All Over China

Here is George in his new $7  Chinese cowboy hat....happy again to find what the Chinese consider: "The American Embassies!"

Mar 27th-Xiamen, China

Traditional GuLangYu Puppets

Xiamen is a seaport south of Shanghai and by China's standards a small city....1.5 million people. It was named an "economic enterprise zone" by the Chinese government in the late 1990's and it has attracted international growth and development. Did you know that over half the world's building cranes are operating in China presently...their presence is obvious in Xiamen (pronounced "chai-men" or by some "sal-mon"...this dual acceptance of pronounciation adds to the confusion, sometimes I think, purposively, for foreigners!) In any case, Xiamen is a growing city of high-rise condominiums. It has a charming little beach island by five minute ferry in its harbor named: GuLangYu or "Piano Island" for its famed music school. We were fortunate enough to have an island tour and be presented with a traditional musical puppet show, then a western classical piano and cello concert...The smiles were more evident here among the local population....kind of like being at the Jersey shore!!!


Traditional wedding couple



Other Hong Kong Pix

A hearty Dim Sum breakfast followed by harborside Tai Chi

Trying my hand at rice cake roll at a local teahouse...not so easy!

Mar 28th-30th- Hong Kong

  There is something familiar about this colorful and bustling metropolis. Maybe it's the residue of its colonial heritage from Merry Old, but it has taken it to a whole new level. Hong Kong or "Fragrant Harbor" as its name translates, found its roots in early trade with India and western Asia areas in spices and aromatic woods, and thus its name. It is comprised of an island, Hong Kong proper, as well as neighboring mainland Kowloon and a chunk of new territories to its northwest. The English took posession after the Opium Wars in the mid 1800's, and except for the brief bombing and posession by the Japanese during WWII, Britain retained control until 1997. The national holiday that was Queen Victoria's Birthday is now celebrated as the birthday of "The Budda!"China has acepted Hong Kong's return while allowing it continued special business enterprise status. Fellow travelers who have done business here or visited over the last 15 years say that, like Shanghai, the growth and modern development is nothing short of amazing. What I found fascinating is the incorporation of the traditional Taoist and Buddist veneration at century old temples puffing with hopeful insence prayers and offerings, plunked amid soaring skyscrapers. The traditonal life goes on in the live markets too, where eels battle for space in small aquariun tanks before being snagged and bagged for supper. All this and Luis Vitton and Chanel and Guicci around the corner...a new 280 mile an hour train will cut the commute to Shanghai from 28 hours to 10 by 2015. An interesting fact is that instead of learning English as a second language, Mandarin is being taught here to the native born Cantonese....I think we had better start taking Rosetta Stone courses subito!



Arriving in Hong Kong harbor during laser show



Rickshaws Anyone???



Shanghai at Night



Views from 88th Floor of USA building nicknamed "The Drill"



Those of you who know me well must wonder how I managed to get up to the 88th Floor...this elevator took 15 seconds!!! Seemed shorter going down.

March 23rd-25th Shanghai

   Shanghai has the most recent history of China's large cities. It has always had the earliest exposure to foreign influence because of it's deep water harbor on the great Yangtse River. There are still distinctive parts of Shanghai, the romantic gardened French Quarter, the stately English buildings around the riverside "Bund" and the shorter Japanese trading houses. The Yangtse runs from Western China near Tibet toward the East China Sea at Shanghai. The Chinese consider it a great dragon with it's tail in Tibet and it's head in Shanghai. When the first tunnel across the Yangtse was finished in 1992, commuting to The Pudang area opened up, and the Chinese government extended the international offer for foreign enterprises to establish businesses and build their most forward thinking architectural buildings. The result is nothing short of a "Future City."

The Old Town is still enticing. The Yuan, with its floating Tea house and funky little dumpling shops. The walkways to the teahouse were purposively made in right angles so that people would take their time walking and stop to consider the various perspectives and beauty at every turn. Makes you want to stop and smell the roses doesn't it?

March 22nd- X'ian

   Aside from being the original capital of China and site of the 6,000 year old Banpo Village,  X'ian boasts the most unexpectedly important archeological find in recent history. In 1974 a rural farmer, digging a surface well, unearthed a piece of pottery which led to the discovery of thousands of terracotta figures, soldiers, generals, archers, and chariots that were crafted to stand by to guard the tomb of the Emperor in 221 B.C. This was a truly remarkable find and the work so pains-taking and patient and the magnitude of the project  so labor intense, it makes one wonder of the society that would support this amount of human sacrifice for one man's worry of the afterlife....but the figures speak for themselves..........

Mar 21st-The Great Wall

This was a crazy good day....as soon as we drove the hour and a half to the north west, the sky was blue and the air pristine....and the Great Wall at Mutianyu was just awesome. Before attempting our climb, we were treated to a hearty bowl of delicious Lamb Curry in a bed of sticky rice....adorned with julienned slivers of carrots and lemon grass and sprigs of the freshest coriander in (of all places) a restaurant called "The School House."The owners were a designer/builder from the States whose work has appeared in Architectural Digest, and his native born Chinese wife. They get back to New York every summer to catch some plays on Broadway. It's a small world afterall! The segment of the Wall we climbed overlooked parts of Mongolia and this day it was tourist-free.

Interestingly enough, the wall wasn't built as one...initially 7 walled and warring City-States each built their own protective walls. It wasn't until much later that the first emperor united these states that the continuation of the Great Wall happened over many more years as a protective barrier against the Mongols. The irony of this all is that as I huffed and puffed my way up the last 32 nearly vertical steps in our segment who was awaiting my arrival but two broken-english speaking Mongolian Chinese peasants selling Diet Coke and candy bars!!! The Wall has been a wonderful source of tourist revenue out in these beautiful "sticks!"

My Favorite China Pix

                                   Man practicing Chinese Letters with water in Forbidden City Courtyard

                                                         Entering The Forbidden City(above)  Temple of Heaven (below)

                                       Incense cauldron in the inner courtyard of the Forbidden City

Mar 20th-Beijing, China

   I've missed getting to our blog sooner...China doesn't make internet access easy, but at the same time I'm glad we had some days to digest all the experiences of our "off-ship" 4-day adventures. George & I both agree that we felt overwhelmingly awed. It is said if you want ancient Chinese history, go to X'ian (pronounced she-an, home of the Terracotta Warriors 221 BC), if you want recent Chinese history go to Beijing (1368 AD-present), and if you want China's future go to Shanghai.
   Lily, our guide in Beijing, was an upbeat, knowledgeable 27-year old. She commutes an hour and a half to get back home to her parents house because she makes an average salary of about 1,000 Yuan a month ($700US). A 2 bedroom apartment anywhere in the city is beyond thinkable(1-2 million Yuan for starters) and they are building these 40 story apartment buildings every 800 yards, so I guess increase in investment won't come any time soon. Lily actually got George's humor (which isn't easy to do even if you're a native speaker). We sensed her immediate pride in how far China has come from the days of the emperors, and the tremendous progress that has been made toward freedom of thought that is tolerated, even from the days of Mao and forward.

    The Forbidden City took hours to cover...Tianemin Square is even bigger than you can imagine from the views we have in TV clips. The significance of shapes and numbers figure highly in Chinese architecture. There are auspicious numbers "9" in particular,which is associated with the emperor and other numbers that are entirely skipped like "4" because they signify death...we therefore didn't give a second thought when our Beijing hotel room was number...I'm not kidding....1313! Emperor Zhou Di (pronounced Judy) third Ming dynasty emperor, was responsible for the building of the Forbidden City and his tomb outside the city is a national shrine.  We visited the Emperor's Tea House in the Imperial Garden of the Forbidden City for a tea ceremony which was very welcome as we were freezing...none of these public buildings are heated and the sun has a way of being severely filtered through the highly polluted smog. I hope we have space to pack all the tea we brought back!

Our guide Lily at the Imperial Tea House

Soeul Traditional Court Cake

Kkul Tarea(honey skein)  is............ a traditional court cake made of ripened honey and malt. It is cooled and kneaded and stretched and then folded like cat's cradle to a thread's thinness to 16,000 strands suggesting the prayer for longevity, health, good fortune and wish-fulfillment. It is filled with a crushed nut mixture. I watched the process with my own eyes...it was amazing and melted in the mouth...So good and so good for you!

Soeul-Man

There are fascinating pedestrian walkway areas for daily fresh food and dry goods shopping.

The Korean flag is the symbol of Yin/Yang...the balancing of opposites. What I learned is that (clockwise) the symbols around the center stand for Water,Earth,Fire and Sky. 

When you're taking a photo say: One, Two, Three.....Kimchi!

National Museum of Korea

The sense of space and light in this museum made it easy to float among the galleries, following the peninsula's history from paleolithic, through the Gojojean, the Three Kingdoms and on to the consolidating Silla Dynasty. There were wonderful displays of Celadon Pottery, the green-grey signature artwork of this country.

Mar 18th-Soeul, Korea

The outstanding feature of this bustling city is its placement in the Hangang River valley amid craggy, stony mountains that hover as backdrops to its modern skyscrapers. I could just picture how beautiful it must be when all the leaves appear and the cherry blossoms bloom in about a month. It has gotten much colder as we headed north on the same latitude, approximately, as Washington, DC. Some of Soeul sprawls down from the foothills. There are about 7 historic "Palaces" around the city. They provide a pleasant counterpoint to the modernity that bustles around them. The Palace we visited was built for a 14th century king who established the simplified Korean character alphabet. The changing of the guard is done in the traditional style.

For those who have followed the blog, I found the corner roof decoration very different in style and color from the one on Lungshan Temple in Taipei.

Taipei too!

We visited the most important Temple in Taipei...the Lungshan Temple. People were praying, lighting insence and dropping yin/yang clackers. This was especially interesting....two orange segment shaped wooden pieces are dropped after a prayer request...if landing one up and one down, the request was heard...otherwise, the request is too vague and must be resubmitted.

Lungshan Temple Roof Dragon

 Alongside the temple sits the herb market. People who have not found satisfaction for their maladies with traditional doctors and their medicine, bring their "perscriptions" right from the temple to be filled in the herb market. These broths are highly esteemed for their healing powers.



One cannot forget....It's the Year of the Rabbit!



Mar 15th-Taipei, Taiwan

There is a strong sense of nationalism and pride that we felt immediately from our guide, as well as from  the grandeur of the beauty of the memorial buildings and museums around the bustling city. Though the strong Chinese influence here is acknowledged, it was surprising to hear the importance of the indigenous mix in the population...that is the lineage from the aboriginal peoples that were here for centuries before the  trade-seeking Europeans and the Japanese took claims. In fact, when China first laid claim, only Chinese men were allowed to immigrate, so that at least one parent was always "native" to Taiwan. When Mao was advancing the "cultural revolution" in mainland China, he was responsible for simplifying the chinese language to promote literacy. The classical chinese written language and ancient writings can only be read by the Taiwanese now, as they preserved its knowledge in their superior educational system. Sun-Yat-Sen and Chiang-Kai-Shek promoted the political and educational stability that aided the framework for a "democratic economy."

Chiang-Kai-Shek Memorial

View of Taipei from Memorial

Mar 14th-Keelung, Taiwan

The moment we sailed into Keelung, the largest and most important port in Taiwan, and saw the female Budda presiding on the looming hillside, I knew we weren't in Kansas anymore! Our first night, spent in the "Night Markets" was sense-sational.

The night markets within walking distance of our ship, blossom between 8-midnight. It's the place to meet and eat if you're a local. Fresh seafood in abundance, cooked "your way" in front of your eyes on a grill, or boiled in your favorite pork, crab or chicken soup with bean threads and such...sticky rice with mushrooms and grilled corn on the cob...dumplings and pork bao(steamed buns with sweet & sour pork inside) galore and even peanut flavored shave ice(G's fav). Taiwan night narkets are also known for their spring rolls so tasty with lots of smoothe and crunchy stuff inside (i haven't a clue what they really were, but most looked well cooked) and together provided a symphony to the taste buds...we haven't gotten sick!

Manila Moments



Air quality is a problem....the malls are popular!