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Let me share with you some pictures from my most recent travels:

I saw the Pyramids, the Statue of Liberty, that Jesus statue, the Coliseum, Niagara Falls, the Taj Mahal, Sydney Opera House, the Eiffel Tower, Easter Island, Angkor Wat, the Grand Canyon, Stonehenge, and a bunch of other famous world landmarks. Pretty impressive, right?

Well it would be, if this wasn’t all in the same afternoon in some theme park in Shenzhen, China.

Last Monday I took the East Rail from Hong Kong up to the border into China to check things out. Ari told me about this park called Window of the World that has replicas of most of the world monuments and landmarks all crammed into one park. A lot of the replicas are just small models, but there are some pretty big ones. Eiffel Tower I think was one of the largest, since it’s kind of like the park mascot. The park was cheesy as hell but still a pretty cool way to spend an afternoon. I only had one day in China and wanted to do some shopping in the evening so I kind of did a quick tour of the park in one afternoon. I got to see almost everything I think.

After walking around in the sun seeing replicas of all the landmarks of the world in one day, I headed back to the station near the border where there is a giant shopping center similar to Ya Show in Beijing, full of small shops selling bootleg and fake stuff. It’s called Luoho and it’s this giant building immediately in front of you after leaving the station into Shenzhen. I didn’t buy too much this time, some DVDs, some shirts, and a pair of shoes. Like Ya Show you have to bargain with everyone, which is half the fun right there. I got the fake shoes I bought down from 400 RMB to less than 100. The guy also offered me one of his sisters to take as my wife for free but I just wanted the shoes. Food in China is also even cheaper than Hong Kong I think – I had BBQ pork for dinner and it was like 3 or 4 bucks US.

Last Sunday I decided against just walking around aimlessly in Hong Kong (which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad idea) and decided to take the ferry out to Macau. Macau is technically a separate “special administrative region of China,” meaning that I’d need to bring my passport to go through customs. That worked for me, since my Passport is filling up fast and I want to get some new pages added soon anyway.

After taking the hotel’s free shuttle to the general vicinity of the China Ferry pier, I still ended up wandering for about 45 minutes trying to find the right pier. I asked someone and their answer was “go to the shiny gold building,” which made me think I was actually trapped in some kind of weird video game. Anyway after a detour through a pretty nice mall and eating Chinese-style curry for lunch, I arrived at the golden pier and hopped a boat to Macau. The guy I asked was apparently not lying. The ferry only takes about an hour, and the ride was really nice. I think I slept most of the way.

Of course the gold building is the boat to casino island.

Arriving in Macau doesn’t feel like you’re in a different country from Hong Kong at all. It looks pretty much the same, but they have their own currency. However this currency is pretty useless if you’re only going to the casinos like I did, since all the games are played in Hong Kong dollars. Macau is a really old Portugese colony and has a lot of historical sights and stuff, but I spent most of my afternoon at the Sands Casino, which is yet another huge shiny gold building. The inside was pretty similar to what I remember from Las Vegas, only without the cigar smoke and free alcohol. Also 90% of the people were Chinese/Asian, and 90% of those people were senior citizens. I put a limit on myself for the day’s gambling from the get-go, and was actually doing pretty good at one point playing roulette and $100 HKD a hand blackjack. And of course I lost most of that by the evening.

The games were pretty much what I expected, but baccarat seemed to be predominant. Also sic-bo and some dice game that I have no idea about. There was also War, as in the card game played by kids who can’t play real card games. Except in the casino the minimum bet is $100. There were also dancers on the bar most of the time (wearing clothes of course), but during breaks they were playing a BoA DVD. It felt weird to be sitting in China listening to a Korean girl sing in Japanese. Quick note: the McDonald’s inside Sands sells Egg McMuffins at any time of day, which is amazing. The HK ones do too, but this was where I made the discovery initially.

I started and ended my Macau trip at Sands, but in between I also walked around the Fisherman’s Wharf area there, which was mostly tourist traps but with some cool buildings. There was an old-style Chinese castle, a volcano, some funky stone gates, and a bunch of Babylonian architecture that was part of another casino. The volcano had an arcade in the basement that was dirt cheap so I played some Street Fighter there in the wrong aspect ratio. I felt like I was in high school through since you have to buy tokens to use any of the arcade machines. (Exhilarama in Crestwood Mall was pretty cool the first few years.) I also went over to the Golden Dragon casino, which is super local with almost no English signs or instructions anywhere, and almost exclusively baccarat. Also I’m pretty sure that everything in the building above the 5th floor was some form of brothel. Karaoke in China (KTV) is not the same as karaoke in Japan.

After getting the 9:30PM boat back to Hong Kong, I checked into my second hotel (cheaper and more stuff in the area). It was pretty late so I just went to Temple Street and got some awesome food at a street restaurant. Beef chow fun (乾炒牛河) might be one of my favorite noodle dishes ever. Also this whole big plate cost me like USD $3.

Saturday in Hong Kong I woke up early to go do some sightseeing with Sunny. I was staying on the Kowloon side, so I had to take the Star Ferry to the Hong Kong side, then from there I took another ferry to Lantau Island. I don’t think I’ve ridden on a boat in a while so it was pretty cool. The first one was only about 5 minutes, then the second was about a half hour.

After getting to Discovery Bay, met up with Sunny and her boyfriend at the pier and we got dim sum at some restaurant overlooking the beach. If memory serves me right, the place was named FAGORA or something funny like that. They had good chicken feet. DB was a pretty cool place, like a little resort town with a lot of expats and higher-end residents. We sat on the patio facing the bay, and it looked more like Hawaii or some tropical island; pretty different from where I was in Kowloon the day before where it seems to not be a requirement to wear shoes, but it was a definite rule that you have to spit on the sidewalk a lot.

I just realized that these Hong Kong blogs might have a lot of pictures. Oh well.

After brunch we took a bus to Tung Chung, where we were going to take the “cable car” up to the area where the Big Buddha statue was. For some reason I was expecting like a trolley that you’d see in San Fransisco: a slow crawl up a hill with a lot of old ladies all humming the Rice-a-Roni theme song. No. Instead I see a long cable going up a tall-ass mountain with little metal and glass cars speeding along it. Holy crap. So we ended up taking this 25-minute cable car in the sky up the mountain to the area with a tourist village, a monastery, and of course the giant Buddha statue. The cable car is called the Ngong Ping 360, since the cars are made of glass and you can look out from every angle. Of course, the key direction to pay attention to is down, since if you’re looking down and it seems to be coming very fast towards you, then you’re falling and you will soon die. Luckily every time I looked down the ground was staying about the same level vertically, and I did not plummet to my death. Luckily.

The above pretty much sums up my feelings during the ride. OK so I’m exaggerating a little bit; it wasn’t that bad.

No, actually it was pretty terrifying, especially with the wind blasting the little car the entire way in every possible direction. But let’s move on, shall we?

Once we got off the little hamster cage cable car, we were in Ngong Ping village, supposedly set up like a traditional village but was really a tourist trap with a lot of gift shops and little restaurants. There was even a very traditional Chinese Starbucks. Our cable car tickets included two little activities, both related to Buddha and both cartoons. It was nice to take a break from walking in the sun though. Finally we got up close to the main attraction: a giant Buddha statue that was visible from the cable car earlier, but looked a lot bigger in person. According to wikipedia, it’s 110 feet tall.

Sure it’s impressive, but it does feel a bit cheap knowing that it’s only been around since 1993.

On the way back down from checking out Big Buddha we got some herbal jelly made with tortoise in the village (which was actually not bad, and supposedly good for you), then headed back to Central to get dinner. Had a TON of food, which was all awesome. Spicy crab in a mountain of fried garlic, a steamed whole grouper, squid, tofu, fried rice, and red bean soup. It was an awesome touristy day overall.

No more cable cars though, please.

I started writing this post on the 5th, as it’s labeled. I actually finished it late at night on Tuesday the 17th.

Last Monday, May 26th, we went from Dalian (well, Wafangdian station) to Tangshan via train. Living in Japan for so long, trains are nothing new to me. I ride trains everyday, and occasionally take the long-distance bullet trains. But the train we took this time was nothing like what I’ve experienced before. This was a 9-hour ride from hell on a train half-filled with hobos. I’m not exaggerating either when I say that; the Orient Express this was not. To illustrate my point, there was a hobo right near us that had a crazy burnt-out (probably a cataract) eye and a crazy laugh, and his buddy was a younger hobo who enjoyed a meal consisting of a handful of raw vegetables and a long chicken’s foot. He munched on this food with his blackened hands and gray teeth during the last leg of the ride.

Earlier in the day, we had finished up things with our client in Dalian at lunch with the bugs and other unmentionable food. On the way back from the restaurant to the client’s office, he pulled over about a block away from the office and started talking to these 2 shabby looking guys. I of course have no idea what they said, but minutes later when we arrived at the office to pack up our luggage, those guys were there with their motorized cart to help us out. They helped haul our ridiculous amount of suitcases and boxes of lab equipment all the way to the train station. Their help didn’t end there. These two guys were pretty old, I’d say at least in their fifties, but since they were (assumingly) hired by our client, it was their duty to haul our stuff all the way. The one guy took our 2 huge cardboard boxes, tied a thick rope around them, and hauled them on his back. The other guy got it easy with two heavy rolling suitcases. They not only hauled the stuff into the station, but after waiting with us for the train to come, they went through the gates and hauled them all the way down the long platform with us. I felt bad for the guy with the boxes, because he was struggling and sweating up a storm. Check him out:

Before I go any further, I should describe Wafangdian station. Like many places in these smaller towns in China, I felt like I was in the 1920’s or 30’s. The station felt like an empty warehouse, with tall ceilings, lots of sunlight, very little electronic presence, no air conditioning, and hordes of poor-looking people. There were no electronic ticket gates or signs. They had these big signboards showing the train number and location, swapping out panels for different trains. The gate was just a metal bar with a guard/attendant standing near it, who would open the gates when it was time to board the train. It reminded me of some kind of cattle ranch, with steer waiting to move from one area to the next. So yeah, not a very favorable image of the station.

Pretty much that entire day I felt like I had time warped back about 70 years.

Now to the train ride itself. After having our two slaves load our stuff onto the train, off we were for Tangshan. Except the train didn’t really speed along. Ever. In fact I’m pretty sure if you would take a bouncy rubber ball and kick it along the tracks, you would be going faster than the train. It never felt like we were moving fast, which probably helps explain why the ride took 9 excruciating hours. Unfortunately Tangshan has no airport so we were told that train was the best way to go. However we also found out later that there are faster trains we could have taken, instead of suffering for 9 hours on the Hobo Express. Of course our guide person never told us about these options, and we were stuck with the value travel plan. Each ticket only cost 94RMB, which is like $13 USD. This low price also probably attributed to the many hobos and other poor-looking and sour-smelling passengers.

The first half hour or so wasn’t that bad I guess. We were able to somehow fit our many suitcases on the overhead racks, and sat down. Again, I felt like I was in the Great Depression era. Then our guide was nice enough to tell us that we’d have to stand up at the 4th station, because we don”t have reserved seats. Yeah. A 9-hour train ride and our guide didn’t have the foresight to pay the extra few bucks to get us seats. So once we hit that station, people got on the train and claimed their seats, beginning our 8 hours of standing on a train that was going at the speed of Jell-O.

It’s tough to write about this train ride now, because honestly I think my mind has blocked out most of this traumatizing day. The area between the cars had a little bathroom, a sink area, and standing room for people to smoke. I don’t know if this is really what the area was designed for, but that’s sure how it was used. There was constantly a crowd of about 20 people on either end of the train car smoking, ensuring that the entire train would be filled with smoke at all times. Oh, and the bathroom? My god. Not only was it the Asian-style squat toilet, but there was an added bonus with this one. It was literally a hole, going outside of the train, onto the tracks. Talk about primitive.

At some point in the last few hours of the ride, our guide ended up getting us involved with the people sitting around our standing area. It was a real mixed bag, with the 2 hobos I mentioned earlier, some middle-aged guys, and 2 people about my age. Of course me and my dad can’t speak Mandarin, and the guide is only interpreting maybe one in every ten sentences for us. Not enough to understand what’s going on. The people were nice though, letting us sit down for a bit, still in awe that not only were we not from Beijing, but we were all the way from America, which to some of these poor local people, might as well be Mars. More than a few people at first just thought we were from southern China, which I don’t know is because of the way we look (family roots are there) or because we just didn’t fit in with everyone else.

Of those 2 people my age, one was a girl who could actually speak some English. I was pretty tired of faking conversation with these people, especially when I don’t speak the language at all, and I was getting a headache from standing up on a slow-moving train for an entire day. I made some small talk with her though, since she was the only other passenger who could communicate with us. It was funny when at one point she looks at me and says, in English, “You’ve got a big ass.” What!? I look at my dad sitting across the aisle to see if he heard what I think I did. “I think she said you’ve got a big ass.” I was totally stunned, wondering how in the world to respond, when she starts pointing at her face. “Yes, you’ve got a big ass” she repeated, pointing at her eyes. Ooooooooh! She was saying I’ve got big eyes. Haha. Thank….you…?

And that was pretty much the only moment of entertainment on the entire 9-hour train ride.

After the big ass incident I had about an hour or two left on the train. I spent most of it either napping or fake-napping (Ari no jutsu) so I wouldn’t have to act friendl
y anymore.

There are still a lot of stories to share from China, but for now I want to show everyone tonight’s activities. We got back late this afternoon from a 1-night trip to Shanghai, where we did some fish work out there. Unfortunately, with less than 24 hours in Shanghai and all of those hours spent either working or sleeping, there wasn’t any chance to see the city or go out at all. But I guess I can at least say I’ve been there. I’m back in Beijing now and should be here until Sunday the 8th when I head back to Japanland.

The hotel breakfast this morning (Wednesday) was some gross eggs, tofu sausages, and 2 weird bricks of toast. Our lunch was plane food – a small dish of noodles, 5 cherry tomatoes, and a roll. Since we had such awesome meals all day, we headed out for early dinner around 5, going to some restaurant in a different hotel nearby. We had a half Peking Duck and some dim sum, which was really good. We were pretty full, but still ready to check out the night market in Wangfujing around 9PM.

We had walked around nearby this area our first night in Beijing last week, but somehow we didn’t see the night market selling all kinds of food. I don’t know how we missed it, but as soon as our taxi pulled up tonight we knew we were in the right place. It’s just one stretch of road, about 3 or 4 blocks long, lined with carts selling food. All kinds of food. Most of it is on skewers and either grilled or deep-fried, but this isn’t just regular stuff like chicken or beef. While of course they have those, this night market is famous for having weird foods. Starfish, sea horses, blood cake, bee larvae, centipedes, and tons of other animals and animal parts were available for purchase. It was pretty interesting, and of course there were a lot of other tourists walking around, freaking out at seeing some of the offerings. We decided we should definitely try something new, and it took us a full walk down and up the street before we decided what to start with. Unfortunately, at 9:45 the main string of lanterns all down the street went off, prompting the cart workers to start shutting down immediately. A fire evacuation would have taken longer – these guys know how to pack up and go home! So we only had about 30 or 40 minutes to walk around and eat a little bit.

The “weird” things we ate tonight weren’t really that weird, so I want to head back at least one more time before I leave. We started off with deer and ostrich skewers, which were actually both really good. Neither were gamey at all, and the flavor was nice. I’d had deer before, but I think this was the first ostrich. We also ate some dumplings and candied strawberries, to ingest some non-strange stuff. The weirdest thing of the night was right at closing time:

Haha, that’s right!

We got some fried scorpions on a stick, which really weren’t bad at all. But not really so great either. They’re fairly small, and deep fried, so there isn’t much taste or texture. But they are kind of expensive, mostly due to the tourist attraction-ness of it all. 3 small scorpions on a stick was 15 RMB, so just over 2 bucks USD. For 50 RMB, you can get the huge scorpions, but I didn’t feel like putting up that much money or biting into a giant scorpion.

Next time I definitely want to try some seahorse and/or perhaps centipede. Maybe the homeless guy with gangrenous legs will be there, and my dad can give him half a skewer of strawberries again.

I’ve been here in China for a full week now, and have already seen a ridiculous number of places. Until Friday, we’d been mainly doing work-related stuff, traveling to various cities and places to do so. The first night we stayed in Beijing, then the next morning we were up bright and early to catch a plane to Dalian. On Monday we took the train ride to hell to Tangshan, with a trip to Tianjin on Wednesday. We came back to Beijing on Thursday, thinking we were done with work, but it looks Tuesday morning we’re heading off to Shanghai. We’ve been touristing it up here in Beijing for the weekend and it’s been pretty cool so far.

The fight night in Beijing (北京) we stayed at a hotel near the somewhat famous Wangfujing area, walking around and getting our first taste of shopping and bargaining at tourist traps in China. Also we got our first taste of the air pollution and dust in this country, which is pretty bad at times. You walk around hacking and coughing like you’ve been chain-smoking 10 packs of cigarettes (which a lot of the guys here do), then have no choice but to spit all over the place (which a lot of the guys and women here do). Nothing says sexy like a woman hocking a loogie right in the middle of the road. Goo.

We got Peking Duck for our first meal, in a fancy-seeming restaurant. This place was the opposite of any restaurant I usually see in Japan. It was huge, brightly colored, and had several dining rooms full of pissed-off workers. In a lot of ways it felt like eating in the middle of a convention hall. It was just me and my dad, but we ordered a full duck and some cabbage soup thing. This restaurant was famous for duck, so pretty much every table ordered one. Every few minutes you see a train of chefs wearing surgical masks come out from the kitchen with carts. They break formation and head off to whichever table they’re serving, and they start to slice the duck right in front of you. Peking Duck is half fat, which I guess is what makes it so famous. Fat and skin. So the guy slices up the duck for you, puts it on plates, and you eat it by dipping the duck meat and skin in sauce, adding shredded leeks, and putting it inside a thin pancake. It’s kind of like getting fajitas, but less Mexican and no sour cream. And it’s pretty good! Really fatty, but the taste is good. You can, of course, just put less of the fatty pieces in when you roll up your duck fajitas.

The next day we headed out to Dalian (大連) via airplane. It was a really short flight, only about an hour and a half. They barely had time to serve drinks and this weird beef jerky fried sandwich thing before we had to get ready to land. Dalian is actually a huge city, famous for its beautiful beaches, zoos, and museums. We got to see none of this, instead driving for about 2 hours to a smaller island nearby, which apparently is a rapidly developing area with a lot of government support. Along the way we stopped by a restaurant that was actually a hotel/motel, and the table took up the entire room. We ate and stuff, met our clients, then headed out to the place we’d be working for a few days. When you think “lab,” you don’t think about this kind of place. Check it out:

That’s the outside of the complex where we were working on the fishies for 3 days. At least they had electricity. It’s a hatchery with all of the workers living on the premises. Kind of interesting to see how these people lived. I also came up with some sweet nicknames for the people there, like Transvestite kid, 2-tone hair girl, and eyebrows.

Our last day in Dalian, we got treated to a big lunch at this market-restaurant a bit closer to the city. Once we walked into the place, there were all kinds of tanks and stuff with live seafood and other animals and vegetables. Our host told us to each pick a dish. We did, but the host also had picked out some dishes. We then headed back to a private dining room. It seems the general norm for these big Chinese meals is to order a number of dishes, put them on the lazy susan turntable, and have everyone share them. No biggie, I’m used to that. What is strange, however, is the number of dishes. I don’t know if it’s just because we’re guests here or if this is what they usually do, but it seems like the equation for figuring out the number of dishes is people x 2, because there’s always so much food. When the first 2 dishes came out, I was speechless. Weird, strange dishes (to me) that must have been ordered by the host. I won’t go into detail just now, although I’ve told a few of you already. I don’t know if I’ll actually post it on the blog, because I can imagine some people getting offended, haha.

Left Dalian and headed to Tangshan (唐山), a smaller city, via train. Of course, this was a 9 hour hobo train ride from hell, which I’ll write about later. It was terrible though. There wasn’t much to do or see in Tangshan, since it’s a fairly small town that pretty much has no foreigners and no foreign tourists even. Nothing is in English anywhere, and since me and my dad don’t speak Mandarin it was pretty interesting. The coolest thing though was learning about the “board taxis,” called “bardu” or something in Mandarin. It’s pretty much a motorscooter with an army green cab attached to the back that can carry 2 or 3 people. It’s a kind of taxi but super cheap. 3 RMB (about 45 cents US) seemed to be the flat rate. Sure it’s not super fast, but it was convenient and kind of cool.

We also made a day trip to Tianjin (天津), which was good for work but pretty boring overall. After the big meeting with businessmen and Communist government types, we went out to a local restaurant with them and had another infinity-course meal. They used a lot of local vegetables or something, and knew the owner, but it was kind of weird because we went to a pretty remote place to eat at this restaurant. And the owner ate with us! It was way good, and luckily no weird animals that I know of, except for the water bug shrimp things. They also served this Chinese liquor called baijo (白酒) which was supposedly 60% alcohol by volume but tasted more like Everclear. It was painful. Especially when the one Chinese guy across the table from me would take his glass, grunt, hit the glass table, and give you a look like “if you don’t drink some baijo right now I will kill you.” A very enjoyable party though. Communists love to give the double hand-sandwich shake, and they also wave goodbye using both hands, in case you didn’t know.

After a long dinner and baijo party, we went back to Tangshan in Golgo 13’s car as he played American rave and trance music picked out especially for us. I have a short video of this car ride that I’ll post later, just so you guys know I’m not kidding about the rave music.