Getting home was trickier than I thought it would be, but thanks to my awesome operator and travel manager Adam I made it home in one piece, or at least back to O’Hare, and I assume I can make it the rest of the way.

Because I flew as a “companion” of Adam’s it meant that my flights were super cheap compared to for realz international tickets. The downside was that I had to fly standby. When I went to Beijing, I took a bus to Chicago then flew direct from there. Because I flew out at the beginning of Easter weekend, very few Americans were headed abroad and so I was upgraded to a mostly empty business class. However, I would not again be met with such luck.

I spent the last week in Hong Kong hanging out with Frankie and her family and bumming around CUHK. There is a direct flight from HK to Chicago, and it looked to usually have open seats. On Sunday I headed to the airport and registered for the flight.

Ok bag just came out on the luggage claim in Chicago; I’m going to go grab it.

Alright, now I’m sitting on the CTA headed back in to Chicago. I suppose I could just write this as though it was all written in one cohesive narrative, but since I think I write these more for myself than for readers (sorry 3 people who read this), I like to include details for my own enjoyment later.

I just overheard a foreign language and looked up to see two Asian girls on the train with me. One is holding a guidebook that looks like it’s in Korean. My usual jealousy of tourists is a bit tempered by my desire to get home, but still it’s hard not to envy somebody whose journey is just beginning as mine draws to a close. Alright, back to the HK narrative.

I was listed for the flight on Sunday, and had even gotten a celebratory text from Adam indicating his confidence in my making the flight as the check-in agent came over to tell me I had not made the flight due to weight restrictions. I talked to Adam, and evidently for whatever reason most flights out of HK go off with 5 empty seats, but are at the weight limit, so what looked like pretty easy flights to get on were actually packed to the max. The next week from HK didn’t look good, and I knew I had to make it home by Friday for my friend’s wedding.

Fortunately Frankie stayed with me the whole time, so when my plans changed we just turned around and grabbed a bus to go meet her parents. While I rode, Adam investigated flights from Shanghai, Beijing, and Tokyo, and thought that Shanghai looked best. However, the window was small. Monday from Shanghai I would have a decent chance, but for the rest of the week it looked very tight.

Once I met up with Frankie’s parents, her dad helped me to buy a ticket from Hong Kong back to Shanghai. Fortunately I have a multi-entry Chinese visa that doesn’t expire for another week, so I would be able to land in Shanghai, go out through immigration, clear customs, collect my bag, change terminals, check back in, go back through exit immigration and customs, and then hopefully make my flight. I started to relax once we found a relatively cheap ticket for me to Shanghai early the next morning.

We spent the rest of the day hanging out at the mall where I bought a Samsung phone that runs Android. I haven’t played with it yet using my ATT SIM (though I verified that it works), but even over WiFi it was pretty damn cool. It’s a lower end Android phone so it doesn’t have huge performance benefits over my iPhone, but Google Voice integration is sweet. I’m looking forward to skipping the awkwardness when people ask me to give them my number by calling them, and I have to explain that the caller ID my phone shows is inconsistent with the number I want them to call.

For dinner we had pizza hut which was actually really awesome. The variety that Frankie ordered had thousand island dressing for sauce, which sounded kind of crazy but turned out to be super tasty. We got some huge crazy meal that came with chicken wings, pork chops, and garlic bread. As we chowed down I became reacquainted with a facet of American eating that I had started to forget: as we ate I got progressively more and more tired, but it was delicious! After dinner we hung out, watched Extract and Arrested Development, then went to bed.

Early Monday morning (it’s still Monday but this is going to be like a 35 hour long Monday for me), Frankie’s dad drove me to the airport. I actually had a seat for realz on this flight, so things were a little bit more straightforward as I checked in and boarded.

I landed in Shanghai and tried to quickly make my way out of the airport to get my bag so that I could come back in and check in for the flight back to the US. The airport was a ghost town, so customs and immigration lines were really short. However, I hit a snag when going through immigration. The officer gave me a quizzical look when she read my departure card and saw that for “destination” I had scrawled, “PVG airport to get bags and change airline.” I explained what was going on but she wanted to see a ticket or e-ticket receipt to back up my story. I didn’t have one since I was going to check in as a standby at the gate. After arguing for a while, she finally let me pass. I scurried out, got my baggage, and cleared entry customs which seemed kind of silly and unnecessary since I was only going to be in the country for 2 hours, but I understand that that’s how the system works.

Once I was free in the airport, time was running out and I couldn’t find the United check-in counter. I then realized that Shanghai Pudong (PVG) has two terminals, and presumably United was in the other.

This time, after a harrowing wait at the check-in counter along with all the other non-revenue standby passengers, I was assigned a seat. It was not business class, and was in fact a middle seat, but I was on board for a flight to San Francisco, and then hopefully on to Chicago.

Once I made it to my seat I discovered that I was in “economy plus” which on United means extra leg room (very comfy). Moreover, the guy who had the window seat in my row had been upgraded to business, so I moved up the arm rest, slid over, and stretched out. The flight went really well. I took an ambien at the beginning and spent some time half-sleeping half-tripping for the majority of the flight. As we neared San Francisco I sobered up and ended up watching the better part of The Blind Side and really enjoyed it. Unfortunately we started a descent right at the climax, so I’m not really sure how things turn out. I think I also watched an episode of House and some movie-esque thing called The Philanthropist that featured the actor from Rome who played Marc Antony, but those were on during my ambien trip so who knows.

In San Francisco, I deplaned, cleared customs, and made my way to the gate for a flight from SFO to Chicago that I would hopefully make. Anybody who followed my twitter or facebook feeds knows that it was a really close call for me to get on that flight. Initially there were like 60 open seats and I was number 5 on the standby list. It looked like it was going to be a piece of cake. Then, suddenly, there were 20 open seats and I was in slot number 23. Things looked grim as the line advanced. Finally, with only 6 open seats left, I somehow jumped forward as there were a couple of no-shows into the #6 slot and just barely cleared. Once again I had economy plus seating, so it was a pretty comfy flight.

From O’Hare, I took a CTA line back into the city, wrote most of this post, and then spent the evening with Adam and Mary Kate. The next morning had another close call as I was almost late for my bus, but yet again dumb, undeserved luck won out and I made it.

Heart,
Dan

And then you’ll see the full content down here. Yay!

Honestly, this train ride felt much shorter than my flight. To be fair, the flight to Beijing was like 2 hours longer, but the train ride felt like half the trip. Maybe the advantage is in leaving when you’re about to naturally sleep anyway.

Right now I have a queue of like 5 new blog posts sitting on my iPhone that I want to get launched, so hopefully Connie’s place will have wifi.

I bought a deluxo-seat on an ultra-modern train. These trains would be the envy of Eurorail and put Amtrak to utter shame. I guess I actually got a bed rather than a seat. The D class trains that run between Beijing and Shanghai are the pride of the fleet and boast truly flat bed experiences for those willing to shell out upwards of 600 RMB (~ $90). For those on a budget there seem to be decent regular seats more in the 300 RMB range.

It was a pretty exciting and hurried trip to the train station. Zhi hui, my new buddy from the coffee shop at Jingshan park, recommeded that I take a bus or taxi to the nearest subway station. Once I got my bearings, I opted to walk to Tiananmen West instead, failing to take into account how far North-South the Forbidden City runs.

However, as I began to make my way, I wanted to check I was headed in the right direction before striking out. I approached a policeman and got to use, verbatim, one of the example sentences from my Pimsleur learning Chinese CD’s. “Dui bu qi,” I began to the police officer, pointing to what I hoped was south, “qin wen, chang ang jie shi tsai nar ma?” (my pinyin is imperfect for this phrase since I’ve never seen, it only heard it). I beamed as he gestured in the same direction and responded, “due (~rhymes with ‘say’) due due due.” Ecstatic, I bounded off south.

Everytime my energy dissipated due to the length of the hike, I was reminded of the humor of using the exact sample sentence I had learned when listening to the chapter about location and streets.

Line 1, the subway that serves Tiananmen, was utterly packed. I got on and just barely squished far enough on board that the doors could close. Fortunately I was only onboard for 1 stop and transferred at Xidan to the much roomier line 4.

From there it was on to Renmin University station to meet Xiaobei for dinner. I was nervously eying our progress north to try to calculate a rough average time per stop so that I knew how early I needed to leave for the train station. Beijing South Railway station is also on line 4 (the same line that serves Beida’s East Gate and my hotel), however it is practically on the opposite end of the line from Beida. I would need to have dinner, finish gong North, grabs my bags, then turn around and make my way South across the city, figure out the layout of the train station, then find and board my train, all in about 2 hours, but as you’ve probably guessed by now, it all went pretty well.

Xiaobei and I had barbecue/shishkabobs for our last Beijing dinner together and boy was it tasty. I wish I had had more time to savor the flavor. We started with spicy rice, yum, then moved on to roasted chicken tendons or ligaments or something like that. They actually kind of looked like pineapple. They were a bit chewy but ok. Next was barbecued sheep livers. Though the texture was a bit novel to me, they were pretty flavorful. After that came chicken wings so big they needed two skewers to be properly supported. These were
extraordinarily greasy and messy, and as you’d guess, very tasty. Best of all was sone assorted goat and sheep meat that looked like it’s been roasted on a spit. Ohmygosh it was so tasty! Unfortunately we had to blitz thru dinner, and although I took it to go, it would ultimately end up in a trash can on the metro after escaping confinement in styrofoam boxes and poking its way out of the bag and onto my jeans.

The train station was a bit confusing. A big sign told me my train would be departing from gate 12, but damned if I could figure out where that was. The only waiting area I saw any signs for was 2F, the one by the escalators. Eventually it dawned on me that 2F meant second floor, so all the departures took off from the upper level. I headed up, got through security, found my gate, bought some last minute provisions, then pushed and shoved my way through the line to get to the platform.

Once on board, a gorgeous train employee pointed me towards the sleeping car section. Service personnel in China seem like a throwback to 50s/60s USA when flight attendants were glamorous, smartly dressed, and just a bit sexy.

I found my way into a cabin where the top bunk was open and haltingly introduced myself. Each cabin has 4 beds: 2 are just off the ground and make nice sofas and 2 are much higher. I saved some money and prevented anybody but me from sitting on my bed by buying a top bunk. Nobody spoke English fluidly, bit we were able to kind of communicate. Shortly after that somebody came in, pointed at my bunk, and yelled at me. It was then I realized that we had assigned beds, and I had not chosen correctly. Fortunately my new friends directed me to my real cabin.

My proper cabin had an older man and woman and what looked like a businessman. They were friendly though we weren’t very good at communicating.

At that point we started to go a little off script, and things got a lot more interesting.

I asked her where she was from and she told me Hubei (or maybe Wubei or something like that). She asked me if I knew any Chinese and we got to talking. The conversation got more and more interesting. I always forget what an awesome trump card discussion about my work is. I’m so lucky to be in a line of research that is actually excellent cocktail party (or tea ceremony) conversation.

She had studied English at a teacher’s university and had been a primary school teacher for several years, and was about the same age as me. We started in on how Chinese kids learn to read using pinyin for phonics versus whole language approaches.

She expressed an interest in learning Spanish, so we started talking about differences between English, Spanish, and Chinese. I taught her how to say a few things in Spanish.

We exchanged contact info after talking for maybe an hour when another group of people came in and needed the table we were using and she had to go back to work.

This was definitely the high point of the day. For me, there’s nothing as fulfilling and satisfying as making meaningful, new connections with people in places where I don’t expect it, especially when those people are pretty girls

Sometimes there’s some tension between those connections existing only for business purposes and people really meaningfully connecting. I love it when we can get beyond our economic relationships and engage on a deeper, more meaningful human level. Everybody has a story to tell, and I love connecting them.

I have to imagine that if my Mandarin were better I’d be able to do that sort of thing more often.

I think my desire to make these kinds of connections is what makes me so often a sucker, and nothing eats at me more than bad feelings after such interactions where people connect just for the purpose of selling me something. I suppose there’s really nothing morally wrong with that, but somehow that just feels so perverse and wrong that I always feel a little violated for a little while afterwards. That’s kind of how I was feeling after I bought my tiger painting, but this interaction has totally cleansed my bad feelings from that one and restored my optimism in the joy of travel that’s filled with many interesting connections.

The group that displaced me is pretty interesting, too. It’s a group of six comprised of two Illinoians, one Taiwanese but now American, one still Taiwanese, and two Japanese. They’re pretty outgoing and seem to be having fun with it. They’re guarded and entertaining but they’re not condescending to the hostess or to the process. I think they offer a good example of a nice multi-cultural way to travel that I’ll have to keep in mind the next time I’m planning a trip with friends.

I’m hanging out kind of to the side right now not sure what to do now. I haven’t paid for my tea ceremony yet, and I don’t want to short this girl who is admittedly in Beijing to find a better life. That said, I’m not sure if she’s trying to let me go without paying…I figure it’s safer to hang out until she can give me a clearer indication. I can’t meet Xiaobei until 6 anyways, so I figure blogging is a good way to spend the time, and also to appear busy so that I’m not just in the corner weirdly watching everybody else.

I was wandering around by myself on some side street when a guy outside a store started talking to me. He was real friendly and was giving travel recommendations, then came the catch as I was walked into his store to look at his art.

I got a neat lesson in Chinese art and caligraphy and learned some alternative Chinese forms of “Daniel.” Ultimately I did buy this big painting of a tiger at I’m sure not a good price, but I really liked it and was pretty happpy with it. Plus, it was on his advice that I came up here, to the top of Jingshan park. It’s this park just north of the Forbidden City. I guess it’s more of a hillside garden. It’s pretty breathtaking, and the panoramic views of Beijing and the Forbidden City are about as cool as advertised, so I guess all in all it wasn’t such a raw deal.

Independence so far is going ok, but it’s a little lonely, especially when I can’t even eavesdrop on other conversations. I need more confidence before I try eating alone; I never know what to order and when I try, everything that looked good tastes awful and vice versa. I think I’ll be meeting friends soon, so maybe I’ll just hold out in the hopes that my lost dinner in Beijing will be a good one with friends.

This is my first time being on my own in China, and I kind of like it. This whole trip I’ve been so reliant on Mandarin-speakers. I’m enormously grateful to them; they make this kind of travel possible, but at the same time it can make me a bit dependent and lose some agency. I’m accustomed to being a very independent traveler. I scout around for cheap hotels, navigate subways and public transit rather than shell out cash for taxis, and like to kind of scrap my way along.

That was the plan last time I was in China, and it was going well until I got massively sick and needed to rely on help. I think that’s forged this notion that in China I need to be taken care of. I got a touch of that independence back at the end of my last trip when I made my way back solo from Hangzhou to the Pudong airport, but still…

Hopefully today will be a shining beacon of my independence. Especially if I want my Mandarin to improve from the ~50 word vocabulary I have now, I need to start using it, and with a variety of speakers. I need to get more serious about my language learning back in the US though if I want to have a fighting chance. I could hardly fluff my way through Spain and I had studied that language for four years. I’m not sure how I expect to be able to totally half-ass my Mandarin and then get by.

I’m thinking today I’m going to hit up Tienneman and just kind of wander around. I just want to see the big photo of Mao, if nothing else. The forbidden city would be cool too, but I hear that’s a more time-intensive visit, and I don’t have much of that to spare. I’ve heard the “Temple of Heaven” is pretty neat, and I have a loose idea of where that is. I think Xiaobei will join me again tonight, and maybe we can go there together.

I’m really enjoying making connections with the Chinese students. Sure, it’s always fun to make friends, but some of them are really excitingly bright and I’m eager to see what kind of work they do when they enter academia as faculty. I hope I’m forging the kind of friendships now that I can leverage for fun and interesting
collaborations in the future, if this is the field I end up working in.

Well, it’s almost time to transfer trains so I should probably sign off soon. The subways here are really nice, some even cooler than the ones I saw in Beijing. I guess that when a country develops so rapidly, all the infrastructure is new and state of the art.

PANDA HAT!

People who know me well know that I have no special love for pandas. Their Chinese name, though admittedly cute, is stupid, too. Bear cat? Come on. They’re lazy, dirty, kind of mean, and yet they’re totally idolized. In all honesty I don’t have any thing against pandas, but I feel like I need to do my part to balance out all of their undeserved love. So imagine the great opportunity for irony when I saw people walking around wearing these adorable Panda heads! Ultimately I think the hat looked better on my friend Xiaobei, but I won’t post the picture of her wearing the hat so that I can continue looking cute in mine.

I’m just wrapping up work in Beijing now. Tomorrow will be my last chance to do tourist stuff in Beijing so I’m planning on visiting the Temple of Heaven, Tienanmen Square, and maybe the Forbidden City. I think its name in Chinese is much less exciting because whenever I say it in English nobody knows what I’m talking about until I point at a map, and they dismissively say something in Chinese.

Tomorrow night I’ll catch a sleeper train bound for Shanghai where I’ll hang out with Connie (and do laundry, woo!) for a couple days, then catch a train out to Suzhou. There I’ll meet Izzie, a friend of my friend Jing who will show me around Suzhou. I’ll stay there for a couple days then visit Hangzhou for a weekend. Hopefully this time around in Hangzhou I won’t be sick and my friends there won’t have to take care of me. After that it’s back to Shanghai for a day or two before I fly to Hong Kong where I’ll bum around my friend Frankie’s apartment, visit Kowloon and HK, and maybe poke around the Chinese University of Hong Kong and even sit in on a lab meeting or two. After that it’s back to Chicago for a mini-vacation with my awesome fantastic buddies Adam and Mary Kate, and then just a short ride on the Megabus back to Ann Arbor. I think I counted it up, and I’ll sleep in a total of 6 different beds on this trip before I make it back to my own. So far I’ve only been in one hotel, so it’s time for my vacation to heat up.

Because I’ll be away from the lab for 2 whole weeks (woah!) I’m going to try to assuage my work-guilt by continuing to, uhm, work remotely. Honestly I think travel is a good chance to get some good projects done on days when I don’t feel like going out. That way I can work where there’s nobody to bother me, and also not feel like a total bum when I feel lazy and don’t want to take advantage of all the awesome adventures that are waiting just beyond my hotel doorstep.

In my rambling narration to a crummy video I took on my way home tonight, I mentioned that being in China, at least where I am, kind of feels like staying at camp. The bathrooms are kind of crummy and gross, the food ranges from awesome to bizarre, not everybody is nice to you, and the paths leading around are often uneven and littered with random stuff, but despite all of the wacky environment, everybody bonds, you collect all sorts of cool and cheap tchotchkes wherever you go, take tons of pictures, and promise everyone you’ll write, but usually don’t.

I had this clever plan to start a “days without sickness in China” calendar/counter on the side of my blog, but unfortunately it would be reset at 0 at the moment. Although I’m 99% sure this is not the kind of trip-ending serious illness I had last time and is instead just a lame-o cold, I was pretty freaked out at first when I felt myself getting a sore throat a couple days ago. I spent virtually all of yesterday in my hotel room, reading Malcolm Gladwell (on Blink right now), watching the Cleveland Show on Hulu, or eating KFC that Jie graciously brought me. I only went out for about an hour for lunch, and when I got back what was supposed to be a nap quickly turned into bedtime. I’m glad that was the case though, because I quickly finished the sore throat phase of my head cold and have moved on to waning congestion. My appetite has also resurged which usually means I’m getting healthier.

Well, I should probably sign off and get some sleep to try to finish my recovery. I’m starting to sneeze rapidly, so that’s probably my cue to take some nyquil, which I happily brought in great quantities with me this time.

I was thinking this post would be a cohesive retelling of my trip to the Great Wall, and I may get to that yet, but so far things are coming out in the order that I think of them rather than in any more meaningful chronological sequence.

After settling in to my hotel at Peking University, I started hanging out with Twila, my advisor, and her daughter. We spent Saturday walking around the Beida (PKU) campus and a lot of time around Weiminghu, which means "Not Yet Named Lake." It’s a very pretty, although now a bit dirty, lake that takes up a big footprint on the north side of the Beida campus.

Most things in Beijing seem to be organized fairly rectangularly, whether it’s the city itself, the series of "ring" road expressways that encircle and circumnavigate it, or the individual structures, and Beida is no exception. You’d think this would make navigation easy, but walking around Beida feels a bit like being at Cedar Point, only without the rides and very limited signage in English. On my first day of work I had to walk from West Gate to East Gate, a trip that should have taken about 10 minutes. It instead took me almost an hour. I had set out without any particular plan, thinking only that I could walk in a mostly Eastward way, but had to quickly abandon that plan when the road veered and I lost my orientation. When I reached one corner of the interior wall without knowing which corner I was in, I was ready to give up until I realized that I had stupidly ignored the sun, brightly settling into the western sky. Reoriented but too proud to do an about face and march back around the dried pond where I was and past the people sitting on parkbenches who would doubtlessly have made note of me, I marched onward and westward, making a thorough tour-de-dried pond before making it back onto a road that had some sort of east-ish feeling to it.

I’m having a really fantastic time here. It’s reassuring to know that when I’m healthy, I actually enjoy traveling. Although I had a good time in China last year, I never really felt like myself the entire time, and it’s reassuring now that I feel at least somewhat normal.