Changlish

So that concludes the basics of my China trip. I'll leave you now with some of the more hilarious attempts at English that were found.

And to those good ones that I couldn't get a picture of:

"No scribbling" (no graffiti)
On a woman's shirt: "A woman who daoesn't wear perfume has no future"
On another girl's shirt: "Power girl dies! never"
On the train bathroom doors: "No occupying while stabling"

and as always, the shirts with english "text" on them found randomly in stores. "A K H Y T F B A E R N"  etc. Mash keyboard in caps + picture = cool shirt bro.

Shanghai

Stepping off the airplane in to Shanghai was strange, because for some reason I felt like I should be stepping out back in Chicago. Though--Shanghai is so cosmopolitan, it was more like New York, if you were having a nightmare about being in New York and you can't read any signs or understand anyone.

Vincent drug us all down to the Bund, which felt a lot like Michigan Ave. He had to point out all the buildings along this strip, and who built them and when, etcetera, and it was a lot of Europeans in the 20s, so they all looked European and 20s-ish.

Then we crossed through People's Square on a little train-shaped bus cart thing (it's a long walk. I'm not sure where the Square part was, because it seemed like People's Really Long Street to me) to get to the Shanghai Art Museum, which is like the only museum in China.

Stanley took his sweet time leading us through 3 of the Musuem's exhibits, which was the equivalent to a days worth of lecture if the lecture was held in a meat locker, since that's about how warm it was inside.

By the end, Stanley was forced to resort to a falsetto British voice (one which Grace and Beatrice started at the beginning of the trip and slowly infected most everyone else with by the end). It was quite entertaining, and prompted his example of Stanley's lecture in Texan later that evening at dinner.

The food we had for dinner was invented by a bunch of monks who got sick of their boring veggie diets, and invented a style of cooking where they make vegetable dishes look and kind of taste like meat. I don't know how, I imagine some sort of witch doctor magic is involved.


Outside Shanghai there are a series of famous gardens, tucked away behind walls and houses in some town. For our shortest train ride, we picked the most comfortable one. It was sort of the Chinese bullet train, with well-reclining seats and tons of leg room. Best 25 minutes of travel.

For the first garden, Stanley led us through the "labarynth of stone" just to make sure we knew how to fully appreciate a garden. It was very hot, and since my sunglasses broke 2 days before, I was finally forced to get some fake Ray Bans from a stall nearby. At least they didn't say Roy Bons like some of the others we'd seen. The garden was awfully like the Chinese Garden in Portland, only bigger.. and actually Chinese.

 We stumbled on a photo shoot.

 The cracked ice pattern is for the "winter" part of the garden.

The majority of the group elected to go back early with Han, since they wanted to go shopping or on a boat tour or something. I stayed, and so did one other student, and both Stanley and Vincent. We went next to the Lion Grove garden, which was pretty much all rocks and a pond. That might sound boring, but I can assure you that I spent the entire 45 minutes we had there trying to find my way out. The garden was more of a playground than retreat. Once I started on the single path, I had no choice but to follow it down through caves, up stairs to pavilions, over bridges, under bridges, around the pond, through some water that was overflowing from the pond, up to more platforms, down through more caverns, and never once going the direction I intended.

We also got to ride in some of those rickshaw things because apparently it is impossible to get a taxi in that town.

Poor man had to get off the bike and haul us over a hill to get to the train station.

Anyway, that was the last thing we did as a group in Shanghai. It was a hot and tiring day at the end of a hot and tiring trip, so I just showered and stayed in that night. Got to watch the "international" channel because it was in English, and also because they were showing an episode of the Sing Off that On the Rocks was on. Then they played the news from 2010. They should probably get new material.

Dali (again)

We had to go back to Dali because to get from Weishan to anywhere, you have to go to Dali, then train to Kunming where there's an airport. So we stopped in at Dali again for 4 hours. It was really, really strange to actually recognize a place in China.

Adam and Liza and I tried to walk to the lake, but when we were about halfway there, we realized that we were only halfway there, so that didn't actually happen. We did go all the way down foreigner street, under the drum tower, past the women washing fish in the gutter water, down a dirt road, across the highway, and a good ways along a pebble-paved road cutting through a swath of farmland.

On the way to the train station, the evening light was really illuminating the lake and the mountains behind it, but since trees are the mortal enemy of photographers in cars, I did not get any good shots.

Weishan

We were allowed to bus from Dali to Weishan, which was totally better than a train. Also, the bus windows open by sliding them sideways, so one can stick their whole head (or torso, if one was feeling dumb that day) easily out the window. No more questioning why dogs do that. In any case, it helped with reflection-free pictures. Weibaoshan smelled like dust and pine--so, Mt. Hood.

Weishan was going through a drought when we got there, which I understand is unusual for the area, as it is supposed to be rainy all the time--hm, that's also awfully like home.

The hottest part of the afternoon is when we got to bus up to Weibaoshan, which is the sacred mountain that he town of Weishan is named after. It has a collection of temples up there, which is why we went. One was even solely dedicated to dragons.

You can see the moss line where the water should be, if it weren't all drying up.

We visited two that were fairly close and fairly shaded, and then took a long, stair-ridden and sun-dried path down to the last on our visit list, which very nearly killed us all. According to Vincent, he has never seen the path so exposed (and therefore hot). We were all low on water by the time we got to the temple, and then they served us hot tea! I'm telling you, it could be 90 degrees out (it was) and all they have is hot food and hot drink all the time. Do not understand.

Anyway, the way back UP the stairs was really the part where we all almost melted into little puddles, which I'm sure would have immediately evaporated. It did not help that apparently our bus drive had somewhere to be after bussing us back down the mountain, so we were hurried along faster than I had the energy for.

Grave site. Could have been us.

After that ordeal, the teachers decided maybe they should make us work in the morning, then get 2-3 hours off in the afternoon when it's hottest. Which sounded swell until it rained the next day, which I'm sure was a joy to the farmers.

We spent the first two days walking to various sites in town and sketching. Ohgawd, so much sketching. Even those that weren't even taking the studio credits in this trip (ahem, ahem) had to sketch roofs and buildings for two days. It was a lot of blllrrrrgghh.

At least my hotel roommate decided she'd rather pay a little extra for her own room so she can wallow in cigarette chemicals. Means I got to spread out a little.

The actual restoration site is one restored temple and a bunch of run down buildings with rubble piled in the courtyard--foundation stones, roof tiles, walkway stones. Some of which I may have pilfered.

I only have pictures of the first courtyard, because the inevitable sick knocked me out of the game the 3rd day, so I never got to see that part. One day of sketching the buildings around town, one day sketching in the first courtyard, one day sketching in the second courtyard, and the rest of the week was spent on redoing the proposal and presenting it. (Basically, we came up with the plans for restoring rest of the buildings in the complex to turn the whole thing into an "international arts center," which means lots of studio space everywhere and some dorms for future study trips.)

Since Weishan's tourism is a little low at the moment, there were more real stores in town that tourist shops.
Like noodles

Or just cool houses

We found the grocery store too, which was good for getting snacks at. I got some dried winter melon things and a stick-shaped cookie with Winnie-the-Pooh branded on the package. They're Pooh sticks, get it?? And we discovered even more odd Oreo flavors in China: green bean, birthday cake, and a set of dual-flavors. I tried the bean and the blueberry/raspberry. Both were... odd.

By the end of the week, the rain sputtered out, and after too much "group" in the group project, we somehow came up with a completed thing to present to the board of the town. Afterwards, they invited us to lunch, which was great until the only thing that wasn't spicy was the rice. Hurrah, I had rice for lunch. (Good thing there was a food market not far from the hotel which sold these awesome fried dough pancake things.) With a few rounds of what was basically ethenol at lunch, we left Weishan.

Dali

This sleeper train ride, we were in the 2nd car, which meant that every time the whistle blowed (every 5-10 seconds. I counted.) it blew right in through the open windows that were doing nothing to cool off the top bunk, where I was, anyway.

At least the Dali hotel was charming. It was set up in a collection of building pods each with their own little garden area courtyard, connected by more garden area pathways.

Before we were allowed to check in though, we had class at the 3 pagodas and temple complex.

 I trekked up all the way to the very last building, which was pretty equivalent to climbing a mountain. The buildings are all built in a line, so every time I thought I'd reached the last one, I'd just discover one more after it. The actual last building was a tower which, once I staggered up the stairs, offered a nice view of the town and the lake, which was glittering warmly in the morning light when we arrived, but as it took me 9 thousand years to get to the tower, was no longer looking pretty for my photo.

Dali has a place called Foreigner Street, which once was the street that all the backpacking foreigners liked to stay at since it was "off the beaten track." Then the Chinese started figuring out that that's where all the foreigners were at, and then Asian toursits started coming to Dali to look at non-Asian tourists, which is all kinds of ridiculous, and ended up turning Foreigner St. into one big tourist spot.

You'd think that'd mean we'd fit in here, but the strip was oddly devoid of foreigners except ourselves that day. We spent the few free hours of our afternoon sitting on the outside benches of a bar playing cards, which was very Chinese of us. Chinese tour guides taking their groups down the street would stop next to us and clearly use us as an example in their speeches. We also started blatantly posing for photos when we caught the shy ones trying to sneak them (the not shy ones would make us pose with them).

One of the girls found a spa in the hotel complex, and convinced myself and another to try this Chinese cupping massage technique thing. I had not heard of it, and in hindsight, probably should have inquired about it more before agreeing. Basically, they have a bunch of round jars, which they briefly heat up with a lighter before sticking on your back. The heat creates suction that sucks up your skin into a sort of ball shape in the jar, which they leave on for about 10 minutes. I felt like a stagasaurus. Then when they take the jars off, you get some really attractive polka dots, which also hurt.

Xi'an

The train to Xi'an was, miraculously, a day train. In some ways, much better, though it meant I couldn't stretch out or anything. There was a lot of staring and "subtle" picture taking, but what's new.
(We, on the other hand, were amused by the Chinese methods of cramming luggage onto the racks)

Vincent became like a main attraction every time he stood up. The whole car would all gather to see what the really tall guy was up to. At one point, when buying some lunch from the lunch cart, there was a whole ordeal that turned out to be simply the lunch man wanted an American dollar instead of the local currency. People from the next car over were even looking in to see what was up.

We arrived finally about 8:30 in Xi'an, and immediately whisked off to the hotel. The next day our tour guide "Tina"--my god, tina was something else--took us out to the Terra Cotta Warriors. (Or the "Turra Cotta Wurrier Musum" as Tina would put it. You might think I'm being mean for making fun of Tina, but you have no idea how annoying this woman was. You'd think we were all baby sheep the way she had to herd us around, non-stop talking, and she only had one volume--loud. Just when you wanted to wander to go look at something, she'd appear out of nowhere like some kind of awful tour guide witch and wouldn't let you leave. She wouldn't even let us pee alone. "Together, we toilet." She was utterly exhausting.)

In any case, the Warriors. They were... farther away than I expected, so thank goodness for telephotos. This was the one time I managed to sneak away from Tina, which was probably due to the fact that it was our first trip. In any case, I breezed through the 4 buildings in a cool 30 minutes, and then had to wait like an hour for everyone else to finish.

The rest of the time in Xi'an we went to the Wild Goose Pagoda and a calligraphy rubbing exhibit/demonstration.