Steve and Marisa Around the World Travel Blog

Joshua Tree

2010-05-26T11:39:00.000-07:00

We went to LA a few weekends ago. I told Steve we were going on a vacation for his birthday but I didn't tell him where we were going. He guessed Hawaii or Alaska, so he was a little disappointed when I handed him his ticket at the airport and he saw he was going to LA. Nonetheless, I think we both had fun.

I would say the 2 highlights were going to Joshua Tree and renting a convertible. The joshua trees were unusual, and the jumping cactuses were bizarre and beautiful. Pictures say it best.

From 20100523_JoshuaTree_Starred

Another major highlight was that we did a 4 mile round trip hike up to an abandoned mine, and neither my foot nor knee hurt afterwards. It's been a few years since I've gone hiking on hills/mountains, so it seems a few doors are open to me that were closed before.

From 20100523_JoshuaTree_Starred

We also encountered a rattlesnake. We did not become aware of it's presence until it rattled at me from about 4 feet away. It stared at us for a few seconds then slithered away. I screamed and jumped, helpfully right into Steve. I then recovered and stepped a little closer to take pictures. I learned from my dad how to put yourself near dangerous animals so that you can get a picture to brag about. 2 out of 2 times, nothing bad has happened.

From 20100523_JoshuaTree_Starred

Anyhow, about Joshua Tree, I must say that spending a day learning about nature and hiking away from the crowds can't be beat.

I'll write a bit more about the rest of our trip in a separate blog post.

My stupid web site

2009-08-06T18:08:00.001-07:00

After years of complaining about how there are too many steve baker's in the world, so nothing about me ranks on google (this is particularly embarrassing given who I work for), I decided to finally make my own web site. This is partially because there are many other steve bakers who could be confused with me and do have web sites, including the one at www.stevenbaker.com, who is also a software engineer in the bay area! I'm just writing this post so I can link to my new web site and increase its ranking for the phrase: steve baker.

amsterdam?

2009-05-19T00:29:00.001-07:00

Last year we visited Trondheim (very far north, in Norway) in the middle of winter. We had a 7 hour stopover in the Amsterdam airport. The airport is quite close to city, so we were able to leave our luggage and visit the city, which we had never been to before.

Our flight back home also flies through Amsterdam, and we thought we had a 5 hour stopover, which is just enough time to walk around a little and get lunch before returning to the airport.

In Florence a few weeks ago we took a Tuscan cooking class (which I think we didn't write about, but it was a lot of fun). There was a 40ish couple in the class that randomly brought up that they had been to Amsterdam for a week. I give it a 50% chance the guy was in finance because he was dressed nicely and they lived in Connecticut. (ha!) He also had a slight brooklyn accent that he hid pretty well, until I asked him, "Are you originally from new york?", after which he got all excited and launched into "fuggedaboutits" and demands for "kawfee", Anyway, we kept trying to pump them for tips about other things we could do in Amsterdam. Our conversation went something like this:

Couple: "Of course you have to walk around and see all the canals"

Us: "Right, we did that."

Couple: "You have to see the marijuana parlors"

Us: (Nodding, we already saw that.)

Couple: "You have to walk through the red light district."

Us: "Yeah we saw that too."

At this point they were stumped and we shifted conversation. Later I steered it back: "Did you do anything else you'd absolutely recommend in Amsterdam?"

Couple: "Oh, the Anne Frank house was really interesting."

Us: sighing, "We did that too!"

Apparently we are power travelers because in our five hours in the city we did everything they could remember from their one week trip to Amsterdam. (Maybe they were doing a lot of drugs and didn't want to tell us and were too drug addled to remember anything else.)

The odd thing about Amsterdam is that despite its reputation to Americans (because of the marijuana parlors and the red light district), we thought it was quite beautiful and a charming city. I was actually unimpressed with the "seedy" areas since there are much largier and seedier areas in American cities.

It seemed like such a nice cityl We're sure there were other things we could have done.

Unfortunately when we checked into our flight this morning we found out we only had a 2 hour layover, so now we're stuck in the airport.

trip to olympia

2009-05-17T20:05:00.000-07:00

A few days ago we made a day trip to Olympia, the sacred grounds where the original Olympic games were held. It is on the complete opposite side of the Pelopenese from Tolo, where we were staying, so we knew we had to get an early start for 3 hours of driving there, and then 3 hours of driving back at the end of the day.

We thought it'd save time and be nice to have a picnic at the Olympic grounds, so the night before we bought a whole bunch of supplies. You can get fancy European meats and cheeses in the US, so we were most excited about buying these treats cheaply in the small supermarket. We bought 3 kinds of lunchmeat, bread, mayonaise (surprisingly, they had Kraft, but we bought another kind), a big sack of fresh olives, and a bottle of wine. We also saw what looked like spreadable cheese with a picture of garlic on it. How could we not buy creamy cheese with garlic? (especially since there is no one else to comment on our breath?)

Driving to Olympia was a no holds barred, full body effort. We got a stick shift car, so we got to practice white knuckled turns while down and up shifting constantly to go up hills, around bends, and to re-accelerate. (More properly, I got to practice while Marisa tried to not vomit in her seat.) I've never seen this done in the US, but in India we admired how the drivers honk ALL the time, ostensibly to warn other drivers, scooters, pedestrians, and passing elephants about the soon-to-occur dangerous maneuever. We noticed a few people in Europe honking around bends, so I took this practice to its logical extreme, as seen in this video:

It made me (us?) feel much safer to honk constantly, because Greek drivers don't seem to care what lane they are in, so we were a bit worried about getting hit head on while rounding blind turns, even if we stayed in our line.

On the way we saw some beautiful mountain towns and views up the valley. We actually appreciated the views more on the way back when we were less stressed out about having enough time in Olympia.

From 20090512_OlympiaStarred

From 20090512_StevePelopeneseStarred

Three hours later, we arrived safely in Olympia. I was feeling exhausted from the effort of the drive, though. I don't think I've ever felt so tired after 3 hours of driving. It was only 11:30, so we planned to head straight to the museum to first learn about the ancient site. After that we'd picnic and then walk around.

There wasn't clear signage for parking. After a minor argument about whether we could drive on the road pointing to the museum (it looked like more of a pedestrian access path), we drove up it and parked the car directly in front. After we'd spent a few minutes parking the car and got out, a woman ran out of the building, "You can't park here! And the museum is closed until 1pm!" There is no predicting museum hours in countries that take afternoon breaks.

We decided since I was already famished we might as well find a spot to picnic, so we kept driving up the road and were amazed to see the old Olympic Stadium to our right, past a wrought iron fence. There was a perfect spot to park the car right across from the stadium, so we got out and picniced right above it. The stadium below provided some entertainment because tourists kept coming in and doing goofy things. One large group of teenagers came in and staged a footrace. As Marisa notes in her photo caption below, I kept yelling "Vittorio" at the racing teenagers below. I'm not sure, but I thought that might be italian/latinish for Victory.

From 20090512_OlympiaStarred

Our food tasted great, at least to me, because I was so hungry from driving and from a small breakfast. I slathered large amounts of mayonaisse and an even larger amount of spreadable cheese onto bread, accompanied by the meat and olives we'd bought. The garlic from the cheese was the dominant flavor, though. Marisa finished before me but half an hour later I was still eating.

I'd started to slow down and was no longer ravenously hungry when I prepared another piece of bread, covered with cheese. I took a bite and realized it didn't taste good anymore. In fact, it tasted kinda bad. "This doesn't taste so good anymore.", I said to Marisa. She laughed, because she likes to laugh at how I get sick from overeating. (mixed with concern over my health)

"This tastes like something familiar... hmm.. it tastes like butter!"

"Maybe it's a buttery cheese", Marisa responded.

"Let me look at that package and see how many calories are in it."

I took a look at the label on the front. Underneath the picture of what looked like cheese and the garlic cloves I saw anew some Greek lettering we had previously ignored. It read, "βούτυρο".

I had a hooked on phonix moment where I sounded the label out.. "Boooo tuurrr oooo. Oh my god, Marisa, this label sounds like butter! This is butter!"

We (mostly I) had eaten an entire tube of butter. Probably 10 tablespoons, at least. I felt pretty sick, scraped all the remaining butter off my bread, and finished the rest of the meat and olives. We proceeded to the museum, stomachs heavy with 2000 calories of butter.

On a side note, I have been surprised and impressed with my ability to read (if not understand) Greek words. This probably sounds stupid to anyone who has been to Greece or knows Greek, but it's easy to sound out Greek words if you already know the Greek letters, which many people do. I learned almost all of them in math and science classes. For example, with "βούτυρο", the important letters are beta (b sound), omega (o sound), tau (t sound), rho (r sound, it looks like a p). Marisa points out that even frat boys know Greek letters, since the fraternity names are all in Greek. This may be the only advantage of being in a fraternity, other than becoming really awesome at drinking games.

The Olympia museum was I think worth it for learning the context for the site, but I don't remember many interesting artifacts from it. They provided lots of history that we wouldn't have otherwise known. (for example, how important religion was to the original games, which was why they were eventually banned as pagan by a christian bishop)

The site itself was amazing to walk around. The complex is quite large and surprisingly complete. Many of the buildings had fallen over, but I don't think we'd ever seen so clearly fallen columns before. For example, in this picture you can see exactly how the column support fell over:

From 20090512_OlympiaStarred

Many of the foundations were still standing, and you could imagine how the athletes would have used various spaces. Marisa took this picture of me pretending to wrestle in the wrestlers courtyard:

From 20090512_StevePelopeneseStarred

There were many other interesting parts of the complex, including baths where the athletes would get massages, stretch, and bathe. It was filled with temples to various gods.

Personally, I thought the neatest part was the runners stadium, where they'd hold several hundred meter races. The arch through which the runners entered the stadium is still remarkably preserved. You could imagine it sorta being like when they run into the Olympic stadium now, or when basketball teams bust through the paper arch covering when coming onto the court. There were treasury houses for each Greek city state lining the road to the entrance, so the athletes could walk past symbols of their respective cities. They also had statues of athletes who cheated, as a reminder of the eternal consequences of a tarnished reputation.

From 20090512_OlympiaStarred

In the stadium I staged my own race and did 15 laps while Marisa walked the course. She had the good humor to take some pictures.

From 20090512_OlympiaStarred

Greece - a History Buff's Delight

2009-05-17T02:11:00.000-07:00

Athens was almost as amazing as Rome. In terms of history, Athens is at least on par with Rome - the ancient Greeks left just as many ancient ruins behind in Athens and the surrounding area as the Romans did in Rome. Other than the ruins the city is mostly ugly though - lots of squat, concrete buildings and graffiti.

From 20090505_Athens_Starred

Most history nerds have a favorite - the ancient Greeks or the Romans. My pick is the ancient Greeks. As a democracy-loving American it's hard to not be impressed by the people who invented democracy more than 2,000 years ago. The military made Athens rich, it was powered by free men, and therefore free men deserved a hand in government decisions. It's a testament to their greatness that they treated men this equally given that democracy went out of fashion for the next 2,000 years after the decline of ancient Greece. (Steve's note: i don't really love democracy. We have too much democracy, which is why we're constantly bothered with stupid propositions from the state on matters about which voters are unqualified to make decisions. America's founders consciously did not want to emulate the idiotic athenians, ha ha! We stood on the spot where socrates died because the people democratically voted he should die! Marisa's counter-point: I realize democracy is not perfect but I don't think all of our readers, or at least the precious few that have made it this far into the post, are interested in a debate about the relative merits of democracy. So I'm oversimplifying. Forgive me.)

The Acropolis and the Parthenon, the greatest ancient Greek ruins we have, sit on top of a steep hill and can be seen from anywhere in Athens. The Parthenon (the main temple) is quite large and its columns are well preserved. Between the building itself, its location and its age, it is awe inspiring. I couldn't get over the fact that people knew how to build such a massive and beautiful structure in such a difficult location over 2,500 years ago, using basic tools of no more than stone or bronze.

From 20090505_Athens_Starred

Athens also has a really nice archaeological museum with exhibits on the Greeks and the Mycenaens (more on them later). The following is one of the most famous statues. It's nearly 3000 years old. We've seen the progression of the art of sculpture during our trip, and it's amazing how well shaped this statue is:

From 20090505_Athens_Starred

Olympia is the site of the original olympic games. It's a massive complex of temples and athletic facilities. It's several hours away from Athens (in the Pelopennese) so most tourist don't make it there, but it's a lot of fun. The Greeks were really into athletics, as we quickly learned at the museum exhibits where at least 1/3 of statues/monuments depicted athletes or athletic competitiions. Athletes make good warriors, after all. Olympia started as a temple complex where the main gods and the god of victory (Nike) were worshipped. The Greeks seemed really into the concept of victory based on the number of Nike statues we have seen. Anyway, the olympic games were originally a spiritual event, a way of worshipping the Gods and their relationship to athleticism/victory. They started with a single short distance sprint event and gradually evolved to include things like wrestling, running in combat gear and longer distance runs. They also served wider purposes such as a way for people from around the Greek world to meet and do business, a time to temporarily halt fighint, and a constructive channel for the competitive spirit. Olympic victors became famous (i.e. the subject of many sculptures, carvings, etc.) and sometimes made rich by their leaders back at home. Steve will write more on Olympia later.

From 20090512_OlympiaStarred

Coming back to Athens, one crazy thing that happened was that we saw 2 separate sets of people doing hard drugs in broad daylight. One was snorting something and one was shooting something. The one shooting something was within 200 ft of a bunch of nearby police officers. Our hotel clerk told us drugs are illegal and if the police see these folks they would arrest them. But these folks are just really punk rock, I guess they don't care. We're told Greeks are passionate about freedom - was this a surprising manifestation of that passion? I'm not sure. Note that we never felt unsafe in Athens. My guide book says violent crime isn't a big problem. People seemed defiant, but not violent.

Myth and Modernity in Tolo Greece

2009-05-14T00:23:00.001-07:00

We will probably write more about what we've seen in Greece for the last week. For the past 4 days we've been staying in Tolo, Greece, which has been a good place from which to explore the Ancient sites in the surrounding Peloponese. We will probably write more about those.

I think a different story gives best the flavor of this part of Greece. On two separate days I went running in different directions from town. The first day I ran south, along the ocean. I ran through orange groves, which are in bloom about now. The smell is so strong that when we were driving through the Peloponese, at first we thought we must have spilled perfume in the car. It wasn't until we opened the window when we realized that everywhere around us was filled with the smell of flowers.

Tolo is not known for anything special. It's not even in our Greece guidebook. We only stayed there because the all the hotels we called in the town we wanted, Napflio, were full. However, within a mile I saw a rocky outcropping jutting into and above the shimmer blue ocean. At the top and along the sides were stone blocks covered with thick vines, barely perceptible signs of previous human work. As I ran along the road towards it, I noticed there was a small sign explaining the site. It apparently was the site of the ancient town of Asine, which was briefly mentioned by Homer in the Iliad. He described it "Asine, commanding the deep wide gulf", when saying how it contributed men to the invasion force of the Trojan war!

I ran on past the sign, through an overgrown path, and up some crumbling stairs carved into the stone. Some of the stairs were still impressively preserved, 3000 years later.

From 20090512_StevePelopeneseStarred

At the top was a small room or watch tower, looking out over the ocean. This casual encounter with myth, especially when you don't even expect it, is what makes Greece seem so magical. I'm sure that undoubtedly the force feeding of Homer to many American students contributes to the amazement at coming across such things.

From 20090512_StevePelopeneseStarred

On the second day, I ran north. I had to run above and through the town of Tolo, which is beautiful. From our hotel I could see a road running up the ridge of some northern peaks, so I decided to aim there. I hoped I could run northwards towards Nafplio. At least, if I scaled the ridge, I might be able to see Nafplio.

About 500m up the road I had seen (1.5mi into the run), I came across a gate. It had Greek words, but in English it said "No Pedestrians and No Vehicles". I ran through, thinking that I could at least explore up a little before turning back. About 5 minutes up, with the gate still in sight, a car of teenagers passed me in the other direction, smirking. Apparently the road was somewhat open, even if we were all breaking the rules.

I assumed the road was some sort of public utility access road or a fire trail, as it was similar to roads I have run on in California. In fact, the mountains in this part of Greece feel very similar to California, They are very steep, dry, and covered in scrubby brush that easily catches fire. As I kept running up the road, I saw an unfortunate amount of trash on the sides. There were broken roofing tiles, discarded tires, and plastic containers. I wondered if the teenagers were dumping that stuff up there. It almost, but not quite, spoiled the view down 1000 feet to the town and the Mediterranean sea below.

From 20090512_StevePelopeneseStarred

I kept running up and had reached a point where I would turn over a ridge and would no longer be able to see the first gate. I could see up to a second ridge, so I decided I'd continue to there and turn around at the top. I wanted to see the other side; perhaps Nafplio would be right there to the North.

I kept running up and noticed that some of the scrub was blackened, as if from recent fire. I came across a second gate that had no text whatsoever except for a big emblem of burning flames. That seemed very strange: Did they intentionally light fires up here? I also caught the disconcerting smell of something rotten, like old meat. Maybe there was a dead animal nearby,

After another 5-10 minutes, I climbed another few hundred feet to the second ridge. I eagerly ran forward to the turning point, hoping to see a beautiful view to the North, all the way to the end of the bay jutting into the Pelopenese. After all, the previous day I'd stumbled across 3000 year old ruins. I crossed the ridge and was rewarded with a view of a... trash dump. That explained the threat of fire and the smell of decay! It was disgusting. The smell was horrible, and there were hundreds of birds circling around eating the rubbish.

From 20090512_StevePelopeneseStarred

I've never heard of a trash heap on the top of a mountain. I would think the wind would carry the smell to Nafplio or to Tolo and ruin vacationers' time. We never smelled it from town or our hotel, though.

That nicely illustrates the constrasts in Greece. On the one hand, everywhere you turn are ancient monuments. There are so many that it seems that the Greeks can't keep up with maintaining them all, nor do many of the ancient places even get any tourists. There was no one else at Asine, and the one sign was lonely and old. Stewarding that history must be a large burden. On the other hand, there is modernity everywhere, including trash heaps on top of mountains, the newest cell phones, cars going 105mph on the ahighways, etc.

Piu Venice

2009-05-14T00:07:00.000-07:00

Marisa already wrote a pretty good description of Venice, but I feel obliged to add a few tidbits. I'm probably more naively enchanted than she is, since as she likes to point out, I have a fascination with all things maritime. I'm not sure if this will be interesting or not.

Venice is bizarre. It is 1000 years old. Built on former glory and filled with booty stolen from its former mediterranean empire, it exemplifies the greatest irony of the crusades, in which the blood and booty thirsty crusaders decided to sack a *christian* city, Constantinople (now istanbul). They got a little sidetracked from the Holy Lands, evidently. They carried the treasure back to Venice. With that treasure they built an improbable city literally on the middle of the ocean, by paving over marsh and canals in a series of low-lying islands. Many paved streets in Venice are called "Rio", which to those familiar with latinate languages will easily recognize as meaning "river". (Think Rio Grande.) That's because that particular street used to be a river, but was slowly converted to land.

I don't think this improbable city would have really been able to continue without tourism. It is quaint and gorgeous but extremely impractical. You have to walk everywhere within the city, unless you have the advantage of having a boat. We'd regularly see delivery men struggling to move pallets of food and drink up and down steps over canals to get to their restaurant or business. I personally am not sure I'd even want to live there. Besides it being so clearly expensive, the other problem was that it's a very contained space. From our hotel I'd need to run nearly a mile to get to a park. Everywhere else in the city the only place to walk or run were tiny lanes about 5 to 10 feet wide. It felt pretty trapped and oppressive, despite being so beautiful and appealing because of the canals and the buildings. It would be impossible to train for a marathon in Venice, unless you like running 1 mile loops for 3 hours.

From 20090501_Venice_Starred

Still, it was awesome, which I mean literally. It's awe inspiring to be standing in such a strange and improbable city, which is in true fact slowly sinking into the marsh beneath, while tourists roam above buying $3000 coats at the Armani store. (We did not buy any $3000 coats, although I kept pointing at them in the display and joking about buying them to Marisa.) The boat transportion was also very exciting. One thing that would have made it better was if we were able to rent boats. We like to canoe or kayak around and have done so in many places. It didn't seem possible in Venice, though, which was very surprising.

From 20090501_Venice_Starred

Those are my additional impressions besides those which Marisa has already written:

Hard Rock Cafe

Our hotel, by happenstance, was about one block from the Hard Rock Cafe in Venice. We discovered it because our first night in Venice we walked from our hotel to Piazza San Marco. After crossing one canal bridge and one block, we saw the Hard Rock. We've traveled in more than 15 countries together but have never gone into a Hard Rock before, but for some reason this one was very inviting. Partly it was because it seemed to have reasonable prices, as opposed to the rest of Venice.

We went in and expected to order only one drink before heading back quickly. However, we were instantly entranced by the rock music videos on the wall behind the bar and the incredibly friendly waitress. It's hard to explain, but when you've been away from the good ole' USA for 3 months and there's a video of "I can't drive 55" with Sammy Hagar wearing a 80s jumpsuit and goofily doing battle in a Mustang with the California Highway Patrol on I-5, followed by his arraignment in a courtroom and the subsequent rescue by his bandmates, you can't turn away. The videos kept coming, and we kept getting more excited. Assuming it wasn't a dream, at one point they played Hotel California, and we sung along shamelessly. They also played some U2 (ok, this isn't american), Scooby Snacks (by the fun lovin criminals), and LA Woman (The Doors). I guess we were missing home and didn't even know it.

Most surprisingly, the Hard Rock didn't even seem to have other Americans in it. We were shocked that it was packed, and it was packed with Europeans of different varieties. It seemed like the hip place to be for younger people in Venice.

On a final note, supposedly the hard rock chain was created because the owners couldn't find good american food outside of the US. However, their menu is pointlessly limited to stuff that is actually quite easy to get all over the world: burgers, steaks, etc. The one thing that any self-respecting American should love and that is hardest to find outside the US is Pancakes/Flapjacks. I crave them practically every morning. We didn't have good pancakes for 2 months until Marisa made them in one of our hostel kitchens as a special treat. (Yay Marisa!)

The Watered Down Sherry, or how the New World encounters the Old World

As Marisa described, one of the adorable features of Venice is that on the main piazza there are many cafes at which paid musicians wearing full white tuxedos play classical and other types of music in classical formats. Many people simply walk up and stand to listen. The setting itself is also beautiful because it's on Saint Mark's Square (Piazza Di San Marco). Despite it being really old, the major view on the square is of the Cathedral, which is so ornate and covered with Byzantine paintings that it looks like it's fake. We felt that if we walked up to it and smacked the rock, it'd be fake plastic that would sound hollow like at Disney, and if we walked around to the back we'd see plywood was holding it up. (The walls were in fact rock and hurt when you hit them, and the building was 3 dimensional.)

Of course, you need to buy something to sit at a table or a seat at one of these cafes with the music. One time after dinner we decided we'd buy one drink at an outrageous price (so large I would feel embarassed to share here) just so we could sit and listen in comfort. We planned to nurse that drink for as long as we dared. It was lateish (10pm), so we decided to order a Sherry for dessert. Sherry is a fortified (extra alcohol) white wine that should appear yellowish to dark orange in color. When it arrived we took a few sips and grew suspicious. It was unlike any sherry we had before. While we are not sherry experts, Marisa uses sherry in cooking, and we've indulged in a few previously, so we have some practical experience. Plus, Steve took Wines 101 at Cornell Hotelier School Pass/Fail, in which they did a unit on fortified wines, including Sherry. He passed, which may or may not mean anything. This particular sherry tasted watery and was only pale yellow in color. When we rotated the glass and let the sherry fall down the side of the glass, it left very small fingers, implying low alcohol content. All previous good sherries we'd had were darker in yellow, and had viscous and thick fingers. Also, very weirdly, it was not sweet, which most sherries are.

We debated for a couple minutes. Normally we wouldn't say anything. After all, when you're in a foreign country it's hard to know what's normal. Still, in this case we felt pretty confident someone had watered down the sherry and the owner should know and that possibly we should get our money back. We called the waiter over. "This sherry is weird. It's not viscous."

"Yes, sherry is viscous."

"NO. This sherry is NOT viscous."

The waiter became flustered. "No, no, sherry is viscous."

"si, si, capisco. But this sherry tastes like it has aqua in it."

"Please. Prego. I will get my manager."

He went to fetch the manager, and we walked up to the bar to talk to him. It felt pretty stupid to make a big deal about the drink, but it also feels pretty lame to be cheated with something crappy when you pay a lot for it.

The manager walked up all haughty. "This is good sherry."

We explained that we felt like it wasn't viscous enough. He said, "Where do you come from?"

We cringed, fearing that by revealing we were Americans he would dismiss our "ignorant" concerns about Sherry. I prepared to deal my Cornell Hotelier School Wine Class ace card, should the need arise. We told him, "The United States, America"

He said, "Where do you get the sherry you have in the United States? This is Good Sherry."

I replied, summoning old memories from class and the back of wine bottles, "Spain or Portugal."

He paused, apparently realizing we weren't complete idiots, "Well, this sherry is Tio Pepe. It is the most popular Sherry in Europe."

"Why is it not sweet?"

"Tio Pepe is a dry sherry."

Marisa said, "Can you try it? It tastes watered down to us. I use dry sherry in cooking, and this does not taste like dry sherry."

He hesistated and scowled at us. He seriously didn't want to try it and acted like we weren't worth his time! He repeated, "This is perfectly fine sherry."

Marisa repeated, "Please, can you try it? It tastes weird."

He poured himself a little glass, tasted with a scowling pinky hold, and then insisted it was perfect. He eventually said that if we didn't like it we wouldn't have to pay, although he was clearly not happy while saying so. Not knowing if we were right or wrong and worried about making a fuss over nothing, we said thanks and sat back down to enjoy the music. We eventually left the money for the drink because we weren't sure if we were just being paranoid.

Later that night we googled Tio Pepe, and it is indeed quite different from normal sherry. It is dry and is quite popular in Europe. It has less alcohol than normal sherry. However, the next day we bought another glass of it (for much cheaper) elsewhere just to check if it was the same, and we're 80% sure the second glass was much more viscous, had broader fingers, and tasted stronger than the glass we had bought that night. Psh, it doesn't really matter, but it feels ridiculous because it seemed likely that cafe charges so much for things and then adulterates them. Still, we got to listen to wonderful music in front of a 1000 year old Cathedral, so we didn't feel that bad about it the next day. I guess ultimately this is another example of getting duped in a foreign country because you aren't sure of how things work.

Venice

2009-05-12T11:28:00.000-07:00

Steve had a boy-like, giddy fascination with boats. Most of his knowledge comes from historical novels. From these novels he has learned to speak like a ship's captain or pirate, but he doesn't know much more than that. When he sees a boat he usually just starts talking like a pirate, shouts "ahoy" at them or says "look! a boat!"

We weren't planning on coming to Venice because it's really touristy and there aren't any top-notch sights here. But we did. And the first thing Steve said when we arrived was "how could we have considered not coming? There are boats everywhere!" And there are. Venice is a bunch of islands in a marshy area connected by lots of landfill. There are canals running through the island, building entries and streets accessible only by water, and bridge crossings everywhere. Cars are not allowed in this relatively large city. Pedestrians can relax and not worry about stop lights or getting hit. You can watch the various vessels in the canals, including lots of gondolas but also boats for loading goods, i.e. a boat full of beer unloading beer crates at a Venetian bar. You can see people climbing into their houses out of boats, and specialized construction boats taking building materials and equipment to the houses under construction.

From 20090501_Venice_Starred

Venice has a magnificent church that reflects the city's historical prosperity. Every inch of the ceiling of the massive St. Mark's Basilica is covered in gold mosaic. The mosaics shine so brightly and look so rich. If you like gold, glittery stuff, it's the most magnificent church I've seen. Too bad the people who built the basilica used it for the private worship of the doges (dukes) of Venice. Venice was very wealthy due to it's prominence in sea trade and at one point had an empire with control of lands in greece and (we think?) asia minor.

The other major highlight of Venice for me was the cafes in Piazza San Marco that have big bands (usually some mix of a piano, violinst, clarinetist, flutist accordian, and bassist) playing romantic tunes. It's so nice to sit (or stand - sitting and eating at these cafes is just about the most overpriced thing you can do, i.e. $14 for a Jameson whiskey, plus a $6 cover charge) in the sun, listen to the excellent music and watch tourists from all over the world.

From 20090501_Venice_Starred

Venice is a nice place to spend a few days, and we thoroughly enjoyed it, but I have to warn anyone who is considering going that it is the most ludicrously expensive place I have ever been (except for the hotel in Tokyo where a single American pancake cost $10).

From 20090501_Venice_Starred

A Child in India

2009-05-09T23:41:00.000-07:00

We take most of our pictures with Marisa's camera, but sometimes I snap things with my phone and forget about them. I was cleaning out my phone today when I came across this picture.

From 20090323_OtherIndiaStarred

The picture is both really cute and terribly sad. The cute little girl with the impish grin is hanging off the back of our bicycle rickshaw. While the driver was laboring up front, she kept putting her tiny finger over her lips to signal us not to say anything to the driver, who presumably would have been extremely angry had he discovered another 40 lbs of weight hanging off the back. We shared in her little mischief and kept surreptitiously turning to laugh at her while maintaining conversation with the driver so he wouldn't notice.

After we stopped she hopped off and came around to the front. She made a sad face, held her tiny hands up to her mouth, and said, "Chapati, Chapati" (bread, bread)

We didn't give her anything, and it's impossible not to feel sad and a little guilty. Perhaps we would have given her food if we had it, but all we had was money. In her case, I'm not sure if she really was hungry. As you can see in the picture, she is wearing bangles, is reasonably clean, and has decent clothes on, although like nearly all Indian children she is very skinny. We did see many other beggar children who looked much sorrier. People in India say you shouldn't give money to children because many of the children do have access to school and should be there, but if they get money and food by begging, they won't go. Also, apparently just like in Oliver Twist, many of the beggars are in begging rings that are run by older adults. Perhaps the cute girl was trained by an adult handler to hang onto the back of rickshaws to charm tourists.

In any case, I am glad we found this picture, because for some reason we'd been thinking about this little girl lately.

Napoli, Pizza, Pompeii

2009-05-09T05:51:00.000-07:00

Marisa already posted about Tuscany, but I thought I'd briefly fill in what we did before that. Between our visit to Rome and Tuscany, we went down to Napoli (Naples) for two nights, mostly because we wanted to visit nearby Pompeii without feeling rushed doing it as a day trip from Rome.

We took the train from Rome to Napoli. That itself was quite an event for the first half hour. We took the second class extremely slow 3 hour regional train (the fast train is about an hour), and we got to the train station only 20min before departure. It is very easy to buy Italian train tickets, so we had no trouble quickly buying a ticket and running to the train about 10m before departure. Unfortunately when we arrived at the train we quickly realized there were no open seats. People were standing between cars and we noticed so0me space near the slightly stinky bathroom, so I threw our giant backpacker bags down on the floor (I carry them both because of Marisa's knee problems). This formed a seat on which Marisa could sit, while I stood next to the bathroom. We were crowded into the space with maybe 6 or 7 other people who were also late and had no seats. We stood there for 30 minutes preparing ourselves to stand for 3 hours next to the bathroom in the muggy heat. Luckily, though, this was a regional train, so within 30 minutes probably half the people had gotten off at various stops outside Rome. We jumped into the next car and were able to sit down in decent chairs for the rest of the trip.

We arrived at Napoli after dark. Napoli has a bad reputation. There is lots of mafia activity, and there is supposedly more than 25% unemployment and thus a lot of disaffected youths. During our walk from the metro station to our hotel (which we had trouble finding), we definitely felt a little uncomfortable. There were many disaffected-looking youths standing on all the street corners. The center of Napoli is medieval. It ended up being cute in the daytime, but after dark mostly we noticed that it was dark, the walls hang over you, and there's a disconcerting amount of graffiti everywhere. It felt like a night and day difference from Rome, which seemed beautiful, inviting, and warm everywhere we went.

We ended up finding our hotel after a frustrating hour of walking. The entry to the hotel itself was through an unmarked, thick steel door covered in graffiti. But we checked in, and everything was OK.

Napoli is known for inventing pizza, and they are very proud of their local variety. They are especially proud of Margherita, which is just tomatoes, mozarrella, and basil. We got some very good and pretty cheap pizza there, although I think we had better pizza in NY at Grimaldi's in Brooklyn, and at a place we once went in Milan. Our first night we ordered Margherita, because that is the Neopolitan specialty. The second night we went out for pizza again but wanted to have something different, so we ordered Margherita con Panna, which means margherita pizza plus italian cream which they pour over the top of the pizza. That sounds weird (pizza with cream on top is rare in the US), but we'd had it before, and it's quite good.

Some Italians (we think local Neopolitans) at the table next to us overheard us order Margherita con Panna, and they got really excited/disgusted. They said loudly, "Con Panna! No Con Panna! MARGHERITA!"

We said to them, "Si, Con Panna!" We had the impression they thought we were clueless tourists who weren't going to try the local favorite, but we didn't try to explain that we had just had margherita the day before.

Then, to our astonishment, one of them went up and ran after the exiting waiter. "Solo Margherita!" The waiter nodded back to them. They'd just changed our order!

We frantically waived the waiter back. When he came back over we said, "Con Panna!"

The guys at the next table repeated "no con panna!" and started laughing.

Our waiter look at us for agreement, and Marisa, practically shouting with frustration said, "No, WITH PANNA". (She wasn't really going to cry, but I think we were both afraid we weren't going to get it with panna.) At this point our waiter nodded and walked away. Later we did get the pizza with panna, and it was quite tasty, so it worked out.

We spent most of our day in Napoli visiting Pompeii, which was amazing. Probably most people know, but it was a town buried under volcanic ash before the people had time to escape. It was later discovered and dug up, and was remarkably preserved, unlike most Roman towns which were built on top of by later civilizations. The bodies of the people there left cavities in the earth (filled with bones). Archaeologists were able to inject plaster into the cavities, so when they dig out the bodies you get a replica of exactly what the person looked like as they died. The result is really eery and quite creepy, as you see the death masks of all these normal people. Despite it being creepy, the people at the site all seemed very respectful of the artifacts.

From 20090422_Pompeii_Starred

Besides the eery plaster bodies, the other impressive aspect of the town is how large and complete it is. You can walk around and see the bakeries, the theater, the houses, and even a brothel in the center of town, which is decorated with still preserved lewd frescoes. The town has been uncovered to the elements for awhile, so it has surely now decayed more than when it was first unearthed, but it still feels like walking around a real Roman town. It was so large that despite spending 8 hours walking around and looking at stuff, we probably only saw 25% of it.

From 20090422_Pompeii_Starred

Besides Pompeii, the other exciting thing that happened to us in Napoli was... someone stole our credit card number and charged $4500 worth of clothes at fancy designer clothing stores. Since we didn't have much access to internet in Italy, we only figured it out a week later when we checked our balance and saw the enormous charges on it. The charges were easy to pick out because we certainly never spend that much money on clothes, in fact we don't really buy clothes unless absolutely necessary (okay, slight exaggeration, but we both hate shopping). Ironically, that week was the only time during our entire trip when we did buy some nice clothes. (We went to a store where I bought a sweater and Marisa got some new pants.) We're still not sure how the thief was able to charge at the store, because our credit card company claims they used a physical card, but we didn't lose our actual plastic credit card. It's completely possible for a number of people in Naples to have stolen our number, though, as many people had access to the physical card when we were paying for things. We don't know if this is related or not, but one stupidity of Europe is that receipts often have the entire credit card number printed on them! We try to shred them or keep them with us, but we may have left one somewhere.

Tuscany - Beautiful, Delicious and Historical Too

2009-05-07T11:21:00.000-07:00

Tuscany has so much to offer. We spent a week driving through the region known for natural beauty, wine and olives, great food, historic towns and famous art.

Tuscany's beauty struck us immediately. The endless rolling hills are a patchwork of lush green fields (reminiscent of Ireland but with bigger hills, although it may only have been green because we were there in spring), vineyards, olive groves and forests. Stone farmhouses, hundreds of years old but beautifully restored, dot the landscape. Everywhere you go there are adorable, medieval and renaissance hill towns made out of stone. Almost all of the dwellings, hundreds of years old, are well maintained and cared for with personal touches like potted plants and shrines. It's a testament to the homeowner's patience, respect for the past and love of beauty that they prefer antique dwellings over modern comforts.

From 20090423_Tuscany_Starred

Food and wine take center stage in Tuscany. Wine tasting opportunities abound (we didn't do much), especially in the Chianti region. Restaurants feature wild game, especially wild boar; tender, slow cooked meats; fresh bean dishes; and of course delicious pastas. Tuscan restaurants know how to do meat (we don't like the meat dishes we've had in Italian restaurants in general, so this impressed us). The Tuscans are also very proud of their olive oil and use it as a simple dressing for salad, beans and bread (I failed to appreciate/get excited about fine olive oil in general, but there are clearly some people out there who get something I don't.).

Florence is the biggest and most historically important town in Tuscany. It was the base of the Medici family who funded a great deal of Renaissance art, and it's a highlight for art lovers. The Uffizi gallery in Florence is the most important gallery in Italy (according to our guide book, although Steve and I don't know enough about art to judge), and Michelangelo's David is also located in Florence. We really enjoyed both, with the help of a Rick Steve's guide with some great background on a variety of paintings and sculptures. We literally had no idea about art or any capacity to appreciate it prior to our museum visits in Florence. The city will probably always have a special place in my heart because now I am a sophisticate, whereas before I was just a crude American. (Note that the preceding passage has a healthy dose of sarcasm. We've gone to art museums before; we just usually get bored quickly.)

From 20090430_Florence_Starred

Rome

2009-05-04T22:30:00.000-07:00

If you had to visit one city in the world, I would definitely recommend Rome. Steve and I have been traveling for 2 months and are getting slowly more weary of sightseeing but Rome still blew us away. It's got everything - important and magnificent historical sights; pleasant, walkable streets; and great food.

The Colosseum, the Forum, and other Roman ruins take up at least 0.5 square miles right in the center of the city. If you have a Western education you don't need to read a guide book to understand why they are important - you can just show up and appreciate their importance instinctively. They are well preserved enough that it's easy to imagine how they looked during Roman times.

From 200090415_Rome_Starred

St. Peter's Square and St. Peter's Basilica are incredibly grand, they make it easy to appreciate the importance and historical status of the church. The Sistine Chapel is covered in paintings and is marvellous, even to Steve and I who have historically gotten more entertainment making fun of art than appreciating it.

From 200090415_Rome_Starred

Rome is also a pleasant place to stay. It is full of old, narrow, streets and buildings with balconies, potted plants and loving personal touches. Most buildings are painted in shades of orange giving the neighborhoods a cohesive, traditional, Italian style. It's a fairly clean city, most of the sights are within walking distance or have good public transport links.

From 200090415_Rome_Starred

We were totally happy to spend 6 days in Rome, filling up our time with the Roman ruins, the Vatican, early Christian catacombs, great food, pleasant walks around town, and gladiator school! We've been out of Rome for at least 1 week now, and we continue to enjoy our travels, but I don't expect we will ever find another city that we can appreciate so effortlessly.

India to Europe

2009-05-04T01:37:00.000-07:00

When we landed in Istanbul both Steve and I experienced a little bit of shock. The streets were very clean and there was grass, trees and flowers everywhere. It made me feel very relaxed.

I've always believed (or hoped) that I am capable of adapting to new environments and giving up creature comforts. I've never wanted to be dependent on expensive things to be happy. When Steve and I were in India we were comfortable with our hotel accomodations, even though they were usually less comfortable then we were used to (e.g. the worst ones had a good amount of mold in the bathrooms, chipping paint or dirty walls, no top bed sheet, bugs, etc.). We got used to the wind constantly blowing dirt into our face, or dodging feces on the street. I am not saying we would have easily adapted to the lifestyle most poor Indians live - the things I describe are minor compared to the accomodations or neighborhoods they live in. But we went without a lot of our standard luxuries for 4 weeks and it was okay.

Every once in awhile a gust of wind would blow dirt in my face and it would make me feel slightly depressed that I constantly felt a little dirty. In Istanbul, the clean, green surroundings gave me a rush of pleasure. I think Steve and I can adapt to many different standards of living. But now I have a little more appreciation for the effect that creature comforts have on me. They give me a rush of happy emotions which is usually unconscious but very beneficial.

scuola gladiatori (gladiator school)

2009-05-03T01:57:00.000-07:00

Since Marisa has not (yet) taken up the call for further blog posts, I will regale with a tale of might and mayhem.

Prior to our flight to Rome, Marisa had pointed out to me the small note in the 'courses' section of our book about 'scuola gladiatori' ("gladiator school)'. It said that gladiator school was a good experience for learning the ancient art of arena fighting. We thought maybe it was a joke, but we read this story online which made it sound like a lot of fun:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-436752/Call-Spatacus-worlds-gladiator-school.html

How could you not want to get smacked in the face unexpectedly with a shield?

The school was on Appia Antica. For those with dim memories of middle school Roman history, that's "the appian way". I remembered the name and not much else, but simply the name was romantic. The appia antica is still made of old roman travertine marble cobblestone. It's a fairly quiet road on the outskirts of rome, about 2mi south of the colliseum. It's lined with small private restaurants and gardens at a quite low density. You can walk 1/8 of a mi at a time without seeing a driveway. Further south on the appian road are the old christian catacombs.

We found our driveway to the gladiator school. It was unexepectedly right next to what looked like a junk yard and a storage area for city vehicles. There were some chickens in a coop next to the junkyard. I guess the appian way isn't prime real estate, even if it was a famous Roman road.

We were introduced to our instructor, who was a bulky and imposing Italian woman of about 30 years age. She would give us a tour of the small arms museum before the lesson began. She asked us if we spoke Italian. When we said no, she got an uncertain look on her face, but we insisted we'd be able to work it out. It turned out she had pretty good English, but really it wasn't that hard to figure out the word for 'sword' or 'pike' when she was pointing at them.

We had a 20min tour of the armament museum which actually was quite interesting. We learned about how the matches were intentionally set up so that if the gladiator with a net was fighting, then the other gladiator, who would typically be a slave, would be locked into a helmet with a hook on top. The slave with the helmet was basically sacrificial meat, because the guy with the net was a trained expert at using his net to catch the helmet to snap the slaves' necks. We hadn't appreciated before how scripted the gladiator fights were, sorta like WWF but without the metal folding chairs.

They also had example equipment for the Praetorian guard and normal roman army legions. Apparently the scuola does re-enactments and shows throughout Europe. They're apparently no joke, because on the anniversary of various events in Rome they are asked to perform. Two days before we arrived they had a show on the Imperial Forum and around the Colliseum. They seemed like the people at ren faires in the US, except without the turkey legs or mead.

After our tour of the museum, we went out to the training ground. She had us change into our tunics and had us warm up by running laps around the yard and dodging swinging sacks of sand. This wasn't that strenous but was surprisingly hard to avoid the swinging sacks. I'm not sure it actually trained us in anything.

We then moved on to training. Our instructor showed us the wooden gladioli (the name of the sword from which 'gladiator' comes). She showed us 4 offensive moves and 4 defensive counters to those moves and had us practice. Many of the defensive moves seemed to involve swirls of the sword tip in great arcs in front of our bodies. That seemed pointless at first, but when we started practicing against each other in slow motion it was actually quite interesting, because it became clear that the arc was intended to use the opponents momentum to continue the movement of his sword (rather than simply blocking it) in order to deflect it out of the way.

The actual final fighting was at first a bit of a let down. As in the above daily mail article, I was hoping that after we learned the basic moves, they would bring out some badass who would then beat the crap out of me (if not marisa), preferably by also smacking me with his shield when I wasn't looking. Unfortunately our instructor announced that our opponent would be... each other.

From 200090415_Rome_Starred

She drew a big circle in the sand of the yard and gave us foam-wrapped gladioli and told us we could start freeform sparring. Given her limited English it took me awhile to understand that the encouragement she was shouting was actually the word, 'therapy!', 'therapy!'. As in, apparently, marital therapy via sword fighting.

From 200090415_Rome_Starred

In the end, though, it ended up being a lot of fun. Marisa and I each had our separate strengths. Marisa seemed very good at striking blows (and scoring points, in the gladiator training point system) against my legs. I came up with a killer combo that involved me switching my sword to my left hand and usually ended with me poking the gladiolus into Marisa's stomach. (I also have a height advantage.) I think we both enjoyed the physical activity and the challenge of the sparring, which was surprisingly difficult. Perhaps we can start swordfighting each other in our backyard.

From 200090415_Rome_Starred

In case you don't believe that we were serious about the sparring, about halfway through a group of schoolchildren showed up for a tour. They sat in the stands and watched us. I kept waiting for them to start giggling at the ridiculous adults fighting with foam swords. They either thought this was normal or were sufficiently fooled by our seriousness, because they just kept watching. Eventually the instructor kicked us out so she could teach a bunch of giggly 12 year old girls how to wield swords.

From 200090415_Rome_Starred

All Quiet on the Western Front

2009-04-29T16:21:00.001-07:00

Marisa has, by and large, been writing summaries of our sightseeing, while I stick to obnoxious stories. However, she claims she's gotten tired of blogging, so if you want to hear more about what we've been up to, perhaps you can send her a private note encouraging her to continue. (That's why I wrote our summary of Turkey.)

turkish baths

2009-04-27T11:09:00.001-07:00

Marisa wanted us to go to a Turkish bath. She'd been to one when she was in Istanbul before and thought it was a good experience. I'd never been, but we'd previously gone to Japanese baths In Japanese baths you get completely naked (sexes are separated), and in the one we went to there was a pool that had an electric current in it that would cause your muscles to twitch if you weren't completely relaxed. Marisa assured me that there's no nudity allowed in Turkish baths, and they'd have no crazy electrical pools, so it didn't seem like the Turkish baths would be too challenging.

I thought it was an interesting experience, but I wouldn't do it regularly. One of the features is that you can get a massage, which we paid for. The inner sanctum of the bath is incredibly hot, very humid, and results in me becoming uncomfortably sweaty. After about 10 minutes of waiting for the masseur I wanted to leave because I felt sick from the heat. (Maybe I was dehydrated.) I kept going to the cold water faucet and dumping pans of it over myself, which cooled me down a little.

Eventually the masseur did come and proceeded to beat the crap out of me. We were both wearing nothing but towels, so it was a sweaty-fisted shared experience. He was very considerate in that whenever I had to move, he'd arrange my towel prior to movement so no inappropriate portions of my body would be shared with the rest of the room. At one point I was lying on my stomach, and he told me (in pidgin English) to turn over. Unfortunately for him, I don't roll to my right. I naturally rolled over to my left away from the enclosing towel, exposing my genitals to his startled, blanching face. He quickly fixed the towel and no one seemed to notice, so it was no big deal.

The massage was OK, albeit a little brutal for my taste. (Maybe that's why I don't get massages very frequently.) The unique feature of the Turkish bath massage, which I didn't know beforehand, is the scraping off of all your outer skin with sandpaper and something that looked to me like steel wool. I insisted he use only the sandpaper. Surprisingly, this process did not hurt all that much, but I was not too satisfied with it because I got sunburnt in India and was already peeling. I have this theory that if you don't touch sunburnt skin and try to prevent peeling it will serve as a protective layer against further sunburns. Ungrounded in any scientific knowledge as this theory is, I was nevertheless very annoyed and completely unable to communicate to my nearly naked and sweaty friend that I didn't want all my sunburnt skin ripped off.

The skin came off in small rolls of flesh that looked a little like rolled up cigarette paper. It was a dark grey color, so evidently I am a very dirty boy.

Through this last stage of my massage my mustachioed masseur kept asking me "ok? ok?", to which I would politely reply "yes, ok." He invariably followed this exchange confirming his customer satisfaction by saying, "after, you tip. i come outside. I am Ahmet (pointing finger to his chest)"

With his limited English and my limited Turkish, and given that I remained in his sweaty, strong, and fairly hairy embrace while still being scraped by sandpaper, I did not think it wise to try to explain to him that we had specifically selected this bathhouse because the tip was included in the already paid price of the massage. I was annoyed he kept trying to tell me to tip but just said, "ok" in response.

After the massage I showered, dressed, and went out to the main lobby where I reunited with Marisa. I was hoping I'd be able to slip out without encountering my new friend, Ahmet, but he emerged through the thick wooden doors of the bath area, still clad in only his towel, at exactly the right moment. Marisa tried to talk to me about the bath, but I said quickly, "I'll meet you outside." I caught his look out of the corner of my eye as I scurried out the front door, and he didn't look too happy. I would say he actually looked a little hurt. I figured he wouldn't follow me outside in just his towel, though, and I was right.

istanbul

2009-04-27T02:53:00.000-07:00

I'm posting this pretty late because, as mentioned in the last post, there are no tubes for the internets in italia.

By coincidence, after leaving India we were scheduled to go to the two capitals of the Roman Empire: Istanbul (Constantinople) and Rome.

We went to Istanbul first from India. We had a 3 day stopover there before continuing to Rome.

Entering Istanbul from India felt like entering Europe, despite what the French might have to say about it. Our last day in India had been fairly chaotic, hot, and surrounded by lots of people. We had a marathon journey -- we left Varanasi by plane at noon, arrived in Delhi, and then had to catch a 4am flight to Istanbul, so we didn't bother getting a hotel room. We spent our last few hours in India in a packed airport waiting area that was dusty from current construction. We tried to sleep on top of a luggage cart piled with our bags and were tired enough that it sorta worked.

We arrived in Istanbul the next morning. In contrast to India, it was very quiet, cold, clean, and there were well trimmed gardens and flowers everywhere. (Apparently the sultans loved tulips, so Istanbul is full of beautiful tulips that are meticulously tended to.) It felt refreshing almost instantly, as I think we were looking forward to some order after the relative chaos of India.

From 20090413_Istanbul_Starred

Of course there are many ways that Istanbul did not feel European -- the muslim call to prayer is played on loudspeakers from all the mosques, which is not something you normally hear in Europe. While many people dress very fashionably (definitely more fashion-conscious than Americans), there are a significant number of women with full hijabs, and even more with headscarfs and modest clothing.

From 20090413_Istanbul_Starred

We wished we had more time to spend in Turkey. We didn't venture outside the city at all. Inside the city we saw the popular sights like the Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and some amazing old Byzantine Christian frescoes and mosaics.

From 20090413_Istanbul_Starred

One of the coolest places we saw was an underground cistern built by the Romans that was only recently discovered. It's right underneath one of the main squares of historical Constantinople, and it's enormous, e.g. the size of a football field, and 4 stories deep. It's hard to believe no one knew it was there. There's currently a few feet of water in the bottom of it, in which fish fish swim around in the eery mood lighting. We wondered what the fish feed on. (perhaps errant tourists)

From 20090413_Istanbul_Starred

We also had some fantastic Turkish food, including doener kebabs, and lamb at almost every meal. The lamb was perfectly spiced every time - or perhaps lamb just tastes that good on it's own? Despite the following picture, we did eat at more places than McDonald's. The McDonald's in Turkey had a very interesting menu, though. Besides India, it's one of the places we've been with the most different menu from in the US. They had a lot of lamb burgers.

From 20090413_Istanbul_Starred

I wanted to make like odysseus, so we considered spending more time in turkey and traveling towards italy via boat through the greek islands. We could see Athens along the way. This plan fell through, though, because it's low season and we read that many of the ferries were only operating twice a week, and we didn't want to get stuck in the islands for weeks. Instead we kept our flight and went straight to rome.

internet in italy is hard, and TIM sucks.

2009-04-26T12:53:00.000-07:00

We haven't posted in awhile because we have no internet. It's surprising, because Italy seems like the worst country we've been in so far for finding internet. China was the best, as there was free wifi almost everywhere. You could walk around and hop on wifi networks. That was one of the reasons we didn't even bother to get phone service there. There seems to be a lot of wifi in Italy, but it's all password protected. In India there was less free wifi, but after 6 hours of futzing around with settings, we got my android phone to work with IDea unlimited internet through their mobile phone network. It was pretty cheap -- only about $0.40 a day.

We tried to sign up for a mobile phone number and unlimited internet in Italy. We had a very (over-)confident guy at a mobile phone store in Napoli who sold us a TIM sim card for 30 Euro ($40) with an unlimited internet plan. Unfortunately he either misconfigured the phone or it didn't work right, because I was getting charged by the amount of data I downloaded, and my prepaid phone kept running down to 0 or even a negative balance. I didn't even know that was possible, but apparently I had a negative $40 balance on the "prepaid" phone. I went back to his store to complain to him, and he visibly lost all his confidence under pressure and seemed to want to get me out of the store. He managed to convince me he had fixed it, so we left. (We were in a hurry anyway.)

I was able to use the internet for awhile, but it's now been shut off again because my balance is below 0. Marisa claims that me getting my TIM internet to work is like my white whale (the white whale is Moby Dick, and I'm the crazy skipper), because I've been talking about it for about a week now. It's been a boon for my Italian understanding, though. Neither of us spoke Italian before, although we do speak a little Spanish. Italian and Spanish seem pretty similar so long as you don't conjugate words, don't use verbs, and in general talk like a grade-A moron. While searching for my white whale I've navigated through a phone tree in Italian, had two conversations in a mix of Italian and English, and had one conversation entirely in Italian. I wasn't that successful in the last one, as the internet still isn't working. The woman did open *another* help center case for me, though.

Example snippet of phone conversation in pidgin english-italiano:

"I called 5 hours earlier and spoke to someone and wanted to know what the status is."

"Yes, you resharged [recharged] your sim 5 euro? You have below zayro [zero] balance" (I had indeed recharged it with 5 euro. That 5 was an unfortunate coincidence with the number 5 in my "5 hours ago")

"no, no. Let me try to explain. I called oggi [today] at chinque ore [5 hour] and spoke to a persone [person]. Capisco? [understand?]"

"yes. you have open case from then."

"si si! [yes yes]"

"it is still open. someone from TIM client assistance will call you tomorrow."

"Do you know what my problema [problem| is?"

"no. you must wait. someone will call you tomorrow." (argh)

"ok... grazie [thanks]"

"I am sorry for my bad english."

"No no! Your english is Perfeto! [perfect]" (I hoped a little charm would advance my cause.)

(blushing over the phone) "Thank You!"

"Prego [you're welcome]"

"Good Bye"

"Ciao"

Meanwhile, no one called me the next day. (or the next)

another new skill

2009-04-17T07:36:00.001-07:00

The same day as the rickshaw driver invited me to drive the rickshaw, we took a one hour rowboat tour of the ganges. We took it at night because we'd read that it was the one of the best ways to view the aarati ganga, which is a type of dusk prayer/ceremony at one of the principal bathing ghats on the ganges.

It was really beautiful and it cost us about $4. (Initially they asked us $10, but we balked until they accepted $4.)

We went out on a small boat that was rowed by one skinny Indian guy. He had limited English but was very friendly.

Perhaps encouraged by my prior rickshaw driving, during the trip I asked if I could row. The guy grinned and offered to show me. I was somewhat startled because he told me to sit in between his legs. He wrapped his arms around mine to show me how to row the oars. This felt uncomfortably homoerotic to me, kind of like the 'tennis pro' seducing the young unsuspecting student. However, it's nothing unusual in India. We had heard about this before, but it might be interesting to you: Indian men are very comfortable with touching each other. They walk down the street holding hands or with arms around each other. (Marisa and I already knew about this, because we've heard stories from Indian coworkers, who told us about how when they first arrived in America and would get funny looks as they walked around holding hands. Once they were told what that connoted in the US, they stopped holding hands with other Indian men.)

Anyway, intellectually observing and knowing about how comfortable Indian men are with each other is quite a different thing from viscerally having myself wrapped in the arms and legs of an Indian rowboatman, close enough to feel his breath on my neck as he talked. Still, I quickly learned to row pretty well. Once he saw I wasn't going to lose the oars and crash the boat, he went around to the front of me, only giving tips when I screwed something up.

Here are some pictures of me rowing, although they're pretty hard to see because it was in the dark.

From 20090411_Varanasi_Starred

a new skill

2009-04-17T07:11:00.000-07:00

I felt sorry for the bicycle rickshaw driver. He was older than normal, looked very thin, and had missing teeth. The few that remained were stained red from chewing addictive betel nut. We usually ignore the pedicab drivers who shout offers of transport to us, so as not to encourage them. Even if we need a bicycle rickshaw, we'lll go to one of the non-yellers. It doesn't really work because we still get harassed every 30 seconds when walking anywhere in India.

But in this case, I wanted to help the gentleman, so we took him up on his offer to squire us 2.5mi in 90 degree heat back to our hotel in Varanasi. For us it was a steal - he only asked for 50 rupees ($1).

Unfortunately, sympathy for the downtrodden-looking is exactly the wrong selection criterion for a bicycle rickshaw driver. He bicycled slower than we could have walked. We were passed by several bicycle rickshaws with fitter drivers along the way. Much smarter would have been to pick a strong rickshaw driver.

He turned to us and smiled, missing teeth and red-stained gums flashing, "Is Hard Work!"

Were we supposed to respond? We weren't sure.

He repeated, "Is Hard Work!"

It seemed he was going to continue saying this until we said something. Seeing no harm in appreciating his efforts, I replied "Yes, we can see it is very hard work! It is hot!". Marisa nodded in affirmative agreement.

He was too short to properly sit on the seat, probably about 5 feet tall. He was quite skinny, and not very strong. We watched with concern as he stood on the pedals, pushing up and down. He continued to pedal in this standing fashion at a painfully slow 3 miles per hour, his entire body slowly moving up and down.

Hs head turned around again, "Are you married?"

"Yes"

"Do you have children?"

This question comes up a lot in India. We find it strange because we are obviously travelling without children. Perhaps many couples flee to India leaving their children at home, but to us it seems strange. "No, no children!"

"I have three children. I work hard at rickshaw for them for food! This is Hard Work!"

After riding another five minutes interspersed with nearly continuous declarations of, "Is Hard Work!", the driver turned his head again, "Is Hard Work! You try!?!?!"

I took a look at Marisa. I wasn't sure if he was serious. "No, that's ok!"

One minute passed. He turned again, repeated: "Is Hard Work! You try?!?!?!"

Apparently the rickshaw driver really wanted me to drive. I looked at Marisa and whispered, "Should I try it? He seems to want me to since he's asked twice."

"Why not?", she whispered back. Marisa told me later she knew why the driver had asked me to drive, but she encouraged me anyway. Our guide book told us that Indian vendors are very happy to teach tourists their craft, and she wanted me to have a real India experience.

"OK, I'll drive!" I yelled forward to the driver.

The driver stopped. The bicycle rickshaw has a small bicycle seat in front with normal bicycle handles. In the back on two large wheels is mounted a bench seat for two people with a tattered cotton canopy. It is effectively a giant tricycle. I took up a perch on the bicycle seat, and the driver moved to the back with Marisa.

We took off. The driver showed me how to brake and how to use the bell. I rang the bell greedily at the nearest approach of anyone. If there's one thing I've learned in India, it's that using the horn is a requirement for turning, stopping, passing, or simply moving.

At first I was uncertain. I had never pedaled a giant tricycle with two people on the back before, especially on a crowded Indian street filled with pedestrians, bicycles, cows, motorcycles, and the occasional honking, frustrated car.

However, I got the hang of it in less than a minute. The first thing I noticed was that I was pedaling the rickshaw at three times the speed of the professional driver.

He yelled at me, now from behind rather than in front, "Is Hard Work, right!"

I didn't realize at this point that the driver was trying to drum up sympathy for himself. My first thought was, "No, this is quite easy." Marisa and I have rented bikes many times on our trip. Because of her knee, she can't pedal, so we often rent a single bike where she sits on the back above the wheel, or we rent a tandem and Marisa doesn't pedal. I even carted Marisa around on the back of a single bike at 9000 feet elevation near Tibet in China, which was not easy. Even with the additional weight of the driver, this rickshaw was much easier to drive than a normal bike where I had to balance with Marisa's weight.

In any case, to be polite to the driver, I translated from English to Courteous, "Yes! Hard Work! You work hard all day!"

I began to pass other rickshaw drivers. Rickshaw in front, 5s away. I flit my eyes to the right, hit the bell, swerve around, check left, swerve back in. I avoid a cow, big eyes and horns pointed my way.

Again, the driver from the back says, "Is Hard Work!", but amends, "You do good!"

I reply, "We ride a lot of bicycles at home!" I didn't add because it'd be too hard to explain, but I was also very used to running in Indian cities, which requires the same fast reflexes and attention to surroundings as driving the rickshaw.

From 20090411_Varanasi_Starred

I had started to enjoy driving and was looking like I knew what I was doing and having fun. The driver seemed to be disappointed. This was puzzling at first, but later it became clear why.

He indicated he wanted to drive again, so we switched spots, and he pedaled very slooowly for 20 minutes back to our hotel. He went so slowly I thought about getting out and walking beside the rickshaw, to ease the load. Marisa and I discussed it and decided I shouldn't do that because it might embarass him.

When we arrived at the hotel I handed the driver 100 rupees and said, "Can you give me 30 rupees back?" We had agreed on 50 rupees, so this was a 40% tip. We debated over the tip. We felt bad for him but we also didn't want to encourage future disengenous behavior.

"I have no change", he replied, with the scamming-gleam in his eye I've learned to identify in rickshaw drivers.

"What, you have no change?"

"I just started work! I have no change." I looked skeptical, as this is a common tactic for Indian rickshaw drivers. They hope that even though you've agreed on less, their claimed lack of change will cause you to just give them the higher amount out of frustration. He then paused and seeing my skepticisim continued with the justification, "I have 3 children and a family that needs to eat!"

I don't see how that was supposed to be reassuring. If he'd simply asked for a bigger tip, that'd be one thing, but it seemed like he was trying to justify his 'no change' by saying he needed the extra money! I suspected he had rupees in his pocket that he didn't want to show me.

Unfortunately for him, we were well aware of the rickshaw 'no change' scam. By the end of our trip we had 50 ten rupee notes in a giant wad in our backpack. We had plenty of change. I pulled 60 rupees out (10 rupees less than I would have given him if he'd given us change) and handed it to him. He complained again, "I have a family! You don't want to give 100 rupees?"

"We agreed on 50 rupees, so that's a 10 rupee tip." We walked off before we had to argue with him more.

Part of us feels bad we didn't give him more money if he indeed needed it. It's very unsettling to be pulled around by someone else using his muscles. It goes against our egalitarian anti-classist beliefs (which may be a peculiarity of Americans?). (In India, where there's such a huge divide between the rich and the poor, many people seem comfortable with having servants.)

On the other hand, he was a horrible rickshaw driver, he was not upfront about how much payment he expected, and he spent the entire ride trying to guilt us into giving him more than his original quote.

Rickshaw drivers, tour guides, bell captains, etc. often ask foreigners for large tips or demand double/triple the standard rate for their services, because they know it's cheap to Americans. You know you're getting screwed, and generally human instinct tells us to try to not get screwed. On the other hand they have much less to their name than you do, and you can easily afford to pay them more. We grappled constantly trying to reconcile these 2 things while we were in India.

I think if we went back to India, I'd offer the rickshaw drivers double the fare if they let me drive the rickshaw. You pay $15 to rent a bicycle in San Francisco, so it'd still be a steal.

Varanasi, and Good-bye India

2009-04-13T23:34:00.001-07:00

We spent our last 2.5 days in India in Varanasi, the holiest city. Pilgrims come here to bathe in the Ganges River water and cleanse their sins. Elderly people come to Varanasi to die - dying here liberates them from the cycle of rebirth.

The action is centered around the bathing ghats lining the Ganges river. You can walk or boat by the ghats and observe Hindus washing themselves, their clothing, and even their buffalo. A thorough pilgrim may spend several minutes scrubbing each individual finger. The women bathe in their saris for modesty. Kids play in the water. Some people meditate or pray. Hinduism is not a congregational religion, but at Varanasi you can see many Hindus simultaneously worshipping, each in their own way. It has a very spiritual vibe.

People bathing. From 20090411_Varanasi_Starred

Tending to a shrine. From 20090411_Varanasi_Starred

Crowds watching an evening religious ceremony from boats and land. From 20090411_Varanasi_Starred

You can also walk by ghats where bodies are cremated in plain view. All Hindus are cremated, with a few exceptions such as babies or sadhus (holy men). Their ashes are spread in the Ganges river (I'm not sure if this part is a requirement, but it's definitely ideal). Piles of wood are setup, the body (wrapped in cloth) is laid on top and covered with more wood. The eldest son, with a freshly shaven head, assists in the ceremony of lighting the fire. Other family is present, however we did not see anyone crying. It takes about 3 hours and the ashes are given to the family to spread in the Ganges. We saw several cremations. A proper cremation with the right kind of wood and at the right ghat is important, but the fire wood is expensive. Some families must buy a cheaper type of wood, or can only afford enough to partially cremate the body. Alternatively they can cremate the body inside a furnace so it turns to ash faster. The remains are spread in the Ganges as is, even if the body is not fully cremated, and it is possible to see floating body parts from unfinished corpses. I'm not sure whether this is common or rare - we did not see any body parts.

Now that we are about to leave India I wish we could stay a little longer. It took us a few weeks to learn how to judge a local. Is this someone we can trust? Or is this a tourist hawker? There are so many hawkers here. In certain places chances are extremely low that a friendly Indian that greets you is a well-intentioned local. But in other places a lot of friendly Indians approach you with advice because they like to be helpful. If you avoid everyone, you miss out on getting to know people. Another challenge was learning how to ignore the hawkers that follow you for 2 minutes in spite of your repeated attempts to shoe them away. They are very persistent. Ignoring them is also something we got better at towards the end.

It's frustrating you have to make snap judgements about strangers at all. One local who followed us a few minutes said to me when he left, "Madam doesn't trust Indians." It made me cringe. I'm still not sure whether he was a hawker or not, sometimes it's not obvious. It feels wrong to judge and dismiss friendly strangers. Your snap judgement maybe incorrect.

One of the lasting impressions India will leave on me was how in certain situations there is absolutely nothing to be gained by being neurotic. If I'm paying someone for a camel tour or to tailor me a sari, I like to ask detailed questions about how they will provide the service, so that I can be sure I will be happy with the product. Up until now I have always been able to get my questions answered. Even if the provider is slightly annoyed with the questions, he/she will indulge me. In India there are people who simply refuse to answer my questions. They respond to my detailed questions with something like "Madam, you will like the sari very much, trust me," or "We will visit all the places you want to see, I am 15 years in this business and all of my customers are very happy." I'm not sure if people completely ignore my questions because a) there is a language barrier and they don't understand me, b) they want me to relax and not worry, c) they are insulted by my lack of trust in their grand plans for me, or d) they are unaccustomed to answered detailed questions and don't understand why the crazy white girl is making things so complicated. At first this was just irritating. But after awhile I also found it a little bit liberating. If I wanted a sari or a camel tour, I had no choice other than to put myself in the hands of someone I didn't totally trust. It was disconcerting, but it forced me to wrestle with the idea that the consequences of paying a little bit of money for a slightly imperfect sari, tour, etc. are not that bad. And it's nice to let someone else worry about the details every once in awhile.

Feeding the Cows

2009-04-12T23:40:00.000-07:00

Cows can be found on many crowded streets in India. Many of them are not owned by anyone, especially the ones that don't provide milk anymore. They feed on trash or piles of grass. Unfortunately they also shit all over the streets. There are also many pigs, dogs and donkeys. The cows enjoy a privileged status since they are holy in Hinduism.

In Jodhpur there is a large field in the middle of the city where cows go when they stop giving milk and their owners have abandoned them. People pay for cattle feed and go inside and feed the cows. I guess this is like feeding the pigeons in a square, except holier.

On our last night in Varanasi we were really stuffed and didn't want to finish dinner. But we have seen beggars everywhere in India and we didn't want to waste the food. We thought about giving it away to a hungry person, and I asked for the food to-go. I knew the waiter might not understand - in most countries we've been it's unorthodox to package up your food to go. The friendly, cheerful waiter gave us a strange, confused look. Uh oh, we thought. He's going to think we are uncultured Americans. He thought about it for a second, and then said "Oh! You want for to feed the cows!" He then cheerfully fulfilled our request.

Kerala

2009-04-11T09:12:00.001-07:00

We're finally relaxing in Kerala, India. Kerala is a tropical state in the south with ocean, backwater canals, rice fields and dense, green vegetation. It's laid back and tourists are treated with respect.

We spent the first 3 days in Varkala sitting on the beach, recovering from the eventful start to our journey in India. The most interesting thing about Varkala was watching Indians on the beach. The beach was totally divided into an Indian section and a Western section. While the westerners pranced around in bikinis and played in the water, the Indians mostly stood on the beach with their family and friends and looked out at the ocean. A few Indian men got in, and zero women. I don't know how Indians can resist the temptation to rush into the water in the oppressive heat and humidity of Kerala, but they do. I also don't know how they can wear pants and long sleeved shirts while Steve and I are sweating like dogs, but they do.

A fishing village near Varkala. From 20090407_KeralaStarred

Fishing huts near Varkala. From 20090407_KeralaStarred

After Varkala we took a houseboat tour through the backwaters, something Kerala is famous for. The backwaters run through rice fields lined with palm trees and fishing villages. Most of the islands do not have stores or roads. Villagers go everywhere by canoe and ferry. They bathe, brush their teeth, wash their clothes and wash their dishes in the canals. At around 5pm many villages are out front fishing for dinner. During the day many work in the rice fields in the center of the islands. Kerala is often called the rice bowl of India, as well as the land of rice and fish.

Morning commute. From 20090407_KeralaStarred

Fishing for dinner. From 20090407_KeralaStarred

Bath time. From 20090407_KeralaStarred

Loading rice onto a rice barge. From 20090407_KeralaStarred

Then we did a homestay in one of the village islands. We stayed with Thomas, Laurie, and their young daughters Ann and Nina. We ate meals with the family and learned about rice farming, how Indians deal with the heat, etc.

Thomas, Laurie, Ann, Nina, Steve and myself. From 20090407_KeralaStarred

It was very relaxing. Thomas told us sane people don't do anything between noon and 4pm. We were guests in his house, we didn't want to disappoint him, and we wanted to emulate the locals, so we dutifully lounged and read when it got hot. In the cooler hours we walked around the village or went canoeing. Most villagers were extremely friendly when we walked by, flashing us big smiles (big smiles are a Kerala staple). The kids all greeted us, practicing their English phrases ("what is your name?", "what is your country?", "where are you going?" ). Several children gave me flowers, 1 chubby boy even swam up to our canoe to deliver the gift. It was adorable! We felt very welcome and comfortable.

From 20090407_KeralaStarred

These girls gave me flowers. From 20090407_KeralaStarred

We ate with Thomas and his girls. His wife eats after everyone is done, but she hangs around at meal time and we got to talk to her a little bit too. The meals were at very specific times: 8:15am, 1:15 and 8:15pm. There was also tea at 4:30pm. The fixed meal times may help the family to coordinate meals at home, since Thomas works in the field and the girls have to go to school. The lunch was the biggest meal and included 3 different kinds of veggie dishes, 1 curry, and a few tiny fishes (they may have been anchovies). I was in heaven with all the veggies, and everything had coconut in it (yay!). The mango curry was made with mangoes directly from their yard. Their milk comes by delivery every day from a local family with 2 cows - as I mentioned, there are no stores on their island.

Drying coconut in the sun. From 20090407_KeralaStarred

As you may have guessed by their names, Thomas's family is Christian. There are a lot of Christian churches in Kerala. There are also a lot of Muslims, for instance most of the fisherman are Muslim. Of course there are also a lot of Hindus. When we stayed in Varkala there was an all-day-all-night festival going on at a nearby Hindu temple that lasted at least 3 days and featured more lights than an amusement park, elephants, torches, drums and singing. Oddly there weren't that many people at the temple while all of this was going on. Anyway, the music from the proceedings was broadcast on loudspeakers throughout the neighborhood, and in fact we have passed through several neighborhoods where music (what we think is Hindu temple music) is constantly blasted all day. (Some of it may also be political as there is a parliamentary election coming up -- there are even guys driving around with small vans and ridiculously disproportionately big loudspeakers mounted to the top, blasting candidate information and slogans). Another thing we observed is the number of folks who have marks on their forehead which I think only come from visiting a temple - I would say at least 20% of men in Kerala have this on any given day. Religion and daily religious worship seems to be a big part of life here, whether it be Hinduism, Catholicism or Islam (in spite of it being a Communist state, although the only thing that ever made me feel like we were in a Communist state was the fact that every single hotel we stayed in had the exact same soap, whether it was a nice hotel, a midrange hotel or a houseboat).

A mosque at the fishing beach near Varkala. From 20090407_KeralaStarred

A church in the Alleppey backwaters. From 20090407_KeralaStarred

shrimp

2009-04-09T04:50:00.000-07:00

I like to think we have good seafood in California. Marisa and I are fans of seafood. We've been in lots of places with impressive seafood: mexico yucatan and baja, the eastern us seaboard, japan, singapore. We also eat a lot of shrimp, or as some people call them, "prawns". I thought I was familiar with the extent of nature's prawns.

During our houseboat trip in the Keralan backwaters our captain stopped at the side of the river at a random shack. At first I didn't know what it was for, but then I realized it was a fishmonger/seafood shack. The captain was provisioning for our lunch and dinner. I walked up to the fishmonger, and he reached behind him to a white plastic container filled with water. Like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, he pulled an ENORMOUS shrimp out of the water. As you can see in the picture, the thing was as big as my arm. It weighed 1 lb! It looked exactly like the baby monsters in the movie Alien that attach themselves to people's heads. Luckily for us, it was dead. We bought it for $7 for our dinner. It seemed pretty steep, but well worth it for eating the biggest prawn we've ever laid eyes on. (The guy tried to sell us a second one, which would have been the biggest prawn we'd ever seen if we hadn't seen the first one, but 1lb of shrimp meat is enough for the both of us.)

From 20090407_KeralaStarred

Marisa has been making fun of me because I keep talking about the size of the shrimp. I told some German tourists we met at the homestay about it and pantomimed it eating my face off like a head crab in Alien; they at least seemed amused.

As for the Keralan seafood cuisine, in the end I think we were satisfied, although the only extremely impressive aspect was the size of the prawn. We had some great seafood curries. We also had tasty fish fillets grilled with a masala spice rub (we bought some spices to duplicate this at home). Since all we would eat was the fish, you could tell that it was really fresh and tender. (Most restaurants claimed that the fisherman brought the fish in at 1am the previous morning.)

The Taj in Varkala

2009-04-08T08:22:00.000-07:00

From the beginning of our trip we'd been planning to go to either Goa or Kerala in India. They're both known as relaxing places on the beach, and we'd gotten recommendations for both of them. We thought about going to the beach directly after our 18 day tour of China, but at the end we felt ok enough to instead travel through North India straight off. Our 10 day tour of Rajasthan ended on March 31, which meant we'd been traveling for 4.5 weeks, spending on average about 2 nights in each hotel room. It seemed like as good a time as any to head to the beach to relax for at least a few days. We ended up picking Kerala because it sounded less touristey than Goa, and we really wanted to feel like we were getting some peace and quiet.

So, speaking of peace and quiet... You may remember that when our cab driver wouldn't take us to our hotel, we yelled at him to stop at the Taj Palace hotel. We've never stayed in a Taj hotel, but somehow we had known it was a very nice hotel that could be trusted. We also felt that going into the hotel was like going into the green zone. This was partially because we felt so afraid from our taxi ride, and the hotel was a sanctuary, but it was also due to the layout of the hotel entrance: There were concrete blast barriers that required an incoming vehicle to weave back and forth (so it couldn't charge the hotel at high speed). There were guards with big guns lining not only the entrance but the outside wall surrounding the property, they had large wrought iron gates, and the hotel was only enterable via a side road.

It took a week, but eventually we figured out why we knew the taj was a nice hotel: The Taj Palace in Mumbai was one of the targets of the violent 26/11 siege by (alleged) pakistani muslim militants. Since it had been in the news recently, we must have internalized the name of the hotel and knew it was a nice chain. (Note that the Taj we went into was in delhi; the attacked one was in mumbai.) In retrospect, that was probably also the reason why it felt like going into the Green Zone. The hotel in Delhi was extremely fortified to prevent a mumbai-style attack.

There are still constant reports of Pakistani incursions in the Indian news. We did our camel safari in the Rajasthani desert about 100km from the Pakistan border. The day before our camel safari, our driver told us that several hundred Pakistani "Taliban" were rounded up by the Indian Army (and got into firefights?) crossing the desert border into India, presumably in order to carry out terrorist attacks within India. When we were on our safari, I kept joking with the lead camel guy and our driver about how maybe we'll catch some terrorists lost in the desert. They laughed, but I wonder if they were just being polite and it wasn't something I should have joked about.

In any case, I mention all this to give some background into the security feeling in India. I don't think people are paranoid, but definitely many hotels have lots of extra security. People are aware of the potential threat after 26/11, but for the most part it feels safe.

Bearing that in mind, before going to Kerala we arranged 2 nights at a Taj hotel, the "Gateway Garden" in Varkala. It had decent reviews on tripadvisor, and we wanted to stay somewhere we knew would be nice so we could relax and not worry about anything.

On April 1, we went to the Delhi airport and prepared to board our Kingfisher flight to Trivandrum Kerala. Marisa started reading the newspaper, and the frontpage story was... an email originating from Pakistan had been sent to the Taj hotel in Chennai threatening it. There were very few details in the story, but apparently the Taj hotel in Mumbai was also threatened, and all Taj hotels were put on extra security alert. So much for our relaxing stay at the taj in kerala.

We considered just canceling our stay and losing our nonrefundable reservation, so we spent some time talking about it. It seemed like the threat (which wasn't even to this hotel) was pretty ambiguous; we decided that we would go to the hotel to check it out and see what we thought about how risky it was.

We also read quite a bit about the earlier attack in Mumbai. The details were horrific. There were attacks in two hotels. At the Taj the militants rounded people up from all the rooms and specifically took Americans and British citizens hostage. (Although the vast majority of innocent people killed were Indian.) For more than a day, the terrorists were under siege by special Indian counterterrorist forces who engaged in a firefight with the terrorists in the corridors of the hotel until eventually all of them were killed or surrendered.

Our first decision was that if terrorists showed up at our hotel, we would hide our American passports and do our best big lebowski german accent: "Ve are Jerman, not Amerikan! Ja! Ve are von Dusseldorf!"

We had arranged for a driver from the hotel, so he picked us up and dropped us off right at the lobby. The first good sign was that upon arrival we realized our hotel was not even labeled as a Taj hotel. All the signs outside said "The Gateway Hotel". It apparently is owned by the Taj group, but is not fancy enough to merit the "Taj Palace" label. Normally that'd be a disappointment but in this case it seemed to give it a lower profile. We also noticed that there was practically no one else in the hotel, which was a good thing. The terrorists had picked the hotel in Mumbai because it was packed to the gills with rich businessmen, famous politicians, and westerners. We also asked the guy at checkin if he'd heard anything about the terrorist threats on the Taj. He looked a little taken aback (afraid?). He got really quiet and said that he hadn't heard anything about it. (We weren't sure if that meant he was clueless, or if people thought our hotel wouldn't be under threat. We felt a little bad for scaring him.)

We determined that it seemed alright to stay at the hotel. We only had reservations for 2 nights, so we decided we'd move as soon as that was up. As a precaution, we made an effort to always be together when on the hotel property in case something happened, and we also tried to stay off the property as much as possible during the day.

That actually probably had a far more dangerous impact, because in order to stay off the hotel property, our first full day in Kerala we went to the beach and rented a beach umbrella. We stayed there all day under the umbrella reading, and occasionally leaving to swim in the ocean. Apparently the umbrella didn't really filter the sun, because Steve got a moderate sunburn, which is probably higher risk than a terrorist attack anyway.

We've since moved to a much smaller hotel with only 4 rooms, which is not a part of a high profile chain. It's quite nice, is half the price of the Taj, and directly overlooks the ocean.

On a final note, if Steve was a terrorist, he wouldn't attack the taj but would instead invade the north end of the varkala beach, because that's where all the pale brits are. You can't kick a seagull without hitting red sunburnt skin there.

People We've Met In India

2009-04-02T22:54:00.000-07:00

Our driver in Rajasthan, Singh, is most likely the person we will get to know best on this trip. Now that we've finished our Rajasthan tour I thought I'd write a little bit about the people we've met thus far.

Singh is from a village near Delhi and his family has a farm. He went to school for 5 years and then left because it was too expensive (nowadays he wouldn't have been able to leave school this young, but Singh was born around 1973). At age 13 he moved to Delhi with his cousin and got a job cleaning taxis. His family fell on hard times and he had to get married at 14. He didn't want to get married and he has never lived with his wife. He learned all of his English (which is excellent) and French by driving tourists.

Singh had a few favorite subjects, but the most obvious one was the conflict with Pakistan. The closer we got to the Pakistan border, the more it came up. The army occupies the last hundred kilometers before Jaiselmar, and there are jeeps, towers, soldiers, etc. everywhere. After Jaiselmar is a buffer zone the Indian army is not allowed to occupy. Singh didn't really have any strong opinions on the conflict, he just worried about it and wanted peace.

He got a huge kick out of the things people do on the roads in India, e.g. a family of 5 on a motorcycle (4 people on a motorcycle doesn't get much of a response, it's too commonplace), people driving around with a small cow in their car, 12 year old motorcycle drivers, etc.

Singh loved Steve's phone, which has a data plan. He would use it whenever he had the chance, but he had no idea how to use it - imagine how difficult a touch screen phone would be to use if you had never really seen one before. He would spend minutes and minutes figuring out how to navigate to his personal webpage, and I found it frustrating to even watch, but he loved every minute of it. He was a man of incredible patience.

Singh, swapping in his car for a camel. From 20090327_RoopangarhFortJaiselmar_Starred

Another person I can't forget was our tour guide in Jaiselmar, I think his name was Saurab. He seemed like a reasonably friendly guy, and he was a so-so tour guide. While he took us around town he told us about the caste system. Twice he stopped 5 feet away from a fellow Jaiselmar resident and said "See, this person is an untouchable," in such a loud, clear voice it was obvious he was heard by all. I have no idea what was going on through the "untouchable" person's head. I am certain that they heard and understood what Saurab was saying. We read an op-ed that says it is no longer acceptable in middle class India to openly discriminate based on caste, but obviously this isn't 100% true. As a point of reference, the op-ed said India has had a member of the Dalit (untouchable) Defense Minister.

Finally, I got to know the breakfast host at our Delhi hotel a little bit. We bonded over the breakfast food - they had a great variety, including Indian specialties. I asked a lot of questions. The strength of our relationship waxed and waned according to my attire. The first day I wore a knee length skirt. It covered most of my knees and some of my calves, and was not horribly indecent, but I quickly realized after one day of wearing it around that it called for undesired attention. The second day I wore a long, Indian print skirt. The host complemented my skirt warmly, and I was happy. The third day I felt settled into our hotel and wore my soccer shorts. Big mistake. The host was noticeably distant and glanced down at my legs twice (not so much in a perverted way, but in an embarassed way). Sigh.

Kids in India

2009-04-02T22:48:00.000-07:00

We had some free time in the town of Jaisalmer after we returned from our camel trek in the desert, so we decided to take a walk through town. We were tired of tourist sites so we walked through parts of the town we hadn't been through before. Most of the residential streets in the town were dirt or sand and were spackled with poop and rubbish. As we walked we caught a glimpse down a beautiful side street made with pinkish sandstone and similarly colored houses lining it. It appeared immaculately clean, so we decided to walk down it.

It was about 4pm and apparently school was out, because there were gaggles of children on every doorstep. As we'd walk by they'd all gleefully smile and yell, "Hello! Hello! What is your name!" in high pitched voices. In fact many Indian children shout this when they see us, and it must be one of the first things they learn in English in school. Another common one is "Do you have a school pen?" which seems to be the preferred gift. If you ever plan to go to India, bring lots of pens!

At one doorstep a pair of slightly older girls were painting each other's hands and forearms with henna. They smiled and said hello, and the younger one asked if we would take their picture. Marisa snapped a few. Then they asked Marisa if she wanted henna on her hands. That's the second time she's been made that offer, and has also been offered to be dressed with liptstick, tikkas, etc. - they want to make Marisa pretty Indian style.

From 20090327_RoopangarhFortJaiselmar_Starred

At this point a small crowd (10?) of smaller children had gathered around us, as they'd followed us coming down the street. They all started crying, "photo! photo!" Marisa said, "Do you all want to be in the photo too?" They cried, "Yes!" Marisa began trying to corral them all into the photo. This was difficult because some of the younger ones didn't understand that they wouldn't be in the picture if they stood behind someone else. As to the ones that wanted to be in front, they thought the closer they stood to Marisa the better, and then everyone rushed towards Marisa, which also made it hard to fit everyone in the frame.

From 20090327_RoopangarhFortJaiselmar_Starred

We snapped a couple pictures and turned the camera to show them on the display. With Marisa moderating, they passed it around, some of the little ones happily astonished at seeing themselves in the display. With wonder, one of them pointed with a chubby little hand at himself in the image.

One of the bigger boys introduced himself as Praveen and asked if we could send the pictures to them. We said we'd try, so he took our pen and paper and wrote down their address. Praveen was about the size of a first grader though he looked like he was maybe in third grade. His English was excellent, and he was not shy. He seemed related to one of the girls who was doing the henna. When Marisa asked her direct questions, she shly looked away and Praveen spoke for her, even though she was at least 6 years older than Praveen.

As we walked away another gaggle of children asked to have their picture taken. Uh oh. We could see more kids down the road. We took a few more pictures, and turned the corner.

From 20090327_RoopangarhFortJaiselmar_Starred

When we arrived at the next street, a new type of invitation greeted us - a mixed age group of boys playing cricket wanted to knew if we wanted to join in. It was fantastic to feel this welcome after spending all day in the touristy areas where the only people that want to talk to you are people that want your money.

the race

2009-03-30T23:17:00.000-07:00

After 6 days of purging food poisoning by ingesting only water, bottled juice, soup, crackers, and bread, I felt OK enough to go running this morning in Jodhpur. I started off at 8:30am. It felt about 70F, which is cool enough to feel quite pleasant, especially as compared to the normal wilting heat here in the afternoon. (And this is spring, not even summer where we're told it reaches a temperature in celsius that was off our internal celsius fahrenheit conversion chart.)

There weren't that many people out and the streets by our hotel were wider than in many places, so it also felt more open and relaxed than as usual in Indian cities. The streets of Jodphur also feel much cleaner, possibly because there seemed to be fewer animals wandering around. There were, however, still just enough cows, goats, and dogs to leave presents on the street in order to keep things interesting. In India they don't need petting zoos for their children, which in some ways is very nice, except for the ever-present poop.

I ran by a big dusty open field where two impromptu cricket matches were being played simultaneously by rifle-thin men. Despite the heat that was leaving me covered in sweat, they wore nice pants and collared shirts while batting and sprinting around in the dust.

A little while later I was running on the dusty shoulder on the left, with traffic (Indians drive on the left), and I noticed that to my right (in the street) and slightly behind me I could hear the constant low throttle putter of a motorcycle. It was staying with me, rather than passing. It would be flattery to say I am fleet, and in any case I am obviously not fleet enough to really be faster than a motorcycle. It was apparent that I had company.

This has been a fairly common occurrence in both India and China, usually with motorcycles and sometimes bicycles. (I occasionally outrun the slower bicyclists, to my satisfaction.) My interpretation is they simply want to either watch me out of curiosity, and possibly want to know how fast I am going. There is probably also satisfaction in observing the amount of effort going into my running, while they coast along easily. It affirms their superior choice of transportion over that of the crazy westerner.

In this instance, I decided to at least put on a good show for the motorcyclist. Acting like I didn't know he was following me, I refused to look behind me to recognize him and increased my pace to a near sprint. I coasted along for a couple minutes in the heat, building up a good rhythm of breathing, harmonized with the putter of his low cc engine. Finally, satisified or bored, he throttled up the motorbike and jumped past me. At this moment I looked up to glance at the driver.

Helmetless with black hair flowing backward in the wind, the driver was a 12 year old boy. Although his posture on the motorcycle was convincingly adult and professional, he grinned at me with the wide malice-less, almond-eyed smile that all Indian children seem to have. Smiles like that are impossible to resist so despite my effort at running I instantly grinned back. Thankfully, he turned back to watch the road, but as the motorcycle finished passing alongside me I was doubly rewarded with the nearly identical, except for more babyfat, grin of his kid brother. He was no more than 8 or 9 years old and was perched on the back of the motorcycle behind the juvenile driver. The younger brother continued to smile as the motorcycle sped off down the street.

(We've seen a number of kids driving motorcycles here. Our driver assures us it's illegal, but that if the police caught the kids they would at most only go yell at the parents. There are at first many things on Indian roads that give us a double-take, but you quickly no longer even notice them unless you're paying close attention: a woman in a beautiful sari walking along the road dragging a moping small child behind her in one hand and carrying a massive pickaxe in the other hand, a man rolling like a log along on the road surface to a temple out of devotion, the presence of large quantities of every variety of domesticated animal often directly on the road, carts carrying loads of straw that look impossibly 4 or 5 times the actual size of the cart, wagons hitched up to camels, cars nonchalantly going the wrong way down a multi-lane highway, etc.)

Nice Shoes

2009-03-30T01:11:00.000-07:00

Before we left on our trip, I bought new running shoes. (It was actually the day before. I like to keep things interesting.) I bought a relatively modestly priced pair of Asic's; I think they were about $100, which is worth paying for me because I do so much running. If I try to skimp I end up paying a visit to the doctor, wondering why my leg has a fracture in it.

On our trip I've worn the shoes every day for both running and walking around, and they've worked out great. Usually in SF I wear slightly hipper adidas flats, but we packed light so I didn't bring them. I don't really care about being that stylish, especially when I'm traveling.

One thing we've noticed about India is how well dressed people are. Even the poorest people often seem to have nicely starched button down shirts and long pants. Maybe it's because they're too skinny from not enough food, but they usually look lanky and quite nice in their brightly colored clean clothes. (even as they dodge huge piles of feces on the street) It makes me feel pretty unpresentable, with my hot-weather REI hiking pants/shorts and my running shoes. I've taken to wearing long pants, despite the heat, so I don't stick out as much. (which may be pointless given my other obvious differences in appearance)

Indians tend to wear sandals, but many people do wear nice leather-looking shoes. Their shoes seem much nicer to me than my running shoes. I'd wear such shoes with a nice outfit or a suit.

To my surprise, when I walk around, little children in nice looking clothes say to me, "Nice Shoes!" I've heard that at least 3 or 4 times. Given my already present concern about feeling underdressed, at first I thought they were making fun of my running shoes. However, Indian children have this adorably innocent way of smiling at you (perhaps unlike in the US, where children are told not to talk to strangers). It's hard to think the children are being mean. Also, when we went on our camel trek, Marisa noticed that the little Indian boy helping her camel spent the entire time, a couple hours, staring at my shoes, which he was fascinated by.

Why would they be fascinated by my shoes?

It took me awhile to figure it out and was confirmed by queries to our driver. The explanation is kind of depressing: The black/brown dress shoes that Indians wear are very cheap to buy, even though they look nice. My name-brand Asic's, which I consider to be "moderately priced", are quite expensive shoes for any Indian to buy. To those kids, my running shoes are "nice shoes", probably nicer than the handmade dress shoes most people here wear.

On a side note, the other thing Indian kids say to me is "Ali Baba! Ali Baba!" Ali Baba is apparently a figure in a children's story who has a goatee beard, ostensibly similar to mine. I stay good humored about it. A 15 year old Indian kid started talking to me at a temple, probably to practice his English. After going through the usual English lesson repertoir of "What is your name", "Where are you from", he complimented me on my beard, to which I replied knowingly, "Yes! Like Ali Baba!" He laughed, "Yes", and repeated, "Like Ali Baba."

India?

2009-03-29T17:51:00.000-07:00

I've tried writing a blog post a few times about our experiences so far in India, but I can't collect my thoughts. It's been very fast paced and we've seen and experienced many intense things. Here is a slightly random list of a few of our highs and lows.

We've been mostly in Rajasthan and Delhi. Delhi is not that great for sightseeing or hanging out. However we spent an afternoon in Raj Path, the park near the government offices. We lounged around in the heat along with the locals, and walked around the nearby politician houses which were heavily guarded and had beautiful, big, grassy yards. Delhi is very green (at least compared to China) and it made us feel relaxed.

From 20090321_Delhi_Starred

Rajasthan is a state in India with a stunning concentration of important and beautiful historical sites. We've seen the Taj Mahal, Amber Fort in Jaipur, Fatehpur Sikri, and the Jaiselmar fort. All of these sites have a lot of Muslim design, were very expensive to build, and were important historically. The pictures may express their beauty and scale better then I could write (although my pictures don't do justice to these sites, which are all top notch).

The Taj Mahal. From 20090324_AgraTajMahalRedFortFatehpurSikri_Starred

The mosque at Fatehpur Sikri. From 20090324_AgraTajMahalRedFortFatehpurSikri_Starred

A mirrored palace at Amber Fort. From 20090325_Jaipur_Starred

Jaiselmar fort from a distance. From 20090327_RoopangarhFortJaiselmar_Starred

In Rajasthan you also see many things Westerners have come to expect of India - women in beautiful, brightly colored saris; animals of all kinds (camels, elephants, donkeys, goats, buffalo) on the roads; cars next to rickshaws, next to men pushing fruit carts, next to camels pulling carts of wood, all packed in side-by-side on a tiny road.

From 20090324_AgraTajMahalRedFortFatehpurSikri_Starred

From 20090325_Jaipur_Starred

Jaiselmar is a city built entirely out of Jaiselmar sandstone, so it's the same color as the surrounding desert, it's built on a small plateau, and it appears to emerge from the desert. It's beautiful. We did a mini camel safari here, and a tour of nearby villages. The village women were constantly at the wells drawing water. They lived in houses made of dung that have to be rebuilt every year after the monsoon. The women were always immaculately dressed in bright saris (it's apparently easy to snap the dust out of saris). Rajasthani women are said to have a hard life - they draw water from the wells in the morning, work in the fields during the day, and come home and cook at night.

From 20090327_RoopangarhFortJaiselmar_Starred

There are many unhappy sights in India as well. It goes without saying that there is a great deal more poverty in India than in the US. There are a lot of child beggars. There are many skinny, frail-looking people here. There are many crowded streets in Agra, Jaipur, etc. with animal and human feces all over the street. A significant number of men here are crippled from polio or for other reasons.

We got some first hand experience with an Indian doctor (that's a horrible segway, but I don't have words to tie up the previous paragraph). I was suffering various side effects from anti inflammatories and my home doctor wanted me to see someone here. Seeing the Indian doctor was quite similar to seeing a doctor in the states, and he used to work at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. He charged me $30 for the visit and my perscription medication was $2. Aside from the price the care was comparable to my American medical care and medical tourism is popular in India.

Dr. Chawla's office in Delhi. aFrom 20090321_Delhi_Starred

The problem with the above doctor was that he failed to mention that the medication he gave me increased my risk of diarrhea. Everyone I know who has been to India has had food poisoning. Nothing could have prepared me for our first 10 days. I had 10 consecutive days of diarrhea and stomach pains, probably due more to the medicine than India. Then Steve and I both ate an old paneer (cheese) dish that put us both in bed for a day and I vomitted 4 times. But it gets worse. Just when Steve got his appetite back, he got sick AGAIN from an old mutton kofta dish. He vomited 4 times.

Figuring out how things work here is incredibly difficult here because it's so different than the states. For instance I've felt sick and I've been hoping for a supermarket where I could find some reliable packaged food (i.e. well preserved food) that won't make me sick. But there are no supermarkets and there is very little packaged food. The limited packed food is sold in tiny stalls. (I suppose this means people eat mostly fresh food here, however Steve and I are learning first hand why food preservatives were invented in the first place). Wi-fi is uncommon here, and that makes trip-planning difficult. We can't find a good website for cheap Indian airline fares, which maybe because most Indians don't have internet at home. Finding flights to Kerala has taken us about 3 hours whereas in the states it would take about 30 minutes.

the god of small scams

2009-03-26T04:22:00.000-07:00

In India, something like 35% of the population lives on less than $1 per day. China is higher but still similar. Keeping that in mind puts in perspective the hundreds of small scams we've encountered every day. What for us is a small amount of money to be scammed out of, for an Indian might be an entire day's, week's, or year's wages.

For instance, in China the taxis were regulated in all the cities we visited, so you paid exactly what the meter said. However, we often wanted to take smaller autorickshaws or even bicycle-cabs, which were not regulated. We'd always be surprised because the unregulated autorickshaw or bicycle driver would quote a price to us that we knew from experience was double that of a real volkswagen or hyundai taxi cab. He'd often have a seeming gleam in his eye. He'd make us suckers and perhaps earn himself a nice extra amount of money. The extra amount of money would often be the equivalent of $1 or less (for a total fare of $2). To take a taxi anywhere in San Francisco is always at least $5. The irony is that probably we looked like ignorant suckers to the drivers, but $1 just isn't enough to get all worked up for us, especially since the final fare is still 30% what you'd pay in any big city in the US. Plus, the rickshaws had much better views of the city than a normal cab, and since Marisa has trouble walking long distances, they were great for us to see lots of things. We didn't mind paying the little extra westerner tax.

The same thing goes for bargaining for all kinds of other things, like souveneirs at the market and necessities. For example, today in India a little kid tried to sell us water. I asked him how much, and he said, "50 rupees!" I countered, "come on. 15 rupees." What a little entrepreneur: Usually it costs 15 rupees. All he did was go and buy bottled water somewhere and carry it in a big plastic bag to the tourist site to sell. He offered back 20 rupees. I started to walk away, so he quickly accepted my 15. I gave him 20 and told him to keep the change because I was impressed with how he was hustling to carry the water around, if not by his honesty.

With all that as background, we have a story to share about our first 2 hours in India. Before coming to India we were warned by practically everyone to be on our guard about the scams. Our India coworkers warned us (in a more subtle way) about hustlers overcharging us.

Fellow travelers we met in China who had been to India warned us in particular about the taxi cabs at the airport. They told us how you need to take an official taxi, and that the airport guy will write the taxi number on a slip. One of them said that when they went to the taxi line, the taxi's number didn't match their slip and the guy kept trying to get them into his cab, but eventually they found their properly assigned cab, despite the first driver repeatedly claiming he was the right cab. We also read the taxi section in the book, which basically said the same thing and insisted that you need to go to the Delhi Traffic Police booth in order to get a proper taxi. Before getting off the plane we read more of the Delhi safety section. Even though there were two of us, we read the dire warnings in the book to single female travelers. It said to never get in a taxi with more than one man, and to make a big show of handing the taxi receipt to the police officer at the taxi line in the airport.

Our flight to Delhi left Beijing at 8pm and arrived in Delhi at 1:50am local time. It was effectively even later for us because we had been adjusted to Beijing time. Marisa had barely slept on the plane, and I had gotten at most a couple hours of fitful sleep. We were quite tired, but in a way we were lucky. Most travelers from the States to India go directly with a stopover in an airport somewhere in Asia, so the trip ends up being an exhausting 30 hours or something ridiculously similar for many people. This reduces them to even more bumbling morons than we were. For instance, Marisa had to explain to a very tired passenger the simple logical conclusion that if he and his wife sat in separate rows, they wouldn't be able to sit together, but if they sat in the same row, they would. He looked awestruck at Marisa's profound intelligence and decided to sit in the same row as his wife.

Even though we had more presence of mind than people direct from the States, we were still not at our best. We got our bags and cleared immigration and customs. Before exiting the baggage area, we went directly to the Delhi Traffic Police booth and told them where we wanted to go. One of the guys first said 200 rupees ($4), but quickly the second guy at the booth said "no, no, it's 250!". I assume this was the Westerner tax kicking in -- charging us an extra $1.We asked them if we could use US Dollars as we didn't have any rupees, but they said no, and that we needed to go out of the baggage area to the ATM. We asked if we could come back in once we got money, and he said something that sounded like an affirmative, but many Indians don't speak English well, so we weren't sure if he understood.

As we left the baggage area to the outer part of the airport, a small man (maybe 5'3 or 5'4 and really skinny) ran up to us and offered to help. We'd already read all about the hucksters who offer to help you in India (this is less common in China), so we told him we didn't need help. Marisa and I argued about where the ATM was briefly, and he 'helped' by pointing it out. We went to the ATM and he followed us and stood outside the ATM booth, which was more annoying than worrisome. After we left the ATM, we saw that there was a second Delhi Traffic Police stand outside of the arrivals area. We walked back over to where we had seen the first booth, but there were guards with shotguns standing by the entrance. Because we preferred to go back in to the seemingly safer people we had already talked to, I asked the guards if we could re-enter. They didn't seem to understand, but the little guy who had been following us around 'helpfully' told us we couldn't and pointed us to the Delhi Traffic Police booth that was outside the guarded area. We had already seen that, and the logo and uniformed person looked exactly the same as the other booth. We also noticed that there was a line of Indian-looking people waiting at it, which indicated it was probably legit. We decided to go to the new booth.

At the new booth the guy quoted us 320 rupees. We told him the people inside had said 250 (and remember, the initial price was 200). After some arguing in which he used our ingorance against us (probably), he told us that 'these are nighttime rates, I don't know why they told you less inside.' It was now past 2am (later on our Beijing time). The extra 70 rupees was exactly $1.20 and didn't seem worth arguing about when all we wanted was bed, so we agreed. Small scams.

To our surprise, when we paid, the guy at the booth told us to go with the little guy who had 'helped' us as we emerged from security. Assuming now that he was legitimate, I looked at him and tried to smile and make up to him for being a jerk and ignoring him earlier. Marisa is every vigilant and was still on her guard, though, and asked the booth guy why he didn't write the taxi number on our receipt. He said something about how they don't do that anymore. As I will explain, in hindsight we should have trusted Marisa's instinct. Marisa and I discussed it very briefly, but I thought it was plausible they might have a different procedure now, so we decided to go with the guy, especially since everyone had told us we should use the Delhi Traffic Police booth, which is supposed to be safe.

The airport signage said something about going out a specific exit, B2. Funnily enough I still remember that message, but I don't remember if the little guy lead us out that exit or not. In retrospect, I now assume he did not. He led us out an exit into an area that was nothing like any airport taxi collection area I'd ever seen. It was our first view of India, and it was pretty bad. It was extremely dusty. There was what might have been an airport circling road, but it was nearly in the dark, and we waited on the side of a road in the dim lighting with the guy. There was no sidewalk. There was no obvious queue for a taxi and no signage about where to stand, and no police officers around.

At this point I was already 50% suspicious. This didn't seem like a taxi line, but I and Marisa had no idea what a taxi line would look like at an Indian airport at nearly 3am in the morning. The airport seemed busy enough with international flights arriving, so in hindsight we should have known that there would still be a real taxi line. I would normally have been more concerned for our safety at that point, but the guy was so little (maybe this is part of the scam and is intentional) that he wasn't that imposing. Also, there was a group of about 5 Westerners also waiting on the dirt shoulder of the road. I assumed they were also waiting for taxis, but then a big charter bus pulled up and picked them up. After that we were alone with the little guy for a couple minutes, but then a white van-like car pulled up. Marisa thinks she remembered a Delhi Traffic Police taxi sticker on the van, so it looked semiofficial. At this point maybe if we hadn't been so tired or knew a tiny bit more about Delhi, we could have given in to our suspicions and checked with someone else at the airport that this was actually the taxi line. Instead we just assumed it was normal and got into the taxi.

To our further surprise, the little guy got in the taxi with the driver. Again Marisa was more suspicious than I, because the book said that single women should not go in a taxi with two men. We were not a single woman, obviously, but still it seemed odd that there would be two people in the taxi. Marisa whispered this to me in the back, but probably stupidly we decided to stay in the taxi.

For that reason we started off in the taxi completely nervous. The little guy started to make chitchat with us. He seemed friendly enough, but he asked a lot of questions about us, and we let it slip that it was our first time in India. Translation: We are ignorant and you can scam us. He continued to make chitchat which made me feel a little better, although his demeanor in retrospect was a little strange/distant. Maybe he was just trying to get information from us. We also didn't get to feel much more comfortable for another reason: The driver's driving was completely insane. We of course had heard many stories about how crazy driving is in India, so we weren't sure if it was normal or not. It certainly felt unsafe to us (driving 100 kmh down a city street), but we had no idea what to expect. Now that we've been in several cabs and have had more time in India, the guy's driving still seems crazy.

Another weird thing was that they got off the freeway. They claimed they did that because the freeway was clogged with transportation trucks (which it was), and they explained that after midnight the trucks are allowed on the freeway. That seemed like a plausible explanation, but it added to our suspicion. As they got nearer the city we were stopped at a police checkpoint. At this point things seemed OK since they seemed to be taking us in the right direction. Even though they got off the freeway, we hadn't entered really seedy neighborhoods or anything (we'd passed nice government buildings and some nice hotels). I had been paying very close attention to the streets because we were worried they might be taking us somewhere to rob us. However, given all that we'd read in the book, I got out of the car and made a big show of walking around until the policemen at the checkpoint saw me. I also saw that the driver and the little guy noticed the policemen see me at the checkpoint. I assumed that would diminish the change they would do something horrible to us if the police knew Westerners were with them (so we couldn't later go missing).

The little guy called someone on his phone. The conversation was in Hindi, but I heard the words 'Connaught Place' in the conversation, which is where we were staying. I guessed he was calling for directions, or maybe just telling someone where they were going.

Things continued to seem OK as they drove to Delhi, although the driver's driving continued to be nerve-rattling. A few minutes later Marisa saw a sign for Connaught place pointing right, and we went left. She asked them "That sign said connaught place! Why are we going in the other direction?" They told her, "Do not worry, Madame! Connaught place is very large. This is all Connaught Place." We were ignorant, so we had no reason not to believe them. Still, Marisa was very suspicious, and this also made me more suspicious. A few minutes after the sign, we asked them what the nice gardens were to our right, and they told us it was the President's house. We were still in a nice area.

In retrospect, I don't know why it did not occur to either of us to read about connaught place and delhi in the book as we drove to get a better feel for whether what they were telling us was true. I think we were too tired. I did have the presence of mind to turn on my phone and open up my gps application. I had no data plan access, but I could at least track our path to get a feel of the direction they were taking us in. I remember thinking all that as we drove, but somehow I never even activated the tracking. (I thought I did, but the next day when I checked there was no track.)

A few minutes later (now well after 3am), the little guy told us we were almost there. (By now it had become apparent the driver did not speak English.) The neighborhood looked a little less nice, but not horrible. We had been staying in small hostels, so it seemed conceivable to me that we could have a hotel in such a neighborhood. At this point the driver started going much slower. The little guy told us, "Your hotel is in that area, but the streets are closed off." From the car we could see that the streets had chains going across them to prevent cars driving in. (This didn't look dangerous -- they were the sort of chains you often see in neighborhoods that close off car traffic.) The little guy continued, "We will drive around to the other side to see if it's open there." The other side was also chained off. They made a big show of driving around more of the neighborhood to show that it was all chained off, called someone on the phone, and finally told us there was no way in.

At this point we had a bit of an argument between Me, Marisa, and the little guy. I asked if it was safe enough to just get out of the car and walk to the hotel, but Marisa wasn't comfortable with that at 3am in the morning (which was probably good judgment), and the little guy agreed that it wasn't safe. He asked if we had a number to call the hotel at. Marisa had the printout from expedia, but for some stupid reason expedia didn't include the phone number of our hotel. It did have the exact address in Delhi. We weren't too careful about checking for the number because we have stayed in literally hundreds of hotels and have never had a problem with a cabbie finding our hotel before. I asked if he could call information, but he said (or pretended) that there is no number for information in India. Marisa said that we didn't care if it costs money, that we would pay. I thought this was a pretty subtle move on Marisa's part that left it open to them to take an additional bribe to take us to our hotel. They could have responded by saying, "Oh, sure, we'll call information, but it'll be 500 rupees". I would have gladly paid if it meant we would get to our hotel, as 500 rupees is only $10. However, his response was very scary because he raised his voice a little and said, "Lady, look, you have no number, I can't find out how to get in if you have no number!" If he didn't want more money, what we did they want? We asked him, "Isn't there anyone you can call or an information place where we could get the number for the hotel?"

At this point he suggested, "We will take you to tourist information center to call your hotel." We agreed to that because we didn't know what else to do, although I think at that point we were both 99% suspicious. What sort of cabbie can't find a mid-quality hotel in a major city, if he's given the exact address? After this as we drove we tried to pay attention as closely as possible, because we were paranoid about them taking us somewhere dangerous.

Our paranoia was richly rewarded with real world confirmation. Within a few minutes they pulled up to a very small one storey building that had a seedy sign out front saying something like, "India Travel Agency". It was very dimly lit in a dark driveway off a small street. There was a tiny greenish fluorescent glow coming from inside the window and low wattage lights underneath the outside sideboard, but otherwise no lighting. It wasn't clear anyone was even in there. It's one of those places where the one forlorn and dirty plastic palm tree decoration makes it looks less instead of more welcoming. This didn't seem like the promised "Tourist Information Center". At this point Marisa and I were damn sure we weren't going to get out of the car. (We agreed while whispering with each other in the back.) I think we had both read about the shady indian "travel agencies" that try to scam westerners out of money, so it seemed pretty obvious why we were there, although we didn't know how the scam would play out exactly.

I was also worried about physical danger, especially because at this point the driver got out and opened my door. I was sitting behind the driver, so the seat in front of me was now vacant. The little guy who spoke English was sitting in front of Marisa, so now the driver was standing to my side, and the little guy was in the front seat to my other side. They were surrounding me. I had to lean back to keep both of them in my field of vision as I sat in the car, which I needed to do because I was afraid they might try to hurt us. I'm not sure what I would have done if the taller driver had done something. I was worried that if he tried something and I had to defend myself, then that would leave the little guy alone in the car with Marisa.

Anyway, the little guy told us we should get out of the car and go into the office to call our hotel. We told him, "We're not going inside there." He insisted to us that we should go in and get them to call our hotel, "Look, this is tourist information office. Go in and they will call your hotel." Since I was half-facing the taller driver who was standing near me with the car door open, I directed my response to him, "We're not going in there." The guy grunted at me and said, "I don't speak English", and the little guy repeated angrily that the driver didn't speak English.

I can't remember exactly what happened next in the dialogue, but we basically argued about whether we should go into the stupid travel agency. They kept insisting we get out but finally stopped when I said, "We are not going in there. Please take us to the police station. We will find out from them where the hotel is or get another cab."

The little guy claimed that he didn't know where a police station was. I had been paying close attention during the drive and was sure I had seen a police station (because its presence made me feel better), but being completely ignorant of Delhi I had no way of describing where it was. In hindsight I don't know why we didn't think to ask them to simply call the police and ask them where the nearest station was. Instead we asked them to just take us to another hotel, but they told us that the way to get a hotel is to go into the travel agency, which we did not want to do. Marisa (I think) finally had the fantastic idea of just telling them to take us back to the airport. At least we knew the airport was safe, and they couldn't pretend they didn't know the way to the airport since they had just driven us from there!

Since we'd made it clear we weren't going to get out of the car, the driver slammed the door and got back into the car really angrily and took off in a huff towards the airport. He drove even faster than before, at more than 100kmh down normal city streets. They seemed extremely agitated and were muttering to each other in Hindi.

As I mentioned, I had been paying careful attention as we drove from the airport, so I knew that there had been several very nice five star hotels along the way. I saw one of hotels and asked them to stop, but they were driving so fast (100kmh) that they had already zipped by it. The little guy said, "Sir, you do not want to stay at that hotel because it's too expensive." I repeated that we wanted to get out, and he said again "It's too expensive!" I didn't tell them this, but I didn't care about staying there. I just figured that a 5 star hotel would be able to find us a taxi that wasn't driven by scam artists.

I knew the second hotel was coming (The Taj Palace), and they zipped by it too as we told them to stop. I hope they simply intended to return us to the airport and weren't going to do anything else. Up to that point they were certainly retracing the route they had taken earlier. However, since we were nearly powerless, I wasn't sure where they were going to take us, I was ready to reach around the seat and start bashing the little guy's head against the window until they stopped the car. I was pretty afraid for our safety. As they passed the second hotel Marisa and I started yelling at them at the top of our lungs "STOP THE CAR STOP THE CAR". The little guy incredulously said, "here?" and we kept yelling, "YES RIGHT HERE RIGHT AT THIS INTERSECTION RIGHT HERE STOP THE CAR".

I'm not sure how we got them to stop, in retrospect, as they seemed determined not to let us out. Maybe the yelling finally scared them enough to let us out. They had driven a full 1/4 a mile down the road from the sign for the Taj Palace, so we felt pretty vulnerable. I was also afraid they'd drive off but had the presence of mind to insist Marisa get out before I got out so she wouldn't be trapped in the car with them. We quickly grabbed our bags. (We have two small backpacks and two big backpacks. They're bulky but easy to grab in a rush, luckily.) At this point the little guy asked us for our taxi stub. It didn't have his taxi number on it anyway, and since we were a ways from the hotel and still seemed to be in danger, it seemed best to just give him whatever he wanted. In hindsight, I'm pretty sure he needed that stub in order to claim our 320 rupee fare from the Delhi Traffic Police. I can't believe he had the gall to demand that from us. Psh.

Before they managed to drive off, we quickly memorized their license plate number (we later sent a complaint to the delhi traffic police. We read online that the police physically beat drivers who play at scams like this. heh.). Since we were still afraid, we half-ran half-walked for 5 minutes down the road to the Taj Palace hotel front. It was all barricaded, so we had to walk another 5 minutes to the side entrance. Entering the security gates at the Taj felt like what I imagine it would have felt like to enter the Green Zone in Baghdad. It was a huge sigh of relief. The doormen were really friendly and held the door for us, the porters carried our bags even after we told them we weren't guests and simply wanted to talk to the concierge. We explained to the concierge what happened, and he was horrified and apologetic for India, but not really surprised. He asked us if we wanted a room there (which I assume we would have paid for), but we said no, that we were wondering if he could just arrange a reliable cab to take us to our hotel.

We got in the Taj taxi, and less than 10 minutes later we were at the doorstep of the Hans Hotel, where we were staying. As we arrived, we realized it was in a completely different neighborhood from where the crazy taxi had taken us when they claimed the road was closed to our hotel. It was in a nice 20+ story building which looked nothing like where they had taken us, and was in a much nicer part of town. We asked our taxi driver if it was possible that the previous guys could not have known where the hotel was, and the new driver thought that was ridiculous. He also told us that we should have only paid 200 to 250 rupees, not 320.

We finally got to our room around 4am, and had some things we needed to take care of and were too worked up to sleep until 5am. I was very very pissed off that the scammer taxi had wasted so much of our time, when all we wanted to do was get off our stupid redeye flight and go to bed. We were obviously relieved we were safe, though. I would have willingly paid more money to avoid that hassle and the fear. At that point, we also had no idea how much money they would have gotten from dropping us off at the travel agency, so maybe they put us through all that just in the hopes of getting a couple extra bucks (which might be a lot for them, but not much for us).

Later we read more about these types of taxi scams online and in a section of our book that we'd missed earlier and also from talking to legit Indians in the travel business. Apparently if you do go into the shady travel agency to call your hotel, the agent only pretends to call the hotel. You are connected to another scam artist who pretends to be that hotel, and who informs you that your reservation wasn't held, and that you'll need to seek new accommodation. At that point the helpful 'travel agent' sets you up in a crappy hotel where you are charged $100 a night for a room that normally costs $5. Evidently the taxi drivers would have gotten a commission on that huge profit, but we still don't know how much money they would have gotten. We were told repeatedly by Indians that we were not in any physical danger, and that these people are just trying to scam money out of us. Our taxi drivers never threatened us physically, although like I explained, we both did feel in danger.

After the experience we felt pretty crappy about India the next day. (which only started 3 or 4 hours later, since we went to bed at 5am, and we wanted to get up at a proper time ) We almost wanted to stay in the hotel all day, but instead forced ourselves to explore parliament and the public building area. We actually had a great time, and it was a nice relaxed way to start to feel better about India. We sat in the park outside the parliament house, read about Delhi, and relaxed.

It was also a great intro, because since then we have never fallen for any major scam, as far as I can tell. We're very careful about everything. (For example, checking many references for the driver we hired and the agency we hired him through.) There are still scams everywhere. We went to the government of India travel office to get recommendations for a driver agency. While looking for the government office, we were directed by maybe 10 different people within 5 minutes to several different tourist offices that they claimed were the government office. Presumably if we'd gone there we would have been directed to crappier drivers and tour groups that got kickbacks from those tourist information offices. Luckily for us, we're pretty sensible usually (when we're not tired after a long flight), and we had the proper address and knew where to go to get to the right office.

I hope the long saga above doesn't make people think we hate India. To be honest, we did hate India for about 12 hours, but our time since then has been great. We'll hopefully write more about that soon.

interesting fellow travelers in china

2009-03-21T19:51:00.001-07:00

We have traveled to other countries where we didn't speak the language before, but China has probably been one of the hardest to communicate in, both because less Chinese people know English (although the English seemed to be about as good as in Japan), but also because we were often traveling without anyone who knew both English and Chinese. (In Japan we were often with friends who knew both languages and thus were a huge help.)

One of the downsides of traveling to a country where few people speak English is we don't feel like we got to know many Chinese people. It is also quite stressful, especially if you aren't with a Chinese speaking person, because you can't communicate with anyone without great difficulty. The difficulty is usually not insurmountable, but it often requires creativity. We have mastered pointing, the primal affirmative grunt, counting with fingers, and more complex miming and gesticulating. How do you tell the food stand guy you want a specific type of soup, but without the green peppers on top because they've probably been washed with tap water that will make you sick, and that you only want one bowl of it, even though there are two of you? (Answer: You point at someone else's bowl that's nearby, hold up one finger and put your hand over the bowl of green stuff before he can add it to your soup, and then wait for him to hold up the number of fingers of yuan you owe.)

I have now even greater respect for immigrants who move to a land where they don't speak the language.

This naturally leads to one of the upsides, which is that it's safe to assume that anyone who is non-east-asian (which usually means caucasian/western in china) is your friend, or at least is willing to talk to you. Marisa is a little more talktative than me to new people, but we're both fairly reserved. When traveling in China, though, we found that we were not nearly as reserved because when you find someone you can talk to you have to jump on the opportunity. We've met a number of interesting people on our journey so far.

Of course nobody can be bucketed perfectly, but Steve likes to stereotype people. Here is an exhaustive list of fellow traveler types:

1.) The pre-real-life student or recent-student: This person (or group of people) is typically under 25 and has just finished a degree, may have worked one or two years to save up money after a degree, or might still be a student (often a graduate student, since they have time on their hands to take off and do nothing for a month). This person usually seems to be trying to get his traveling in before taking on real responsibilities. They're often traveling for a long time, e.g. an entire year. These people (especially those who have not worked at all yet) are shocked at the idea that someone would take a $4 cab ride because that's how much they spend each night in their shared dorm housing. Spending $22 on a private room with your own bathroom is a grievous waste of funds.

2.) The eternal student/career-less traveler -- This is a little hard to distinguish from Type 1 (and in fact may be a later stage of Type 1, except that sometimes you encounter people who claim to be students but are >30 years old and spend 4 months each year traveling and have been in school for 10 years. They are usually lucky enough to be from countries that subsidize their education. They don't like to talk about what they'll do 'after school' or at least have not put much thought into it.

3.) The hostel bum -- This is the drunk guy in the bar who bends everyone's ear and seems to have been living at the hostel for years. One wonders how he's paying for it, but at $3/night for a hostel dorm room, $60,000 in savings would last you until you die. China is cheap. Type 3 may be a natural progression from Type 1 and Type 2.

4.) The working professional: Often this person is European, because Europeans get many more weeks of paid vacation a year than Americans (sometimes >5), so they can travel for months at a time. Marisa and I are sorta in this category, except we're taking an unpaid leave. These people can vary in age from 20s to 50s. You could imagine, depending on how disenchanted they are with work, Type 4 may become Type 3.

5.) Retirees: Surprisingly enough, there is a sizable contingent of retirees who stay at 'youth' hostels. It probably requires a little more energy and courage than taking a tour group.

With that said, here's a few people we'd like to remember from our journey in China:

Awhile back in our description of the great wall, we joked about a group of people who we assumed to be russian based on their language and their amusement at buying commie (soviet star) fur hats. (Marisa thought they were finnish, steve thought they were russian.) It turns out they were Polish-Canadian, so we're not sure who was right. (Marisa argues she was closer to being right because they were from a soviet satellite country. I'm not sure if that counts. Was Finland actually in the warsaw pact?) Amazingly enough, the Poles ended up paralleling our journey for more than a week. After the great wall in Beijing, they stayed at the same hostel as us in Pingyao, which was a full 12 hour journey from Beijing. After that, they stayed at the same hostel as us in Xi'an, which is another 6 to 9 hour journey from Pingyao. Not surprisingly, they had the same Lonely Planet book as us, which recommended all this stuff.

We traveled on different days, but ended up having a good time in the hostel bar with them at Xi'an, and they gave us tips about traveling to India, which they'd been to in a previous trip. Another coincidence was we discovered that one of them had been offered a job at Google but turned it down! (This came up in conversation because he was talking about how he didn't ever want to work for a big company again.) These people were sorta Type 4 (working professionals) but were far more interested in talking about their 3 months of traveling they managed to do each year than what they do for a living.

We have a great example of the kind of bonding that comes from finding someone else who can actually speak English. In Chengdu we wanted to go out for hotpot. Hotpot is where they put a boiling broth in the middle of your table on a gas burner, and you drop your own ingredients in to cook it. Sichuanese hotpot is knowng for being very good and also quite spicy. We took a auto-rickshaw to a restaurant area and simply walked to the hotpot restaurant with the most people.

Unfortunately they didn't have an English or a picture-based menu. When the waitress seated us she got very confused by our questions, and it was impossible to order. She next did what we found is a common coping strategy to overcome the language difficulty in China: she found a Chinese *customer* in the restaurant who was eating at a table with some white people, under the assumption that he could translate. She brought this guy over to us, and he started to translate, but then he just said, 'WHY DON'T YOU JUST JOIN US?!??!?! I AM EATING WITH CANADIAN AND FRANCE PEOPLE!' (This particular fellow was very enthusiastic and friendly, although that seems to be fairly normal for Chinese.) After he insisted we wouldn't be imposing, we thought this was a great opportunity, so we went over to sit with them. It turned out that the Chinese guy was in town from Shanghai and was staying at a hostel (not ours), and had just met the Canadian and the Frenchman at the hostel, and they'd all decided to go out to dinner together, so we were at least not unwelcome intruders since they'd all just met each other.

We had fairly nice conversation (for people who had never met each other). The Canadian and Frenchman both worked in Asia (South Korea and Taiwan) and were traveling around the mainland of China for a vacation. The most interesting bit was that near the end of our dinner, Marisa asked the Chinese guy (who was fairly young) what his job was. He told Marisa that right now he is working as a manager at H&M, but that his lifelong dream is to go to the Cornell Hotel College (In retrospect that helped explain how friendly he was). At that point Marisa turned to me and told me what he said, and I said, 'I... went to cornell!' At that point he exploded and insisted on shaking my hand. He shook my hand several times that night and also when we ran into eachother the next day at the Panda Zoo. We also exchanged email addresses, although if he thinks I can help him get into the hotel school, he's mistaken. I did explain that I majored in computer science, and that the one class I took at the hotel school was 'Wines 101', which was pass/fail and was spent slurping alcohol. I thought the Frenchman at the table would be impressed by that, but his facial expressions didn't seem to change from mildly quizzical.

In Chengdu we also met a nice young British couple who fit stereotype 1, as they'd worked for a short time after university before starting on a 9 month trip. We ended up seeing the Panda Research Center with them and also shared Sichuanese cooking lessons to split the cost of the lessons. (Marisa is writing in a separate post about the Chinese interpreter who helped us in the cooking lessons. That wasn't his job, as he's in Tech and simply interpreted as a favor for the hostel owner. He was interesting in his own right.) The British couple is eventually heading to San Francisco, so we even shared our email addresses with them in case they need tips. They were sleeping in a dorm room with an obnoxious guy of stereotype 3 who apparently snores by night and brags about his multiple degrees by day. (He claimed he was an 'engineer', but later said he was a 'doctor' and a 'teacher'. Chengdu is a launchpad for Tibet, and he talked in the bar about his hiking and climbing exploits, but we suspected based on his behavior that the most climbing he did was into the top bunk in the dorm room after tossing down one too many in the bar.) He appeared to be living in the hostel. This is exactly why we didn't get the ultra-cheap dorm housing option.

We've met many more people, but another interesting person we came across in Lijiang in Yunan was an elderly retired woman from Denmark. Although her English was not fantastic, she was extremely talkative, and we ended up sharing a driver with her to visit the famous Yulong Snow Mountain. We observed that she was very good at communicating with Chinese people despite speaking no Chinese. Later she told us that her career had been as a teacher of retarded children. She said many of her students were unable to speak, so she has had to learn how to make rudimentary signs and to mime actions to explain things. There are apparently many interesting differences between common Western gestures and Chinese gestures. For example, apparently holding your crotch in China and jumping up an down does not mean you have to pee. (Actually, we already figured that one out, because Marisa tried it at a restaurant. For some reason they always seem to know what I want when I get up from dinner, so maybe I look more bestially desparate when searching for the toilet.) Another interesting sign difference was that miming putting food in your mouth with your fingers isn't a recognized gesture for eating in China. ('Why is this lady putting her fist in her mouth?!?!?') Instead you have to act like you're holding chopsticks.

Besides those people, we shared some period of time with a number of other people: An American Mesa Airlines pilot who planned to travel to 15 countries in 20 days, an our-age-ish British couple on a 3 month holiday, an 40-something Israeli couple who we shared a bunch of travel tips with, and of course some of our Chinese tour guides that were able to speak English. (We had a particularly good guide in Xi'an who spoke very good English.)

hostels

2009-03-21T19:49:00.000-07:00

We spent all of our time in China (and plan to spend most of our time in India) staying in 'youth' hostels. (as we will perhaps elaborate on in a later post, it's not really just youths who stay at youth hostels, and we met lots of interesting fellow travelers in hostels so far.) We normally stay in more expensive accommodation, but since this is such a long trip we wanted to try to do it on the cheap. On average we paid about $22 a night for a private room for two people with a private bathroom. Dormitory housing with shared bathrooms is ridiculously cheap (a few bucks a night), but we figured for such a low price it was worth springing for privacy.

In Europe we have a little experience in hostels, and it's been hit or miss. In China we were overwhelmingly impressed by the quality of hostels. They were all very clean. It tends to be mostly westerners that stay at them (or at least at the ones recommended in lonely planet), so most of the staff speak at least a little English. They were very helpful and were able to arrange events and transportation (plane, train, bus) and also recommend and make reservations at other hostels for our later destinations. We could have gotten by without their help, but it would have been much harder since so few people in China speak good English.

Many of the smaller hostels seem to be run by families who live at the hostel, which is quite interesting to observe. In the main room where the computers are (for patron use), there's sometimes a TV that they all sit around and watch. You can get a view of the family dynamic, including loud yelling between the husband and wife in Chinese.

The one downside is that often the rooms are fairly small. The trickiest thing has been the bathrooms. Usually they are clean, but if you've ever been at sea, they resemble the head in a tiny cabin. Excepting some of the nicer hostels we stayed at, usually the entire bathroom IS the shower, so as you shower you spray the sink, the toilet, and the entire bathroom floor with shower water. There's a drain that everything drains into in the middle of the bathroom. Maybe I'm a spoiled American, but I like an isolated shower container that I can stick my caboose into while showering so that 30 minutes later I'm not galoshing around a still wet bathroom floor when I have to use the toilet or the sink again. It seems like a good way to spread fungus. Luckily, we brought bathroom flipflops.

(note from marisa:) The biggest plus for staying in hostels is the advice you get from fellow travellers. You always meet someone who has been to the places you are considering going, can tell you which hostel to stay at, how long to stay there, and what types of scams to watch out for. We managed our last 1.5 week in China planning everything at the last minute, relying largely on advice from others. We also got a ton of advice on how to prepare for India - India appears to be a mandatory stop for any long-term traveller, and it feels like everyone has been there. It was based on traveller advice that we decided to hire a driver in Rajasthan - train stations are the single place you're most likely to be scammed, drivers are cheap to americans (about $50/day), and you can see more faster. Having a driver makes me feel extremely lame/incompetent since my parents journeyed all the way from Europe to India over land on their own in their youth, where someone tried to by my mom for a camel (or was it a horse), which my dad could have conveniently used to get the rest of the way to India. However I'm consoled by the fact that we've met several hard core, long term travellers that go with drivers.

Lijiang, a charming old town in China

2009-03-20T22:04:00.001-07:00

We spent the last few days in Lijiang, a town in the Yunnan province which borders Tibet and Vietnam. The old town is the most perfectly charming, attractive and well-preserved place I have been. The narrow cobblestone streets are lined with waterways that the people use for washing and fetching water. The houses have traditional Chinese arched, tile roofs. Depending on where you stand you can see snowy mountain views behind the houses. The Naxi, a unique minority ethnic group in China, are the primary home/shop-owners in Lijiang.

From 20090317_Lijiang_Starred

The town is a little too perfect in fact. The Chinese government figured out how much money tourism could bring to Lijiang, has promoted tourism, and the town is now packed with and caters to tourists. We still loved it though - many of the Naxi people, especially the older generation, live and work amongst the tourists. You can escape to parts of the old town that are all Naxi. Plus it's really interesting to see how the traditional Naxi interact with the imported Western and Han cultures.

The Naxi are matriarchal. Traditionally the woman runs the business. Men are known for arts and poetry. These traditional roles weren't totally obvious as we walked around but we saw a lot of women shop owners and men taking care of the children. The women we interacted with and ran our hostel were assertive, competent, and seemed like they could take care of business.

From 20090317_Lijiang_Starred

Traditional Naxi lifestyle is still very present. Many of the Naxi women wear traditional, non-Western costume. It's very common to see the women carrying huge baskets of produce home from the market; family members delivering freshly prepared lunches and dinners to shopkeepers; closely knit families living and working together in 1 room shops/homes; and people cooking their meals in the street and washing their clothes, dishes and even hair in the waterways that line the streets. You don't see many young people wearing the traditional costume though, unless it's a getup for the tourists. The young people mostly seem to work in Han-owned "Naxi" shops in the center of town, or restaurants that cater to the tourists. In the old Naxi village Baisha, where there are very few tourists, you see almost no young people - they are probably working in Lijiang. It's quite sad to witness and be a part of the forces that are eroding the Naxi culture.

From 20090317_Lijiang_Starred

I went for a walk early this morning and stumbled on a group of 25 older Naxi women doing dance performances in the main plaza. Some of them seemed to enjoy themselves but many seemed to be going through the motions. I thought they were being paid to perform for the tourists. There were a handful of locals that were not a part of the costumed group but joyfully participated in the dancing nonetheless. It brought a tear to my eye to think about how music and dancing could bring Naxis so much joy, but it could be reduced to a tourist gimick that the old women felt compelled to participate in to make a little money. Fortunately I may have misinterpreted. The woman at the tourist information booth claimed that these women perform for free AND that there is a group of young women who dance every day in the afternoon. So it's difficult to understand what impact tourism is having on the traditional Naxi culture.

(Steve's comment) : Baisha is a small village about 9 miles outside of Lijiang. It's funny that Marisa didn't write about how we got there, because she didn't have to make any of the effort to do it. :-) We rented a tandem bicycle for $4 for the entire day (In San Francisco that'd probably cost $30). Because of her knee she can't bike, so I had the pleasure of biking 9mi uphill (+500ft vertical distance) while moving about 400 lbs of cargo (including myself). Actually, it was a lot of fun, because we got to see the countryside along the way. For the most part is was quite beautiful, although as is unfortunately common in China, there were parts of the road that were well-decorated with rubbish. The ride back took us 1/3 the time, and I didn't have to pedal at all because it was so downhill.

From 20090317_Baisha_Starred

When we walked through the streets of the Baisha village, which is more Naxi, agricultural and poor, I said "Nihao" to everyone we saw. A third smiled back warmly, and the rest either thought we were freaks or wished us gone from their neighborhood.

Walking through Baisha gave me a first-hand glimpse of hard manual labor. I saw old people (it's hard to know how old, since their lifestyle probably causes them to age earlier than we do) crouching in fields, breaking rocks and carrying huge loads. My first impression was how lovely and peaceful Baisha was, and what beautiful mountain views it offered, but the villagers' bodies pay the toll for their lifestyle.

From 20090317_Baisha_Starred

(Steve's comment): It was really amazing to see all the things that were done in Baisha via physical labor. In many places people built walls by pounding the crap out of rocks until they were in the perfect shape to fit together (rather than using cinderblocks, which were readily available). I'm not sure if that's because they prefer the look of the hand-hewn rock walls or if it's because that's cheaper for them, as labor is so cheap in china. All throughout Baisha we heard the sounds of pickaxes and hammers powered by human muscle. Another interesting construction technique was that people seemed to be making bricks, by hand, from the mud/clay in their front yards. They also mixed in hay and animal dung, and then left the bricks out to dry.

From 20090317_Baisha_Starred

Our hostel in Lijiang, Mama Naxi's, was a unique experience. Whenever you sit down in the common room/dining area you are given some sort of food, wanted or not, e.g. banana, yak yogurt, even muesli one morning. You also get a snack handed to you on your way out for a day trip. Mama Naxi doesn't want anyone to go hungry. She likes to ask what you are doing that day and insists on helping you arrange a driver, guide, future hostel bookings or travel tickets. She does this for no commission because "Mama Naxi loves to help her guests!" according to a sign near our room. Mama Naxi walks around the dining area and makes sure everyone has the right condiments and if they don't shouts, sometimes to noone in particular, "more honey!," "milk and sugar!" Actually her English isn't even that good, but she uses choice vocabulary, body language and intonation with incredible effect. Her husband is also around and occasionally serves people or asks them what they are doing today, but Mama Naxi is definitely in charge. She has several female helpers who help when requested but would rather be sitting in front of the TV in the corner. The staff hangs out here whenever they can. They also cook eggs, french toast, etc. on a tiny camp-looking stove that sits conveniently beside the TV. Other than that, it's pretty much a normal hostel.

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(Steve's comment): My favorite mama naxi moment was when I walked in for our free breakfast and she said something like, 'Today you have banana pancake!!!' to me. How could I resist? It wasn't like a normal pancake, but was one of the local ways of making a pancake-like piece of bread, covered with bananas and wild-flower nectar-tasting honey.

Chengdu, Sichuan

2009-03-18T00:28:00.000-07:00

We came to Chengdu to experience Sichuanese cuisine and see the scenery. Sichuan is a moist region surrounded by mountains, and the fiery food here is supposed to dry you out. A lot of backpackers come here to go to Tibet or backpack in the mountains in general, and otherwise there aren't too many tourists.

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From our first day we heard about foreigners getting stopped by police. It's near the 50th anniversary of a failed Tibetan rebellion. Our hotel has informed everyone that the western part of Sichuan (which borders with Tibet) is closed, tourists are being turned away, and mobile phones don't work there. Even the Tibetan neighborhood in Chengdu is closed to foreigners. The police came to our hotel 3 times looking for a group of Israelis at our hotel that were caught taking a picture of a self-made sign in the Tibetan neighborhood of Chengdu. The Israeli's claim it said "Happy Birthday," but the police suspected something like "Free Tibet". A lot of our fellow travellers have had to totally change their travel plans, including our Polish-Canadian friends.

Our hotel manager, Sim, is quite a character. He's Singaporean and his wife is Japanese, and theirs is the only "foreign-run backpacker hostel." He's very knowledgable and helpful and takes his guests on a variety of custom trekking tours. The Tibet problems are causing him a lot of grief since he wants the best for his guests. And apparently the landlord and police are rough on his hotel since they don't like foreigners. Further the Sichuan earthquake caused a decline in tourism and cracks in their building that the landlord won't fix. You have to feel bad for the guy - he's obviously staying in Chengdu because he loves helping his guests live out their travel dreams, but running this hotel seems to cause him a lot of grief.

When Sim found out Steve was sick he personally walked us over to a nearby spa and waited with us while Steve got a cupping treatment, which dries out the body and involves torches, cups and wierd purple spots on your skin.

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Probably the top rated site in/near Chengdu is the panda breeding center, where several hundred pandas live. China breeds pandas here and loans them out to zoos around the world and in China, and any offspring pandas belong to the Chinese by contract. We saw tons and tons of pandas of all ages, especially babies. The adults were all eating or sleeping. Pandas don't get much nutrition out of bamboo so they have too eat a lot and conserve their energy. The babies were all playing. They are still fed milk/formula so they get to mess around all day instead of chewing bamboo. There's not much else that needs to be said other than that they were basically the most adorable animal you could imagine.

We also tried to take in some scenery at nearby Qin Cheng Shan. This steep mountain is a (or the?) birthplace of Taoism and is dotted with temples to visit on the way up the mountain. Oddly this is one of the most expensive things we did in China. The temples in the park were hit pretty bad by the earthquake.

From 20090312_Chengdu_QinChengShan_Cupping_Starred

I got carried in a sedan-chair like thing up part of the mountain. I wasn't particularly keen on doing this, but it was the only way we could get to the top without destroying my foot. 2 middle aged men carried me up a rapid 200 ft elevation hike while smoking. This was impressive, though one of them sounded like he was about to have a heart attack. Part of their trick was that they had 2 younger guys with them and they switched off when they got tired. There were at least 10 carriers milling looking for people to carry and, and roughly 1 customer - me. The chair was actually extremely uncomfortable, both physically and mentally (because I don't like the idea of paying other humans to carry me), however the carriers were really happy to have work. They maybe having an exceptionally tough time because of the earthquake's impact on tourism and the economy. On the other hand, it seems normal in China to have 3 people employed doing the work of 1 person, or doing work that is isn't necessary at all. For instance each bus stop has a rush-hour attendant, and it's common for stores to have multiple employees milling around chitchatting with each other.

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The other really memorable thing we did here was take cooking lessons. We did this at our hostel and it was a surpringly good lesson since we each got to personally make 3 different Sichuanese specialties: kung bao chicken, spicy green beans and ma po dofu (tofu in spicy red sauce). Everything was delicious, although the chef didn't wash his hands after touching raw chicken. It's a freaking miracle we don't get sick more often from eating out.

Running and Pollution in China

2009-03-14T18:39:00.000-07:00

Before coming to China, my officemate warned me that 'Asian people don't exercise', and he said I probably wouldn't want to go running when in China. I sort of knew what he meant, as I went running in Japan and saw almost no other runners out. In Singapore it was similar. Still, though, I didn't feel that out of place running in those places. His comments also seemed strange because many of the Chinese-born Googlers are quite athletic. (As examples, I used to run fairly frequently with the same Chinese officemate and another Chinese coworker, and I regularly see a Chinese Googler running pack near campus who seem pretty intense.)

We only spent a few days in Beijing, and we were so busy that I didn't end up running at all. I think we saw one runner on the street. We later saw about 20 runners, but they were all in military uniforms and boots and were clearly doing some sort of training exercise. :-) I don't think I'd have wanted to run in Beijing anyway. My officemate warned me that the pollution and dust would be bad, and it was. Our noses regularly blew black mucous from the dust. The sun was out all the days we were there, but was obscured by a thick haze that left it barely viewable on all except for a single glorious day where Beijing suddenly seemed much nicer.

The air smelled thickly of what I now know/assume to be coal. We traveled to Ireland a few years ago. In Ireland in some parts of the country they burn peat in furnaces for heating. Peat is an early stage (not yet fossilized version) of coal. It's cut from decaying plant matter in bogs. When it's burnt it has a very distinct smell that I had never smelled before (but probably people from our parents' generation smelled all the time in American cities). Luckily, when I was running in Ireland I could run out of town and get out where the air was clear, but in China the smell of coal is everywhere, and it smells exactly like peat. I don't know why its thicker in China than in the US since we also generate the majority of our power from coal (seems like a number of reasons: coal plants located nearer town, people burning it in their personal furnaces in China, lack of scrubbers/de-pollutants on the power plants).

Between the lack of sunlight and the smell, it's pretty stifling of any desire to go running. We have stayed at low budget hostels. I'm told that if you stay at a fancy hotel, you can work out in the exercise room because inside nice buildings the air is always filtered.

I finally went running in the second stop of our journey, in Pingyao. I thought since Pingyao was a small town it would be less polluted than Beijing, but in retrospect that was probably a stupid assumption. In Pingyao most houses had a small pile of coal outside them that was fed into the furnace, so I should have realized that all of the houses burned coal for heat. Marisa and I had climbed up the city walls earlier, and it looked pretty, so I decided to go back to try to do the loop around the city, which was only about 4 miles. (On a side note, Marisa and I got into an argument because you have to pay to get onto the city walls, and you can only go up once per ticket. I wanted to go up a second time for my run, but the ticket office lady didn't speak English and simply couldn't understand that I'd want to buy a second ticket to be able to go on the city walls again. Since she wouldn't sell me a second ticket, I had proposed to Marisa that on my run I simply slip/sprint past the guard who wasn't paying much attention anyway, but this being the people's republic of china, Marisa thought that was a stupid thing for me to do. In the end I relented and said I'd only run on the walls if they'd let me pass, even though they'd see that my ticket was already punched. When I ran up in my running clothes, the woman looked confused but waived me through. Disaster/Imprisonment Averted.)

I had to run through the city about 0.4mi to get to the walls. Pingyao is extremely provincial. I'm not sure that *anyone* goes running in Pingyao, let alone a tall white guy in running shorts. It was about 45 degrees F, which is not extremely cold. In Illinois and New York, where real men fall off trees like crab apples, people go running in shorts well into the 30s. But people in China were shocked that I'd be wearing shorts in 45 degree whether (FYI 2 weeks later, we still have seen no one in China in shorts, even though in Chengdu and Lijiang it was near 60). Running through the city was pretty uncomfortable because everyone just stopped and gawked at me, and even yelled up the street to announce to their buddies that something special was coming up the street. It wasn't that bad, though, because we were already used to being the odd people out in China. I tried to reward their looks by running really really fast, so hopefully I was impressive. I outran all of the people on bicycles on the street and a couple guys on crappy motorbikes. (they drive slow in pingyao) At first I thought people were staring at my crotch; I still don't know for sure but I think they were gawking at my shorts and/or my white legs.

After getting up the wall it was an easy run for the first couple miles to about the halfway point. What I hadn't counted on, though, was that the smoke from Pingyao was much more intense on the walls. I speculate that it rises from the town and gets sorta trapped on the wall. In any case, by the time I got halfway around the wall, my throat was really itchy and my eyes were starting to burn. I did everything I could to only breathe through my nose but it was still pretty bad. I finished the circuit of the walls (4mi) and goaded myself into doing another half circuit because I partially got used to the smoke. I think later that day or the next I got chest pains of the sort I used to get when I was a kid and had asthma attacks. (I have weird asthma where I get piercing pains in my lungs when I breathe.)

Running in the rest of China has been pretty similar in terms of pollution. I ran in Xi'an and Chengdu, which are both fairly big cities. Big cities are always hard to run in, but China is especially crazy. Perhaps we will write a post later about the traffic. It is insane, but strangely enough that makes running more interesting because every step is like jumping a hurdle: Do I jump off that curb with my right leg so I can hop around the motorbike, and then spin off my left leg to dodge the gaggle of schoolchildren, or do I instead just try to jump over that barrier? It takes your mind off being tired and the crap going into your lungs. I've run in manhattan, singapore, tokyo, and touristey areas of SF, though, so none of the dodging of people is too different.

What's different and unfortunate about China, though, is there don't seem to be any uninterrupted pedestrian areas like you find in other places. Even in Japan and Singapore I was able to run along rivers that had pedestrian underpasses for major roads, but in Chinese cities I end up waiting 3 minutes for absurdly long lights to switch so I can cross. I compensated by running fartlek sprints after the waits at each intersection.

The final thing I was surprised by was how many comments I've gotten even in big cities where I'd think they see at least some runners. I wonder if people yell stuff at Chinese runners; they definitely yell, 'Hello!' at me. I've been good-humored about it, though, and have taken to replying with a friendly yell of 'Hello!' or 'Nihao!' (Chinese for 'Hello') back at them. I'm tentatively proud of my good humor in China because when jackasses make comments to me in the US I usually respond with the finger. I'm not sure if the Chinese are being jackasses or not, so it seems better to give them the benefit of doubt.

Our last stop in China is in a place in Yunan called Lijiang. This is the first place in China where we've seen gorgeous blue skies and sun. It's also at 7900 feet elevation (nearly 1.5mi), so it may well be above the smog layer that's everywhere else. I thought this was a small place, but I just read a little more about it and was shocked to discover that Lijiang has a population of more than 1 million people. That's small by China standards but is larger than San Francisco!

The Historic China Route

2009-03-12T23:39:00.000-07:00

We've been travelling south from Beijing to a historic, provincial town called Pingyao and then on to Xi'an to see the Terra Cotta warriors. The earliest Chinese dynasties were based in Xi'an and this region.

We took a hostel tour of the Terra Cotta warriors, complete with a stop to a tourist restaurant/trinket store and the Terra Cotta Warrior Factory/trinket store. It appears that Chinese tours are not complete without mandatory walks through maze-like (think IKEA) trinket stores. We learned most of our Terra Cotta Warrior background information from the video we watched in the car on the way there. This was a super-cheap hostel tour so we can forgive our tour guide Zsa Zsa for not being all-knowing.

A Qin dynasty emporer had the warriors built in front of his tomb so that he'd have a military force in his after life. He was a bit obsessed with his military, having used it with a large degree of brutality to become the first emporer to unify China. He put the mock army in front of his tomb so he'd have a military force in the after-life. It seemed like the emporer wasted a huge amount of resources on the warriors (money, labor and human life - he had all of his laborers killed when the project was done). But if he built them for eternal protection then I guess it seemed like a good idea to him (historical note: his empire fell apart a few years after he died). Other emporers include mock armies in their tomb but this particular set is massive in terms of the number, size and individuality of the warriors.

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The warriors are mostly shattered when they are discovered, and pieced back together for our viewing pleasure. From 20090308_TerraCottaWarriors_Starred

The commander warriors were found standing in some sort of formation in this pit. From 20090308_TerraCottaWarriors_Starred

Xi'an itself was more attractive and cosmopolitan than Beijing, but it's still a big city. It was an ancient capital of several Chinese dynasties and the start of the Silk Road. It's surrounded by the old city walls, anochronystically juxtaposed against large modern buildings inside the walls. The highlight is the charming Muslim quarter, with narrow, stone-paved streets lined with outdoor shops and street food vendors.

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The Great Mosque in this neighborhood looks like a Chinese temple complex and is hardly discernible as a mosque except for the beautfil Arabic Koran inscriptions all over the wooden walls inside the mosque.

This is the mosque's minaret, disguised as a pagoda. From 20090309_Xian_BigGoosePagoda_MuslimQuarter_CityWalls_Starred

From 20090309_Xian_BigGoosePagoda_MuslimQuarter_CityWalls_Starred

This is also the neighborhood for great street food in Xi'an and we had Yang Rou Pao Mo 3 times: goat broth with noodles, goat, and a thick, unleavened bread in tiny pieces crumbled into the soup. I'm not sure why it was so good but I think I will try to make a goat broth when I get home.

From 20090309_Xian_BigGoosePagoda_MuslimQuarter_CityWalls_Starred

Our hostel in Xi'an was happening and busy. Everyone we met made us look like small-time travellers. It's awesome to meet other travellers from all over the world, it's like travelling to all of their countries for free. There was a good blend of people with real jobs as well as young, aimless travellers. The hostel was clean but loud at night from the people leaving the bar downstairs. I guess we're old farts at this point since we were trying to sleep instead of getting in on the action. Much to my chagrin Steve encouraged the loud-aimless-18-year-old crowd by giving them our extra, free drink tickets on our way out, instead of to the more "mature" travellers.

Before we got to Xi'an we spent a day and night in Pingyao. Pingyao has an old, walled city that is extremely well preserved and the buildings are famous for their traditional courtyard architecture. For a city that looks, smells and feels like coal dust, it's surprisingly charming. Historically it was a provincial capital and many of the old buildings are now setup as museums were you can learn about what made Pingyao such a great city in it's time, including the armed escort service and the country's (and maybe world's) first draft bank, both oriented around allowing people to trade with other locations without running a risk of being robbed on the road. Pingyao is more slow-paced than Beijing and Xi'an, and there are hostels at every corner with restaurants, bars, etc., so you never have to worry about making any decisions. It's a nice, mellow alternative to the bigger Chinese cities.

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Sleeper Train

2009-03-07T15:56:00.001-08:00

On the evening of March 5th we rode our first overnight sleeper train from Beijing to the historical/tourist town of Pingyao. We've taken trains in the US, Europe, and in Japan before for half-day/day journeys, but never slept in one.

We'd been warned about how crazy Chinese train stations would be. They were indeed teeming with people running in each and every direction. Having taken the trains in Japan, that didn't bother us so much. (I remember it being hard to deal with at first in Japan, though.) The main thing we were paranoid about was getting our stuff stolen. The one unique thing was the waiting area. We had an hour before the train left so we poked our heads into the hard seat (lower class) waiting area, and it was stuffed to the gills with people. There didn't seem to be seats (maybe they were along the wall), and the floor was so crowded with people that I don't think we could have worked our way through the crowd, if we wanted to. They were crowded up to the entrance of the room.

We weren't sure about the food on the train, so we decided to get food in the station while we could. The guy in fast food nation must have been right, because I was irrationally attracted to the warm inviting breast-like shape of the golden arches. (It's funny to hear them say 'I'm loving it!' in Chinese in their Chinese commercials.) Disappointingly, they didn't seem to have anything special on the menu except for a red bean filled pastry. Marisa wanted something healthier, so she ended up getting food from a chain called 'California Beef Noodle', funnily enough. I tried to avoid the stares and acted like an ignorant foreigner when I brought my double cheeseburger and beer from a convenience stand into the California Beef Noodle seating area. No one said anything to us, so I guess that played to my advantages of being white, goofy, and tall.

After dinner we went to check out the soft seat waiting lounge. We (well I, maybe not Marisa) had thought we'd bought the higher class soft seat tickets, but the woman manning/guarding the doorway to the waiting lounge took a look at our tickets and shook her head, so we didn't get to see the inside. Marisa told me later that she had been pretty sure she knew we had bought hard seat tickets. Psh.

The train ride itself was a new experience since we'd never ridden in a lower train class, especially overnight. Since we bought hard-seat, we were in a train car with an open aisle running the length of the car and rows of doorless rooms lining the aisle. Each room contained a pair of sets of bunk beds stacked 3 high (so 6 beds to a room). There were two squat toilet bathrooms (no soap), which through the night got progressively more disgusting, until at the end of the journey I would have preferred my trip to the bathroom was a nightmare rather than something that would leave real manifestations on my shoes the next morning. Luckily the McDonald's and California Beef Noodle ingestion did not cause any secondary effects. (To be fair about the toilets: Despite my predilection for potty humor, Marisa thinks I'm pretty squeamish, so maybe the toilets weren't so bad, and I'm just a baby.)

People on the train were very friendly, considering that no one else spoke English except for one guy who knew how to ask where we were from. He was excited to learn we are from America, as most Chinese people seem to be. (Or perhaps they're just being polite.) Surprisingly, when we say, we're from "the US" or "the United States" or "California" some people often have no idea what we're talking about, but they sometimes do know "America". So this guy with the limited English skills kept trying to talk to us about something. We think he was trying to offer for us to switch bunks with him so we wouldn't have to take the top, which is considered to be the worst. He had the middle. That didn't make much sense because then Marisa and I wouldn't have been able to sleep across from each other. In any case, clearly the language barrier was somewhere between asking where we are from (easy) and negotiating whatever he wanted to negotiate (hard).

The bunk itself was tiny, but luckily we'd bought the top bunk (which are also cheapest), so my feet could stick out into the aisle over people's heads as they walked by rather than tripping them as they walked by. Luckily its dry and cold in China, so my feet don't smell. There was about 2 feet of air between the bunk and ceiling, which was not enough to sit up, but was enough to flop around. Marisa didn't seem to have any problem with the size of the bunk.

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The train left at around 7:30pm. Before getting in their bunks everyone made themselves at home and sat around shooting the shit on the bottom bunk. (It sucks to be the person whose bunk that is...) The only other seats were small fold-down chairs in the aisle next to the window that Marisa and I latched onto like little clams. We figured we were due that because it was impossible to sit up in the top bunk anyway, whereas the bottom and middle bunks are possible to sit on. Conveniently for everyone else in the car (who were all Chinese) sitting in the aisle put us in a prime spot where they could all stare at us and observe our every move.

We sat around and read for about 60-90 minutes, which was made slightly harder by the youth behind us who announced to all in the car how hip (and wealthy?) he was by playing music on his iphone with no headphones. It would have been more distracting to us, except it was in Chinese and we couldn't understand the lyrics anyway.

We got in bed around 9pm. Technically lights out were at 10pm, but other people seemed to start going to sleep around that time as well. I wrote up some of our Beijing experiences in bed -- I didn't want to use the laptop outside the bunk because I was afraid about someone stealing it, although that may have simply been paranoia given that no one jacked iphone-boy. (Although I didn't check if he still had the iphone in the morning.) Even though lights were out at 10:00, at 9:30 the middle-aged gentleman in the bunk beneath me started grunting and smacking the bottom of the bunk, which I took to mean he wanted me to stop typing. As confirmation, the smacking and grunting stopped when my typing stopped. Luckily, he had a reward for my cooperation: heavy snoring for 6 hours that prevented me from falling asleep. Marisa normally finds it much harder to fall asleep than me, but she was OK because she had earplugs. I didn't want to wear earplugs because I was sleeping with our bookbag of electronics, passports, and money and figured I should have my wits about me. (I slept with my arm through the strap.) The bag also decreased the already small amount of space in the bunk, but I prefer to think of that as simply making it more cozy.

I was impressed with how quickly everyone else seemed to fall asleep. I guess these folks were used to communal sleeping on trains. People also made themselves comfortable really quickly. One guy in the bottom bunk had a 5 course spread of chicken in a bag, noodles, tea, etc.

Overall we thought the train was pretty comfortable, especially for the rock bottom price. Despite feeling like I hadn't slept, I wasn't that tired the next day. We got up around 6am and sat watching the scenery go by. We were quite worried about missing our stop, but that was an unnecessary worry because the conductor came around to wake up people who weren't ready to get off. Next time we'll probably spring for a soft sleeper, though.

Another visit to Tiananmen

2009-03-07T15:54:00.000-08:00

March 5th was a mostly uneventful day. We had been hoping to leave earlier in the day, but the night before when we tried to arrange train tickets to Pingyao (our next destination), they told us the only tickets available were a night train. The hostel desk worker kept assuming we'd want to take the shorter duration train that left at 5pm and arrived in Pingyao at 3am, despite Marisa repeatedly saying we'd rather take the train that left at 7am and got into Pingyao at 7am. We were a little concerned about arriving with nowhere to go at a city we'd never been to at 3am, not to mention that it'd be in the freezing cold.

Since we had nothing planned, we putzed around all day. We decided to go back to Tiananmen square again. Our first day in Beijing we had a bizarre experience where we got into a Taxi and said 'Tiananmen square', and the taxi driver refused to take us. We showed him the Chinese text in the book, so we think he knew where we wanted to go, but we had a frustrating 5 minute argument with him in Chinese and us in English where at the end we still had no idea what we were arguing about. Eventually we all just shrugged and Marisa and I got out of the cab and walked to Tiananmen square. It was all fenced off, although you could walk on the sidewalks across from it, so we don't know if the fences had anything to do with him not wanting to take us. Perhaps relatedly, Mao's mausoleum was also closed. Unfortunately it seemed to be closed again, so we still didn't get to see Mao's pickled body. We did get to walk around the gate to the old city wall of Beijing. (The city walls are torn down, but the gate is still there and is huge.)

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Mao's Mausoleum. From 20090305_Beijing_TianenmenSquare_LamaTemple_Starredf

Tiananmen square was otherwise uneventful. There are a massive number of security personnel around it. There actually seem to be four types of them: what looks to be the normal army with green uniforms who march around in columns around the square and also stand around watching with walkietalkies, other people standing around in similar looking but silver-colored uniforms, city police in police uniforms, and, lastly, people in civilian clothes but red armbands with yellow letters. I don't know what each of these groups are, but ignoring the civilian clothed people, there's a uniformed security person about every 10 feet around the square. (if you average, because sometimes they're in clusters of 4 or 5 sitting around shooting the shit)

Things you are not allowed to do in Tianenmen Square. From 20090305_Beijing_TianenmenSquare_LamaTemple_Starredf

Random security check. From 20090305_Beijing_TianenmenSquare_LamaTemple_Starredf

On our first visit to Tiananmen Square we saw a woman who was wearing a red banner with black Chinese letters around her chest who was in the process of being carted off by the police. We had to use our imagination to guess what her deal was, however we heard a Tibetan supporter was shot after lighting himself on fire in Tianenmen Square recently. This second time we went I was curious to see if we'd see any other protestors and was thinking about trying to snap a picture of them. We didn't see any, which is perhaps fortunate because I don't know what would happen if they saw me taking a picture. We did surreptitiously snap pictures of the police checking random people's bags as they walked around the sidewalk. It mostly seemed to happen near Mao's Mausoleum, so I wonder if that's a place where people try to protest.

At the risk of being political, we thought that was all pretty interesting to see because it's something I couldn't imagine in the US, where you can protest at least up to a certain level of obnoxiousness wherever you want (It's hard to imagine getting carted away for simply wearing a shirt), On the other hand, our government now claims (or recently claimed) the power to detain anyone indefinitely for ill-defined 'terrorist' activities, so I'm not feeling particularly smug about our relative freedoms.

Marisa's foot was hurting more after our walking on the previous two days, so we ended up stopping at 4 or 5 little shops to get warm and rest. We had some fantastic snacks (a pastry stuffed with green onions, mushroom noodle soup, tofu and sauce at a fast food place) and we usually drank tea and beer. One unforeseen-to-me consequence of water being undrinkable is that given the choice between buying bottled water and similarly-priced-beer, it's easy and perhaps providential to choose beer everytime. burp. (At least with beer you know for sure that the bottle hasn't been refilled with tap water) Most days we drink nothing but beer and coffee. (well, ok, and tea)

Fresh food delivery to our noodle house. From 20090305_Beijing_TianenmenSquare_LamaTemple_Starredf

Before heading to the train station, we also took a taxi to the Tibetan-Buddhist temple in Beijing, which is supposed to be the biggest outside of Tibet. Interestingly, it was a former imperial residence that was converted to a Tibetan temple for political reasons, as a kind of compliment to the Tibetans. (The temple information said this, and that it was intended as a way to help the unification of the different ethnic groups in China) As visitors and certainly not Tibet experts, we didn't have the full context to know if whether the information they had in the temple was correct or not. There were people keeping watch in the temple who were dressed up as monks, but we've read that these people are often not buddhists and are just paid to sit there and keep an eye on tourists who might try to rip stuff off the walls. :-)

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Night Market

2009-03-06T05:19:00.000-08:00

The same day we journeyed to the Great Wall, we came back to Beijing. We wanted a light dinner, so we decided to take a taxi to the Beijing Night Market. Though touristey, it was fantastic. Basically it is an entire block of stalls of food of the kind they have at fisherman's wharf where you can buy it and eat it on the spot. The main difference is that here the vendors are quite a bit more aggressive and try to "HELLO" you into taking their particular brand of fried scorpion, as opposed to the other guy's. We didn't order anything too wild, but I think we tried about 10 different things. (pot stickers, buns, squid, banana fritters, noodles). Street food is awesome.

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On a side note, I'm used to seeing hobos in San Francisco. At the night market, though, we were both really saddened by this incredibly cute but dirty little girl (maybe 3 or 4 years old). She had ribbons in her hair and was all swaddled up in what seems to be the common chinese little kid winter jumpsuit. She was with her dad (grandfather?) picking up food that tourists at the market had thrown into the trashcans. We've seen poor people before (parts of mexico), but I don't think I at least have ever seen so directly the wealth of tourists and Beijing residents at the market contrasted with the poverty and lack of opportunity for a little kid like that. I hope she'll end up going to school when she gets older.

"This is a Great Wall"

2009-03-06T05:11:00.000-08:00

I'm writing this in a sleeper berth that seems to be about 6 inches too short for me. There's two feet between me and the ceiling, and lights go out in 1 hour. (addendum: the guy below me snarled something in Chinese that I took to mean "stop making noise" about 20m after I added that note, so I had to shut off the laptop)

On March 4 we went to the one place where you have to go when you visit China: The Great Wall.

The Great Wall is obviously long (although apparently it's a myth that it can be seen from outer space), so there are numerous places close to Beijing where you can go visit it. Lonely planet lists a few places and poopoos the most common spot tourists go at Badaling.

Lonely planet likes to be all indie and and likes to poopoo 'tourist' places. As a consequence, we've had several experiences where lonely planet sends us somewhere random where we see 5 other people carrying the same lonely planet book.

Since badaling is the most convenient, we ended up going there despite the warnings against it.

Besides Badaling in general, Lonely Planet also warns against the tours that wind you through chinese medicine sales pitches and jade exhibits followed by massive showrooms for jade.

With that in mind, we followed the lonely planet recommendations to a tour company right at tiananmen square.

The first thing we noticed that made us slightly afraid was that the waiting room for the tour was entirely Chinese. When we got on the tour there were 4 other westerners out of about 40 people. Their talkytalk sounded to me like Russian, although Marisa pointed out that their English was flawless, so she thought they were Finnish. Later on at a merchandise stand the men in the group bought giant commie fur hats with red communist stars on the front. Given how much they seemed to enjoy the commie hats, I'd stick with my first guess of Russian. But anyway, I digress: The point was it seemed like there'd be a low likelihood the tour would be in English given the paucity of English speakers, but we went anyway.

It turned out the tour was entirely in Chinese, so we didn't understand a word of the jabbering in Chinese that we sat through for 2 hours in the bus. BUT the windows were pretty much entirely fogged up so I don't know the chinese tourists got to see anything anyway.

We stopped at the Ming tombs first, which was a nice diversion. We didn't see actual coffins but saw reproductions. The tombs were huge and impressive (although for some reason were quite plain and felt like a nuclear fallout bunker), and in beautiful surroundings.

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After that we stopped for lunch. Remember, lonely planet warned us against tours that tried to sell us jade and chinese medicine, and they recommended this tour. So... Wait for it... Wait for it:

Before we ate lunch we were told we had to walk through an exhibit on the history and use of jade in Chinese civilization. It was mildly interesting, and at the end we emerged through double doors into this MASSIVE showroom that was probably 10x the size of the jade exhibition and full of vendors trying to sell jade. It was setup like a maze that you had to meander through to find the exit. We walked right through to the end. This is a digression, but I'm writing this on a sleeper train and have a lot of time: Lonely planet warned us that as westerners everywhere we'd go in China people would try to sell us crap. They were pretty much right. People are really persistent. Often all they seem to know is a few words in English; sometimes literally all they know is "Hello!!" We've gotten pretty used to walking by vendors who simply yell, "HELLO!" at us. We also now appreciate how much meaning is able to be carried in a single word. As you approach a vendor the "hello" can be inviting; as you show doubt the "hello" becomes more plaintive; and as you start to walk away the "HELLO" turns into a different thing entirely, resembling what you might hear from a taxi driver in new york if you cut him off on a pittsburgh leftie.

The strange thing about the jade salespeople is they didn't yell, "hello!" at us. It was remarkable, because just outside the jade place there were vendors selling cheaply made hats and tshirts proclaiming, "I climbed the great wall!!" who were jumping over eachother yelling "HELLO" to fleece of us of our dollars, but inside we were literally completely ignored. I even made eye contact with jade vendors to see if they'd attempt a sale. Nary a movement, let alone a shouted "hello". I don't get it: Maybe westerners only buy crap in China and have never shown an interest in jade. I was tempted to go and buy some jade out of spite just to show them they shouldn't ignore us, but Marisa wouldn't let me.

After the jade we went into the "restaurant" for the provided lunch, only to discover we had to walk through an exhibit on Chinese Medicine! This was exactly the other thing Lonely Planet warned us about. We didn't mind, though, because the exhibit was fascinating, not so much because of the incredibly bad English translations, but because of the props. It was about the use of all the the parts of deer in defeating various illnesses. It was replete with pieces of deer in preservation fluid. Each piece of the deer was supposed to fix different things. I can't remember what they were, but the deer testicles are seared into my mind, as well as the deer 'placenta', which I think was a bad English translation, because on closer inspection through the glass case it looked to me like a FETUS since it was a tiny hairless deer with tiny little deer limbs and a tiny little deer head attached to a tiny little deer body. They also had hacked off deer hooves and a nose. The explanations were too inexplicable in English to convince us of the efficacy of Chinese Medicine (I don't think we were the target audience anyway), but it did make us incredibly hungry for lunch.

Afer touring the Jade and the Chinese Medicine we finally made it to lunch. We got there before everyone else because all the Chinese Tourists were off blowing their dough on Jade and Deer Pieces, so we sat down at an empty table. Marisa guessed that it would probably be family style because she's way more observant than me: there were no dishes, and only small rice bowls.

I didn't believe her but she ended up being right. I was worried that no one would sit with us, but was pleasantly surprised that plenty of people sat with us. (We're continually pleasantly surprised by how amazingly friendly Chinese people seem to be, even if they only speak limited English.) I think both of us were slightly squeamish about sharing food/saliva with a bunch of people we didn't know, but hey, we'd live.

Unfortunately, neither of us had paid much attention to the section of the book about table manners. Ironically, we both remembered the things that are considered gross in the US but are OK to do in China: I guess it's easy to remember the things that you normally worry about but can now ignore. We knew it was OK to slurp and in general make lots of noise when you eat, and we knew it was OK to pick up your bowl and shove food into your face. (Both of these things are necessary when eating with chopsticks, so it makes sense.) It's easy to think of stuff like that and then assume that anything goes, but of course each culture is different and while some things we might think are gross are permitable, other things we might think are normal might be considered gross to a Chinese person. Too bad for our tablemates, because we didn't remember any of those things. To be fair to us, we weren't visiting anyone in China and hadn't foreseen that we'd be eating at a table with Chinese people that weren't waiting on us.

The girl next to me ended up making horribly disgusted looks at three things: The first time was when Marisa pointed her chopsticks at her when asking her to pass something. The second time was when I put a bun directly on the table, which apparently must be as nono even though in the US it'd be fine to put bread on the table. The third time I caught a nasty glance was when I had a bunch of fish bones in my mouth and took it out with my fingers and put it underneath my rice bowl (ha ha. This would be dubious in the US too, but we weren't provided a napkin to conceal it, and I wasn't prepared to choke to death to preserve my honor.) So: I guess we are barbarians.

Thus went lunch. The food was excellent and the company good, despite our faux paus.

After lunch we hopped on the bus to finally go to The Great Wall.

Given her leg problems, Marisa was worried about having to climb up to the great wall, which is great not only because of its length but also because of its location, which is literally on top of a bunch of mountains. Luckily for us we knew there'd be a tram. What we didn't expect was that in the spot where our tour dumped us off they had a ROLLER COASTER. Literally, the thing that took us up the mountain was a set of roller coaster cars. I think it was probably the most dangerous thing we've ever ridden, and we hadn't even done the downhill yet. The track going up was covered with seeping black oil for lubricant, and all along the route were strewn emptied engine oil cans (of the variety that would normally be used in a car engine). I think the people who maintain it just climb up along the track dumping cans of oil out on the metal.

From 20090304_Beijing_GreatWall_MingTombs_Starred

It was FABULOUS (and definitely well lubricated).

We got off at the wall near the top and ended up walking for nearly an hour up to the summit. Marisa made it to the tower before the summit; I took off running to the top and ran back down to catch up with her. I thik the (still msotly Chinese) tourists thought I was a big freak, but I wanted to go running on the wall and go to the top of that section. On the way down I stripped to my tshirt because I was hot even though everyone else was in thick winter jackets.

Steve in various states of undress. From 20090304_Beijing_GreatWall_MingTombs_Starred

From 20090304_Beijing_GreatWall_MingTombs_Starred

The wall itself was amazing, although there was extremely low visibility (maybe half a mile) because of the thick dust and haze in the air. We may write a post later about the horrible air conditions in Beijing, but apparently that entire section of China is often covered in dust-filled air that's blown down from the Gobi desert.

We were impressed by the stamina of a lot of the tourists, especially the several old Chinese people we saw with walkers/canes climbing up nearly-vertical-seeming sections of the wall.

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The way down was via the rollercoaster contraption that took us up. An employee sat in the first car controlling what seemed to be the only braking mechanism. We fleetingly wondered if they've ever had any conductors pass out, but tried not to think about it. It didn't actually go that fast downhill because he rode the break, which was apparent to anyone in the vicinity because of the pungent smell of burnt brake rubber.

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To conclude, the Great Wall at Badaling was well worth the trip. Lonely Planet also sucks because they're too uppity and anti-'tourist' stuff. 70% of the fun of our Great Wall trip was observing things as Chinese Tourists, including the family style meal, the rollercoaster ride up to the great wall, and the entreaty that eating deer fetus will cure your arthritis.

First Day in Beijing

2009-03-04T04:33:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure if we'll keep writing such lengthy details of our trip. I ended up jotting down a lot of notes about our first day, but that might get old. (I wrote this one while on a tour bus outside Beijing on our second day...):

Our first day in China we woke up at 5am because of jetlag. We woke up cold.

I didn't tell Marisa why it was so cold until later: Our room only had one electrical outlet, so I'd unplugged the spaceheater to make room to recharge our mini laptop computer and my phone. :-)

I wanted to walk around and explore Beijing even though it was so early, so we got up, showered, and started off across the city towards the Forbidden City.

Marisa is normally the more courageous of the two of us, because I'm kind of a baby about talking to people (and don't want to make an ass of myself in a foreign country). In spite of that, three circumstances do make her doddering, incoherent, and timid. Unfortunately they were present this morning:

1.) When she's cold (We were both surprised by how cold it was in Beijing -- it seems to hover near freezing)

2.) When she's tired (jetlagged)

3.) When she's hungry (We hadn't eaten)

I'm so cold! From 20090303_Beijing_ForbiddenCity_Highlights

As we meandered our way through the city towards the forbidden city Marisa wasn't very happy. (To be fair, she was also really worried about her foot, as the doctor told her to try to ramp up during the trip, and she isn't supposed to be walking that much.)

We had been hoping to stop at a cafe or bakery to get some breakfast and rest, but surprisingly none of them seemed to be open that early. We did see lots of kids going to school. I guessed that perhaps there would be more activity down the smaller alleys (hutongs) where lots of people live. We had read about the small street food stands in hutongs, so it seemed better than continuing to walk on the abandoned street.

We had no idea if there would be an outlet or if it'd go anywhere, although it was promising that there seemed to be lots of through traffic. A few blocks into the hutong we were very excited to come across exactly the kind of place we had read about. There was a small shop where a cook was chopping up raw dough and dropping it into vats of oil to fry it into long strips. We watched him for a few minutes and were unsure how to pay so were going to chicken out and leave, but then a kid on his way to school came up and we saw him give the guy money. Like I wrote before, Marisa is usually braver about trying to buy stuff like this, so I tried to get her to do it. :-) Unfortunately for me, she was too grumpy from the cold and the hunger, so I went ahead and just dropped some money into the vendor's box and ended up with 5 slices of dough. We sat down outside in the cold because the place was full inside, but the bread was hot and quite tasty. After awhile we saw someone else order a soup for dipping and got jealous, so we pointed at the soup and got some of that too.

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The guy in white is frying dough. From 20090303_Beijing_ForbiddenCity_Highlights

After our refreshment we were feeling much better about walking and continued on down the hutongs until we emerged somewhere near the north end of the forbidden city.

We ended up doing a lot more that day: We of course spent a lot of time in the forbidden city, which was beautiful and really interesting. You can see our pictures here. The lonely planet guide claimed that there was a Starbucks in the forbidden city.. It mentioned that in passing as a travesty, but I was very excited about the presence of a Starbucks. It's really hard to find good brewed coffee in other countries. Unfortunately, we never did find the Starbucks.

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After we left the forbidden city we stopped in a little store full of crap. I was intrigued to disfcover that many of the small stores in china look *exactly* like the small stores full of equally cheap crap in chinatowns in the US. This is true right down to the fake chinese weapons, which I always thought were a US thing for gullible tourists. Anyway, we stopped in primarily because we wanted to buy wedding rings. We were afraid of losing ours, so we left them at home. We ended up buying cheap bands for $12. We were so cold all day, despite literally wearing all our layers (I wore 3 sweaters and 2 undershirts) that we also stopped to look at cheap coats. The woman there tried to give us a hard sell for a 2380Y ($300)-listed coat: She asked us to name our price, so Marisa said 300Y off-handedly (I didn't even want to answer because I wasn't sure I wanted it.) She balked at that, and we started to walk away. At that instant she cut the tags off and threw the coat at us, saying (in english) "fine! fine!" At that point I looked at the coat and wasn't even really sure I wanted it and indicated that to her. She seemed to get really mad at us since she had cut the tags off, but we hadn't told her we'd take it! I'm not sure if we'd done anything wrong by naming our price or not, but we ended up walking out with her huffing and saying something about having cut off the tags.

After that eventful interlude, we decided to go to dinner. We had read about several peking duck places. Initially we set off by tianmen square for a peking duck restaurant that boasted george w bush and fidel castro as patrons, but we weren't able to find it. Instead we hopped in a taxi (which are ridiculously cheap in china) and went to a place in the embassy district. The duck place was great -- we got to go back in the kitchen and select which duck we wanted. (They had maybe 30 of them roasting in an oven, as they roast their ducks for a couple days.) They brought it out and gave us an elaborate carving ceremony. Feasting ensued with duck, soup, veggies, plum wine, and chinese beer.

flight and first few hours in China

2009-03-03T03:48:00.000-08:00

Yesterday night we arrived in Beijing and got out of the airport at about 7:30pm. Our flight had been a long 12 hours but was as good as could be expected. My chinese officemate had freaked me out about taking Air China by telling me that he thought the seats would be tiny, since they wouldn't be made for tall white boys like me. He did add that the Chinese hostesses would all be nice looking. That wasn't really much consolation. In the end we were pleasantly surprised, because the seats on the flight were fine and had plenty of legroom.

We didn't do much last night since we were so exhausted. We took a cab to our hostel and checked in. On the way into the hostel I'd caught a whiff of a kebab vendor. I have a thing for crappy street food -- Marisa always rolls her eyes at me when I insist on getting chili dogs when we see them in SF. I really wanted to try one of the kebabs, so we bundled up (it is below 32 fahrenheit in beijing at night) and took a walk down a hutong, which is an old alleyway. We ended up standing at the grilling stand so we could watch how other people ordered, copied them, and just handed money at the person so she could make change. What I thought was a fried fish ended up being some kind of pork slice, but it was still tasty and had a spicy almost-jamaican-jerk flavor, and it was only about $0.50.

After that we went back t o the hotel and fell asleep almost immediately at 9pm. Yay for jetlag.

About This Blog

2009-02-24T09:14:00.000-08:00

Marisa and I thought it would be nice to create a blog to record our thoughts, impressions, and activities during our around-the-world trip of Spring 2009. Hopefully we'll have time during the trip to write here. For those who don't know, we are traveling from March 1 to May 19 to roughly: China -- 2.5 weeks, India -- 3.5 weeks, Mediterranean (turkey, greece, rome, france, maybe other places) -- 6 weeks.

We want to be able to refer back to memories in the future, but also thought it would be nice to make it semi-public so family members can follow what we're up to. We know at least one person said she would follow our travels (my mom), so at least we aren't narcisistically talking to ourselves! If we can get pictures to show up here we might upload those; otherwise we'll just link to picasaweb albums as we create them.