Xi'an: warriors, meat and Muslims

This past weekend, I flew to Xi'an with my coworker Guo Xin and her husband Kevin and met with GX's friends who took the overnight train. The main reason for a trip to Xi'an is to visit the Terracotta Warriors, several hundred life-size, unique warriors and horses placed in a Qin Dynasty emperor's tomb to accompany him into the afterlife. Fortunately, once in Xi'an there are many other things to see, do and eat. (Photo: Drum Tower)

It flies in the face of most visitors, nationals and historians, but I was not bowled over by the warriors. Yes, it's interesting seeing them standing in all phases from internment through renovation in the pits from which they are still being unearthed and reconstructed. They have erected buildings over three original sites to work on and preserve the warriors while they are on exhibit. An unconventional method considering most museums. It took a long time to get to the site, and walking around at the speed and behest of my friends' tour guide (something common in China - at a museum or historical site you hire a tour guide) was a little frustrating. Plus, one of the three pits was closed during low season, it was cold, and I was sleep deprived. Whine, whine, whine.

Why was I sleep deprived? One needs to chose their traveling companions carefully. We had opted to stay at a pretty cool youth hostel and share a room. Besides limits on our ability to communicate, they did not got to bed before 1 am and both mornings one thing or another woke them up early and apparently without any thought to whispering and tip-toeing. The two things I had wanted to do on this trip were visit the warriors and bicycle along the renovated city wall. The latter activity was continually delayed in favor of the groups' other interests and thus, we ran out of time. However, as part of this group, I did enjoy the inside track as a domestic tourist. They found the best local restaurants, conversed with taxi drivers, found buses, told me about the city and its history, and haggled for me. In the end, I saw a lot of the wall, just not the top of it. And that was really okay.

What turned out to be the most fascinating part of the trip was visiting the Muslim quarter. Partly touristy, partly untainted, there is a large Islamic culture which spills over into architecture, food, clothes and tradition. In addition to the seemingly endless supply of animal parts for sale, the staples of this region are noodles and a chalk white unleavened baked then grilled bread which is thick, dense and almost tasteless. They break it up in itty-bitty pieces to thicken soup, spread finely chopped peppers on it, or slice it open and put mutton or beef in it to make a greasy, soft yet crispy sandwich. In the soup and sandwiches you can order a spectrum of fatty to lean meat. At one meal, GX was dismayed and disgusted to find out her husband had bought one that was entirely fat. As gross as it sounds, it melts in your mouth - however, after eating one of these sandwiches, I was keenly aware of how fat slows gastric motility. My gut hurt and my appetite disappeared for about 24 hrs. Oh, but there was so much yet to try.

Another perk of being with Chinese travel companions was Kevin has a friend in Xi'an who treated us to the biggest meal I've had in this country. (Several more dishes arrived after this picture was taken.) It was obscene. So many different dishes, so little room in my stomach. Plus when they said they were going to have "white wine", I thought great, I'll have some of that. Turns out their white wine is a 45% alcohol liquor made from sorghum which we drank in 1/2 ounce glasses during a succession of toasts until the bottle was empty. Strangely enough, none of us felt the affects of this potentially potent drink except for our host who, by the end of the meal, sported a tell-tale red face and was walking around the restaurant holding hands with Kevin. This gentlemen, who is the VP of local banking branch in Xi'an, also gave us a ride to the airport when we left. So perhaps not your typical traveling adventure, but having the Chinese connection definitely had its pluses.

Happy New Year

After two days of hermit like existence puttering around the apartment in my new massage pajamas, IMing/emailing with friends, reading books and magazines and watching a random assortment of DVDs, all in an attempt to recuperate my stomach, it turns out, what I really needed, was a night on the town.

Fortunately, my coworkers had made plans for us to go out on NYE. My hotpot coworker family picked me up and we met with Guo Xin and her husband at a large shopping mall called The Place. Not an imaginative name but it gets to the point. Between the two Place buildings is the extremely large LED Sky Screen - 2,296' long, 88' wide by 80' high and is second largest in the world (Las Vegas has the largest). It faces downwards creating a virtual ceiling not unlike what one might imagine of the ceiling at Hogswart. The images changed from a cosmos theme to an Olympics skydiving theme to random people walking around above your head. Under this canopy, Coca-Cola was setting up to host some sort of special NYE event. From the second floor of the mall you could see over the wall to the show, but after checking in before and after dinner and STILL nothing was happening, we gave up on it. It was cold and the hotpot family needed to head home.


Guo Xin, her husband Kevin and I taxied over to a foreigner bar called The Rickshaw to ring in the New Year. The music was great 80's hits, it was just crowded enough, wasn't too loud but of course, it was very smokey - all in all, a nice place for New Years Eve. There was an impromptu countdown, clinking of glasses all around and then the DJ put on Auld Lang Syne. 2008 had been aptly ushered in and it was time to grab a taxi to head home. Mission accomplished.




Wishing everyone a safe and happy New Year Eve and wonderful 2008!

Chinese Massage aka ticklish torture

China has newly decided that the country will have a three-day holiday for the western New Years. However, unlike a conventional western holiday, the days off are Sunday-Tuesday but you have to work on Saturday. I'm not sure how they justify the trade-off, but there it is. This is a photo of our office building. We are on the 12th flr but keep in mind, there is no 4th flr - four in Chinese means death and is an unlucky number - and no13th flr. Our floor is about equal to the grey stripe on the building behind it.

After work on Saturday, Guo Xin and I went to have Chinese massage. The only thing I knew about this form of massage is that they concentrate on the meridians of your body which are all represented in your feet. Thus a lot of attention is given to your feet and then they work their way up your legs, back and finally head. It is an extremely ticklish undertaking. Fortunately, we were in the same room with our respective masseuses (mine male, hers female) so I had a translator. Not only was it ticklish but sometimes it hurt too. Both sensations distractions from what should be a relaxing experience.

I also opted for a treatment, which I have heard called "cupping" and Guo Xin referred to as "that awful thing". At any rate, I figured I'd try it. Glass globes are heated and then quickly placed on your back causing your skin to be sucked into the opening of the globes. This is supposed to be good if you have a cold because it sucks the "cold" out of your body. If you your body feels "heavy", it will make it "lighter". I don't have a cold, but figured lightening is never a bad thing. It wasn't terribly painful but after the allotted ten minutes (and for my masseuse, his allotted smoke-break if his gum chewing was any indication), I was happy to have them removed. The more "cold" you have in your body, the more purple the spots on your back will be. Apparently, I did not have a lot of "cold" in me. Good to know - and for a while I'll have big red circles on my back as a reminder.

Note: An internet search produced this explanation: "This technique draws the skin and the muscle into the cup through suction. The skin under the cup often turns red purple signifying a blockage of Qi correlating to the problematic and congested areas. Cupping is a method of treating disease which cause local congestion, drawing up underlying tissues and forming blood stasis. Cupping is particularly good for treatment of pain, gastro-intestinal disorders, chronic bronchitis, asthma and paralysis, arthritic pain and muscle spasms along with many other ailments."

Photo: I snapped this picture in the Xi'an youth hostel bar. It is such a great ad - perhaps it's saying that drinking their coffee will have the same effect as Chinese "cupping".

Home Sweet (hotpot) Home

It's nice how unexpected little surprises can pop up. Friday was a long and quiet day at work and I actually wasn't feeling too well stomach-wise, maybe too much caffeine and too many butter cookies (lovely western diet). Right before the end of the work day, our finance office Zhao Min invited me home to have dinner with her family. She thought it would be nice for me to see how a Chinese family lives - how right she is.

Probably because she heard me talk about hotpot, she thought that would be a nice dinner to make, though not the spicy variety I'd had before. In her snow-dirty car (where else in the world can snow make your car dirty), we drove to her apartment, stopping first at a small vegetable market were I amused the locals by taking a picture of mushrooms, then driving through the campus of one of the two largest universities in BJ - the current head of China is a graduate. Apparently, graduates from this Univ. go to work in the government, and graduates from the other Univ. go overseas.

Making up the rest of Zhao Min's family is her husband, an accountant, her 9 year old daughter and their very excitable golden retriever Lucky. Their apartment is tiny with two bedrooms, one bath, one very small living space and a small kitchen. The family had spent four years living/working in Botswana so Zhao Min and both her husband, and especially her daughter, speak very good English. It was a nice dinner where we cooked meat, fried tofu, fish balls, and leafy greens in boiling water and then dipped them in a sauce of sesame paste and some sort of pickled (?) tofu. They also had me try a spicy beef ligament side dish (too chewy) and a hot drink made from rice alcohol and "nutritious ingredients" boiled with dried seasoned plums. It was sweet and salty. They also had me try a medicinal alcohol from Russia which was much sweeter like a port. As Zhao Min's husband described it, eating around a hotpot is a very warm, relaxing and friendly way to eat with friends and family. I'd have to agree.

Presentation Day

Most of the day today was spent at Dandelion School. A new member of the Mercy Corps Scotland board of trustees is in Beijing visiting her daughter for the holidays. Our Mercy Corps US CEO met Kathy and suggested she contact Mercy Corps China while she was in town. And she did. We threw together a couple power point presentations and met her and her husband at Dandelion School to tell them all about our country programs. Because of my English language skills, I was unanimously voted the presenter with my colleagues as back-up. It went really, well with Kathy and her husband asking many questions and in turn, I learned a lot from their visit. They have a long history in the development world with work at DFID, WHO and the like. They spent many years living in India before moving back to London. While Kathy admitted that her husband would have been a first choice to be on the board, he is now working full time on economic advising on immigration issues for Parliament. Very interesting couple and it sounded like MC China made a good impression on them. Who knows, perhaps that will lead to greater enthusiasm and support for our programs from Headquarters PDX and Scotland.

Boxing Day

So I have never celebrated Boxing Day, but when I suggested to my coworkers that we delay Christmas until the 26th when everyone would be back in the office, one of them said "isn't there a day called Boxing Day?" So, that is what we celebrated - without a clue as to how. For our version, in the afternoon we took pictures around the tree and they each gave me a small gift: instant coffee, chrysanthemum tea, assorted little butter cookies and a couple chocolate bars. Kind of a theme.

This evening, I had plans to meet Peter and Charmaine Smythe for a Peking Duck dinner. I asked my coworkers for suggestions and suddenly the plan took on a mind of its own. Five of us trekked off to dinner with directions and coupon in hand. Kong Zhen insisted on driving, and now I have experienced rush-hour traffic in Beijing. Having allotted over an hour to get across town, Qin Liang and I ended up jumping out of the car mid-road, crossing lanes and hurtling a small divide in order to catch the nearest subway stop. Even then, arriving late to meet the Smythes. Kong Zhen parked and grabbed the subway as well.

The restaurant was located on the third floor of a large shopping mall, and was fairly good. I have lost some of my taste for the food so I don't think I enjoyed it as much as I normally would. The Smythes said it was similar to the duck they've had in Australia.

It was a long day but a good night on the the town and thus a Boxing Day well spent.

Christmas Day

The day dawned on a decidedly dreary day - natural haze, smog or both, I can't say. At any rate I caught myself wondering, partly out loud, how I could be seeing a full moon so frequently. And then I realized, that I was looking at the sun. Hazy sun, hazy moon, they look so similar. All I know is that the sunlight in Beijing casts a dim, gray hue onto everything it touches. I'm using this as an excuse for why I haven't taken many photos. To borrow from the great Simon and Garfunkel, it truly is a "hazy shade of winter". Grey, grey, grey. (This is a great web site I found that talks about the air quality: http://pyongyangsquare.com/beijingair/?m=200712 )

After listening to some Christmasy tunes courtesy of NPR's web site, I headed out in the world. I met up with an Australian couple who I barely knew but we had decided to spent Christmas together. I met the husband briefly on my Burning Man trip. Upon hearing that he and his wife were planning on traveling, via land, from Dublin to Singapore, on their way back to Melbourne, and would be stopping in Mongolia and Beijing in December, I suggested we keep in touch and see if we could meet up. And lo' and behold, we did. As with everyone I've met from Melbourne, Peter and Charmaine are great, friendly people.

We spent the day walking around Beijing, freezing. We visited the Jingshan park where you climb a man-made hill to look out over the Forbidden City - which we could barely see due to the haze (see pic of P & C above). I guided them to the Hutong neighborhood where we sought refuge from the cold in a tea shop with a very enthusiastic tea lady who seemed to provide a bottomless pot of tea and gave us eggs hard boiled in tea (though they were very salty so I'm not sure the cooking method was entirely true). It was a long day and so we parted ways, with them going to check out a famous night market and me heading home. And that, dear reader, was Christmas.