January Journal

In which I arrive in China and explore the Northern regions.

January 12th, 2005
    My long journey is over. I am now embedded in a brilliantly illuminated cubicle many floors below central Beijing. Incalculable hours have elapsed since I last slept properly, but I should try to describe a few of the more notable details of the trip before conking out. We flew twelve hypnotic hours in a half-empty 747, up across Alaska and thousands of miles of frightening ice mountains, chasing dusk most of the way into the West. Flying across Manchuria, I observed a limitless level plain of snow, dotted with villages and many long narrow fields, looking like scattered matchsticks. The Beijing Airport is a paradigm of cleanliness and efficiency. I jumped on a shuttle bus that plowed through the city and left me dazed and confused somewhere. I had no idea where I was, or what to do. A rickshaw peddler with rudimentary English latched onto me. Not really knowing what to do, I climbed into his trike, and he peddled me off to a decent youth hostel, which was actually where I had intended to go. I am already liking China. More to tell after I sleep.

January 13th, 2005
    This day I arose before dawn and went out into the streets, heading for Tiananmen Square. Central Beijing seems to be very clean and modern, but everything is very spread out and built on an enormous scale. The main streets are like superhighways with special protected lanes for bikes. The amount of bikes here is really awesome. A mini critical mass forms at every traffic light. Beijing seems to be a good place to bike. The distances are a bit long for walking, and as a pedestrian, you’ve got to go through underground passages to cross the street. The square is a vast empty space over which Chairman Mao presides. Many red flags were flying, and enormous Stalinist buildings loomed alongside. It had a very old-school communist feel to it. I noticed that a crowd had gathered around a long perimeter, and in a few minutes, some sort of militaristic flag-raising ceremony began as a song played over loudspeakers. Dawn. I walked south down the square and into some of Beijing’s remaining hutong, or narrow alleyway neighborhoods. In a raised area, a homeless man burned plastic bags, and another practiced tai chi. The city has a very welcoming feeling to it. Very few people stare at me, although there aren’t many foreigners about. I considered paying a visit to Chairman Mao’s wax effigy, but decided I’d rather not wait in line for such a demonic cause. At least not then.
    I decided to visit the Forbidden City, which is at the heart of Beijing. It’s where the Emperors and their eunuchs and concubines lived. My guidebook doesn’t say too much about it, so I was quite blown away by how awesome it was. The sheer size and complexity of the place is astounding. It has something like 9,000 rooms, and many gardens, pavilions, theaters, and courtyards, all painted in brilliant red, yellow and green. The front part seems to have been constructed for ceremonial occasions involving vast groups of people. You walk up and across large open areas to a series of throne chambers. The back part is where everyone lived. Many carved dragons chasing flaming pearls. There was an especially awesome theater building from 1776. It was an open pagoda with stages on all levels, entirely covered with intricately carven decoration, painted in screaming garish colors. Apparently, operatic theatrics were staged on all levels simultaneously. I also especially loved the many beautiful gardens, which had wonderfully gnarled old Cyprus and catalpa trees, as well as weird scholar’s stones. One spreading pine’s label informed us “the older it gets, the more strange it becomes.” Many unusual geological and coral curiosities were displayed for contemplation. In one place, a small artificial mountain had been created out of bubbly volcanic rock.
    Chinese taste coincides very much with mine. They seem to love old trees, strange stones, tortoises, and garish colors. So do I. I also observed some truly stupendous kitsch, including six-ton intricately carved jade monoliths, and artificial bonsai made out of coral and minerals. The scale and intricacy of the place was overwhelming. After a few hours of wandering around, I exited out the back and climbed a hill behind. This hill was constructed from the enormous quantities of earth excavated during the construction of the vast moat that surrounds the Forbidden City. At the top was a pavilion with a giant Buddha from 1999. The original apparently bit the dust in the Cultural Revolution. From up there I could see how truly huge Beijing is. There were giant skyscrapers and towers visible for miles in all directions out to the horizon. The peak of this mountain (or shan) had a very good clear feeling to it. I started to like China very much. Later I walked back to my subterranean hotel, stopping to eat a weird thing from a street vendor. She made a giant pancake, tossed on an egg and chopped veggies, flipped it over and brushed it with some stuff, placed a big block of weird crusty stuff on it, the chopped and folded it up. 2.5 Yuan. It was delicious. I wonder if I’ll ever know its name.

gun boy

January 14th, 2005
This day I visited various touristic sights. First was an ancient observatory from the 15th century. This was a stout, sloping building, weirdly located among overpasses and skyscrapers. On the roof were amazing and gigantic cast bronze astronomical instruments, all fully decorated with entwined dragons and other mythological beasts. There was a huge starry sphere, theodolites, azimuths, protractors, strobulites, and so on, shells within shells. Next I rented a bike and rode up to the Lama Temple, an enormous Tibetan Buddhist complex in the Northern part of the city. There was lots to see here, but I felt a little odd just staring at things when so much active worship was going on. It was interesting to see very modern looking young people burning incense before gigantic, multi-armed, boar-headed gods. The incense was wafting thick. In fact, I could smell it from well outside the temple. The architecture was quite amazing too. There were many fascinating ancient mandalas, scrolls, paintings and statues. A few of these I got to inspect closely, most of them were being subject to fairly intense, ongoing worship. I’d feel weird just standing and checking out some object while crowds of people were actively prostrating themselves before it. Lots of monks were walking around chatting and using beads. It’s interesting how many different religious traditions make use of rosary beads.
Next I crossed the street to visit a large and largely deserted Confucian temple. This was a more peaceful and beautifully dilapidated place, with ancient Cyprus trees (700 years old), and more giant dragon-tortoises supporting inscribed pillars. Also a weird silent warehouse containing the “13 Classics” inscribed on hundreds of big stone pillars. The girls from the dusty gift shop were playing hackysack in front of the big temple.

Happy family explosion

January 15th, 2005
    This day started off with a visit to the woefully uninteresting Natural History museum. I was hoping for silent halls of dusty, moth-eaten exhibits, but instead got 3-D laser-projected images of Cambrian life forms. It was the most technologically flashy museum I’d ever visited. On the upper floors, human evolution culminated in the invention of birth control, graphically displayed. I next took the subway up to Beijing’s premier Daoist temple, which proved to be awesome. At first glance, it appeared to be similar to the other temples I’d seen here, with ancient cypresses, giant tortoise sculptures, and enormous grotesque statues. The numerous worshipers worshipped by burning joss sticks and placing red placards. But all along the sides of the large central courtyard were hundreds of rooms, each open on one side. Every room was a “department” where you could burn incense or donate money for a certain cause. They featured phantastic, life sized, brightly painted plaster statues of wild gods and demons, many with animal heads, and holding outlandish weapons. Some were injured, or even being disemboweled. I wrote down a small selection of the best departments:
Jaundice Department
Department for Reducing Longevity
Aquatic Animal Department
Water Birth Department
Mammal Birth Department
Department for Halting the Destruction of Living Beings
Department for Opposing Obscene Acts
Department of Suppressing Schemes
Deep Rooted Disease Department
Flying Birds Department
Forest Ghost department
Toxicant Department
Insect Birth Department
Egg Birth Department
Department of Demons and Monsters
Abortion Department
Department of Hell
Department for Implementing 15 kinds of Violent Death
Preservation of Wildness Department

I donated one Yuan to the Halting Destruction of Living Beings Department. A label explained in English that the various water, egg, bird birth departments were for ensuring that evil folks got reincarnated as such things. The statues in the Department for Implementing 15 Kinds of Violent Death were particularly awesome. All these departments had a few donations, but by far the most popular were the Departments for Wealth, Longevity, and Progeny. There were also departments for Signatures, Resurrection of the Dead, and Just Officials. The amount of effort that must have gone into making the statues for all of these endless departments is amazing. There were some very brisk, serious, and well-dressed businessmen making sacrifices before the main central gods.
    I next rode the subway around to the other side of town to visit a White Dagoba Temple. This featured a huge, white, Indian style Stupa, established by Kublai Khan, who ordered arrows shot in four directions to mark its boundaries. This temple also featured an overwhelming display of billions of small cast metal Buddhist statues, all mounted in their own cases. After walking around some more, I came back to my hotel for a rest. While walking around the city, I really notice how happy and boisterous people seem here, despite the cold and grey skies. The word self-confidence keeps recurring to me when I think of how to describe people’s attitudes here. Everything seems bright, brisk, and punchy.

January 17th, 2005
    Yesterday I rented a bike and rode a long way out of the city along a canal to visit the summer palace, a huge complex of buildings for imperial pleasure. These were all in the usual style, weird but highly codified. The huge lake there was frozen, and I enjoyed walking around on it for a few hours. I also rode out to a botanical garden near the hills at the edge of Beijing. At night, I visited some old friends from college who now live in Beijing. Their high apartment overlooked a sea of construction sites that apparently go 24-7. Looking out over Beijing from the dark windows of their high apartment, way out to the horizon in all directions, I could see falling molten sparks from constant welding going on.

January 18th, 2005
    This morning I paid a visit to Chairman Mao. He was looking a little bloated and collapsed at the same time. After being ushered through a silent hall in which his “body” lay in a glass canister, we emerged into a large mall of Maoist kitsch. It’s rather funny how rampant capitalism has invaded even this preserve. Afterwards, I bought a train ticket South to Datong for Thursday. It’s supposedly a horrific pit, but has some interesting Cloud Ridge Caves nearby. I already feel like I’ve pretty much seen Beijing.

January 20th, 2005
    This day I journeyed by slow train six hours from Beijing to charming Datong. The train ride itself was actually fairly entertaining. It started off exceedingly crowded, with people standing in the aisles. As soon as everyone got settled down, they started eating frantically, throwing the plastic wrappers, peels and shells onto the ground. Soon a serious layer of crap had built up on the floor. Various vendors plied back and forth, selling more food. At one point a grandiloquent vendor of multicolored, self-illuminating pens came by, giving a series of dramatic demonstrations, during which he stomped on his wares and hammered them into the walls to show their durability. Almost half of the passengers ended up buying these pens. Chinese people just LOVE crap, as my friend pointed out while explaining the prevalence of sweaters for the endemic smushfaced dogs in Beijing. After the aisle had grown nearly impassible with layers of trash, special sweepers came by, sweeping it up. By the time they’d swept to the end of the aisle, their pile was enormous. The sweepers came through twice during the trip, once reinforced by mops. After their eating and trash-generating binge, most passengers fell asleep. During this trip I also observed one man wipe the snot from his nose on his friend’s sleeve, without incurring the slightest hint of displeasure. An infant likewise urinated all over some man’s shoe with total impunity, serene indifference characterizing both parties in the transaction. At last we arrived in Datong.
    Ah, Datong. Datong is the kind of city where when you inhale a lungful of steaming raw human shit, you sigh for the sweet relief it affords you from the background conditions. In fact, even as we neared Datong, the air went from a clear, crisp blue, to jaundiced yellow, to dense, sickeningly toxic brown. Hundreds of crumbling chimneys are placed throughout the city, constantly belching black smoke, even in the center of town. In addition, every teetering hovel burns sulphrous coal. Walking down the street just now, I would occasionally breath by accident some corrosive fume so toxic I would involuntarily retch. Right around the corner from my hotel is a large dumpster filled with plastic trash ON FIRE. It was just sitting there burning, belching black smoke. Along the roads is a mixture of black snow, plastic bags and frozen globules of sputum. This is the ugliest city I’ve ever seen, and still my days in China are young.

January 21st, 2005
This day I visited the famous and aptly named Cloud Ridge Caves, a sandstone ridge into which billions of Buddhas had been carved around 460-510 AD. It was actually quite spectacular. Some of these caves held enormous 20 meter tall Buddhas, while others were crammed with countless small ones. These Buddhas were rather plump, although they had yet to reach the stage of morbid obesity that the traditional Chinese Buddha exemplifies. Much of the original color remained on the carvings, although sadly they were all thickly coated with grimy black coal soot. Every horizontal surface was covered with it, and indeed there was a huge coal mine across the street. Several signs made a big deal of how the government re-routed the coal trucks so that they wouldn’t go right past the site, but given how the whole area wallows in a sea of its own toxic crap, I can’t see that it would make much difference. The unique smell of burning coal is everywhere. Perhaps it is a bit like England during the Industrial Revolution, when they burned so much coal and everything was grimy and black. I took a strange local bus back into town, and then navigated my way around by compass for 3 or 4 hours. Some of the street markets here were rather interesting. Many frozen fish and piles of coal. Woolly donkeys were used to pull carts of coal. Small dogs stained black plied the smoldering garbage piles. I eventually found a small Buddhist monastery near the foul center of town. The poor bodhisattvas and apsaras inside were covered with the Datong patina. I felt like they were waiting for a future time when they would be cleaned. Apparently, the only other foreigners in town are the young French couple staying in my hotel dorm room. The Datongers certainly do stare at me much more than the people in Beijing did. It’s nice to regain my rock star status. I realize that staring at other people is just another way of announcing that you are ignorant and isolated. Tomorrow I intend to travel down to Taiyuan, another notoriously polluted pit. Hopefully, by continually traveling South, I’ll eventually reach a latitude at which my mustache does not continually freeze onto my face, a most embarrassing and vexatious predicament. Perhaps this explains the evolutionary advantage of beardlessness in these climates.

January 22, 2005
This day featured an exciting minibus ride form charming DATONG to pastoral TAIYUAN. I climbed onto a bus supposedly about to make this trip, and waited for nearly an hour while the bus tout rounded up passengers. A huge open flame from some kind of device heated the bus. I was about to give up, when suddenly the bus filled up with tons of screaming, snot-encrusted, chain-smoking passengers and their voluminous baggage. After about 37 minutes of yelling and screaming, the bus finally got underway. My expectations of a quick trip were soon thwarted. After a few minutes of plying the dense Datong smog, we pulled into a crumbling courtyard filled with rubble and smoldering plastic and coal. Another extensive mass screaming session served as a prelude to our all piling into another, more cramped bus, where the screaming continued unabated for a considerable period. I’d have hated to have seen these guys at a Cultural Revolution criticism session. At last this new bus pulled out onto a small highway. We traveled down this for a few hours. Thousands of huge coal trucks were going in both directions. So much coal dust blew off of the trucks that a small subsidiary industry seems to have arisen, where guys with bicycle trikes sweep up the dust and cart it off to sell. Meanwhile, the pollution was so intense that visibility was down to about 100 meters. I sat right behind the driver, whose general theory of driving was to always drive in the same lane as the oncoming traffic, if at all possible. His skills were actually quite impressive, although at one point he managed to beat the first descending gate at a railway crossing (by driving in the wrong lane) but not the second one on the other side of the tracks, leaving us pinned in the path of an approaching train. Luckily, a gap of several decimeters remained. He also got pulled over by the cops for some other inscrutable offense, necessitating another long delay. At one point, the driver slammed on the brakes, causing several passengers, who had been sitting on 6” high plastic stools in the aisle, to fly forward and pile onto the dashboard in a heap. Instead of sympathy or concern, this occurrence occasioned widespread gales of cackling, derisive laughter. Eventually we left the potholed coal truck highway, and drove along another very impressive, newly constructed superhighway with many tunnels and bridges, some several kilometers long. At last after about six hours, we arrived in scenic TAIYUAN, which is almost as foul a toxic pit as DATONG. I checked into a fairly decent railway hotel, indulging in a room of my own, which came replete with a single-use tube of toothpaste. I walked around the city for a bit and ate a yam. The amount of people here is really amazing. Every space is just crammed full of people.
towers

   I visited a serene monastery with two huge and awesome 13-story pagodas. This monastery was completely empty, except for the ancient doorman and myself. I climbed up the dark, slippery, steep hexagonal staircase in one of the pagodas. It was actually quite interesting in there. Instead of coming out onto a balcony, the stairway led to a high dark chamber near the top, with four tiny windows. I had to crawl on my knees through a small tunnel to peer out of the windows. Also, each floor of the pagoda had a unique wooden grate at the center, allowing you to see all the way up and down. I took off my coat and boots and did some meditation sitting on the grate of the top floor. It was odd to be alone in the middle of this huge city, enclosed in a dark, claustrophobic cell, high up in the air above the ground. Through each of the small, low, grated windows, a tiny section of the smoggy town was visible. You could stare directly at the sun through the red coal haze. When I came down, the wizened doorman unbarred the gates to let me out. Along the way home, I made the interesting and possibly dangerous discovery that a large bottle of beer costs 2 Yuan, or about 25 cents. It tastes fairly decent, although it does not seem to contain any alcohol.

January 23rd, 2005
    This day began with a laborious and painful failure to buy a train ticket out of here to Xian. I’d heard that buying train tickets in China is extremely difficult for foreigners. The ticket office was located far from the train station, on another random street. A long line snaked out the door. I’d written down the words I wanted to say on a piece of paper, so I practiced them while waiting. The guys waiting in line with me found this rather entertaining. I practiced a bit with them. We waited for more than an hour, slowly creeping towards the two-inch diameter aperture behind which the retarded ticketmistress was enthroned. When we finally got there, my linemates told me that the only train to Xian was full. They also found this fact mildly hilarious. I walked off in somewhat of a rage, but soon found the bus station, where there was no line. Busses left every hour all day, so I got a ticket easily. Mish mushkela.
    I reflected that the difference between buying bus and train tickets is very reflective of the difference between capitalist and communist systems. The train system is controlled by the state. It is slower, safer, and more comfortable, as well as having a sort of romantic, wistful appeal. The busses are owned by many independent operators, and are faster, more liable to crash, and certainly less comfortable. However, while buying a train ticket involves waiting in long lines, usually when you even walk past a bus station, the touts start calling out to you, asking where you want to go.
    I’d intended to visit the nearby ancient town of Ping Yao today, but after the train ticket debacle, I decided I’d had enough of all sorts of transportation issues for the day, so I decided to just walk around Taiyuan. I walked down the main street to the frozen river. Here my muse for solitude led me to a most wonderful place. On the other side of the river was a very long and totally deserted riverside park, stretching literally out to the vanishing point in both directions. Not a soul was there. I derive such an intense, physical pleasure from solitude. As soon as I am alone, I can feel my soul unfolding, growing and expanding wonderfully. This feeling is always particularly strong when I am in a place abandoned by human beings.
    I spent the rest of the day wandering the streets, surveying the diminutive crowds. The string was sometimes unusually intense, but it doesn’t usually bother me if I’m in the right mood. Nevertheless, I am always extremely gratified to observe a singular phenomenon associated with people staring at me: namely-people staring at me so intensely that they crash the vehicle they are riding. This is not an unheard of event in the remoter regions.

Garbage collection in Xian.
Bicycle trikes brought the rubbish here, where it was sorted before being loaded on a truck.

January 24th, 2005
This day featured a long and comparatively uneventful bus ride from TAIYUAN to XIAN. Only one brief pointless screaming session enlivened the journey. Thankfully, smoking was not allowed. I read Tristam Shandy most of the way. There is a peculiar delight in reading that sort of thing in foreign lands. A sort of escape from the escape. I can remember reading Vanity Fair with great pleasure on a mountaintop in the Egyptian desert. Xian is a large, modern city still retaining its original surrounding wall, which is quite impressive. I found a hotel bed for 30 Yuan (about $3.25) and set out to explore the city. I was immediately accosted by brazen prostitutes, some of whom even emerged from their lairs and were so bold as to grab onto my jacket and attempt to pull me in. They each had a little storefront, with a glazed glass sliding door, slid open. The police stood idly by. I walked into the Muslim quarter, which featured men in skullcaps, and delicious roast fishes.

A vegetable market seen from the walls of Xian.

January 25th, 2005
This day I made a stunning success in obtaining a train ticket to Chengdu for the 27th. I accomplished this by bypassing the vast queue and skipping to the front for being foreign. The Sufi Soleiman taught me this trick. The coup delighted me. I spent the morning cycling around, visiting a few dull pagodas and a museum, which proved decisively that the Chinese have always excelled at producing huge bronze cauldrons. Otherwise, the Xian museum was rather dull. My favorite thing was a stone chopper from the Paleolithic (c. 900,000 BC). It looked like you could do some serious damage with it. It’s actually surprising how little of China’s ancient history remains. Almost everything old is a restoration, or dates back to 1750 at most. There are a few very old pagodas around, but little else. This is such a contrast to the Eastern Mediterranean, where there is so much ancient stonework around that it is used for corralling goats. Perhaps this is the result of climate, the use of clay bricks rather than stone, and the abundant tumults of Chinese history.
The more I travel, the less the various arrangements of matter on display interest me. I did have a great time today walking along the top of the city’s massive walls, peering down onto the backstreet events. By the time I got back to the place where I’d gotten up onto the walls, the tall iron gate was locked. A few passersby observed my predicament, until I resolved it by climbing up the gate and jumping down the other side.

Xian view

January 26th, 2005
    This day I visited the renowned terracotta warriors near Xian. The amount of work that must have gone into creating all these large statues is amazing. Each was life sized, and individually crafted. Thousands of them filled several halls hundreds of meters wide. Most had been reduced to indiscriminate rubble, but many had been restored. They had all been buried in massive trenches, paved in brick, and roofed over with massive logs and woven mats. The extent and intricacy of the massive display was exceeded only by the series of nearby enormous shopping malls filled with garish kitsch. I was very curious why the warriors had been made. Were they for use by the Emperor in the afterlife? What was the ancient Chinese conception of death? Was some massive battle anticipated there? Surly there must have been some reason for all this, but the attached museum did not speculate on it. In fact, it really contained no relevant information whatsoever. It did, however, contain an extensive exhibit and display about itself. This contained pictures of innumerable dignitaries inaugurating massive construction projects, as well as commemorative engraved plates. Apparently the Chinese, both ancient and modern, love two things especially 1) CRAP and 2) massive construction projects. All their modern highways plow straight through mountains in long tunnels, and span valleys by means of vast bridges.
    The bus ride out here was through some very foul and depressing countryside featuring dead plants and huge belching factories and power stations. Its odd how with all their high tech and industry, they can’t seem to make the hot water run for more than a few designated hours each day.
    I came back to my dorm room here at my hotel to find it occupied by two very silly Italian girls. They laughed uproariously for a long time, and huddled in bed together, getting out every once and a while to warm themselves up with a hairdryer. I’d never seen a hairdryer stuck down someone’s pants before. Indeed it is very cold in this grotty basement dormitory. I spent most of the day making a full circuit of Xian’s city walls. It was snowing lightly all day. Along the south wall, workers were making giant surreal floats for the upcoming Lunar New Year festival.

January 28th, 2005
    Yesterday I took an overnight train from Xian to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province. It was fun to crawl up into the little top bunk and sleep there. This was the “hard sleeper” section, where conditions were somewhat more civilized than in my previous “hard seat” journey. Here when people spat things onto the floor, they at least made an attempt to kick them into the ventilation grate afterwards. Some also wore ties. I read Tristam Shandy and ate sweet miniature mandarin oranges most of the way. After arriving in Chengdu at about 5 AM, I walked a few miles through sleeping streets to my hotel. The weather here is slightly warmer, almost subtropical feeling, although still chilly. The brown cloud of pollution extends even here. When will I ever get out from under it? After a nap, I set out to explore. I found several awesome markets, one for plants and bonsai, the other for live seafood. The plant market smelled wonderfully of something like jasmine. Many cactuses and ficus-type bonsai. The seafood market was quite mind-blowing, with a huge array of crabs, shrimp, prawns, eels, fish, bullfrogs, squid, octopus and turtles all crawling and slithering over each other, dying and being whacked on the head, weighed and chopped up. I suffered a sort of perverse laughing fit when I saw this one girl reach into a fish tank, grab a few fish and whack them repeatedly until they lay still enough to sit on the scale. She repeated this operation in an endless cycle, like some sort of demonic functionary of the afterworld.
    Next I visited a special bamboo garden to commemorate the Tang Dynasty poetess Xue Tao. There was a statue of her, her grave, and a special well where she drew water to make the special crimson paper on which she wrote her poems. Also towers for observing the moon. There was quite a bit of impressive bamboo growing there too. Of course, the place was not without its requisite shopping mall full of useless plastic crap and blaring amusement rides. What a horror have the machines made of this world.
    I walked around town for many more hours, until my feet ached. I visited the small Tibetan neighborhood, which featured lots of monks walking around in their purple robes, and all sorts of Mahayana crap for sale. Chengdu is actually not far from Tibetan areas. It sits at the back of a huge agricultural plain, surrounded by high mountains, some 6,000 to 7,000 meters high (20-23, 000 feet). I wonder if it is possible to see them if the pollution ever clears? Occasionally in the streets I see people of a strange race I’d never seen before. I think these are Uighurs, a Turkic race from Western China. Generally people do not stare at me, but occasionally I’ll run into some people who have obviously never seen a Westerner before. I must appear quite weird to them, with my red beard, angular blue eyes, and two-meter height. Who ever heard of blue eyes? Such an odd angular face and pointy nose. I can remember how after living in Cairo for a year, I too found myself staring at the freakish foreigners as they climbed out of their tour busses and waddled in the thoroughfares. Sometimes I’ll run into a child here who will give me such a big friendly “Hello!” Also people will utter in surprise the word loawai “foreigner.” It means “old outside.” I like this phrase, as it seems peculiarly suited for me. Speaking of thoroughfares, I find it remarkable how the Chinese do not get out of the way when walking down the street. Until I experienced conditions here, I never realized how everyone in the West is constantly accommodating everyone else by means of small lateral movements and forward motions to facilitate free passage. Here people seem oblivious. They will stop in the middle of a narrow, crowded passway to meditate, do a U-turn, blow snot out of their nostrils, or hold out their kid to let it urinate on the sidewalk. Special pants with a slit in the buttocks are worn for this purpose.

January 30th, 2005
    Yesterday I explored around Chengdu, and visited their Buddhist temple, where I obtained a series of cool laminated Buddhist images. Sadly, their vegetarian restaurant was too crowded to eat at. The whole temple had an interesting frantic atmosphere, with lots of screaming, arguing and begging. I also biked around the city on my minute rented bike, and walked around later.
bird

Today, however, featured an exciting trip to the sacred Daoist mountain Qingchen Shan, about 65 km from Chengdu. Qingchen Shan is a series of ancient temples located in a hilly temperate rainforest. Best of all was an absolutely awesome 1,800 year old Ginkgo tree. This was a truly monstrous Ent, dating back to the Eastern Han dynasty. It had weird, drooping, stalactite growths hanging off of its branches. Apparently long ago some Daoist masters retreated to this area to meditate in caves. One of the first planted the Gingko tree here. Here I finally learned what this magic pearl that features so frequently in Chinese iconography means. Supposedly it is the primordial unity that existed in the chaos before creation. I also saw many other wonderful and unfamiliar trees in these forests, some like Norfolk Island pines, others with yew-like foliage, but tall, cedar-like growth. Some parts of the trail were beautifully silent and isolated, but others were quite noisy and crowded. Many of the Chinese, being for the first time in their lives more than 3.7 decimeters away from another person, felt compelled to continually scream and shout into the echoing hollows. Also manifold flutes and whistles were vended along the way to keep the primordial stillness at bay. I passed several families screaming and whistling like lunatics in the forest. At the peak was a pagoda with a three story tall statue of Lao Tsu astride an ox. Many Daoist monks and a few nuns were about. Also, worth the price of admission alone, I found a beautiful Chinese Swiss army knife lying alongside an obscure path. When I came down from the mountain, I found that all tourists were supposed to take a moronic, rinky-dink ferry across a small lake to reach the exit. I found an interesting side path back that led through some beautiful vegetable gardens and small homes with an intricate split bamboo system for carrying running water. Tomorrow I plan to travel out to the sacred Buddhist mountain Emei Shan, so I might not be reporting back for a few days.

February Journal

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