The flight from Guilin (closest airport to Yangshuo) to Shenzhen didn’t leave until 11:15pm, so we had some time to kill in Guilin. Ryan originally wanted to go to the airport and chill there for 7 hours, but I convinced him we should do the 4 mile walking tour of the center city instead. We stored our bags at the bus station and headed off.

Two things occurred in Guilin that we had been warned/told about but had yet to encounter.
1) We were celebrities! The stares were unwavering. People would turn their heads as they passed to continue looking. 3 people asked to take pictures with us, and countless others snapped pictures more discreetly. The girl in the picture below gave me a big hug after snapping the photo.

2) A man on a street corner chatted us up in very proficient English and then invited us to a tea ceremony at his home, which we politely declined.

Guilin was a very pleasant stopover, known for its water features, as the city with 2 rivers and 4 lakes, and many hills that pop up out of nowhere in the city. The walk took us through parks and along the water, past groups of people playing cards, the two pagodas in Fir Lake, boats, people fishing and swimming, and others singing in the pedestrian tunnels under the bridges.
            

(Oops, forgot to log out as Ryan again).

Wednesday 2 October, our third day in Yangshuo, went like this:

1. Woke up and ascended to the rooftop of the retreat for an 80 minute massage ($24). Views from the rooftop were one of a kind. We tried to beat the heat by going at 9am, but I was in a full sweat by the end. The baby oil they used also magnified the burning effects of the sun on my tender, pale skin.
2. Ate breakfast on the outdoor patio (including a mystery fruit the size of Nicole’s head): 
3. Meandered through the local country roads on a scooter for a few hours, with gorgeous views of the intricately farmed landscape. In the process, I skipped sunscreen application on my arms and got nicely burned:  
4. Eventually found ourselves at the 7 Stars Tea Plantation (once Nicole the navigator learned how to recognize Chinese letters), took a private tour through the fields, and enjoyed a tea tasting ceremony (we drank 4 cups of tea in the process) followed by a late lunch. We learned when picking tea leaves/buds that no leaves (only buds) are used for green tea, one leaf is for oolong tea, two leaves is for black tea, and matured leaves is for black tea for old people (more of a digestive aid):  
5. Scootered back to the retreat and then into town.  We stopped at a German bierhaus to drink Hofbrau dunkel on a balcony and peer out at the throngs of tourists browsing the local goods. We found ourselves playing “Gringo bingo” — a simple game of who can spot the non-asians first. It actually took over a minute at one point. We had learned that 90% of tourists in China are Chinese…but I think that number should be higher. We also had a great view of some of the local/colorful foods being prepared streetside.

In the balcony photo, you can get a fun taste of all the different cultures at once: German Bierhaus, Texan cactus, Chinese flags, and Yangshuo karst mountain scenery.

Overall, Yangshuo was a great town in the Guangxi province with lots of Western influence. Our Village retreat was owned by some Belgians named Jenny and Tripper, and they dutifully populated their beer menu with Belgian beers. Great service, and a fully English-speaking staff made this stop on our adventure a true pleasure.

Other than the Beijing hot pots, we had not entered China with any grand culinary expectations. In the 1980′s, Yangshuo was known as one of very few places in China where one could get bread, jam, fried eggs, and pizza.  Nonetheless, we signed up for a half-day Chinese cooking class, starting with a guided trip through the local government run market with our instructor.

This place was straight-from-the-farm fresh, and very colorful. Nicole looked like a kid (or me) in a candy shop. Here you could pick up anything from frogs, eels, and fish, to garlic stalks, lotus roots, bean curd, and melons (a.k.a. squash) that put our garden’s yield to shame.

A small van then transported us just outside town, where we had biked the day before, to a small establishment with 2 kitchens, each filled with propane tanks, burners, woks, and large butcher knives.

Our instructor walked us through 5 courses that are favorites among the locals: steamed chicken with goji berries + dates, pork dumplings with egg base, roasted eggplant with pickled red pepper + garlic relish, sauteed bok choy, and a pork dish with veggies (the pork dumplings were eaten as an appetizer).

Of our classmates seated around the table, 5 were Jewish (couple from Boston, 2 girls from Israel, and Nicole), and 3 were not (2 from Netherlands — very tall I might add — and me). This was a great mix that lead to interesting conversations about travel and Holland (Michigan), as well as taboo topics like religion and politics.

Note: cooking is great fun when there is service staff cleaning up the kitchen in between each course.

Note2: Nicole considers this one of the best meals she’s had on our trip.  Here’s to hoping she starts cooking more at home because of it

For our last hurrah in Shanghai, we decided to spring for the upgraded transportation option to the airport (something like $8 USD).  Instead of the cheaper 1 hour local subways, we made our way to the Longyang Maglev station to take the magnetic levitation train.  I was looking forward to the smoothest, fastest train ride of my life.

This was an experimental line, just servicing the airport to convince the potential funders of its feasibility and safety.  During peak hours, max speed is listed at 300 km/h (same as the bullet trains we’ve been on), but at a few off hours, it goes up to 430 km/h!  Unfortunately our timing was a little bit off, so we only hit 300.  Total ride time: ~7 minutes.  Smoothness: Oddly, it was as bumpy as a regular train.  Maybe the 90′s style aerodynamics of the train had something to do with it?

The train was only ~25% occupied –> maybe the locals are over the hype and just waiting for the cost to go down at this point?

All of Asia’s fast trains have me wondering why North America does not offer them?  It sure would be convenient to have a high-speed rail service along many of our key metropolitan corridors: Austin-Chicago, Austin-Columbus, Austin-Baltimore, Austin-Scotch Plains, or maybe even DC-Baltimore-Philly-NYC-Boston and San Diego-LA-San Francisco-Portland-Seattle.  Key items needed for this to happen:

• The support of a filthy rich and crafty entrepreneur since our government could never accomplish, let alone afford anything on this scale.
• Ability to reuse existing rail lines.
• Speedy ticketing, security, and boarding procedures.  If it takes as long as an airport, it will fail.
• I’m pretty sure there are some other key things missing from this list

Maybe we’ll just end up skipping the whole high-speed rail phase and go right to pneumatic tube based travel…

Beam me up Scotty.

We arrived in Shanghai Thursday afternoon, at which point Ryan promptly took a nap and I did some laundry.  Ryan doing laundry:3, Nicole doing laundry:1

Dinner was at a very western wine bar (we were hungry, our original Chinese restaurant destination wouldn’t seat us because they closed in 20 minutes, and did I mention we were hungry?), where a big group of friends were celebrating a birthday and gave the entire restaurant slices of birthday cake. Always a good way to start a meal. This was followed by a walk along the Bund to enjoy the Shanghai night skyline.

Shanghai is a huge metropolitan city, and was mostly a spot for us to do a little bit of relaxing and recharging. The city houses some of the tallest buildings in the world, which we enjoyed a view of from the 87th floor bar at the Park Hyatt hotel in the Shanghai World Financial Center building (6th tallest skyscraper in the world). Here we were able to see the Oriental Pearl Tower, the Jinmao Tower (ranked 16th tallest), and the new Shanghai Tower currently being built (to be the 2nd tallest). We ate some delicious Shanghaiese food; dumplings with pork and crab roe, shrimp spring rolls, and pork dumplings, our most expensive meal yet, but it did cover both lunch and dinner. The evening was spent at the acrobatic show in the Shanghai Centre Theatre, some Cirque-like acts, some circus-like acts, a group of girls juggling while on unicycles, overall a fun night.
     
      

Saturday we hopped a train to a bus to Tongli, one of the ancient canal towns outside of Shanghai. The town contains many well preserved buildings from the Ming and Qing Dynasties. I was a little nuts, because we got a later start and the trip took longer than expected, and I didn’t think we’d have enough time to see things in the town. Ryan, the calming influence, convinced me it would all be fine, and it was. We visited Pearl Tower and the Tuisi Garden, a World Cultural Heritage sight.
      

We also visited the Ancient Chinese Sex Culture Museum. (I mean, how could we pass this up?). Smiths, Strevigs, RDB – There was a display with Peruvian art, some of which looked very similar to RDB’s gift from Peru. The museum has an outdoor garden with nice sculptures, though I’m unsure what exactly some of them mean (the second one below?). We also tried some Tongli specialties; sesame cakes (yum) and green dumplings (Ryan says ok, I say not so great).
     

The bus to the train ride home had tired us out, and we were not too hungry after all the sesame cakes, so we decided “When in Rome” . . . and ate instant noodles for dinner. The Chinese really do eat instant noodles on a regular basis is seems. Dessert was green tea Kit Kats Ryan had picked up leaving Tokyo. They are awesome. We should totally import them to the U.S. The noodles look exactly like the picture on the container, right? Ryan spiced his up with some crunchy, spicy bugle-like snacks.
      

Ryan thinks he is finally starting to feel better. He’s had a cold since our second night in Kyoto. What is that? 2 weeks ago? Invariably, he gets sick anytime we travel out of the U.S.

It took a little while to figure out (searching for ‘things on roofs of Chinese houses’ does not yield very good results), but Bing (Google is very slow in China) informed me that the odd structures on top of many Chinese residences are solar water heaters. Very cool and environmentally friendly. The website I was reading talked about how inexpensive they are in China, but how they are very expensive in the U.S.

Oops, just realized Ryan was still logged in, so all this got written under his user. Oh well.

P.S. Congrats Dal on retirement! Enjoy your luncheon, wish we could have been there.

Monday 9/23, after conceding defeat on my ATM card, we took public transportation back to the Beijing West Railway Station.  I ate a spicy chicken sandwich, two orders of fries, and 2 large gulps of an icy Coca Cola from the McDonald’s before realizing I should not be drinking anything with ice.  Hopefully that one does not come back and bite me.

Here’s a panoramic photo of the hectic train station before we passed through the gates onto the platform.  Newsflash: a lot of people live in China.

With Beijing in our rear view mirror and shrinking fast we finally started to relax.  Just 1100 km in 6 hours (187 mph).  Nicole nodded off while I set to work fixing our Picasa photo album timedate stamps from Japan.

Note: If you want to keep “date picture taken” tags correct relative to where you took them, you need to 1) set your camera time / timezone / daylight saving time correctly, 2) set your computer’s time correctly, and 3) make sure any friends you’re traveling with have done the same if you plan to import their pictures.  Somehow, Kelly’s camera was off by 13 hours, 35 minutes?  And somehow most of our pictures had been imported as duplicates even though the “exclude duplicates” option was set?

Our train ride was very smooth and smoke-free while in motion.  At each of the 8 stops or so along the way, everyone would step outside for a cigarette or two and let that smell carry into the cabin.  There is certainly a tobacco addiction problem in this country.  More so than what we’ve experienced in Europe and in Japan.  Everyone smokes everywhere.  The non-smoking signs in restaurants and subway stations are merely a suggestion.  The non-smoking hostels/hotel rooms seem to be rotated daily.

Some of the scenery along the ride:

Power Plants:

Rice fields:

Construction projects:

The construction projects tended to dominate the landscape.  It went like this: farmland – farmland – incomplete high rise apartment complex – farmland – farmland…  It was very eerie, reminiscent of frontier ghost towns.  Almost every construction project was about the same height, ranging from 4-20 buildings, and the same amount of incompleteness, although at least a few workers and cranes could always be spotted on them.  There were dozens and dozens of these clusters across the rural landscape.  It makes me wonder if much of the housing boom is just a front –> luring investors into grand plans of new cities full of people and marketplaces, just to fall short of being complete.  It could also be that these projects were all started at the same time (within the last 1-2 years) and are progressing well — hard to tell.

For now, I choose to view this rural landscape as being sprinkled with building carcasses.

I don’t think we passed this, but we may as well have: China’s Abandoned Disneyworld Knockoff

PS, Happy Birthday Grandpa!  I hope you enjoy the Corvette I sent you from Japan (picture of) – Maybe they can be picked up at the local Wu-Mart in Beijing too…

Sunday night in Beijing — we were fresh off a great Hot Pot experience, and back in the lobby of the hotel with $0 in our pockets.  Luckily, there was an ATM in the lobby.  I made several unsuccessful attempts at withdrawing money from my “Credit” account, thinking I was just trying to take out more than the ATM max amount;  Nicole successfully withdrew 800 RMB from her “Cheque” account.

I corrected my mistake and got 2000 RMB (~$320 USD).  We hung out on the lobby’s better wifi for a while before heading up to our room for the night.  About 30 minutes later as I was packing for our 10:05am train ride to Xi’An the next morning, I realized I did not take my debit card out of the ATM!  While we were in the lobby, we did not notice a lot of traffic or any ATM users, so I rushed down hoping it was still hanging out the machine.  It was not.  The front desk informed me that the ATM will “eat” the card if it sits there too long (a good thing), but that the ATM service folks could not be contacted until 9am the next morning, and then that they probably wouldn’t be out to retrieve the card until around noon.

American ATMs beep loudly, talk to you, flash lights in your eyes, and spit out your card early, or with the cash and receipt.  This ATM spits out the card last, without much fanfare.  I was so happy to have gotten my 2000 RMB, I did not think about the future withdrawals I’d have to make with my card :-\

The next morning, assuming that the ATM ate the card and it was not stolen, we find out that the ATM service was going to stop by at 10am.  We bite the bullet, take a taxi to the Beijing West Railway Station (the second largest in Asia) because we can’t change our tickets through the web or phone.  Rebooked on the 14:42 train for -4 RMB (to our relief because we were warned by the hotel it might cost up to 500 RMB (half the price of our tickets).

It’s now 10:05am.  We hightail it back to the hotel in another taxi (Apple Maps said it should take 24 minutes with traffic, it actually took nearly 1.5 hours in heavy traffic and a driver that was more interested in chatting on the phone and hocking lugis out the window than providing speedy customer service — by the way, this is an absolutely disgusting habit (which I admittedly used to have when I was a kid) that the locals partake in everywhere.  On the sidewalk, in the train station (indoors!!), in front of you, next to you, behind you, almost on your foot.  Yuck).

At the hotel, the ATM had already been serviced.  They aren’t allowed to hand over any found cards to the hotel staff, so they informed me that I must walk 5 minutes to the nearest Bank of China branch to retrieve it with my passport.  Once there, I’m told that they don’t have it yet.  The people that service the ATM machines take between 3 and 7 days to turn any found cards over to the nearest branch.

Epic Fail.

After a walk back to the hotel, in the cold rain I might add, I gave in to Nicole’s insistence that I just cancel the card and move onward, relying on her (much the same way that we relied on Kelly and Jason for cash in Hakone and Jogasaki).

Now we’re officially living out of 1 pocket instead of the hybrid 1-2 pocket.

Depending on the spending restrictions Nicole imposes on me (j/k), I may have a new card shipped to meet us…but I’m not getting my hopes up.

Thanks to Nicole for making us document all our card numbers and telephone numbers, as you need them in order to cancel them.

Our last night in Beijing, and the one checkbox left on our list was a real hot pot for dinner.  What’s a hot pot?  It’s like Shabu-shabu.  What’s Shabu-shabu?  It’s like fondue.  What’s fondue?  Eh, it’s like beer.  We set our targets on a chain that got great reviews on Trip Advisor: Haidilao.

A short 20 minute walk, 10 minute train ride, and 30 minute walk later, we find ourselves on a rather local side street where everyone was staring at us (this has been happening everywhere in China — we’re either the strange looking foreigners, or we’re the easy targets for locals peddling their wares).  We eventually found our restaurant next to this place:

There was a 1 hour wait, but they guided us upstairs, sat us down and started feeding us free munchies (puffed corn, puffed rice, bugles?, and sweet popcorn).  We could have gotten a free manicure if we had chosen.  Pass.  This place is apparently known for their impeccable service — if you can get over the language barrier I suppose.  Instead Nicole made friends with a Londoner who lived in Beijing, and her parents.  We find out what this hotpot thing is all about and get her to tell the wait staff that we don’t want anything spicy.  She probably saved our meal.

We ordered thinly sliced beef (a la shabu-shabu), mushrooms, and noodles, and carefully selected dipping sauces without nuts or spice (this left Nicole with soy sauce).

Then this guy stretched and tossed a noodle for us right at our table (kinda like light sticks at a night club)

We were running short on cash, and as we’ve already mentioned, even though everyone advertises their acceptance of credit cards no one actually takes them.  We count up 195 yuan in our name and start to get worried that we didn’t have enough for dinner and the subway home (4 yuan).  The bill comes in at exactly 191 Yuan — Phew!

This is by the way our most expensive meal thus far in China — at 0.16 USD to 1 yuan, a $30 meal is not bad, but still overpriced by Chinese standards.