the "Explong Hotel"

Week

News: I am staying in strange 70s era hotel about 100 feet from my apartment. I don't know for how long I will stay. There are no plumping fixtures under the sink, so everything that's in the sink drains directly onto the floor. Last night I went to the sleep to the sound of men playing a violent slap-intensive version of gin rummy. I have started teaching adults on the weekend nights. Adults are strange. I am working day and night on the weekends now. It's terrible, but mildly dealable. I had my first visit to a chinese dentist and simultaneously had my first chinese root canal. It was brilliantly perfect procedure, the best I have ever had. It was the equivalent of 130 U.S. dollars. That's 10% of what I pay in the U.S. It for now.

--
written with wuv by hannah

www.shoesonawire.blogspot.com

A night

Open Window

The Factory Road

Last week I headed west on my bike toward some mountains that always remind me of heading west in Tucson. And not unlike on the more hidden parts of the Tucson mountains, the western hills near ShiJingShan are pocked marked with small open pit mines. My bets they are simple dirt and rock mines excavated around the pre-existing wash, which has since turned into pools of factory run-off, or I can only speculate based on their proximity to that billowing factory in the background and taking into account that I have yet to experience any significant rain for the past 3 months. Spotted a man and boy fishing or skipping rocks. Standing under the freeway in this picture.

Trees planted in uniform rows in the former mine basin. Beijing has instituted region-wide project called the Green Belt (a belt of trees circling the city usually near the Ring Road freeways). The swathes of trees of course are to aid air quality primarily by keeping top soils and sand from blowing crazily all over the place and making Spring miserable as is custom.

This is the truck driver.

BORING NEWS ABOUT MY INTERNET SITUATION!!!!!!!!!

Hotmail is working sort of, but that was a big scare. I am officially changing my email to my gmail account that I have neglected to remember the password to for the last 4 months...
it's

hpiercecarlson@gmail.com

please change this in your contacts and start emailing me here. All though, sure I will still check hotmail.

Also, thanks to BENNY's! suggestion to try an anonymizer proxy muh-jigger now I can see my own blog after 4 months of not being about to see it. Its rather exciting. Also, David now I can see your new blog,which by the way is www.sleepytako.blogspot.com. That's all.

booo Hotmail

I haven't been able to access hotmail (except only once for 2 hours) for the last 3 weeks. It's a nationwide problem, no one really knows what is going on, whether its technical or whether hotmail has somehow ended up on the Chinese firewall list, meaning its being blocked. You can never tell when a page is blocked or whether it has problems loading, you recieve the same error page. If it is being blocked it doesn't make much sense (and its probably an disasterous accident) as in, that China has extremely good relationship with Microsoft. (Famously, a few weeks ago when Chinese President Hu Jintao visited the U.S. his first meeting was held not with GW but with Bill Gates, the chinese loooove Bill Gates) Here's an article illuminating hardly much at all about the problem except for the fact that is indeed widespread.

Add to my own frustration. I am having problems finding a suitable BIG name alternative to hotmail. My gmail account is inaccessible as well. I have forgotten the password to my yahoo account and "my" secret question to rectify the password problem is a question I don't remember having ever answered...Plus, I can feel google's blogger.com (the domain host for this blog) becoming ever more useless. Important buttons are not appearing when the page loads and other horrible things like not publishing when I press publish and losing things that I have written. It doesn't make it much easier that I am using a chinese operating system and everything on the screen apart from my own written text is in Chinese. So the possibility of pressing wrong "buttons" and accidentally deleting everything is precariously high.

I will sort a new email address soon...I really don't want "hanniepie1@yahoo.com" but for now that's how you can reach me...

Holiday Traveller: Day One: The Train to South East China

Haiyan, Yu Hua, and I boarded the sleeper train on Saturday, April 30th. The two of them are classmates from a Sunday lecture class in Chen Buddhism (popularly known by its Japanese name Zen Buddhism. Though Chen is apparently very different.)

I lucked out and got the relatively secluded top 4th tier bunk.

Haiyan looking up the word "vortex" and/or "dimension" as I was pseudo-informing her about Sedona, Arizona; and later, for some reason I gave her a rather needless history of the architect's Arcosanti's dream of thousands of people living in a single monster skyscraper in the middle of the Arizona desert. There was something about leaving Beijing, passing through miles and miles of unrelenting human settlement, that reminded me of that dream...That's Yu Hua eating a square of lima bean paste. He is a funny young business man who dresses and acts like a carefree student. He sang from a Buddhist hymnal book the whole trip. He is very good. He also kept showing up at random to give me whole packages of Mentos later in the trip when I ran into some pitying circumstances.
North to Southeast, Beijing to Nanchang, is about 780 miles, enough to pass through radical differences in landscape and climate: from grey to green, dry cool to hot humid, heavy industry to heavy agriculture. The soil is very fertile in these lands broken up by craggy limestone mountains and lying in the river basins of the Yangzi River (properly known as Chang Jiang).

Bus from Jiujiang, Jiangxi; crossing the Yangzi River; to the dusty town of Huangmei, Hubei

Sunday morning: Inside of medium-distance bus that drops you off where ever you want to be left. That could be and often was anywhere out along the paved/dirt highway from Jiujiang to Huangmei and beyond. If you want to catch a bus just stand anywhere on the road with a bunch of luggage and eventually one will pick you up. (On Thursday, I experienced the same bus taxi phenomena from the 3 hour ride from Huangmei to Wuhan, which happens to be along a very heavily trafficked and high-speed interstate. The people stand virtually at random along the interstate. I think its a glorius idea, saves you the trouble of getting to the station miles away.)
My only picture of the mighty Yangzi River, which despite the pathetic composition of the picture is the second longest and largest river in the world, and the ummm...vein from which chinese civilization pulses.
Yu Hua, some helpful lady, and Haiyan in Huangmei.
Barber Shop

Our Huangmei Taxi idle as Haiyan buys loads of fruit to deliver as offerings to the temple. Village People. The taxi, as we eventually ascend through mountain road side villages, is nearly impaled by a 15 ft bamboo pole carried by a small old women, nearly collided with a huge hog walking up the middle of the road, and beamed about five people who didn't respond or perhaps know how to respond to the rules of the road {those being primarily to 1.) honk when you are behind someone 2.) honk when passing someone, and 3.) to honk after having sucessfully passed someone.}
Destination: those Mountains.

Si Zu Si, Fourth Master Temple

Our desitation! The gate to Si Zu Si, the Fourth Chen Master's temple, very old. The place where about 100 people gathered as disciples of the Zhuang Shi a Beijing Chen Tea Master (Haiyan's teacher) to learn about Tea Philisophy and meditation. This a rather remote and well-kept ancient temple. I still cannot believe that I was able to live here for 5 days.

700 year old tree, or if that is not possible, "the really old tree"


There were few day tourists, as this location is pretty remote. 

Living in a Pretty Temple is Fun!!!!!

The little space where they spray painted all the red stuff red.

Our Room
Bed Sheets
Haiyan's Sister's Friend's Fun little Girl who speaks pretty good english.
Zhuang Shi on our mountain walk on the first night.

Temple Life

Tea with the Tea Master Zhuang Shi, Haiyan's teacher in Beijing who arranged this entire retreat and made special arrangements for me. Unbelievably, this entire experience was free, except for the modest cost of the train ticket.
His english wasn't great, but nor is my Chinese. He is very lovely man and makes cute little teas in little glass bowls and giggles.
In our meditation sessions. Some lasting for 3 back to back 40 minute meditations. Those girls on the second row are Haiyan and my roommates. They are Cantonese yoga teachers from Shenzhen, across the bay from Hong Kong. They really took care of me after spraining my ankle.

Eating

My favorite times of day were 630am, 11am, and 630pm, when we gathered for the communal meal with the monks. They had a few ways of gathering us for lunch. One way was to smack that big metal gong, another was to bang a wood stick against a marble slab, and another was a smaller gong stuck with a hollow stick, I suppose they all meant something different, but I didn't know, besides I was usually early!
The monks arrive, we stand, they take the first 2 rows, bells ding, chants are sung, we thanks the chefs, servers, and god, and are then served our simpley, but no less abundant vegetarian meal in efficient rows.
On bowl of steamed rice and one for a melange of different vegetable and tofu dishes. To me the food was perfect and delicious, despite the lack of variety. I love vegetables and sloppy stuff that mixes with rice.
Our bowls must be kept at the edge of the table, we must remain silent, and we must finish everything served to us, even if we have asked for too much. I learned the special chopstick sign language to communicate with the servers what and how much I wanted. When when are finished we must place the bowls at the edge using our chopsticks to flush the distance between the edge of the bowl to the table.
Day tourists weren't allowed to eat with the monks, only us meditation retreat people. Some tried to sneak in, but mostly they just watched as if we were apart of a living heritage museum...Though I suppose we were.

Little Hike: Stairs to the 2nd Master's Temple and Valley life

So by day one I was in the habit of skipping the morning meditation sessions to go exploring the mountain trails around the temples. Here is gate to the stairs leading up to the 2nd Master's Temple.
Felt like the equivalent of 14 flights of stairs in my apartment that I regularly take just for the heck of it. About a leisurely 12 minutes.
Some resident monks.

Grand view of Si Zu Si (did I mention, my home for five days!)

Ancient outhouse

The little house from the picture above it.

I like green valleys.


Wedding, valley-style. The blue dump truck delivered the wedding party up to the valley trail where there was this little tiny village. I made a little stir as I am a little certain few to no foreigners make it here frequently. For about five minutes as I watched this car do an eight-point turn with silly techno music blaring out its windows I become the subject of the wedding video. I did a little dance, which seemed to please everyone there... I think.

 

My Big Hike

On Tuesday, I again skipped the morning meditation classes to adventure in the neighboring mountains by my lonesome, much more meditative for me than sitting in a room with a hundred people on the floor with towels around their laps...So I headed for the distant mountain temple (that small building atop the background mountain) . First I had to descend into the valley below the cliff village from which I took this photo.
The valley farm village.
Half way up.

Not Walking

So on Tuesday afternoon, I couldn't do much except sit here and look at the nice scenary with my foot in a cold water bucket reading my depressing book about the Collapse of civilizations...
And lie in bed listening to BBC and french radio programming on short wave...

Eventaully someone gathered up a local doctor and he came in and did some major acupressure, which is very painful by the way, on my swollen ankle and oddly but effectively on the inner nape of my elbow, which I guess is a key acupressure point unleashing the bad stuff in my ankle. Several other people came by with oils to give my ankle a good kneading. 

It was super-humid and the sun was burning. I was drenched. After about an hour of steep hiking up a narrow trial I made it to the ridge line of the mountain where I could view 3 mountain valleys all at once. I love looking down on these terrace farms.
The little modest temple at the top is inhabitated by a small family who greet hikers all day and allow them to sit inside their chamber to cool down. They were quite interested me as few to no foreigners make it to these temple sites. All of the tourists are Chinese, mostly those from nearby Huangmei. The inhabitants, spoke little Official Beijing (Putonghua) Mandarin, but rather a indecipherable (to me) dialect of Huangmeihua.
The terrible catch to this beautiful and exhilirating morning was that as soon as I was already planning my next hike back up here and some other mountains, my trip took a turn for the worse. I slipped coming down off a gravelly steep part of the trail landing hard on my left ankle twsiting and popping it. I have sprained this damned ankle 3 times now. I know that my left leg is slightly weaker than my right. I have less flexibility on the left, so I am imbalanced and thus favor clumsiness toward the left side of my body. Maybe this is some reasoning. This time it was incrediblely painful and scary. I sat their in the dirt a little nauseous and wobbly for a while, plus I had the lone descent of most the mountain below me! Argh...Really Sucked!!!!I slowly made it back down feeling extremely dissapointed for the rest of my trip here in the mountains.

Last Day: Another Mountain Temple, Tangential review of the book "Collapse," and Lakeside Tea Ceremony

On my last day with the Chen Meditation group, I lost major participation points as my sprained ankle (from my lone adventure the day before) kept me from ascending the steps of yet another, apparently even more spectacular, little temple, in a different nearby Mountain range.

At the temple, while the others climbed up the steep high mountain, I made friends with one of the many incense and iced drink pedlars who set up shops outside in tin shacks. So for 2 hours I sat on his little bench with my roommate friend (she felt sorry for me and skipped the temple climb) and watched Huangmei families negotiate incense and souvenir prices.

We walked (I hobbled) around the makeshift parking lot perched on the cliffs. I didn't take any photos as my batteries were running low. The sides of the mountains were heavily deforested in patches. And I could tell where their were attempts to reafforest with patches with an homogenous pine species. As long as I looked out from the mountain upon the patch-worked farms and paddies, glistening far below, the view was spectacular. If I looked down, however, the sloping sides of the moutain underneath the tree canopy were littered thick with garbage.

The sad fact is that I have seen much of the countryside congested by rubble and colorful heaps of garbage. I often stop myself from taking pictures of these messes as I don't want to offend the Chinese who accompany me. I don't want to be an outsider seeming to document the worst and the ugly, but I will certainly not pretend like the majority of what I see has been as beautiful as my pictures report.

In actuality, I have seen a lot of poverty, destruction, environmental damage, and polluted, crumbling homogeneity in the landscape. That is not to say that these are problems that are perpetuated by any inherently destructive, unenvironmental nature of the people. From my small observations, its a matter of the lack of infrastructure for dealing with these problems in places far from major population centers.

After the temple, they piled about 100 plus of the "Meditators" back into the busses and drove us through the small rice paddy villages, with rugged and rutted dirt roads, lined with surprised looking villagers. The whole day I got to follow in a plush air-conditioned Buick with my Cantonese Yoga-instructor roommates who thought I was cute (" ni hen ke ai" they kept saying) because of my grammarless bad Chinese, dependence on a user un-friendly phrase book, my jilted hobble, and, I am sure, my general over-grown baby-like appearance and demeanor.

A footpath near the lake. From here I watched a women carry two huge bundles of kindling down a gentley sloping path. She kept dropping them. It took her about 20 minutes to waddle them about 200 ft to her electricty-less stone farm house. The farmers (peasants as they are sometimes refered) work very hard. I see them bent over in the paddies and fields, carrying sticks double-side loaded across their shoulders. I cannot even imagine. My life is so removed from a peasant's reality.

(An Aside: The culmination of my week's meditation

We have spent they past several days living in close approximation of Buddhist monks. Trying to know our "hearts" to "empty our thoughts", etc. I don't know if I achieved the intended affects of my meditations, but certainly in these times of trying to be clear, reflective and grateful I have come to re-acknowledge for myself some understanding.

I know that I am among the 20% of fortunate people on this planet who live in "First World" standards, but who is to say that I am living a "better" life than a farmer that grows his/her own food, lives low on the resource consumption scale, besides that of a small amount of land and water. I am living a different life for sure, better in terms of health and access to modern services and ammenities. But I certainly am not living sustainably. At this instant, I could not grow my own food, work as hard and long, or know my way around a lifestyle of sparse modern conveniences. I would need to relearn an entire way of living, indeed I would need to learn to value this way of life over my current life of relative labor-free abundance and luxury.

And honestly, only a major catastophic event that required me to live in such a way could push me into such a drastic transition...maybe, probably. I could live with less, but I am not willing right now to be invididually self-sustaining, maybe I will never be.It is my understanding that world living standards can only become so extravagant and consumptive before entire social, economic, and environmental systems began shutting down, and as a result swathes of societies might then need to adjust their lifestyles, else suffer the fates of countless past civilizations who similarly collapsed under their own design. This I think will happen unless we are pre-emptive now with reconciling our lifestyles with the natural thresholds of the environment...

Oh, let me explain, something else happened on my Holiday adventure: I finally finished Jared Diamond's mega-book Collapse. It's a truley special book. One that I recommend to anyone who cares to discover what we so painstakingly try to avoid seeing, the potential signs of eminent societal and environmental change . Diamond is my new favorite popular geographer. It's an excellent cross-cultural, historical, geographical analysis of past and present civilization's and their downfalls. So I am in the most populated, resource consumptive, productive, and worst polluted countries in the world, I could not deny the oppurtunity to understand what is happening here, while I am here. As a result my perception is colored by what I have recently learned from this book, despite it not being specifically about China. The most important concept to note is the interconnectedness of the world's environmental problems, they are no longer just local nor regional. China's like every other country's problems absolutely affect the entire world.

Moving on....

Unloading the busses on the Dam Wall at the lake.

Water level markers
Prepping for a sensational dam-sitting meditation experience.

This was all narrated by the Master who sung a delicate lullaby like a very shy little girl. Or maybe it was an actual little girl, couldn't tell.

 

This flag that was carried every where the Meditators dared to travel, such as up a tremendously narrow and crumbly 1-story dirt cliff of which Master Zhuang Shi made all 100+ people climb inorder to sit atop a peacful grassy overlook to hold a tea ceromony. Alas, I could not with my niule'd ankle climb said cliff, nor could many of the older attendants. So we continued to sit on the dam with bus drivers and watch them take 45 minutes to get all 100 people up the cliff while each clutched their individual tea sets and fruit baskets. Then we eventaually watched them have delicious tea that we thought we might also have gotten to enjoy, but alas....no. At least I got to take photos of the people-free dam wall.

 

The Wuhan Strangers

My last day of adventure I was out of camera batteries and space, so I write what I can remember about my quietly unusual day in Wuhan:

On Thursday I left the mountain temple and the retreat to return back to Beijing alone. I was really looking forward to managing my way through small town bus stations and big cities with their big city train stations. But, in acutality leaving was very, if not too, easy. It was rather smooth buying a bus ticket, in fact. I immediately stepped onto the bus after the purchase. Even though its a long ride, three hours to Wuhan, I think a bus left every 10 minutes or so. In the well invested Eastern parts of China they're not short of transportation options, or individuals creating their own transporataion options.

I went from Huangmei to Wuhan the capital of Hubei province in the morning. The bus ride was really nice. The scenary: soft green hills, farms, etc--lovely. Not the most visually appealing bus, but really comfortable. There was only one well-behaved live chicken in a ladies' purse. The loudest part of the ride was the TV DVD player. I watched part of a stupid Hong Kong crime/romantic comedy and mostly all of the "music videos," which featured Chinese popstars performing on stage with extreme stage effects and over-choreographed dancers. It's hard to like most of the pop music as it is over-produced and the singers have ridiculuous Fraggle Rock haircuts. But my favorite popular group I think is Ma Tou Qin, from Inner Mongolia. They consists of a little girl, her cherubic mother, and her cherubic grandpa. They were rather liked by the other bus people too.

The solo adventure well rolling, I was really looking forward to a long afternoon exploring, though painfully on my ankle, Wuhan, the major Yangzi River port city that is one of the largest in China. First, I was to meet a woman at the bus station who had arranged a 8 pm night train ticket to Beijing for me. Zhu Shi, a connections of Master Zhuang Zhi's. I arrived and we met after some confusion. She ran up to me and bowed apologizing. She was small and chubby women, almost didn't look Asian in the face and figure. She wore a train workers shirt. In fact, she is a ticket saleswoman in the Wuhan station. I gather she sells hard-to-come-by Holiday tickets as a side-income.

She grabbed my heavy bag when discovering my sprained hobble. Then we attacked the terrible the congestion of oven-like Wuhan streets. Viscerally, the city really is miserabley hot and humid, and smells like wet, grimmy metal. But in appearance it was green and lovely. Very different than Beijing...more "South China" as I had imagined it. Here there were old men with long grey beards and mustaches crouching on little stools in oriental pajamas, with chinese collars and plain black slip-ons smoking long pipes. Ladies went bare legged, except for panty-hose socks with high-heeled sandals, and mostly all had umbrellas. Some men gathered under tents playing cards wearing dress pant cut-offs, with white button down shirts open to their bare chests.

Zhu Shi wanted to take me to lunch in a nice vegetarian restuarant near the downtown temple. There we ate some pickled cold fake meat versions of tongue, ham, and spongee tofu skin, a huge hot bowl of gelatinous yellow porridge (hot jelly-like porridge is the last thing I wanted to eat at that moment), some curly meaty vegetable mixed with deadly peppers, and the most enjoyable dish sauteed flower stems. It was a lot and I had to eat most of it despite not really enjoying the taste. We washed this all down with 2 cold bottles of some surprisingly good Apple Cider Vinegar.

She was too generous with the meal. I purchased the ticket from her during lunch. We awkwardly communicated, though I nodded a lot even when I didn't understand. She has a teenage daughter and husband and all are practicing Buddhists. I was kind of hoping to see some stuff around the city, but not wanting to dissapoint her as I didn't know what she had in mind next, so I said nothing of my plans to loaf around the River.

She paid for the lunch and led me a few blocks to her apartment complex. I wanted to say, "Oh that's okay I want to look around the city," but I was also curious and thought maybe the offer to rest in a nice women's apartment was a more real way to experience Wuhan...I suppose.

She lives in a big flat of apartment towers for train station employees. Her's was on the top floor over looking the loud train station. The outward appearance of the flats were not the greatest, all were gentley oxidizing. But her apartment was rather lovely and clean. We sat down on her couch she gave me slippers offered me huge container of cold mango yogurt even though I had just eaten a tremendous amount of incongruous foods at lunch. She turned on the television to women's international Badmitton. I looked down at my ankle and as soon as I got my sock off she was coming into the room with vile of oil. She then squated down and poured a bunch of it on my foot and aggresively massaged my swollen ankle into a soft numb and tingly mound; meanwhile, I sat there slurrping about a half a quart of yogurt watching badmitton (Netherlands vs. Japan).

So after the massage, yogurt, and television, and after we exhuasted the use of my crappy phrase book I was offered her daughter's room to take a nap. I obliged, after all, I did have about 6 hours to kill in this women's apartment. So I slept for about half that time, listening to the loud train and staring at her daughter's really well-drawn charcoal renderings of the busts of greek philosphers that were taped on the wall. I could have slept in that hot bedroom for 10 hours, but eventually I figured I should get up and go back into the living room. Immacculate timing: as they were all, Father, Mother and daughter, standing next to their a table with about five heaping dishes for dinner--though standing in a posture as if they had waited for me to emerge from the bedroom for the last 2 hours...

So we ate and the 14 year old girl (she was chubby in an american way, not in a chinese chubby way, which means simply a chubby face) shyly asked me that she would like to go abroad and how much would it cost. I thought maybe they were being so accomodating because I was a means to at least hook their daughter up with a program. I gave her as much information as I could, despite her poor english. And promised that would send her information via email, though she didn't have an email address. I asked her where she would like to go and at first she smiled and said "America" as if being polite to my question, me being an American and all. Then later she brought out a English picture dictionary and pointed to a flag and said I would like to go here..."Ukraine!?" I was more than surprised. I laughed acutally, then I resettled, when I realized her seriousness and I asked why and she said to study drawing. I said that her drawing was good, but then oddly, she replied "No, not good at all" So, sure, I guess Ukraine would be just as okay a place as any other for a chubby, shy, Chinese girl, with little english, and with no confidence in her art ability to study art abroad. Stranger matchings have occured...I suspect.

With still 2 + hours to kill we rounded out the unusual evening watching a DVD of tapped live performance of Singing Buddhist All Stars. The performances were grandiose and enchanting and heavily synthesized.

Then I was accompanied to the train station by Zhu Shi, treated to 2 bottles yogart drink for the train ride and then we proceeded to wait in the small poorly ventilated train station office with no windows for an additional 30 minutes. Both of us fiddling on our cell phones.

Wasn't quite what I had expected from my day layover in Wuhan, but surely I will always associate Wuhan with Zhu Shi and her insistent generosity and her quiet little family with their quiet little aspirations.