China trip 3 - Naxi village

We had an extraordinary opportunity to visit a Naxi village near Lijiang. The village housed an art cooperative (lijiangstudio.org). They did things like murals on the village buildings, Naxi shaman music:

Here's an example of Naxi writing. I have no idea what this means, maybe something like, women who have babies in their bellies should go that way to find a bathroom:

This is the nearby lake. The kids caught 3 or 4 toads here.

The guy in the middle of this picture is the grandfather of the family that housed the art cooperative. Jay is on the right and worked with the grandfather to set this all up. The grandfather was a cute man. He drank whiskey with breakfast.

The grandmother of the village was an awesome lady:

We had a great dinner at the village:

Fly paper near the kitchen.

We walked to a nearby Tibetan monastery which was really cool. Here's one of the Naxi guys who rode horses near the temple:

The new part of the temple which is under construction (amazing paintings and art already on the walls before the temple was even completed):

China trip 2 - Dali

We flew south to Yunnan province which borders Burma/Lao/Vietnam and is home to many of the minority peoples in China. Yunnan also borders Tibet, so a trip up towards Tibet was obligatory. Jean and her extended family had been hanging out in the capital city of Kunming for the previous month or so. Kunming is at about the same altitude as Boulder and is one of the more livable cities in China - nice weather, not too hot in the summer, dry climate except for the rainy season which happened to be the same time as our visit!

We rented a huge van - there was a seat for each one of us and each piece of luggage too! We drove up to Dali, Lijiang and then Shangrila.

The kids got along great, especially Leo and Hugo, who climbed around on the seats and did headstands in the van.

Of all the places we visited, we liked Dali the best. It was funky, with a great night market, and lots of Chinese musicians playing in the streets. Lots of artsy stuff to buy and pretty unique. I think all of us agreed we could have spent many more nights there. I wish I had a picture of the amazing grilled squid guy. Makes me drool just thinking about it.

We stayed at Jim's Tibetan Guest House, just outside the old town. It was perfect, about 400 Y for a suite with two rooms and three beds. Jim's father had been sent from Tibet to Yunnan during the Cultural Revolution.

Dinner in Dali was awesome! Select your own meats to grill or veggies to stir fry:

Yunnan cities often had streams running down their streets:

We did eat some fried grasshoppers and cocoons, courtesy of Jean, but we didn't have any of the bug street food like these dragonfly nymphs:

The big attraction was the bicycle-powered cotton candy guy:

Feet get super icky in China - all those squat toilets don't help. The solution? Fish! Here we are getting our feet cleaned by fish. 50 Y for 30 minutes of foot cleaning.

Does it hurt? Well, most of the fish are pretty small. But some are monstrous! Yeah that's me screaming. It's super ticklish.



Keeping the kids going while on tour is difficult. They have zero appetite for historical sites. So occasionally we have to do things like this horse cart ride:



We took a boat ride to Erhai Lake near Dali to see the Cormorant fishing. In old China, they put rings around the Cormorant's necks and had the birds catch fish. We had a big debate over whether this was staged or not but the show was pretty good:



And they did catch a fish in any case:

Leo and Hugo at Erhai Lake

China trip 1 - Beijing

We went to China in July for four reasons:

1. Leo's been taking Chinese classes for a year and I wanted to further encourage him and also reward him
2. To stop Paul from always asking, "when are you going to take ME to China?"
3. Because I hadn't been there since 2006 and I knew it was changing fast
4. And most importantly - because our good friend Jean was taking her family to China and we wanted to hang out with them (plus they all speak Chinese better than me and they had a house rented in Kunming!)

We flew on Air China which wasn't my first choice but is much nicer now. Leo was ecstatic when he found the footrest and the video games and the movie set:

Paul and Leo thought no trip to China would be complete without a visit to the Forbidden City and Great Wall so we went to Beijing first. Luckily our friends Ted and Linna had a fantastic Beijing apartment that they were not using (because they were in Boulder!) so we had deluxe accommodations out in Chaoyang (eastern Beijing). We got incredibly lucky because this is what the smog looked like in Beijing in July:

We arrived on July 10, when the smog levels were low and had clear skies until the day we left. The apartment was on the 28th floor so we had incredible views for our stay. That last day was horrible. We couldn't see anything. Chaoyang Park, across the street, had an amusement park, roller skaters, a rec center, and a lake

We visited the Forbidden City, the hutongs (old back alleyways), the art/calligraphy district, and the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall. And we saw a few of my old renewable energy friends/colleagues.

The requisite Forbidden city shot (it was horribly hot - I can't begin to tell you how hot. I made my way same as I did back in 1991, from popsicle stand to popsicle stand. The cheap popsicles are 16 cents these days).

We saw my friends Xiao Gao and Dandan. We went to Houhai and pedaled a boat around the lake.

Leo soon had a new fan:

Xiao Gao is always too generous and this visit was no different. He took us to Da Dong which is one of the most famous Peking Duck restaurants in Beijing. 

I've never had such fancy food. The lychees were served on a tray over dry ice so that it looked like they were smoking. The private room had real art and the fanciest bathroom I've ever seen. In fact the lid of the toilet automatically opens when you walk into the bathroom. Here's the server carving the roast duck:

It was so hot in Beijing, we had to do what Beijingers normally do in such situations - go to the mall! And what a mall. We went to Fangcaodi, which has real art. This is one of the probably ten Salvador Dali sculptures there:

Leo nearly got shot by a stormtrooper:

More art - this is a VW Bug:

They have a Din Tai Fung which is a chain of Taiwanese dumpling restaurants that is universally acclaimed. they have many different kinds including truffle dumplings. The dumplings are each folded 18 times. An assembly line of workers in a clean room is responsible for the scrumptious treats. 

My friends Xiao Song and Xiao Hu and her family took us to the Great Wall over the weekend. They were over-the-top generous, driving us up and getting us the myriad of tickets that you need to get to take the bus to the Wall (you can no longer drive directly to the wall), get into the complex, take the cable up, and take the slide down. We drove up to Mutianyu which my friend Mikey had recommended for its alpine slide down the hill. It's also less touristy than Badaling but touristy enough to have a cable car up. The roads up were brand new and really nicely done. Apparently there is now a 7th ring road. I remember when the 4th ring road was in the middle of nowhere.

Xiao Hu and her family:

It was horridly hot. We made our way from one popsicle stand to the next. Prices started at 1Yuan (16 cents) at the base, went up to 5 on the Wall, got up to 10 at one of the midway towers and was 20 Yuan at the topmost tower that we reached. Needless to say, we weren't paying over $3 for a tiny popsicle. Leo did a great job hiking in the hot sun. He loves running up steep steps:

It was hard getting him down in the heat though. He just sort of melts if there is no challenge in sight.

Luckily we made it down just before the rain started.

I thought we ought to see some Chinese acrobatics since Leo has never seen them, but he preferred Kung fu. These shows are pricey now but still very well done:

Finally we managed to get Leo a chop (stamp with his name carved into it). He'd wanted one for a while. He doesn't know this but his Chinese name (ok, I never gave him a real Chinese name - I don't even have a Chinese name - so I call him Liu, which is my surname when you spell it properly) is the fourth most common name in China. We got the chop in Liulichang which is the calligraphy hutong that tourists frequented about 15 years ago. No one seems to go there now.

Tian'anmen Square was hot:

The Temple of Heaven (Tiantan) was hot too:

This is Leo's version of the temple:

We ended our stay by being nearly an hour late for dinner with Lao Li, an old work colleague. He had two parallel dinners going on in two private rooms so hopefully he was ok with us being late. It was still pretty embarrassing, however. Private rooms and fancy dinners and a lot of alcohol used to be the norm in business here. Now no one drinks because there is 'zero tolerance' for drunk drivers. And fancy dinners are less common as the government cracks down on the excesses that used to be the norm. 

Beijingers are now so rich, they're traveling tons, even throughout China. Lao Li said it was a lot cheaper now to fly to Hokkaido, Japan for vacation than to go to Lijiang, Yunnan, China or Tibet. And certainly we saw very few caucasians, and tons of Chinese people in all tourist locations.

We talked about the old days when Lao Li, Xiao Song and Xiao Hu and I all used to work together. One summer, we had Xiao Song and Xiao Hu out to NREL for a sort of internship. I told them I missed them and asked how the new community was going. Apparently it's all different now. We decided we had been really lucky back then because we had such great camaraderie, we all knew each other's families, and we had so many adventures together.

Travel from hell

We leave home at 4 am to get taxi which was conveniently arranged by Jean's mom (thanks Herching!) and get to airport before Anything is open. My stomach is cramping as it does with bad food poisoning. The Air China people have a problem with our ticket and can only book us through to Beijing, not Denver or even Vancouver. When we get to gate we find the flight is delayed because of weather and no one knows when it will leave. A young Kunming girl, heading to the US for the first time is going to stay with her brother's friend who is Afircan American and lives In Harlem. We tell her about the US and trying to get from JFK to Harlem. I don't think she made her flight though because we were delayed two hours. We got our luggage fought our way into an elevator to check in again, waited in some horrid line only to find our seats had been taken because the Kunming folks messed up our ticket.

Leo wants this. In Beijing he managed to fall off a cart and hit his head. We are miserable. Middle seats for 12 hour flight. I had spent hours getting all seats for all flights. Blech

Police!

Not sure why the police use a smart car or why they write their name in Italian?

Veggies!

We went to the Vegetarian restaurant today, the one that Jean's mom had mentioned looked like a good place. It was yummy. Mushroom soup with lots of different kinds of local fresh mushrooms. The traditional braised eggplant with salty texturized soybean instead of pork. And snow peas with walnuts that looked like squid. Leo got sushi which wasn't very good.

synchronicities, failures, and travel fatigue

Today was hard. Last night Paul's hard drive completely died and he lost a lot of work and won't be able to work on the plane ride home, so he's pretty bummed. We tried to get out to see something and mostly failed. It got hot today too so that didn't help.

But first I wanted to show you the mobile police pods that are all over Kunming:

I think they are cute, and funny. There are cops all over town.

Next I wanted to show you some really yummy red merlot wine. It used to be that the only red wine you could get here (aside from expensive imported French stuff) was Great Wall wine. Now there are wineries everywhere including Shangrila (the mountain town that we visited). This wine is organic, very tasty, and comes in 850 ml bottles! We got this from the travel agency folks in Shangrila who took us out to a super yummy yak dinner. 

We ought to go see the Stone Forest, Kunming's premier attraction, but it is a 2 hour bus ride each way and we are touristed out. So we went to the central Flower and Bird Market today. It took a while to find it because its location is now a big hole that will soon contain a high rise. In fact there wasn't really much of a market there at all, just some stalls with old trinkets. We did see some colored chicks, though (not sure how they do this):

Leo had a bit of a meltdown around this time. We ducked into the ramen place that we ate at yesterday and had more Japanese food. Then we decided to take a double-decker bus around town since Leo had never been on the second floor of a double-decker. We got lucky and landed on a bus that was headed home. Unfortunately, we weren't really ready to go home and so hopped in a taxi. We decided to try out the Lonely Planet's recommended art district - "the Loft" which is supposed to be an unused warehouse district with art galleries and a Scandinavian restaurant. It took us a while to get there, because it was on the other side of town. It was in the middle of a construction zone. Leo melted down again. We found one art gallery with one exhibit which was bits of rolled up newspaper that was formed into large ropes and shapes. 

However, the gallery was holding a charity show tonight and we eventually found this poster:

 

These Boulder folks were in the Naxi village when we were there. We met the guy in front, who is the lead for the group and who lives in North Boulder and who had studied with the same Chinese profs that Minh had studied with at Columbia U. I had no idea they could sing and dance! They were supposed to be high school students who were in China for 6 weeks to learn Chinese. We didn't get to see it because we had to get dinner. The Scandinavian restaurant was no longer there. There were no other galleries. The outing was a big bust.

So we hopped in another taxi back to our home mall, which was nearly an hour back. I thought we might find some spicy Vietnamese soup there - Leo's favorite. But no, it turned out to be Chinese food at the Vietnamese restaurant. We went to the busiest restaurant in the mall, which had lots of yummy dim sum and stumbled back home.

Xing ba ke

At the Starbucks again. The cafe mocha here is $6 for a venti. And folks don't just order coffee, they have plates of pastries too. Chinese people are richer than Americans. It's hard to believe. The lines for the Strarbucks are out the door. Haagen Dasz is $10 for a bowl and $5.5 for this mini cup: