-Xihu - Photos on and around West Lake itself. -Baoshi Shan - Photos from the climb up Gemstone Hill. -Lingyin Temple - Photos from the Lingyin Scenic Area.
Or you can click the Maitreya carving to go to the overview page :-)
Tomorrow I promise to write about day one and post some photo highlights :-)
There's so much to describe and say about Hangzhou that I think it's going to require two separate posts. After all, I'm uploading about 200 photos to flickr for you to look at, and I have many fun stories to tell.
The short version: The trip was a rousing success. Hangzhou is beautiful, well, at least the Xihu area is. It was a welcome escape from Shanghai and it couldn't have gone better. We did so many things that my feet and legs hurt from walking. I got very little sleep, given that we got early starts on both Saturday and Sunday mornings. I think I improved my Chinese by talking to so many people (including Adeline). I ate some really good food at some great restaurants, (including chicken brains, yum), including one that is over 150 years old. I didn't get much relaxing done, but there was a bit of that. But who has time to relax when you have mountains to climb?
The long version: Well, I hope to start that tomorrow with a "Hangzhou Day One" post, with illustrations via flickr. The Internet is very slow here so I started uploading Day One's pictures just now. I hope they'll be done by the time I wake up tomorrow ;-) If you wanna be ahead of the game, you can check out my photostream now. I also have a couple videos to upload.
Oh, and I didn't get my phone back :-( Gonna buy a new one tomorrow or Tuesday ... luckily I think I have all my phone numbers written down somewhere.
Seriously, this is the second time here in Shanghai that I've lost my phone. Tim, his wife, and a friend went out to eat at this new Jamaican place that a co-worker recommended. We were supposed to meet at the Shanghai S&TM stop, which we did. I called Tim from there and he said he was on his way. We then proceeded to meet up, take the subway to Century Ave., walk 15 minutes, go into the restaurant, and eat. As we were getting up to leave, I unconsciously checked (as I always do because I'm OCD about these things) for the Holy Trinity - keys, wallet, and cell phone. Well, Baby Jesus was missing! And by that, I mean my phone. Haha. I searched everywhere - messenger bag, pockets, jacket - to no avail. Tim called my number and got the dreaded "This caller cannot be reached" message, which signifies the phone is off and probably in a trash bin somewhere. Oh well. Lucky for me it was super cheap. And Tim said I could talk to China Mobile and get my phone number back, no problem.
Since I'm meeting up with Charles tomorrow morning to go to Hangzhou, I used Tim's phone to call him and let him know not to bother calling me. But who I really needed to call, and whose number I didn't have on me for Tim to use, was Adeline, who is taking us to Hangzhou tomorrow. Then I headed downstairs with my friends and begun to walk back towards the subway. We hadn't gone more than 10 feet when I saw Adeline walking our way! Imagine my shock. And the first thing she said was "You lost your phone!" My jaw dropped several feet, haha. ESP is real!
... or not. Seems that whoever had gotten a hold of my phone had called Adeline, because she's the first name in my list (seems there is some benefit to having a name that starts with A, after all.) Whoever had my phone doesn't speak English, so I guess he just accessed the Contacts list and pressed 'Call' on the first name he saw. So Adeline got this call from (supposedly) me, only it was some guy speaking English (presumably because he knew the phone's display was English, therefore the phone's owner was American, and therefore anyone he called would be American), saying 'I don't speak English very well" in a Chinese accent. She thought I was joking around with her, haha. But of course they figured it out and he asked her to meet him at a restaurant on Zhang Yang Lu which, obviously enough, is where the Jamaican place is. So that's why we ran into each other :-)
Very strange. As of that meeting, she hadn't met up with him yet, so it remains to be seen whether or not I'll see my phone again. I would be very surprised if I did!
But shit, really, two times in two months is a little excessive! I should chain the thing to my waist or something ...
So I had planned to go to Beijing next week, from April 25th - 29th, to do some sightseeing and catch Jen's play. However that plan fell through when a) Jen's show got cancelled and b) some friends invited me to the MIDI Festival. So today I switched my Capital City trip to be from 4/30 to 5/4.
I will still get to do some tourism, because we're all planning on going to the Great Wall, and honestly I don't know how many days I can sit out in the sun surrounded by sweaty rock 'n roll kids. (Lord knows how many days I've spent like that already.) So I will probably attend like 2 days, or a day and a half, of the festival and then spend the rest of the time touring or something like that.
Fun times :-)
In other news, I'm capitulating to the GOOG and have given my life mostly over to cloud computing. It's funny. I now check email via Gmail, use Google Calendar to organize my non-work life, update this here blog on Blogspot, and catch up on news 'n things via Google Reader. The only two non-GOOG webapps I use are flickr (owned by Yahoo!) and Remember the Milk (probably soon to be acquired by one of those companies). Well that's not true, I use a couple others, but those are the most prominent right now.
It's just so dang convenient.
This weekend is my trip to Hangzhou and I'm really excited :-) I leave Saturday at 8 AM and return Sunday night around 7. Expect plenty of pictures!!
This is why I enjoy having a tutors -- I learned how to say "zombie" in Chinese. It's huo2 si4 ren2 - literally, "alive dead person". (The numbers are the tones.) Awesome.
I'm now on the lookout for any Chinese zombie movies - she assures me there are a few in existence.
Also, I finally had a camera with me during a meal. This set is from a team dinner Saturday night at the Thumb Plaza. Highlights:
In other food-related news, I made good on my promise to buy some matzah! So I have two boxes sitting around. I'm going to bring one into work tomorrow. It's not exactly the tastiest delicacy, so I'm not expecting it to attract a huge amount of attention ;-)
In other non-food related news, I just came across two really useful web sites for learningChinese.
Jin tian wan shang wo he ba ge you tai ren zai zhe li chi wan fan. There were si ge Mei guo ren (including me), yi ge Fa guo ren, two Israelis (including the rabbi), and the rabbi's wife (who's from Michigan). Oh, plus their three small children.
Sorry about the Pinyin there. I'm practicing, so you'll have to deal with it :-)
On the way there, I had literally no idea what to expect. Would they be formal? Nice? Super-religious? I walked in and they were doing Ma'ariv. Everyone was in nice clothes, which immediately made me feel weird since I was wearing a t-shirt and khakis. (Plus some pre-existing metal in my ears.) But I was able to sing along to a couple prayers, which felt food. Then we ate dinner (after kiddush and n'tilat yadayim of course), cooked by the rabbi's wife and assisted by two aiyis.
Dinner was great. The main dish was some kind of stewed beef, but I didn't recognize most of the other food, except for the potato salad, haha. Then we sat around and talked, benched, and talked some more. I met one guy who's an automotive test engineer at Hella. I felt like I spent 30 minutes in some kind of sales pitch, actually. It was like we spoke the same language -- CAN, HIL, simulation, modelling, real time, The V. And strangely enough, this wasn't the first time I've done that in Shanghai! It was mostly informative though -- talking business on Shabbat can be construed as melachah and therefore is strictly forbidden by some, including this guy. But, you know, in 24 hours Shabbat will be over :-)
Anyway, everyone was nice, and I'm sure I will go back again and see them at some point. If anything, I want to buy some matzah from them on Sunday so I can make fried matzah ... and also to introduce my Chinese co-workers to it. It was fun explaining the concept of kashrut to them today at lunch. They seemed incredulous that we would not be eating any pork at dinner :-)
At any rate, I'll probably end up at their seder next Sunday night. Of course I'll most likely be the youngest ... better warm up my singing voice!
You think these two were friends in a past life? Or -- in an alternate universe?
Friday day we had off, so I went to Roy & Eve's place and made spring rolls with a bunch of other friends. If I can toot my own horn a bit, I was not so bad at the rolling part. I ended up rolling at least 50 of the 100 or so we ate. There were three kinds: curry, banana, and teriyaki chicken. Mmmm.
Saturday I was really lazy and didn't do much. Then my friend Cameron called and invited me to a socc-- I mean, football game at Hongkou Stadium. He's Scottish, so football (patience, guys - that's what they call it over here! When in Rome ...) runs in his DNA. I however cannot recall the last time I was at a football game. It was the Tianjin Teda coming to town to play the Shanghai Shenhua.
The weather was pretty rainy and crappy, so the capacity of 35,000 was not even close to being full. I'd say maybe a couple thousand were there. But we sat right next to the loud Shenhua fan section, so that provided some atmosphere. They were chanting and yelling and beating drums and waving flags the whole game.
At some point they started singing a tune that I recognized, but I couldn't place it. Then it hit me -- these Chinese football fans were humming the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Now, I mean -- okay. That just blew my mind :-)
Tianjin scored once, early in the second half. But Shanghai came back with two goals in the last 15 minutes to win it. So that was fun. (Yeah yeah -- I sound really excited don't I?) The highlight of the game for me was a drunk fan who stumbled onto the field and began accosting one of the players:
It was all well and hilarious until the security guards dragged the dude away, and I realized he probably won't be heard from again for a good long while. (Nah, just kidding -- I think.)
Sorry no pictures. I'll do better next time and bring my camera.
Sunday I was supposed to go to Taikang Lu again to relax, and by "supposed to" I mean "wanted to." But instead I ended up at Moganshan Lu, this sort of cousin to Taikang Lu in the art world I suppose. But whereas Taikang Lu is a bunch of narrow alleyways, Moganshan Lu is a broader, more open maze of warehouses and small plazas.
That's where the pictures at the start of this post come from. I stayed there for nearly five hours, taking pictures and looking at stuff and browsing in bookstores and reading and eating and chatting with shop owners. (Yes -- I can kind of do that now. But only in small doses.) I knocked on doors and climbed stairs and looked out windows and debating crawling across some scaffolding to reach alternate rooftops. It was pretty great and very relaxing.
With my now-superior insider peek at the Shanghai art scene, I've made two observations. Observation the first: lots of photographers are into the whole my-pictures-are-black-and-white-except-for-one-or-two-brightly-colored-objects thing. I saw this trend in many galleries on Taikang Lu and I certainly noticed it at Moganshan Lu. (Listen to me, I'm becoming Robert Hughes over here.)
The second observation I had was that lots of artists create, well, variations on a theme. But that theme is really, really obvious. Example: a single gallery might be full of 20 - 30 paintings. Each painting is of, let's say, a person or two or three or a hundred people, but they're all done in the same style. They might just have different clothes on, or be in a different setting, or have different color skin. But they all share very distinct features that group them together. You'd have to be blind not to see it -- because all the people look the same.
Example:
Those same grinning faces adorn every single painting in that gallery, just in different costumes and environments and shit. I dunno if it's supposed to be this way or what, but it gets a little monotonous, especially when you're in a gallery and all these faces are leering at you from the walls and they all look exactly the same. It's especially noticeable because the facial expressions never change. Each one is exactly the same.
It's like, ooh, cool-looking face in a military uniform, cool-looking face in a cocktail dress, cool-looking face standing on a cliff by the sea. I dunno. Yeah they're cool-looking and distinctive but, again, it gets old.
Damn brain, I'm too logical for the art world I suppose.
After that I came home, ate dinner, and watched No Country for Old Men (finally!) I so love the Coen brothers and this film didn't disappoint.
