China:One Month

Now that I've been vagabonding around the Northeast for a month and a day, I feel I'm qualified to say a few things about China and about life on the road. 

The People

Getting along with everyone here has been much easier than I expected.  Partially, it's because I've been away from home long enough that I'm used to the stares.  Partially, it's because the absurdity of my bike and gear mean that all of said staring is completely justified; it'd be stupid of me to take it personally.  Partially, it's because being on a bike means I am only approachable when I want to be – i.e. when I stop to  buy food, to rest in a park, to look for directions – so I don't feel my personal space impinged on too much.  Also, whereas in the past I often felt self-conscious and out of place while backpacking aimlessly, now that  I'm traveling in a way that seems to fit my values and desires and general lifestyle so well, I generally feel cheerful and comfortable and open to just about whatever China throws at me. 

Mostly, though, Chinese people, or at least the kinds I tend to encounter and the in the kinds of places I tend to encounter them, are friendly, warm, curious, courteous, jovial, understanding, etc.  Cooks let me into the kitchen to pick out ingredients.  Other restaurant patrons chat with me before, during, and after meals, sometimes even sitting at my table, sometimes pouring me a glass of beer, sometimes buying me a bottle of apple-milk for desert.  People driving scooters and motorcycles pull up alongside me and chat for a bit as we ride; people driving cars roll down their windows and offer me water and road tips.  Yesterday a guy on a motorcycle stopped in front of me at a stoplight, turned around, said "Hallo" and thrust two pieces of candy at me, then smiled and zoomed off.  Fruit and snack vendors sell everything at fair (i.e. incredibly cheap) prices.  A friend of a CS host of mine even gave me free fruit and two (!) free bags of almonds.  Everybody compliments and indulges my fledgling Chinese.  Even when I'm tired and try to shut down a conversation by saying "I can't speak Chinese!" they just smile, say "You're speaking Chinese right now!", and keep on asking me questions or telling me who knows what.  Nobody teases me (to my face, in ways that I can understand) about my ridiculous biking shorts or haircut.  Most importantly, nobody has hassled me while camping. 

In fact, and of course, 99% of people just ignore me and go about their own lives.  I'm cool with that. 

The Food

Again, two thumbs up!  The basic unit of money is called a kuai and is worth about  15 cents.  Many fruits  and street snacks cost exactly…1 quai.  Or less .  Apples, bananas, plums, mandarins, fist-sized vegetarian dumplings, all sorts of sweet and savory street pastries, cookies, crackers, and more.   A pound of peanuts (raw or roasted) costs a dollar, as does a pound of cherry tomatoes or five pounds of watermelon. 

As for restaurants, we've been to a range, from bright-lit ones with table cloths and floors swabbed shiny to dinky, mangy ones where there's not even a menu.  The stir-fries are often pretty similar to the ones I knew from Chinese food back home – that kind of perfect level of greasiness and goopiness that makes everything delicious.  The more exciting ones incorporate ginger, red pepper, and even vinegar.   Tofu can take numerous forms ranging from sloppy to totally dry.  Noodles, also come in all sorts of spiffy varieties: rice and wheat (some are even made of tofu!), skinny and wide, long and short, doughy and not, hot and cold.  So, whether we're eating at a "rice room," "alcohol house," "alcohol room (hotel), a "small eats," a "homemade vegetable," or a "noodle room" (thus ends the lists of kinds of restaurants that I can recognize), it's always an adventure and it never fails to please.

I remain a bit mystified at how certain things seem to be missing from Chinese cuisine.  Like, from the standpoint of a country with a huge population and looming resource problems, isn't cooking everything in oil kind of a big waste of beans?  Wouldn't it be better to eat food prepared in less resource-intensive ways, like boiled, steamed, raw, or pickled?   The only thing I can think of is that in a country with so many people (though I'm not convinced that China really has more people than Korea or Japan relative to area) there must be a lot of pressure on restaurants to cook as quickly as possible.  Or also perhaps that people just don't need to care about efficiency and sustainability quite yet.  After all, despite all the land, water, oil, etc that go into raising animals, meat consumption here is on the rise, and fast.

The Roads

So far, much better than anticipated.  We do most of our riding on second-tier roads since the first-tier roads are major interstate highways that are a) no fun to ride on and b) off-limits to bikes anyways.  The second-tier roads are paved nice and smooth except in the occasional construction zone, as are even the third- and fourth-tier roads.  It's only in occasional parts of the deep, deep countryside that we've had to ride over gravel and dirt. 

Most everything is also wider and less-congested than expected.   Even driving around Beijing didn't feel any more dangerous than Korea, though I suppose that's not saying much.  The main and almost-main roads in most mid- and large-sized cities tend to have dedicated bike/scooter/donkey cart lanes separated from the car lanes by some sort of barrier.  Countryside roads generally lack the barriers, but they still have dedicated "alternative transportation" lanes which are often twice as wide as the car lanes.  Plus, it's not uncommon for there to be two, three, or even four car lanes in each direction where only one would do.  Let's not forget that just about everywhere the roads are lined with trees on both sides so that I get to cycle in the shade almost all day long.

Unfortunately, the drivers don't quite measure up to the infrastructure; traffic here does have an element of lawlessness to it.  Passing on the wrong side of a two-lane road is standard practice, as is making a left turn the instant the stoplight turns green, trying to speed through the intersection before the cars coming from the other side do.  At smaller junctions, drivers making left turns will often cut into the wrong lane a hundred meters early and then take the turn from the inside lane rather than go for a nice, orderly 90-degree angle turn.  Cars and trucks will even pass one another on switchbacks, bridges, and unlighted tunnels!

Still, what I refer to as "lawlessness" is mostly a figment of my imagination.  Because the rules of the road look different from my own, I'm tempted to say that there aren't any.  In reality, though, there are rules and Chinese drivers know them and everyone gets along fine.  Indeed, the craziness of it all probably makes everyone a little more careful, a little less complacent.  And, somehow, even a bit more patient and forgiving.  The only real cases of road rage I've witnessed have involved foreigners (other than myself), and I've only seen (the aftermath of) one accident**. 

[**I couldn't quite make out what had happened, but one mac truck which should have been in the left lane (from my oncoming perspective) was blocking most of the right and had the right side of its front cabin bashed in.  This would lead me to guess that it had been trying to take the turn wide, only to run head-on into something else.  Except that that "something else" was another mac truck which had been thrown off the road and into a ditch.  To my right.]

The one thing that does bother me is the honking.  Drivers of vehicles of all sizes here honk.  Frequently.  When passing you, when approaching you, upon seeing you coming in their general direction.  And it's not usually a gentle little  "Just so you know, I'm coming towards you, so you might want to be a little extra careful" warning honk.  It's a big, nasty, head-shattering blast.  I have no doubt that when I swerve, it has less to do with my being distracted or enraged and more to do with successive sound waves pounding into my bicycle.  I've had big trucks honk at me despite the total, unarguable absence of even a single other vehicle in my bike lane, the two lanes going in my direction, the two lanes going in the opposite direction, and the opposite bike lane.  Just me, a truck, and landscape as far as the eye can see.  I can only guess that the driver must have been a) concerned that I might swerve over two entire lanes into his path, b) thinking that I would be so absorbed and mesmerized by the utter silence of the landscape that I wouldn't be able to hear his loudass engine, c) a sadist, or d) just bored.  I suppose d) would be understandable given how big China is.  Rough job.      

            

The Riding

Nevertheless, being on the road is wonderful.  Physically, it's much less taxing than you're probably imagining, and emotionally it's much more rewarding. I would (indeed, I have, I continue to) gladly trade a day of being honked at for an evening alone with the woods and the stars.  A day of dust and exhaust in my face for an hour of winding through quiet cornfields with blue skies above.  Three hours of grueling climbing for ten minutes atop a mountain looking down at my achievement and thirty minutes coasting down the other way. 

I can no longer count how many times I've had my breath taken away.  Not by the Great Wall or Tiananmen Square or the Forbidden City, but by packs of sparrows bursting in unison out of a hedge as I pass by; by clouds casting shadows on rolling hills; by terraced mountains and corn as far as the eye can see; by bare-faced rock walls standing perpendicular to the road, towering over it; by valleys beneath me, rivers alongside.  On some nights I can see more stars in one glance than I'd see in an entire year of normal life.  Several times the sheer beauty of it all has moved me to and even over the brink of tears, overwhelming me with such a love for "nature" that I count myself lucky to be alive and grateful for everything I have and everyone I know.  It's at moments like this - not when I feel scared, or alone, or exhausted, of freezing, but when I feel totally alive and connected to and of this Earth – that I miss family and friends most.  It's a missing rooted not in the sad fact that they (you) are not here with me, but in the happy fact that we are each in our own place, leading our own particular lives, and at least for some length of time our paths ran alongside one another.  May they soon do so again!

Solo Week Photo Log

Fauxbo's Dilemma Sweet Potato Chips

Resting in a park

Homestay grandma and grandkid

Homestay courtyard

Dudes hangin' out. 

I popped by this old town called Jimingyi.  It was definitely the coolest people-made place I've been too so far.  It was a postal outpost several hundred years ago, connecting Beijing and Inner Mongolia. Now it's mostly falling apart, but in a really rustic, beautiful, (here's that word again) authentic sort of way.  Reminded me of a Bright Eyes lyric:

"And I sat watching a flower

as it was withering.

I was embarrassed by

its honesty."

No colors, no pretensions. 

Rock, mortar, wood, dirt.

The whole city was walled in.  Each wall was about 1km long and only had one entrance, here at the center. I nearly just rode by, figuring that there would be an entrance fee.  Then I saw someone just buzz in nonchalantly on a moped and I figured I'd give it a try.  

Leaving Jimingyi.  

Along the way, I stopped to have a snack.  I chose this park because they were playing corny-sounding old Chinese music and at least twenty-five couples were dancing ballroom-style in the park.  As soon as I sat down on the ledge to eat my apple and street bread, though, people started to gather around me, some poking my bike, some trying to chat me up, some just staring.  I placated them as best I could while munching and then asked if I could take a picture before going.  It was then that I noticed that nobody was left on the dance floor.  They had all come to gawk at me. 

On the perils of not being able to read a menu. I thought I had ordered one dish of vegetables and one dish of noodles.  Instead, I got two plates of noodles, one of which had stir-fried vegetables in it.  I am POSITIVE that it didn't have the character for "noodle" in the dish name.  

Shop owner and I had a chat about the characters on the piece of art above.  I showed off which ones I could read and gave him a little lesson in Korean pronunciation.  

 Couchsurfing in a giant empty fancy shmancy apartment.

 Goat shepherds.

 I ran into these folks who had pulled over to the side of the road to pick wild jujubes.  We chatted (in Chinese!) for about 30 minutes while stuffing ourselves.  Turns out the pink lady's sister teaches Chinese in Koera.  Also, the yellow pants one refused to join me on my trip.

 The view from where I camped that night. 

It's getting chilly!  Down to 50 degrees (F) at night. Good thing I've been trying to live without heat in the winter in Korea for the last two years.   Then again, I had comforters and hoodies then.  

 Climbing and climbing.  

A new record!  Getting up this high nearly killed me.  Out of about 40km up to this point, at least 35 had been uphill, and the last 3 or so had been in my lowest gear.   

Rewarded with a plate of tofu and vegetables in hot pepper oil at the end.  Two dollars.

 And then the trail kept going up!   My optimism had been crushed enough times to know that this wouldn't be the final pass.  

 Still more climbing, even on the other side of this.

 1416 meters!  Yeahhhhhhh!  After this, I coasted downhill, not pedaling once for 20km, then only occasionally for the subsequent 10.  I need new brake pads.  

On my way (to my friend's) home! 

Dudes who stopped me, chatted, gave me water, and offered some advice about the road ahead.  Specifically, they said to take a detour on Xi'an Lu Road so as to avoid a certain 1000m high mountain pass.

Some reservoir.

Camping!

The next morning's breakfast.All sorts of leftovers.

That's a wrap!   

Going Solo

Yes, the inevitable has happened and I am roaming around China all by my lonesome this week.  Mingyu has some visa stuff to sort out, and I figured that since I had already taken care of all my business in Beijing*, rather than sit around getting in my hosts' hair, I'd take the chance to bite the bullet and try traveling by my lonesome while it's still my choice.  

The idea of camping by myself was so intimidating that it took me quite a while to get up and get moving; by the time I had done laundry, watched an episode of Bill Maher, lunched with my hosts, packed up, and split, it was already nearly 3:00PM.   It took about half an hour to make it to the other side of the center of Beijing, and then about the same again to really get clear of the city.  Thus, within about an hour I was facing the road all alone.  I guess I've been at this long enough, because it didn't feel like much of anything. 

The first solo campout, though, was a bit freaky.  I pulled off the highway just past the side road leading to the Ming Tombs (yet another UNESCO World Heritage site that I don't really want to spend a day exploring) , following a gravel road down into some kind of orchard.  I couldn't tell what kind of trees they were, but I immediately recognized the planting technique from Sadhana: each tree had been planted into a deep divot, about three feet in diameter, which helps to retain water, and then the divots had been filled with leaves and pine needles and other organic matter, which will eventually decompose and feed the tree.   All the divots made it a little tough to find a place to pitch the tent, but eventually I found a spot that was both big enough and also fairly difficult to see from the main road and both the auxiliary roads nearby.  As it wasn't quite dark yet, I killed some time by having dinner: a roast sweet potato purchased at a rest stop just before (Y4), an apple purchased from a farmer on the side of the road (Y4, down from 5), and a handful of almonds received as a gift in Chengde.  To my surprise, that was filling enough.  It looks like my body is adjusting to all the riding and learning how to extract maximum calories from every meal.  That, or I'm still burning off fat accumulated over several days of dining in Beijing.

As the sun set, I pitched the tent atop of the plastic tarp that Mingyu had let me borrow.  I was very glad I did, because as soon as I got into the tent, I noticed that even though I had swept the ground clear of rocks and sticks, there were still several points where something seemed to be protruding out of the ground.  It turned out that I had missed several sharp and stubborn straw-type roots, which had punctured two layers of Mingyu's tarp (sorry dude!) but, thank god, hadn't poked into my tent.  So, I spent the next thrity minutes or so running my hands ever-so-lightly over the tent's floor, finding every little puncture risk, then gently flattening them all out until I was sure that it was safe to set my gear and my self inside the tent. 

The puncture fiasco had shaken my confidence and gotten my nerves all worked up so that I could hardly enjoy the fresh air and the pleasant noises from all the bugs and frogs nearby.  Instead, I lay silent, hear potential footsteps in each ruffle of leaves and scraping of pine needles against my tent's outer layer, seeing flashlight beams in the intermittent bursts from the fireflies' bums.  At one point, I was so sure someone was outside my tent that I actually grabbed and pocketed my pocket knife and prepared to step outside.  Not that I had a clue what I would do with it.  I waited one more minute, heard nothing,  and lay back down.  Before sleeping, I made a pact with the lone mosquito that had managed its way into my tent: "I let you live and, better yet, suck all the blood you want tonight.  In return, you wake me up if anyone comes near."
My sleep was fitful, coming only at intervals, partially because I was on the alert for visitors, partially because, as I found out the next morning, I had camped just down the road from a big truck stop, and partially because I was scared of rolling over and punching a hole in my tent's bottom.  The mosquito held up his end of the deal, though, so I woke up safe and sound, if not especially well-rested. 

The day then progressed as normal: up, eat (my now-standard breakfast of raw peanuts soaked the night before and whatever fruit I happen to have stocked up on the night before), set up my bungee between trees and hang up the tent's outer shell to dry, pack my bags, pack my tent, hang up the tarp to dry, do some stretches, pack the tarp, pack the bike, hit the road.  Ride for a while, then stop at a little shop for some grub.  This time, three somewhat fresh "Yue bing" (moon pies, which are like heavy donut on the outside and weird chunky nougat/fruit/nut paste in the middle) for Y1 each and a few stabs at conversation with the locals. I managed to talk to a couple people for about five minutes, and even put together an entirely new sentence: "How old do you think I am?" Chinese is really straightforward – all you have to say to make that sentence is "You think I how many old [question particle "ma.]  No new words pop up (like "do"), no word order changes (that "do" again, and "how old" in the front), no verb conjugations (I am).  One dude guessed twenty-two, so I patted him on the shoulder and thanked him through a mouthful of mooncake.  When another guy asked me his age, I managed to tell him that because of the white hairs in his 'stache I figured he was 45.  He was actually 48.  Take that! 

Then I rode and rode and rode and rode, about 40km, mostly through fog and dirt and smog and next to a long line of nasty big rigs, until I found the market and sweet potato fry stand mentioned in the previous post.  I found a park, laid the tarp out in the sun to clear off the rest of the morning dew and had a little rest before setting off again.  Somehow, the town I thought would be coming up next didn't materialize and it was another 25km before I found somewhere to eat.  Lunchtime brought more linguistic success, as I was able to recognize the characters for a new type of restaurant ("small eats"), then order food despite the lack of a menu or anything to even point out, and finally request a little extra cilantro.   

Normally after lunch it's rest time, but I wanted to take the opportunity to push myself physically, so kept on' trucking, hoping to hit 100km.  I don't know why I care so much about that number, nor do I know why it seems so hard to get to it in China even though I managed it every day for a week in Korea.  About when I hit 80km, a convenience store owner told me that the town I was thinking about sleeping in, Jimingyi, was around 20km away. Perrrrrfect.

He was just about right, and as my odometer neared 95km I saw a sign for Jimingyi, and then another sign for its "Historic Postal Center."  I had read that the town used to be a hub for China's pony express or something of that sort, but I hadn't anticipated that the old city center it would be surrounded by its own great wall, easily 10m high and 1km or so on each side. 

It was after five and beginning to get dark, so I waffled about whether or not to go in. It seemed like quite a risk –if I entered but failed to find one of the homestays that the Lonely Planet mentions, I would most likely be forced to find my way out and to a new campsite in the dark.  No fun.  I tried it anyway, navigating at random down rocky dirt roads, peeking my head around abandoned buildings (someday soon I'll squat somewhere!), freaking out when the owner popped out from behind some corner of the courtyard, thanking the lord above that she hadn't seen me plucking jujubes from her tree, and asking people on doorsteps if they knew any hotels or homestays around. 

Eventually I ran into one guy who pulled out some sort of ID card hanging around his neck, which I imagine must have proved that he was a tour guide.  He told me he knew a homestay place (the word in Chinese is "peasant house") and showed me down an alley and into a courtyard with about five people sitting in it.  I asked the owner if I could stay and she said yes; I asked how much and she said 17 bucks. I hadn't haggled at all so far in the trip, but considering that my guidebook said 2-3 bucks was the going rate, I said that I didn't have Y100 to spend.  Someone tried to explain that the book must be old and that prices had gone up since.  Even though he was completely right (my book is from 2007), I  started to walk away.  The landlady seemed not to mind, but the guy who had brought me there, perhaps hungry for his commission, told me it could be done for fifty.  I asked the landlord if that was indeed the case, and she demurred. In-between man insisted, but I wanted to hear it from her.  Finally, she said OK.  She asked if I wanted dinner, and when I asked how much, the pudgy guy with the ID said she could feed and lodge me for Y100.  I told him that for Y10 I could go grab food in town (my noodles at lunch only cost Y5),then  opened up my food bag to reveal bananas, apples, peanuts, almonds, and sweet potato chips, and told him I could even eat for free if I wanted.  Pudge laughed as the landlord stuffed a bill – maybe Y10 or Y20 – into his front shirt pocket and told him to scram.   

After the negotiating stuff, I felt a little awkward, but it seemed my hosts harbored no hard feelings.  I had a shower and we sat down to chat in the courtyard.  The woman agree to cook me dinner and even to let me watch.  It was amazingly simple – oil, fry the vegetables, add salt, add water.  No other spices, not even any MSG.  I had been hoping to be invited to eat with the family, but they sent me to my room with a bowl of rice and two plates of vegetables, so I thought to myself while I ate.  There's some slight irony, or at least karmic reciprocity, in this situation.  I lived in Korea for years, finding it a little weird and morally questionable that I constantly allowed people to pay, either with food or money, to spend time with me speaking English.  Now, here I am, paying good money (by local standards) to stay in a room even though I have a tent, and to eat someone else's cooking even though I have my own food, not because I particularly want either of them, but because I want to do more than ride around and look at this and that.  I just wanna chat with some folks, make friends, give and receive what little my piddling Chinese skills will allow.

Luckily, even though we ate separately, the family wasn't too averse to humoring me, so after our meals a couple of us gathered in the courtyard and spent a bit of time trying to converse.  I managed to figure out the ages of the family members, the relations, and what they all do (more or less).  I also managed to argue with the mom about how old the dad looks (she wasn't too happy that I kept saying he didn't look fifty yet) and to tease another dude for being a year younger than me by calling him "little brother."  [Language note: I heard him say "Compared to you I am one year small" and realized I had just been given the structure used to making comparative statements.  I tried out it several times in the following hours and can mostly get my point across with it now.]  I explained that I had been teaching in South Korea but that I had quite my job, at which point the Mom asked me how I could afford to eat.  I responded that she sounded quite a bit like my own mother, at which cracked the dad up.  I even got the dad to explain to me that this house – or rather, this smattering of rooms surrounding an open-roofed courtyard – had been in his family for two hundred years, or five generations.  His son, my younger bro, will be the sixth, and his son, just a year old now, will make seven. 

After thirty minutes or so of passing my dictionary back and forth, we ran out of things to talk about and retired to our separate rooms.  I have to say, though, I consider this first homestay a pretty big success.  Twelve bucks down but clean, with a roof over my head, veggies in my belly, and a bit of friendly socialization with a family that speaks no English and lives inside a two hundred year old house down a back alley inside a disintegrating 800-year old city.  Not at all what I pictured when I woke up this morning. 
* In order of importance: find a Frisbee, find a few bicycle parts, get rid of extra gear (by donation), see Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, get ripped off at a restaurant. 

A Real-time Fauxbo's Dilemma

It's slightly past 11 AM.  You've been cycling, mostly uphill, for over two hours.  The day has been overcast but you worked hard enough that you did sweat a bit.  Particularly your feet.  You finally hit a town and swing by the first outdoor market you see.  Three ladies are selling freshly fried sweet potato chips for five kuai per bag.  You buy one and take it to the park to eat.  You read DFW while munching when, not altogether surprisingly, a chip slips from your fingers and plinkos down the rock you're sitting on, finally coming to rest in one of the shoes you took off so you could air your feet out. 

Do you eat it (the chip)?





If you say no, you have yet to obtain fauxbohood. 
If you say yes, but then look around to make sure nobody watches you shake out your shoe and eat the flaky yellow thing that comes tumbling out, you're almost there. 
If you eat it without hesitation and then think that it will probably actually make your shoe smell better, you should come join me immediately.

Windows Phone에서 발송된 메일입니다.

Week 3 Food Recap

Though we're still eating well and enjoying every meal, the trend of having fewer and fewer foods to take pictures of continues.  We've started to get repeats when using random menu pointing as our method of choosing dishes.  Also, I find myself becoming more and more interested in the scenery and, as my language skills improve, in the people.  I'd rather try to chat them them up than spend time fumbling around with a camera.   .

 Still hungry after lunch so we ordered some noodles.  They came in a fancy pot.  5Y

 Spicy noodles and bak choi from a Muslim restaurant in Chengde.  7Y

 Feeling peckish, Thinnking of "Jiao-zi," which are about the size of an egg or so, Mingyu orders ten fist-sized "Bao-zi." Language lesson learned.  We at them all.    1Y a piece!

 He likes the lamb skewers. 

 Tomato and egg Jiao-zi

 Not filled up by the dumplings, I get a giant yam on the street.  Cost one dollar and was not too far from the size of my head.  I ate it all. 

 We passed through Chengde, a city famous for its almond milk.  Actually, it's not all that great.  Tatses a little chemically, like it's made from a powder.  Still, sweet and cool and somewhat creamy and rather refreshing and not animal-based.    12 bucks for a case of 24.  

 Beans and ginger and other hot stuff!  This dish would have knocked my socks off, had I been wearing any.  

My first meal in Beijing: cold noodles in a Sichuan garlic sauce with julienned veggies and crushed peanuts.  That, a pumpkin donut, and a big cup of soy milk.  $3.