Forecast: Smoke

The airport in Hong Kong is much like flying into Reagan or San Francisco in that you fly over water until the last minute before touching down. While I generally love flying, this experience never ceases to terrify me. After spending about two seconds at immigration I made my way into the city. I was shocked first by the modernity of the train I took, and secondly by the huge mountains that were shrouded in clouds.

I’ll spare you the details of my first few days since it was overloaded with orientation stuff, and me being awkward and shy in front of new people. But, I will note a few things. One, the city is basically a greatest hits collection of people from all around Britain’s former empire. Two, one gets the sense that smoking is the national sport in China from walking just about anywhere indoor or out. Three, never look an Indian in the eye. All they want is to sell you shirts, and they will not hesitate to break the personal bubble of space that we hold so dear in the US to grab your shirt which CLEARLY needs replacing. Fourth, if you buy a bottle of wine in a new country make sure you have a corkscrew. I made this mistake, but fortunately my many years of fancy book learnin provided my with the logic to force the cork in while only spilling a few drops. I had a particular sense of satisfaction when I finally got my wine flowing and looked up to find a poster on my wall that read ‘There is no place that Jesus is not.’ Apparently it was a good thing I skipped on my initial gut instinct to call the frost desk for a corkscrew, since the Catholic Church ran the hotel.

Now on to the good stuff of going to Red China. We went to Xi’an first, which many people have never heard of until you say ‘You know… that place with the warriors.’ I was confused before I even got there. I expected a fair amount of Chinglish in China, but I was puzzled by Google’s weather forecast of ‘Smoke.’ Surely they meant fog right? Wrong. They absolutely meant smoke. If you don’t believe me Google it and see what comes up.

Since we were arriving in the beginning of January to the middle of China it was a bit on the cold side of things, and all the power plants were thus consuming MASSIVE amounts of coal to heat the city. The visibility is no more than three kilometers, and a tiny layer of sketchy soot covers everything (a fact that pissed me off to no end whenever I rubbed up against anything and ended up with a dirty jacket).

We went to the terracotta warriors first where I was underwhelmed by the so-called ‘Eighth Wonder of the World.’ Perhaps they seem more impressive in postcards, and maybe the enormous complex that covers the site belittles them, but I was nonetheless disappointed at the scale of the warriors. Now don’t get me wrong, I am very impressed at the history behind the site. And I am amazed that not a single warrior was found intact, yet 600 or so life size fighters have been painstakingly reconstructed. All I’m saying is that my mental image was grander than the site itself.

The best part of Xi’an is the wonderfully preserved City Wall. Gale Cleary would be proud that I kept my promise and managed to rent a bike to ride around it. As fun as this was, I demonstrated my intense athletic and manly skills early on as I managed to break the bike and then stared at it in confusion until an employee of the bike company brought me a new one. WIN. Aside from this minor mishap, the wall was gorgeous; at least the part you could see was gorgeous. The end of the wall was almost never in sight as the ever present smoke hid everything more than a few kilometers away.

Among the strangest things we did in Xi’an was a trip to a ‘local village’ to see how the majority of Chinese people live. While this was a richer village, I still felt like we were being driven an hour into the country to look at poor people (something I much prefer doing in the privacy of my own home with some whiskey and an episode of Cops, Jerry, or Maury). It was strange to say the least. Everything was rundown and half broken. The town leader led us around as we were chased by a dozen or so adorable children that were fascinated by our foreign whiteness. However, not everything in this town was kosher with me. The local men folk were taking their pigs out for a giant truck to collect for slaughter.

While I have a fair amount of respect for people that are vegetarians, I will never back down on my love of bacon, ham, and all the glorious foods that can be taken and fried from pigs. That being said, the way the pigs in this little collective farm village were being collected for slaughter made me miss the wonderful ignorance of America where I never see the horrible way in which the McDonald’s type shit I eat is gathered. In a nutshell, about five men pushed the squealing (and I mean squealing like a shrieking hooker getting snuffed) pig up to a truck as a man on the truck dragged the pig by its throat with a hook like instrument up the entrance. It was a sight I will never forget, and hopefully a sight YOU will never forget if I ever manage to get my pictures online.

The other sight worth mentioning is the Wild Goose Pagoda. Aside from the awesome ass name, the pagoda itself is a huge monument to the Chinese people’s former faith in Buddhism. The only downside is the rows of birds, cats, and dogs in hamster cages that line some of the paths for ‘aesthetic value.’ I wanted to free all the animals desperately trying to escape, and much preferred the roosters that had somehow gained the freedom to roam around the grounds sans the cage.

Before I continue lets get one thing straight. This epic trip is essentially a combination of my favorite and least favorite things… going to new places, and group travel. In case you haven’t noticed I am a fan of traveling (and if you haven’t noticed just stop reading cuz ur not getting anything out of this), and I had been looking forward to this trip for months. On the other hand I loath traveling in big groups. From my days as a kid traveling all over the stunningly beautiful land that is the Midwest on buses filled with hockey teams, to more recent trips around Europe with travel groups I cannot stand the slowness, inefficiency, and limited itineraries of traveling in large groups.

With this in mind let’s talk about some of the more entertaining moments of Xi’an. The first night we were there I went to dinner with about a dozen guys to a restaurant across the street from our hotel. While the lack of streetlights and traffic signals made the huge military parade style road more difficult than usual to cross, it took a good 10 minutes longer than any sensible person should take to cross it. After much deliberation on where we were ACTUALLY going, our group stood on the edge of the road like a toddler dipping its foot in the pool afraid of drowning should it jump in. Being the paragon of patience that I am, I quickly said eff this and walked across the road in a style that would have made Moses proud as everyone ran screaming across the street following my apparently bold lead.

I knew dinner was going to be fun as we passed a PetCo style area of fish tanks filled with every edible sea creature imaginable (something I found fascinating until I saw bags filled with live snakes strewn about the floor). None of us spoke and Chinese, so we haphazardly pointed to pictures in the menu that must have been 30 pages long of things ranging from sweet and sour port to fried duck heads. We ended up with a shit ton of food and a few enormous beers for everyone. My inner fatty was in paradise, and was only outshined by my inner Jew who relished in paying $5 USD for the whole thing (Rachel that ones for you).

Our trip featured lectures from guest speakers who were all very interesting, but the person leading the program is a man named Phillip Bruce. This very British fellow was a fascinating man to talk to, and shared my same looks of slightly snobby embarrassment when people in our group said things like ‘Yo dat shit was MAD fucked up.’ We had a great conversation on the new Russo-Chinese oil pipeline, and he even recommended a Russian restaurant in Beijing for me to try.

Xi’an is somewhere everyone should go once in their lifetime. But, once in a lifetime is probably all that is required to enjoy the city. I’m all for ancient walls, warriors, temples, and all that jazz but I was very happy to leave the polluted city for the modern city of Beijing.

P.S. A friend of mine mentioned the replacement of Ted Kennedy by a Republican in an email. While this was fairly interesting news to me (albeit not entirely surprising given the way things have been going…), I noticed that not a single newspaper or person in China seemed to have picked up the story with the same enthusiasm as I’m sure it has been receiving in the US. I feel that we often get so wrapped up in our own politics and drama that we fail to look at the larger picture. Some of the leading stories and things I have found most interesting in China are as follows: lead and iridium poisoning of children all over the country, children being abducted to work in smelting factories, immense governmental corruption, coal miners dying in large numbers due to safety code violations, and hundreds of people dying in Xinjiang in race riots. And we fret over how, as the richest nation on earth, the replacement of a single member of our legislative body will affect us? I admit to getting wrapped up and very passionate over certain issues in American politics, but I think it would do us all a world of good to step back and look at the world around us. We really don’t have it so bad, and we should be thankful everyday for the extravagant and free ways in which we are all able to lead our lives.

P.P.S. I saw a solar eclipse as we were leaving a temple. Not only was it among the coolest things I have ever seen in the sky (which led me to look at it for waaay to long), but it led to an interesting discussion of astrology as it related to the Chinese. Apparently solar eclipses were bad news bears for emperors as they were an indication that the dynasty was losing the ‘mandate of heaven’ to rule. Chinese people believed that the mysterious shadow over the sun was actually a dragon taking a bite out of it.

P.P.P.S. The Chinese idea of dragons probably originated from their interpretation of dinosaur bones.