Map of the Sherrys in China

May 4 – Leaving China

I’m sitting on the 747 from Shanghai to Chicago. Remember when the 747 represented the height of luxury? No more. No individual screens for watching. Oh, they do offer free “Private Screening” which means you can watch on your own device if you happened to have downloaded their app before boarding. Can’t download it on the plain unless you pay for their wifi. Huh! Not enough legroom even for me. The good part? No one in coach was allowed to move into the four empty seats one row in front of us, because they have “extra” legroom, without paying $249 more. Then the flight attendant, a sweet flirty guy, let the kids sit there to watch the movie. The result? The Sherry family have seven seats to spread out on and the kids aren’t sitting right with me(!). Enugu about the plane, more about China:

Our passports got their fourth and final exit stamps. The trip to China is officially over. I know this is true, but I’m not sure what it really means. I won’t be trying to speak and read Chinese. I won’t have to struggle to find foods acceptable for the kids. We won’t be nomadic . . . Well, I probably still will get a chance to speak Chinese, especially if CWW gets some Chinese kids as it often does. The kids will know what the food is going to be. No complaints? Unlikely. Settled? The condo is rented through the summer. We still won’t have a true home until we settle in at camp. It is true, though, that we won’t be in hotels as often. More often, we’ll be at friends’ homes.

What have been the biggest surprises of the trip? The first is that I expected us to settle down somewhere, but we never did. I thought that we would get more tired  of moving around than we did. Sure, we took days off, and we even settled for up to a week in Xining, Xishuangbanna, Nanning, and Chongqing, but we never stayed longer than a week in any one place. There was just so many places to see. I should say, though, apart from Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, I feel that we saw all the sites I hoped to, and many that I wasn’t sure we would get to. 26 provinces.

Favorite places? I suppose I ought to start thinking about this question since everyone will ask. First thoughts in chronological order: Great Wall, Huashan, Maiji Shan, Zhangye Danxia, caves at Mati Si, Mingsha Shan and Yadan National Park near Dunhuang, Johkang Temple, Potola Palace, Everest Base Camp, Langmusi hike, Jiuzhaigou, Chengdu pandas, Bamboo Sea hike, Wulong National Park, Tulous, hiking and biking in Yangshuo, Bajiaozhai National Park, Tiger Leaping Gorge, village trip near Lijiang, Stone Forest, Dragon Back Ridge in HK, food in Hoi An, Phang-Nha caves, Sapa, Halong Bay, Leye sinkholes, Watercurtain Cave at Huangguoshu, Zhangjiajie National Park, Sanqingshan, Kunshan and Guoliangcun Tunnel Roads.

Looking forward to: food (Shanghai Gate(!), Duk Bua, JP Licks), friends, regular adult conversations, driving my car, fresh air, drinking water from the tap, consistent good bread products, no fast food, eventually sleeping in the same bed for weeks on end, cool weather, fast Internet, laundry machines and dryers, more than two sets of clothes, Eastern Daylight Time, friends, English language.

Expect to miss: having everything in a backpack, freedom to move, tons to see, exciting new things several times a week, earning money without working, high-speed trains, learning Chinese,

Back to Shanghai

I forgot to post yesterday, but anyone following the blog knows what we’ve been doing. Yesterday, we took the high-speed train from Nanjing to Shanghai. Coincidentally, it was the same train that we took to Suzhou on Friday; we just stayed on for two more stops. The train seemed empty when we left Nanjing, but it quickly filled up at other stops. Soon, it was standing room only, befitting the last day of a three day weekend. We dropped our bags at the Kotler’s and went to the bakery for lunch (big surprise). Unfortunately, I woke up with a stomach ache and was feeling pretty lousy all day. I didn’t eat much at the bakery, but we did buy a pile of pastries for the house. We rested all afternoon. Ella played dress up with Sarah for hours, while Dylan has discovered a new favorite game: Monopoly. For dinner, we went out to the Koala Bar.

Today, we slept in, got breakfast at . . . the French bakery, of course. Then we went to Tianzifang, a labyrinth of little shops that have taken over what used to be a small residential neighborhood but is now full of tourists and shoppers. It was only a quick outing. We were back for a noodle soup and an afternoon of more games. Jonathan gave me an old suitcase of his parents that he had brought here when he had too much stuff. I’ve filled it and will bring it back to Needham so he can use it for another U.S. to China trip. It is full of stuffed animals that the kids won at the arcade when we were with Luc in November. Today they asked if we could go back to the arcade. Only if they promised not to win anything.

Nanjing

We met Xiaobing right after breakfast and spent the day with him, mostly in the three main sights of Zijin Shan, Purple-Gold Mountain. As today is May 1, Labor Day in the whole world outside the U.S. and a Chinese holiday, the park and all the sites were packed with people. We haven’t seen crowds like this since Jiuzhaigou in October.

We started at the Ming Xiaoling Tomb, the burial site of Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty. His grandson moved the Ming capital to Beijing, so this is the only Ming tomb outside of Beijing. While the tomb complex used to be even bigger, it is still an impressive site. We started by walking up the 600 meter spirit path which is lined with statues, including generals and advisors. 

There is a boastful stelae announcing that the Ming were better than the Song and Tang, and then we came to the massive Linghun Pagoda with its impressive stone passageway/tunnel up to the top. 

The actual tomb is under a man-made hill behind the pagoda.

From the tomb, we took a short tourist bus to the Sun Yat-Sen Mausoleum. This was the most crowded site of the day. Dr. Sun Yat-Sen was the founder of the Chinese Republic, the first premier of the Guomingtang, and the first President of the Republic. He is an unusual figure in that he is revered by both the Nationalists and the Communists, perhaps because he died before they began to fight each other so he didn’t need to pick sides. When he died in Beijing, he asked to be buried in Nanjing in a modest manner. Well, he got one of those wishes. The mausoleum lies partway up the slope of Zijin Shan. From the bottom, it looks like an endless set of stairs to the top. (There are 392.) 

From the top, you can only see the platforms between the flights and not the stairs. 

The roofs of the pavilions are blue and the walls white, the colors of the Nationalist flag, and the ceiling of the mausoleum has what is probably the largest Nationalist blue sun in the People’s Republic.

From the Sun Mausoleum, we went to the Linggu Temple. There we saw the Beamless Hall, an usual ancient Chinese building in that it was built without wood supports. Instead, it has vaulted stone ceilings reminiscent of medieval churches. 

Near the Buddhist temple, the kids got to circumnavigate an enormous tortoise which symbolizes long life. We also got to climb the modern but tall Linggu Pagoda.

 Xiaobing didn’t join us for the long climb up the dizzy-inducing, cement circular stairway in the center of the pagoda. The views from the top were terrific.

Today was hot, and we were sticky and crowded all day. The traffic was also terrible, and it took over an hour by bus to return to the area near our hostel, just a few miles away. Ella wanted Beijing duck, and Xiaobing found a nearby restaurant on his cell phone. We walked there only to find it shuttered. He found another one a bus ride away. We went there, and it had been replaced with another restaurant. He looked one more time and found a third one a short walk away. We went there and found not a restaurant but a duck stand, but they did have Beijing duck and they only had one left. We bought it and then found a small hole-in-the-wall restaurant which let us eat our duck at their table. I was just relieved that we could finally eat. Even better? The duck was delicious, perhaps the best Beijing duck we’ve had on the trip. I should note that we’ve eaten Beijing duck in Datong, Nanning, Nanjing, but never in Beijing! The delicious duck was a fitting end to what should be our last day of touring on this trip. Tomorrow we return to Shanghai. That will give us a day and a half to relax and organize all our stuff.

Rest/Sick Day in Nanjing

Last night was a long night. Soon after I posted yesterday’s blog, Dylan got up with an upset stomach and threw up. (This time he did have the foresight, with a reminder, to get to the toilet before as opposed to after.) That was the first of 4-5 times during the night that he threw up, combined with a couple of times at the other end. I was kept busy consoling and cleaning up. The nadir was washing his pajamas and the bathroom floor at 4 AM. 

Not too surprisingly, we ditched out plans to tour Nanjing today. Instead we stayed at the hostel. We did some school work, updated journals, watched movies. We had to change rooms from our absurdly large room to a more modest one without windows. It isn’t terrible and will probably be quieter at night, but we do miss the fresh air. My sneakers have finally called it quits (the sole is disconnecting in the heal), so I bought new ones today. We will see how the Chinese brand holds up over time. I ran in them this afternoon and they felt fine.

I think Dylan is mostly better. For breakfast he only had some bread and tea. The hostel people are quite nice but they seemed to think that an appropriate breakfast after being sick should involve rice porridge and pickled vegetables. They were mystified as to why I wanted tea for him. For lunch he had waffles with banana and yogurt. Both stayed down and his energy was fine. He’s having more waffles for dinner. Tonight really should be better than last night.

Tomorrow we are meeting Xiaobing for a day in Nanjing. We stayed with Xiaobing in Beijing for the first six days of our trip. It seems symmetric to bookend our journey with a second visit at the end. Here’s to Dylan being healthy.

Suzhou

Today we went on a day trip from Nanjing to Suzhou. The high-speed train was about 90 minutes each way, giving us a good seven hours in Suzhou. It was another sunny and hot day, so spending that much time outside was plenty.

Suzhou is famous in China for its excellent gardens and canals. There are many classical Chinese gardens in Suzhou, and our first destination was the most famous: the Humble Adminstrator’s Garden. This garden was first built in 1509 and has 13 acres of lotus ponds, zigzag bridges and over ten pavilions. (He sure was humble!) I think it’s most famous view is the one below in which the pond and trees frame the North Temple Pagoda in the distance. 

There were many other beautiful views of stone sculptures,

arched bridges,
and other pondside views. 

This garden displayed many of the features of Classical Chinese gardens, including the hills constructed and planted to look natural

and the rock sculptures that are carefully built yet look like large weathered stones found in nature and brought to the garden. The kids particularly liked to climb in and on these rock sculptures, ascending their winding staircases and poking their heads through the holes. 
After a good hour in the Humble Administrator’s Garden, we stopped for lunch and then walked along a particularly beautiful and unfortunately touristy canal to the Garden of the Master of the Nets. This garden was named after one of the owners, a retired official who enjoyed to fish in his later years. Dylan wasn’t sure why he wasn’t called the Master of the Rod. This garden was quite different from the first one in that it was quite small. It was more densely packed with pavilions and used winding passages to give the impression of being much bigger than it was. We had a good time finding our way into the many pavilions

and courtyards.Our last stop in Suzhou was to the Panmen Gate, a park with a towering pagoda

and impressive gates in a short stretch of the original Ming dynasty walls. From the walls, there was a nice view of the Wumen Bridge. 

 We had a full and interesting day in Suzhou, enjoying the gardens and other sites, and even just strolling along the many canals. 
We had a tough time finding a cab back to the train station, so we ended up taking a ride on the back of an electric scooter. We didn’t get back to our hostel in Nanjing until after 8 PM, so we are glad that we can sleep in. We will spend the day looking at sites in the city.

To Nanjing

I didn’t realize until yesterday that this weekend is another Chinese holiday. I believe it is a long weekend for May Day, International Labor Day. In any case, finding rooms and train tickets has started to become tricky. 

For Nanjing, Xiaobing, the father of one of my students who hosted us in Beijing when we first arrived, now lives in Nanjing and offered to find us a hotel. He was going to treat us, but I felt embarrassed accepting this gift now that we’ve been managing on our own for so long. So I told him that we didn’t need a room since I already had a hostel picked out. Yesterday, I finally emailed our preferred hostel, and they responded this morning saying that they are booked through the weekend. Further, Hostelworld had no rooms available and booking.com only had expensive options. The reasonably priced ones were for locals only. Finally, I did find a mid-range hotel in the Lonely Planet that had a room that started at 420 yuan for the first night and went up to over 600 yuan over the weekend. I made the reservation so we could at least have something, but I wondered whether I shouldn’t have accepted Xiaobing’s offer after all. 

When we got to Nanjing, we went by subway to Fuximiao and started to walk towards the hotel. I stopped into one reasonable-looking hotel on the way but they didn’t take foreigners. Just before the final turn, I saw the circle sign that indicated an international hostel. The kids just wanted to get settled and start movie time, but I thought we should at least look inside. To my surprise, the hostel had space. We got a somewhat expensive family room for the first two nights (still under 300 yuan) and we will move to an ordinary twin room for the last two nights (even cheaper). Our room? It is enormous, easily the biggest we’ve had in China. Truly there is room for three or four more beds. And the kids were thrilled to learn that the room comes with a western breakfast. 

Trains have also been tricky. There are tons of daily trains from Hangzhou to Nanjing, but most of them were already sold out. This morning, I did find one train that still had about 120 tickets left. I tried to book the tickets through the hostel, but their booking agent was already off for the holiday. We had to go to the train station and buy tickets there. By the time we got there, that train was sold out. Luckily, we were able to get tickets on a train only two hours later. Upon arriving in Nanjing, we went to buy tickets for a day trip to Suzhou tomorrow and to Shanghai on Monday. For tomorrow, we got tickets in the morning to Suzhou no problem, but there were no tickets back in the afternoon. She checked one more time and found one seat on a returning train with two standing-room-only tickets. I’m hoping the two kids can share the seat. It’s only for an hour . . . For Shanghai? She couldn’t sell me tickets because it was four days in advance. The old “we will only sell foreigners tickets three days in advance” issue. We last saw this bugaboo in Guilin, I believe. What a pain! I’ll have to try and buy the Shanghai tickets tomorrow.

For now, we are enjoying our enormous room and the pleasant weather. It was sunny and warm today, and the humidity was gone, too. I had a pleasant though slow run along the beautiful old Ming dynasty walls that still survive in the hostel neighborhood. Tomorrow: Suzhou.

Lingyin and Longjing

Today the rain abated and we went for a long outing to the south of West Lake. We started by taking the local bus to the scenic area of Lingyin Temple. Originally built in 326 AD, the temple has been rebuilt at least 12 times, so the buildings themselves are not particularly old. The Hall of the Four Heavenly Kings is watched over by four large statues like this one.

Behind it, the Great Hall houses a 60-foot high Sakyamuni based on a Tang Dynasty original.  

On the reverse side of this huge statue is a mass of sculptures depicting Guayin surrounded by 150 others. It is quite amazing.

We finished our tour of Lingyin Temple by walking across the nearby stream and along a series of older Buddhist caves. We then exited the scenic area to get lunch before our trek over Pegasus Mountain, a ridge between the temple and the Longjing tea plantations. Using my GPS-enabled map program, we quickly found the start of the trail up the mountain. It looked like a fairly wide stone path.

We soon entered a beautiful bamboo forest 

and had great fun finding new bamboo shoots, some quite short.

The trail soon got much rougher and steeper. At times, we were walking up a stream, trying to keep our feet dry with decent success. 

It was not hot but very humid, so it was not the most comfortable hiking weather. We also were not following the trail as depicted on my GPS map, so I wasn’t completely sure we were going the right way, but I knew we would hit the ridge trail somewhere, as we did, joining the wide, well-paved trail.

We went beyond what looked like the trail down the other side of the ridge because Dylan was eager to get to the top of Pegasus Peak which we could see in front of us. There we enjoyed beautiful views of Hangzhou in the distance behind West Lake

and other ridges across the valley.

After some chocolate, we resumed our hike, backtracking to the trail we saw earlier and quickly descending into Longjing, the premier tea growing area of Hangzhou and famous throughout China. 

We soon came out to Longjing (Dragon Well) village and the National Tea Museum which was surrounded by its own extensive tea fields.

From there, we caught a local bus back into Hangzhou. We did some souvenir shopping, got dinner, and came back for showers and bed. It was a full day. Tomorrow we move on to Nanjing.

Rest Day in Hangzhou

This morning’s weather report called for clouds in the morning and showers in the afternoon, but meanwhile it was pouring down buckets. So, we abandoned our plans to go looking for a well-known tea plantation and stayed in the hostel doing school work. For lunch, we found a Lanzhou hand-pulled noodle shop for some beef noodle soup and then Dylan and I got our hair cut. I thought that I had misunderstood the barber when he told me the price: eight yuan each. Did he mean eighty? That seemed a bit high. No, he meant eight each, sixteen in total. I paid him with a twenty and he even gave me five back with a wave indicating that I should keep the extra yuan. I had thought we had been getting good deals on our haircuts before, but fifteen yuan is just over two dollars.

After haircuts, we returned to the hostel for more work. We reached a major landmark in our work today: we have finished all the material from the ThinkMath! third grade curriculum. I have anther curriculum which we will use for reinforcement, but this means that we have covered the full year of math. All the rest will be gravy.

For dinner, we had trouble finding a restaurant with adequate non-spicy food, so we ended up back at the noodle shop. I couldn’t stomach another beef noodle soup, but the fried noodles were pretty good. Back in the hostel now for what should be an early night.

West Lake, Hangzhou

Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, is an old city, the capital of the Sourhern Song dynasty starting in the 12th century. It was a wooden city and burned to the ground several times, often by conquering armies, so there are no historic remnants to see. Its jewel is West Lake, an enormous body of water with shoreside parks, long straight causeways, and several pagodas atop nearby hills.

We spent most of today circumnavigating the lake, covering about nine miles in six hours. We started at Orioles Singing in the Willows, a small park on the eastern edge of the lake.

Like most of the lakeside parks, it had manicured walkways, cultivated gardens and graceful arched bridges. We eventually got along the lake itself, where we had our first views of Leifang Pagoda in the Sunset.

We decided that we had to go up the pagoda, but this isn’t some ancient Chinese relic. We climbed the hill on escalators and took the elevator to the top floor

There we enjoyed magnificent panoramic views of West Lake.

Continuing on, we walked the length of the Su Causeway, almost two miles long and punctuated by many bridges. We stopped briefly once to enjoy a small island garden called Fish Viewing at the Flower Pond and a second time for a small lunch.

We were pretty tired once we hit the west shore, but we continued to walk over another island, a second shorter causeway where we saw locals flying kites, and around the north shore past one of Chang Kaishek’s villas.

The day was gray and cool, but only a few sprinkles actually fell. We dragged ourselves back to the hostel to put up our feet during movie time. There are tons of tourists walking, biking, and taking the shuttle around West Lake, mainly Chinese tourists with a spattering of westerners, but the lake is so large that except at a few bottlenecks, it doesn’t feel that crowded, perhaps like the Esplinade on a normal day.

If the weather cooperates tomorrow, we will go to visit some temples to the south of West Lake and look for the tea plantations where they grow the famous Longjing tea.