China was not our favorite destination as a whole, but within it, we did see some REALLY incredible things! The top highlights include The Great Wall and a spectacular Chinese Acrobat show around Beijing; the Terracotta Warriors in Xi’An; the Panda Research Base & Breeding Center in Chengdu; beautiful, top-notch Chinese gardens in Suzhou (near Shanghai); and, for me at least, riding a levitating bullet train in Shanghai. I think if we had to pick THE one favorite thing for the whole country, though, for both of us, it was definitely the Pandas!
Since we saw so many things in China, I’m gonna have to break this post up into two pieces. This first one will talk about Hong Kong and Shanghai. I’ll get to Beijing, Xi’An and Chengdu in the next one, so I don’t overwhelm you.
We begin this post in Hong Kong, where we first arrived in China… sort of. Since Hong Kong is a weird, Special Economic Zone of China, neither Jime (as a Tica) or me (as a Gringo) needed a visa to visit. And, since we didn’t have time to get ALL of our visas for this trip while we were in the US, we took this option to land in Hong Kong, and apply for our China visa from there. We had Jime apply as a Tica, since fees for US Citizens are MUCH higher than for every other nation (because the US charges everybody else too much money).
Side note: Speaking of money, Hong Kong is a bit interesting with their money. Despite the fact that they are officially part of China now, Hong Kong very much still is it’s own place. Aside from not requiring a visa for me, Hong Kong also has their own money (you know, like Eddie Murphy in “Coming to America”). But that’s not what’s actually weird. What’s weird is… their money is printed by PRIVATE banks… THREE DIFFERENT private banks! I mean, talk about being owned by corporations, in these city, even HSBC can literally print their own money! It’s so weird to see 3 bills of the same denomination, and then to notice that every single one of them not only looks different, but was printed by a different bank! Weird!!
(100 Hong Kong Dollars = about $13 US)
Back to the China visa thing, though… we had a bit of a scare about how much of a visa they were actually going to give me. Despite the websites I read online that said that while 30 days was normal, I could probably even get a 90 day visa, the reality turned out quite different. The visa agency we hired for rush service said that lately, they had recently been giving gringos only a 15 day visa… whereas we needed at LEAST 30 days, or we were going to be completely screwed. So, we had ourselves one nice night of worrying what the hell we could do… since our Visa for Vietnam, the next country after China, wasn’t valid until 30 days away anyway. We’d be in limbo for 2 weeks! So, when the visa arrived the next day… “The Envelope please… and the winner goes to… 30 days! 30 days, ladies and gentlemen!” Woohoo! Yay for 30 days!! Yay, we didn’t get screwed!
Aside from the visa roller coaster, we also had some other ups and downs in our two nights there. For starters, we were unable to find a SINGLE hostel/hotel online that was not fully booked. But, we didn’t panic. Jime found on the wikitravel page for Hong Kong that there were a couple different high rise buildings (locally called mansions) just FULL of hostels that don’t have web pages, and that the typical backpacker thing to do was to just show up at the building, start at the top, and work your way down. So, we did just that. But after a full hour of walking every floor in the 15 story building, we found NOTHING. Every single place was either filled up completely, or so ridiculously over-priced as to be out of our budget.
Eventually, as we were sitting in a hallway, defeated, sweaty, tired and worried, this Indian guy walks up to us and asks if we’re looking for a hotel. “Yep!”, we say. He says “OK, I have one over here, if you’d like to see. It’s not big, but you can look at it, and if you like it, you can stay.” Turns out it was perfect. It was exactly what we needed: two beds, AC, a bathroom and a door. Hell, two beds with or without a door would have been enough at that point!
While we were hanging out in Hong Kong, though, we enjoyed wandering our neighborhood, looking for yummy food. Our first night out, within about 5 minutes of aimless wandering, we came on this really AMAZING looking noodle house with a giant pot of simmering beef stew in the window. We could also see, through this window, a whole rack full of barbequed chicken, duck, and pork! And, when we saw the menu, the prices seemed great. WIN! We went in, and they even had an English menu. We ordered one of the beef stews, and a bowl of BBQ pork with rice. HOLY COW! DELICIOUS! It was one of the best meals we’d had on our entire trip. The beef soup was rich, meaty, savory and FULL of flavor, since it seemed like it had been stewing for hours. The pork was perfectly cooked, juicy, and with a sweet glaze on the skin. AMAZING food!
Alas, in Shanghai, our next city, good food was much harder to find. So were English menus, for that matter. There was a restaurant at our hostel, but it was both over-priced, and under-tasty. And, sadly, no matter how hard we looked, we couldn’t find any more places like that noodle and BBQ place. What we DID find, though, was a place called Coco, right across the street from our hostel, that had SUPER yummy juices.
I don’t know if you’ve seen them, but it was one of those “Bubble Tea” or “Pearl Tea” places, where they make you drinks that have little tapioca balls in them (they call them pearls). Well, Jime tried out a really nice combination (that she invented) where they made her a Passion Fruit slushy (como granizado de maracuyá) with the pearls. To put this drink in perspective… shanghai was HOT. HOT and HUMID, even at night. It was almost unbearable… almost worse than India: less heat maybe, but more sweat. So this drink… it was PERFECT! It was a strong flavor, ICE cold, super sweet with a little bit of sour, and with the flavor of home from the maracuyá (passion fruit). Even better, it turned out this juice place was a chain, so there were stores all over the city, on every street corner like Starbucks in the US. Long story short, we went back here EVERY SINGLE DAY (sometimes twice). It was a good thing we took such good advantage of the place, because after leaving Shanghai, we would never find this store again. SO SAD!! Still, while we were in Shanghai, we enjoyed the HELL out of them.
Also in Shanghai, I of course road that High Speed Maglev train. This is something I’d wanted to do pretty much my whole life, ever since I first read about them in a Popular Mechanics magazine as a boy. I talked about this already on Facebook, but I’ll repeat myself a bit here [geek alert]. This ride was AWESOME!! The ride is only about 7 minutes long, and goes from the Shanghai Pudong airport to about 30km into the city. But… BUT… during that ride, this train… floating on air with freaking MAGNETS… gets up to 431 kph (268mph)!! That makes it the fastest commercial train in the world, with speeds matching that of a Grand Prix race car. In a plane, because you’re so high off the ground, you don’t really feel the speed, even though you might be going twice as fast. Down low to the ground on a train, though (even one up on raised tracks like this one), you definitely DO feel it, especially when you turn a corner! When the train turns, in order to keep you from being thrown across the cabin, the entire train leans into the curve. Sure, other fast trains do this too. But this train, from what I could tell, leans over WAY more than usual! It felt like we were at least 30° over! To picture that, think of a clock… 30° is when the minute hand is at 2 o’clock. In a train… at 431kph.. you FEEL that shit! Anyway… it was awesome. It was fun. We took a round trip, and it was everything I wanted it to be (except that like all fun rides, it was over way too soon).
Also while we were in Shanghai, Jime learned that we were really close to a city called Suzhou, which just happened to contain a LOT of classic Chinese Gardens, including two of the top four in the whole country. And, with China’s lovely high speed train network, we could get there with just a 30 minute train ride!
The reality of getting there took MUCH longer than 30 minutes of course, but I won’t go into that here. We did get there though, and over two days, we saw three gardens! The first one we saw was the Lingering Garden. As the wiki page mentions, this is one of the largest gardens around, and it was HUGE! It was also gorgeous. When you first walk in, you see this gigantic main pond. This pond is truly spectacular and right off, we bought ourselves a couple popsicles and just sat down on a while and enjoyed them while staring out at the tranquil beauty. This one front area is already bigger than the entire grounds of the Chinese Garden in Portland.
After taking our time there and just quietly enjoying the place and looking at the koi in the pond, we wandered on to see the rest. It was pretty, definitely, but you know what? With all that… we still felt like it wasn’t quite capturing the magic the way the Portland Chinese Garden does. We couldn’t put our finger on it, exactly (we still can’t), but… even with all of the magnificent old buildings, perfectly restored, and with all the trees and bamboo and river rock… it just didn’t have quite the same magic that the Portland Chinese Garden has.
What they DO have, though, is a really AMAZING collection of Bonsai trees. In fact, they have a whole area of the garden, specially dedicated to just that. And some of them are truly spectacular and amazing!
The next day, we actually saw two gardens. We started out at a smaller one called Master of the Nets. This is another garden that, while maybe not one of THE TOP FOUR, is still very highly regarded. So, experts on Chinese Gardens agree, it’s a fantastic garden. We, however, are apparently not experts. For us, it felt a little empty, and somewhat lacking in charm. I think maybe either it was just too hot outside (which is was), or maybe we just have different tastes. We actually didn’t spend very much time in this one, because we wanted to make sure we didn’t miss the last one, which was going to be another huge one, and another of the THE TOP FOUR: The Humble Administrator’s Garden.
The Humble Administrator’s Garden, at long last, finally blew us away. THIS garden was FANTASTIC! Just like the Lingering Garden, you get your best view right when you walk in. The main difference is… this one was “correct”. The balance on the pond was better… both big gardens had lots of lotus plants everywhere, but… at the Lingering Garden, they were so bunched up and out of control that you couldn’t see anything. This Humble Administrator’s Garden, though, knew a little something about proportion. There were nice little clusters of lotus here and there, but they didn’t completely dominate the whole pond. Also, this one had a lot of little bridges crisscrossing all over the place. While crossing one of the bridges, we saw not just a fish, but an EEL popped up to say hello. Hello Eel!
Aside from the beautiful ponds and better balance of life and building and the many more trees and shade from the sun, this garden also had many little mini stages with people playing traditional Chinese instruments. We spent about 30 minutes in one room, just listening to one woman after another play truly BEAUTIFUL music on a Chinese harp (or zither), called (I think) a Guzhang. Whatever it was called, the women who played it had me completely mesmerized. At the end of the day, we jumped on our train back to Shanghai.
Back in Shanghai, we enjoyed a couple museums and a nice view to finish off our visit to this city. The first museum was the Shanghai Museum. For starters, this museum is free, so that’s always a plus. But beyond that, this is one of the greatest museums we’ve ever seen. It’s well-laid out, had great signs, many floors, and some pretty incredible different collections. Our favorite, or at least the one we spent most of our time in, was the collection of Bronze Age objects. Some were art, some were weapons, some were ceremonial bowls. What really blows you away is how amazing all of these pieces are (both in terms of the original skill that went into making them as well as how incredibly well they are preserved/restored) considering that the oldest pieces in there are more than 4,000 years old!! Holy CRAP! These people were casting metal alloys with artistic value 1,500 years before Socrates was wetting his diapers. After a few thousand years at this, you might say they got pretty decent at it.
The other exhibits in the museum were also really impressive, of course. One of our other favorites was an exhibit on the traditional clothing of some of the minority tribes. I think our brains were pretty well melted after the bronze exhibit, though, so we sort of floated through the rest of the museum a bit faster.
The last museum we saw in town was the Urban Planning Museum. It was neat. There’s a lot of high tech stuff, and some nice drawings, and some nice stories about how the city started planning its space. The biggest spectacle in the building, though, has to be this gigantic miniature model of the whole city. It’s FRIGGIN HUGE! Not only that, but somebody (many somebodies) actually spent the time to make individual models of EVERY SINGLE building in the city! That is some SERIOUS attention to detail! Amusingly, every so often, they turn off the lights in that room, and the city lights up. It’s cute.
Speaking of planning, Shanghai is an INCREDIBLY well planned city. As far as the subway goes specifically, that has got to be THE best organized, best explained, and beautifully-functioning transit system we’ve ever seen. For that matter, even the busses were organized, and you could use the same pre-paid card for both bus and subway, but I’m going to talk about the subway specifically here. At this point, we’ve seen a LOT of metro and subway systems. We we were already impressed by the Budapest metro system, but this was easily the best we’ve ever seen. Here are some things that make it awesome:
* It move a LOT of people. There are trains every 2-5 minutes, and every train is fast and carries thousands of people.
* You can pay many different ways. You can buy one-trip tokens, or a pre-paid card with money on it, or a 24-hour pass ( I think a week pass too, but I’m not sure). You can buy (or refill) those passes from human agents, or from machines that have VERY good and easy instructions in both Chinese and English.
* The paths from one part of the station to another are clearly marked, even color-coded (i.e. everything for Line 1 is red, Line 2 is green, etc). There are signs EVERYWHERE (even on the floor) letting you know where you are, and which way the various other trains are, and even what attractions might be upstairs, and which exits to take to be closest to them. Even the trains themselves matched the color codes (i.e. the seats and hand-holds were all color-coded to match their number)!
* The entire subway stations, both upstairs and downstairs on the train platforms, are VERY well air conditioned. It might be 40C outside, but in there, it’s a cool breeze.
* There are stores and restaurants in many stations, include our favorite place, Coco. On a hot day (so, pretty much every day we were there), there is nothing better than A/C and a Coco.
* The stations are clean… like, you could almost “eat off the floor” clean (though not quite, because every now and again, you’d see a parent holding up their tiny child to pee on the floor). People are constantly sweeping and picking up trash.
* Waiting areas for boarding the trains are clearly marked, both where to get on, and with arrows showing people to let folks getting off the trains go out the middle, and folks getting on the trains enter from the sides.
* The routes of all the trains were mapped like a ring with spokes, and covered the entire city VERY efficiently, with many chances to transfer easily from one train to another.
All subways/light rail systems should work this well. The level of organization was just a thing of beauty. While many systems in China do NOT work, this one at least is a shining example for the whole world of how to do it RIGHT.
As a last stop, to wrap up our visit to this city, we walked over from the Planning Museum to the tallest building we could see, some Hyatt Hotel. Shanghai has several spectacularly tall buildings in it, including the Shanghai World Financial Center, which, at 492m, made it the 2nd tallest building in the world back in 2007. Alas, those pudknockers want to charge about $25 to go up there. Jime and I both love a good view, but we were NOT going to pay almost $50 just to ride a damned elevator. So, we went to this very tall hotel, which was almost as good, has a giant, 360 degree view from a bar and restaurant at the top, and was completely free to ride up and look. It was definitely a great view! And even nicer without paying $50 for it.
And then it was off to Beijing! We got ourselves a lovely ride on yet another high speed train. And, while it may not have been floating on magnets, or quite as fast as that maglev train, it was STILL awesome, and still quite fast, at up to 350 kph (220mph). This made a 5 hour trip out of what other trains take up to 13 hours to complete. AND.. the train was PRETTY! Dig it. :)
(Is it just me, or does that thing scream “Cylon” to you?)
Please enjoy the full photo set for this post here: http://alexjimenartw.shutterfly.com/pictures/1718
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