Summer Palace

May 16, 2011

Early on in the acupuncture course, we voted to move our “weekend” to Monday and Tuesday. The idea was to take advantage of our flexible schedule and plan touristy things on the week days when stuff would be less crowded. During my brief time in China, I hadn’t noticed a big difference in crowds on week days vs. weekends, but whatever. So we made it through 7 days of school, and finally our “weekend” arrived on Monday!

I enjoyed a lazy start to the day: slept late, tried to organize the messy explosion from my suitcase, sent a few emails, drank a few beers… Finally, in the early afternoon, we took off for the Summer Palace. It was a beautiful afternoon and we enjoyed strolling around the lake, pausing here and there to just relax and take in the sights. I could definitely see the appeal of the area as a summer resort for Chinese royalty.

Chinese noodles

Relaxing at the Summer Palace

More relaxing at the Summer Palace

The Long Corridor

It was a windy day at the Summer Palace

Rickshaw!

After leaving the park, we hailed a rickshaw to take us to the nearest subway station. The three of us piled in the back was definitely a fun ride! We made a mistake in not agreeing on a fare beforehand, and our driver tried to massively overcharge us when we got off. Even granting him some extra for hauling all three of us, he was asking too much. We were helped in our exchange by a subway security guard, who was successful in running off the tourist-hassling rickshaw driver after we had paid him a much more than fair fare.

We decided to head towards the 798 Art District to see China’s version of SoHo.  When we got off the subway, we estimated we still had about 3km to travel to get to the district. We first tried to hire a taxi, but were turned off by the prices and decided to walk. This turned out to not be a great idea, as the street we were on became a major highway. We trudged along the shoulder, tired and hungry, and some of us who shall remain nameless stopped to pee in the bushes. We’d finally had enough of this form of travel when we came to a bus station. We boarded a bus that seemed to be heading in the right direction and got off at what seemed to be a stop relatively close to the art district. And then we trudged some more… it’s possible our estimation of distances had been off… When we finally arrived in the right area it was around 9pm and all the art galleries were closed as were many of the cafes – it was disappointing, especially after the several hours time we had spent working to get there. Proving that even in Beijing, it’s a small world after all, we ran into some of our friends who were finishing up dinner. So we ate and had a few drinks and decided 798 must surely be cooler in the daytime.

Third Year Blues

Everyone says second year of vet school is the most difficult. Course-wise, that may be true; but I’m here to say that third year is no picnic, either. I’m pretty sure there’s some research out there that says two years into anything (relationships, employment, etc.) is when people start to really get sick of things, and I am sick of vet school. So I plan to finish the last couple of China blog entries, right after I catch up on equine lameness lectures. I think equine lameness is truly my least favorite subject so far in school. The material is the perfect combination of confusing/complicated and totally irrelevant to my future career. It’s hard to give a damn.

There are still good parts about school:

{Perfectly benign photo of cute kitten removed to comply with social media policy}

Neutering shelter kittens so they can be adopted!

Drinking with friends!

Things for my reader to look forward to in the coming weeks: the Summer Palace, Chuandixia, and Leaving China!

Fun diversions during acupuncture course

May 9-20

Best meal in China

After school one day, Ashley and I set off to navigate the Beijing public transportation system. Megan had left school early that day with our faculty advisor and one of our other classmates to tour the Beijing Raptor Rescue Center, where Megan would be working for the month of June. So the plan was to meet up with those folks at the Temple of Heaven for some quality sightseeing and then find a good spot for a meal.

We went to the closest bus stop with a list of buses that would take us to the closest subway station. After waiting for a while with none of our listed buses appearing, a friendly student asked where we were going. To our surprise, he nicely told us that any bus would take us to the subway station! So we got on the next bus. To our surprise, any bus does not take you to the subway station, which we realized after we turned off the main road, heading away from the where we knew the subway station to be. (Thanks for trying, nice student.) So we got off at the next stop, crossed the street, and starting making plans for a new route. There were many people who spoke English in Beijing, especially this close to a university, so we asked lots of people for help. The general consensus was the next subway stop was “too far” to walk. Yet still… when we looked at our maps, this just didn’t seem to be true. So we walked, and checked our maps, and checked streets signs, and walked, and there you go – we made it to the subway! We never were sure why our Chinese helpers were so adamant that it was “too far.” It was several kilometers, for sure; maybe that is “too far” for the average Chinese person on the street….

Anyway, we were very proud of our successful navigation to the subway, but when we got in touch with Megan et al., we found out that the Temple of Heaven was already closed for the day! (One more acupuncture course gripe: getting out of class too late in the day to see cultural sites before closing.) So we instead made plans to meet up for dinner in a hutong somewhere near Andingmen. Ashley and I wandered around, looking for several different bars/restaurants that had been recommended to us. We ended up stopping for a drink outside an unknown place and got to chatting with some Canadian ex-pats outside. They told us we had happened upon one of their favorite places in Beijing! When Megan et al. arrived, we let our new friends order for us since the menu was entirely in Chinese (no pictures here) and they seemed to know their stuff. We ended up enjoying some of the best food of my entire trip! In addition, our new friends were in a band and invited us to their show at a local music club in a few days.

On our way back, we got to appreciate the out-in-the-boonies aspect of our current lodgings. We caught the last subway cars just a little before 11pm. When we got off the subway, we were still a good 20-30 minute walk to our hotel, which we didn’t want to walk in an unknown neighborhood that late at night. We went through a bunch of cabbies before we finally found someone willing to take us home.

Live music in Wudaokou

Several of us headed out to hear the Canadians we met a couple of days ago play in their band. They were playing at a club called D-22 in a neighborhood called Wudaokou. Wudaokou is close to several big universities, has a large international student population, and is supposed to be a pretty cool place with lots of bars and clubs. Even though we had the exact address, when our cabs deposited us on a street corner nearby (one of many instances where the cabbies seemed to prefer dumping us off close to where we were going instead of taking us all the way there) we had some trouble finding the place. After turning in circles a few times, we asked for help. This resulted in one of the many instances where we were amazed at how helpful people were! The couple we asked literally spent 15 minutes with us to send us off in the right direction. They didn’t know exactly where it was, but they accompanied us to a store to ask for help, asked other people for help on our behalf, etc. It was truly amazing. (Although I have to admit, there were a few times in China I asked for help and was frustrated with how helpful people were – “Dude, just admit you don’t know what I’m looking for and let me go so I can ask someone else!”)

We eventually did find the bar and spent the evening drinking, playing foosball, and listening to the bands. A few nights before, a couple of our friends had gone out in Wudaokou and had a hard time getting back to the hotel – the same old no-cabs-want-to-go-to-your-stupid-hotel-in-the-boonies problem. Since Megan, Ashley, and I had been in China longer and were pretty confident navigators/phrasebook users/cajolers, we figured we wouldn’t have as much trouble. Still, it was interesting to see how much the neighborhood shut down at night. The streets were happening when we got there around 8ish. When we left around midnight, the place was deserted – and this was supposed to be a bar/club neighborhood! It was weird. After several cabs refused, we were eventually able to find a ride back to the hotel.

Silk Market

One day after class, another friend of mine and I headed downtown to the world famous Silk Market. The Silk Market is a 5-story building filled with vendors ready to sell you silk (duh), cashmere, jewelry, luggage, clothing, and on and on and on. The vendors are fairly aggressive and haggling is the norm here. As an example, I looked at a small hand painted silk scroll that “cost” 260Y (about $45); I eventually bought it for 50Y. After tolerating as much haggling as we could take and spending as much money as we were comfortable spending, we were ready for dinner. And as much as I loved the food in China, I seriously, totally, utterly, and completely missed cheese. We decided to satisfy that craving by splurging for pizza for dinner. It actually didn’t have as much cheese on it as an American pizza would have, but it totally hit the spot.

Getting Chinese Students Drunk

We had two social/celebratory gatherings with the Chinese students towards the end of the course. The first one was a party where there would be food, music, and alcohol, but it was also supposed to be a kind of exchange of cultural entertainment: the Chinese students were going to show us some stuff and we were supposed to show them some stuff. As a group, we were a little stumped about what “American entertainment” we could put together, especially on such short notice. We settled on singing a few songs, putting on a skit or two, and drinking games. The drinking games were THE hit of the party. I have never seen more enthusiastic and excited Flip Cup players ever.

Goodbye Dinner with the Chinese Students

On the next to last night of the course, we had a goodbye dinner and gift exchange with the Chinese students. We had brought vet school T-shirts, etc. to give to them and they gave us various Chinese good luck favors. We had a huge and yummy multi-course dinner served family style on a big Lazy Susan at each table. It was very nice to spend some more social time with the Chinese students and very sad to be winding down our time left in China.

Acupuncture course

May 9-20

The two week veterinary acupuncture course was the reason I was in China. It was ostensibly the reason, anyway. In reality, the acupuncture course presented a fabulous opportunity for me to travel to a country that I might otherwise never visit. I got to see and do amazing things in an amazing country. I was getting elective credit for the class, and hopefully I will get some retroactive funding from a couple of school groups for educational travel expenses. Now I just had to sit through some acupuncture lessons. I’m not extremely interested in so-called alternative medicine but I still thought it would be a kind of cool learning experience.

I don’t have that much to say about the acupuncture class. I didn’t really enjoy it. There were good parts and bad parts. Briefly,

The good

• Interacting with Chinese vet students. They were fun and friendly and as interested in learning things from us as we were from them. (I’ll write some more later about some of the fun things we did together.)

• The food in the university cafeteria was quite good. And cheap.

• The opportunity to go to China and hopefully get some of my expenses back.

• Hey, I was in China! Sleeping in a Chinese bed, eating Chinese breakfast, walking on Chinese streets…. Pretty freakin’ cool!

The bad

• Slow paced instruction.

• Eastern approach to acupuncture. I knew the class would be taught from the eastern perspective. Duh! I just didn’t expect how much it would bother my scientific, I-need-proof mind.

• Physical discomfort. Hard wooden stools that literally bruised your butt. Stuffy, non-air conditioned room. Construction right outside the windows that sent whirls of dust into the classroom and jackhammers that made it impossible to hear our soft-spoken teacher. Some days it felt like we were being punked.

• Not enough hands on stuff. I got to poke one donkey one time with one acupuncture needle.

• Location. The university was far from downtown Beijing. It was a pain to go anywhere fun in the evenings to shop, eat dinner, see the sights, etc. It could be quite the challenge to get back at night since the buses and subway stopped running at 11 and no cabs wanted to take us so far out where they wouldn’t be able to get a fare coming back in.

And that’s all I have to say about the acupuncture class.

It's hard to be too disappointed when you get to have delicious dumplings (for less than a dollar) for breakfast every day.

Adorable patient

I loved this kitty. He just hung outside this window and begged to be petted.

Our donkey, and Alex, one of our new friends

China Agricultural University

Course completion certificate

Our new friend Andi

Hanging around Xi’an

May 8, 2011

When we awoke Sunday morning it was hot in our room and noisy in the courtyard. This effectively killed any yearnings to stay in bed all day, so we checked out of our room, left our bags behind the front counter, and left for the day to explore Xi’an a little on foot. It was another blazingly hot day (made worse by my continuing fever) so we walked slowly and stayed on the shady sides of streets. We ended up in the Muslim Quarter, which is known for its good trinket shopping. I spent most of my time loitering in stalls with oscillating fans or hanging out under shade-providing trees. 

Finches for sale in Xian: decoration, pet, or food?

After walking for a bit, we stumbled upon a shadow puppet museum/theater. Shadow puppetry originated in Xi’an over 2000 years ago! We were invited in to see a show, and I have to admit I was pretty skeptical about how enjoyable the experience would be. I was sick, hot as hell, and have never been a fan of puppets. Megan and Ashley were really excited, however, so I relented (a couple of refreshing adult beverages helped with this) and we were ushered in to the small theater. I remained a skeptic for the first several minutes of the show, but it actually turned out to be pretty cool!

After the show, we wandered and shopped a little bit more, but were really dragging after our whirlwind tour of the sights the last few days. So even though we had several more hours to kill before we needed to head to the airport for our flight back to Beijing, we decided to call it quits on our Xi’an tour. We headed back to the hostel to hang out for the rest of the afternoon.

Hanging out at the hostel

The hostel staff advised us to get to the Xi’an airport about 2 hours early. Not knowing what to expect, we decided to take their advice. We hired a taxi to take us to the airport with plenty of time to spare. Checking in turned out to be a breeze, so we were there way, way too early. Still, we were in a well air conditioned place, so it wasn’t a horrible spot for our tired butts to hang out in for a bit. Sadly, it wasn’t long before we found out our flight to Beijing was going to be delayed. From the best we could gather, there had been some weather somewhere that screwed up air traffic control. Our flight was one of the last flights of the evening and we were already going to be getting to Beijing quite late, so we did our best to wait patiently, fervently hoping we would just get to Beijing sometime that night and not have to spend the night in the Xi’an airport.

We fit the requirements

I was feeling quite ill at that point and made several trips to the bathroom just to splash cold water on my face and neck. I wanted more than anything to be lying down in a bed somewhere! So we were very happy when our flight took off only 1.5 hours late! It turned out to be a fairly unpleasant flight – quite bad, but in a different way than my epic New York-Beijing flight. I spent the entire flight sweating like crazy and turning various shades of green. I have never before even come close to throwing up on a plane, but for this flight, I spent most of the time with a barf bag in my hands, ready to use if needed. There was a little bit of turbulence, but nothing too extreme, so I blame most of my problem on pre-existing sickness and exhaustion. Ashley suffered on the flight as well. She had some head congestion and one of her ears just wouldn’t pop – so while I held my stomach and moaned, Ash held the side of her head and tried not to cry. Thankfully, we managed to land without Ash’s head exploding or me barfing all over the place.

From the Beijing airport, we hailed a taxi to make two stops. We first headed towards downtown to pick up our large bags from the lobby of the Drum Tower hostel. We then headed back out to the boonies to check in to our new hotel where we would be staying for the acupuncture course. By the time we got to our new hotel, it was sometime around 2 am and we were very eager to climb into bed!

Sadly, our check in experience at the hotel was a nightmare. The staff did not speak English. (Yes, we were in China and all, but this hotel was chosen for us as a good place for 25 English-speaking Americans to stay. You’d think English would have been on the menu.) So fine, we’ll use our phrase books and the smattering of Mandarin we’d picked up over the last week. Except the front desk girl was also dumb as a box of rocks. We went round and round and round, trying to explain that we had a reservation already. Unfortunately, we didn’t know what name our rooms were reserved under: Our names? Our school? Our faculty advisor? Our Chinese host? We finally had a light bulb go off when we mentioned the name of the other student I would be sharing a room with during the course. She had checked in earlier that evening. So they took my information and gave me a key to my room. It was very late, and I didn’t want to wake my roomie, but we really needed help to get Megan and Ashley’s room sorted out. So I trekked off to my room to wake my roommate. Except my key wouldn’t work in the door. So I went back down to the front desk for help. The door man went back up to my room with me but he couldn’t get my key to work either. So he woke up the housekeeping man; his key also didn’t work! So we tried knocking on the door and calling the room – no response from my roommate, who the next day said she didn’t hear a thing!

Back down at the front desk, we finally accepted we weren’t going to get the whole “we have a reservation” thing through to the staff for Megan and Ashley’s room, and although I had a room, I couldn’t get in. So we booked one room for one night, and all three of us would sleep there. This baffled the staff, as the rooms are equipped with two single beds – not designed for an extra person. After repeated rounds of pantomiming sleeping on the floor and requesting an extra blanket and pillow, they finally got it and left the three of us in peace.

By then, it was 3:30 in the morning and we had no idea what time we needed to show up in the lobby for school the next day. We checked our email and our Chinese phones for messages from anyone in our school group, but there was no information to be found. So I slid a note under my roommate’s impenetrable door to wake us when she got up. To be safe, we set an alarm for 7 am. Utterly exhausted, we turned out the lights and conked out for our 3 hours of sleep.

The neglected blog

I've been so busy lately! A week in San Diego with college friends; a week in the Caribbean with my family; a weekend at the beach with my vet school friends -- I know, my life is so rough! Anyway, now that my summer vacations are over and my Summer Vacation (from school) is nearly over, it is time to wrap up the China trip blogging. End of China - coming soon!

Terracotta Army

May 7, 2011

Although the Xi’an hostel was fun and picturesque, it did not provide the best sleeping conditions.  The adorable courtyards were adorable – so adorable that they were where everyone wanted to hang out drinking beers late into the night, and hang out drinking coffee early in the morning.  The window in our room opened into one of these courtyards and it wouldn’t close all the way, so all the chitchat noise came right in. Even if the window had closed all the way, however, we probably would have left it open since our air conditioning was not working. So it seemed the hours of sleep in the hostel would be from about 2am until about 7am.  I woke up tired and still feeling feverish.

Adorable courtyard at the Shuyuan International Youth Hostel

We boarded a tour bus for the hour-long ride for the day’s adventure. It was very, very, very hot when we got off the bus and found our way to the ticket office of the Terracotta Soldiers. The entrance to buy tickets was very far from the actual entrance to see the soldiers. We considering riding the available golf cart shuttles to the entrance, but the price seemed too steep (something like 10Y, which is less than $2 – funny how that seemed expensive!) and after all, we were able-bodied young people. Even if I was in the early stages of dying from the Chinese Exotic Bird Influenza Plague Pox.  It was also very sunny, so we were happy to see the soldiers were housed in buildings. These buildings, in effect, turned out to be like moderately climate-controlled airplane hangars. They were not as hot as outside, but they were not a cool and comfortable 78 degrees, either. I’d guess the temperature was somewhere in the mid 80’s and quite stuffy. But at least we were out of the sun.

Hey you, with the flu! Walk a bajillion miles this way to the entrance.

Sunny and smoggy

There are three pits of excavated soldiers at the site.  We opted to see them in “reverse” order, saving the biggest and best for last.  The pits were literally pits, with viewing platforms set up all along the perimeter.  Some areas had gangways that let you go out closer to the middle of the pits. It was very crowded and there were lots of tour groups pushing and shoving. I walked around in a cold sweat, looking pale and feeling faint. I think I would not have made it without my little fan. Still, everything was so amazing that even the flu couldn’t stop me from enjoying the day. 

Some statues were separated and encased in glass so we could get close up views

Still in the process of being excavated

Life-saving fan

Megan and Ashley point out the World Heritage Site sign

There were a lot of tourist groups. We were nearly crushed by this one.

The largest and most impressive pit.

Statues being cleaned up before being placed back in the pits

We took the tour bus back to the Xi’an station and then hailed a taxi to take us to a restaurant we had picked out for dinner. Our taxi driver seemed to be taking us the wrong way. And sure enough, he dropped us at a place that was not the place we requested. It turned out to be another location of the restaurant we asked for. We checked out the restaurant and just didn’t like the feel of the place, so we left. And then we walked for what felt like ages. It is very difficult/impossible to get a taxi in Xi’an unless you are at a taxi stand. We didn’t know this and were frustrated that no taxis were stopping for us. After a full day of sightseeing feeling cold, clammy, and feverish, I was just not up for a wander-around-Xi’an adventure. What a relief when we finally got back to the hostel! We sat in one of the pretty courtyards, drinking beers, gorging ourselves on delicious street food, and writing postcards to friends and family. Later in the evening, an interesting British ex-pat joined us to chat. He, Megan, and Ashley eventually got into a very deep and intellectual discussion/debate, which everyone knows is not my cup of tea. I was tired anyway, so I took my feverish self to bed while they stayed up to the wee hours of the morning discussing serious stuff like the Chinese economy.