a weirdo in china, pt. 13: elision

It was my second-to-last day in China, and it was time to play a bit of catch-up. Off to the Emperor's Summer Palace!

This actually passes for a sunny day in Beijing.

It's going to be hard for me to adequately convey the feeling of this place in words and cloudy pictures alone. It gave me the sense of being in a nice park, but we were in Beijing in the summer, so nowhere outside is really actually nice. Still, there were some cool things to look at.

A very Long Corridor.

A Marble Boat. Actually wood, painted to look like marble. Still can't float. A classic example of misappropriation of government funds; it was apparently constructed with money earmarked for the Imperial Navy.

I even got to ride the boat, which definitely ranked in my top-10 boat-related experiences. But no, the most interesting thing I saw at the Summer Palace was definitely this family:

Somebody told me Peppa Pig was banned in China, but Peppa was EVERYWHERE.

After that, we headed over to a shopping arcade, which was a bit overly-gentrified and boring. Yet I found fascinating sights wandering some nearby back alleys!

This guy is advertising a clown-themed laundromat, rather effectively, I think.

Entrance to Cat Castle, a cat cafe...

With quite a large resident!

I dearly wanted to experience the joy of a WAFFLE STICK, but resisted.

Guan Yu in all his well-deserved glory.

I also visited the home of Qi Baishi, the most famous Chinese painter of all time.

I found his painting Pine to contain a truly ethereal sense of beauty and impermanence.

And some kids playing badminton in the street.

The back alleys of Beijing were great, because it was the only time I had in that city where I saw how people really lived. And to be honest, it seemed like they were doing a lot better than Shanghai. There are still heaps of random crap everywhere, but in Beijing, it isn't actual garbage, and there is some sense of order to local life. Shanghai, on the other hand, was just a mad scramble for survival. If it wasn't for the horrendous air quality, I would have preferred Beijing much more.

Neighborhood water purifier

a weirdo in china, pt. 12: demission

Okay, this is a series of posts about China, I know what you're here to see. It's Great Wall time, people!

Wait, that's a durian pizza, not the Great Wall!

There are actually a bunch of different Great Wall sites to choose from. We visited Mutianyu, the best-restored section, which was still pretty crumbly.

It was actually a gorgeous day by Chinese standards, about 80°F, cloudy, with a cool breeze and zero air pollution this far from the city. All that added up to me being able to push myself much farther than I could have otherwise, which was critical because the Wall is loooooooooooooong.

There are about 20 watchtowers in the area I visited, and each watchtower is roughly 1000 feet from the next. But those 1000 feet are a real doozy. Rather than the flat, shallow curves I'd expected from pictures I've seen, I discovered a Great Wall that was basically a series of cruelly misshaped stairways where it wasn't a 45° ramp.

Traversing it was an ordeal, plain and simple. There are hardly any moments of normal, even walking. You're either climbing stairs that are different heights at each step, forcing you to keep your eyes on the ground and constantly adjusting your gait, or you're hyperextending your knees trying to reach down to the next lower level. Mile after mile, you fight through the exhaustion of it all and continue on, knowing your reward after the next watchtower is more of the same.

That might sound pretty bleak, but don't get the wrong idea. I really enjoyed it! It was a lot of fun managing my energy levels and pushing myself to see how far I could go in the limited time allotted. I didn't make it to the 20th watchtower, but I got to #18, and I felt pretty good about that.

The reason I focused on the physical challenge of it is because, to be frank, I'm not terribly impressed by the fact of the Wall's construction. It's cool, and you aren't likely to see much like it, but the Chinese are quick to admit that it's been worked on for virtually their entire history. I could probably build a pretty cool wall too, if you gave me five thousand years to do it.

Still, it's neat to imagine the guards patrolling this place in its heyday, and wonder what kind of ways they might have found to pass the time. The landscape is fine, but there's nothing really interesting to it besides the Wall itself.

So we wandered around for a couple hours, my friend hunting for millipedes atop the wall, of which there were many. But eventually, things came to an end, and I had to find a way back down the mountain. Now, I had come up to the wall via chair lift.

And chair lift was an option to go back down. But it was far, far from the BEST option.

IT WAS EVEN MORE AMAZING THAN IT LOOKS. I went much faster than the people in that video, and I said 'fiddlesticks' to the men standing on the side of the track telling me to slow down. I said 'fiddlesticks' by slowing down just enough to satisfy them, then immediately zooming away when they were safely out of reach. I could not be stopped. I still can't. It was the best part of the Great Wall, but that's not to say anything bad about the Wall. The toboggan ride was just that incredible. You haven't lived.

a weirdo in china, pt. 11: partition

I set my course in the direction of the Forbidden City.

Tiananmen Square

The entrance to the F.C. stands right on Tiananmen Square, which is an enormous, empty, soulless expanse of concrete dead in the center of Beijing. One one end, the mausoleum of Chairman Mao, in which his preserved body lies forever in state. I did not go to see it.

At the other end, the Gate of Heavenly Peace itself promises entry to that most forbidden of cities, watched over by Grandpa Mao himself.

For being an enormous city square packed with thousands of tourists, Tiananmen Square is a surprisingly subdued place. And don't be fooled by the color of the sky in these pictures -- this is what passes for a sunny day in the smog-chocked Beijing city center. People came out in droves, but they seemed to be maintaining a respectful attitude in the presence of these foundational pieces of Chinese national identity.

Our guide actually mentioned the 'student protests', but only to say she couldn't discuss them in any depth. She seemed unsure whether we'd even know what she meant. I've found that explaining the Western view on Chinese totalitarianism to mainland Chinese is kind of a waste of time. Their government has done a pretty spectacular job constructing a narrative where China is essentially blameless. So we just shrugged and said, yeah, every American who knows about China knows about Tiananmen Square.

So it was huge and striking and somber. More than anything, there was an air of sacrifice to the place, a constant reminder that the Anti-Japanese War (yes, they call it that) was an existential struggle that forged a nation of heroes. It's a strange contrast that America, young as it is, is so temporally distant from its founding fathers, while China's five-thousand-year history still permits it to produce figures like Mao who can reinvent the country anew.

Once passing through the gate and entering the Forbidden City proper, the first thing I noticed was a basketball court.

This was part of a rest and relaxation area for the guards stationed in the square and Forbidden City, I guess?

But moving past that, I started to take in the interior. I found that it looked like most of Beijing, actually:  huge, monolithic, and repetitive.

There were gardens, sculptures, courtyards, fancy pagodas, and all the rest, but surprisingly little that I would call beautiful. It felt like a museum more than a palace, and from what I know about the lifestyle of most Chinese emperors, that probably isn't too far from the truth.

We processed through the Forbidden City, ooh-ing and aah-ing where appropriate, but ultimately it's just the same type of building, with minor variations, repeated over an enormous piece of real estate. It's the kind of thing that's not really easy to appreciate from inside, so I was happy when we found the exit.

Jingshan Park, just outside the F.C., is a hill with a pavilion atop which offers the ideal viewing angle to really absorb the majesty of the golden-roofed city. It really delivered!

This stuff all kind of speaks for itself. It's a phenomenal visual spectacle, and it purports to be a cultural spectacle as well, but it's kind of hard to see that. When you visit Europe and go to castles, there is a great deal of reverence and import placed on the royal persons who once lived there, but there's also this general vibe that feudalism was pretty bad and we're all better off thanks to the Enlightenment and the supremacy of liberal humanist principles.

The Chinese approach to the Forbidden City and its history seems to be beyond that reverence, though. The attempts to create continuity between the emperors and the Communist Party leaders are clear, clumsy even. Autocracy is an accepted fact of life. Sure, Mao wasn't right about everything -- our guide said she was taught the 70/30 rule in school, Mao was 70% right, 30% wrong -- but he had the general idea.

And...that's just preposterous. The only thing today's China has in common with the society Mao envisioned is that it idolizes Mao. But they keep the pretense going, because what else do they have? The men in suits running the country today didn't save their people from the brutality of Japanese invaders.

But the City is open. Is that progress? I was told repeatedly that the people actually running the government today have their offices far, far away from the noise and pollution of central Beijing. They would never stoop, I was told, to being around the riff-raff.

It's a Pleasure Island, and I was glad to leave it, even if the views were great.

a weirdo in china, pt. 10: exquisition

So I ditched Shanghai and set out for Beijing!

We took the high-speed rail out of Hongqiao Station, which has an operating speed of roughly 350 km/h. It was a really nice ride, with cheap snacks. I spent most of the 4-hour trip chilling in a connecting compartment with a beer, looking out the window at the insane sights we were speeding past.

We were moving too quickly for me to get good pictures of the most extraordinary stuff. But there were more than a few amusement parks:

I also saw pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and a colossal Iron Man (hulkbuster, obviously). If you can dream it, someone in China has built it.

It wasn't a bad train ride by any means. The trains were one of the most enjoyable things about my visit to China, really. They were the only times I truly felt like someone cared about my well-being as a customer, as opposed to just trying to take me for all I was worth.

So the ride was comfortable, the views were good, the snacks were tasty and cheap, and as we went north, we hit a point where I could look out the window and actually see the transition between rice and wheat cultivation. It felt like I was getting a glimpse of China almost as well as when I'd been wandering the backstreets of Shanghai. It felt good.

Then I got to Beijing.

The air hit me like a hammer. When I'd arrived in Shanghai, I'd believed I knew what they meant when they talked about poor air quality. The air throughout Shanghai has the character of the air outside an airport terminal, with its permanent sensation of exhaust and despair. But, for all that, it was pretty light and breathable.

Beijing's wasn't. Beijing's air smells like a spoiled-beef-and-ground-pearl-flavored cigar. It has all the noxious character of a soaking-wet, incontinent St. Bernard. It smells like a man with a bacterial infection in his armpits mistakenly used a cinderblock for deodorant. And then decided he liked it and kept doing it for fifty years.

And it doesn't just smell. It has a texture, and it clings to everything. It makes the whole place feel ill and overused. People asked me why I didn't just use a mask, but the air already makes you think you're wearing one. It smothers you. Walking outside for more than two minutes made my eyes start to burn. A mask wouldn't be enough. You'd need a hazmat suit to protect yourself.

Pollution is terrible!

So, you'll have to excuse me if there's a bit of a scarcity of outdoor pictures from Beijing. I tried to go for a walk and get a feel for the neighborhood, but the atmosphere was more oppressive than any totalitarian regime could ever hope to be. It made me wonder if the entire smog system wasn't just a modern anti-assembly device.

For dinner, we had Peking Duck, which was delicious. It was eaten so quickly I didn't even get a picture of it. And I will give China this: its nice restaurants are really nicely decorated.

Even if the outside of the building, like every building in Beijing, just looks like a boring grey blob.

But Beijing is the capital city, so if any place is going to give us a sense for what it means to be 'Chinese', at least by Chinese standards, it has to be here. But I'm really starting to think even China is just going through the motions.

If it ain't lethally broke, why fix it?

a weirdo in china, pt. 9: admission

It was my last day in Shanghai. I had to make it count. So I set my sights on the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum!

It's really big. I couldn't find an angle that would fit the whole thing in one picture, so here's the central 1/5.

As a matter of national impression, China really, really wants you to see it as a technological wonderland in the same way South Korea, and to a greater extent Japan, have managed to position themselves. And where there's a strong enough profit motive to do it, they generally succeed. For example:

This here is a vending machine you can only interact with by using your phone. You scan the QR code at the top and it takes you to a website that handles all ordering/payment. Unless you don't have a Chinese phone, like me, in which case you find another vending machine.

There's no arguing how effective phone-based payments have been at transforming transactions at every level of society. From the lowliest street vendor to the fanciest department stores, nearly all currency exchanges take place by phone. When I arrived, cash in hand, I was told I would seem like a bit of bumpkin, and while nobody was actually annoyed by my old-fashioned paper money, it definitely slowed things down compared to everybody else.

I mean, beggars accept e-payments. It's that ubiquitous. So I was understandably excited about going to see this museum and uncovering just what other technological marvels China had been hiding in its expansive, Qin Dynasty-era sleeves.

Well, it turns out fully 1/3 of the museum was dedicated to nature, in the aspect of a natural history section. Which, while pretty cool, is basically the opposite of science and technology...

I came to China to see panda...sculptures.

And the natural history area was easily twice as crowded as the rest of the museum. I've heard unimpressive things about the Shanghai zoo, but at least it has one. It also has its own natural history museum. I mean, I didn't even see any dinosaurs at this place.

But at least it had a spider wing.

Surprisingly mobbed!

And a temperature-controlled rainforest section, which in Shanghai just means they turned off the A/C.

Naturally, it contains sculptures of giant insects doing battle, because...science!

There were a lot more animal exhibits than just the panda, naturally, and I got a slight chuckle from the prominence the moose got in the North America exhibit. All the Chinese tourists were pointing excitedly at it. Moose are a big deal no matter the locale, it seems.

Turkey fight!

I eventually got tired of animals and wandered over to the rest of the museum, to see what they had to offer that was actually related to Science and Technology. The rest of the exhibits were pretty cool, but roughly on the level of scientific rigor of what they offer at the Franklin Institute (including four IMAX theaters). That's not a bad thing, though! It's just right for kids. And the robot exhibit finally had some of what I was looking for.

You can compete in archery with a robot, for some reason! The robot wins.

They also had CALISTHENICS ROBOT (built cars) and RISK ELIMINATING ROBOT (blows up land mines, or prepares actuarial tables).

If you want to learn more about robots, check out these knockoff Transformers toys in the gift shop!

There were many more exhibits, all pretty fun, but it would take forever to go through them all. However, the museum did give me the perfect way of explaining China's relationship with technology.

There is an extensive waiting area in front of the museum. If you look at the picture of the front again, you'll see a covered, fenced-in area in the lower right. That's normally where the line is:

And it streeeeeeeetches to the very end of the plaza.

Now, this particular day was super rainy, so not that many people came out to the museum. There was almost no line to speak of, and nobody was using the covered waiting area at all.

I noticed as I was walking up that there are nozzles which spray mist over the waiting area to help keep people in the line cool. How did I notice?

Because they were running.

That's right. Not a soul in line, on a soaking-wet typhoon day, and these misters are still running all-out. It's a wonderful technological solution to a problem that exists basically everywhere in Shanghai. Yet it's been enacted with the broadest, brute-force method, in a way that winds up being wasteful and visibly ridiculous. And the picture doesn't even show the worst of it. When I got out of the metro and stepped into the plaza, I thought it had gotten foggy. But that was just the mist filling the plaza!

Overall, I thought it was a nice museum, and a really great value for money, especially for kids. But it really underlined for me the fundamentally surface-level approach the average Chinese institution takes to solving problems. In a sense, it was a relief to know it wasn't personal.

On to Beijing!