Name the fruits in the pictures below.
- Roman, no guessing on the first one. I know that you know what it is.
- John and Shelley, I’ll leave it to you to abstain if you know them from your trip here.

We have sampled all the fruits unknown to us, including a persimmon and a small spiky yellow fruit not yet identified. It looked like a small horned melon, but with red seeds inside instead of green. There are tons of fruit stands everywhere, a lot of them selling single passion fruits with the tops cut off and a spoon for an immediate snack. Delicious!

October 1st is Chinese National Day and the start of a week long holiday. This is also when the people of China descend on tourist spots and everything (tours, taxis, activities) double in price. For that reason, Ryan and I decided to hit the hot spots in Yangshuo on September 30th. We rented bikes and spent all of Monday biking around the town, through some small neighborhoods, across the Yulong River a few times where bamboo rafts were launching, taking multiple wrong turns, but greatly enjoying the scenery.
     

Eventually, we got ourselves on the correct path and stopped at the Big Banyan Tree and the Gold Water Cave, also called Buddha Cave. The cave is fascinating, with stalactites and stalagmites, but our tour guide focused more on what the formations looked like (ie. buddhas, elephants) rather than the history of the cave and natural formations. Ryan took a mud bath in the cave at the end of the tour. I passed, as the mud, really more liked dirty water, was a bit on the chilly side, but it allowed me to get some great pictures of Ryan.
     

(3 washings of the swim trunks were required to remove the stench of the muddy water).

After the cave, we biked over to Moon Hill, hiked up to the top for picturesque views and watched a few rock climbers. As you can see below, the Chinese are real sticklers for following the rules.

     

At the top, we chatted with a Chinese man and his two sons. The man lived in Austin for 4 years while attending McCombs, and then Chicago for a few more before moving back to Shanghai. Two nice Austrian girls then traded picture taking duties with us.
     

Traffic and driving in China, even in smaller cities like Yangshuo, is crazy. The bike ride back to our hotel was probably one of the most stressful things I have ever done. Ryan tends to disagree. He thought it was pretty easy, cause everyone is going slow and steady, but he’s more comfortable on a bike than I am, and my bike was a little too big for me. I was not too fond of getting squished between another biker on one side and a moped on the other, or trying to go around a huge traffic circle with buses cutting us off, or mopeds weaving in and out around us. Oh yeah, and don’t forget dodging the pedestrians. Stressful! It did help to just be able to follow Ryan though, as he was a good leader. And the scenery outside of town, and even in the town, was beautiful.

A nice shower and dinner at the hotel was followed by the Liu Sanjie Impressions Light Show. On the shuttle to the show, we came across our first Americans in China! A mother and father from Chicago, visiting their son who teaches in Shanghai, and another nice girl from Texas, also teaching in Shanghai. The show was created in 2004 and depicts daily life of the people living around the Li River, with beautiful music. The highlight, though, is the mountains in the background beautifully showcased by the lights. Have I mentioned that the natural scenery here is amazing?

For our last hurrah in Shanghai, we decided to spring for the upgraded transportation option to the airport (something like $8 USD).  Instead of the cheaper 1 hour local subways, we made our way to the Longyang Maglev station to take the magnetic levitation train.  I was looking forward to the smoothest, fastest train ride of my life.

This was an experimental line, just servicing the airport to convince the potential funders of its feasibility and safety.  During peak hours, max speed is listed at 300 km/h (same as the bullet trains we’ve been on), but at a few off hours, it goes up to 430 km/h!  Unfortunately our timing was a little bit off, so we only hit 300.  Total ride time: ~7 minutes.  Smoothness: Oddly, it was as bumpy as a regular train.  Maybe the 90′s style aerodynamics of the train had something to do with it?

The train was only ~25% occupied –> maybe the locals are over the hype and just waiting for the cost to go down at this point?

All of Asia’s fast trains have me wondering why North America does not offer them?  It sure would be convenient to have a high-speed rail service along many of our key metropolitan corridors: Austin-Chicago, Austin-Columbus, Austin-Baltimore, Austin-Scotch Plains, or maybe even DC-Baltimore-Philly-NYC-Boston and San Diego-LA-San Francisco-Portland-Seattle.  Key items needed for this to happen:

• The support of a filthy rich and crafty entrepreneur since our government could never accomplish, let alone afford anything on this scale.
• Ability to reuse existing rail lines.
• Speedy ticketing, security, and boarding procedures.  If it takes as long as an airport, it will fail.
• I’m pretty sure there are some other key things missing from this list

Maybe we’ll just end up skipping the whole high-speed rail phase and go right to pneumatic tube based travel…

Beam me up Scotty.

We arrived in Shanghai Thursday afternoon, at which point Ryan promptly took a nap and I did some laundry.  Ryan doing laundry:3, Nicole doing laundry:1

Dinner was at a very western wine bar (we were hungry, our original Chinese restaurant destination wouldn’t seat us because they closed in 20 minutes, and did I mention we were hungry?), where a big group of friends were celebrating a birthday and gave the entire restaurant slices of birthday cake. Always a good way to start a meal. This was followed by a walk along the Bund to enjoy the Shanghai night skyline.

Shanghai is a huge metropolitan city, and was mostly a spot for us to do a little bit of relaxing and recharging. The city houses some of the tallest buildings in the world, which we enjoyed a view of from the 87th floor bar at the Park Hyatt hotel in the Shanghai World Financial Center building (6th tallest skyscraper in the world). Here we were able to see the Oriental Pearl Tower, the Jinmao Tower (ranked 16th tallest), and the new Shanghai Tower currently being built (to be the 2nd tallest). We ate some delicious Shanghaiese food; dumplings with pork and crab roe, shrimp spring rolls, and pork dumplings, our most expensive meal yet, but it did cover both lunch and dinner. The evening was spent at the acrobatic show in the Shanghai Centre Theatre, some Cirque-like acts, some circus-like acts, a group of girls juggling while on unicycles, overall a fun night.
     
      

Saturday we hopped a train to a bus to Tongli, one of the ancient canal towns outside of Shanghai. The town contains many well preserved buildings from the Ming and Qing Dynasties. I was a little nuts, because we got a later start and the trip took longer than expected, and I didn’t think we’d have enough time to see things in the town. Ryan, the calming influence, convinced me it would all be fine, and it was. We visited Pearl Tower and the Tuisi Garden, a World Cultural Heritage sight.
      

We also visited the Ancient Chinese Sex Culture Museum. (I mean, how could we pass this up?). Smiths, Strevigs, RDB – There was a display with Peruvian art, some of which looked very similar to RDB’s gift from Peru. The museum has an outdoor garden with nice sculptures, though I’m unsure what exactly some of them mean (the second one below?). We also tried some Tongli specialties; sesame cakes (yum) and green dumplings (Ryan says ok, I say not so great).
     

The bus to the train ride home had tired us out, and we were not too hungry after all the sesame cakes, so we decided “When in Rome” . . . and ate instant noodles for dinner. The Chinese really do eat instant noodles on a regular basis is seems. Dessert was green tea Kit Kats Ryan had picked up leaving Tokyo. They are awesome. We should totally import them to the U.S. The noodles look exactly like the picture on the container, right? Ryan spiced his up with some crunchy, spicy bugle-like snacks.
      

Ryan thinks he is finally starting to feel better. He’s had a cold since our second night in Kyoto. What is that? 2 weeks ago? Invariably, he gets sick anytime we travel out of the U.S.

It took a little while to figure out (searching for ‘things on roofs of Chinese houses’ does not yield very good results), but Bing (Google is very slow in China) informed me that the odd structures on top of many Chinese residences are solar water heaters. Very cool and environmentally friendly. The website I was reading talked about how inexpensive they are in China, but how they are very expensive in the U.S.

Oops, just realized Ryan was still logged in, so all this got written under his user. Oh well.

P.S. Congrats Dal on retirement! Enjoy your luncheon, wish we could have been there.

Xi’an is famous for the Terra Cotta Warriors, which is where we headed on Wednesday. My navigating put us on the wrong side of the tracks, literally, at the railway station to catch the bus. The 20 minute walking detour turned out to be interesting, through first the bicycle/moped repair district (shop after shop after shop of parts) and then the LED sign district. As we’ve mentioned before, everything in China is huge, so while it sounds simple to go to the train station and catch a bus, the train station is massive, making it very difficult to actually find the bus stop. We were ushered onto a bus by a pushy bus attendant before having time to figure out the number of the bus. Turns out it would have gotten us to the warriors eventually, but was a local that made lots of stops. Regardless, we didn’t know the number of the bus we had boarded, so we got off the first bus at a later stop and onto another bus we were certain would get us there. The man sitting next to me on the second bus tried to give me 1 yuan; I have absolutely no idea why.

The Terra Cotta Warriors were very impressive. The underground army was built as Emperor Qin’s mausoleum, around 200 BC. The statues themselves were much larger than I expected, life size of a large man. There are currently three pits open for viewing; the third houses the high ranking officers, the second consists of military forces including archers, war chariots, cavalrymen, and infantrymen, and the first, and most impressive, contains the main army. There is still a lot of work being done excavating the area.
            

Along the drive were orchards after orchards of pomegranate trees, with stand after stand of people selling just pomegranates. All the trees had plastic bags around the pomegranates, no idea why, have not had a chance to Google that one yet. I did buy a pomegranate, and it was good. They are always a lot of work for little reward. And what do they do with all those pomegranates? It seems like way to many just to eat. Hard to tell, but here’s a picture of small individual plastic bags over each pomegranate in the orchard.

For dinner we stopped at a restaurant back in Xi’an that advertised ‘welcomes foreigners’, but no one spoke any English. The only reason I mention dinner at all is because Ryan was putting rice on his plate from a bowl, and one of the waitresses decided he wasn’t doing it right, or was doing it too slowly, and came over with chopsticks and scooped rice on his plate for him. Between that and the man offering me money on the bus, it was an entertaining day.

Back at the hostel, we joined the dumpling making party along with a guy from Australia and two sisters from Sweden. Mikki from the hostel taught us how to make the dumplings, rolling the dough, stuffing (veggie ones with egg, chives, and spices for this evening), and then boiling in water. They were pretty delicious, and something easy enough to make at home. Maybe we will start an annual dumpling making party to celebrate Chinese New Year?
     

Side note: We figured out that the relatively horrid smell in Beijing was actually stinky tofu, a common street food! And boy does it stink.

Our late arrival in Xi’an was met warmly by the helpful staff at the hostel and a guy playing guitar in the cafe on the first floor. Our room had a nice king size bed, but was unfortunately not the cleanest. After a coffee and a beer in the cafe, we requested new bedding and proceeded to change the sheets on our bed. (No, this is not the part like the Bellagio).

Tuesday morning brought an early 6am departure for a trip to see pandas at the Shaanxi Wild Animal Rescue and Breeding Center. This center rescues injured animals and also protects animals from extinction. Our tour guide was really good; he has been giving tours of the center for over four years, and has seen the animals come and go, and knew the pandas all by name. We saw two pandas in their indoor/outdoor living habitats, a four year old female YaYa and a similarly aged male Erla. Here are pictures of the two posing for us.
     

We also saw an older brown panda named Qizai, which means superstar. In addition to the pandas, the center houses golden monkeys, golden takin (meaning sheep-ox in Chinese), crested ibis, eagles, vultures, an owl, and small red pandas (whose name means small bear-cat in Chinese). This was a great tour, definitely more than we had expected.
     

After a nap, we walked out to the south gate of the Xi’an City Wall, built by the Ming Dynasty in the 14th century, where we rented bikes to bike around the top of the wall.  We decided to go for the tandem (first time we’ve ever done it), and it was a blast! It was also definitely harder than expected, especially when Ryan is on the back seat. When I’m on the back, I could take pictures, re-arrange my backpack, basically do whatever, I would just help peddle. When Ryan was on the back, every time he pedaled it would totally throw off the balance, and I had to work hard to keep us not running into people.
            

We headed down to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda for dinner and the nightly water show. Craving some ‘normal’ food, Ryan walked into the KFC, but the menu was unrecognizable, so he wound up with Burger King instead. We had talked about the water show being like the Bellagio, totally kidding, but it was actually a whole lot like the Bellagio water show! The fountains turned different colors and swayed back and forth to the music. It was very funny.
     

Monday 9/23, after conceding defeat on my ATM card, we took public transportation back to the Beijing West Railway Station.  I ate a spicy chicken sandwich, two orders of fries, and 2 large gulps of an icy Coca Cola from the McDonald’s before realizing I should not be drinking anything with ice.  Hopefully that one does not come back and bite me.

Here’s a panoramic photo of the hectic train station before we passed through the gates onto the platform.  Newsflash: a lot of people live in China.

With Beijing in our rear view mirror and shrinking fast we finally started to relax.  Just 1100 km in 6 hours (187 mph).  Nicole nodded off while I set to work fixing our Picasa photo album timedate stamps from Japan.

Note: If you want to keep “date picture taken” tags correct relative to where you took them, you need to 1) set your camera time / timezone / daylight saving time correctly, 2) set your computer’s time correctly, and 3) make sure any friends you’re traveling with have done the same if you plan to import their pictures.  Somehow, Kelly’s camera was off by 13 hours, 35 minutes?  And somehow most of our pictures had been imported as duplicates even though the “exclude duplicates” option was set?

Our train ride was very smooth and smoke-free while in motion.  At each of the 8 stops or so along the way, everyone would step outside for a cigarette or two and let that smell carry into the cabin.  There is certainly a tobacco addiction problem in this country.  More so than what we’ve experienced in Europe and in Japan.  Everyone smokes everywhere.  The non-smoking signs in restaurants and subway stations are merely a suggestion.  The non-smoking hostels/hotel rooms seem to be rotated daily.

Some of the scenery along the ride:

Power Plants:

Rice fields:

Construction projects:

The construction projects tended to dominate the landscape.  It went like this: farmland – farmland – incomplete high rise apartment complex – farmland – farmland…  It was very eerie, reminiscent of frontier ghost towns.  Almost every construction project was about the same height, ranging from 4-20 buildings, and the same amount of incompleteness, although at least a few workers and cranes could always be spotted on them.  There were dozens and dozens of these clusters across the rural landscape.  It makes me wonder if much of the housing boom is just a front –> luring investors into grand plans of new cities full of people and marketplaces, just to fall short of being complete.  It could also be that these projects were all started at the same time (within the last 1-2 years) and are progressing well — hard to tell.

For now, I choose to view this rural landscape as being sprinkled with building carcasses.

I don’t think we passed this, but we may as well have: China’s Abandoned Disneyworld Knockoff

PS, Happy Birthday Grandpa!  I hope you enjoy the Corvette I sent you from Japan (picture of) – Maybe they can be picked up at the local Wu-Mart in Beijing too…

Sunday night in Beijing — we were fresh off a great Hot Pot experience, and back in the lobby of the hotel with $0 in our pockets.  Luckily, there was an ATM in the lobby.  I made several unsuccessful attempts at withdrawing money from my “Credit” account, thinking I was just trying to take out more than the ATM max amount;  Nicole successfully withdrew 800 RMB from her “Cheque” account.

I corrected my mistake and got 2000 RMB (~$320 USD).  We hung out on the lobby’s better wifi for a while before heading up to our room for the night.  About 30 minutes later as I was packing for our 10:05am train ride to Xi’An the next morning, I realized I did not take my debit card out of the ATM!  While we were in the lobby, we did not notice a lot of traffic or any ATM users, so I rushed down hoping it was still hanging out the machine.  It was not.  The front desk informed me that the ATM will “eat” the card if it sits there too long (a good thing), but that the ATM service folks could not be contacted until 9am the next morning, and then that they probably wouldn’t be out to retrieve the card until around noon.

American ATMs beep loudly, talk to you, flash lights in your eyes, and spit out your card early, or with the cash and receipt.  This ATM spits out the card last, without much fanfare.  I was so happy to have gotten my 2000 RMB, I did not think about the future withdrawals I’d have to make with my card :-\

The next morning, assuming that the ATM ate the card and it was not stolen, we find out that the ATM service was going to stop by at 10am.  We bite the bullet, take a taxi to the Beijing West Railway Station (the second largest in Asia) because we can’t change our tickets through the web or phone.  Rebooked on the 14:42 train for -4 RMB (to our relief because we were warned by the hotel it might cost up to 500 RMB (half the price of our tickets).

It’s now 10:05am.  We hightail it back to the hotel in another taxi (Apple Maps said it should take 24 minutes with traffic, it actually took nearly 1.5 hours in heavy traffic and a driver that was more interested in chatting on the phone and hocking lugis out the window than providing speedy customer service — by the way, this is an absolutely disgusting habit (which I admittedly used to have when I was a kid) that the locals partake in everywhere.  On the sidewalk, in the train station (indoors!!), in front of you, next to you, behind you, almost on your foot.  Yuck).

At the hotel, the ATM had already been serviced.  They aren’t allowed to hand over any found cards to the hotel staff, so they informed me that I must walk 5 minutes to the nearest Bank of China branch to retrieve it with my passport.  Once there, I’m told that they don’t have it yet.  The people that service the ATM machines take between 3 and 7 days to turn any found cards over to the nearest branch.

Epic Fail.

After a walk back to the hotel, in the cold rain I might add, I gave in to Nicole’s insistence that I just cancel the card and move onward, relying on her (much the same way that we relied on Kelly and Jason for cash in Hakone and Jogasaki).

Now we’re officially living out of 1 pocket instead of the hybrid 1-2 pocket.

Depending on the spending restrictions Nicole imposes on me (j/k), I may have a new card shipped to meet us…but I’m not getting my hopes up.

Thanks to Nicole for making us document all our card numbers and telephone numbers, as you need them in order to cancel them.

Our last night in Beijing, and the one checkbox left on our list was a real hot pot for dinner.  What’s a hot pot?  It’s like Shabu-shabu.  What’s Shabu-shabu?  It’s like fondue.  What’s fondue?  Eh, it’s like beer.  We set our targets on a chain that got great reviews on Trip Advisor: Haidilao.

A short 20 minute walk, 10 minute train ride, and 30 minute walk later, we find ourselves on a rather local side street where everyone was staring at us (this has been happening everywhere in China — we’re either the strange looking foreigners, or we’re the easy targets for locals peddling their wares).  We eventually found our restaurant next to this place:

There was a 1 hour wait, but they guided us upstairs, sat us down and started feeding us free munchies (puffed corn, puffed rice, bugles?, and sweet popcorn).  We could have gotten a free manicure if we had chosen.  Pass.  This place is apparently known for their impeccable service — if you can get over the language barrier I suppose.  Instead Nicole made friends with a Londoner who lived in Beijing, and her parents.  We find out what this hotpot thing is all about and get her to tell the wait staff that we don’t want anything spicy.  She probably saved our meal.

We ordered thinly sliced beef (a la shabu-shabu), mushrooms, and noodles, and carefully selected dipping sauces without nuts or spice (this left Nicole with soy sauce).

Then this guy stretched and tossed a noodle for us right at our table (kinda like light sticks at a night club)

We were running short on cash, and as we’ve already mentioned, even though everyone advertises their acceptance of credit cards no one actually takes them.  We count up 195 yuan in our name and start to get worried that we didn’t have enough for dinner and the subway home (4 yuan).  The bill comes in at exactly 191 Yuan — Phew!

This is by the way our most expensive meal thus far in China — at 0.16 USD to 1 yuan, a $30 meal is not bad, but still overpriced by Chinese standards.

Our last full day in Beijing we headed to the Temple of Heaven. By this point, all the temples were starting to look alike, probably because they all do; mostly red, with blue, green, and gold detailed painting, animals on the corners of the roofs. The Temple of Heaven has different architecture than the Forbidden City and Summer Palace, in that it is a circular building. This is where the emperors would go to pray for rain and a good harvest.

Ryan was done with walking and sites after the temple, so he headed back to the hotel to do some laundry, while I headed to the Drum and Bell Towers.
Ryan doing laundry:3, Nicole doing laundry:0
Do I have an awesome husband or what?

I exited the wrong subway exit (which I knew at the time) and promptly got lost in the winding hutongs, taking about a mile long detour. Luckily, I was able to pick up a baked sweet potato from a street vendor for sustenance.

The Drum and Bell Towers were both originally built for musical reasons and then used as timepieces. I arrived at the Drum Tower just about in time to climb the long staircase up, enjoy the views, and look at the time keeping pieces inside, before the hourly drum show started.
      

The climb up to the Bell Tower was similar to that of the Drum Tower, with not as much reward, as the only thing at the top is a big bell. Afterwards, I attended a fun tea tasting held in the bottom of the tower, where I learned that I really like Ginseng tea. The girl there was a bit pushy about me buying some tea, and didn’t quite understand when I kept telling her that I really do not have any room for tea in my bag.