Update – Posts both new and long-overdue

There are a number of blog entries I've been meaning to do to wrap up the Cambodia portion of our trip.  This is just a quick note to say that I've finally finished them and let you know where they are.  

They're bookends to our trip - two at the beginning:

Day 79 - Tue Jan 20 - The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (S-21)

Day 82 - Fri Jan 21 - Choeung Ek "Killing Fields"

...and three at the end:

Day 103 to 104 - Fri Feb 13 and Sat Feb 14 - Killing time in the 'Penh

Days 105 to 109 - Sun Feb 15 to Thurs Feb 19 - PP -> BKK -> HKK -> Huizhou

Li’l Red Knife - RIP

Days 211 and 212 – Monday June 1 and Tuesday June 2 - Suzhou and home again

Our second day trip from Shanghai is to Suzhou. Technically we’ve already been to Suzhou – we passed through it on Day 210 to get to Tong Li – but we didn’t see much more than the train station and whatever happened to be outside the window of the bus/train we were on.

Our first impression is not that great. The train goes past some decidedly un-scenic cityscapes of dusty and unused land lots, as well as row after row of both run-down and up-and-coming apartment blocks. So far, we haven’t seen any evidence as to why it once had the reputation of one of China’s most beautiful cities (this was around Marco Polo’s time) and why old Chinese proverbs refer to it as a paradise on earth.

A lot of its reputation, then and now, comes from its gardens. There used to be hundreds, now there are just a few remaining, but they’re in excellent shape. Some are hundreds of years old.

We start off with the North Temple Pagoda.

We’re a little temple/pagoda weary at this point, but at the very least on a hot day a temple is often a nice cool place to enjoy the shade...

…and the view:

This temple offers a few added bonuses: a lovely bicycle still-life...


…and a double-header of bad-English signage for our collection:



(The first warns of low ceilings, while the second warns that the floor can be slippery.)

We have two gardens on our list – first we head to the Humble Administrator’s garden in the north-west corner of the city center. It’s from sometime in the 1500s and is the largest one left in the city. We walk around all five hectares of it (I believe that works out to about 50,000 square metres) past manicured gardens and ponds…



…and buildings intended for drinking tea, watching theatre and looking at the moon:

There are lots of details…

...and about 25 or so points of interest, in addition to it being really hot and humid and our 5th walking, so we’re pretty tired. Pierre wants a picture of me in the doorway; I’m feeling frumpy and tired – here’s the compromise:
 

The second garden - Garden of the Master of the Nets - is about a 30 minute walk away, and we trudge over to check out this much smaller garden.  It's originally from the 1100s, but it gets its name from its 18th century owner who decided to take up fishing after he retired from the government.  

During our last few trips, I’ve wondered how some of the site fared during the Cultural Revolution , and why some locations survived at all. The Red Guard were  especially thorough about eradicating the “four olds” (“old customs, old culture, old habits and old ideas”) during their rampage across the country in 1966, and even in the years afterwards it was often "out with the old" to make room for the new.

At this garden we get a hint of how things worked out in some places. When we enter the first building of the Garden of the Master of the Nets, we are right behind a group of North Americans whose tour guide begins with a story about the Cultural Revolution.

She says that the garden's groundskeepers at that time realized that it would be targeted quickly and that many things would be destroyed if they didn’t find a way to protect them. Some things could be hidden or buried, but there still remained the problem of the larger items, and the lack of time to get things out. In the end, the groundskeepers took newspapers and posters with Mao’s image and glued them all over whatever they could. At that time, the cult of Mao was at its peak and doing anything to harm or destroy Mao’s image was very taboo (punishable by death, I believe). So, when the Red Guard arrived, there wasn’t really much they could do – destroying the artifacts would mean destroying or defacing the Mao images they were covered with. In the end, the things were left alone.

As a result, some things, like the clay carvings at the entryway seem like they might be fairly new, as part of the ongoing restoration of the place…

…but the rest of the area is pretty intact, and seems like the original detailing:

The garden covers a small space but is organized in such a way that it feels much larger and it takes over an hour to walk around the entire area. By the time we catch the train back to Shanghai we're pretty knackered.  We top off the night with a dinner of Indian food at the lovely, amazing and incrediby tiny Kaveen's Kitchen , and then bus/fly/bus our way home on Day 212.

Day 210 – Sunday, May 31 – Tong Li

Getting to Tong Li (rhymes with song-me) from our hostel in Shanghai without taking an organized tour involves the usual transportation shuffle: a metro from Jing’An station to the Shanghai Train station with a transfer at People’s Square; a one-hour train ride to nearby Suzhou city; a 45 minute bus ride from the train station to the gates of Tong Li.

Tong Li is a canal town, compact and well-kept – a small community that has kept its whitewashed buildings and old facades even as the city of Suzhou grew up to and past it. The place is lively with tourists and almost every business in the village seems geared towards tourists. There are small boats available for hire on the canals…

…but it’s easy to enjoy the village on foot. We walk along the roads that edge the canal, under the trees and canopies…



…and down the alleyways and side streets.





It’s easy to get disoriented on the winding streets, so it takes us awhile to find the two buildings that we’re interested in checking out.

Our first stop is the Chinese Sex Culture Museum, which we had originally thought was in Shanghai but which had to relocate some time in the last few years. Founded by a couple of sociology professors, the place has rooms full of historic artifacts relating to sex – there is a garden filled with ancient fertility statues, fertility totems from well back into the B.C. years. The entire exhibit is very professional and does a very good job of educating rather than titillating, even though much of the collection consists of fairly explicit statues and paintings. Most of the exhibits are specific to China’s history, and include some more general artifacts, such as examples of the special coins that were used to pay for prostitutes, and the type of decoration found in brothels.

The plaques throughout the exhibit are well-translated and leave us with a mish-mash of sociological details about the history of sex – gothic arches as symbols for the vagina, birds as phallic symbols*.

*The latter vindicates a theory that Pierre has had since Phnom Penh – in their National Museum we saw a number of old statues, one of which showed a man riding on the back of a peacock, and positioned so that he was holding onto the bird’s neck for balance. “That statue,” Pierre says, whenever he describes it to someone, “is not about a man riding a bird.”

My favourite items from the exhibit are a series of porcelain sex figurines that are stored in tiny fruit-shaped containers. The plaque explains that these were used in a previous century (possibly the early 1900s?) because it was quite common for both the bride and groom of certain classes to be completely ignorant about all things sexual on their wedding night. Decorum prevented their parents from discussing any details with their children, no matter how grown up, and kids had almost no way (and no permission) to get any experience. Still, people had to get on with the baby-making once they were wed, so these little figurines were created as a solution.

The mother of the bride would secretly put one of these figurines into the bottom of the girl’s clothes trunk. While unpacking, the girl would discover the container and its contents, and open it up. Voila - instant sex ed. The girl could disengage the figurines of the naked man and woman and see quite clearly what went where and how. This way at least one of the couple would have a basic idea of how things worked, but no one had to pass on the information directly.

There’s plenty to see but since the museum doesn’t allow any pictures, we don’t lose any time trying to photograph things, and we have plenty of time left over to head over to Gengle Tang, a Ming Dynasty estate about a 15 minutes walk away, on the other side of town.

Inside we find that many of the rooms hold root sculptures. In a nutshell, huge sprawling roots of old trees are used as the basis for sculptures. They’re polished and treated – it seems like the ideal goal is usually to change the structure of the root as little as possible. Depending on the shape of the roots, the artist will sometimes carve animals and flowers into the shapes, and other times they’ll simply use the structure of the roots in conjunction with another statue as a symbol. In this statue, the root acts as a kind of halo that swells out around Buddha.

We wander around the hallways…

...and up and down the stairways…

…to enjoy the views:

By now, it’s already mid-afternoon, and we have to catch the train back to Shanghai around 5:40. We decide to visit the Tuisi Garden before heading out, and spend a bit of time enjoying the ponds…


…paths…

…and doorways…

…as well as checking out the views from inside some of the buildings:

The light indoors is dim and the breeze is nice so we take a break to sit back for a minute and finally get another picture of the two of us together.



In one of the rooms, we notice a beautiful design on one of the window shutters in a dim corner. It takes us a minute to realize that it’s actually a huge moth, wider than my palm:


We enjoy the moth and the breeze and the view a few more minutes, then work our way back through town and head home.

Days 207 to 209 – Thursday May 28 to Saturday May 30 - Shanghai

The end of May brings another long weekend - this time a Thursday off - so Pierre reschedules his Friday and Monday (Tuesdays are always free) and we set up six day trip to Shanghai.

Getting from A to B always involves the usual transportation shuffle – here it’s a city bus from our apartment to the airport bus terminal, a long-distance bus to the Shenzhen airport, and a domestic carrier Shenzhen to Shanghai Hongqiao airport.

At most airports, we count on finding two things: A) a general information desk for tourists where we can get a map and some relatively disinterested (non-commission) advice on how to get to city center and B) a shuttle or public transport from the airport to somewhere downtown for a reasonable price. When we arrive, Hongqiao (sounds like HONG-chee-ow) Airport seems to have neither. The girl at the hotel and taxi information desk says that, from the airport, there’s no way to get a public bus to the Jing’An temple near our hostel. She recommends a taxi to the city center for about 200 kuai (sounds like kw-eye, rhymes with why – approximately 40$CAN).

The guidebook doesn’t say anything useful – the few city buses it mentions don't go anywhere near where we want to be. We’re pretty sure there’s got to be a middle ground between expensive/convenient (taxi) and cheap/indirect (any old city bus).

There are a few buses out front, but the signs are in Chinese only and there’s no sign of the Chinese characters for “Jing’An temple.”– a friendly passerby points us to a bus with no number, whose hostess says that yes, they go to/near Jing’An. We get on, figuring that, at the very least, wherever it drops us off we can walk to a metro stop and get ourselves to the right area. Since we’re not really sure where it goes, I follow the buses route on the map with my finger until it drops us off directly in front of Jing’An temple, a short 7 minute walk from our hostel, the Le Tour Traveler’s hostel.

Total cost: 4 kuai (80 cents) each.

This sets the stage for a relatively inexpensive trip. While planning the trip, we expect Shanghai to be expensive, but things work out in our favour.  (This also set the stage for us noticing the entire trip how little we are spending on things, or how much we would have spent if we were interested in doing a particular thing, hence all the prices that are mentioned in this post.)

For our first 3 nights in the hostel, we’re upgraded for free to a deluxe room due to overbooking. For food, we stick to simple, cheap good food – in the morning there are the fried stuffed pitas for breakfast (1 kuai/20 cents per pita) from the street-side kiosks; lunch and dinner are usually at nearby canteens for about 8 kuai (1.50 $CAN) each per meal. This lets us treat ourselves a few times without going over budget.

We’re not much for drinking when we travel – beer is usually over-priced and more dehydrating that it’s usually worth in a hot climate. But when we stumble across The Bund Brewery, a pub that serves a local microbrew, we decide to splurge. We discover it’s possible to buy mugs by the litre-glass, so we do.  (Comes to 88 kuai/16$CAN and worth every jao/penny.)

Me and my hat head waiting for Pierre to take the picture so we can have a sip…


…and Pierre diving in.


Living up to its name, the Bund Brewery is located in the Bund, which is the central riverside area of Shanghai. It used to be a kind of Chinese Wall Street in the early 1900s, and the area is known for its architecture and waterfront.

We walk around the area awhile, but to us the buildings remind us of the Sparks Street area of Ottawa.  Though it’s pretty, we don’t feel the need to take any pictures or stick around for very long.

Plan B is to walk along the waterfront and enjoy the view – from the west side we can see odd bulb-shapes of the Oriental Pearl Tower – a tv tower and tourist lookout, most likely with a restaurant or café at the top. (At 250 kuai per person, we avoid the trip to the top so we’re not really sure what’s up there.)

Other than that we don’t see much of the waterfront. In preparation for Shanghai’s Expo 2010, the length of the waterfront is under construction and boarded off entirely – it’s so well boarded-off that without the map I probably wouldn’t know for sure if there was water on the other side of the fence. On the west side, the closest we get to the water is this:


Around the city are posters advertising the Expo and showing plans for some of the country pavilions. My knowledge of Expo’s is pretty slim, but from what I remember it’s usually a big showcase for bold architectural design. 2010 is no different – most of the pavilion plans are pretty ugly and like someone designed on a dare.

- Canada: looks like a bit of a mess (it looks like even more of a mess on the Canada site) 

- Spain: kind of neat with a bread-basket look 

- Czech Republic: looks like a superstore

- UK and Switzerland are equal parts interesting and baffling.

(If you scroll down here you’ll see more examples.)

I wonder how these buildings are going to fit in with the rest of the city, which is already quite a mix of styles all within a short walk of each other – from the 1930’s New York styles of the Bund, to the Art Deco apartment blocks in the French Concession, to the Old Town with its narrow alleys and old low buildings.

We spend a few hours walking through the Old Town, with its low improvised awnings for shade…


…its bright corners…

…and dim narrow alleyways:

On Day 209, we attempt to visit a couple of museums: the Propaganda Poster Art Centre and the China Sex Culture Museum. As always, walking lets us get from A to B while seeing the city at the same time, so we head out on foot and our quest to find the museums takes a few hours. Today, it turns out, is kind of a write-off.   One museum is not where the guidebook says it is, and the other has been moved out of Shanghai.  

We try to salvage the day by finding our way to the south-west of Shanghai via city bus to the ancient town of QiBao (sounds like chee-bow, rhymes with me-wow). The location of the bus pick-up point eludes us for about an hour, and the bus ride takes a while.  When we finally arrive at the QiBao bus stop, the town is not located where the map says it is and we have to wander around for awhile to find it.   Once we finally get to QiBao proper, we're too tired to do anything but walk around for an hour and eat dinner.

The ever-excellent Shanghai metro (cheap, prompt, clean) now goes as far as this area, something that wasn’t true at the time our book was printed (hence the tedious bus ride here.) The ride home on the metro is fast.  

We wrap up our day by early evening – our trip for the past several months has gone fairly smoothly and we’re not too worried to lose a day to a series of mix-ups.  If anything, we figure our trip has gotten it out of its system for awhile...  

We hang out in the room and plan tomorrow’s day trip to nearby Tong Li.

Days 186 to 206 – Thursday May 7 to Wednesday May 27 - May and HK

April and May are the months of guests. One of Pierre and Dre’s oldest friends and neighbours (and honorary Gallant), Rosalynn, makes a two-week visit to China and spends part of her trip with us in Huizhou.

Shirley and Ernest, heads of the Gallant clan, continue to enjoy their 6 week visit to China.

By mid-May, one detail that continues to surprise them is how very many pregnant women they see walking around the city, toting one or two other toddlers alongside. The single-child policy does not seem so alive and well in Huizhou – multiple-kid families are quite common.  “We are too far from Beijing,” one student tells me. “Maybe people that are close to Beijing listen?” (Some of the exceptions are laid out here.) 

The majority of May is very hot and very humid, so our days out mostly revolve around early mornings and late afternoons, with sightseeing kept local and low key. Pierre’s birthday is May 15th, which turns out to be a reasonably warm day, so we visit a few places in the city and then head over to Huizhou’s West Lake scenic area.

The place is relatively quiet today. We check out the tower…

…then climb the tower…

…with a few breaks along the way to enjoy the scenery, as well as the cool breeze that passes through the tower.



We check out bamboo grafitti:


…and the sunset before heading off to dinner.

For dinner, we splurge on sushi, at the Birthday Boy’s request …

…then head home for a beautiful fruit cake, complete with icing orchids. (The card says: To Pierre, 生日快乐 [sheng1 ri4 kuai4 le4] Happy Birthday!). Pierre is serenaded with an English, French and Chinese version of Happy Birthday. For most of these versions, there are only one or two singers who know the words well, and the rest of us mumble and hum along.

On Day 204, it’s time to head to Hong Kong for Shirley and Ernest’s flight home on day 206. We decide to go a few days early to take a short tour of the city.

In Hong Kong, the city is on swine flu alert (as are many other tourist destinations, I'm sure). The hotel clerk takes each of our temperatures with a non-contact thermometer gun that he points at our foreheads – our temperatures are noted down on the registration form along with our full names and passport numbers.

For the majority of May, our umbrellas have only been used as sun cover…

…but in Hong Kong the rainy season decides to get down to work for a few days. We take a guided tour of the city to see as much as possible (or at least a few things) during the time we’re there. Rain in Hong Kong leads to heavy fog, so most viewpoints our tour takes us to on Day 205 look a bit like this (you can see the buildings faintly in the lower left hand side):

Closer to the ground, things are a bit more interesting. We take a sampan much like this one…

…for a ride around a boat community in Aberdeen Harbour.

The tour drops us off at various locations in the city, including a local market, where we find a few final gifts and check out a water-side temple.

The guided tour is a hit except for a fairly pointless trip to a jewelry factory and showroom – at that point on the trip the guide makes it clear that they only include the factory as part of the trip because tourists are often interested in jewelry but run the risk of being ripped off if they don’t go to a reputable shop. He ends his speech with: “If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know. Now, welcome to my uncle’s factory.”

We laugh – we can only assume he’s joking. Overall, our guide is excellent and is quite the comedian. He warns us about pickpockets (“Be careful. Because Hong Kong is better than the Italians – much more skilled at taking your wallet”) and signs off the day with: “Thank you for taking your tour with us today. If you are happy, this is Hong Kong and my name is Steve. If you are unhappy, this is San Francisco and my name is Bill.”

We spend a quiet night in the hotel and then on Day 206, we part ways, with Ernest and Shirley enjoying an uneventful flight home, while Amelie and I bus-metro-bus-bus our way home to Huizhou.