global_jd

Quick recap

A "Read Me First" kind of entry, written Sat Oct 17 but postdated to stay at top for awhile....

Made it to Beijing, and my luggage (with netbook charger) arrived two days later. I had written a few rough entries while waiting, and these appear below. Twitter still seems to be blocked... you request the address and it just waits forever... I've no desire to antagonize The Powers That Be by looking for a proxy server.

Been having a great time in Temple of Heaven Park in the mornings, then napping and walking in the afternoons. But today was the first day I had real walking shoes, so things have been a little painful.

That's the rundown, now back to your regularly scheduled wordy blogposts.... ;-)

Wait, I can't seem to see a preview of this post, or the blog itself, even though I can see Typepad's editing window. Let me try to Publish this directly, even though I won't be able to see it... 50/50 whether it gets through, talk about a classic ambiguous interface....

Update: It's now 11am Monday in Beijing (8pm Sun in SF), and I'm packing up to take an overnight train to Xi'an in the west. Made it out to Tiantan Park four of the five mornings I've been here, and became a regular with some of the folks manipulating ropes in the park. I've been taking additional notes, but haven't been posting them yet... hard to do when you can't see what you're writing. ;-) All well... on to the next stage.

Update: Fri Oct 23, evening, in Chongqing. Some congestion I picked up in Xi'an has turned into a slight fever. Been in bed most of the afternoon, am waiting on Room Service for Tiramisu and fruit... it's all about the sugar. All the following essays are out of order, as I've been writing offline and posting when connectivity becomes available. Twitter's still toast.

Update Wed Oct 29 11am (Tue 8pm SF time): Ain't much internet connectivity in the middle of the Three Gorges! I'm on a boat sailing down the Yangtze. Both connectivity and power have been problematic. Will debark in two days in Nanjing, and I anticipate resuming normal (although Twitterless) contact then. And yes, the Three Gorges area is unbelievably beautiful, although they did mispell the word "gorgeous".... ;-)

Update Sun Nov 1 6am (Sat 3pm SF time): Added a bunch of entries I had been storing up over the past week, backdated so they'd appear in written order rather than published order.

Update: Sun Nov 8, San Francisco... have pulled together most of my notes and published them here... may have an extra essay or two to come later, but this trip is pretty much packed up.

PRC09 wraps

The goal: Learn more about the culture, the history, the natural sites of China, and get some practice in language production.

The method: Five nights in Beijing, an overnight train to Xi'an for two nights, a plane to Chongqing for four nights, five nights on a boat through the Three Gorges and down the Yangtze, then three nights in Nanjing, two nights in Suzhou.

The cities:

•    In Beijing I was mostly in Xuanwu and Tiantan, and saw only a little bit of Olympic Park, Houtian, and the touristed areas... hard to tell how much changed.
•    Xi'an is funky and gutsy, but the traffic and air were difficult. I had a chance to walk a little of it five years ago, and a chance to walk some more of it this trip.
•    Chongqing has an impossible city center, very entertaining, although I saw only a little bit of the larger municipality. Fascinating.
•    Three Gorges was a new landscape painting, every hundred feet. Huangshan was surprisingly satisfying. The Yangtze itself, wow.
•    Nanjing has culture oozing out of every pore, and is in rapid transition to a new version of itself. Easy to spend more time there.
•    Suzhou would be great, once the cabbies and pedicabs got a clue.

Biggest takeaways:

•    Creative destruction: The cities and the country are reinventing themselves. I was particularly shocked by the amount of reconstruction going on in Chongqing and Nanjing. But it's part of a tradition -- most of China's grand buildings have been revamped and changed over time -- stones from old hutongs are being used to build newer versions of traditional structures -- one city's plan is drawn from another's, the same principles are constantly being reinterpreted. The amount of startup businesses is phenomenal, even though their startup skills may be under-experienced. The rate of change far, far exceeds what I see in San Francisco.
•    Generation gap: I saw two types of groups which were shellshocked, without emotional affect: tourists, and elders who have had their city and country change out from under them. Apartment complexes don't support the previous social structures. And on this trip I saw more spoiled and overweight sibling-less children than before. Each generation has a different dynamic, a different understanding of China. Very stark.
•    Computery stuff: People looking at their hands were about the same as in San Francisco (which has increased dramatically over the past year). But most of the shoulder-surfing I did showed text displays. I'm really impressed by visual design and motion design in China, and think (particularly with the language differences) that this would have great implications for mobile use, once the ecology moves beyond just text. But I was greatly under-impressed by Chinese information design, the thinking of things from the viewpoint of the user, and anticipating their needs.

Skill arts:
   I use a cane, and enjoy juggling rope. I got the chance to spend four of the five Beijing mornings at Temple Of Heaven Park, and got the chance to observe many players. I didn't find a similar scene in other cities, just little pockets of early-morning physical activity. In the latter section of the trip I had the chance to practice some of the new things I had learned, and have progressed greatly... footwork in particular. I'm sad, though, that I never saw anyone handle an everyday walking cane with grace and intention.

Food:
   As usual, I dropped a belt notch this trip... I eat some, but not enough to replace the energy I expend walking all day. I did not find a good source for Biang Biang Noodles in Xi'an, nor Bang Bang Noodles or even hotpot in Chongqing. Got to visit the insect foodmart near Wanfujing once, but was turned off by the tourist hustle. Enjoyed the Chinese/Western breakfast buffets at the hotels. Had some spicy skewers in Sichuan, discovered some real good Ma Po Tofu in Nanjing, ate lots of bowls of noodles, drank lots of juices and yogurts and teas, and rediscovered matured rice wine. But for all my interest in different foods, I'm not real good at scoring a princely meal.

Biggest complaints: Hygiene, noise, the inability to anticipate what happens next.

Biggest pleasure: Taking a moment to recognize someone's humanity, smile, and receive a smile in return.

 

Skill Arts, Nanjing & Suzhou

For learning skills of coordinated movement, in Nanjing, I struck out.

While taking the bus in the first day I did see a group in a park near the northwest (hard to tell what they were doing, although group Tai Chi was part of it). Up towards Crowing Rooster Temple there were elders stretching to instructional cassettes, and one woman had a sword, but the only other gear I saw was an accordion. Nearby, towards the City Wall Museum, I heard the whirring roar of Chinese YoYos, and saw three or four players doing the usual tricks nicely. But no sticks, no ropes, and no big party scene as at Beijing's Temple of Heaven.

Part of the scarcity is that I was here three nights, and stayed in late one morning to recoup. The other part is that parks are spread throughout the city, and there are no particularly obvious central gathering places as in other cities. I did some websearches for likely candidates but came up empty.

I don't know if there's an actual difference in the local scene... don't see any reason why there should be, aside from the lack of critical mass and network effects. I definitely haven't given things a fair shot of enough investigation -- the Purple and Gold Mountain area alone is large enough to support much group action, and the only time I've been there has been late in the morning. But even in Shanghai the amount of early-morning physical activity fairly leaps out at you. Here in Nanjing I haven't even picked up a clue.

I've been personally progressing, though. With double-weighted full-height rope I can now do three-beat weaves while turning around in either direction, walking forward, walking backwards. I've started in being able to transition from this to a single-ended swinging, like a small rope dart, with the various straight tosses. I've seen ways to integrate wraps into this, although I haven't yet progressed to a five-beat weave. There's also been room enough to do some work on horizontal planes, but my transitions from plane to plane are still gawky. I'm reserving rope-as-staff work to when I get back home... will need lots of privacy to get the rhythm.

The cane, as always, also progresses when I spend hours a day walking. It's always in motion, particularly when avoiding obstacles in the street... a small swing to the wrong side allows a larger swing to the correct side to avoid a bicycle wheel blocking the sidewalk, a bit of construction debris, the chair and table set up in the walkway. Everything gets a little more graceful when the cane is handled for hours on end.

Best place I may have swung and twirled was probably the great southern Zhonghuamen Gate in Nanjing. It's five or six stories tall, almost broad enough to support a soccer field, expansive views in all directions, and nearly deserted as the autumn sun goes down. I didn't do anything particularly interesting or lengthy there, just enough to pay my respects.


Update: I spent three nights in Nanjing and didn't stumble across anything resembling Beijing's early-morning scene at The Temple of Heaven, but I wish I had had at least a morning or two to check all the different areas at the Purple & Gold Mountains. In Suzhou I had two nights, but no morning excursions to the parks... one morning I had to rest up, and the other I had to pack up, and websearch on "suzhou park tai chi" and such didn't turn up obvious hits. The latter part of this trip was more personal practice than observation.

Even more tweets

Twitter is blocked in the PRC, but the service has trained my brain too well, and I cannot stop thinking in roughly 140 letters. These are from Nanjing and Suzhou, the last two cities of this trip.

Travel outside of the comfort zone always seems to temporarily boost IQ.

If you're going to the PRC and want to bond with adult males, bring plenty of classy foreign cigarets and pass them out, one or two at a time. It's an accepted social gesture.

(And if you don't smoke, consider it for the trip... tobacco helps gate sensory input, lets you cope with the noise and the lights and the crowds better. Seriously, look up nicotine's effects.)

The PRC I first saw in 2004 is not the one of 2009. I think that by 2014 it will have evolved even more dramatically. The keyword here is dynamism.

Wordpress is still blocked here, as are Blogspot and Typepad. Also blocked is Om Malik (who wrote something anti-PRC a few years ago, as I recall). On the other hand, scobleizer.com is up, and his site back in 2004 or 2007 had been blocked. Slashdot and Hacker News are available.

Tai Chi and similar arts are almost uniformly taught by rote rather than rationale. You are taught things to do, and must discover principles yourself. China may produce a Madonna or a Britney, but I'm not so sure about a Charlie Parker.

Even on a fast connection, Typepad's "rich text editor" lags in loading time, and is not cached. Downloading rich logic for every page refresh does not scale, confirming natural expectations.

Why does garlic smell so good after it's cooked, and smell so bad after it's eaten?

One sign that it's the end of a long foreign trip: the longing for one's own Waterpik once again.

Opera's location bar hinting seems to include page text, which isn't as helpful as Firefox's use of only URL, page title, and any page description. (Too many false positives.)

An enjoyable aspect of the PRC is being able to toss around 100-dollar bills so freely. (Used to be about US$12.50, now about $15.)

One downside of not being able to read Twitter for the past three weeks is that I've entirely lost track of what so many people are thinking of eating for breakfast.

Perhaps it's better to think of Chinese beer as a pleasant beverage, rather than as beer.

You'd be shocked by how many signs are in English here, both official and commercial. It sort of slips under your awareness, but English words are spelled out everywhere.

A metro station in Nanjing had relatively loud music, paced about 60bpm. Rhythmic entrainment, to calm people down?

If Nanjing surprised me by how walkable it is, Suzhou surprised me by how strollable it is. The center of town is almost a pedestrian mall, more Venice Beach than Venice.

One other thing that surprised me about Nanjing was the number of walled estates. I'm not sure of the dynamics of it yet, but many apartment buildings were in private guarded areas.

I have looked, but not yet found on this trip, any of the Darkie or White Men toothpaste which was everywhere in 2004, and still common in 2007.

For awhile this trip the cabdrivers reminded me of Mac bloggers... they're always honking, rarely observing. (Weird to be a fan of one brand like that, rather than of new human capabilities in general.)

Note to self: Next time I'm in China, start drinking Shi Ku Men Lao Jiu immediately. (It's a Shanghai-style Huangjiu, matured rice wine, 12% alcohol at $4/500ml, and much nicer than the Taiwanese stuff we can buy in Frisco. Or the Chinese beer.)

One of the things I hate most about Apple is how its financial success and mindless fanbase convince some at Adobe to act with similar opacity and non-responsiveness. Don't encourage bad role models to the corpofolk!

I'd bet that the length of a cold or respiratory infection can be reduced by wearing a surgical mask, even if only because it increases humidity, preventing nasal drying. Aids your natural response.

Suzhou has something rare in other cities: the KEDI convenience store chain. But their parks tend not to have that amazing tube-steel exercise equipment found in Beijing, Shanghai, elsewhere.

Figured out the disquieting thing about public expectoration is the hawk that sounds like a shotgun cocking, followed by the higher-pitch whine of the projectile. Waiting for the other shoe to drop; scary.

  --  and after return to San Francisco  --

It's odd how little traffic there is on the streets, and how few of them honk their horns.... ;-)

American supermarkets are weirder now. Prices seem very high, stock selection not always satisfying, and they play decades-old verysafe music.

The people next door moved out. Not only is there less yelling and drama on the street now, but there's less risk of it coming within the next hour too -- no lurking bummer! :)

Terminology of Toys

It's hard to figure a good name for some of these cross-cultural toys. Here's the best I've got so far.

"Diabolo" is the English word the Chinese translations provide, but I'm not sure it's the best one... in San Francisco we use it to mean a specifically-shaped device, one which I've only seen incidentally in the PRC. So I'm now using "diabolo" for the large symmetrical inverted yo-yo shape we see in the west, "Chinese Top" for something which spins mainly on the ground, and "Chinese YoYo" for the one which spins mainly on the string. Subject to change, and I'll occasionally use "diabolo" for the entire class of devices, but this is the best nomenclature I've been able to figure so far.

I'm going to use "Shooting Stars" to describe the double-weighted rope of height-length or less. With all due respect to Marc MacYoung, "monkeyballs" wasn't cutting it, and I feared it raised lurid thoughts in the minds of westerners. "Shooting Stars" is more poetic, and has historical justification, and is still definitely in the plural, and although it is not common terminology seems to describe the thing better than anything else I've seen. (For the height-and-a-half length of double-weighted rope, "jump rope" will do... never mess with someone carrying a jump rope, or even a dog leash for that matter.... ;-)

Now I'm using "meteor hammer" in the stricter sense of a single-weighted rope of roughly twice-height length or greater... pretty much interchangeably with "rope dart", save as a percussion instrument rather than an edged one.

With that in mind, "swinging poi" means just playing with double-weighted rope in general, whether single or double strands, whatever the length. It's convenient. And "twirling cane" is for any type of manipulation of a half-height stick. 

Hmm, that seems simple enough in retrospect.... ;-)

Final day of first visit, Nanjing

Nanjing may be the most walkable city I've found in China. The walled city area, I'd guess, is about a third as big as San Francisco... the automobile traffic not as aggressive as Shanghai, nor as congested as Xi'an, nor as ten-laned as Beijing... the hills, lakes, canals and twisting streets make for great variety... and the weather seems as mutable and (in autumn) as temperate as San Francisco. It's been easy to accidentally stumble across history or temples or food streets on every outing I've made. I've left a lot of the city untouched... would be easy to spend more time here. Random impressions follow....

The first day was warm, in the 70s on the Fahrenheit scale, and very humid. The second day dropped fifteen degrees, and the third fifteen below that, to the 40s, as the entire country encountered a freakish cold snap. During the summer it's murderously hot, and humid from the surrounding lakes and rivers, but during these few days at the cusp of November the weather has been some of the most conducive to walking that I've found in mainland China.

The reason I couldn't find much in central Xinjiekou was, frankly, because pretty much the whole area is being reconstructed. I had seen some large cityblocks under construction when checking in, but it wasn't until I got the chance to walk around a little that I realized how much new building is going on. In past years I had seen Beijing preparing for the Olympics, and Shanghai preparing for the 2010 exposition, but in both Chongqing and Nanjing the construction I've seen has surpassed that, at least on a percentage basis, if not in total acreage. It's astounding, my mind can't grasp the magnitude of "creative destruction" here.

Sidewalks all throughout the central district are under renovation. This has serious implications for walkers! It looks like each piece of sidewalk is handled by a different small contractor... there's not a central Department of Public Works as in San Francisco. Still two guys watching and instructing while one guy does the actual work, though. ;-)

The standard sidewalk construction attire? Sometimes it's a jacket, but more usually it's the single sports coat that the worker may have. No uniforms, no orange safety vest... very different scene.

And if a guy can work in his only sports coat, then it makes sense that it wouldn't quite matter if the pedestrians have a clear place to walk while the construction is going on... that would be a side-issue to actually getting the job done and getting paid by the boss. Even if there were a marked-out safe pathway, the bicycles and electric bikes and delivery trikes and card tables and sales-on-a-blanket and shoeshine ladies and what-all would block it anyway. After the sidewalk is done there will be a clear path, so hurry up and get the job done, that's the important thing. ;-)

As a result, any walk in an improvement area is a cross-terrain walk, alternating between storefront path and sidewalk and motorcycle path and roadway, crossing a pile of dirt here, picking among a stack of discarded tiles there, wending among the bicycles parked at odd angles, avoiding the cars parking on available sidewalk, and of course watching out for the crowd of careening wild pedestrians. I don't know how the people who don't use a walking-stick do it; the cane's three-footed source of support has seemed to be a necessity when walking in the downtown area.

Right now I'm typing in the German Brewhaus beneath the Jinling Hotel in Xinjiekou, enjoying a nice full-strength dark beer, munching large roasted peanuts, smoking a pipe of blueberry/vanilla Virginia and Burley tobaccos. It's nearly deserted, here at 7:30pm, although I bet it will pick up towards 9 when the band comes on, and the foreign businessmen upstairs are escorted down by their intelligent young translator/guides for a European experience after their tiring foreign business-filled days. 

I've got a good view of the entryway of the (apparent) KTV separating the bar from the hotel... been watching dozens of Chinese girls enter the past hour in jeans or business clothes or culottes and heels, then seeing them after they've donned full-length gowns for the lineup for prospective patrons. (First night I was here I thought it was a wedding party... any gal in a gown is a thing of beauty to me, and I hadn't known it was really just a costume of business convention.)

Ninety degrees away is the dressing room for the bar I'm at, and girls come out of here in German blouses and suspendered plaid kneelength skirts... quite the contrast, or perhaps not. The groups of Chinese-speaking businessmen are now starting to come down the escalators, laughing perhaps a bit too intoxicatingly loud. I've seen the young male staff at the karaoke bar handling bottles of Chivas Regal and Johnnie Walker and looking like they're ready and able should troublesome duty call... on previous nights I've seen the lineups of gowned girls waiting to be chosen for a booth. It's not my scene, and I don't understand it, but there seems quite a bit of human capital which understands the routine.

This morning I took the underground north to the Nanjing Railway Station, to try to buy a ticket to Suzhou. Chinese railway stations are a trip-and-a-half... a kaleidoscope of human life, crowded, every eyeblink tells a story. I spent close to an hour examining the various display boards, trying to dope out what ran when, why I might want one train over another, and only succeeded in copying down the departure times for the wrong line. Ended up going back to my hotel and asking for help, and they already had a ticketing office in-house, and did it better than I could have. Lesson learned, but I'm glad I soaked in the flavor of the station.

After a break at the hotel, I took the metro south, to the great Zhonghuamen Gate at the south of the old walled city. I don't think my words can do it justice; I was profoundly impressed. Easily five stories tall, based on packed-earth drawn from the surrounding moat, protected by thousands and thousands of twenty-kilo bricks. No, I'm *sure* my words can't do it justice... where Xi'an's wall was drawn with geometric precision, Nanjing's wall seems even higher, and curves around with the rivers and the hills, a stone snake surrounding the lion city... a response, not a dictum. 

This main southern gate entry was built for defense, and has inner walls to rain weaponry down upon any attackers who may it through the first multi-ton doorway. Thousands of troops could hide within this gate's walls, shooting arrows and pouring oil on invaders who breached the first line of defenses. It is tall, tall, tall, tall, tall. There were two wide stairways for cavalry to mount to the upper levels. People live inside the walls today; all you can see are the air-conditioners sticking out of the wall. From the top you can view across miles and miles of scenery, and that's without the multistory wooden observation towers which were once built atop. The walls of Nanjing are beyond my power to describe... every brick has a story of some conscripted laborer, centuries ago, who struggled to raise it to the heights and cement it in place. The city's wall established what was in, and what was out... a distinction which carries through into the mentality of today. Centuries old, but still impressive, a thing of beauty today. My words can't do it justice, but I was lucky to experience it.

... took a break just now, and went to the toilet shared by the brewhaus and the KTV, it had an attendant who pointed me to the best current urinal, who held open the light-operated faucet and pointed out the soap, then pounded my back while I washed my hands. He had ten-kuai and twenty-kuai bills on his stand, but I left a five, 'cause I already know how to pee. Meanwhile the two or three dozen gowned girls at the establishment have been joined by a half-dozen sturdy young lads in navy whites standing in the lineup, as more and more groups of customers enter, including some escorted westerners. Please excuse me, I'm fascinated, but I really don't wanna know.... ;-)

Backtracking a bit, the metro to Zhonghuamen led me to a mini-adventure... the station was to the south of a river, counter to my main map's north-of-the-river. I got my bearings and walked rather briskly through some neighborhoods that apparently hadn't seen a foreign visitor in quite some time, but did make it across the bridge to my destination. Later at Fuzi Miao, the shopping area surrounding the old Confucius Temple, I didn't find a single non-Asian among the thousands I saw... quite a difference from two afternoons ago, when the cruise boats contributed approximately 0.5% of the current population. I sort of like being the outsider like that... makes me feel more comfortable when regarded as a weirdo  in San Francisco. ;-)

One place I didn't get to visit was the museum of the occupation of Nanjing in 1937, usually called "The Rape of Nanjing". It's a serious event... close to half-a-million Chinese were killed within a few weeks of the Japanese army's advance from bombed-out Shanghai. I've researched it a bit, but don't feel comfortable talking about it... the museum was apparently closed on a Monday though, so I've got a good excuse for not going. But my one real contribution on the subject is that I don't see it as a Japanese thing, so much as a youth-gang thing... the military in Japan at that time was a boys' network, without significant feedback from other segments of society, and was royally effin' delusional, as such in-groups too often are. We've got the same problems in the States, with ghetto gangs and latin gangs and and other dysfunctional boys' networks, and I suspect China has a similar problem emerging, with Little Emperors experiencing two decades of positive change without learning how to play well with The Other. Regardless, if you want to understand China then I think you have to study the centuries of sorrow they've experienced, whether from Kubla Khan or Manchurian invasions or unequal treaties or the Japanese invasion or the KMT's executions or the Cultural Revolution... life is precious, but life is cheap, and today definitely has better potential than yesterday did. It's too bad so many of us had to cry so bitterly during the journey to this place, though.

Okay, it's nearly 9pm, and the Brewhaus house band is warming up, even on a Monday. I tried to order some food but had to subsitute fried rice for steamed dumplings, and spicy tofu for spicy fermented tofu -- the latter turned out to be the best Ma Po Tofu I ever ate, by the way -- but it's all getting a bit too close to the Land of Managed Expectations for me, I've got to cut out and retreat to my room, rest up for the train ride to Suzhou tomorrow. 

I've had a great time in Nanjing, walked 'til my feet got sore and my eyeballs bled, and don't even ask about my eardrums. I have zip idea about the digital scene, but I've got a much better flavor of the overall scene. Nanjing's a good town, and I think there's a meaningful chance that in five years it will be a great town. Things change fast here, that's my biggest takeaway. If you get the opportunity, I'd encourage your own first-hand experience of the place... definitely seems worth it.

Update: The band did get worse, and the flood of testosterone-addled customers to the KTV did grow larger, and the working girl who arrived at the brewpub punctually at 9pm to work the westerners understood my "duibuqi, wo ting bu dong" adequately enough, but I'm sure glad I got the check and got out of there when I did, it's a strain to try to pass for statistically-normal for too long a period.... ;-)

First day in Nanjing

NANJING, Oct 31, evening: Arrived in Nanjing this morning, disembarked the Yangtze cruise ship, and now have easier power and connectivity again. Was going to go out, but it's raining, and turning the crowded streets into wet and slippery crowded streets just scares me much too much, so I'm sitting in a brewpub in the hotel's basement, drinking a dark beer on Halloween, and will catch up on various thoughts, stream-of-consciously, with little concern for arranging things for readers' easy harvesting. No meaningful content here, but perhaps some interesting kinks, read at your own risk.

This is my first time in Nanjing. It's a very old city, capital of the Kingdom of Wu back towards 200AD, Ming capital for awhile before the Yongle Emperor moved it to Beijing, scene of the signing of treaties which gave Europe extraterritorial privileges in the concessions, capital of the new Republic of China for a bit before the Japanese army boys slaughtered Nanjing's citizens to make a point. A town of significant sadness, yet a town of significant culture and awareness.

There are trees everywhere, great broad leafy trees shading the sidewalks, shedding gallons of leaves during the windy late-October afternoon. Lakes surround the city, canals connecting them and bisecting neighborhoods, a sudden coolness as you enter their realm. The massive Ming-era walls still live, although in fragments... unlike Beijing or Xi'an these walls follow the city's geography, and curve and twist with the landscape. The Purple Mountain rises to the east, the smaller Red Mountain to the north, the now-broad Yangtze bounding it to the east. It is genteel and refined, the Kyoto to Beijing's Tokyo, yet with a street grid that wraps around the hills, the rivers, the lakes.

Nanjing is known as the city of short dynasties. Although it has been a capital of many Chinese rulers, these dynasties last 20 years, 30 years, sometimes even two or three years. Whenever the focus comes here, it goes away quickly. Nanjing is called the city of coiling dragon and crouching tiger, the dragon being the massive Purple Mountain to the northwest, the tiger being the stone-walled city to the southeast. Its symbol, though, is the lion, wide of mouth (to collect wealth and fortune), wide of rump (to retain same). Its cabbies are angry honkers, yet the streets feel safer than Shanghai or Beijing. People gawk at the westerner with facial hair, a pipe and no tour group, yet it is very, very easy to draw a smile, from all strata of society, if you're willing to try.

I'm still baffled by Nanjing. I am in the geometric center of the city, Xinjiekou, at the intersection of the main north/south street and the main east/west street. I've walked maybe six miles during the day, and got turned around once... no mean feat. Xinjiekou is the commercial hub of the city, yet all I've found are small high-priced stores... an escalator trip through a nearby department store showed clerks mouthing the words to trite muzak, very sad, very empty. I think there's a food court across the next intersection. Earlier today I was down at the old Confucius Temple, thonged and very hopping, lots of street food. But in this section of town I've failed to find even a bowl of spiced chicken, and so am working off sweet pork jerky from a convenience store.

The first day in a new town is such an exhiliration! Checking a map, getting a compass bearing, finding a subway and figuring its process, trying to remember every tall building, to create a mental representation of the city. It usually takes me a day to figure how any printed map corresponds to walking distance... a little overshoot here, an unexpectedly long trudge there. Only the sleek north/south subway line has opened up so far, the east/west line still under construction. The bus lines are only a yuan or two, perhaps I'll chance them tomorrow.

The brewpub I'm in is in the basement of the Jinling Hotel, a famous one, smack in the middle of the city. There are actually brew kettles and storage vats here, so I hope they make the beer here too. The menu tells you what sizes of glasses you may buy (currently I'm on the 500ml mug at 42 RMB), but does not tell you they offer some type of light ale (seemed to pack a kick), a dark beer (surprisingly tasty, and also above 4.5% bacteria poop), or what else they might have. It is depressingly overstaffed, as are many Chinese businesses, and although the kitchen crew is idle I've yet to communicate that I might like some pub food (don't think the peanuts are enough, and the duck necks are probably too much, but perhaps there's something in the middle). The staff makes the formal polite welcomings, and the assistant manager who is practicing her English is particularly friendly, but all will smile if you make small contact and give them face, as another human being.

Next door in the basement is a strange establishment. I suspect it's some type of KTV (Karaoke TV) bar... it is dark and noisy with ultraviolet lights and glow bands, the female staff in gowns and Halloween masks shouting "Huanying guanyin" as the middle-aged males with discretionary income enter. I'll try to learn more as I pass back to the hotel, but I do draw the line at non-serious singing of music.

There are streetside juice bars, as in Taipei, with bubble tea and killer fresh orange juice, about a buck US. I had a skewer of spicy tofu, knifed to resemble menudo, from one of the cleaner street stalls. Down towards the Confucius Temple the food scene reminded me of Taipei, lively and vibrant. There are a few other street scenes here I hope to explore, should the weather permit.

But right now it has turned 9pm on a Saturday night, and the pub band has started playing "I Love You Just The Way You Are"... a little more soulful than the nearby Albertson's supermarket in the Haight-Ashbury perhaps, but far beyond my current limits of tolerance. I need to finish off this half-litre mug of dark beer and get the hell out of here before I start adding musical editorial content of my own. A pity, it could have been less obnoxious.

(Ending on a happier note, last night was my final night on the boat, and after a very stressful day among the tourists on beautiful Yellow Mountain, I smoked a pipe while walking on the empty upper deck of the ship, and the PA system was playing a recording of what music from the Zhou Dynasty might have sounded, over 2000 years ago... bells, and stone gongs, and a small plucked string section, an occasional deltablues-ish guqin or reedy sheng... silent, musical, alone in the middle of the Yangtze, gamelan-like tones reminding me of what we have been. Beautiful.)

I like music that entices, not music that commands. I like people that listen, not people that pontificate.

Update: I wrote the above in the pub and was in my hotel room by 9:30. Laid briefly on the bed, and instead conked hard. I woke up in a haze... the bedside clock (unusual in a Chinese hotel) had arms on the one and seven... the large tenth-story window was grey with a line of twinkling lights across the bottom... briefly I thought I was still on the ship, looking across to the south bank of the Yangtze on a foggy morning, but I wondered why the shoreline lights weren't moving as they should. Persistence of vision.

Bad day for America

I've just regained (limited) Internet in the PRC, and have a bunch of experiences to type up, but this one seems to trump them all... looks like Federal Judge David Carter of Santa Ana has folded in requests for the Obama machine to produce even the most basic documentation of his citizenship, his eligibility.

The link goes to a self-proclaimed "conservative" site called 24ahead.com... he has had the most reasonable writing on this particular subject that I've seen over the past few months. I've got no evaluation (or even knowledge) of his other positions. I linked to him because corporate news sources, including Fox and even indie bloggers like Little Green Footballs, have been distorting the facts and smearing the questioners of the legitimacy of the current ruling structure. 24ahead has been dealing with the actual issues.

The issues themselves are simple. Someone asked Obama/Soetoro for his birth certificate. In October of 2009, just before the election, ObamaCo filed for dismissal of the request. They have done so dozens of times since, in multiple courts across the country.

Doesn't matter if the original questioner was a nutcase. Doesn't matter. The fact is that the mob filed for dismissal. That's not openness. That signals something to hide.

There are many answers ObamaCo could have given. Filing for dismissal is the wrong answer. It is the wrong answer.

The followup dialog remained ambiguous, but confirmed the pattern... they attacked the questioners, misrepresented the controversy as only about the birth certificate. I don't know what kind of hell Orly Taitz has been going through. I don't know what kind of pressure they put on Judge Carter. I do know how Betsy Wright's Bimbo Squad employed Pellicano and Paladino to threaten women who were attacked by The Man. I do know that the Obama Eligibility facts have been consistently been misrepresented, the real news has consistently been ignored, and any who doubt The Faith have been personally attacked with prejudicial terms like "birthers" or worse.

If you want a federal job, you've got to show your records. If some cipher from Chicago wants The Big Job, he damn well better show his basic birth location & doctor, elementary school records, passport history, whether he has applied for aid as a foreign student, and all the other normal documentation The Machine has carefully squirrelled away. He should show them whether or not he's asked. But if asked, it's despicable for them to attack those who request such basic and expected openness and transparency.

He needs to answer the questions about why the only school record we have lists him as an Indonesian citizen. He needs to forthrightly discuss his own website's admission of British and Kenyan citizenship. He needs to provide a good explanation of why he's the only recent presidential candidate without a public Grade Point Average. He needs to stop with the personal attacks, and just answer the questions.

He needs to answer why his law school admissions did not list his alternate names. He needs to clear up the confusion on his Social Security Numbers and Draft Card numbers. He needs to document his travel to Pakistan, his entire passport history. He needs to clear up why his campaign removed the AVS check on credit card donations. He needs to answer. He needs to actually be open, instead of just spouting off about how open he is, and how closed you are.

It was the filing for dismissal which was the smoking gun. Previously you could argue that his citizenship history had been hidden simply through innocent negligence. But filing for dismissal  -- stonewalling -- is the key intentional action which would normally trigger the antibodies of an objective press.

The reluctance to reply indicates he is ineligible, and his administration is fraudulent. The timidity of Republicans to acknowledge these basic questions implies the mob has nuclear dirt on them. The failure of the press indicates that they are part of the same corrupt machine. The lockstep of the citizenry indictes a fraudulent society.

It's a bad, bad day, in Saul Alinsky's Amerikka, when a cat may no longer look at a king.

More unpublishable tweets

Tips for Beijing West Station: The "English Desk" isn't, but it's hidden down a corridor to the left. Taxis are in the basement. Duh. (And the clerk may be perverse; she gave an older gimp like me the upper hard berth!)

It's sort of freaking me out that there's only like 70 more days we'll be able to describe the year by starting with "200-something".

Usual routine: Wake before dawn, walk five to eight miles via a park, come to hotel to eat shower and crash, get up towards dusk and do another five to eight miles. Awesome.

It would be fun to fix cars randomly, middle-of-night, so that one time out of a hundred the car horn would deliver a meaningful but non-fatal electrical shock to the driver. Over time civilization would ensue.

I bet it'd be valuable for someone to do an "Annotated Techmeme"... just call out the people who have nothing to say, and distill out those pages which did hide ideas within bloated text.

After all those years in tech support, you'd think I'd at least consistently ask myself "Just to be sure, does the problem persist after you restart the computer? That's an easy potential cause to get out of the way." (Hotel internet connection.)

Fri Oct23, evening: Although I've had congestion, it seems more a fever than a cold. Took two easy walks today, but crashed after about 2pm. Craving tiramisu, burnable energy.

Those blogs with a Twitter widget never stop loading here.... ;-)

Tiramisu update: The Room Service crew tends not to have the English skills of the front desk. "Tiramisu" is universally understood, but "fruit plate" is better requested as "shui guo".

I never got Foursquare, but I assumed other people were just more popular and social than me and were trying to meet up with anyone nearby. But gawdhelpme if you ever auto-tweet that you're on a BART train, you're history, bub.

Those who jabber on "network neutrality", like "global warming" and "open web" and "all natural ingredients", think they're saying something discrete when they're just expressing an undefined marketing sentiment.

One of the great unsung advantages of a netbook is that they fit easily into any hotel safe.

Chongqing is indeed a city of mist, along with mountains and rivers. It would make a setting for Lord of the Rings type of landscapes.

All software is squirrelly. We just become used to a particular set of squirrelularities.

Last night I enjoyed some grilled squid skewers in Chongqing. This morning I wondered how they got ocean food so far inland as street food.

When I was growing up in New York & Long Island, a Chinese restaurant was still unusual, and the grocery stores had Chung King brand crispy noodles and soy sauce. I used to wonder why they didn't call him King Chung, until I learned it was actually a place.

Oddly enough, websearches on "'herb caen' umbrella" do not turn up any results on one of his most important contributions to society.

I've gotten into the habit of using a napkin to handle tongs at a buffet table, and Purell after using a public keyboard and mouse. I need to get into the habit of wearing glasses while people are eating and talking; tired of getting their food and spittle in my eye.

The tourists' cameras get in the way of their eyes, the guide's voice gets in the way of their ears, the conversation about home and other trips get in the way of realizing where they are.

While waiting in queues, a walking-stick is wonderful soft persuation to prevent tailgaters from becoming rearenders.

And when someone bumps into me in foot traffic and says "Sorry," I say "Don't be sorry, just Be Here Now." You're not really conscious unless you're looking around.

Odd realization about Beijing this time... not one person wanted to sell me a Rolex. Most of the watches sold this trip were luxury items, self-definition, not cheap practical timepieces. Mobile kills another industry.

Grab bag of notes

Miscellaneous observations which fit nowhere else, added on a number of different days, in Beijing, Xi'an, and Chongqing.

Pajama wear is still big. This is mostly in Beijing's hutongs and residential areas of other cities. Quality seems to be high... dress pajamas, fully buttoned, worn with undergarments and slippers. I wish we had that kind of elan in San Francisco.

The concept of the convenience store chain does not seem to exist in the PRC. 7-11, AMPM and other chains were a revelation to me in Tokyo and elsewhere in Japan, and I've relied on them in Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and elsewhere. Maybe it's because the state operates local cigaret/alcohol shops here, or maybe it's because the concept of foreign ownership of a business is not tolerated on the mainland. It's easy to buy plastic bottles of juice or tea, and many also have a few cans of beer, but there's no wonderland of oden and buns and crackers and dried fruit that I've seen elsewhere. Even 500ml bottles of beer are hard to find outside of restaurants. Maybe I just don't know how to shop it here.

Bird guys are big, big, big. Every morning you can see retired gents walking their hooded birdcages to the park, swinging them to and fro, why I do not know. Sometimes they carry multiple cages on a stick across their shoulders. They hang the cages from the trees, and their songs are very beautiful. Best scene so far is in Chongqing, where I've already seen large birds in individual cages, even balsa blockhouses of small birds in small cages, maybe six rows of eight, six feet across, freestanding upon the ground, transported by bang-bang pole.

Chongqing has chickens too. I saw a few of these in Beijing, but nothing like that in the Mountain City, where a large cage or bushel would hold half-a-dozen hens, or maybe 2-3 larger roosters. They'd be brought to the park and let loose to peck, then a few weeks later would be dinner, I suppose.

White cats roam the parks. People would bring them plastic bags of food in the morning, and it seemed certain people know certain cats. Pretty.

And you know about the tree people, right? People commune with individual trees, stroking and hugging them. I saw a few trees with odd truncated lower branches that middle-aged women would, well, hump during their morning wake-up routines. I'm not too sure how deep a communion they receive.

I came across a wet market this morning in Chongqing that was much livelier than anything I've seen in Hong Kong. Rows of ducks would sit placidly waiting to be bought and dispatched before being cooked. The ducks were so well-behaved that I wondered whether someone had slipped them a mickey, maybe some stale beer, to keep them quiet. And unlike the wet markets of Kowloon the streets here were curving and hilly and of very uncertain footing... much more of an experience than the rectilinear layout of Mongkok.

I've seen very little rope, stick and toy work in Chongqing. Partly this is because there are few big parks, and I don't know where to go... when I've gotten to a park in the morning I've seen people stretching, maybe some empty-hands Tai Chi, and one lone sword dancer. But I haven't yet found anything to compare to Xi'an's parks or the Bund in Shanghai, much less the scene in Beijing. There must be a scene here; I just don't know how to find it.

On this trip I've been mainly using the Opera browser -- if it's good enough for Russian hackers, it's good enough for me! I've been writing in Notepad++, which I hadn't used before, but which is a good solid text editor. Opera took a little while to configure to my liking (tabs, displays, etc)... glad I got the opportunity to get familiar with it again.

Which sites are blocked here? I can't see: NewTeeVee.com; certain complex Google News searches ("adobe -'please download' -'this site requires'" after the third page, eg); Blogspot, Typepad, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook; Mark Cuban; varied US political blogs (hit & miss; some surprises get through); Google News time-sorted searches (intermittent), and Google News sequential pages (fails after about three or four pages).

Wikipedia is not currently blocked, in late Oct 2009. I haven't tried to hit particular entries which might be blocked.

In Chongqing a higher percentage of people seemed to be wearing various shades of red, perhaps 25% of pedestrians after including the odd fluorescent yellow or lime green. Some were straight-up red, others were burgundy, russet, dark pinks, hot purples... generally, it seemed a lot more red clothing than I had seen elsewhere. I really like those russet raw silk sport jackets some men wear, but there's little chance of me hassling the hardsell sales process to try one of my own. Maybe in San Francisco.... :(

Kids here are a mixed bag. Those under five years stare at unusal-looking people (like me), and you can earn big points with their parents by waving, smiling, saying "Hello" and "Bye-bye". But subteens are often willful and spoiled, often already overweight. They do not have the experience of negotiating with siblings, with the siblings of their friends. This may be one of the great risks of the next few decades.

I have a number of wallets. There is the little black leather change-purse, purchased at Asakusa Kanon in Tokyo, holding yuan coins and jiao coins and folded yuan bills in a flap in the back. There is a recent nylon mini-wallet from REI in San Francisco in the other front pocket, with 5Y and 10Y, 20Y 50Y and 100Y bills folded separately for easy access. The back pocket has a nylon zippered pocket safe with my ID and credit and bank cards, secured by a looped cord to my belt. Then in the hotel safe I have a leather travel wallet, with a photocopy of my passport and other essentials, itinierary and spare cash, used at airports and while travelling between cities. A pickpocket might game me, but they cannot game me much.

Herb Caen's Simple Umbrella Etiquette

I'm writing this essay solely because both Google and Microsoft websearch do not list a suitable entry in their first few pages of their useless hits on query "'herb caen' umbrella". Please consider this as my little bit to improve today's edition of The World Wide Web.... ;-)

If it's raining, and you have an umbrella, then look ahead of you, and raise it up when passing someone closely. This protects you from poking someone's eye out with those metal tips and incurring costly legal bills.

Now, this should be a no-brainer. You can get some slack from staring at your feet or the device in your hand on a sunny day. But when you're wielding the power to damage others, you have a responsibility not to hurt them. You must lift your eyes, and react like a real human being, not like a damaged one.

I suspect the people who do not obey this commonsense dictum are also those who (as automobile drivers) do not signal their turns, or those who (as pedestrians) attempt to push into a subway or elevator before others can exit, or those who (as voters) vote however the news corporations imply they should vote. Were we to summarily execute these flawed individuals, I'm sure the world would instantly be a very much finer place. Do not let yourself be lumped in with these lower-quality planetary denizens destined for summary destruction when the Final Rapture occurs. Just be a normal thinking Joe, and lift the damn umbrella.

I'll conclude with a wholesale swiping of a topic titled "Umbrella Etiquette", which was in turn swiped from an unsourced posting to the New York version of Craigslist:

<blockquote>
Umbrella wielding gentlemen have an obligation to their fellow pedestrians. In Tokyo, umbrella etiquette extends to holding yours open while the person disembarking from the bus behind you gets his deployed. According to a poster on the Craigslist forum, New York City's rules of umbrella etiquette are more basic:

1. Please leave your patio umbrellas in storage or attached to said patio table. You egomaniacs do not need to take up a 10 ft radius of dry space.

2. If you choose to ignore Rule #1, please have the common courtesy to raise your patio umbrella when sharing sidewalk space with other umbrella-carriers. Not doing so will result in umbrella fender benders and will block traffic behind you, causing both coffee and people to spill.

3. If wearing a rain parka, hat, and a hood, please leave your umbrella at home. Once again, dry space is limited and you have already established your necessary space.

4. If it is determined that you need an umbrella, please do not then hog overhangs or awnings. Once again, you have a f#!%*~g umbrella, so please reserve limited dry space for the poor shleps who do not.

5. Please, for the love of god, if you have spiky metal points shooting outof your umbrella, use extra caution when cutting people off, etc. or just f#!%*~g buy a new $3 umbrella - they are everywhere.

If these rules are not followed, then any fellow New Yorker has the right to take your umbrella, patio or otherwise, and beat you with it.
</blockquote>

Perhaps tellingly, the above essay, as well as other reasonable and pertinent hits on the search query "umbrella etiquette", seem to be largely blocked in China at the moment.

Update: The original Craiglist post is sourced, thanks to an archive link from Jason Kottke. But I'm still unable to find Herb Caen's original, and more genteel, handlings, from the archives at sfgate.com.

Last day in Chongqing

A day of elation; a day of frustration. Final day in Chongqing. Biggest takeaway? Relax and things will take care of themselves. So far. ;-)

I took a morning walk about a mile away to the last remaining remnant of the city's walled gates. These are located where Minsheng Lu and Heping Lu curve around and meet, and were constructed during the Ming Dynasty. The history seems to go back further though: many of the plaques in the area were quoting dates in the 1100s and beyond. There are lifesized metal statues of people fighting to climb the walls, and defenders throwing boulders down on the people climbing ladders, archers everywhere. Not a pretty lifestyle!

One of the benefits of smoking a pipe is that I can stop and fiddle with it, out of the flow of foot traffic, and just look around while doing so. The streets are only occasionally marked by streetsigns, so contextual clues like the location of a mosque or an escalator really help. (The longest escalator in Asia, even bigger than the Central Walkway on Hong Kong Island, is near the Chongqing railway station. I didn't make it there, but did stop by the smaller Kuanxinkou Escalator (sp?) near Shibati, connecting the lower city with the upper... like Tokyo, there's a low town and a high town, with status in each to match.)

Then I walked north, found the monorail, took it eight stops to "Yangjiaping Walking Area", a large shopping center to the southwest of city center. This is the start of the university area, developed during WWII when coastal areas were under occupation. I had planned to walk a few metro lines north, but realized on the way in that freeways seemed to cut off obvious footpaths, and so just wandered, people-watching, thinking deep thoughts. I'd tell you what those deep thoughts were but I'm now continuing writing this the next day, and am not in the right mental place to do so. Later.

Took the metro back to a new station nearby my hotel, and had some fun with a google-eyed pair of four-year-old twins... after peekaboo we ended up blowing kisses to each other as the whole car laughed. The walk back started nicely, but then so did the rain, and slick tile inclines with unobservant pedestrians, many with impolite umbrellas, sorta ruined the mood. On my last night in Chongqing I stayed in the hotel room, too scared to chance the streets.

But the next morning, when the Victoria Prince cruise boat pulled away from Chongqing, I did tear up a little. I like the town. It's difficult, and grey and overcast, and I never had hotpot or bangbang noodles, but I was very impressed by the population of the town, and what they've achieved. "City of Lingering Aftertaste", indeed.

Today I've been sailing down the Yangtze, and we'll reach Fengjie and the start of the Three Gorges in the morning. Took a shore excursion in evening to Fengdu, Ghost City, the Entrance to Hades... again treacherous slick footing on the stairs leading up to the main temple, so I went as far as felt comfortable and smoked a pipe and swung some poi while looking out, through silent trees, to the river that supports a third of China.

No deep thoughts to write tonight, sorry... been thinking them, but it will take the right opportunity to present. A little alcohol, a little tobacco, a little people-watching while typing would all help. The boat does have internet access but it depends on geography, and sheer steep cliff walls still prevent weak little internet signals from coming through. Not sure of my workflow the next few days... just sailing down the river.


Update: What places does Chongqing remind me of?

San Francisco, the moist air, the hills' crooked streets, the historical reputation for quirkiness.

Hong Kong, for its stairs and grime, for the difficulty in navigating by logic, for the light show in the harbor at night.

New Orleans, for the rivertown feel, the regional reputation for spiciness.

Tokyo's older irregular sections, around Ueno Lake, up in the old samurai areas now converted to residential, and also its underground world of malls and tunnels.

New York's old air quality, its filigree of tunnels and overpasses leading to unknown destinations, its realistic brashness.

Chicago's broadshouldered warmth and industry, its ability to cast aside the past for new needs of today.

Moria, the Dwarf city in the Lord of the Rings, dark and scary yet warm to those of good heart.

London's storied sulphurous fog, its resistance to invasion, its history in every block.

More Chongqing notes

CHONGQING, Oct 24: I lost most of yesterday due to fever, but it seems the forced rest did the trick, and I'm back in the pink today. Rough travel notes follow; no main point, just observations on the day, in a stream-of-consciousness way, which may or may not be of interest to anyone reading the other entries here.... ;-)

It's about 10pm Saturday night, and I'm back in the hotel, drinking local beer. It's Shancheng brand, with shan being the character for mountain, and cheng being the character for city... Mountain City beer, which is the nickname for Chongqing. It's a Pilsener, as are most beers here, and I think the label says it's 9.5% alcohol, a 4.75proof beer... again, on the light side. These 500ml bottles are sold at all the street stalls, and people pop back three or four with a meal. Cost me five yuan a bottle, about seventy-five cents at today's rate of exchange... would go for $3.69 + tax in San Francisco. Between this and the cheap Baijiu, I don't know why the CCP doesn't make cannabis and opium legal again. (Sichuan used to grow a lot of hemp, and I've heard that opium pods were an occasional ingredient in Sichuan hotpot, so it's not as farfetched as it might seem.)

Today had light occasional rain... dangerous on these slick inclined tile sidewalks. I took things very slow while walking, and so far have lived to tell the tale. The city beat me on a few counts, and I had a few more small triumphs of getting around... a draw. This is definitely the most challenging urban environment I've ever been in. I don't think it's an impossible city, but it sure has a big upfront learning curve. Fascinating. I'm glad I'm here in the temperate autumn, and not in the legendary summer.

A couple of times today I thought visiting Chongqing would have been a great event for the San Francisco Suicide Club, the precursor to the Cacophony Society. We used to do bridge climbs, Moonie infiltrations, rapelling in large abandoned buildings, and other stunts which would challenge your preconceived capabilities. I'm centered and calm, but am definitely enduring things which would have me running and screaming were I to only imagine them.

Early today I took the metro line out a few stations to Liziba, and tried to walk back through the Stillwell Museum, Eling Park, and other sites in the area. No way! The streets climbed around and took me where they wanted to take me. I finally ended up at the building the CCP used during WWII, when Chiang Kai Shek tolerated them in town as a precondition for the US and the Flying Tigers to continue fighting the Japanese for him. I could recognize the characters for Chou and Lai on a statue, figure it was Chou En-Lai, but couldn't make out much of the other signboard material in the museum exhibit of the buildings in which they lived. Gave up and hailed a cab to get back to the hotel, and saw the Peoples Assembly Hall on the way... hope to visit that tomorrow night, my last night in town, to see the massive dancing scene they have in the plaza in the evenings.

One very cool thing I saw this morning further in the promontory was how WWII bomb shelters had been reworked as car garages, restauarants, other uses. People have dug into the mountains here, and those spaces are still in use. I know I won't see the range of such recycled burrows, but I'm glad to have seen first-hand at least a little bit.

Late in the afternoon I got back out, and managed to find the northern connection for the cross-Yangtze cablecar... the trick to local navigation seems to take it slow and steady, just gradually hone in on a target... it's an isthmus, there's only so many places a river-crossing gondola can hide. A box holds twenty people suspended by cable above the river, takes about five minutes, costs half a buck. I was thrilled, even though the view was still socked-in and overcast. Then a 45-minute walk through twisty neighborhoods until I finally found Nanbing Lu, the food street on the south bank of the Yangtze. These are big dining palaces, a whole block of them, but none of them seemed oriented to the single diner, so I crossed the street and discovered a whole bar street hidden beneath the roadway, overlooking the river. The bars were a little strange, all empty... I couldn't figure out if people enjoyed the afternoon there and had already left, or whether it only came alive after people ate meals across the street. I'm not comfortable being the only person in a bar, particularly if the deepest draft is a Budweiser. Took a cab back to the center of town, failed to find a meal on Hao Chi St, and got some fried rice at a food court. That's what I done today. Following are some riffs on that routine.

How come I couldn't find a meal on Good Eats Street? Mostly because I couldn't dope out their process. It's like trying to fill out an IT form at Adobe, I'm very willing to enter the process, but I just keep getting blocked when trying to guess what they want me to do next. Many of the canteen-style places have the ingredients laid out, and you tell the cook how you'd like them prepared. This has obvious problems when there's a language barrier. In the food courts the final dishes are presented, as in Japanese Kappabashi work, only with real food. I just walk, look, and point... no questions asked. In Hong Kong and Taiwan I've also gone hungry, simply because I couldn't figure out what they were asking me before they'd give me food. Partly my personal foibles, partly the fixation of the process they use.

Speaking of asking questions across languages, repeating a noun does not make a sentence. There have been plenty of times where someone repeats "120 yuan!" or whatever, writing it down on paper and showing it to me, and I say "I understand you're giving me a price, but what do I get for that price?" People used to ridicule The Ugly American for repeating a phrase in a louder tone of voice, but I've seen the same weakness across cultures. Rephrase it, mime it, keep a smile in your eye, don't get stuck in repeating a pattern... if there's a blocking-point in the communication, try something different. No shame, just something we've got to grow out of.

Another communicational problem I've seen across Asia is how some people, particularly those in lower service positions, will assume they cannot communicate with someone who looks like they're a foreigner. I first read of this in the excellent Nihongo Notes series from Japan Times (still available at Kinokuniya Bookstore in SF)... even fluent speakers will find that they cannot communicate with some people, simply because of the way their face is arranged! This is funny enough in Japan, whose linguistic homogeneity through the country is remarkable, but it's extra remarkable in China, where most natives speak Mandarin as a second langage, and where natives often honestly compliment foreigners on how more "standard" their pronunciation is. I don't know any way to cope with this other than to grin and move on, after getting silently waved away.

(The flip side of this is that Asian-Americans without native language skills will be assumed to know perfectly well what the speaker is saying, and that any incomprehension is some kind of act. Now *that's* difficult! I'd rather be waved away I think. ;-)

One more language note is that I'm hearing a *lot* of Chinese I can't understand at all. I can pick out sentence patterns when people are speaking Mandarin with a heavy Sichuanese accent, but there's other stuff going on here too. I couldn't even tell you how many dialects I'm hearing in a day. It's easier to deal with the written word than the spoken word.

The car-honking is nearly unbearable. But I've noticed that on any street it's a minority of drivers who commit the majority of the honks. You can hear their tonal differences. Widespread car ownership is still very new here. But city bus drivers are some of the worst offenders, and I'm pretty sure their horns are at a higher decibel level than private autos. These honkers have deep, deep problems, ones that I suspect I might solve were I only to have an opportunity to cram that bus up their capacious as... but wait, I digress. ;-)

(Seriously, noise pollution has direct effects on health. It doesn't get the airplay of particulate matter, or even chemo-agriculture or mobile phone irradiation, but at some point we humans will get a freakin' clue on not getting right in-the-face of innocent strangers for no good reason. You're frustrated, and so you frustrate us... makes no sense. These car honkers need to get their feedback, because they're oppressing the rest of us.)

I think I've got a gift of rapport, at least in superficial relationships... when I see other foreigners deal with natives I never see mutual smiles, it's usually very strained. I don't mind being the brunt of a joke, and so can take more chances, get more laughs, have more fun. I've been fortunate enough to do grunt customer-service work myself, and feel more at home with ordinary working people than many of the foreigners seem to be. We're all human, there's a little spark in everyone, and none of us were born knowing what humans are intended to be. I keep thinking that next trip I should brush up on my street magic, that's a sure way to fascinate kids, and particularly in China, once you make their child smile, you've got an "in" with the parents. I think folks are happy to see a looser American, one that won't rant at them for odd reasons. Whatever, I feel lucky about connecting with strangers across a language barrier.

One more day and night in Chongqing, then I'm on the Victoria Prince luxury cruiser for a five-day trip downriver to Nanjing. Part of me welcomes the removal of stress; part of me dreads dealing with English-speaking vacationers. I've got some guidebooks to read, some good tobacco to smoke, a few play-toys to exercise with. The ship is billed as having internet access, and if they've got any Newcastle Stout or other thick beer, I'm set. I still need to book the last two nights' hotels in Suzhou and Shanghai before the flight home, but it's about time I'll be heading back eastwards again.

The Sticks of Chongqing

One of the reasons I was interested in Chongqing was of the large number of porters, the "Bang Bang Men", who carry goods up and down the staircases on sticks across their backs. They're still omnipresent, even with the increase in automobiles, but I'm not yet sure how they use the stick in daily life.

The sticks are different than what I expected. These are thick bamboo or reinforced bamboo, maybe shoulder-height in length, and 2.5 inches in thickness. Some use half-tubes though, sculpted out with shallows on which to hang a rope. There's usually a short rope harness at each end, maybe eight inches long after doubling and quadrupling. Through this is threaded the ropes which are attached to the load -- sometimes a four-point attachment to a woven basked, sometimes a burlap bag, sometimes ropes tied around applicance boxes.

I've seen lots of guys with sticks lounging around, but I haven't seen any of them handle the stick gracefully... it seems too thick, too heavy to manipulate effectively. I still suspect that these are used in streetfights, which I've had the good fortune not to have to witness... if gangs use tire-irons in melees than I'm sure the non-owners of automobiles use any portage rods they have handy. But so far I haven't found anyone simply having fun with having a stick in their hand.

Walking canes are common, split about 50/50 between knob-head or derby handles and crook-topped canes. Many of the latter are those "knobbed bamboo" type of canes you can see occasionally in SF's Chinatown. I'm not sure what type of wood it is. Most lack a rubber tip, which makes me wonder how useful it is on a wet hillside. Haven't seen anyone rip off even a simple twirl yet though.

The most common stick in Chongqing? Seems to be meat skewers. These are about twenty inches long, maybe 3/16th inch thick. Big satay here, folks! They accumulate everywhere on the food streets.

I've been hoping to find a unique perspective on daily life with a stick here. So far I haven't stumbled across one. Still got more miles to walk.... ;-)

Update: One more type of stick I've been seeing around Chongqing is a six-foot length of (what appears to be) hardwood, maybe an inch, inch-and-a-quarter diameter. It has a dual metal prong on the end of it. I've seen some people use it for moving portable electric wiring into position, and others for pulling trash paper off rock hillsides. At first I thought it might be for removing oranges and other fruit from trees (Sichuan's got significant agriculture). Don't know what it is mainly designed for, but they're often sold at streetside hardware stores. 

Chongqing Notes

CHONGQING, Oct23: Flew into The Mountain City yesterday afternoon, and it's been a blur... the last day in Xi'an had the worst air quality I've seen on this trip, and many on the plane were coughing. I'm congested, and wondered if I had caught a cold, but it seems to be clearing up with the moister air of Sichuan. Random notes follow, in no particular reader-friendly order....

I've never been here before, and felt my brain exploding like that of a hyper little boy as I soaked it all in. I can't prove it, but strongly suspect that such novel travel results in an increase in neuroplasticity, as new structures are formed in the brain. Healthy stuff. ;-)

The ride south from the airport takes about 40 minutes. I wandered off the plane and started looking for a map (hah! more later), and was asked by a pretty Sichuanese girl if I knew where I was going, etc. She wrote out the hotel for me in characters, then said that their tour booth could bring me into town for 120 yuan. High, but US$15 is what a shuttle in SF would cost me anyway, so I took them up on it. They hooked me up with a driver and a middle-aged lady to ride shotgun. The girl spoke English, and I didn't try any Chinese... fortunate, as I could eavesdrop in the backseat during the drive with the non-English other two.

Reminded me of growing up in New York! The roads were twisty, the air grimy, underpasses and overpasses and curlicues and brick tunnels. I knew the general southward direction we were going. The first glimpse I had of the promontory was the "New York New York" building through the mountains, designed after the Chrysler building in Manhattan. As I sit here on the 31st floor of the central Harbour Plaza Hotel this building is just off to my left, two blocks away. Haven't seen King Kong yet.... ;-)

Chongqing is the biggest city you've never heard of. Up until ten years ago it was the largest city in Sichuan, until it got spun off into its own huge municipality... maybe something like 30,000 square miles, thirty million people [check]. Defining "the world's largest cities" depends on how you define the city bounds, and Chongqing Municipality has large rural areas, but the central little isthmus of downtown Chongqing seems closest to the northern side of Hong Kong Island, all twisty streets and hills and flyovers and hidden stairways.

The moisture in the air reminds me of San Francisco, and there's definitely a lot of fog and mist too. But this moisture comes from the surrounding mountains (misty Chinese mountains are not literary license!) and of course the large rivers on three sides, rather than from an ocean maritime layer. Felt good in the nose, like stepping off the airplane at SFO does.

Imagine if Jasper O'Farrell had never laid a grid upon downtown San Francisco, and the city streets instead respected local geography as in Twin Peaks and Forest Hill Station. Then take away the street signs and maps, and insert buildings laid far back from the street, and put some buildings atop other buildings. Don't forget to build an underground layer, as in the malls of Tokyo, and add frequent Beijing-style pedestrian barriers such as overpasses and tunnels instead of crosswalks. That sorta describes Chongqing. Check out the satellite imagery sometime. I really like how complex it is! 

The street grime is closest to the Kowloon side of Hong Kong, although with the steep streets the footing is much more dangerous. Vehicular traffic seems a little more serene than Xi'an and Beijing... there's still fast unsignalled turns and honking, but a bit more genteel here. I'm getting the hang of waiting on a corner until there's a critical mass of pedestrians, then using them for cover.

As for orienteering, well.... ;-) I had difficulty finding maps stateside, and that appears to be because you don't really use streetmaps here, at least not in the downtown area. All the maps I've accumulated disagree with each other. Street signs do exist, on occasion. But so far I've been getting along well by keeping a general idea of where north is (thank you, trusty little compass) and then heading in the rough direction of my goal. I even found the building of my riverboat's travel agency, set back about 200 feet from the street, by using the little Japanese-style address placards on some buildings, and doping out the characters on some of the building signs. Triumph!! :)

(Chinese street signs aren't as complicated as they appear, particularly in the PRC. There's almost always a Zhongshan Lu (Middle Mountain Rd, with some historic connection), a Minsheng Lu (Peoples Life Rd), other common names, frequently with modifying digits. This was particularly noticeable in Taiwan, where in each city all the major roads tended to have the same names, even though the roads were in different locations in different towns. There's a smaller character set for street signs. If you can find them, that is. ;-)

Language is mystifying. The level of English here has surprised me, considering how few think of Chongqing as a tourist spot. I guess it's from handling all the folks who pass through for river cruises down the Three Gorges. This was also the first place this trip I've seen significant amounts of signage in Japanese, and even some Korean. There's Mandarin, and there's also Sichuanese which is like a sibilant Mandarin, but which can still confuse Beijingers. (Sichuan was resettled after the CCP took power, so many imports communicated in "standard" Chinese... Beijingers love their final "r" sounds, while HongKongYan turn "n" to "l" and Sichuan goes crazy over "s" and "z".) But then there are other tongues which I can't place... could have sworn I heard some Hokkienese at some point (from coastal Fujian, and also the local tongue in Taiwan). But so far I've been using mostly English to communicate.

Food is everywhere! I've been eating erratically, eating little for a day or so then gorging when opportunity presents. There are street stalls which scare me (no refrigeration and no running water, no thanks), and an all-Chinese menu is still 50/50 for my capabilities, but it's indeed a bit more approachable than Xi'an, and more geared towards single diners and snacking than Beijing.

My first meal was a snack of three panfried dumplings in a plastic bag for one renminbi (less than twenty cents), then a plate of satisfyingly greasy char kway teow noodles (but with a different name) in a Food Republic court in a mall. My hotel is right near Jiefangbei, the "Peoples Monument" in the center of the old town, which aside from being convenient for cabbies, also places me smack dab atop Hao Chi Jie ("Good Eats Street"), still known on my maps as Ba Yi Jie. This ped-only area is full of strollers at mealtimes, with the local specialty being skewers of grilled meat dusted with crushed chiles and white peppercorns, yowza! I also had a streetside bowl of noodles (mungbean noodles?) slathered in chili in a diced pork gravy, plenty of cilantro and garlic. Eating Sichuan food in Sichuan!! My lips still tingle.

Last night I walked downhill to Chaotianmen, the old landing dock at the foot of the promontory. There's a huge plaza and lightshow here each evening... think of Hong Kong's light show, or the river sight on Shanghai's Bund, if these two older cities weren't quite so sedate, and didn't have to worry about electricity (here provided by the Three Gorges Dam). Words can't do it justice. I love the brassiness of Chinese visual design; it's like a lion dance with clashing cymbals, only with architecture and electrical lights.

After the show I watched the line dancers on the plaza. Mercifully, here there was a single sound system, rather than competing tunes. Cells of four to eight middle-aged ladies would dance in tandem, and sometimes cells would merge or split apart, each doing their own set of gentle synchronized movements. People looked at me, not quite sure what to make of this lone European, the only one on the plaza. Finally a member of a bunch of local tourists asked to take his photo with me, and the floodgates were open... twenty snapshots later, many peacesigns and thumbs-up and OK signs later, it was over. We had fun. ;-)

The mood of people? I can't quite figure it out. It's not as happy and open as Beijing or even Xi'an. When someone stares at me and I smile back, there's a positive reaction maybe one time in four. Other times it's stoneface. Maybe, as in San Francisco, the relative lack of direct sunlight makes people more withdrawn. Don't have a handle on it yet.

The girls are very pretty here. Some do have those awful heavy blackrimmed eyeglasses which scar Beijing's beauty, but Sichuanese girls really seem to deserve their reputation for loveliness. No fliration, no come-ons or anything... just pretty.

Construction is everywhere. On a limited land area that means destruction is everywhere too. The jackhammers take a break around 6:30pm for noodles -- you can see them eating while squatting on the sidewalk -- then keep up until 11pm or so. Not a problem; easier to bear than the crazy yelling guy next door to me in SF. 

I've seen a few packs of shellshocked caucasian tourists, in the heavily-populated areas. But in the neighborhood parks and local stores I'm an oddity beyond comprehension. The hotel had a Japanese tour group last night but they seem to have gone, so it's much quieter now. (I had to do the muffle-the-door-with-towels trick last night... odd considering how the Japanese Air Force bombed this last KMT refuge sixty years ago.) Few people seem to choose travel destinations for urban orienteering like I do. ;-)

I'm pretty banged-up physically... been pushing myself past exhaustion on many days. Tonight I'm recuperating from a slight fever (the Tiramisu and fruit plate did help!) and I'd like to explore beyond the central district over the next two days, check out the scene at the Peoples Assembly Hall tomorrow evening, ride the overhead cable cars across the rivers, watch the light show from the food street on the south bank, maybe figure out how to get to the old village of Ciqikou. No way I can get out to the rock carvings at Dazu or the ancient water-diversion projects of the Sichuan Basin; I'm just too played, and time is too tight. Aside from exhaustion and some respiratory/fever stuff I'm doing fine, and starting Monday I'll have only occasional daytrips while cruising down the Yangtze in a boat. Chongqing deserves its reputation as a very unusual type of city.

Skill Arts Roundup

CHONGQING, Oct 23: Unordered notes here on manipulative arts I've seen outside of Beijing, to be updated as the trip progresses....

I was in Xi'an for two nights. The overnight train from Beijing arrived just before 6am, and after considering and rejecting the aggressive cabbies at the Xi'an train station, I managed to walk the six or so long blocks to the Sofitel on Peoples Square (Expedia got me a room for about US$130, which they upgraded to a suite because I came between conventions.) Dropped off the bags and took a walk north two blocks to Revolutionary Park (Genmin Gongyuan).

This was filled with people... lots of slow Tai Chi, line dancing, one-off stretching. Only players I saw with props were the Tai Chi Jian (sword) people, and Diabolo/YoYo work. Lots of the latter, mostly hanging out together in the eastern section of the park. This work was beautiful, lots of round-the-body manipulation... would look very cool with ultraviolet or LED or (gulp) Flame Diabolos. The better people were dancing within the sphere they described with the strung yoyo... light on the feet, graceful.

One woman came in with a bag, sat on the bench next to me, and was quickly surrounded by a crowd. From what I could pick up of the conversation she had apparently just gotten back from Hong Kong with some new toys, which she offered for sale. These were plastic Chinese tops, the asymmetrical style of Diabolo, with the larger and less-dense end having the usual air chambers which changed pitch with increasing rotational speed. Some models had friction-free steel bearings to wrap the string around, similar to a sleeper-style US yoyo. She also had a variety of sticks, including some expandable ones, which seemed to be slightly different than the ones the Xi'an players already had. Price for a large top seemed to be about four yuan (US$.50! would probably cost $10 in SF). I had no interaction with the crowd... invisible. (I've tried to use a double-dome diabolo in SF but have no skills, and so had nothing to share.)

The next morning I walked to a much larger park just outside the southeast corner of the city walls... think the name was Longzhamen, but I'd have to dig out a map to be sure. The entrance was through a farmers market... slow and chaotic going. Again there was a crowd of diabolo players, but also a separate crowd playing two-person catch with the tops.

I did see some stick work in Xi'an, but not too much. These seemed to be armpit-height sticks, similar to a Japanese jo, and the movements were mostly of a formal form and its constituent parts. The style reminded me strongly of Xingyi Whip Staff work which I've seen on a DVD, and which I've associated with a coastal heritage near Shanghai. Like the jo there was much use of both ends of the stick, sliding hands.

Sticks were again outnumbered by swords. I did not see the long-tassel swords used by one group in Tiantan in Beijing. Some of the groups had a mix of sword and empty-hand work, both doing the same slow Tai Chi movements... this equivalence of the forms was a surprise to me.

The only use of soft tools was some bullwhip and chainwhip work I saw from afar. In Longzhamen I heard a whip cracking across a lake, and when I got around to that side I saw it on the ground, with the owner apparently preoccupied with a large, heavy, ground-spinning top. Then while walking back I saw two gents with chain whips practicing on the pedestrian walkway between the moat and the city wall, but I did not cross the intersection to get a closer look.

(Speaking of closer looks, none of the whip practioners I saw used any type of eye protection. One guy did wear normal eyeglasses and had some earplugs. Scares the heck out of me... even when snapping a four-foot unweighted rope I'll gear up against accidents... a whip can easily cut through leather, and the cracker can disintegrate at any time... wonder what the occupational damage is for a toy like that. I respect whip people, but it's not my own scene, too scary for me.)

Oddly, I did not see any rope dart or shooting-star work in Xi'an. Legend has it that the rope dart was first used in either the Western Han dynasty about 250BC just northwest of Xi'an, or during the Tang Dynasty 800 years later in Xi'an. Maybe it's the institutional Wushu training in Beijing which has kept that tradition alive there. Still, aside from the three whip guys and loads of Diabolo players, it was a few sticks, a good number of swords and fans, then emptyhands and all outnumbered by dancers. Very pleasant. But Beijing still seems to have a culture all its own.

West China Rocks

XIAN, Oct21: Drew Carey can bite me. It's West China that rocks.

I'm sitting in a hotel room, with a $4.50 minibar can of Tsingtao, a $1 flask of baijiu (100ml, 112 proof), some almonds and dried apricots. Ten floors below and across the street I can hear the disco fan dancers who are using the promenade of a department store for their night's entertainment, featuring synthesized Suona (you won't recognize the name, but it's that incredibly brassy, duck-like free-reed horn) atop modern beats -- synthesized local tradition from the Tang Dynasty -- snapping their fans open and closed in unison, enjoying moving with their friends. Next to them is some type of young males' group, maybe police/military, doing some type of stick/drum/chant thing. I've spent the last few hours walking among the stupidest freakin' traffic in the world, and am exhilirated by it all. This place is a thing unto itself.

I can't eat the food... the street stalls have ambiguous sanitation, the restaurants serve family-sized portions, and so I've been living off the hotel's breakfast and luncheon buffets. There's no beer to speak of, no convenience stores to pick up a cold sixpack. The closest thing to any flirtation is some scary old ladies rapping on the glass of their window as I pass by, inviting me in, but no thanks baby! The noise levels are through the roof, with many drivers honking on empty roads, just to keep their hand in. The dust from construction discolors my shoes daily. Blisters on my feet, knees that should be replaced. It should all just suck, but it doesn't.

People stare at me. There are others of European descent here, but they tend to cluster in certain areas, and bunch up in tour groups. I rarely see another westerner on the streets where I walk. Children gape openmouthed. Guys drinkin' with their mates wittily shout out "HalLOOO". I call out "HalLOOOOOOO" back, eyes meet, we both smile. 

I walk in sketchy areas of town, far more impoverished than SF's Market St, and yet there is absolutely no sense of the street parasites that punish visitors to San Francisco. If you treat them as people, you get treated as a person in return. Fully 180 degrees away from SF. It is fresh, not rotten.

The drivers should undergo electroshock therapy... they do not allow themselves reaction time to handle stupidity. I came across three different multicar accidents today. But Beijing and Shanghai have only had meaningful auto populations over the past fifteen years, and the west is much less rich than the coast. I'll cut them some slack here, assuming they'll improve with experience, and assuming they don't kill me before I get out.

There is litter, there is non-observance of others, there's a distinct lack of thinking what-happens-next... parking a bicycle in the middle of a sidewalk is obviously stupid. But it's not malevolently stupid, as it would be in SF, when someone would be daring you to object. Here it's just plain stupid, and is not part of a racist power trip.

The business environment here? I don't know. The social consciousness is also unknown to me... I do see that many people get their mental marching orders from CCTV. I hear of corruption and cronyism, but have no first-hand experience.

But I do see the people, and they're good people, and I like them. They deserve better than what they've had, and I see them witnessing profoundly rapid improvements in their lot. It's not even, and it's not enough, but it is real, and it is significant.

A place where a smile can be returned. It's hard to imagine how any place can be better than that.

Next stop is Chongqing, also a gateway to the west, but further south across a mountain range, and on the Yangtze instead of the Yellow River. I hope the traffic's a little better, the food a little more approachable for a solo traveller. Looking forward to it greatly.

Wushu Potpourri

BEIJING, Oct15 - I may not have any luggage, and may be short a day or two's worth of sleep, but I had an absolutely awesome time this morning in the Temple of Heaven park. Lemme tell ya about it.... ;-)

Temple of Heaven, or Tiantan, is a large park just southwest of Tiananmen Square. It was used twice a year as the place where the Emperor would commune with Heaven in rites intended to improve the coming harvest. After the end of the monarchy, it became a public area, open year around, and is the largest greenspace in Beijing.

Tiantan has architecture, sure, but what's really interesting for me is the wild kaleidoscope of physical activity each morning... thousands of people doing Tai Chi, shuttlecocks and hackysack and paddleball, singing and musicians and ballroom dancing, fan and sword and ribbon dancers, people walking their birdcages, many many more.

A few years ago I hurt my knee, started using a cane, and it taught me so much that I still use it on the street. The cane also brought me into the "skill arts" world, which includes juggling, hula hoops, rope work, and similar awareness/dexterity skills. One of the goals of this trip to Beijing was to learn more about the Tiantan culture of physical skills -- last trip I was blown away when I saw my first rope dart practitioner -- and I lucked out on the very first day of this trip.

I heard a cracking sound in the distance, and assumed it was construction work. But the rhythm was off, and then I wondered whether someone was setting off firecrackers. But the rhythm wasn't right here either. Peering through the trees I saw it, and as I drew closer I understood what I was seeing. Someone had a long wooden staff, about as tall as your eyebrows, and on the end was three feet of chain, and tied to this was maybe four feet of rope, and on the end of this was a smaller strip of leather. It was a staff-whip, like a bullwhip with gradually decreasing mass down the length of the instrument. The practitioner would get it moving in a certain direction and then reverse direction. As the change in acceleration migrated down the whip, the parts of lighter mass would increase speed to match. The result was that the leather cracker on the end would be travelling at supersonic speed, breaking the sound barrier with a loud crack.

And that wasn't all, these guys had a bundle of toys! Three-sectional cane (like a three-piece nunchaku, only longer), Nine-Section Whip (a chain of nine sections, about four foot long -- if you saw Jet Li in Fist of Legend, he used Jiu Jian Bian techniques with a leather belt against a katana sword at the climax), rope dart and meteor hammer (fifteen foot rope with a half-pound knife or metal ball on the end, used against armor -- Jackie Chan in Shanghai Noon used a rope and a horseshoe), monkeyballs (like two poi tied together, or a 4-6 foot rope with a light weight on each end), diabolos ("Chinese Top" or "Chinese Yo-Yo", controlled by a string tied between two rods)... each had their own bag full of cheap homemade tools.

They were very approachable too... within 15 minutes we were showing each other moves, which is extra remarkable considering how shy I usually am. I could tell some of them had longterm training from their leg movements, the casual and graceful way they manipulated the tools.

One had an odd momentum move with my cane... he balanced it off-center against the back of his thumb, crook high and foot low, then kept it in dynamic balance through a flowing Figure-Eight motion. It would be a very nice addition to the set of Nate Leipzig "Grips With a Cane" that I'm trying to rediscover, a magnetic effect.

Another move he tried to teach me is spinning a double-weighted rope as a staff... keeping the momentum in each weight balanced enough that the rope is always straight between them. He could do wrist rolls and high-tosses while spinning this way. I've seen it done in some of the "Chinese Acrobatics" videos you can buy in SF's Chinatown, but he gave me some tips on grip and timing that may help me to finally get it, once I put in enough practice.... ;-)

We spent about an hour, stretching, spinning, watching, laughing... I really appreciated their generosity, and hope they won't mind if I come back each day this week.

Elsewhere in the park I saw an instrument that was new to me, a whole group of people doing sword work with a long tassel on the end. The tassel was kept in motion similar to a poi. I know of the tradition with a Horsetail Whisk (used by guards who could not carry blades... a very soft horsehair instrument could neutralize an attack) but this seemed a little different... if the whisk was replaced with a flail you'd have an impact weapon for armor, and also a blade for close-in defense. They used both forward and reverse grips while manipulating the sword, wrapping the tassel around the body for directional changes. Very difficult to keep both the rigid sword and the soft tassel in graceful motion simultaneously.

The whole scene reminded me of a bluegrass festival or music camp, only moreso... over here you had a group of pipa players (double-horned flute with a gourd resonator), over there a half-dozen erhu players (two-string fiddle), sometimes playing the same tune... lots of people playing cards or Chinese Chess... and then all the physical activity too. I've never seen anything to match the Temple of Heaven on any morning of the week.

UPDATE - The above was written after my first day here. I was in Beijing five mornings, and managed to make it to Tiantan four of those days. Always hung out with the same group of folks, it was quite collegial.

On one of the weekends we were joined by two 20-somethings, a guy with very precise and powerful throws with a ten-foot rope dart, and a woman who worked with one and two leather bullwhips. She tried to learn the Meteor Hammers at one point, using a metal set, and conked herself in the head, before switching to a practice set with rope and weighted rubber balls.

Speaking of which, what is the name? I asked them, and she wrote it down for me... I don't have Chinese input on this machine yet, but the Pinyin was Shuang Liu Xing, or Double Wandering/Flow Star. We often translate this as "Meteor", but I think I like "Shooting Star" better. The Shuang signifies a doubly-weighted rope. After doing some searches that night I think one of my teachers, coincidentally named Mr. Liu, may have been captured onto YouTube doing some demonstrations... once I get beyond The Great Firewall I'll be able to see if it's him.

The same day two Israeli tourists stopped by. One of them had done some Poi work, and had never thought of using a single rope. She did some Butterfly and Behind-the-Head Butterfly that the others soon attempted. She was all butt and boobs and bellybutton and was the star of the show, but the Whip Lady smiled as she watched her too.

They all got a kick out of the set I had improvised, a few small silk bags, filled with small bars of hotel soap, tied shut around a hole-in-the-center coin at each end of a six-foot cord. It's lighter than even their practice sets, takes a little more trouble to handle cleanly.

Big thing I came away with from the week was that I have to work on my footwork more. Many of the Ba Gua Zhang videos I've watched have emphasized the palms (upper body) combining with the stances (lower body). These folks were dancing within the rope spheres they threw.

Later I wondered at the difference between their single-weight & long cord work ("rope dart") vs their double-weight and short cord work ("meteor")... in the first they focused on wraps and sudden releases, always working in a straight line, forward and back. With the double weights they did fewer wraps (reasonably enough) but also did a lot more horizontal orbits, with the weight shooting forth at a variety of angles. Maybe it's due to competition technique, where the dart's wraps and releases are complex enough that they strip away the extra melee-type swinging. The Japanese Kusarifundo techniques (aka manriki) use an even shorter double-weighted chain, and also seem to work at a variety of angles. Then again, I didn't see any of the "fast tying" (hayainawa? sp) techniques of Maasaki Hatsumi, where he would tangle an attacker up in a 10-15' unweighted rope and winch the limbs together. Each tradition seems to have its own emphases.

One morning I saw someone doing Ba Gua Zhang whirling circles with a pair of Deer Horn Knives... these are wicked curved blades, points and edges everywhere, scary. He also had a rope dart, but didn't use it while I was watching... wonder how he would have moved when combining circular techniques with rope.

Another oddity is the hula hoop. I saw these for sale on the streets of Beijing, but never saw anyone using them in the park. Later, in Xi'an, I saw teenage girls using them, in the straight around-the-waist techniques, probably for improved self-image. I didnt see any of the more advanced hooping popular in San Francisco, at least not yet.

There's a park in one of the oldest sections of town that seems dedicated to the Diabolo.  ("Diabolo" is the English name given to the Chinese Top family... one version is like a large Yo-Yo with the two halves turned around to make it concave in the middle... you play it with two thin sticks with a string tied to the ends.) This is in Xuanwu, south of the city wall, west of Qianmen. I had chosen it for the cabbie's convenience when finally escaping Beijing West Station. There are many friezes on the wall surrounding the park, showing someone in Qing dress doing Diabolo tricks. There's also a dedicated "Diabolo Area" in the park. That's all I know about it. Pretty cool, though.

Long entry. I'll put notes from other towns in a separate entry. But I was very happy to be able to partake of the whole riotous Tiantan scene for a few mornings, and to be accepted by a nice bunch of folks specializing in rope work.

Some tweets

I'm not really online this trip... the inability to connect to Twitter or to read on Typepad takes the zing out of things. But that mental challenge of describing experiences in a phrase or two hasn't gone away. Here are some things I would have tweeted, had I been able to. (And there's no pressure on me this way to hit exactly 140chars, a vacation in itself.)

One of my guilty pleasures in visiting China is listening to annoyed European tourists resort to English to kvetch and whinge.

Odd thing about learning Chinese is that Chinglish makes more sense... the stilted phrasing of a C-to-E translation seems much more natural when reverse-translated back to C.

These lightweight airline shoes have trudged through miles of dusty hutongs.

That building shaped like an Olympic Flame... each of the four sides has a flatscreen embedded, extending across four floors' worth of height. May be bigger than the display screens on barges in Shanghai.

I am an object of fascination for tourist photographers in San Francisco. But what's surprising is that people like to snap me elsewhere too, where the concept of "some old hippie" does not exist.

Chinese hotel rooms tend not to have clocks... reminder of death, I think. Workaround: find a TV channel with a clock in the graphics bar.

One of the problems with Twitter proxy sites is that they'll require your password to Twitter. Total cost is therefore indeterminate.

As usual, the longer I stay in a country whose language I'm studying, the worse my speech production becomes. It's exhaustion. After a week or so I'm a mute.

The cabbie, stopped at a light, yelled out to another cabbie two lanes over, "Hey, what's up, n****-man!?" They then continued in Beijing-style Mandarin.

China in a nutshell: outstanding visual design; non-existent information design. (The first is all about the speaker, the second is all about the listener.)

Maybe they drive that way because it makes the karaoke seem good in comparison.

It's true that the biggest currency in China is in a smile, in a moment of mutual recognition and respect for another human. It gives face. The payback is far, far greater than in San Francisco.

I see on Techmeme that westerners are protesting lapdances at a Hack Day in Taiwan. I guess those whities don't know about the tradition of funeral strippers.

Buying undies in Xidan

BEIJING Oct15: My luggage didn't make the flight to San Francisco. It will come out on tomorrow's plane, is what they told me. That meant I had to buy some clothes to take me through two days.

New experience -- last time I was in Beijing I didn't buy anything, the obligatory price-bargaining doesn't suit my nature, or my language skills. But, when the option is to wear the same socks three days running, then I guess I've gotta learn!

I took a cab to Xidan, the shopping area on the west side of Forbidden City, mirror-image to Wangfujing on the east. First stop was a department store, overstaffed, many different stalls, but each focusing on bigger-ticket items.

Prices on tags were outta this world... when I could find socks, they'd be at the Adidas or Nike or other name-brand stall, priced like 70RMB (about US$10). Same for underwear, a single pair of "Lee's" brand jockey shorts was over 100RMB. I wasn't sure whether this was just a starting point for haggling to bring it to a reasonable level, but later realized it was the namebrand aspect of the thing... the department store couldn't *afford* to sell generics anymore.

After the better part of an hour of this, I ate lunch to collect my wits, then went to the back-alley street stalls. Got a longsleeve T-shirt, some boxers, and 3-pack of cotton athletic crew socks for about $12US... probably could have bargained it lower, but that's still a reasonable price to me.

Big lesson I learned here... the department stores sell on image. They can no longer sell goods, so much as sell people a new perception of themselves. We've got a similar thing in the US, but not to the same degree, I think.

(Picked up a pipe, too, at one of the state-run stores... a little semi-bent Prince shape, brown rusticated finish. The stem seems to be vulcanite, already with a little greenish discoloration. Broke in pretty quickly, after a charring first smoke. Not sure if it's briar, but I doubt it... still seems to hold up. A packet of Orlik's Golden Slices was probably imported for some Danish tourist, worked well for me. About US$30 for pipe, tobacco, cleaners and lighter. I've seen three or four guys smoking pipes this trip, a few on work-tricycles. With the cane and facial hair, I think I'm workin' a good Sun Yat Sen vibe with the populace.... ;-)

Flying in

BEIJING, Oct14: Qianmen sure has changed a lot. Not that I would know yet, of course.... ;-)

I woke up early Tuesday, crossed the last of the items of my worklist, and was waiting for the shuttle at 11:30. It came over an hour later. Fortunately the plane was delayed for two hours... that made it a 14-hour trip. Got to Beijing, but my luggage is somewhere else. Made it into the city, into the hotel, got a quick shower and a beer, and will crash very soon. All I know is that if I wake up and it's dark, I go back to sleep... if it's light, I'm hitting the hotel's breakfast buffer, then walking to Tiantan to see the skill arts. If my stuff isn't here by the time I come back for a nap, _then_ I'll worry.

Saw other travelers with a lot of drama, swearing, annoyance. I find such people annoying. ;-)

Had three people walk into my cane so far. I wasn't quick enough to pull it away. Also saw many people pushing onto the subway while others were trying to get out, despite pavement markers to the contrary.

I'm staying at the Qianmen Jianguo Hotel, a Soviet-style building which now handles tourists. I stayed here on my first trip in 2004, and like it 'cause of the neighborhood... right smack in the middle of the rich mercantile/cultural area south of the Imperial City. This area was closed off for pre-Olympics renovation when I was here in 2007. In 2004 Qianmen Ave was full of funky family-style shopping, but had the air of a doomed supermarket. Now the same street is renovated into a Chinese-flavored Disneyland of major-label stores. But I hear the sidestreets were preserved and still have real flavor.

My charger for this computer is in the luggage. Guess I'd better shut off now. ;-)

PRC09, why?

I'm about to take off for six days in Beijing, three in Xi'an, five in Chongqing, and a trip down the Yangtze to Nanjing, then wending down through the delta for a Shanghai flight back. Four capitals of China.

I've been to Beijing twice, and Xi'an for two days. There's a lot to look forward to....

Beijing: Yogurt and fresh bread from the breakfast street stalls. Seeing how Qianmen fared after the reconstruction. Exploring the traditional southwest of the city. Trying to get to Tiantan every morning to look for people manipulating sticks, ropes, and balls. The culinary oddities at the food street off Wangfujing. The new Olympics buildings. Maybe the gardens at the rear of the Forbidden City, which were under reconstruction in 2007.

Xi'an: Taking the overnight train from Beijing, mountains rising on the right. The Muslim Quarter. Buying the local clay ocarina I neglected when here in 2005. Hand-pulled noodles. Tang relics. Maybe a bike ride above the old City Wall. Maybe the Provincial Museum, which I couldn't hit last time. Was capital during the Tang dynasty.

Chongqing: Where Beijing and Xi'an are rectilinear, Chongqing is a whirling mass of curving streets, stairways, rivers and hills -- famous as a city where anyone becomes lost -- what a challenge. I'm also interested in the character of the people of Chongqing... said to be very direct, warm, responsive. It's the home of Bang-Bang Noodles and hotpot, and gives its name to Chongqing Chicken. I want to know how the Bang-Bang men handle their sticks when they're not carrying loads tied at each end... canes seem like they'd be used on the misty hills too. Was capital during the occupation in World War II.

Three Gorges: It's a cruise ship, so I'm a little apprehensive... hope I can find a quiet corner with a pipe and a book. I've got Eric Danielson's obsessive books, and the Odyssey literature on the river. I'd rather build a rapport with the people working on the boat, than with the tourists.

Nanjing: A river town, invaded and rebuilt many times, a cultural center. Remnants of city walls, Confucius Temple, tree-filled streets. Not sure of my agenda yet. Capital during Ming and other eras.

Suzhou: Think I may be able to get a night here on the way to Shanghai. I've been to Hangzhou, but not to any of the other Water Towns. The last few days still have some flexibility.


The automobile traffic in China scares me. But I tell myself they haven't had time to discover the practicalities of polite predictability... just a generation has had cars, and those new owners often have Little Emperor syndrome too. I see them as being on the path to improving their scary driving... different from San Francisco, where driver quality has deeply degraded the past two decades.

Twitter, Typepad and possibly Flickr have been blocked leading up to the National Week celebrations. I hope they open up soon. Not sure what type of online presence I'll have the next few weeks.

One thing I'm also looking forward to... it's easier to get a smile returned on the streets of Beijing than in San Francisco. ;-)

Progress report, 101209

Long time since an update. Steady studying during this period, though.

Since autumn I've been book-studying in New Practical Chinese Reader for 3-4 days each week... significant progress. First few months were in reviewing NPCR 3, which I had sorta organically absorbed rather than systematically assimilated. Since then I've been taking chapters in order from NPCR 4... first few chapters took 3-4 weeks each, but now that my study procedure is better I can do a chapter every two weeks.

I've also been using McGraw-Hill's "Streetwise Mandarin" the last two months. It's more conversational than NPCR, focusing more on colloquial and idiomatic speech. The book is smaller than NPCR, and I don't need to carry dictionaries, so it's easy to use on the 2-3 other days of study each week. It's also fun to mix the two audio courses together... get about a dozen hours a week while walking.

I'm at an odd stage, much listening and reading, but little speaking and writing. I doublethink myself a lot while speaking... I used to stutter when I just entered gradeschool, and it feels like it may be a similar symptom... brain goes too fast, tongue isn't relaxed.

Also been wondering about how I can "understand" something without language. If I'm watching a TV show I fall behind when trying to mentally translate to English, but if I just listen I can get a better sense of the conversation... I think. ;-)  Instead of going Chinese-to-English I think I'm starting to go direct to Chinese-to-understanding. But to check that theory I have to translate the whole thing to English, and that's where I fall behind again. Whatever, I'm consciously attempting to do less mental translation now. The test, I guess, will be how well I do in simple daily conversation the next few weeks.

The cane has been great... sort of like learning to play a musical instrument. It's very comfortable to walk three-footed, and it's great to always have a tool handy to stretch out the shoulders and back. It's an extension tool for the hand, too, once the habits and grip-changes are learned to keep it graceful and out-of-the-way. My upper body and posture are better than ever before.

I've been working a raw Red Oak cane and another in White Ash... rasping and filing an ergonomic handle, chiseling finger and thumb grooves, sanding and oiling over and over again. Wherever a bone in the hand meets a convexity, it becomes a concavity... take away each little point of pressure. Other people do make good canes, but I really like forming one to my own needs. In a year or two, once they gain lots of character, I'll seal them up with Tung Oil, harden and waterproof them.

For rope play I've been converging on a jo-length rope, high as the armpit, with a small weight on each end. I started with two 3' poi, and a "rope dart" of twelve feet with a heavy knot on one end, and merged the skills in a nine-foot jumprope-sized double-weighted rope. But the shorter jo-length rope is handier to manipulate, wrap around the body... and easier to use in an apartment. ;-)  I made one set with some small silken bags from SF Chinatown with a few ounces of sand, and have a travel set that packs up next-to-nothing and which can be weighted with a few coins or some soil or salt on arrival. The two-handed poi weaves require more care with the shorter length, but this ends up making cane twirls more graceful, as I better learn the natural momentum of objects.

Working steadily, working hard... some days I go back and look at some of the materials I used a year or two before, and that's when I can see the progress being made.