Greetings from the Road

My first post after the family arrival. We spent their first few days in Shanghai, with me laughing every time something I now take for granted startled them, and filling the role of trip planner, navigator, translator, food orderer, negotiator and ATM. We went to the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition, which had a rather uninteresting diorama of the city as it will look in the year 2020 and half-attempts to explain the city’s efforts in municipal development, transportation, greenification and tourism. The museum did, however, have a lovely exhibit of paintings done by Dali in the 1970s inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy and other works. In all, as I may have said before, Chinese museums tend to leave a lot wanting (The Shanghai Museum, at which I saw the collection of Chinese ceramics and slightly condescending “Hall of Minority Ethnicities”, is the only major exception to the rule I have seen thus far), so no one was particularly surprised, but the exhibit was at least different if not informative. We toured around the city, did some shopping and had Christmas dinner at an Irish Pub with an open bar and tables full of loud expats.

From Shanghai we were on to the more Chinese and (somehow) more daunting Chengdu, where we met up with one of my classmates and her family for a Sichuan Hotpot dinner (lots of fun guessing with the non-English menu resulted in some choices not often appealing to your typical American eater: “bamboo ____” proved not to be bamboo shoots but an edible fungus that grows in bamboo forests and resembled a sea cucumber, and what seemed like a safe choice of chicken turned out to be chicken kidneys). Still, I maintain that accidental orders are half the fun of hotpot (the first time I went this semester we ended up with duck’s feet, which turned out wonderfully if left to really boil). Chengdu is big and ugly and utilitarian, with small pockets of charming Chinese temples and gardens. Unfortunately its main appeal is as a base camp for trips deeper into Sichuan, for which time did not allow. Still, we enjoyed spicy foods and a Tibetan neighborhood that sold prayer flags, Buddhist accoutrements and, of all things, chrome blenders, saw a Sichuan opera/variety show performance, drank tea in a Zen monastery courtyard, and had a wonderful DVD shopping excursion that took us weaving through stalls in an electronics market, and suddenly swept to a back stairwell and a small room crammed with bootleg movies and tv shows, where we were allowed to browse to our hearts’ content.

Now we are in Lijiang, in the Yunnan province, and for the first time in two months I find myself not in a city. Lijiang is known for its Old Town, a Song Dynasty village turned backpacker haven that has been entirely rebuilt since it was destroyed by an earthquake in 1996, thus proving that the Chinese can forge and replicate anything, from purses to DVDs to iPhones to German beer to money to historical towns. The town is now full of quaint courtyarded guesthouses and cafes with western/Tibetan/Japanese/Chinese/Local menus and beers and coffee and internet and tour booking, and stores selling all manner of tourist crap, all tied together by cute narrow alleyways with white walls, ceramic tile roofs, red lanterns and small waterways. We had fun guessing which of the locals (and there are many, all old, all in traditional dress) were paid to wander around as part of the local color and quaint scenery. One old guy was carrying a hawk on his arm, identical gaggles of old women came and went through the town squares, and occasionally lavishly decorated ponies were led down the narrow streets. It all seemed very choreographed, but there is something nice about it anyway.

As I post this we are getting ready to leave for an overnight trek in Tiger Leaping Gorge, so I’ll try and post when we get back.