China 2004

Date: Wednesday, March 10, 2004 7:55 AM
Subject: Ring a ding ding, we’re in Beijing!

Hi everyone

Just a quick update to see how fast I can type at the 20 yuan per 15 minutes Internet cafe. It’s so interesting being here; I love everything, the bright characters on the neon signs, the bicycles, the food...
I’ll start at the beginning:

Our flight: Ottawa-Vancouver
It began with Lorne winning a free Tim Hortons roll up the rim coffee in the airport, and then we get on the plane, just 1/2 hour late because of de-icing. I open my March Air Canada Enroute magazine and there’s my name, under "Letter of the Month", and it says I receive two bottles of Ironstone Vineyards wine. (They never told me they were running the letter about "the death of cool" that I wrote on the way back from the Bahamas.)

This is becoming a silly hobby to see how many letters to the editor I can get in print while on holidays - e.g. the Chicago Tribune printed my Chicago letter and the Globe and Mail printed my Calgary Stampede letter. Closest thing to being a travel writer. (I’ll send my China letter from home.)

The in-flight movie was Cheaper by the Dozen with Steve Martin, a.k.a. Cheaper by the Dozin’. I am starting these notes in the beautiful Vancouver airport, eating tofu and noodles and hot and sour soup, and looking out at the mountains, kicking myself for not having my watercolor paints in my carry on.

I finished my first of six trip books, Girl With the Pearl Earring, as the plane opened its door in Vancouver. A wonderful, ‘suck you right in’ picture of life in 17th century Netherlands.

Vancouver-Beijing
So we get on the second plane, and propelled by boredom induced Starbucks decaf I ask the Air Canada flight attendant where the washroom is. She looks me in the eye and says, "you know how poor we are, we’ve done away with them."
Okay, says I, open a window. :)

Then follows a string of meals and movies each of varying quality. Fish, chicken, Cup o Noodles, Master and Commander, Runaway Jury, I Love Lucy, infomercials...I slept not a moment, thanks to heartburn likely from the hot and sour soup. Lorne took a Gravol and slept peacefully between Enroute crossword puzzles. Read second book, "Storm: Stories of Survival from Land and Sea", and looked out the window at Siberia.

China experience begins as we leave the Beijing terminal to the sound of honking car horns and jostling taxis, the overpowering smell of cigarette smoke, and a muggy 20 degrees F. (It was frigid by the next day.)

We drove along a modern industrial highway dotted with brand new 30-foot trees put in to help with the polluted air and prepare for the Olympics.

Signs have more English than I would have thought, in imaginative translations. Within the city there are as many bikes as cars, with their own boulevard for bikes only but so many near misses at intersections that I couldn’t look.

We are staying at the Wangfujing Grand Hotel. A "five star" hotel where There’s a sign over the sink that "Tap Water Is Not Potable" and you have to use your hotel key card to activate the electricity to turn on the lights. We are with two other school board employees, Geoff who just got here from Seoul, Korea, where he was arranging the same kind of partnerships, and David, who grew up in Nanjing and attended Carleton University.

My first impression? It’s so nice to see so many people out on their own, not surrounded by SUVs. Yet it’s eerie in the smog; like the colours are missing and it’s like a black and white movie. The first evening, without having slept for 24 hours, we went out to one of the many huge Peking red and gold duck restaurants for the ritual duck, pancakes and soup. Every table but ours was chain smoking.
Looking out the window in the morning was the same white haze around dozens of gray/silver low rise apartments. But poking through in the distance were a few pagoda roofs from the Forbidden City spreading out beyond. I went for a swim in the basement pool before the hotel breakfast included with the room - my favourite breakfast of Congee, red bean dim sum buns and fried noodles.

Liu Jing Jing, a 20-year-old student practicing her English, waited with me at the embassy Wednesday morning while Lorne met with the Canadian Ambassador, and then she spent the day with us at the Forbidden City, Tienanmen Square and the Great Wall.

At the Forbidden City I was surprised when a Chinese woman asked me to be in her family photo, but Liu Jing Jing said the Chinese like getting pictures of foreigners. Tian’ anmen (several different spellings) is the largest square in the world. The Forbidden City or Imperial Palace operated for five centuries and 24 emperors and ordinary Chinese were forbidden from even going near it. It1s a huge kilometer in length.

We’ve been driving around in little taxis with no seatbelts and no room when the four of us cram in. I have been most amazed by the mountains on the way to the Great Wall because they look so much like the China in pictures I’ve seen for so long.

At the Great Wall, we fought off the attack of the souvenir t-shirt, ‘have your photo taken on a camel’ peddlers, not the Mongol hoards. There were no hoards. The sun came out but it was so cold and windy there were more peddlers than tourists. Fascinating; I wanted to spend longer.

Tomorrow we fly to Nanjing for meetings with City Education Bureau and Provincial Ministry of Education, two days later drive to Suzhou for school visits, then drive to Shanghai. I’ll write again in a few days, and also when I get back.

Lorne is keeping his own ‘business trip’ diary and also sends love to all.

Louise

Nanjing

Date: Friday, March 12, 2004 9:00 AM

Subject: notes from Nanjing

Hi everyone
It’s time to leave Nanjing - I’m starting to know my way around.

Here’s a bit of what we’ve been doing:
Wednesday March 11
Flew Air China a bumpy 1 1/2 hours from Beijing to Nanjing, a crowded flight filled with businessmen in black suits. Nanjing is an attractive city of "just" 5 million. It was raining when we arrived and the thousands of bicyclists were wearing colorful rain ponchos, and the cherry blossoms were about to burst open on the long treed avenue similar to the Champs Elysees.

We are staying right downtown and walked to the "Radio and Television University" we were visiting. In the evening we were hosted to a ritual banquet with unending dishes, including a huge, smiling Yangtze River Fish, multiple toasts and smiling and nodding. It’s our own version of "Lost in Translation."

I read "How to Do Business in China" the week before we left, and there was a whole chapter on "the banquet" which was very useful in understand the procession of the evening.

Shortly after the last course, soup and then fruit, while we were in mid-sentence of a conversation, the top host waved his arms and said the dinner was over. Immediately everyone hopped up and put on their coats.

Fortunately I knew that and didn’t take it personally. Also not personally do I take the plopping down of a fork beside me by the waitress whenever I1m eating with chopsticks. It’s the same when I speak French in Quebec and get replied to in English. In both cases, I can manage, but just seem awkward and so they’re trying to be helpful.
In the morning I was on my own while the men went to meetings and then picked me up for yet another hosted meal.
I walked up Hazhong Road with my "Please Drive Me To..." card from the hotel, with Chinese instructions on how to get there in case I got lost. The uneven sidewalk was packed with hurrying people, bikes and scooters; good excuse for not running while I’m here.
The two downtown Nanjing department stores I went to had the latest styles and brand names I don’t buy at the Rideau Centre - lots of pointy, spikey shoes; in fact it was just like the Rideau Centre, only with staff.

At least one uniformed person at every table, every counter, every door, every two feet, and more staff dusting and cleaning. I paused to look at some lingerie and had no idea at all what the lingerie table woman was telling me; maybe that after all the eating I’ve done this week, nothing on her counter would fit me.

The only purchase I’ve made so far has been an "I Climbed the Great Wall" red sweatshirt from a Wall vendor.

On the streets, I look at all the bicycle riders in their regular clothes and carrying an unbelievable load of packages,
paraphernalia and children, and I think, what am I doing biking in Spandex. Lunch was hosted by the Nanjing Bureau of Education in the old area of the city. (I need a whole book to describe the food and decor, including live goldfish in a big bowl in the centre of the table.)

Then we walked around Zuan Wu Lake, and climbed up 392 steps ("commemorating 392 million Chinese people") to the tomb of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen. We were joined spontaneously by Guo Jing, a university tourism major who wanted to practice her English with us.

But absolute highlight today was our visit to Mr. Gu’s college, where the four of us were placed on chairs at the front of the class so 15-year-old "broadcasting" students could ask us questions. The girls were particularly interested in me - they kept saying I was beautiful! - and couldn’t believe I was left handed (when they made me sign autographs.)

They presented us with bouquets of flowers, and took photos. I had some of my bio art cards in my bag, and they fought to get them as if I were a rock star. Another banquet for dinner, and a walk around the Confucius temple area at night.
Tomorrow the brocade factory and drive to Suzhou. By the way, at the banquet we had an animated discussion on working hours and effort in both countries. Lorne told them the night before we left for China, I had gone in to work.
The Chinese men said "Ohhhhh and it was no contest.

I’m afraid to edit or spellcheck this note or hotmail will disappear again, so forgive the imperfections.

Best wishes to all, and I’ll get back to you in a few days.
Love
Louise

Suzhou

Date: Saturday, March 1", 2004 4:05 AM

Subject: a note to you from downtown Suzhou (doesn’t rhyme; it’s pronounced Sue Joe)

Hi everyone

A short note about today, as I sit in the Suzhou Garden View Hotel and wait for Lorne to finish his meetings. In high school, I had learned briefly about the Nanjing Massacre, but it had meant little until we went to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial site this morning.

The memorial to the 300,000 Nanjing residents killed and worse by the Japanese in 1938 was very impressively done with outdoor statues and stones, and a museum, and had a continuous line of visitors paying respects, including busloads of school children in their uniform track suits. It seems most school children have colorful school track suits.

After the massacre site, we walked over to the Nanjing Brocade Research Institute (there really wasn’t any research) and watched the factory workers on huge two-person looms working as their ancestors did. It takes at least five years to be trained in their family tradition.

There was a display of very hold historic robes and other brocade fabrics. Lorne bought a silk brocade tie and I got a reversible red brocade jacket. As is usually the case, the alleys and back streets are filled with laundry hanging, individual commerce and vibrant street life. We walked along a back street then hailed a taxi back to the hotel checkout to pick up our van ride to Suzhou.

A three hour drive past continuous gray stucco housing and rice cultivation. The "service centre" just off the highway had a woman selling live rabbits, turtles and gerbils in cages, mandarin oranges and other fruit, as well as Chinese snack food. A truckload of large live pigs parked beside us at the service centre, but we hadn’t seen any other animals all the way along. The public "bathrooms" no longer surprise me, and I’m getting much more efficient.

Best wishes to all.

"Talk" to you in a few days.


Louise
Date: Monday, March 15, 2004 1:19 AM

Subject: cycling in Suzhou!

Hi everyone Here I go again...I’m writing these notes as a reminder to my own fuzzy brain, and sharing with you in case any of it is of interest. Because it’s more important for me to be out doing than writing, it’s a sporadic chronology only. Please invite me for a philosophical discussion of Eastern and Western ways, with tea, when I return, and forgive what may seem superficial. I really am doing a lot of thinking.

So much of what is in my memory is vignettes:

... the beggar with the monkey, the street sweepers with their twig brooms, the women in Tong Li washing their clothes in the canal, the eagerness in the city to learn new words and practice English with us. Mr. Gu says his 8-year-old daughter started learning English in kindergarten.

Two little girls when we were out walking called out, "Hello, how are you?" to us.

With the World Heritage Congress coming up in Suzhou in June, there is beautification construction everywhere, bricklaying, tree planting, much by men wearing suits and white gloves and no hard hats.

The pattern and discipline of all the artists, whether doing embroidery, root carving or bonsai. I will try to remember that... Alain had told me of Suzhou1s centuries old reputation for the beauty of the city and its women, and it truly is a unique place. It was founded in the 6th century B.C. on a network of canals to control Yangtze flooding. Silk and gardens are its historic pride.

At the Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute (workers and shop, no research visible) we watched women embroidering with strands 1/40th of a silk thread that you could barely see. They take at least three years to learn how to do it. The works on display were unbelievable - including a full-size embroidered Mona Lisa. It was amazing to someone like me who represents three generations of awful sewing tradition.

We then spent several hours walking around the "Humble Administrator’s Garden", acres of ornate pagodas, trees and flowers overlooking reflecting water. I hope to paint from my photos when I get back.

In the afternoon we drove to Tong Li, an ancient water-bound town on the water that is truly Venice-like. We took a gondola ride around and then re-traced our steps beside the canals.

Everywhere we went was crowded with local, not international, tourists, and some asked once again for us to pose for their cameras. For a change from Chinese cuisine we have also eaten McDonald’s takeout while travelling - as research for Diana, and I saved the box. Last night the four of us at supper at the Australian restaurant next door to the hotel that was having a Tex-Mex night. One hamburger was enough to propel us back to Chinese food.

In our hotel with black tile roof and whitewashed walls, the Suzhou Garden View Hotel, the courtyard magnolia trees are blooming, bamboo is growing, and it really is a perfect, serene setting right on the main street which has so much traffic it1s almost impossible to cross.
This morning Lorne was off on more school visits, and I stayed back to rent a bicycle, which I1d been anxious to do since we came to China. When in Rome... It was a coaster bike, "Cowboy" model.

Victor, a very friendly 25-year-old clerk from the hotel offered to go with me to practice his English. He was wonderful, leading me in and out of intersections, back alleys, main roads around to "Shi Lu Foot Street" and "Shi Lu Road International Business Street" according to his description. We biked for 2 1/2 hours and had lunch at KFC - his choice. He had a hamburger and I had a spicy chicken wrap with vegetables that tasted very Chinese.

The biking was a real experience. Nobody - pedestrians, bikes, cars, scooters - stops for anyone, or signals. They just weave in and out.

Scooters honk, cars honk, but you never know what for, and they go the wrong way in the lanes. And there’s construction mess and bicycle rickshaws and obstacles everywhere.

Victor says it must be wonderful in Canada where everyone has a car and he wanted to know the make of mine. I told him I thought bikes were better than cars. Now I’m going to sit in the hotel garden and paint until tonight’s banquet.

I wish all of this for all of you.
Love, Louise

Hangzhou

Date: Tuesday, March 16, 2004 11:00 PM

Subject: Food, schools and an English lesson

Hi everyone This will be my second last e-mail (tomorrow Shanghai and then home Saturday.)

We are now in beautiful - even in the pouring rain - Hangzhou, famous for the West Lake, honeymoon capital of China "since Marco Polo wrote about its captivating women and the loveliness of its temples and gardens." Marco was right. Think Niagara Falls meets Lake Louise.

The past couple of days we’ve been alternating eating and meeting, so I will describe a couple of each.

Monday night at the banquet hosted by the Suzhou Municipal Education Bureau, the wine was traditional Chinese yellow wine (fermented with rice) and the table was decorated in coral and gold, with each of the eight napkins folded differently, the highest napkin for the host. He took his role very seriously and served us himself, insisting we eat and drink everything before us. We were grateful for no banquet the following day in Hangzhou, but food was still very good.

For dinner we went with a Chinese educator to a popular Chinese family restaurant that Mao used to frequent. Among our food items was West Lake Fish in sweet and sour sauce, "Beggar’s Chicken" in Lotus leaves, and bamboo shoots in spicy soy sauce.

The gleaming new school we visited in Suzhou Tuesday morning has 1200 students, grades 1-9, located in the Suzhou Industrial Park. We sat in a glass-walled meeting room, at a rectangular glass table with ferns lined up in the open centre part, and we were served the traditional cellophane wrapped oranges, bananas, and tea in paper cups with the school name on them. (I hummed to myself "you serve me tea and oranges that come all the way from China" by Leonard Cohen).

Arrangements were confirmed for 10 students and two teachers to come and join Henry Larsen Public School in Ottawa for five months. It is a pilot project, with hope of more to follow. The students will come in August and stay to experience Canada’s great winter cultural festival, Christmas.

The school we visited in Hangzhou in the afternoon was a $4 million government funded grade 7- 12 school for 4000 students, the best in the region. I don’t think a more beautiful school exists anywhere in the world. It puts to shame Carleton University.

Now a bit on the language...I am laughing with not at the problem of translation. They are trying. The sign for the rest stop on the highway said "lie fallow". Here are the fire regulations on the back door of our hotel room (they mean, the dot on the map above, shows you where you are): Security Scattering Sketch Map Declaration

… Place don’t worry if a fire occurring. Our hotel have owned succor gathering facilities to sure you transmitted safely

… Place follow the direction route to the information corridor and there safeguards will take you out to the security belts

… Point profess your excellency seat.

The room service menu has "intestine roll with egg" for breakfast. Sausage? A few other choices from the menu where I had lunch yesterday, a very fancy place with couches and private rooms:

"Su the metre fear soup of sense of shame"

"Irish sheep leg thick soup"

"Lotus soundly north mushroom slippery chicken meal"

"Thick flat spit out departent" which may be a baked potato. Fortunately David Wang of the Ottawa board is with us some of the time and can help out.

Perhaps there is a market for Ottawa Citizen advertising features to provide second stage translation services. I’m going to look into that. Anything to get back to this wonderful place more often!

That’s it for now; we have another school to visit.
Love
Louise

Shanghai

Date: Thursday, March 18, 2004 6:28 PM

Subject: Shanghai and goodbye

Hello everyone

A few more anecdotes to complete the cycle. Even as I was waiting for the internet, I had a nice chat with a woman from Florida working here to upgrade hospitality training.

Wednesday afternoon we visited Hangzhou No. 4 Middle School and met with the woman principal at a round table with a massive flower arrangement coming up from the floor in the centre, even bigger than the one at the last school. And to the standard fruit and tea offering was added fresh lychees, huge grapes, and the fruit of which they were most proud, plump purple plums with the label from Chile still on them.

The teacher "monitor of the day", a man wearing a red armband to signify that, would take bananas and other fruit from the bowls, and place it in front of each of us to make sure we ate.

Then two hours later, with liaisons accomplished and arrangements for exchanges made, the principal led us across the street to the tea house for tea - and also strawberries, sugar cane, smoked fish, pine nuts, raisins, Asian pears, noodles and a selection of little fried pastries in an unending procession of little bowls.

I want to point out that these schools we’ve been visiting have been the absolute top in the country. They are the ones with budgets for education and travel. The great majority of schools are crowded and in very primitive surroundings.
In China there are now 125 million middle class people, and yet 900 million rural peasants.

The contrasts are hugely evident whenever you turn a corner off a main street. I1m so dumb the first time I saw laundry hanging on a tree in front, I thought it was for sale.

After a very worthwhile visit to the Ling yin Temple with a 65-foot Buddha (founded a.d. 326) and its hill covered with carvings, and the room with 500 giant Buddhas, each different, we left Hangzhou for Shanghai. The cities we’d been in for the past few days have been "small", just six or seven million. Shanghai is more than 1" million. The density is mind boggling. Out our hotel window the high rises look like matches standing up in a matchbox. There have been 3,000 highrises built in the past five years.

A few memories of the bumpy three-hour drive from Hangzhou to Shanghai:

… clusters of identical houses and people working by hand in the fields, on every single piece of land, the whole way. (Doze for 20 minutes, look up and it looks the same.)

… a rest stop ‘fast food’ operation offered only leaf-wrapped sticky rice in six options e.g. meat, nuts, egg etc. Heaven!

… Men holding small signs by the side of the highway near the entrance to each city. They offer to guide unfamiliar drivers on streets that might not even be on maps yet. (They hop into your car or bus.)

… Shanghai’s huge traffic jams, yet they are trying to control cars by making people bid on a limited number of plates each month. Wei Wei, the mother of an international student now in Ottawa, told us she didn’t win a plate last month with a bid of $39,000 RMB. (A car can be another $100,000.)

The CEO of a Shanghai drug company and husband of a man who makes TV shows, she hosted us to a rich banquet and then escorted us across the street last night to a Laura Ashley-decorated coffee shop. We sat listening to "Feelings" and "Don’t Cry for Me Argentina" sung by a live Chinese trio. There were pastries and sliced fruit, grape-sized oranges on the table, and traditional Chinese attentive service providing Irish coffee and cappuccino.

Afterward, David Wang, our school board liaison, invited us to visit the two-bedroom Shanghai apartment he rents for $700 a month Canadian. Yes, the difference is the salaries here.

You can tell this is Shanghai and not a "smaller" centre because the internet room in the hotel is open 24 hours instead of the brief hours in the other places. It’s 7 a.m., and Lorne is still sleeping.

I’ve come down to write my last e-mail before we head out to the Shanghai history museum , Yu Garden, and the European-like Bund area. Jessie, a finance student at the university, is accompanying us this time. We met her last night, and her English is amazing considering she has only been school taught and never lived in an English-speaking environment.

I could go on and on with observations and experiences. Can it really be just over a week since I came to China? I won’t be checking the internet again.
See y’all soon.

Love
Louise

Date: Sunday March 21, 2004

Subject: We’re back

Hi for the last time about China; this is the addendum, completing the circle. I want to be as hard-working and disciplined as the Chinese people I saw. On the second last day, we rode the Shanghai subway - new and well laid-out, with English translation, and good shops. Nicer than Toronto’s subway and 50 cents Canadian for a ticket.

The Shanghai Museum was excellent, telling the long history of the area with wax models and streetscapes. Then we took the subway again to Nanjing Street for dumplings for lunch, a huge basement "fast food" chain restaurant packed with people. The three of us (me, Lorne and Jessie our student "guide") sat at a table for four with a woman we didn’t know, and we didn’t speak to her or she to us the whole time. Crowded, but you have your privacy.

In the afternoon we had Danguipiangofiang flower tea at the teahouse at Yu Garden, a busy area of small shops. The tea house proudly displayed a photo of Bill Clinton and Hillary drinking tea there. I bought some Chinese paintbrushes in a shop, with Jessie as usual doing the bartering for me. She told me the shop woman yelled at her, "You’re Chinese and you’re poor, why are you helping her get a lower price!"

We joined Geoff and David for our last supper at a Japanese hot pot restaurant near our hotel, then walked around the lit-up Bund followed by coffee on the 54th floor of the Grand Hyatt Hotel facing the Huang Pu River and the Bund from the other side.

We took the elevator higher to the 85th floor for a further magnificent view of Shanghai at night. I was skeptical when Geoff said we had to go to the hotel, but he was absolutely right. It was unbelievable.

The hotel has an interior courtyard and you can look down and down and down as if you’re in a space ship.

In the morning at our hotel, a Toronto woman who works for a Taiwanese auto parts company was happy to talk to a fellow Canadian. She sells to Wal-Mart which is expanding in south China.

Wei Wei, who had hosted us for dinner earlier in the week, came by with a gift of tea for us and a shopping bag "care parcel" of stuff for her daughter who is attending high school in Ottawa. She generously donated her company van to drive us to the airport.

On the way to the airport we spent a couple of hours at Zhujiajiao village, 40 km sw of Shanghai. Lively narrow streets packed with food vendors and crafts. Women sold goldfish for people to release into the river. Lorne and the other men had shoe shines on the street, by a woman carrying around a stool and polish.

We still managed to get to the airport, 100 km from Shanghai, way too early, despite all the forms to fill out. We dawdled at our last Chinese Chinese buffet, and bought a Beijing Olympics 2008 t-shirt.

We were glad our luggage wasn’t overweight with all the gifts we’ve been given and have bought.

We had just enough time for our connection in Vancouver because the airport was extremely busy, perhaps because of the end of March Break, and arrived in Ottawa on time. Air Canada was very helpful and professional.

So zai jian (good-bye) for now.

I will miss writing these e-mails.

Love
Louise