(no subject)
I have had extremely limited internet access on this trip, so while I’m now back in Taiwan, I’m going to start catching you all up with my adventures in Xian.
I have visited Taiwan before, for lunar New Year (Year of the Pig). That was great fun - pig decorations everywhere. Now it is Year of the Cow (my year) though unfortunately not lunar New Year. A lot of the museums and shrines we have visited have images and sculptures of the zodiac animals, and my friend Oyce, her sister N, and I have had a lot of fun locating ours. In Chinese the names are apparently less masculinized than they are often translated into English - cow, pig, and chicken rather than bull, boar, and rooster.
Once you get outside of the cities of Taiwan, trees are everywhere, many of them draped in creepers, moss, and ivy, so the impression is one of solid green. It’s a dullish wintery green now, but Oyce says in the spring the color is electric. Taipei is a bustling, livable city, full of clothing stores and subway construction zones, noodle restaurants and shaved ice stands, and convenience stores selling custard tarts, manga, socks cleverly rolled up to resemble boxes of candy, cold remedies, tea-boiled eggs, and California roll-flavored Doritos. We bought a bag of the latter (and also some Meltykiss strawberry-filled chocolate). They don’t taste at all like California rolls, more like cheese Ruffles, but are strangely addictive.
Touching down in Xian was like entering another world. There was so much angry-sounding shouting at the airport that I thought some kind of altercation was going on, but no, people are just a lot louder than they are in Taiwan. Compared to the sleek Taiwan airport, the one in Xian was a bit grubby and dingy and old. Scrolling electronic proclamations in red banned the importation of materials detrimental to China’s morals, government, and culture, and also deadly poisons, embryos, and semen.
I whispered to Oyce, “Approximately half the passengers are smuggling in their own semen.”
Outside of the airport, it was bitter cold. I spent the entire time in Xian bundled up in layers and layers and layers, and was still freezing. It never snowed, but it was below zero and ponds were frozen over, and the wind was so cold it hurt.
The air pollution in Xian is beyond belief, apparently some of the worst in China. Yellow-gray smog hangs so thickly in the air that details half a block away were often hazy, and it sometimes obscured the sun. If you’ve ever been close enough to a massive forest fire when ash falls from the sky, it was like that but much worse. The air feels gritty in your throat, and a metallic taste settled in my mouth. I went around much of the time holding my scarf over my mouth like Dracula’s cape, and at night I dreamed that I had been shot and my lungs were filling up with blood. I hate to think of the amount of respiratory illness and preventable deaths this must be causing to the people who have to live in it. This must be what the notorious pea soup fogs of old London were like.
To my surprise, as we were traveling with others as well for the Xian leg of a trip, the others booked the whole group with a tour guide. I had no idea this was going to happen, and while I did get to see a lot of stuff that I would undoubtedly never have seen otherwise and it was extremely kind of them to have me along, overall it confirmed my preference for traveling on my own schedule, taking as much time at any given place as I want to spend and being able to go back to the hotel and relax if I feel like relaxing. Our days began at about 9 AM and did not conclude till 9 PM, with every minute tightly scheduled.
The very first night, we were taken to a touristy dumpling restaurant featuring a giant gold dumpling in the lobby beside a dumpling diorama, with wee dumpling-making wooden people and a display of dumplings cunningly shaped into goldfish, frogs, crabs, ducks, etc, complete with little bulgy eyes. The dumplings we ate, while varied in fillings (the best was a sweet-sour tomato-cabbage which tasted more Eastern European than Chinese to me) tough-skinned and lukewarm. When a hotpot was lit at the table, reminding me of the episode of Top Chef Masters where one of the chefs smears Sterno on a coconut and sets it on fire, one of the aunties suggested that we drop the dumplings in the boiling soup to heat them up!
We were then whisked off to an over-amplified performance in a very cold theatre of a local precursor to the Peking Opera, which did not feature any tumbling or wu shu. I’m afraid I do better with cultural activities when I’m expecting them, not exhausted from a plane trip, and have had time to look them up in advance. And have some vague idea of what’s going on. It was subtitled, but in simplified Chinese, which Oyce can read only with difficulty, as she learned traditional Chinese. I know a few of the characters which overlap with Japanese, which I read at about a first grade level. The performance went something like this:
Maiden minces about the stage, declaiming in archaic Chinese. Twelve characters flash across the scene, of which I can read “heart” and “flower.” Oyce whispers to me, “Something about a heart and a flower.”
Overall my favorite part of the performance was when a man came onstage to do a comic monologue and manipulated strings to make his moustache bounce up and down. I think the entire group felt the same way, because we fled at intermission.
Note: Please, no comments about China being evil. Obviously I have criticisms, but these are merely my impressions as a tourist, and are not meant as a condemnation of an entire vast country and all its inhabitants.
I have visited Taiwan before, for lunar New Year (Year of the Pig). That was great fun - pig decorations everywhere. Now it is Year of the Cow (my year) though unfortunately not lunar New Year. A lot of the museums and shrines we have visited have images and sculptures of the zodiac animals, and my friend Oyce, her sister N, and I have had a lot of fun locating ours. In Chinese the names are apparently less masculinized than they are often translated into English - cow, pig, and chicken rather than bull, boar, and rooster.
Once you get outside of the cities of Taiwan, trees are everywhere, many of them draped in creepers, moss, and ivy, so the impression is one of solid green. It’s a dullish wintery green now, but Oyce says in the spring the color is electric. Taipei is a bustling, livable city, full of clothing stores and subway construction zones, noodle restaurants and shaved ice stands, and convenience stores selling custard tarts, manga, socks cleverly rolled up to resemble boxes of candy, cold remedies, tea-boiled eggs, and California roll-flavored Doritos. We bought a bag of the latter (and also some Meltykiss strawberry-filled chocolate). They don’t taste at all like California rolls, more like cheese Ruffles, but are strangely addictive.
Touching down in Xian was like entering another world. There was so much angry-sounding shouting at the airport that I thought some kind of altercation was going on, but no, people are just a lot louder than they are in Taiwan. Compared to the sleek Taiwan airport, the one in Xian was a bit grubby and dingy and old. Scrolling electronic proclamations in red banned the importation of materials detrimental to China’s morals, government, and culture, and also deadly poisons, embryos, and semen.
I whispered to Oyce, “Approximately half the passengers are smuggling in their own semen.”
Outside of the airport, it was bitter cold. I spent the entire time in Xian bundled up in layers and layers and layers, and was still freezing. It never snowed, but it was below zero and ponds were frozen over, and the wind was so cold it hurt.
The air pollution in Xian is beyond belief, apparently some of the worst in China. Yellow-gray smog hangs so thickly in the air that details half a block away were often hazy, and it sometimes obscured the sun. If you’ve ever been close enough to a massive forest fire when ash falls from the sky, it was like that but much worse. The air feels gritty in your throat, and a metallic taste settled in my mouth. I went around much of the time holding my scarf over my mouth like Dracula’s cape, and at night I dreamed that I had been shot and my lungs were filling up with blood. I hate to think of the amount of respiratory illness and preventable deaths this must be causing to the people who have to live in it. This must be what the notorious pea soup fogs of old London were like.
To my surprise, as we were traveling with others as well for the Xian leg of a trip, the others booked the whole group with a tour guide. I had no idea this was going to happen, and while I did get to see a lot of stuff that I would undoubtedly never have seen otherwise and it was extremely kind of them to have me along, overall it confirmed my preference for traveling on my own schedule, taking as much time at any given place as I want to spend and being able to go back to the hotel and relax if I feel like relaxing. Our days began at about 9 AM and did not conclude till 9 PM, with every minute tightly scheduled.
The very first night, we were taken to a touristy dumpling restaurant featuring a giant gold dumpling in the lobby beside a dumpling diorama, with wee dumpling-making wooden people and a display of dumplings cunningly shaped into goldfish, frogs, crabs, ducks, etc, complete with little bulgy eyes. The dumplings we ate, while varied in fillings (the best was a sweet-sour tomato-cabbage which tasted more Eastern European than Chinese to me) tough-skinned and lukewarm. When a hotpot was lit at the table, reminding me of the episode of Top Chef Masters where one of the chefs smears Sterno on a coconut and sets it on fire, one of the aunties suggested that we drop the dumplings in the boiling soup to heat them up!
We were then whisked off to an over-amplified performance in a very cold theatre of a local precursor to the Peking Opera, which did not feature any tumbling or wu shu. I’m afraid I do better with cultural activities when I’m expecting them, not exhausted from a plane trip, and have had time to look them up in advance. And have some vague idea of what’s going on. It was subtitled, but in simplified Chinese, which Oyce can read only with difficulty, as she learned traditional Chinese. I know a few of the characters which overlap with Japanese, which I read at about a first grade level. The performance went something like this:
Maiden minces about the stage, declaiming in archaic Chinese. Twelve characters flash across the scene, of which I can read “heart” and “flower.” Oyce whispers to me, “Something about a heart and a flower.”
Overall my favorite part of the performance was when a man came onstage to do a comic monologue and manipulated strings to make his moustache bounce up and down. I think the entire group felt the same way, because we fled at intermission.
Note: Please, no comments about China being evil. Obviously I have criticisms, but these are merely my impressions as a tourist, and are not meant as a condemnation of an entire vast country and all its inhabitants.