Aaron's Visit Part 1 - Hangzhou

Recently, I had a Northwestern friend of mine (who also worked at Deloitte) come and visit me for awhile in China. He had spent two weeks in southeast Asia traveling around with some other Northwestern guys and decided to add a stopover in China at the end of his trip. I picked him up from the airport on a Saturday night and the first thing that struck me was how tall he was. He's probably around 6'2" or 6'3", which is quite a menacing height in China. Before I had never really thought about his height, but at this time, needless to say, I felt quite threatened by this towering white man.

Since it is commonplace to hold a sign for the person you're waiting on at the airport and just in case Aaron wouldn't recognize me, the only non-Chinese person there, when he came out of the terminal, I made an all-American sign to make him feel quite at home upon arrival. Note my superior drawing skills.

Airport Welcome Sign

Even though we didn't get back to my apartment until around midnight, we decided to go hit up one of the areas with a lot of street vendors selling food since Aaron hadn't eaten much that day and we wanted to spend some time catching up.

Aaron Eating the Northwest China Muslim Spicy Fish (My Favorite Street Food)

Street Food Vendors and Shirtless Chinese Men in the Summer Heat

The next day we decided to ride bikes around West Lake and see the city. Since my ankle was still not that healed, it was a lot better and faster to ride bikes around. Before we set out, I took Aaron to my favorite cheap restaurant on the street near my apartment. They sell great soups with hand made noodles and lamb for around $1. You can't beat that deal. However, we miscalculated because it was so scorching hot outside and hot soup is not how to deal with 100+ degrees and heavy humidity. During our first half hour riding around I think we neared the point of total saturation in sweat.

Wes and Aaron at the Restaurant

Noodle Soup

Lamb Meat on a Stick

I took Aaron around all the usual places in Hangzhou. The best thing in Hangzhou is West Lake, with the lily pads, lotus flowers, willow trees, and traditional Chinese gardens.

Bridge at West Lake

Aaron in Contemplation

Pagoda at "Lotus in the Breeze at the Crooked Courtyard" Garden

You can ride bikes around the whole lake in just a couple hours and the views are pretty good the whole way around of pagodas and the city.

Wes with West Lake

West Lake with Leifeng Pagoda

Leifeng Pagoda

The next place we went was Wushan Square and the "Heavenly Wind at Wu Hill" pagoda, another cumbersomely translated name. This is one of my favorite pagodas in the city and I think the view of the city is great from the top.

Aaron at Wushan Square

Wes and Aaron at "Heavenly Wind at Wu Hill" Pagoda

"Heavenly Wind at Wu Hill" Pagoda

When you go to the top of the pagoda, you can see a panoramic view of West Lake and the city of Hangzhou.

View of West Lake

Neighboring Pagodas

Leifeng Pagoda and West Lake from a Distance

Hangzhou Downtown

After Wushan Square, we were feeling a little hungry, so we went to this place that has some interesting types of donuts. It's one of the few places in Hangzhou that I know of to get donuts and it has some unique flavors and the designs are pretty classy. One of the flavors Aaron got was called "Spicy Flossy" which has spicy fish or something on it.

Best Bite Donuts

After eating, we went to the Qinghefang historical street that is right next to Wushan Square. It has a lot of shops with traditional Chinese goods like medicine, tea, crafts, etc. A lot of the stuff is pretty touristy and not really worth buying, but it's a cool street to see just for the style of buildings and to see what kind of things they're selling.

Qinghefang Historical Street

Making Some Snacks

Some Kind of Medicinal Root

At the historical street, there is an alley with some street food vendors that sell crazy types of food. You can buy anything from bugs, duck heads, chicken parts, crabs, and much more there.

Some Shrimp Looking Creature and Bugs

Duck Head

Unknown Meat with Spicy Peppers

Chicken Wings

Qinghefang Street at Night

Aaron with Buddha and Qinghefang

By the time we finished at the historical street, we were both pretty beat from riding around on bikes, walking, and just being in the heat all day. However, before we made the ride back home, we stopped at the fountain and light show they have at the lake every night. They have the fountains synchronized to different songs and it's normally pretty cool to check out. It's something like the fountain show at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, just not nearly as large and glamorous.

Fountain Show

Fountain Show

After that Sunday spent going around Hangzhou, Aaron went alone to Beijing on Monday morning since I had to work during the week. When he came back, we had some Sichuan style hot pot on the Friday night before our trip to Yellow Mountain. The hot pot is filled with some kind of broth and a few vegetables or other spices. You can order some vegetables and meats that you get on the side and put in hot pot to cook whenever you like.

Aaron and I were feeling like having something a little outside the norm, so we decided to get some pig brains. I have never eaten brains before, but it was actually not that bad. They were really soft, almost like a foam, and you didn't really need to chew at all. Compared to other crazy meats or organs I've eaten before, the brains didn't have any bad or mineral aftertaste. I wouldn't eat brains everyday, but they were a lot better than I expected.

Wes and Aaron at Chuan Wei Guan Sichuan Hot Pot

The Hotpot

Pig Brains

Sea Kelp

Beef Strips

Brains Anyone?

These Brains Look Delicious

That was pretty much everything we did in Hangzhou. The second weekend of Aaron's visit we went to Huangshan or Yellow Mountain, so stay tuned for that one.

Here are some more pics of our time in Hangzhou:http://picasaweb.google.com/wallred10/AaronVisitInHangzhou#

Sprained Ankle

Recently I have been playing basketball with some of the guys from my office. It's been good to get a little exercise and get back into playing some ball from time to time. Chinese people have a growing passion for basketball and some of the guys I play with can play pretty well. The only big aspect of the game that seems to be missing when we play is any kind of cohesive team play. The games mostly alternate between one guy shooting up an outside shot or another guy driving to the basket as close as possible then throwing it up. I rarely see people trying to work it into the middle, doing pick and rolls, driving it and then kicking the ball out, or anything like that. I guess that kind of stuff might take longer to develop than some of the other fundamentals like shooting. Maybe I'm just overestimating the type of play that should be going on for just a pickup game, though. Another thing I have noticed is that pretty much no one will shoot threes, which in the past few years has pretty much been my specialty. It's good, though, because it has forced me to change the way I play and try to drive to the basket more often.

I had been playing fairly regularly until a few weeks ago. One night when we were playing, I jumped up for a rebound and landed on someone's foot coming down and sprained my ankle pretty bad. I've had a lot of sprained ankles in the past from playing basketball. Maybe I just have weak ankles or something. After I sprained my ankle, all the guys I was playing with wanted me to sit down and take off my shoe, but from my experience I knew that if I did that my ankle would swell up big time and I would be in trouble. I figured that I could just walk around for a little while and keep the ankle loose and shake it off as I have done a lot of times before. However, after a few minutes, I could tell that this one was more serious. I made the thirty minute bike ride back home from the gym and my ankle felt ok during the ride, so I thought that maybe I was going to be all right, but the longer I waited, the more tight and swollen it got.

Ankle on the Night of Sprain

Ankle on the Night of Sprain

The next morning when I woke up, my ankle was extremely sore and I could barely put any weight on it. Since I live on the sixth floor of my apartment building and there are no elevators, I couldn't imagine going down all those stairs and then either riding my bike or walking to work like I normally do, so I had to stay home.

Ankle the Next Morning

Slowly my ankle was getting more and more swollen and it was starting to bruise up a lot, especially in the area just below the ankle. It was a bit funny because in the beginning when it hurt the most it wasn't really too swollen and didn't have any bruising. After the one day resting at home, I was able to walk ok and went to work the next day. When I showed my coworkers my ankle, they thought it looked so bad and I had to convince them that it was actually feeling much better. A lot of them told me I should see a doctor and spray some medicine on my ankle, which would definitely be the Chinese solution. I didn't think it was worth it to try to convince them that it is impossible to heal an internal injury by spraying some medicine on the external surface, but who knows, maybe the placebo could work if I just believe it to be true.

Beginning of Bruising

The Fattening of the Foot Bruising in Full Swing

It was a bad time to injure my foot like that because I had a friend coming to visit me in China and we were planning to hike Yellow Mountain, not to mention all the walking around you normally do when traveling around. I had about one week to rest before he was coming, so I tried to sit with my foot up and ice it as much as possible. By the time he arrived, I was able to hobble around pretty well and I made us ride bikes the first weekend since that was a lot easier for me to get around. After that I had another week to rest before we hiked Yellow Mountain and by then I was feeling much better. My ankle felt pretty strong while we were hiking, although it was pretty sore by the time we had finished on the second day.

Fat Foot

Bruising All the Way Up to My Toes

It has been about a month since I first injured my ankle and to be honest, it's still not 100% healed. This is definitely one of the worse ankle sprains I've ever had. Normally, when I was younger, I would always heal up after a few days or a week, but this one is taking much longer. Maybe the injury itself was much worse or maybe it is just that I'm getting older or not in as good of shape as I once was. Either way, I'll be a lot happier when it's back to normal and I can get back to playing basketball and other stuff with no pain.

Here are a few more pics if you want to see my bruised foot in higher resolution: http://picasaweb.google.com/wallred10/SprainedAnkle

Solar Eclipse in Hangzhou on July 22, 2009

It has been quite awhile since I have updated the old blog, but it hasn't necessarily been from lack of material, although I have been traveling less lately. The main reason is that the blogspot website has been blocked in China for the past few months. Not just blogspot, but also youtube, facebook, twitter, picasa and many others of the best sites to waste your time on. It's been pretty brutal not being able to update my every thought on these sites at all times, but I've been able to manage. I have found a bit of a back door to access my blog, so I'm going to try and start posting again. I should note that the speed of access is extremely slow, which is liable to make my head explode when uploading pictures, so savor every word of this blog as if it were a fine wine. Not too much has changed since my last post. I'm still working at China Windey and things are going well. I do have a bit of a backlog of posts, so hopefully I can get caught up in the next few weeks. One of the best things that has happened recently was the solar eclipse. As part of my master plan in coming to China, I calculated that Hangzhou would be an ideal location to view the eclipse almost exactly one year after my arrival in China. Well, I wasn't actually that forward looking, but I was lucky enough to be in this part of the world for one of the longest full eclipses in supposedly about 300-400 years. The eclipse took place on a Tuesday morning. After waking up, I was pretty disappointed because it was an extremly hazy and overcast day, so I was worried that I wouldn't be able to see it very well. The eclipse was supposed to start around 9:30, so I went down to the ground level from my office to have a better view. I hadn't bought any special glasses to look at the eclipse because I didn't really trust buying glasses like that from the same street vendors who normally sell counterfeit clothing, shoes, sunglasses, and everything else. I imagined my retinas getting burned out from some shoddy counterfeit eclipse glasses.

I tried making one of the pinhole cameras to see the sun before the eclipse, but alas, a four year engineering degree seems worthless when constructing such an elaborate apparatus. Luckily, a nice guy let me use his glasses and you could see the sun being partially blocked out by the moon. Without the glasses, I took some quick glances to the sun and you couldn't see this partial blocking with the naked eye. However, the best part of the eclipse, the totality, you don't need glasses for, so it wasn't that big of a deal that I couldn't see that well. Despite some warnings that the brightness of the eclipse would ruin my camera lens, I took a few pictures before the eclipse.

People Waiting for the Eclipse

Sun and Haze Before Eclipse

Close Up of Sun Before Eclipse

The eclipse started at about 9:34 and lasted until about 9:40. I didn't quite know what to expect, but I have to say that it was really amazing to experience. It started to get dark slowly at first, then before you knew it, the sky was completely dark as night. It was even possible to see stars in the sky. The moon blocked out the sun almost completely except for an outer ring of light. While looking at the eclipse, I thought that primitive man would have surely seen such an inexplicable event as a sign of the times or as some foreboding occurrence. Complete darkness in the morning doesn't happen every day after all. Nowadays, scientists can calculate within seconds when and where the eclipse will occur, but that doesn't take away the awe of seeing one in person.

Here are some pictures of the solar eclipse and the totality, where the moon is completely blocking out the sun. I included some classy pictures of my watch to show the times as well.

Before Eclipse: 9:33

Beginning of Eclipse The Totality

During Eclipse (tough to see): 9:37

Darkness at the Office During Eclipse The Last Seconds of the Totality

Unfortunately, all good things must end and right on time, it started to get bright again and then it was just like normal daytime. Since it happened so quickly, it almost made me wonder if I had really seen what I just saw. As soon as the moon wasn't completely blocking the sun, it looked like the full sun was shining, but if you had the special glasses you would be able to see that the sun was just a sliver slowly getting larger.

After having such a surreal experience, it wasn't much fun to face the reality that I had to go back and sit at a desk in the office. Instead of working on some boring document, my basic instincts were telling me that I would be better off sacrificing some virgins to appease wrathful gods to avoid having such a punishment again in the future. I couldn't get anyone else to go along with that idea, so I had to go back to work.

End of Eclipse

After Eclipse: 9:41

This Guy Was Really There

I'm really happy that I got to see the solar eclipse. Since I'm kind of a nerd about space stuff, I quite enjoyed experiencing something like that firsthand. For a few more pics, check out picasa: http://picasaweb.google.com/wallred10/HangzhouSolarEclipseJuly222009

Huangshan with China Windey

A few weekends ago, I went to Huangshan (Yellow Mountain) with my department from China Windey. I already went to Huangshan last September, http://wes-allred.blogspot.com/2008/09/huangshan-yellow-mountain.html but last time the views were not that clear and I figured it would be a good chance to go with my coworkers and get a different view of traveling in China. The biggest difference was that this time I would be going with a tour group, something that I previously avoided like the plague. Normally, tour groups are a little annoying to me when I've been traveling with a small group or alone. The tour groups are filled with gawking tourists wearing matching hats, clogging up walkways and blocking views, all while being led by a tour guide blabbering away on a small speakerphone creating a lot of noise in the tourist areas that might be better off with a sense of peace and respect for either the nature there or for the monuments of the past. When a bunch of groups get together in a small space, the noise and crowding reach critical mass and lead to an unpleasant experience. However, the tour groups are how the majority of Chinese people seem to travel, probably because they offer cheaper rates, similar to buying in bulk for a discount. The groups are just a fact of life in China and impossible to avoid. Soon, I would be joining their ranks. This trip would also be different from my first trip to Huangshan in that we would not stay the night at the top of the mountain, but instead we would go up and down in a single day. To do this, we had to stay the night in the city about one hour away from the mountain. We woke up really early to try to beat the crowds, but unfortunately a lot of other people had the same plan. Before when I went to Huangshan, we went during the week, so there weren't as many people there, but this time we went on the weekend and the crowds were huge. In order to see the mountain in a single day, we took the tram up to the top instead of hiking, but we still had to wait around one hour to take the tram because there were so many people. The good thing about this trip, though, was that the weather was perfect the day we went to the mountain, with the sky clear and temperature cool. However, I committed one of the most egregious errors I have ever done while traveling and forgot my camera battery in the charger at home. Since it's a special camera battery, I couldn't buy a replacement. So I only have a few pictures that my coworkers gave me from the trip. Too bad, but it was kind of nice to just sit back and enjoy the view without trying to take a bunch of pictures.

Wes at Huangshan with Tourist Hat

Huangshan

Despite the perfect chance to see great views, the tour group somewhat stifled our opportunity. Once we got to the top of the mountain, where some of the best views are, we only stayed about 15 minutes until the tour guide made us move on. I think we waited more time at one of the bathroom areas than at the top of the mountain, which I thought was pretty ridiculous. Since there were so many people at the top of the mountain, we didn't really get a chance to see everything that was there. That's another problem about going with a tour group. Even though you don't have to make the plans, reservations, or worry about the details of the trip, you can't control where you go, what you see, and how much time you spend at each site. I also like to do the research because then I tend to learn more about the place I'm going to and after the trip is over I'll remember more about the places I've been. Oh well, sometimes you just have to roll with it and enjoy the time. After our brief stay at the peak, we headed down the mountain and hiked the whole way down. All together, we were only on the mountain five or six hours and we finished by 2 pm. Lame. After our time at Huangshan, we did another one of the mandatory group tour activities, namely being herded around to several shops to buy tourist goods. The first place was a tea shop and they had a presentation and sampling of some of the local teas. Despite my initial reluctance to get sucked into any tourist trap and buy overpriced items, the prices for the tea were pretty good and I bought some of the red and green tea. I'm kind of a sucker for different kinds of tea and I always like to buy the local specialties when I'm traveling to new areas if the price is ok. During the presentation, they even made promises that if I combined the red tea 50/50 with beer, that it would get rid of my beer belly. Get rid of my beer belly by drinking beer? Now that sounds like a solution I can get on board with. The next place we went was basically a traditional medicine shop, except I suspect that this place sold mostly placebos. They had a poisonous snake in a cage and every hour for the presentations they rattle the snake's cage, pull it out, and smack it on the head so that it will shoot some venom into a cup of baiju, or the white/clear alcohol that is popular in China. They said that this combination was especially good for your health. They also claimed that the testicles of the snake had magical healing powers and when they displayed some during the presentation, there were more than a few people who rushed to the front to take a closer look. At one point, they even tried to sell some snake oil, but I remember the English phrase of "snake-oil salesman" and resisted buying anything at this shop. They even gave small massages with the snake-oil that produced a burning sensation, but that still did not persuade me. At the end of the day, we went to a historical street with a bunch of the typical tourist items for sell, such as scroll paintings, chopstick sets, tea accessories, and much more. The street itself was pretty cool with the old style building and street food vendors. The next day, we went to an ancient village nearby Huangshan called Hongcun. It is surrounded by a pool of water and is filled with small alleyways, buildings with elaborate interiors, and a lot of other interesting sites. Even though it was raining that day and it was pretty crowded, I thought the village was pretty cool.

Bridge and Water Around Village

Pond Inside Village

Old Buildings

Little Girl at Shop

Inside a Building

After the visit to the village, we headed back home. It was definitely an interesting experience going with the standard Chinese tour group to Huangshan, but I don't think I'll go with a tour group again any time soon. It's not really the sort of traveling that I like to do, although for some people it might work out. For those coming to China with limited time and no knowledge of the language, it could be a good option. Despite the hassle of the tour group, it was nice to spend some time outside of work with the people from my department and see Huangshan on a clear day. While I was pretty negative about the trip in this post, I was mostly just being sarcastic and I had a lot of fun hiking around, eating the meals, and seeing the tourist shops and presentations. Although I've already been to Huangshan twice, I might have to make one more trip to attempt to have a complete visit with good weather, a working camera, and plenty of time to see the sites. Hopefully, the third time will be the charm. While I don't have many pictures, I have posted those I have on picasa: http://picasaweb.google.com/wallred10/HuangshanWithChinaWindey