CIT's China Travel Blog

China International Travel CA - New Website Announcement

2011-09-22T14:03:00.000-07:00

Please visit the new and improved home of China International Travel CA!

We have redesigned our website to make it more attractive, easier to navigate, and more informative. Changes and new features include the following:

Each of our standard tours has its own page featuring representative photographs and complete tour information, as well as links to PDF itineraries (English and Chinese), photo itineraries or galleries, a “place page” for each destination on the tour, and the tour’s Chinese information page
Chinese- and English-language pages have been separated into distinct subdomains to reduce clutter and improve readability
Our new “place pages” feature useful information about the destinations on our tours, in addition to the existing photo galleries:
- A description of each place, with basic information and a map showing its location
- Our photo galleries and photo itineraries now load much faster than before and feature sharper-looking images
- Links to related blog posts and other sources of more detailed information
- Tips and info for travelers specific to each place
FAQ: Answers to questions often asked by our clients and China travelers in general
The left-hand navigation menu has been replaced with drop-down options in the main menu to increase available space for content
Search box: The new search function gives you a new way to find the content you’re looking for
Coming soon: Our blog is being rebuilt, with new posts, reformatted and updated old posts, and improved navigability
Coming soon: Comment forms on selected pages to allow you to ask questions, post reviews of places and attractions, and add your own observations and tips

We hope you will find our new website both useful and enjoyable! Please let us know if you have any questions or are unable to find something from our old site.

Note to our Blogger readers: Most of our old posts from this blog are being revised and reposted on our new website's blog. We will provide links to new versions of old posts for your convenience. This Blogger page will not be fully maintained, and not all future posts will be added here, so please refer to the blog on our new website for the most up-to-date posts and information.

China International Travel CA's New Digital Brochure

2011-06-22T16:53:00.000-07:00

Announcing the arrival of our brand-new digital brochure!

Download it for a convenient introduction to us and our services:

All of our standard China tours in one file
More detailed itineraries than our old brochure
A wide array of stunning new photographs
Complete booking information and forms
Optimized for the iPad, with internal links for easy navigation
Perfect for offline browsing, anytime, anywhere
Share it with friends and family

Get it today and start planning your dream vacation to China!

Mind the Gap: A Documentary About Sustainable Urban Transit

2011-06-07T15:11:00.000-07:00

China International Travel CA recently learned of an interesting and important project that we have chosen to support, and we hope you will too. These kinds of cultural exchanges are a critical part of the international effort to fight climate change and create sustainable modern societies. In this area as in many others, the United States and China have a lot to learn from each other.

MIND THE GAP: A documentary project about sustainable urban transportation

MIND THE GAP events focus on Citizen Participation – sharing ideas of what you can do to improve your transit carbon footprint. We bring together local speakers and artists who share ideas about walking, biking, public transit, and new forms of car sharing. We also provide information on ways to get involved with the legislative process affecting urban transportation.

FUNDRAISER FOR FILMING IN CHINA

Dates: May 27 - July 5

Where to donate: MIND THE GAP Kickstarter Campaign

Amount: Accepting donations from $1, no amount is too small

Goal: $3,500 by July 5

Thank you gifts: We have organized thank you gifts for you from donations as low as $10

KICKSTARTER DETAILS:

Kickstarter is a platform that allows independent artists to raise funds needed for their projects. With film grants shrinking and many grants unavailable to filmmakers until their filming is complete, this is a great way for the community to get involved and help make the film they want to see.

A message from the director, Laura J. Lukitsch: I have been working on pre-production for MIND THE GAP for over a year now and am at the stage where I am ready to film. I've been doing research and filming in California, but it is time to see and film what is happening in other countries.

At the end of June I leave for Beijing. I need funds to be able to travel, for equipment rental, crew, and a translator.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1804332874/mind-the-gap-a-documentary-about-sustainable-urban

If you can, please give Laura a hand!

Forklifts in the Night, Exchanging Autos

2011-05-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

During the period of my life when I was studying abroad in Taipei, Taiwan, I was an inveterate walker. Whenever I visited a new place, I would buy a map and set out on a peripatetic exploration at the first opportunity. And while in Taipei, I routinely spent long stretches of time walking around the city by myself at all hours, familiarizing myself with its geography and making serendipitous discoveries.

One of those discoveries occurred late one night when I was walking down a narrow sidestreet. I came upon a forklift that was unceremoniously picking up cars parked on one side of the street and depositing them on the other, proceeding car by car down the block. The scene was so surreal, and yet the manner in which the driver was going about his work was so casual, that I could only stare for a moment, chide my lying eyes, and keep walking. In the years since, I’ve sometimes wondered whether that strange sight was actually just a product of my febrile, sleep-deprived brain, which was on constant stimulus overload back in those heady days abroad—especially since it was the dead of night, and I had quite possibly been drinking beforehand. Now, however, after a quick search online, I have video evidence that such things do happen (in Taiwan, at least):

For all I know, this sort of thing is a routine occurrence that the locals don’t even bat an eyelash at. At the time, it felt as if I had wandered off into some kind of Bizarro World where people with forklifts can do whatever the hell they want, where Dude, Where’s My Car? has a radically different plot, and where street cleaners have a better option than punishing hapless residents with $40 parking tickets. (I make this comment as a former San Francisco resident who, like many others, unwittingly helped fill the city’s coffers by occasionally forgetting to move my car.)

But just as one person’s geeky is another person’s cool, what seems absurd in one society is completely normal in another—a fact I’ve often been reminded of during my adventures in China (and probably just as often living in the United States, which I’m well aware is by international standards a profoundly strange country). In any case, it’s nice to know that this, at least, was not something I merely hallucinated.

A little bonus anecdote: Thinking about different standards across societies, I'm reminded of the radically different idea people in China have of what constitutes appropriate driving behavior. After a Shanghainese friend of ours violated one too many traffic regulations (which presumably are more than just rumors in Shanghai, even if they’re not actually enforced), I asked her ironically if she even knew what a stop sign was. “You know, the octagonal red sign with a big ‘停’ (tíng, the character for ‘stop’) on it?” To my eternal astonishment, she literally did not know what I was talking about. I had to explain the existence and function of stop signs to a woman who had been driving—accident-free, mind you—for many years. And no, she wasn’t joking; although there are stop signs in Shanghai, there aren’t many of them, and the fact is that they just aren’t much of a factor in the decisions that Shanghai’s eminently practical drivers make. As I contemplate the traffic ticket my mother once got in a U.S. suburb for a “rolling stop” at a stop sign, even though the intersection was completely free of any pedestrians or other vehicles and she had a perfect driving record, I can only shake my head. Two different extremes, indeed.

If you don't recognize this, you're probably a
driver in a major Chinese city.

May 2011 Random Discovery Photo of the Month

2011-05-10T13:08:00.000-07:00

Update – September 22, 2011: This post has now been integrated into this post about our Random Discovery Photos on our new website.

This month’s photo is one of innumerable jaw-droppingly (or at least double-takingly) random sights I’ve come across while exploring the vast human particle accelerator known as Shanghai. As you can imagine, in a city with that many options for shoppers, to be successful you have to find a way to stand out. This shop certainly got my attention with its mannequins, which are not only cutely cartoonish or disturbingly psychotic, depending on your point of view, but also used in an inventive way: ostensibly, the sole purpose of mannequins is to be an inconspicuous display device for items of clothing, but clearly the primary function of these particular mannequins is akin to that of the wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tube men used at American car dealerships. Otherwise, why would some of them be naked? Well, here’s some free advertising and attention for you, whoever you are—too bad I can’t remember exactly where I took this, or what exactly you’re selling, or what the name of your store is. (It does appear to be across the street from “Jun,” though.)

How could anyone get "overstocked" on something so awesome?

Adventures in Chinese Slang

2011-05-04T18:01:00.000-07:00

One fascinating effect of China's continuing growth and modernization on its popular culture is the explosion in slang expressions that has occurred in recent years, in large part because of the use of the Internet by ever-larger numbers of Chinese citizens. As in the United States, wildly creative, funny, and vulgar new slang expressions can become popular overnight as a result of mass exposure online. The New York Times recently ran an article that quoted this People's Daily article about the most popular new Internet expressions of 2010.

If you're interested in learning some Chinese slang, either as part of a serious course of study or just for the hell of it, I highly recommend Eveline Chao's recently published book Niubi! The Real Chinese You Were Never Taught in School, which I've been enjoying lately. Many expressions I've heard my Chinese friends and in-laws use quite frequently (not the dirty ones!) but didn't fully understand are given a clear and thorough explanation in the book. If you want to really speak like a native and have fun with the dynamic, living language that is contemporary Mandarin, this book is a great resource. Here is a selection of some widely used expressions, along with some of my personal favorites that I've come across so far, in both my own daily life and her book. Click on the pronunciation key for each expression to hear an MP3 recording of it. (Warning: Keep in mind that although I’m always told that my pronunciation is good, I am not a native speaker of Chinese.)

加油 (jiāyóu)

literal meaning: “add fuel” (add + fuel)

colloquial usage: “Go!” or “Let’s go!” (a way of offering encouragement, e.g. to players in a sporting event)

酷 (kù)

literal meaning: ruthless, strong (e.g. wine)

colloquial usage: “cool” (a loanword from English slang)

给力 (gěilì)

literal meaning: “give power” (give + power)

colloquial usage: “cool,” “awesome,” “exciting” (northern slang)

无聊 (wúliáo)

literal meaning: “nothing to chat (about)” (nothing/lacking + chat)

colloquial usage: “boring” or “bored”; also used to playfully scold someone who’s making a joke of questionable taste

郁闷 (yùmèn)

literal meaning: “melancholy,” “depressed” (melancholy + depressed)

colloquial usage: “boring”/“bored,” “depressing”/“depressed,” “(I’m) bored/depressed!”

白吃 (báichī)

literal meaning: “blank imbecile” (white/blank + stupid/imbecile)

colloquial usage: “idiot,” “dumbass”

笨蛋 (bèndàn)

literal meaning: “stupid egg” (stupid + egg)

colloquial usage: “dummy” (not necessarily harsh; often affectionate)

滚蛋 (gǔndàn), 滚开 (gǔnkāi)

literal meaning: “roll egg,” “roll away” (roll + egg, roll + away)

colloquial usage: “Go away!”, “Get out of here!”, “Get lost!”

土 (tǔ), 土包子 (tǔbāozi)

literal meaning: 土 = “dirt” or “earth”; 包子 = “steamed bun,” a common food in poor and rural areas (“dirt”; “dirt” + “steamed bun”)

colloquial usage: 土 = “ignorant,” “uncultured,” “rural,” “untrendy,” “out”; 土包子 = “yokel” or “bumpkin” (also, anyone out of touch with or ignorant about modern or trendy things)

土得掉渣 (tǔdediàozhā)

literal meaning: “so rural that [one is] shedding dirt”

colloquial usage: “What/Such a bumpkin!”, “So ignorant/untrendy!”

狗屁 (gǒupì)

literal meaning: “dog fart” (dog + fart/butt)

colloquial usage: “BS!”, “Nonsense!”

废话 (fèihuà)

literal meaning: “wasted words” (waste + words/speech)

colloquial usage: “Nonsense!” or “Duh!” (“Well, of course, you dummy!”, “Thank you, Captain Obvious!”)

瞎说 (xiāshuō)

literal meaning: “speak blindly” (blind + speak)

colloquial usage: “to speak nonsense,” “Nonsense!”

拜托 (bàituō), 帮帮忙 (bāngbāngmáng)

literal meaning: “please”; “help [me] out”

colloquial usage: “Oh, please!”, “Yeah, right!”, “Come on!”, “Gimme a break!” (sarcastic)

吹牛 (chuī niú) [from 吹牛皮 (chuī niúpí)]

literal meaning: “to blow up (inflate) a cow” [“blow up a cowhide”]

colloquial usage: “to brag” (especially when making exaggerated or false claims)

牛 (niú)

literal meaning: cow, ox

colloquial usage: “awesome,” “badass” (For an explanation of the surprisingly vulgar origin of this widely used expression, see Eveline Chao’s book.)

拍马屁 (pāi mǎpì)

literal meaning: “pat the horse’s butt” (pat + horse + butt)

colloquial usage: “flatter” (especially to flatter someone in a position of authority or someone with the power to help you with something)

没劲 (méijìn)

literal meaning: “lacking strength” (lacking/no + strength)

colloquial usage: “lame”

面 (miàn), 面瓜 (miànguā)

literal meaning: “noodles”; “noodle melon” (noodles + melon)

colloquial usage: “wimpy,” “timid,” “weak”; “wimp,” “wuss,” “coward” (northern slang)

傻瓜 (shǎguā)

literal meaning: “foolish melon”

colloquial usage: “little fool,” “silly billy” (usually affectionate)

三八 (sānbā)

literal meaning: “three eight” (three + eight)

colloquial usage: “silly” (often used to describe feminine silliness), though it can have a stronger, more insulting meaning among some Mainland Chinese

书虫 (shūchóng), 书呆子 (shūdāizi)

literal meaning: “bookbug” (book + bug/insect), “bookish fool” (book + fool/idiot)

colloquial usage: “bookworm,” “nerd,” “a person with no social skills”

In her book, Eveline Chao doesn’t pull any punches; she includes a wide array of vulgar and extremely insulting expressions that I’ve elected to leave out of this post. So if you want to know when people are saying bad things about or to you (or want to be able to dish it out in return), you’ll find her book extremely useful.

Past Random Discovery Photos of the Month

2011-04-26T15:56:00.000-07:00

Update – September 22, 2011: This post has now been integrated into this post about our Random Discovery Photos on our new website.

March 2010: This is not, of course, actual panda milk, but cow’s milk produced by a company with the name Panda Brand, but at first glance it’s pretty disturbing. Given that even within China the Cantonese people are known for daring to eat anything (“广东人没有不敢吃的”), one wonders whether this would be a Cantonese delicacy if pandas were not an endangered species. (photo by Ming Xia)

April 2010: “Adibas” shoes—In China I’ve seen every kind of attempt to narrowly avoid copyright infringement you can imagine (including a t-shirt with a familiar-looking cartoon dog called “Snooby”), but for some reason this one in particular cracks me up. In a similar vein, here are some amusing variations on the McDonald’s logo that I recently came across online. (photo by “Lanchongzi”)

May 2010: This leprechaun was apparently a participant in Beijing’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. He seems to be pulling off the unlikely role with self-applauding conviction, despite the conspicuous clash between his red beard and black hair. (photo by Ivan Walsh)

June 2010: I came across these “U.S. Army” pillows in a resort store in an isolated mountain area of Guangdong Province in 2009. (Interestingly, in recent years I have continued to see people in China dressed in clothing featuring the American flag or a reference to the U.S. military.) In that same mountain area, an area with almost no Western tourist presence, I came across cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon being sold in a roadside convenience store. Globalization is happening in some very surprising ways.

July 2010: In my many trips to China, I still haven’t tried scorpion, but these “scorpion kabobs” (for sale in Beijing’s Wangfujing shopping district) do look surprisingly tasty. You might need a toothpick, though. (photo by Thierry)

August 2010: On the same trip to Guangdong Province, I saw these birds (ducks, I think, but I’m not sure) being herded along the road like goats or sheep. Unfortunately, I could only snap this blurry photo through the windows of our bus as we navigated the traffic jam. Driving conditions were quite fowl that day, you might say.

September 2010: One of my favorite places in China is Lijiang, a remote valley nestled amidst spectacular mountains in Yunnan Province. One of its many charms is the laid-back character of its “old town” areas, where you can see sights like barmaids engaging in a spirited singing contest with competitors across the lane or dogs hanging out on roofs. (photo by Chris Feser)

October 2010: Last fall, on my umpteenth trip to Shanghai’s Bund (it never gets old), I came across one of the strangest sights I’ve ever seen: this cat decadently ensconced in a chariot being pulled down the street by a hapless team of toy dogs. The chariot seems to be some kind of patriotic nod to the Shanghai Expo, which was still going on at the time but certainly didn’t need a gimmick like this to get media attention. Someone in the crowd of pedestrians surrounding the chariot, noticing my baffled reaction, said something I didn’t quite catch about how the chariot had achieved some level of Internet fame in China. I haven’t been able to confirm that claim, but I certainly would not be surprised if it were true. (On a side note, how is it that Star Wars computer wallpaper, among other completely random images, comes up in a Google image search for “Shanghai Expo cat chariot”? Looks like that algorithm needs a little tweaking, Google.)

November 2010: “Pennington Bear”—While visiting a newly developed pedestrian mall area in Xi’an last fall, I noticed a group of human billboards (can’t say what they were promoting, however) in various animal costumes and clown getups. You would think that the bear or cat costume this guy was wearing would be enough to get people’s attention, but no...for no reason that I can puzzle out, he threw in a Chad Pennington jersey for good measure. Chad Pennington, of all people—a player in an American sport that I’m quite sure had nothing to do with whatever they were promoting, a sport that as far as I know isn’t even marginally popular in China. For that matter, how did they even get their hands on a Chad Pennington jersey in Xi’an? Truly random.

December 2010: This ice sculpture of a tiger head appears to be eating a minivan. This photo was taken in Northeastern China near Harbin, whose outdoor winter display of giant ice sculptures is internationally famous. (photo by Ivan Walsh)

January 2011: This is another photo from Dayan, one of the “old town” sections of Lijiang, that exemplifies its relaxed and informal vibe. These boys, probably children of the local residents and shopkeepers, were playing some game of chance (and judging from their demeanor, actually gambling), but I didn’t want to interrupt to ask what exactly it was they were playing.

February 2011: I took this photo in the Shanghai Museum in 2005. The museum displays were fascinating, of course, but I couldn’t help being distracted by this completely inexplicable little cartoon figure featured underneath the museum pieces: it had alien or animal eyes, painfully splayed fingers, and unnaturally curved extremities, and it was naked except for some kind of cap, bikini underwear, and unidentifiable footwear, with two conspicuous little dots for nipples. It was a complete mystery to me how such a thing came to be used in the museum. Who approved this idea? Was it done by some mid-level museum manager as a kind of in-joke? Was the museum’s collection on loan from a friendly (if a little strange) alien race who had preserved our past for us? It was one of those amusing, perplexing details that reminded me as a Westerner how strikingly different the Chinese sense of taste and propriety can be—in the West you might see figures like this in a children’s museum, but not on displays featuring world-class works of art and artifacts thousands of years old! With my Western biases, I can only shake my head and say, “Weird.”

March 2011: Amusing examples of Engrish or Chinglish still abound in China. The most interesting ones occur when bad translations mix with cultural differences that defy easy explanation. I believe I came across this mysterious device in a shop in Shanghai. Even taking into account the clumsy translation, I’m not sure what a “fruit vegetable counteracts poison Machine” is, what it does, or why only the word “machine” is capitalized on the package. Can people use it to eat rotten or toxic fruits and vegetables? Do Chinese spies carry it around to detoxify themselves, using only whatever fruits and vegetables are handy, when enemy agents have slipped arsenic into their food? Whatever it is, it must have something to do with Traditional Chinese Medicine. A Google search for its Chinese name, “果蔬解毒机,” does generate over one million results (as of today), if you want to learn more about it. Personally, I’d rather let it remain an interesting mystery.

How to Apply for a Visa to China: Do's and Don'ts

2011-04-18T13:36:00.000-07:00

Update – September 22, 2011: This post has now been reposted with images intact at this permalink on our new website.

DON'T try to express your interest in China by doing an impression of Kung Fu Panda while singing "Kung Fu Fighting."

What's cute in a cartoon will get you creamed in a consulate.

DO allow China International Travel CA to save those of you who live in the San Francisco consulate's jurisdiction a lot of time and trouble for a modest service fee: $10 if you're joining one of our tours; $20 for everyone else. We've helped many, many clients with their visas, and we can ensure that everything will go smoothly. We'll be glad to answer any questions you have about the application, submit and pick up everything for you, and make sure your freshly stamped passport gets back to you safe and sound with its "new visa smell" intact. All of our contact info can be found here.

DON'T talk loudly while waiting in line about how much you like Sharon Stone. She's not exactly popular over there.

Insulting the victims of a natural disaster:
not Sharon's best career move.

DO make sure you go to the right consulate, depending on where you live. Consulates can only issue visas to people living in their jurisdiction.

DON'T stage a "laugh mob" in the consulate lobby in a misguided attempt to create good vibes and brighten everyone's day.

Laughter may be the best medicine, but an overdose might kill your chances of getting a visa.

DO check the links on our Booking page to make sure you have updated information from the consulate website about everything you need to apply.

DON'T try to give yourself "Chinese cred" by rocking a Fu Manchu look. To someone from China, it doesn't project the coolness you might think it does.

"Yellow peril" stereotypes are not the way to make a good impression at the Chinese consulate.

DO apply for a twelve-month multiple-entry visa, since it costs the same as a single-entry visa for U.S. citizens anyway. You never know—if you take one of our tours, you might find yourself traveling to China again very soon.

Although you can request same-day service if you're in a desperate situation (but check with your local consulate to be sure), DON'T wait until the day before your trip to apply for your visa. You never know when your application might be held up for some unforeseeable reason.

DO make sure your passport has six months of validity remaining and at least one blank visa page when you apply.

DON'T look scary...or try too hard not to look scary. Just play it cool and natural, man. Or if that's too difficult, just let the professionals at CIT handle it for you.

Who is less likely to be granted a visa: a victim of demonic possession, or Stuart Smalley?

April 2011 Random Discovery Photo of the Month

2011-04-12T11:41:00.000-07:00

Update – September 22, 2011: This post has now been integrated into this post about our Random Discovery Photos on our new website.

Every month I feature a "Random Discovery Photo of the Month" on our homepage, a photo that is "random" in both the traditional sense of the word (chosen with no very specific criteria in mind and in no conscious order) and the contemporary colloquial sense of "strange and surprising." Most of the photos on our site highlight China's many beautiful and culturally profound places, but I wanted to have a prominent place to regularly feature photos that reflect the delightfully humorous, quaint, or just plain weird things that foreign travelers inevitably experience in China. Most of these photos were taken by me during one of my many travel experiences in China, though occasionally I choose an interesting photo that I've come across on Flickr or another Internet source.

April's Random Discovery Photo of the Month is of a tiny kitten I came across in a Shanghai alley, perched high on a narrow ledge and apparently enjoying its own little patch of grass, while I was taking photos of a traditional "shikumen" district in the downtown area. (See my post entitled "Shanghai's Disappearing Shikumen" for more photos and an explanation of what "shikumen" are.) When I noticed it up there, it seemed like such a precarious place for something so fragile and innocent, particularly in the midst of an urban environment fraught with dangers for such small trusting creatures. No doubt my all-too-human tenderness was misguided, however, as I'm sure that millions of callow Shanghai kittens quickly learn to prosper in that perilous city. Anyway, I wrote a haiku (originally a Chinese form of poetry, I believe) to go with the photo:

Kitten on the edge

Small patch of urban ledge-grass

Precarious life

As work and life have kept me extremely busy over the last several months, I've been forced to let this blog lie fallow. But now it's ready for planting, and over the next few months I'll be adding a wide range of posts that I hope people will find interesting, including culture- and literature-oriented posts, practical travel advice and information, lots of photos, and stories about more of my own travel experiences in China.

Coming soon: Some of our past Random Discovery Photos of the Month and the stories behind them.

Update on China in the U.S. Media

2010-09-07T00:01:00.000-07:00

As always, I've been keeping an eye out for news stories about China that readers of this blog might find interesting:

The New York Times recently featured an article about using t'ai chi (太極拳, or tàijíquán) as a treatment for fibromyalgia, a condition that causes chronic pain. Participants in the study who practiced t'ai chi typically reported significant improvement in the severity of their symptoms—in some cases quite dramatic improvement. This study follows others that have shown the numerous health benefits of practicing t'ai chi. The website Supreme Chi Living (www.americantaichi.net), which is funded by the U.S. government and was formerly known as the Tai Chi for Consumer Health Information Center, has a wealth of information about legitimate scientific research on t'ai chi. As a former sometime practitioner of t'ai chi (these days, unfortunately, it's hard to find the time to do it even occasionally), I can certainly offer my anecdotal support for the idea that t'ai chi makes you feel better in a variety of ways.

T'ai chi master Yang Cheng-fu demonstrating
the pose called "single whip"

I've heard about democracy being practiced in China at the local government level, but the openness and freedom of such elections is limited. However, China is demonstrating a remarkable willingness to experiment with cutting-edge methods of governance that show real promise, as Joe Klein discussed in his recent column for Time entitled "How Can a Democracy Solve Tough Problems?" This is a perfect example of the kind of process by which China and the United States (along with other countries) can learn from each other. (Note that it is an American political scientist who has helped the Chinese government with the implementation of this system.)

In another democracy-related (or at least equality-related) development, the strikes happening in Chinese factories in recent months demonstrate the power of economic development and access to information in encouraging people to assert their rights. That sword can cut the other way, too, as the state of our own prosperous yet flabby democracy shows, but this evolution certainly offers hope for the people of China. The New York Times invited a number of experts to discuss the significance of the strikes on the page entitled "What Do China's Workers Want?"

The Times also recently featured an article about how a provincial court in China has decided to hear a case brought by a man who was denied a teaching job for which he was qualified after testing positive for H.I.V. The man's lawyer summed up the significance of this development: "In the past on sensitive cases like this, the court would be very reluctant to accept the case. But this time they accepted it smoothly and quickly. That means the legal system in China is making progress." You can read the article here.

All of these developments offer hope that China, despite the inherently autocratic nature of its political system, is making progress in ways that will make the lives of its people better in more than just a material sense. China faces many problems, but it continues to show determination and adaptability in dealing with them. Here's hoping the United States will show a little more of that as well.

CIT in HK: Our 2009 Hong Kong Trip Part 3

2010-08-09T19:26:00.000-07:00

Update – November 8, 2011: This post has now been reposted with images intact at this permalink on our new website.

Well, "next week" somehow turned into "in a few weeks," but here we go with Part 3 of my account of our trip.

After our leisurely stroll through downtown Hong Kong (see Part 2 of our HK trip), we decided to take a ferry to Cheung Chau (長洲), a small island in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. I had fond memories of it from a previous trip there in 1997.

If you'd like to experience Hong Kong yourself with an itinerary that will allow you leisure time to do some independent exploring, sign up for our Hong Kong 3-Day Tour or our China Highlights 11-Day Tour.

The cliché that it's not about the destination, it's about the journey, can be quite literally applied to a ferry trip in Hong Kong (though in our case the destination was pretty sweet, too). Although Hong Kong is a terrifically stimulating environment, it can also be stressful, but a leisurely, comfortable ferry ride forces you to relax and smell the figurative roses—roses that in this case happen to be colossal towers of glass and steel, along with the magnificent mountain and ocean scenery that surrounds them. Depending on how hot it is, you might choose to enjoy the view from an indoor seat, where the titanic air conditioning system will make you feel like you're closer to the North Pole than the sweltering South Pacific. Personally, I'd never want to miss the breeze and the sun on the outdoor deck. The only thing that could have possibly made our trip better? A cold six-pack of Tsingtao.

Click on any photo below to open a full-sized version in a separate window.

As you pull away from the ferry terminal, you have a great view of some of the tallest buildings in the world, including 2 International Finance Centre and the Center. You'll also see a great variety of vessels in the harbor (one of the busiest in the world, of course), some of them pleasantly quaint, such as this tugboat.

In this photo you can see Kowloon's International Commerce Centre, the tallest building in Hong Kong and #4 in the world, which was still under construction at the time this photo was taken. The ship in the foreground appears to be some kind of naval vessel.

From the ferry, you can enjoy constantly varying views of endlessly varied Hong Kong. And as you cruise farther away from Hong Kong Island, a bigger scene unfurls before you—a picturesque combination of city, mountain, sea, and sky.

This is a view of Hong Kong Island from the west; the area on the left is the downtown area (the Central and Western District), and the area on the right is Aberdeen, in the southwest part of the island.

As you enter Cheung Chau Harbor, you can see that the local fishing fleet is still quite robust.

Here, you can see the breakwater protecting the harbor from large waves. The late-afternoon sun glints off the furrowed surface of the water.

The chance to enjoy the scenery while we recovered from hours of walking was itself more than worth the cost of the ticket, let alone the opportunity to relax and eat seafood on Cheung Chau.
(video by CIT)

This is the view alongside the ferry pier. Both small ferryboats, such as the one pictured here, and much larger ferry ships, serve the people of Cheung Chau. Some of the ferries we saw appeared to be something like "water taxis," run for the locals by private operators.

The waterfront near the pier shows the influence of the West and the influence of the tourist trade (a Circle K, a 7-Eleven, and a McDonald's all in a row; small shops selling knick-knacks, bric-a-brac, tchotchkes, curios, trinkets, and souvenirs), but most of the island is charmingly and convincingly local. In fact, I was delighted to find that it seemed as though nothing had changed since my visit 12 years earlier. In the modern world, that kind of reassuring consistency is hard to come by.

There are a number of restaurants along Cheung Chau's waterfront, specializing in seafood, of course. We chose one, more or less at random, and in our eager hunger inhaled a bountiful meal (I was so hungry that I forgot to take a photo until these dishes were all that remained). To my wife's discriminating Shanghainese palate, it was not the best seafood she had ever had but quite enjoyable nonetheless. Surprisingly, I recall the vegetables as being my favorite dish—simply prepared yet intensely flavorful. And there's nothing like a cold beer in a shady spot with a view of the ocean, except perhaps a cold beer on a Hong Kong ferry.

I've always found seafood tanks like these rather cruel, but I suppose their redeeming quality is that they force you to be more aware of where the pleasantly dead food on your plate came from than do most Western-style restaurants that hide the uglier bits of the preparation process—and they have the added virtue of allowing you to confirm that your food is indeed fresh.

All in all, I would describe Cheung Chau as an oasis of relaxation, a refuge from the bustle of the city. The part of the island that best epitomizes that quality is Cheung Chau Beach, a crescent-shaped stretch of sand just a few minutes' walk across the narrow part of the island from the waterfront.

From the beach, which faces Hong Kong Island to the east, you can admire the distant view of downtown HK while you relax, far away in both mind and body. The visible distance somehow makes it easier to let go of the urban insanity of modern life—which, paradoxically, is only a convenient ferry ride away when you need a little craziness. If I ever suddenly retire from human society to live as a nomad, this is one of the places I'll go. Call me "the convenient recluse." Tibetan monasteries are just too darn extreme.

Although my little pocket camcorder doesn't really do justice to the vividness of Hong Kong, I think this clip does capture the serenity of Cheung Chau Beach on the evening we relaxed there for an all-too-brief time.
(video by CIT)

As night began to fall, I took this photo of Cheung Chau Harbor.

After two days chock full of endless walking and flagrant gawking, we didn't have the energy for much partying by the time we got back to the city, but we did stroll around to do some shopping and take in the impressive bustle.

With stores, clubs, bars, night market stalls, street performers, and restaurants galore, there is never a shortage of nighttime activities in Hong Kong—even a simple stroll along the streets can be entertaining.
(video by CIT)

Two of my favorite memories of Hong Kong are things that I unfortunately didn't capture on film.

One of these memories is passing by the basketball courts on Cheung Chau where I had seen locals playing an intense style of pickup basketball—with one of them even dunking in the short time I watched them—on my first trip there in 1997. As a basketball fan since early childhood, I was deeply impressed. Way back then, when Chinese basketball was not yet on anyone's radar, I began to realize that it was only a matter of time before Chinese players would begin to emerge on the international scene. This time no one happened to be playing when we passed by, but just the sight of the same courts put a smile on my face.

Later, while strolling along the streets of Kowloon, I watched a small crowd gather outside a media store that was showing a Michael Jackson concert DVD at the entrance. Although I haven't been a big Michael Jackson fan since I was about ten, I've always appreciated his magnetism as a performer, and to see it attract Chinese locals to a little TV on a street in Hong Kong several months after his death was somehow touching—the kind of thing that reminds us of our essential unity. As travelers, we seek the exotic and the new, but ultimately what we want to find, in spite of all our differences, is a deep connection with the people and places we visit, something that transcends the superficial, the local, and the temporal. I felt that in Hong Kong, as I've felt it everywhere I've gone in China, and it has made those travel experiences both exciting and comforting.

CIT in HK: Our November 2009 Hong Kong Trip Part 2

2010-07-21T10:39:00.000-07:00

Update – November 8, 2011: This post has now been reposted with images intact at this permalink on our new website.

On our second full day in HK, we struck out on our own and enjoyed some sights and experiences no less beautiful and stimulating than the more touristy experiences we had had the day before. And of course, we only scratched the nanosurface of all that there is to do and see in Hong Kong.

If you'd like to experience Hong Kong yourself with an itinerary that will allow you to do your own independent exploring, sign up for our Hong Kong 3-Day Tour or our China Highlights 11-Day Tour.

Click on any photo below to open a full-sized version in a separate window.

We started off in Kowloon, whose claustrophobic urban canyons, crammed with billboards, have a bit more character than the more modern, sterile, finance-oriented buildings of the downtown area. Just the sight of it is highly suggestive, rich with the possibilities of so many lives in such a small space.

In the morning we each had a tasty bowl of spicy noodles at a little eatery with the almost hilariously unimaginative name "Chinese Noodle Restaurant." (Its Chinese name, 四川麻辣米綫, which I would translate as "Spicy Sichuan Rice Noodles," is a bit more descriptive.) When eating at places like this, be careful not to let them make you pay the "foreigner tax." Sometimes people who are obviously foreign (especially Westerners) are charged extra; this did in fact happen to us at one restaurant, but it wasn't here.

The food in Hong Kong is world renowned, and although as a semi-vegetarian I'm not as crazy about HK's Cantonese and seafood-oriented cuisine as I am about some of China's other regional cuisines, even my persnickety palate was pleased by the food we had there. These noodles were an even better morning stimulant than coffee.

Afterward, we took a subway ride from Kowloon to downtown HK, the Central District of Hong Kong Island. Although the subway ride was convenient and comfortable, I don't want to imagine what it must be like during a sweltering August afternoon rush hour. I just hope it has a massively powerful ventilation system.

The Landmark in downtown HK is probably one of the finest shopping malls in the world, with many of the most exclusive brands represented. As someone with rather plebian tastes and an utter lack of sartorial style, I felt about as comfortable as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. It was beautiful and impressive, but I don't think anyone with a philosophical bent can help feeling a bit alienated by the hordes of worshippers at downtown Hong Kong's altar of Mammon.

After we emerged from the Landmark with our bank account fortunately still more or less intact, we witnessed an impressive phenomenon: the lunch rush amidst the office buildings in the Central District. Every day, tens or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of worker drones descend from their mile-high celestial cubicles simultaneously to swarm the streets and mingle with the crowds of shoppers and tourists. This video clip doesn't fully capture the intensity of it, but it was quite a sight (and sound).

We also witnessed the amusing sight of this "human billboard" (on the aptly named Theatre Lane) preparing some kind of costume—a sun, a sunflower, a strange mythical creature? I can't tell. Actually, "costume" doesn't do it justice. "Promotional siege engine" is a more accurate description.

Soon we took shelter from the crowd in the Kosmo Wellness Cafe, an oasis of calm with tasty (and at least nominallly healthful) beverages and friendly service.

Our beverages: a smoothie and some milk tea. I suppose drinking milk tea in Hong Kong is disappointingly predictable, but it was indeed good.

With all the time I've spent in places like San Francisco and Shanghai and New York, you might think I would be fairly gawk-proof at the sight of gleaming skyscrapers, but downtown HK is stimulating even to jaded eyes. As the scads of photos (many more than I'll inflict on you here) I took there prove, I spent a lot of time gazing upward at the impressive buildings, playing the role of slack-jawed American yokel, to the amusement of the locals around us, no doubt. At one point my wife even offered to buy me a bib. Well, she didn't say that, but I'm pretty sure she was thinking it.

I don't think you can blame me for gawking, though—by some measures Hong Kong has the best skyline in the world, and it currently boasts five of the the twenty tallest buildings in the world, including Two International Finance Centre, above, which comes in at #4.

The Bank of China Tower (left) and the Cheung Kong Center are the 12th and 52nd tallest buildings in the world, respectively.

Despite all of the industrial towers of steel and glass, downtown Hong Kong somehow manages to be rather charming, too, with its many shops, its cultural distinctiveness, and its pedestrian-friendly environment.

The trolleys, in particular, are rather quaint to an American's eye.

One somewhat unexpected sight we came across was this anti-Citibank demonstration. This and some other things we observed on our trip, along with the recent news about factory workers in China going on strike and successfully demanding better wages, gives me hope for the "little people" of China who have thus far largely been left behind by China's remarkable economic success.

This protester is wearing a shirt that reads "psycho" (or "insane") at the top, and it looks like the bottom part says "God destroys." At least I'm pretty sure he was a protester, not an actual self-declared psycho. In any case, I didn't even consider messing with him, and as you can see I waited until his back was turned to take this photo. My experience suggests that it's best just to take people labeled "psycho" at face value.

Next up: our ferry ride to Cheung Chau and a taste of Kowloon nightlife. I'll chronicle the rest of our trip next week.

CIT in HK: Our November 2009 Hong Kong Trip Part 1

2010-06-28T15:57:00.000-07:00

Update – November 8, 2011: This post has now been reposted with images intact at this permalink on our new website.

If I had to sum up my perception of Hong Kong in one phrase, it would be "a place of extremes constantly juxtaposed": the ultramodern and the traditional, the fabulously (or perhaps absurdly) wealthy and the poor, the East and the West, the artificial and the natural. And as fast-paced and intense as it can be, there are even places in HK where you can truly slow down and relax. It is an incredibly dense microcosm of the world, and increasingly of China itself. Obviously, for a tourist or traveler, few places in the world are more fascinating and fun than Hong Kong.

Last November my wife and I had a chance to visit HK; it was her first time and my first time in twelve years. First, we took the "half-day" tour (it actually ended up being a bit longer, which was fine with us) that our clients take (on our Hong Kong 3-Day Tour and our China Highlights 11-Day Tour), and then we did some exploring on our own. Here are a few photos and video clips that show the many different sides of Hong Kong that we experienced.

Click on any photo below to open a full-sized version in a separate window.

The first stop on our tour was Man Mo Temple, a charming old Taoist temple in downtown Hong Kong.

The temple lies sheltered amidst tall apartment buildings, almost as if it were worshiping at the feet of modernity. Let's hope not—modernity could use a little more Taoism, not the other way around. (And by the way, yes, that is the moon up above, tiny as it looks.)

Literally, there is a thick Taoist atmosphere in the temple, including a tranquil, sunlight-streaked central area with incense coils suspended in midair that my little digital camera couldn't do justice to. (You can see a somewhat better attempt here.) This little nook is labeled "Hall of Ten Kings" (though you can't see the "ten" in this photo).

From what I saw, there tend to be more tourists at the temple than regular worshipers, but they are usually quiet and respectful and do not spoil the tranquil, meditative atmosphere.

Many visitors to the temple do pray and burn incense, however, regardless of where they may be from.

A closeup of the entrance to the temple, which was built in 1847.

The interior of Man Mo Temple

The ride up to Victoria Peak on the Peak Tram

The ride up the peak feels even steeper than it looks in this photo, and it's a fun trip, especially when the weather is as good as it was on that day in November 2009. A spectacular view of Hong Kong's vast cityscape and harbor spread out beneath you as you climb the mountain.

After you exit the tram, you can sit down at this comfortable cafe and enjoy a drink as you take in the view from the Peak Tower, one of the best city views to be found anywhere in the world.

I've seen a million variations of this photo, but it's nice to have been able to take a pretty decent one myself, even if it's not very original.

For those who have time to hang out on the mountain, there's a pleasant path that circles the mountaintop here. (taken from a point near the Peak Tower)

The Peak Tower, where the Peak Tram line ends, is (at least to me) an interesting work of modern architecture that augments the natural beauty of the mountain. Not quite Frank Lloyd Wright, perhaps, but I like it.

I guess it was inevitable given all the tourists with time and money who visit Victoria Peak, but yes, there is a shopping mall next to the Peak Tower called the Peak Galleria.

If you walk around the area near the Peak Tower, you can enjoy some beautiful views of the rest of Hong Kong Island and the surrounding area. Facing approximately southwest, you can see Cheung Chau (長洲) and part of Lantau Island (大嶼山) in the distance.

These peaks lie to the west of the Peak Tower.

This is the breathtaking view that greets you right outside the Peak Tower at the end of your tram ride up the mountainside: an army of skyscrapers, millions of people, and a long view out across one of the busiest harbors in the world to Kowloon.

At Aberdeen, you can take a relaxing boat ride around the harbor and check out the sampans and boathouses of the local fishermen, whose traditional way of life continues today.

Although fewer fishermen and families actually live full-time on the boats at Aberdeen these days, it is aptly described as a "floating community." I imagine life here must be profoundly intimate, both with other people and with the elements. Even a glimpse of it caught during a brief boat tour is fascinating.

The harbor at Aberdeen also features the internationally famous Jumbo Floating Restaurant, which is exactly what it sounds like: a restaurant on what appears to be a very large boat.

This video clip shows the essence of Hong Kong: that it is a place of extremes. Large yachts and speedboats owned by the fabulously wealthy float beside small junks and sampans owned by poor fishermen.

The south side of Hong Kong Island is much less developed than downtown Hong Kong on the north side, and when the weather is good, it is a truly beautiful and relaxing place. This is a shot of part of Repulse Bay.

This is another shot of tranquil Repulse Bay.

Some of our favorite moments in Hong Kong came after the tour was over and we had time to explore the area on our own—and on our Hong Kong itineraries we give you time to do the same. I'll share photos of and thoughts about those experiences next week!

China in the Mainstream Media

2010-05-20T16:08:00.000-07:00

As someone who remains constantly fascinated by China, I'm always keeping my eyes open for interesting news about every aspect of Chinese society. China is receiving more and more coverage in the mainstream Western media these days as it continues to grow and prosper and as more Westerners realize just how important and fascinating a country China is.

Time recently named a number of China's movers and shakers to its 2010 "Time 100" list: J.T. Wang, Bo Xilai, Robin Li, Jet Li, and Han Han—interesting and influential people, all. These days, it's increasingly true that anyone who's an important figure in China is an important figure in the world.

Time also recently released its 2010 "Best of Asia" list, in which China figures prominently, of course. I sometimes have a hard time finding good non-leather shoes, so I bought a pair of Feiyue shoes right after reading this article and doing a little research on Amazon!

Expo 2010 is also getting quite a bit of exposure in the Western media, including this MSNBC World Blog article. (There's also a great Expo slideshow linked to the article.)

The New York Times has also prominently featured some interesting China-related articles recently, including this fascinating piece about the sometimes disconcerting experiences of teachers from Mainland China participating in a program that allows them to teach in American schools. Unsurprisingly, the number of American schools offering Chinese language courses is on the rise, a phenomenon that the Times asked a number of experts to write about here. This article, on the other hand, is about the simultaneous efforts to both eradicate and document (and, in some cases, actually preserve) instances of "Chinglish" (also known by the more inclusive term "Engrish") in Shanghai's public places. (See this slideshow for some amusing signage featured on the Times website.)

In the near future I'll be more actively updating this blog with more stories, photos, and video from my travel experiences in China. In the meantime, happy reading!

Dogs of China

2010-04-22T12:39:00.000-07:00

Update – September 22, 2011: This post has now been reposted with images intact at this permalink on our new website.

The barrage of information—sensory, cultural, linguistic, emotional—that a Westerner traveling in China experiences can be both thrilling and overwhelming. Depending on your personality and interests, certain things tend to cut through that noise and grab your attention. For me, one of those things is dogs. On our most recent trip to China last November, my traveling companions and I found ourselves taking photos of the dogs we saw in all the different places we went. Although the phenomenon of “toy dog as fashion accessory” is definitely catching on in major Chinese cities, most of the dogs we photographed were living in more rural areas in a more traditional man-dog relationship, which is to say they were not relentlessly groomed and spoiled. In some cases the conditions they lived in were a bit pitiful. Like dogs anywhere else, however, one thing they all seemed to share was personality.

"Got no time for hangin' out—I got things to do,
places to go."
(photo by CIT)

Given the familiar and purposeful way with which he trotted down Dali’s Foreigner Street, the center of night life in the city, this party animal seemed to be running an errand or something. In fact, the more “urban” dogs we saw all seemed to share that sense of purpose and to live faster-paced lives, much like the cities’ human denizens.

Frankenstein's dog
(photo by CIT's Tracy Liu)

Watching this weird-looking dog in Dali, however, really made me sad. A still photo doesn’t do its weirdness justice; the way it moved made it seem somehow broken, or as if a mad scientist had assembled it from leftover dog parts. It was clearly suffering from some kind of debilitating affliction.

"Take your photos, tourist,
just don't block my light."
(photo by CIT)

"You can't handle the truth."
(photo by CIT)

"You come to me on this, the day
of my daughter's wedding..."
(photo by CIT's Tracy Liu)

These guys were enjoying the sunlight partway up Jade Dragon Snow Mountain at White Water River, hanging out with tourists and yaks. They were apparently used to having their pictures taken, as they were uninterested in our presence and utterly nonchalant. Begging for food was clearly beneath them, too, so they also must have been quite well fed. Something about the self-assured coolness of that second dog somehow reminds me of Jack Nicholson or Marlon Brando.

"Don't mind if I hang out with you,
do you? No, you don't."
(photo by CIT)

"Dude, you really think you
can say no to me?"
(photo by CIT's Tracy Liu)

This dog in Lijiang’s “old town” area of Baisha (“White Sand”) hung out with us in the open-air restaurant where we ate, begging for scraps, which it got quite a few of. At first I thought the owners wouldn’t want us feeding it and thus encouraging it to keep begging, but it didn’t seem to occur to them that some people wouldn’t want a dog underfoot as they ate. It didn’t bother us, at any rate. But this dog sure seemed to have a sense of entitlement—it made me feel like a total jerk for even considering not feeding it. A couple of other restaurants we ate at in Yunnan and Guangdong also had dogs hanging around, and they actually lent a certain charm to these places. Reminded me a bit of the dog lying on the bar at Arkey Blue’s Silver Dollar in Bandera, Texas, a “dude ranch” town I used to frequent as a kid.

(photo by CIT's Tracy Liu)

(photo by CIT's Tracy Liu)

I don’t even remember seeing these dogs that Tracy, a friend working in our Shanghai office, got photos of, but they’re cute little fellows.

Is this a dog, or a land manatee?
(photo by CIT)

A gratuitous closeup shot of its
charming ugliness
(photo by CIT's Tracy Liu)

This dog in Shuhe, our favorite “old town” area of Lijiang, on the other hand, made quite an impression on us and probably a lot of other tourists, too. We all agreed that this is one homely pooch, clear proof that “ugly” is an international language. It’s no Sam, mind you, but not very attractive. Since it seemed like a nice dog, though, I’ll refrain from talking any further smack about it. Poor guy.

Mmmm...gimme some more o' that!
(photo by CIT)

As you can see from its blurry tail, this dog roaming the streets of Shangri-La’s Old Town was quite pleased, presumably because it was being fed.

In memoriam: Rover
(photo by CIT)

I’ve saved the most tragic dog for last. This dog that we met briefly in Guangdong seemed like a perfectly serviceable companion—healthy, apparently well behaved, and even reasonably good-looking. As we passed by, our local tour guide made a comment that this dog would “上桌子,” which literally means “go up on the table.” You can probably guess what he meant, but I unthinkingly and naively replied with something like “Oh, lots of dogs have a tendency to jump up on the table.” Foolish foreigner. What he meant, of course, was that the poor dog was destined to be someone’s dinner. As I understand it, in many places in China dogs are generally not eaten, but Guangdong is one of the exceptions. Man’s best friend, indeed. Although I try not to be culturally judgmental, I must admit this is one practice that seems just barbaric to me. On the other hand, if you don’t see anything barbaric, you’re not really traveling. That should be a saying. In any case, rest in peace, o tasty Rover.

English in China - Part 1

2010-03-01T17:37:00.000-08:00

Any Westerner who has much experience traveling in China has seen firsthand the problems created by attempts to translate Chinese into English. In defense of the non-native English speakers charged with this potentially embarrassing task, English is, of course, in so many ways a vastly different language from Chinese. Still, it’s hard not to chuckle at some of the crude, inappropriate, and unintentionally hilarious results of their attempts: a phenomenon known as "Engrish." In my travels I’ve come across many instances of Engrish, which I’ve begun to document, especially as the quality of public English translations in China improves and Engrish begins to disappear.

Public signage is probably the main source of Engrish:

"May joy be with you
The smile will be with us!"
Can't we ALL smile?
(photo by CIT)

"Caution, slip!" Wait – so I'm
supposed to slip?
(photo by CIT)

"Safety exports"
(photo by CIT)

"Ganzhi Blind a Health Chamber"
(photo by CIT)

Rock out with "Uncle Rock"!
(photo by CIT)

There’s actually an interesting story behind "Uncle Rock."

I also enjoyed some of the English names of formations in the Jiuxiang Caves near Kunming that we came across on our trip to Yunnan last November:

The world-famous
"Feudal Headman Castle"...
(photo by CIT's Anna Qin)

...and "Posture in Lying of an Old
Immortal Man After Drunkenness"
(photo by CIT)

In some cases in which you would have to nitpick to find fault with grammar and usage, such as this sign in the Stone Forest area, English translations can still have unintended connotations. In that social context, a place where many ethnic minorities (non-Han Chinese) reside, the use of the word "civilized" has an uncomfortable authoritarian undertone for some Westerners that is completely missing from the Chinese version, which is an innocuous call for everyone to keep the area clean:

"The Stone Forest, our home,
shall be beautiful and civilized."
(photo by CIT)

Another common source of Engrish is literal translations of the names of dishes whose historical and cultural background are unknown outside China. The menu photos below are from a restaurant in Lijiang and a dumpling restaurant in Shanghai (for the record, the food at both of these places was absolutely delicious):

"Pure tribute crab dumpling"
(photo by CIT)

The ever-popular dish "The millet
fries the salty duck egg spicily"
(photo by CIT)

You gotta love how the attributive "Yunnan" becomes the subject of the sentence "Yunnan slightly fries the meat" (perhaps better rendered as "Yunnan-style pan-fried meat"), and a similar mistake results in "The millet fries the salty duck egg spicily." If I didn’t eat a mostly vegetarian diet, I would have loved to get crazy with the "Wild fung chicken soup." Give credit to the owners of the restaurant for finding all of the more-appropriate standard translations they could for the other dishes, however.

Then there are the completely strange or unexpected instances of English you encounter randomly, such as this appropriately-named store and the mystifying brand name on the package below that I came across in an upscale hotel bathroom (note the hilarious cartoon image holding an apple):

"P.I.M.P": The latest in hip-hop fashions
(photo by CIT)

"Donless"?
(photo by CIT)

Even as Westerners enjoy a few laughs at the expense of these hapless translators, we shouldn’t be too smug. Most young people in China are diligently studying English, and in the future there will be a much larger number of Chinese whose English is not just good, but in many ways better than most Americans’. And as China’s presence in the world continues to grow, no doubt many non-native speakers of Chinese will be faced with the opposite task, resulting in laughably crude and inappropriate Chinese translations—a phenomenon that might be dubbed 憃文. (If you can read Chinese, I think you’ll get the joke; if you can't, well, that’s what it’s like to be on the other side.) No doubt I’ve been an unwitting perpetrator myself on many occasions, but fortunately my Chinese friends have usually been too nice to give me too hard a time about it.

Chinese New Year Fireworks

2010-02-18T12:42:00.000-08:00

To celebrate Chinese New Year in China, especially with family, is a fun and fascinating experience: the festive atmosphere, both at home and out on the town; the excessive consumption of food and alcohol; and, perhaps most exciting of all, the fireworks. In 2003 I spent Chinese New Year in Shanghai, and the amount of gunpowder detonated in that city in the 16-day period from New Year’s Eve through the Lantern Festival absolutely blew my mind (no pun intended). As a childhood pyromaniac who hadn’t indulged in fireworks in many years, I was on fire with excitement (again, no pun intended)—though to anyone with normal sensibilities, it was like being in a war zone, with so many fireworks going off at certain times that you could barely have a conversation outdoors. My father-in-law and I burned (no pun intended, of course) a completely unjustifiable amount of cash on long strings of firecrackers, big batteries of rockets, and various other explosives. I strolled through the city streets, tossing firecrackers to and fro and setting them off in every nook and cranny to magnify the sound of the explosions. Obnoxious, mildly destructive, and environmentally irresponsible, to be sure...but also ridiculously fun. If not for my distaste for puns, I would be tempted to say that I literally had a blast. I’m just fortunate to have emerged from the experience with all ten fingers and all five senses intact.

In celebration of the new year, I present some spectacular photos that will give you some idea of what the experience of celebrating Chinese New Year in China is like. We at CIT are anticipating another successful year, and we’d like to wish all of our family, friends, and customers a fierce Year of the Tiger. Thank you for your support!

Fireworks make the city look
and sound like a war zone
(photo by Jaye Zhou)

It's amazing the city is
still standing afterward
(photo by Aapo Haapanen)

Outside viewing on high-rise
balconies is not recommended
(photo by Harry Alverson)

Mile-long strings of firecrackers
scare away evil spirits...
(photo by Ming-Yang Sue)

...and people, too, if they
know what's good for them.
(photo by Ming-Yang Sue)

Firecracker aftermath
(photo by Ming-Yang Sue)

A fireworks display at
Shanghai's Huangpu River
(photo by David Wong)

To see more fireworks photos, please visit the blog page on our website.

Raft Trip at Longhu Shan ("Dragon-Tiger Mountain")

2010-01-23T08:50:00.000-08:00

In 2004 my wife and I took a trip to Jiangxi, an inland province that, while no doubt changing rapidly, is still lagging behind the coastal regions in terms of development. (Personally, I think a little less comfort and a little more local flavor makes a trip more interesting, but that’s for another post.) While there, we visited Mount Lu and a truly poor rural village, among other places, but one experience that also sticks out in my memory is the raft trip we took at Longhu Shan.

(video by CIT)

One great thing about China is that you can truly get away from it all there, especially in inland rural areas like Jiangxi. This raft trip was a profoundly relaxing experience. Check out the trained cormorants catching fish for the fisherman on one of the rafts! (On our Yunnan Highlands Local Culture 11-Day Tour, you might see cormorant fishermen in action on Lake Er at Dali.)

(video by CIT)

Waaaaaarm beer! Peanuts! Get yer warm beer and peanuts! A bamboo raft trip at Longhu Shan: just like a baseball game, but without that loud obnoxious drunk shouting and crowding your space, and without the threat of a foul ball bashing your head in unexpectedly, and...ok, it's nothing like a baseball game; it's much better, though that beer could have used a little refrigeration. And that raft vendor could use a little more charismatic sales patter. (Our tours that include Guilin feature a raft trip like this one; those that include Kunming, Dali, the Three Gorges, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Zhouzhuang, and/or Suzhou all feature gondola or boat trips that you may find even more relaxing or stimulating.)

(video by CIT)

During the last part of the trip, we walked overland as the bamboo rafts were portaged past an impassable section of the river. It was a good opportunity to get some footage of the beautiful farmland in the area, record the deafening sound of the obnoxious local cicadas, check out an ancient Taoist temple (where an immortality pill was created by a Taoist master, who's unfortunately no longer around to tell us how he did it), and take a rickshaw ride. At one point during the walk, a local man started to talk with me, and you can hear him saying that I look like an American before the conversation is cut off. (The identification of "Caucasian" with "American" is very common in China, and comments like that always make me want to launch into a lecture about why such assumptions are wrong - but maybe he just meant that my flagrantly casual clothing and wide-eyed, foolish manner were unmistakably American, in which case I can't argue with him.) After the raft trip resumed, we watched a flashy "cliff acrobat" rappel down the side of the mountain as a prelude to a "hanging coffin" show; the area was once home to a minority (non-Han) culture that placed its coffins in grottoes in the cliff face. Unfortunately, either my battery or my tape ran out at that point, so I was unable to record what followed. (If you’re interested in these “hanging coffins,” our tours that include the Three Gorges feature a boat trip that will allow you to see similar ones.)

Progress in China

2010-01-14T11:20:00.000-08:00

“Progress” is a word that carries all kinds of philosophical and historical baggage. However, progress of some sort is undoubtedly being made in China, and foreign visitors are invariably impressed by the speed and scope of the changes there. On our most recent trip to China in November, we saw all of the usual and obvious signs of this progress—new buildings under construction, massive public works projects, infrastructural developments, people earning and spending money everywhere, technology being integrated more and more into everyday life. But there was one small fact in particular that seemed incredibly significant to me: even while we were in a remote, rural mountain area, we were able to get perfect cell phone reception deep down in a cavern and also in a mountain tunnel. Wow. Having a crystal-clear conversation with people on the other side of the planet as you walk among stalactites and stalagmites definitely makes an impression.

Progress: A "touchmedia" screen
with advertisements and visitor
information in a Shanghai taxi.
(photo by CIT)

Progress? Now you can
find Pabst Blue Ribbon even
in remote areas of China.
(photo by CIT)

Local beer, properly bottled,
not made with formaldehyde.
Ahh...Now THAT'S progress!
(photo by CIT)

As an American who values what our political system gives us, I certainly wouldn’t want to exchange our system for China’s. But these days China has an unquestionable ability to Get Things Done. What China has been able to accomplish in the last 25 years is truly remarkable, and other countries can certainly learn from China’s successes. A couple of months ago, Time published an insightful article about this issue called "5 Things We Can Learn from China." It's definitely worth a look, and in fact there are links on that page to a number of articles that should interest anyone wanting to understand contemporary China. Happy reading!

Christmas in Shanghai Part 2

2009-12-06T07:11:00.000-08:00

Update – September 27, 2011: A revised and expanded version of this post, with images intact, has been reposted on our new website here.

December 6th Update: As usual, the “Christmas spirit” of commercialism is in full evidence in Shanghai this year, filling Chinese shoppers with Western cheer. I didn't see any killer Santas, lame Santa costumes, or hip-hop Christmas choirs, though, so it appears that (as in everything else) China is making progress in its celebration of Christmas. And as you can see from the last photo below, taken in the lobby of Kunming's Weilong Hotel on November 17th, the imperial presence of Christmas in China isn't limited to coastal cosmopolitan centers anymore—it has extended its dominion far into the country’s interior:

Click on the photos below to see larger versions.

Lovely decorations at the
Jin Guang City Plaza mall
(photo by CIT)

A blurry gold Christmas tree captured
from my cab as we careened by
(photo by CIT)

Unencumbered by Thanksgiving,
China can beat the U.S. to the
Christmas punch by putting decorations
up before mid-November.
(photo by CIT)

Christmas in Shanghai

2009-09-27T23:00:00.000-07:00

Update – September 27, 2011: A revised and expanded version of this post, with images intact, has been reposted on our new website here.

One of the nice things about being in Shanghai late in the year—besides avoiding any possibility of hot weather—is the opportunity to experience a Christmas atmosphere in China. It’s one of the consequences of American cultural influence that Christmas is now celebrated by a lot of people there, primarily in the form of decorations and shopping. (What it comes down to, naturally, is that Christmas is another way for the purveyors of materialism to get people to engage in some good old American-style self-indulgence.) I find it all good fun, personally, because there’s no danger of 5,000 years of Chinese culture being done in by a fat, bearded white man in a red suit, but depending on your opinions about globalization I suppose it could be quite disturbing. In any case, it’s certainly a bit surreal to hear “Jingle Bells” in a random Shanghai store and to see statues of Santa Claus, local people dressed up like Santa (not always very convincingly, mind you), enormous Christmas trees, and Christmas lights side-by-side with symbols of Chinese culture. And it’s fascinating to see the Chinese interpretation of Christmas—in some cases you would think you’re in the US, and in other cases they get it horribly or hilariously wrong:

Click on the photos below to see larger versions.

Christmas lights adorn the trees on
some of Shanghai's commercial streets
(photo by Jakob Montrasio)

Every year there's a big Christmas tree at
the Grand Gateway Mall
(photo by Marc van der Chijs)

Where it starts to go wrong: "Bling Christmas."
What is this, the Lil Wayne Chinese Children's Choir?
(photo by "Foxmachia")

A vaguely pig-like Santa with disturbing hands
and what appears to be a snout
(photo by Christopher)

A psychotic Santa Claus: apparently about to shiv
some fool with that Christmas candle...
(photo by Christopher)

...or about to go to war with his homie,
the deity-general Guan Yu
(photo by "Kanegen")

Making Connections in Rural China

2009-09-10T16:45:00.000-07:00

The boy held out a piece of fruit and looked into my Western eyes. With the confident familiarity of someone who frequently came into contact with foreign tourists, but with no discernible greed or manipulativeness, he asked me for some paltry sum for it–an amount that he no doubt knew would be nothing to me, though I'm sure no local would have paid half that much. He and his brother smiled, along with the other village residents standing around us, and their smiles were genuine. Their warmth touched me across so many divides: of age, of ethnicity, of upbringing, of culture, of geography, of material wealth. But it also made me intensely conscious of all of those divisions. I was moved both by a kind of sympathy for the limitations that I knew this boy's life would be lived within and by an unexpected jealousy that I would never experience the kind of life he seemed to be living quite happily–a life uncomplicated and untainted by the questionable influences of modern American life. More than anything, what touched me was a profound sense of the beauty of the place and the people in it. Standing there on that long staircase that climbed up the side of the gorge from the waters of the Yangtze, I felt that this moment was the culmination of many years of dreaming for me. For so long I had wanted to stand in this place, to see these sights, to talk with people like this, to feel these feelings, and it was all more meaningful than I could possibly communicate to anyone.

I gave the boy what he had asked and thanked him. I was caught so off guard emotionally that I didn't think about what I was doing, and I've often wanted to smack myself for not saying more, for not giving more. It was such an inadequate gesture, inadequate to express all that I wished I could somehow share with him and with everyone there. But maybe in the end that simple response was the best thing I could have done. Would offering more money have seemed like a kind of insult? Was there anything I could have said that would have been understood better than a heartfelt "thank you"?

Later, I broke down in front of the other members of my tour group, all friends and acquaintances. I don't think they knew what to make of my reaction, not knowing everything that was behind it. I tried to tell them that I wasn't sad; I was just overwhelmed with so many emotions that they could not be contained. The only way to deal with them was to let them flow. Under other circumstances such a public display of emotion would have been humiliating, but in that moment of pure feeling I didn't care. And the echoes of that feeling have stayed with me ever since.

That encounter occurred on my first trip to Mainland China in 2001. Although I've had any number of memorable experiences in China of every kind, probably the most emotionally profound experiences I've had have been in my contact with people living in rural areas in China. The sense I always get when I'm in China of life being lived more deeply, with more immediacy and more vitality, is magnified in areas that are less touched by modernization and Westernization. The people living in these areas seem more there–less distracted, less needy, less divided, in the way that modern media technology, consumer culture, and the faster-paced life of cities seem to make us all.

On a trip to Jiangxi a few years later, I had a similar but less overwhelming experience in a small rural village, a place that was definitely not part of the China promoted by flashy tourism advertisements and government propaganda. A member of our group had grown up there, and we were invited to spend a day with the locals. I was told that I was the first foreigner (or perhaps they meant the first Westerner) ever to visit their village. Who knows whether that was literally true, but I definitely felt like a bit of a celebrity, with a group of local children constantly following me around. They were fascinated with my camcorder and had me play back recordings of them several times so they could see themselves. As with the boy in the Yangtze village, the untainted joy of these children left a deep impression on me. But instead of trying to capture the experience in words, I'll let this video footage tell a little of the tale:

I hope that everyone who travels to China is fortunate enough to have experiences like these with the local people. They're easy to find, even while in a tour group and even within a big city, if you're open to them. To say that they can be life-changing may be a cliché, but it's not an exaggeration.

Shanghai's Disappearing Shíkùmén (石库门)

2009-08-14T17:05:00.000-07:00

Update – September 22, 2011: This post has now been reposted with images intact at this permalink on our new website.

In a previous post, I mentioned China's "economic miracle." The most miraculous thing about it is that it has not (so far) been accompanied by crippling social instability or insurmountable problems. However, the costs of this revolution are also quite real and multifaceted. One of these costs is the rapid loss of China's traditional culture, including the environments in which this traditional culture was born and has thrived.

In Shanghai, for example, vast tracts of the city filled with traditional buildings are being razed and replaced with new high-rise buildings. Though they provide people with cleaner, more comfortable, more modern living and working environments, these new buildings seem to result in a much more isolated and less intimate community atmosphere than the traditional neighborhoods that the majority of Shanghai's population used to live in. These neighborhoods were built around a style of house called "shíkùmén," or "stone gates," which over time often became extremely crowded as they were subdivided into smaller units.

Shikumen doors
(photo by CIT)

Laundry and furniture in a shikumen lane
(photo by CIT)

Shikumen residents
(photo by CIT)

When I first visited my wife's grandmother's neighborhood seven years ago, my impression of these shikumen was that they were usually dirty and unbelievably cramped, and that no one who lived in them could have any privacy whatsoever, or even real comfort. Some of them, in fact, reminded me of rabbit warrens or bunkers of some sort, with ladders, steep stairways, and narrow, dimly-lit hallways connecting their cramped rooms. They were definitely not the kind of place I could see myself ever getting used to.

Tiny kitten on a shikumen ledge
(photo by CIT)

Kitten on the edge
Small patch of urban ledge-grass
Precarious life

"Humankind has only one planet
Everybody attend to the population problem"
(photo by CIT)

After having spent some time there and having observed the residents' lifestyle, however, I came to see the other side of life in the shikumen: the sense of intimacy, interconnectedness, and community responsibility that they fostered, especially given the fact that the same families have often inhabited these houses for generations. For someone who had grown up in such a place, the shikumen way of life would no doubt seem natural and comfortable in a way that life in one of the newer buildings could probably never be. With activities like washing clothes and playing chess often done outside, in the small lanes on which these houses are located, neighbors inevitably interact every day and come to know one another well. In Shanghai's newer buildings, on the other hand, neighbors often don't seem to know each other, and they have little incentive to get to know each other, because they're all comfortably shut away and don't have to interact. I'll admit that, yes, I too would much rather live in one of these comfortable new units, which are much more like the apartments many Americans are used to living in. But l can't help feeling that the disappearance of the shikumen and the resulting fragmentation of Shanghai's communities is, at least in one way, unfortunate.

Here, then, is a tribute to Shanghai's shikumen, in the form of these photos I took on my most recent visit to my wife's grandmother's neighborhood. It's entirely possible that in the next few years these homes, too, and with them a great deal of history, will disappear.

Looming skyscraper in the haze:
Better than the shikumen?
(photo by CIT)

More increasingly rare
propaganda: "Proposal for
establishing a safe family"
(photo by CIT)

Shikumen residents:
A disappearing way of life
(photo by CIT)

The face of change
(photo by CIT)

A curving shikumen lane
(photo by CIT)

Shikumen walls
(photo by CIT)

Thoughts on the Recent Violence in Xinjiang

2009-07-15T14:31:00.000-07:00

Although I don't intend to deal directly with political issues in this blog, one goal I have is to foster a better understanding of China among the non-Chinese who may read this blog, in whatever small way I can. In addition, I'm sure there are many non-Chinese who are wondering whether it's safe to travel in China right now, and in Xinjiang in particular. As a result, I feel I should say something about the recent violence and ongoing tension in Ürümchi and Xinjiang Province.

First of all, we at CIT would like to express our sorrow and sympathy for the victims and their families. Whatever the truth is about the violence that occurred on July 5, it is certain that many innocent people were killed. And whatever its political significance, this event was, above all, a personal tragedy for everyone touched by it.

From a traveler's perspective, the first thing to know is that the government of China and, for that matter, most of the Chinese people place the highest priority on stability and "keeping the peace." In the wake of the violence that occurred on July 5, the reports I've read that seem to be the most objective say that riot police were effective in preventing further violence and deterioration of the situation. (If they had not, it is quite possible that many more Uighurs and Han Chinese, both, would have died.) Whatever ongoing problems and tensions exist in Xinjiang, I fully expect the Chinese government to continue to be effective in maintaining stability. For the time being, I don't believe that travelers in Xinjiang will be at risk. That said, of course travelers should be aware of the situation, make prudent decisions, and avoid putting themselves in potentially dangerous situations. Our experienced and concerned tour guides will help ensure that this does not happen, and our tours will avoid any potentially dangerous areas.

A related concern is the increase in anti-American and anti-Western sentiment in China. My experiences in China suggest that whatever political issues the Chinese people may be upset about (often with good reason), many of them continue to be interested in the West and in Western culture, and as a general rule are friendly and welcoming. They don't take whatever anger or frustration they may feel out on individual Westerners, and I've never personally known any Westerners traveling in China who were the victims of violence. (In fact, I don't even recall ever hearing of any such incidents.)

I happened to be in China during the immediate aftermath of the 2001 "Hainan Island incident," in which an American spy plane collided with a Chinese military jet, killing the Chinese pilot. Though there was much discussion of the incident and some (understandable) anger among the Chinese, I did not sense any anti-American sentiment directed toward me. In the years since, the image of the United States and the West in general has deteriorated in China, but the fundamental safety of Western travelers in China remains assured. I would guess that in some situations and places, anti-Western sentiment might be more obvious (take, for example, this American reporter's experiences in trying to interview Uighurs about the recent violence), but these tend to be extreme and isolated situations that don't reflect the typical traveler's experience. (In this reporter's case, is it surprising that he would have such an experience on the streets of Ürümchi in the aftermath of the killings of so many Han Chinese and in the context of so much Western media bias? The threat of violence was not justified, of course, but surely it can't be a surprise that such an incident would occur.)

Whatever criticisms can be made about issues like the Chinese government's policies toward Xinjiang and Tibet, I am confident that the risk to travelers in China, even in those particular places, is minimal. In fact, the risk is probably lower than in most places in the world you might choose to travel to.

From a broader perspective, it is deeply saddening to see the continued lack of understanding between China and the Western world that has been highlighted by the violence in Ürümchi. I've been reading the comments left by both Chinese and non-Chinese readers in response to some articles and blog posts about the situation (see the links below), and they reveal a great deal of suspicion, ignorance, and anger on the part of people on both sides who are clearly intelligent and well-educated. Obviously, anonymous comments made on the Internet are not the best source of sober and even-handed reflection, but the interaction among these people is both revealing and disturbing. As is generally the case regarding issues like the ethnic and economic tensions in Xinjiang, the truth is complex. Unfortunately, what we in the West (especially the U.S.) are usually exposed to is a fairly simplistic and one-sided account that tends to reinforce our prejudices about the Chinese government. While I would never suggest that the Chinese government be exempt from criticism, we Westerners really need to be sure that we look at the situation objectively and become better informed before we make strong judgments. I would not presume to say what "the truth" about China's policies toward Uighurs and Xinjiang is, but I think reading these articles and the responses to them is a good beginning in determining for yourself where the truth lies.

Accounts of violence in Xinjiang (BBC News)
Ürümchi riots signal dark days ahead (The Telegraph)

As an American who is keenly aware of the history of racism in my own country, I hope that the Chinese people will be quicker to engage in constructive self-criticism than my country was. (I believe that there is already plenty of evidence to suggest they have done so and will continue to do so, but it's easy for people to find excuses to avoid that difficult process.) I also hope that we in the West will be more objective and better-informed in our attitudes toward China. With this blog, I will try to make a small contribution to that hope.

China's Drinking Culture

2009-06-25T11:02:00.000-07:00

One of my many misconceptions about daily life for the typical Chinese that I mentioned in my first blog entry concerned drinking and partying. Though I had forced down some Chinese liquor on one or two occasions before going to Taiwan for a study abroad program, I still thought of the "Chinese personality" as rather sober and strait-laced. Boy, was I wrong. It's foolish to think in absolutes about any culture, especially one as rich and varied as China's, and I quickly discovered the party animal side of Chinese culture. For many Chinese, it's customary to make frequent toasts at meals, play drinking games, have drinking competitions, and drink prodigiously while engaging in activities like karaoke. If you're a foreigner, they may take it easier on you, or they may be eager to take you down. And you may get your liver handed to you.

Although there are a lot of drinking stories I could tell, one of the first that comes to mind is from a trip to Jiangxi Province with a couple of my wife's friends from Shanghai. Having seen them drink just about every experienced drinker they've encountered into a stupor, I now know not to provoke them. But in my first experiences with them, I was like a mischievous child poking a cute, furry wolverine with a stick. Needless to say, I got clawed, chewed up, and spit back out.

On that particular occasion, the drinking began on a red-eye train trip from Shanghai to Nanchang. Our friends brought a bottle of Chinese liquor (白酒, or "baijiu") with them, but once the drinking began after most of the passengers had gone to sleep, that bottle lasted all of a few minutes. We then relocated to the area at the end of the car, as far away from any sleeping passengers as possible, and proceeded to play drinking games while sitting on the floor. As a tenderfoot playing against sly and savvy veterans, I managed to lose just about every round and had to endure constant imbibing just to get the small satisfaction of occasionally making them take a swig. And naturally, as I got drunker, I got worse and worse at these games. It was the most vicious of vicious circles. Over the course of the night's festivities, we drank every last can or bottle of alcohol available on the entire train...and it was a BIG train with a LOT of people. I remember taking a long stumble through I don't know how many cars and past I don't know how many startled passengers (I was the lone white guy on a train full of hundreds of locals, and I was appearing out of nowhere) to the front of the train, where there was rumored to be more beer, and being elated to find that they did indeed have a few more cans. In the end, I collapsed on my bunk and passed out while my still bright-eyed companions outdrank some random passenger who had foolishly decided to join us - and who, we found out later, missed his stop while sprawled out unconscious.

The wolverines with their hapless victim

And that was only the beginning. After three or four hours of sleep for me, and even less for my friends, we got up ridiculously early to exit the train and begin our sightseeing, and the drinking continued at lunch with another bottle of baijiu. For my friends, there was nothing demoralizing or even unusual about this. For me, however, it was starting to become intimidatingly clear how much pain the next few days held in store for me.

So the moral of this post is that depending on the company you keep while in China, be prepared for your liver to take a serious beating. If my liver could talk, it would go off on me like Christian Bale on a wayward dolly grip for the abuse I've dealt out to it during my stays in China. On the other hand, I've gotten a lot of fun and some good stories in return. Just be careful, folks, because you may end up biting off more than you can chew. And watch out for those Shanghai women! They may be sophisticated and well-dressed (the photos above don't do these two justice), but they can probably drink you under the table too.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Burgeoning Shanghai

2009-06-14T13:08:00.000-07:00

Ask anyone who's been to China more than once in the last twenty years about their impressions of China, and invariably one of the first things they'll talk about is the unbelievable pace of growth and change. Although China does face significant problems that it must deal with over the next few decades, its "economic miracle" is undeniable to anyone who has witnessed it firsthand. One of the places where this growth is most conspicuous is Shanghai. My wife and I have visited Shanghai five times in the last seven years, and every time we go back the changes are enormous - so enormous that they can be overwhelming, even to a Shanghai native like her. In just the last two decades, Shanghai has become a forest of gleaming high-rise buildings and shining neon lights, with a lively, even febrile nightlife, hordes of shoppers buying the latest fashions and electronics, and unimaginable sums of money changing hands on a daily basis. Here are some photos that testify to the rapid pace of life and expansion in the largest city in China (click on the photos below for larger image files):

An area in downtown Shanghai
(photo by Aapo Haapanen)

Neon lights on Shanghai's
famous Nanjing Road
(photo by Thierry)

Pudong, the area east of the Huangpu
River that used to be farmland
(photo by Emile B)

Pudong at night
(photo by Hario Seto Supranggono)

The Ever-Surprising, Always-Stimulating Nature of Travel in China

2009-06-05T00:01:00.000-07:00

Update – September 22, 2011: This post has now been reposted with images intact at this permalink on our new website.

The process began as I desperately clutched the seat in front of me, wondering whether I would even survive the ride into Taipei from the airport. No doubt the driver, my Chinese professor's brother, found my fear quaint and amusing as he weaved nonchalantly through the crush of contending cars. Driving with a heedless brusqueness that would have evoked a string of one-finger salutes and perhaps a few acts of violence in most American cities, he aroused the ire of no one on that highway in Taiwan. Most of the other drivers were too busy doing exactly the same thing to even notice him. So it was with these stomach-churning observations that my process of disillusionment began, not one hour after I had first set foot in Asia.

Strange mannequins in a Shanghai shop - Why are some of them naked?

As a white American who was double-majoring in philosophy and Mandarin, my first acquaintance with China and Chinese culture was primarily academic. I had an idealized impression of Chinese culture formed by the many hours I had spent analyzing the Analects of Confucius, stumbling through t'ai chi, meditating to Buddhist chants, struggling with the abstractions of Chinese poetry, listening intently to the feverish plinkety-plink of classical Chinese music while drinking green tea and inhaling incense smoke, and scratching out Chinese calligraphy that must have seemed to my Chinese friends like the scratchings of a second-grader - in other words, through an ivory-tower exploration of China's vast cultural panorama. Although I had had a number of close Chinese friends for years, they were primarily well-educated, somewhat Westernized Chinese who were not at all representative of the typical citizen of China or Taiwan. So I guess it's no surprise that some part of me always expected to find in the daily lives of the Chinese people a more elevated, culturally sophisticated lifestyle than I had observed in American society. In that sense, I've had some disappointing experiences in China: I've seen pollution, ignorance and backwardness, a dog-eat-dog business mentality, shallow popular culture, and, of course, harrowing city traffic (not to say, of course, that these same flaws and many more can't be found in the United States). Fortunately, looking back on the last thirteen years of my travels there, I can say those experiences have been far outweighed by the many more pleasant surprises that China has given me, in addition to treasured friendships, soul-cleansing mountain hikes, touching encounters with earnest rural villagers, late-night strolls through the urban canyons of Shanghai, euphoric drunken karaoke binges, wide-eyed walks along ancient city walls, and meditative moments in temples and teahouses, all of which have made every day of my time there fresh and stimulating. China is a land rich with paradoxes and brimming with vitality.

Relaxing in a boat on West Lake in Hangzhou

These are the things that I'll be sharing with you in this blog, and these are the things that I hope our company will allow some of you to experience for yourselves. When you travel anywhere, life is more vivid, more intense, somehow more REAL than it is during the mundane routine of daily life. Nowhere has that been as true for me as it is in China. No matter what kind of life you've lived, traveling to China will be one of the best things you've ever done - especially with the extensive knowledge, practical experience, and thoughtful service that my Shanghainese wife and her Cantonese partner, along with our many connections in China, can provide. Our tours are a good place to start your own cultural journey.

Welcome, then, to the home of China International Travel CA, Inc. I hope you enjoy browsing our website and watching it grow. Please feel free to contact us with any questions you have.

A foreign devil making a fool of himself and all his fellow foreign devils in a karaoke room