shampoo

I went to the corner grocery store today to pick up some suppliesyogurt,
fruit, water and shampoo. The first three items were simple enough; Ive
become a pro at picking them out. The shampoo was a bit trickier.

The entire left side of an aisle was full of shampoo shaped bottles and
there were four employees hanging out there ready to help me pick
something out. The bottles say shampoo and conditioner in English but all
the details are in Chinese. So the only thing I have to go by is the
smell.

I picked out a bottle of shampoo, which had a pleasant sandlewood smell.
The employees tried to talk me out of it because it was expensive. They
pointed at the price and then at other bottles and their (lower) prices.
But I persisted and wanted to pick out an odorless conditioner.

The employees showed me which bottles were conditioners and would hold
bottles up to me explaining (in chinese) their qualities. I couldn't pick
out any words so, to my ears, they sounded like birds song. I stared at
them, nodding and squinting, totally confused, trying to repeat them,
stuttering. Then we'd stare at eachother.

I found one conditioner that looked promising and wanted to ask if it was
good. I pointed at the bottle, raised my eyebrows and them gave them the
thumbs up. They didnt get it. So I said ta hen hau ma which literally
means he very good (question) but in my nervousness I screwed up the
tones. They made fun of me: I heard one repeat what I had said to her
friend and they laughed. Then she answered me in a loud voice yes at which
point we all burst out laughing.

I've been here for four months and I'm still surprised at how complicated
my daily routines have become. I'm nearly out of toothpaste... this should
be fun!

Leaping Tiger Gorge in the NY Times

check out this article in today's new york times about yunnan (where mike and i went last month!).

united airlines has ruined rhapsody in blue

I've listened to Rhapsody in Blue, in pieces, about five times today. United Airlines plays it on a continuous loop when they put you on hold. It doesn't matter that you might be paying 12 cents per minute to call from China: they like to put you on hold frequently.

The good news is that I've successfully changed my flights (all four of them) to a week earlier. That's right! I'm going to be coming home on May 23rd. I'll be arriving in Boston around midnight on the morning of the 24th. Does anyone have any suggestions for ways to get from Logan airport to Cambridge at that time of night? I imagine I won't be out of customs and immigration until after the T stops running.

I can't wait!!!

rice

What does it take to get a bowl of rice around here?

The custom in Hangzhou when one goes out to eat at a restaurant, is to have rice only at the end of the meal, if at all. The purpose of the rice is to fill you up if you didn't have enough cai.

We go out to eat every day, often two times a day (hence our pot bellies and tight pants). And we like to have rice with our meal because it soaks up excess sauce from the dishes and is quite tasty. Although we order rice and ask the waitresses to bring it early, we often have to remind them a few times before it arrives. I don't think they understand why we would want it early.

At lunch yesterday, Wei asked our waitress a number of times to bring the rice. They kept promising it but no rice arrived. And, since waitresses, in general, seem to hate Wei, we worried that the rice might not arrive at all. So Lisa stood up and, to avoid being ignored by the waitress, got in her way (with her arms spread wide) and asked for rice. Still no rice showed up.

Lisa was fed up so she decided to get the rice herself. She walked out the door to the serving table and came back with a giant tray covered in bowls of rice, followed by four frantic waitresses. She was declared our heroine. We had our rice!

We've had this rice problem nearly every time we go out to eat, although usually four or five requests are more than enough. On Sunday night, I went out to dinner with David, Aaron, Xi, Miranda and Phillip Candelas. We ended up at some fancy restaurant in a renovated part of town. Again our rice wouldn't come despite our frequent requests. David got fed up and yelled at our waiter. The rice then arrived immediately.

(Note: In China, like some other places such as Italy,one sometimes has to pitch a fit to get what they want. Its not considered rude to yell at someone when they're not taking care of you. This horrifies Americans but sometimes its the only way to get what you want (such as rice). Its especially amusing to witness Americans adapting and resorting to this tactic.)

more Huang Shan

Last Monday and Tuesday, Matt and I went to Huang Shan. I’ve already told you about the walnuts but I would like to fill you in on more of the story.

Lately, my typical evening has been this:

That table in David, Lisa and Aaron’s apartment seems to be the only place around where we can get wireless internet. Its unreliable and requires angling ones laptop just so and offering food to various gods. Cursing does not seem to help.

So we crowd around with our laptops and blame each other when we lose reception. We then pull our hair out in frustration, complaining about how much we want to go home…

The trip to Huang Shan was a nice diversion.

We took a “three hour” (= 5 hour) bus ride to Huang Shan on Monday morning.

a rest stop on the way
our beloved bus driver on one of his many cigarette breaks

After passing though dozens of very long tunnels and crossing many long bridges (each with a sign giving its name and length), the highway ended. We were about half way there when we started on the local roads. The countryside went from boring to stunning. We were surrounded by rice patties resting between wooded hills dotted with purple and red flowering trees.


I wish I had been quicker with the camera but we passed a bit old pagoda what was in such disrepair that it had trees rooted into and growing out of its (four or five story high) roof.

When we got off the bus, we were met by Mr Wu, a short middle aged man in a shabby pinstriped suit who spoke English. He offered to help us get to the mountain and get return tickets; all he wanted was for us to eat at his restaurant. The food wasn’t bad.


At 4pm, we set off on the climb up the eastern stairs of the mountains. We had nice weather and made good time going up.




We woke up at 4:30 the next morning and, wearing the down parkas provided by our hotel (that’s what the extra star was for in the four stars), we set off and climbed a kilometer of stairs to watch the sunrise. A group of three guys who were ahead of us urged us to hurry up. We had never met them before but followed them and sat with them in a nice spot. We were soon joined by a mob of people who elbowed around us, a few even whined their way in front of us.


Huang Shan is famous for its sunrises. Sometimes there is a sea of clouds hovering half way up the mountains, leaving curves and mountain points sticking out the top. The sun peeks over that turning everything orange. I had to buy the postcards. It was super cloudy on Tuesday morning so this was our sunrise.

Here is a movie. The focus is much better and you can see the wind blowing the clouds above us across the sky. When there was enough light to see this, everyone screamed.

Exactly fifteen minutes after sunrise was supposed to happen there was a mass exodus back to the hotels.


We stuck around and walked around the peaks before grabbing a terrible buffet breakfast at one of the hotels.





Matt took a nap while I wrote postcards in the lobby. (Some of you are going to get lucky!) During his nap, the view from the hotel went from this:

to this:


At first the fog was kind of spooky and fun


But after a few hours of hiking we could no longer see the mountains or the tops of bottoms of the cliffs.

Along the chained fences, couples have left pad locks symbolizing their "locking themselves together."
is the size of the lock proportional to the magnitude of your love?


While waiting for the Walnut Incident (see previous Huang Shan blog entry) to be over I took this photo for color contrast

And I took some movies of the wind through the trees.

After it started raining, the tour groups donned color coated ponchos. There were the yellow poncho gang and the clear poncho gang. The ones that left me envious were the clear ponchos with red or blue polka dots. I pulled my poncho out of my backpack (the one that I got last summer but wouldn’t wear, preferring to get wet while at Rumney because, well, take a look) and became a lost tour group member.

Jolly Green Giant’s underwear.


Some movies of the poncho parade

After a few hours of weaving through the poncho’ed crowds in the fog and rain, not seeing much of anything besides ponchos, we decided to wimp out on the rest of the descent and take the gondola. (Actually I’m supposed to take sole credit for the whole gondola decision)


While waiting in line for the gondola I noticed that the gentleman standing behind me was wearing a rather fetching blue polka dotted poncho. I wanted to complement him on it so I pointed at his stomach and gave him the thumbs up. He didn’t get it. He looked worried and searched his poncho for a problem there. So I tried again with the thumbs up. Still confusion. So I pointed and said "hen hao." Nope. He called his wife across the lines and she had to come over and translate for us. I was mortified.

They rode with us in the gondola. Check out the movies of our ride down. It was fast and wild.
near the top
coming out of the clouds

Somehow we ended up on an earlier bus back to Hangzhou. Yet again, we were the only foreigners on the bus. Any English speaker trying to evesdrop would’ve been utterly confused because our conversation was all topological-this and conformal field theory-that. It was quite fun to chat about our research, drawing Penrose diagrams on the fogged up bus windows.

Lingyin Si

Last weekend, Matt and I went to Lingyin Temple in Hangzhou. Somehow this temple escaped the Cultural Revolution but the structures are not as old as you might expect: its been destroyed in rebuilt 16 times since 326 AD.

We started out on the Zhejiang Univerity campus where I got a photo of Matt, bigger than Mao.

We then hiked up the hill behind campus and through the Botanical Gardens. We were a bit tired by the time we got to the temple.

Lingyin Temple on the weekends is an ideal experience for the meta-tourist. Giant blobs of people in matching baseball hats follow tour guides wielding colorful flags and megaphones. For the ordinary tourist, it is overwhelming.


(that’s corn on the cob—one of the street food options. Other choices are tea eggs and tofu on a stick)


Lingyin Temple is big on all scales. The grounds are big. The buildings are giant cubes. The trees and big and wonderfully old. The crowds are big and, apparently warrant signs like this:


There were so many people burning incense that if one got too close to the cauldron, they run the risk of having their pants catch on fire.




The art work is nice but not exceptional. Everything is mostly big. But I did enjoy looking at the animals decorating the roofs:



and the large circular window carvings:




(this meeting includes animals in the audience. don’t know why)

When the monks chanted their five o’clock prayers, one had to fight their way to the front to have a peek.


This temple puzzles me as much as any other I’ve been to. There were more buddhas surfing on the heads of fish. And, in a fountain, there was a giant marble sphere.

And why does Buddha have blue hair?


I’m going to have to read up on Buddhism when I get back to Cambridge. I really want to know what all this stuff is about!

We stumbled across some guys carving a new sign for the temple. It looks like intricate work.


I think this beastie looks like a muppet.


They’re performing heavy renovations on some buildings in the temples. I took this photo through a hole in the wall.


Many of the monks wear these yellow robes. They match the color of the temple walls (camoflage?). Sometimes I see them around town, going shopping and such. I’m always curious to know what’s in their shopping bag—birthday presents for their mums, perhaps?


After visiting the temple, we wandered around the grounds outside. There are hundreds of statues carved into the rock in the cliff and in caves. This climber adds good scale to this Buddha.


Matt asked me to take this because he likes elephants (but not in a political way)




Queues don’t seem to exist in China. Instead, you cut to the front from the side or elbow your way ahead. After refusing to pay twice the usual fare for an illegal taxi, we hopped onto a bus and left. By "hopped on" I mean we hung out at the back of the mob and very slowly made our way onto the bus.