or otherwise insure that I will be too frozen by the end of the day's activities to really care what I've just seen. Today I resorted to buying a "RL Polo Sport" watch cap from a street vendor. Made of acrylic it was not very warm, but better than a bare head. When we get driven from the bus parking area to a tourist site zipping through the cold air in an open vehicle only intensifies the cold.

Sometimes the unintentionally hilarious translations are amusing enough to help make us forget our discomfort for a minute.

Today we left the haven of the Ritz Carlton in Sanghai and drove by bus to Suzhou. It is called the city of gardens, and is in a southern part of China full of lakes, ponds and canals. In fact on the way there we crossed the Grand Canal which is the second largest manmade feature after the Great Wall. It stretches from Beijing south and ends in Shanghai. It was ordered to be built by one emperor, and added on to and extended by several others. Parts are in bad repair, but here in this region it's still an active waterway.

On our way we stopped at Tongli, a "water town", built on a series of canals. The town is 1000 years old, and we toured a few historic museums.

I was much more interested in the street life, a well as some of the snacks.

Our Bryn Mawr guide, June, stopped for some "stinky tofu", which lives up to its name. It's apparently like French cheeses in that the taste is much more mellow than the smell. June says it's now hard to find in tourist areas as the vendors have been pressured to stop sellng it as the odor bothers foreigners. However, this town is small enough, and infrequently visited by foreign tourists. The same booth was selling fried crabs on a stick. (That's June in the foreground of the photo of the stinky tofu vendor.)

In one of the sites we visited a man was doing papercuts by hand. I bought a few to bring home, as they were excedingly lovely, and very well priced.

This was a blind musician, playing the 2-stringed erhu, and wearing a costume from another era (note the amplifier he has hidden in a plastic bag at his feet):

This was the stage in the center of town where they performed opera:

I was too slow with the camera to capture any of the performers.

This sign led to an attraction we, sadly, had no time to visit:

Lunch at a Suzhou restaurant was designed to push our culinary limits. Among the total 15 dishes it included eels in hoisin sauce, pork tendon, baby abalone in herb sauce, silky tofu with hairy crab, and stewed chicken in a pot. Chinese Wendy made the servers bring the pots back off the tables and take the heads off the birds before serving the dishes to us again. The feet, however,were still there.

I liked what I saw of Suzhou from the bus. A bustling small city, with colorful vendors and shops.

After lunch we went to a massive, complicated garden called "The Humble Administrator's Garden". I missed the whole story of why this obviously extremely wealthy official referred to himself as humble. The sun was near setting, and the views through the garden were extremely lovely in every direction.

And I was very, very cold. 

Later in the Suzhou Pan Pacific Hotel, I had a hot bath, and a salad for dinner. Tomorrow more Suzhou gardens and back to Shanghai. Only 2 more full days of this trip. I can't believe it's almost over. I also can't believe I've only been gone a bit over 2 weeks, it feels like months.