I just found the real characters for "add oil", and the real pinyin is jia you. Since it was such an important phrase during our trip, I thought I'd share :)
11/01/2010
Jet lagged
October 30th: We have been home for more than two days, but the jet lag just keeps hanging on. We have been up since 3:00am! So I will take this opportunity to finish off the story of our trip to China.
November 1st: Jet lag seems to be subsiding, and now I have finally finished this and can publish it.
* * *
Our last few days in Beijing were full of more sightseeing adventures and family time, hence the lack of further posts.
First things first: The Story of the Beijing International Half Marathon.
This story actually begins back in June, when I initially tried to register us via the website. I completed the extensive questionnaire (including passport number and blood type) and clicked 'send'. I got a humorous pop up box telling me: "Congratulation! Your signing up has been success!" I then proceeded to the PayPal button to complete the registration, only to find that it wouldn't work. I sent an email explaining the situation to the email address listed on the website, and a week or so later received a reply telling me to "just click the PayPal button and follow the usual instructions." I patiently re-explained that I had already tried that (and in fact tried it again before responding) but that it didn't work. Another week later I got another reply telling me to "just click the PayPal button and follow the usual instructions."
Needless to say, I started to get a little frustrated. This went on for a few more rounds, until I decided to make use of a different method of payment listed as an option. I happened to have some close contacts in Beijing who lives not far away from the office, and so I thought I might ask them to just go down to the office and make the payment on our behalf.
A little bit of background this race. According to Karl, running in China is not like running in the US. It hasn't really caught on as a sport, and so the marathons tend to be less well organized, less supported, and include lots of people who haven't trained or who are carrying giant flags or running in costume or things like that. Karl told us it's a little like mass chaos, and that in past years there have been ONE MILLION spectators for this race. Even the registration form didn't make it sound like the Boston Marathon, which now completely fills within 7 hours of registration opening on line. It just said that payment was due by September 10th, and if you paid after that time it would cost more. So I was not anticipating any problems with signing up. By the time it occurred to me to ask Karl and Mikkin to go make the payment for us, they were already in the US for the summer. But no worries, they were due to get back a week or two prior to the September 10th deadline.
So come September 10th, I get a "good-news-bad-news" email from Karl. He reported that the good news was that we would definitely be running in the half marathon, and also it would be a lot cheaper than anticipated. This was because of the bad news--it was full and they were not accepting further registrations. Even though Jay and I had already registered, they didn't seem to have any record of our registration. However, he said the person at the office told him that it's no problem to just run the race without registering, and that lots of people do that.
We were disappointed. But what can you do? Plus, who can really be that disappointed when you're about to leave for a vacation in China? So we thoroughly enjoyed the first part of our trip, had all the training runs mentioned in other posts, and arrived back in Beijing on Friday evening. Karl and Mikkin's good friend Thomas, who they had met last year while living in Zengzhou, also arrived in Beijing on Friday to run with us. Only difference was that he had actually signed up...
Saturday morning we met at 8:30 to take the 45 minute subway trip to the Olympic Green to go to the expo. (left: Karl buying breakfast on the way) Thomas was going to pick up his race packet and bib number; the rest of us were going to see if somehow we could get a last minute registration. Upon arrival, we went right to the registration booth and confidently gave our names. The volunteers manning the booth were all college students with excellent English speaking skills. They typed frantically, looking for our registration, but to our complete lack of surprise, they were not able to find us. We explained that we had filled out a registration form last summer, but hadn’t been able to pay. That was when we found out that the website on which we had registered was NOT in fact the official marathon site itself, but one operated by a tour company, CITS, that arranged travel and accommodations and the like for runners. This fact was entirely left out of the website itself. We begged a little, asked if there was anything we could do. They apologized profusely for the confusion, and recommended we come back around 7:30pm, just before the expo closed. They said they could give us the leftover numbers that no one had picked up. We exchanged cell phone numbers with cautious optimism, and went to have a look through the expo. There were only about a dozen booths, most of them for other races taking place in China. Not very exciting.
That evening we had the traditional Chinese carbo load of spaghetti and garlic bread and broccoli. Delicious! (Tobiah had rice cereal).
We were encouraged by a phone call Karl got from one of the girls at the registration booth, confirming that we were looking for three registrations for the half marathon. However, when we called back to confirm the time the expo was set to close, we were told they wouldn’t be able to give us any of the leftover numbers. They said that in past years they had given them out, but this year they weren’t allowed to for safety reasons.
Hm. What to do, what to do. It was a long way back to the expo, with no guarantee of results. We decided to give it a shot. We didn't really have anything to lose, and the timing of this trip to China was decided entirely because of this race, so we went back. For our return trip to the Olympic Green, we decided to save a little time and spring for a taxi, which cost the three of us a total of 45 yuan (not quite $7). On our way, we discussed a little strategy. Should we beg? Plead? Cry? Yell? In the end, we had a lengthy session including all of the above while surrounded by a pack of event volunteers and an unlucky official who got the short straw, and had to tell us over and over that there was nothing she could do, while we tried to reason and explain about how far we had come, etc etc.
At one point, one of the volunteers pulled Karl aside and asked him for his phone number. She said she would try to get us some bibs, and call when she could. The race official clearly felt terrible about having to tell us 'no'. We ended up with official race t-shirts, bags and pins for our efforts, but no numbers. The volunteer wasn't able to come through for us with the underground bibs, but she did tell us to just run the race anyway, and that lots of people do that.
But of course, we have to make a project out of everything. We called Thomas and had him come back to the Mac center with his number, which was 20557, and spent the rest of the evening making high quality color copies of his bib, seriously discussing the differences, the margins, the color quality. Attention to the difference in material lead us to a discussion of how we could make the copies more shiny, which lead to a session of coating the fake bibs with candle wax, scraping off the extra wax, crumpling the paper like a real bib, re-scraping with credit cards, then applying Scotch tape to the backs to reinforce the areas where they pinned to our shirts. As we were dispersing for the night, still laughing at the ridiculous amount of effort we put into what would most certainly end up being a needless project, we ran into Steve, another ELIC teacher who had just been planning to run the race without registering. We gave him one of our extra bibs (yes, we made practice copies...), and Team 20557 increased to five members.
It was a pretty hilarious night, and a pretty hilarious next morning when we all arrived down in the lobby of the Mac wearing our identical race t-shirts with impressively convincing, identical bibs pinned to our shirts. The morning was cold, rainy and dark. We boarded the bus and subway for Tian'anmen Square, and at every stop we gained more and more passengers clad in fluorescent yellow race t-shirts.
And of course, as we entered the half marathon corral the guard barely even glanced at our beautifully constructed bibs amongst the mass of other people flooding through the gate. Our project was pointless. But still hilarious.
1. starting line, as seen after exiting the subway; 2. us at the starting line (with 20557), 3. person on a platform in the background, leading stretching exercises (which included big arm windmill movements guaranteed to injure several people in the near vicinity), 4. Jay and Karl, psyched to start running, 5. the spooky lights and the starting line as seen from our corral, 6. Steve signing some guy's t-shirt who was so excited to be starting next to us and now has lots of pictures of us.
The run itself -- for me, at least -- was fantastic. The rest of the team runs much faster than I do, so I was alone for most of it. Karl's impression of running in China appeared to be quite correct. We saw people carrying all their extra clothing in big backpacks, people carrying large flags, even some dressed in business casual. Unfortunately the cold and rain limited the number of spectators to far less than one million this year, but there were still plenty of shouts of jai-oh ("add oil") from the sidelines. It rained the entire time and everyone was completely soaked through by the finish line, and then frozen through once we stopped running. But I did it! I ran the whole thing without stopping and without dying. I met a guy named Hal who is from Boston but lives in Beijing around the 19th kilometer when I was starting to fade and needed someone to talk me through the last mile. He was great (thanks, Hal!). And the bonus for being slower than everyone else is that you have people waiting at the finish line to cheer you on and other people waiting in a nearby restaurant with hot tea. Fabulous finish. I've never been so cold or sore or stiff in my entire life, but fabulous nonetheless.
1. Team 20557 (with Steve's head covering the finish line), 2. stretching in the subway station, 3. reminiscing about the adventure we had just completed, 4. some gimps so disabled after the race they got to sit in the handicapped seats
In the first picture, you can see the remnants of my paper bib (the parts that were taped) still hanging on to my race shirt. Here are some before and after pictures:
So that was the race. Highly satisfying overall. The rest of the day was spent trying to get warm again and eating pizza.
And now we still had two more days left in Beijing! This is the best part about a half marathon as opposed to the whole thing: we were plenty sore, but still had enough energy for a walking tour of Beijing (including the Forbidden City, the Bell and Drum towers, the hutongs, some lake shore paths, a rickshaw ride and some shopping) and a hike to the Great Wall.
Our last two days in photos:
1&2. Babysitting for Tobiah while Karl and Mikkin go out to dinner, 3. Tian'anmen Square, 4&5. Forbidden City, 6. Read this. It is hilarious. 7. Imperial Gardens, 8. top of a park just north of the Forbidden City, looking back over where we just came from.
1. Rickshaw ride, 2. hutongs, 3. view from the top of the Drum Tower (yes, we climbed two hills the day after the race), looking back towards the the top of the park we had just come from (you can see the tower at the very end of that long street), 4. old drum, 5. new drum, 6-8, Hot pot!
Finally, below is our trip to the Great Wall. We took a van ride for about 2 1/2 hours (van shown below, with picture of Chinese Chicken), then hiked up a hill to a beautiful, rural, unrestored section of the wall.
And thus ends our trip to China. Thanks for following with us!
10/23/2010
Beijing International Half Marathon
We came.
We ran.
We conquered.
Go Team 20557!
Pictures from the starting corrall:
And 21.1 rainy, freezing kilometers later:
The tale of how we got to this point is long and dramatic, fraught with tears and laughter. But Team 20557 made it across the finish line!
The details will have to wait. For now, my only two priorities are pizza and nap.
10/22/2010
60 hours in Wuhan
It was a whirlwind trip, but we certainly made the most of our short time here. Rather, Jay's aunt and uncle Kris and Doug made the most of it for us. They have lived in Wuhan for the past four years (and in China going on seven years). They work at an international school and are fantastic hosts and tour guides (Tom and Candy sure will appreciate their hospitality when they come next spring!). Doug picked us up at the train station at 7:00 in the morning on Wednesday and we immediately stopped for typical Wuhan breakfast. While I am not used to noodles with spicy peanut sauce and fried bread first thing in the morning, it was delicious. We also learned that whenever Kris brings this to school to eat for lunch, people giggle, just as we would if someone brought cereal for their lunch.
The rest of the morning was napping, freshening up, and a tour of the school, which is in quite a remarkable building with quite a remarkable staff (I think Tom and Candy will be impressed when they come next spring).
1. school building, behind the field they share with a Chinese elementary school, 2. School logo, 3. hallway displaying the flags of all countries represented at the school, 4. Kris and Jay in the library (where Kris works).
We then went to a Chinese supermarket and marveled at the meat department (but weren't allowed to take pictures of the bins of chicken necks, chicken feet, live fish, livers, intestines, and plenty of other unidentifiable dishes). We spent the rest of the afternoon at Yellow Crane Tower. From www.chinahighlights.com :
A tower called the Yellow Crane Tower was built about 1,800 years ago. It was a famous building in China. An ancient poem named "The Yellow Crane Tower" was written by Cui Hao, and many Chinese can recite it. So, the new park is a popular tourist destination. The original building was destroyed ages ago, and other buildings were built on the original spot and also destroyed. Some sources say that the last wooden building was built in the late 1800s.
1. extensive gardens, pools, art, statues in the gardens below the tower, 2. the tower itself, 3. the giant bell you can ring if you pay 10 yuan, 4. view from the top of the tower
On Wednesday evening, we were treated to yet another amazing Chinese meal, prepared by Kris and Doug's "eye-ee" (no idea how to spell this, or even how to translate exactly. She is hired to come in three days a week to help with the cleaning and shopping and to cook amazing Chinese meals), consisting of jiaozi, garlic broccoli, pumpkin soup, and pork ribs. After dinner: mahjong lesson! For this purpose we learned to count to ten, and also the directions: bei (north), nan (south), xi (west), dong (east). Our useful Chinese vocabulary also includes the word for 'eggplant': 茄子 (pinyin:qie2 zi; rough English pronunciation: che-ad-zuh). We also now know that Erin McRae married a man who's name could be construed through a mangling of Chinglish to mean Good One (how-ee). How appropriate! :)
Thursday morning we went for a 40 minute run and topped it off with climbing 11 flights of stairs to Kris and Doug's apartment (When Tom and Candy come to visit next spring, they will be glad to know there is an elevator, too). This was our last training run before the 1/2 marathon this Saturday, and was good practice for our lungs. I am definitely going to need to spend a week or so in a hyperbaric chamber to recover from this smoggy experience.
Next, on to the Hubei Museum, where we saw the ONE MILLION YEAR OLD skull of the Yunxian Man, and this set of bells that were unearthed from the Spring and Autumn period (over 2000 years ago).
We saw a short music and dance performance featuring replicas of ancient instruments.
Thursday evening we went to Chinese barbeque for dinner along with some staff from the school. We showed up at 6:00pm in what appeared to be a parking lot filled with long rows of white tents. Out in front of each tent was a cart filled with vegetables and skewers of meat and a long skinny trough filled with hot coals. The way it works is you order a a variety of foods (meat, little balls of dough, vegetables) and they cook it over the coals and bring a plate filled with skinny little skewers to the table. We had corn on the cob, edamae, more jiaozi (which we can't get enough of), noodles, and more skewers than 10 of us possibly could finish.
The best way to round out an evening in Wuhan is with a foot massage. It's called 'foot' massage, but I think that is because half of the 90 minutes is spent on the feet. The other half is a full body massage. There are no pictures of this, as all four of us were too relaxed to think straight. Jay and Doug had a Thai massage, which is a different experience entirely. For more details, ask Jay after we get home.
Today (Friday) was a much more leisurly day, with sleeping in, packing, strolling the Hankou Beach, flying kites, and lunching at the Aloha Diner. It's a western diner within walking distance of Kris and Doug's apartment (Tom and Candy will love the milkshakes!), and has this helpful sign for those unfamilliar with western bathrooms:
Now we are at the airport, our flight is 25 minutes delayed, and we will be sitting in row 54 on our last domestic flight--Wuhan to Beijing.
---------Are you curious to know how we got around the big city of Wuhan with all its insane traffic? Doug hired a driver for us for three days. Her name is Jao Ming, and she picked us up, dropped us off, brought us snacks, loaded our luggage, and was nice in addition to all that. How much does such excellent service cost?
- $600 yuan for three full days of driver service
- Exchange rate is 6.65 yuan per $1.00 US, which equals $90.22
- gasoline in China costs (Grandpa, I know you were waiting for this!) just under 7 yuan per liter.
- the math: 1 gal = 3.78 liters makes 26.46 yuan per gallon or about $3.98 per gallon.
- Say we used about 10 gallons of gas, so about $40 for gas.
- Grand total for three days of personal driving service for four people: $130.
- Tom and Candy, you can hardly wait now, can you??
10/21/2010
Tandem Biking
I forgot to post this hilarious (funny to me, anyway) series of photographs Jay took while driving through ridiculously heavy traffic at the end of our tandem bike ride in Yangshuo.
10/20/2010
Yangshuo to Wuhan
Day #3 in Yangshuo: relaxing morning, beer fish for lunch, tandem biking through the countryside afternoon, travel to Guilin in the evening, overnight train ride to Wuhan.
Beer Fish: according to Karl, this is the local dish that we were supposed to try. For lunch we went to a fabulous local restaurant with fabulous food. And we tried the beer fish. Which it turns out is a whole fish, chopped up and cooked in a soup. We tried it, picked through the chunks, identified the head, the tail, various fins, some eyes... and then gave up.
After lunch, we rented bikes for another tour through the countryside. Since Jay was still quite sunburned from yesterday's run he bought a hat for shade. And to complete the foolish tourist image, we decided to rent a tandem bike.
...Which made for a lovely view from the back seat:
We saw the big banyon tree and ate ice cream Moon Hill Cafe:
Saw the ancient Dragon Village:
The twelve hour train ride to Wuhan was as comfortable as possible, as we had a 'soft sleeper' car, in which the beds are slightly wider and are only four per car, and the two others in the car were quiet non smokers who also wanted to sleep the whole night.
10/18/2010
Dragon Bridge Adventure
Our trip to the Dragon Bridge was... not possible to explain in this blog. The plan was to run along the Yulong River (11 miles--our final long run before the 1/2 marathon next weekend) and take a bamboo raft back to Yangshuo. In an extremely understated nutshell, it did not go as planned. We ran, we walked, we rafted, we got very lost, took a taxi, picked up an accidental guide who led us the final four or five miles through a shortcut I am CERTAIN no other tourist has ever seen (through fields, villages, people's back yards...). The scenery was astounding. The detour was well worth it. Below are a few pictures; you can ask us for the rest of the details when we get home.
Yangshuo
I have spent this morning out on our private terrace of the Rosewood Inn, enjoying breakfast and coffee and the quiet morning. After the packed insanity of Shanghai (packed with both activities and people), it is nice to have some quiet time.
We arrived here on Saturday afternoon and spent the rest of the day exploring this little town. It is in the country, surrounded by weird mountains. Yangshuo appears to be an adventure travel destination. There are a zillion shops for bike rental, hiring guides, booking hiking or climbing trips, white water rafting, kayaking. The nightlife also appears to be pretty extreme. We have learned that nothing happens in the early morning (hence the quiet terrace), and around 9:00 the streets become as packed as Shanghai, with clubs and bars and stalls selling the same tourist junk, and all the shops stay open.
The town also has a definite 'tourist' section, very clearly divided from everything else. Below are some pictures:
**View from airplane window, and three pictures on West Street (main pedestrian tourist road)**
On our first evening, we went on a cormorant fishing tour. After sundown, they took us out on an old, rusty, very loud fishing boat on the Li river to follow the cormorant fishermen. They go out on long boats or bamboo rafts with a light on the front. The cormorants swim in front of the boat and dive to catch the fish. They come up to the surface to swallow them, only they can't swallow them because the fishermen have tied strings around their necks. When the fishermen see a cormorant come up with a fish and try to swallow it, they sweep the bird out of the water with a long bamboo pole, then pull the fish out of its throat and throw it in a basket. There were about a dozen birds, swimming very fast in front of the boat. Quite a remarkable system.
We stopped along the shore so they could give us a demonstration of the unswallowed-fish retrieval system, and to take some hilarious photos:
Next post---
The Dragon Bridge: Nine hour round trip.
10/16/2010
Shanghai: Day #3 -- Watertown
Lesson of the day: while it is very nice to have iPhone in case of emergencies, it is important to remember to keep it OFF. Particularly at night, which is daytime in the US, and if you forget to mention to your friends that you are in China, they might call you some afternoon, which would turn out to be 2:00am where you are, which would cause a jet lag relapse and you would be unable to get back to sleep.
While our last day in Shanghai was not quite as packed full of touristy goodness, it was still plenty long. Fortunately, our hotel is a paradise filled with fabulous amenities including a gym that is open 24 hours and glorious lobby with 3 story ceilings and of course the Club Room, with its extensive breakfasts and awe inspiring views. So we managed to enjoy our (long) morning before the next day of touring started at 9:30.
First thing we did was drive to Zhujiajiao, an ancient water town about an hour's drive from the center of Shanghai. It is a village from the Ming and Qing dynasties with canals and ancient bridges for some of the streets. It is another strange mixture of the very old and the very new. The village began as a family settlement (that is the translation of the name) about a thousand years ago, and then flourished 500 years ago. The old buildings and ancient bridges again sell everything from hand made local delicacies to cheap World Expo knockoff products. The narrow lanes are crowded with locals and tourists and entrepreneurs trying to sell us watches and purses.
After lunch, the Shanghai Museum and the People's Square:
10/15/2010
Shanghai: City of the Future (still Day #2)
At 10:30 we met our new guide, Vanna, and our driver (whose name we didn't catch) and went to the "Wall Street" of Shanghai and up to the top of the Shanghai World Financial Centery. It was built in 2008, and is the 3rd tallest building in the world after the new one in Dubai and the Taipei 101 tower. It is 492 meters tall and has a sort of keyhole cutout in some of the top floors, giving it an interesting archetectural effect.
In fact, architecture was sort of the theme of our day. We went to the top of the observatory and looked out over the city from above, then later in the afternoon went on a river cruise and looked up at where we had been. There is a ridiculous number of sky scrapers here, and all of them have been built in the last 20 years. The skyline goes on forever. I suppose if you are a city of 20 million people you've got to have some place to put them, but Shanghai has really gone all out with making their architecture interesting.
Above is the Jin Mao Building, the 3rd tallest building in Shanghai after SWFC and the Oriental Pearl Television Tower, as seen from the plaza outside SWFC. Next is the view from the observatory.
Getting up to the observatory was no small feat, but the designers made the journey interesting. There is a long corridor from the lobby to the elevator waiting area. The ceiling of the waiting area boasts a gigantic LED countdown clock that reports where the elevator is (height in meters). When the elevator is coming down, the numbers drop at an alarming rate. The journey inside the elevator is also a little spooky in a Star Trek sort of way, with moving lights demonstrating the speed at which you are traveling.
Next: Lunch.
Delicious.
Not small.
Included kelp.
Pictures from the Huangpu River Tour:
Picture number 2 features the Pearl Television tower (spiky round thing), the SWFC in the back (with the keyhole at the top), and the seagull shaped restaurant on the waterfront at which we ate lunch.
As if all of that wouldn't have been enough to fill one day of tourism, we also spent time at a silk factory learning about worms and weaving and how much better silk is than other natural products. Did you know that the life cycle of a silk work from moth laying egg to egg turning into a cocoon (to make another moth) is only 45 days? We also learned that stronger silk is made from a "double cocoon." It turns out that if you put two silkworms in a small dark place together, such as a matchbox, they get fooled into thinking that they're already in a cocoon, so they spin one together. The silk from that cocoon can be used for making quilts, pajamas, skin cream, and even medical equipment.
We visited "Old Town", which is a group of restored buildings originally built about 400 years ago by a wealthy land owner who wanted to please his parents. The entire construction took over 20 years to complete, so his parents never lived to see the finished product. Since that time it has been run down and renovated several times over, and at one point was used by the army. Currently it is a sort of disturbing mix of beautiful historical buildings adorned with signs like "Starbucks" and "Esprit" and of course, "McDonalds." It spans several city blocks and is constantly so packed with people that you can hardly walk down the streets. Tourists and locals alike are there to shop and to sell.
Vanna led us to the end of the street and through a gate, and suddenly without warning we were in a beautiful, walled off garden area that had been saved from retail. Koi ponds, pagodas, bridges, statues, stone formations--all breathtaking.
After fighting our way back through the pedestrian streets of Old Town, we got back in the van and fought our way through traffic to the Central Hotel for dinner. Driving in Shanghai--that is another topic entirely, and will be saved for another time. After another interesting dinner of local Shanghai delicacies (including black fungus and tiny shrimps complete with heads, tails, feet and eyes), we saw an acrobat show.
The acrobat show was a thoroughly made-for-tourists experience, complete with fancy lights, sparkly spandex costumes, obnoxious tourist audience who talked (and took pictures--can you imagine??) the whole time, and culminated in eight people driving motorcycles around the inside of a steel cage.
Still, you have to respect the timing and athleticism.
Here is a video:
(I tried to upload it, not sure if it works...)
On the final insane Mario Cart-like drive through the streets of Shanghai, under the elevated freeways backlit with flourescent blue lighting and along the river bank with all the skyscrapers doubling as laser light shows, the streets were packed with people and traffic. The ubiquitousness of the light effects gave it a Gotham-meets-the-Jetson's feel. With its elaborate architecture and sprawl of 20 million people, Shanghai is definitely the City of the Future.
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