1-14-2005 Shanghai has lots of places to go shopping and its one of the more common things to do here. This time we went shopping at an old temple, which had a really nice garden in the middle. It cost about 10元 to get into the garden and it took quite a while to get through it. It was very nice though and very old. It looked like it had been restored and was maybe several hundred years old. There were little buildings through out with large ponds filled with fish. All the buildings had the classic Chinese roofs with the curving up of the corners. Audrey bought some more stuff at a few of the small little shops and we took lots of pictures. I discovered that Elita is quite a good photographer as she took most of the pictures with my camera. Unfortunately I uploaded all the pictures at the same time and they are not all in the right order. Once we were done shopping we took a cab and found this little Japanese restaurant. It turned out to be not that great, but we picked it because it started to rain a little, and we didn’t have our wet weather coats or any umbrellas. Dan ended up ordering two meals because his first one wasn’t very good. We took two cabs home, I went with my mom and Dan, Elita and Audrey went by the mall to pick up Audrey’s new glasses. Mom and Dad went to bed when we got home, and I went out with Dan Elita Gina and Dámaris for Hotpot once again. It was very good once again. We had to pack when we got home for our flight the next day and I didn’t make it to bed until about 3:30am. It was too late to stay up as we planned on meeting at the hotel across the street from Dan’s apartment for breakfast at 8am.

1-15-2006 Today we got up early and had a buffet breakfast with the parents and everyone else staying at the hotel. It was a buffet with just about anything you could want for breakfast, including many different types of Chinese food. After breakfast we went to a museum down town where the most interesting thing was ancient bronze pots, sculptures and instruments. They also had ancient clothes, cloths, and ceramics. The ceramics were also cool but I don’t think they were as old as the bronze. We didn’t have too much time at the museum because we had to catch a flight to Guilin and be at the airport by 2pm.

My head started to get a bit congested on the way to the airport. I didn’t really think much of it until the air pressure on the plane felt wrong. My head felt like it was going to explode for the two and a half hours I was on the plane, and about half way through my ears plugged up, and I couldn’t hear anything. We took a private bus for about 45 minutes into town from the airport and the driver, who didn’t speak any Chinese, must have thought we were crazy because we were playing a song game the whole way there. Someone would pick a theme and we had to think of songs that fit into that theme. The catch was you actually had to sing the song, not just think of its name.

We got all settled into the Sheraton Hotel and then headed for dinner. There was a walking street just around the corner, on the same block as the hotel and we found this nice, brand new restaurant where we had some excellent local Chinese food. It was a long day, and after dinner we used the Internet for a little bit before going to bed. This hotel didn’t have wireless or Ethernet in every room, so they wired DSL through the hotel. If you wanted Internet, like we did, it was 50元 per day for the DSL modem. The Internet seemed faster than it was anywhere else on the trip, but I think that’s because nobody else in the hotel was using it at that time.

1-16-2006 Elita found and hired a private tour guide today with a bus, to go see some of the sights in Guilin. Our first stop was the football hill. At the bottom was a nice little park and garden with a few statues, a model of a little ship and a large bush about 15 feet tall shaped as a peacock. There was a little cave that went under the hill and on the river side it opened up again with nice statues carved into the rock of the hill. There was also a very large arch, but the bottom of the outside part didn’t touch the ground at all. There was just enough room to put your hand under it. The rock was very smooth from people touching it so much. We then hiked up the hill. There were 365 steps up to the top and I ran it all the way up. There were gnats at the top that sort of blocked the view, but it was a very nice view.

Once we were done with the football rock it was onto the caves in Guilin. Our guide explained that many people were saved in the caves when the Japanese came through about a hundred years ago and wiped out the population and destroyed the city. She said the caves could hold about 4000 people, and it was only know about by the locals. The caves remained hidden to the public until about 1970 when the government made it into a tourist attraction. Seeing the caves was very cool because it wasn’t really in the city. We had to drive about 20 minutes on a not-so-great road to get there, yet the tourist sales people were still everywhere trying to sell whatever they could for way too much money by Chinese standards.

We headed to see a silk factory after seeing the caves. The silk factory wasn’t really a factory, but instead a mock factory for tourists to see how the silk is made. There was also a showroom to buy silk quilts and bedspreads. The process was kind of cool, but I’ll let you guys watch the video of it when I get it done instead of writing about it in detail now. Our last stop was the Elephant trunk rock. This rock was very near downtown and was just off the main road. They put up big signs and tall bushes so you couldn’t see it from the street without paying. Our guide said that if you don’t get a picture at this rock, then you have not been to Guilin.

We got foot massages after dinner. They were an hour long and the place was really cool. It cost 100元 per person for a 1-hour session and we all got to sit in these nice chairs in the same room. This place was like a compound; it had many different buildings with separate rooms of different sizes. One of the girls said they could do 150 massages at the same time, but she was happy they weren’t busy so she could rest in between customers. None of the masseuses could speak any English so Dan and Elita did a lot of translating. One comment that Dan’s masseuse said was that “everyone is happy when you [Dan] are around”. Dan is always talking and the Chinese people thing he is the funniest thing in the world. He likes to speak his Chinese and sometimes he slips up because you can say every word with four different accents, and each accent has a completely different meaning. Our massages were great, though for Dan, it was not hard enough. We went shopping for snacks after our massage so we could have some things to eat on the river boat on the way to Yangshuo.

Just finished uploading 30+ photos and will have lots more to post soon. In 8 hours, tomorrow morning for me, we get on a boat for 5 hours and go through the tall pointy rocky mountains from Guilin to Yangshou. After the mountains get old I’ll have plenty of time to type up better descriptions about what we did in the pictures you see on flickr right now.

I know it’s been a few days since I’ve done a real update about the trip, and since the last update a lot has happened. A lot more people have shown up including my parents. I was a little upset that at night when we picked them up, the maglev train only went 301km/hr instead of the 431km/hr it went when I went on it originally. Dan and Elita have also gone to the airport two more times since my parents shoed up. He went once to pick Shane and Len, and then again to pick up Gina and Dámaris. I think now that everyone is actually here, Dan ended up going to the international airport in Shanghai five times, at an hour each way. I’ve also seen much of shanghai several times now as more and more people keep wanting to see the same thing, but its all good. When my parents arrived, we took them to the nice Korean BBQ restaurant down the street and we all really enjoyed it. We had enough people this time to actually get two grills, which made it much better.

The next day Gina and Dámaris showed up in the morning, Dan went to go pick them up while Elita Audrey and my parents and I went to one of the many shopping malls to look at electronics, musical instruments and glasses. If you go to the right shop, you can find frames with a prescription for less than US $50. They also have all the same designer names that are everywhere else, but for the same prices as everywhere else. Audrey ended up buying another pair of glasses, and my mom got a new frame without a prescription. After that we headed to one of the musical shops in the mall and Audrey got a new bamboo flute and some two stringed instrument that is only found in china. We saw a few people playing the instrument in the subway for change. It is a bowed instrument like a violin, but the bow goes in between the two strings so you can play either one at any time or both at the same time. We also went into an international musical equipment store that had lots of home theater stuff; many sets of speakers, each isolated in their own demo rooms and even the gold plated audio connectors you will find at radio shack but they were the solder on type and very cheap. Another item they had at many of the kiosks was a little video/mp3 player that looked exactly like the iPod Nano, but it also played mpeg4 and was only 256 or 512mb. I got some new tapes for my camcorder, 3 for about 18 dollars, which was an okay price; I think it’s about the same as in the states. After we were done at the mall, we went to rest for a bit before going to the ‘Old Jazz Bar’ at the Peace Hotel downtown by the river. The Peace Hotel was kind of strange. We’ve been in it a few times now, and each time I walk in, a nasty smell that takes over the whole building just overwhelms me. It’s all made out of old oak or some kind of wood that has been sitting there for about a hundred years. The jazz really was great, except for their intonation, their rhythm and their tempo as well as their choice of music. So really, it was quite bad. The only thing that was good about it was the Chinese character translation of the ‘old jazz bar’ was ‘old people jazz bar’. After we decided it sucked, my mom was not feeling well, and went back to the hotel with Audrey and my dad. Dan Elita Len Shane and I all got into two cabs and went across town to another jazz bar. It was more like blues and the music was too loud, so when we finished eating and Shane’s friend Sara showed up, we went to this historical house/restaurant/park/bar that Sara recommended. This place was amazing. We had to walk a decent amount around the block to get around the huge wall that protected the house with only one gated and guarded entrance. It was a huge, three story house, with a bar on the bottom, a fancy restaurant on the 2nd floor. We wanted to get a table at the bar, but they were full so they offered us a private room on the third floor. This was the best place we’ve been to so far for hanging out, and talking with drinks. Our room was about the size of a hotel room, with very fancy private dining rooms on both sides for parties of ~12-16 people. In our room there were also two little areas where two people could sit at their own table, each was creatively lit from a statue that looked over their little tables. We stayed until about 1am and then called it a night.

Jan 7, 2006
The Great Wall

Our hotel room in Beijing was much nicer than the one we got in Harbin, except for the small of paint when we got there. After a while I didn’t really notice it anymore. The bathroom and shower was very strange though. The entire bathroom itself was a shower, the drain was in front of the toilet and there was a power outlet on the wall with a little plastic cover over it right where the showerhead dumped out the water. That plug was also the only other plug in the room other than the one the TV was plugged into.

We got up at 8am today and packed up all our stuff to leave in the hotel’s lockup room so they could resell our the room, and so we didn’t have to take all our stuff to the Great Wall. We walked down the street to this bus touring company and got tickets to go to the Great Wall for 80yuan each, which is way cheaper than the 450 yuan for a cab to take us there and wait for us since it also included the tickets to get onto the wall. The bus ride was not that bad other than the fact that the seats were too close together. Audrey and Dan both slept on the bus but I just looked out the window. The trip took a little over an hour and a decent amount of that time was just getting through the traffic down town Beijing. When we got there the tour company tried to rip everyone off by only taking us to the very bottom of the hill where there were a few gift shops. It was about a 10-15 minute hike up to the entrance onto the wall from there, and they wanted another 60 yuan each to get a ride to the top. We just did the little hike to the wall. I went very quickly and had to wait for Dan and Audrey to catch up. We decided once on the wall to go to the left, where most people were going to the right. Going to the left was not as tall, and it didn’t have any splits in the wall where you could go left or right, but it was a hell-of-a-lot steeper. I don’t know the elevation of the wall is where we started or where we ended up, but some of the steps on the wall had to be 24-30 inches tall. Again I spent some time while climbing waiting for Audrey and Dan, but we eventually all made it to the top. There were a good number of foreigners there, many of them spoke English and they were from all over the world. Once we made it to the top, there were even more independent merchants selling everything from jewelry to custom engravings of the wall. We ended up getting a certificate stamped and signed that said we made it to the top. The people there are good at very high-pressure sales. And nothing is cheap at the top of the Great Wall since they had to haul all their crap up there. Their English was for the most part very bad since they just memorized a few phrases to help them sell their crap, but they must do all right since there were lots of them at the bottom, top and on the way.

Hiking down the wall was much easier than the climb up, but its one of those times you realize you have muscles you didn’t think you had. I thought that my knees would hurt really bad when I was done or the next day but they didn’t at all. At the bottom we had about an hour to burn before our bus left for downtown Beijing, so we used the 2yuan off coupons to buy some beef noodles for lunch. They were very good but the place was very cold so the hot soup wouldn’t stop steaming, which made it hard to eat without getting a bunch of steam in your face. Especially since I’m very poor at eating with chopsticks. Dan and Audrey both fell asleep on the bus ride home. The bus had to stop to get gas, which was about 4.55 yuan/liter. After some calculations I figured out that its about the same as in Los Gatos. The other interesting thing was that the gas station was on the freeway. It was just like a rest stop on highway 5, but a gas station instead. I think they did this since it’s a toll freeway, and you have to go through gates when you get on and off. When we got back we had about 5 hours to kill before we had to catch our overnight train back to Shanghai. We walked around some of the old streets in Beijing, went to an Internet café, and also stopped by a Trek bike shop that I saw from the cab. After seeing that you could buy a common bicycle in china for $20 at the grocery store, I didn’t think they would have anything like Trek, but sure enough, they had the same inventory as anywhere else, including my mountain bike, for the same price. The guy said though that it’s much cheaper to buy components in china from Shimano than anywhere else in the world.

Overnight Train to Shanghai from Beijing

Our train left at 7:51 local time, and was supposed to be about 13 hours long. The train was about 20 cars long, 2/3rds of them being sleeper cars, with 3 bunks high the whole way down. Audrey got to sleep on the top, and Dan and I were on middle bunks next to each other. They did lights off around 10:15pm, and we had to be quiet, but Dan and I weren’t ready to do that after finishing up talking with the other people in our bunk, we went to the food car. They said they were closed, but the guy let us hang out in there and buy beer anyways. We were the only ones int here, and we played cards for about an hour and a half, drank about 3-4 beers each, and then quietly went to bed in our bunks. I didn’t sleep that well on the train as every once in a while there would be 2 jolts, followed by 2 more. They were car-coupling jolts when the train would slow down or speed up and they were felt for both couplers at each end of the car we were on. I had never been on a train quite like this, and if I actually spoke their language it would have been much more fun. Even so, I would much rather travel this way overnight than by plane, even though the plane is much quicker. If you are traveling, the overnight train makes much more sense because it acts as your transportation, and as your hotel, since that night you don’t have to stay in a hotel room.