Ari's Planet

More India pictures are online, including 10 extra photos from Agra and pictures from Fatehpur Sikri, Jaipur, Delhi, and Pushkar. Amazingly, I somehow managed previously to not upload any pictures from Beijing, including the Great Wall and Forbidden City; these are now finally online.

I've posted the rest of my China photos (at least those that I care to post) as well as some photos from around Kathmandu in Nepal.

I take the flight from Chengdu to Kathmandu. I am tired, hardly slept the night before, kept up by a persistent cough, pollution. I sleep through take off. Half an hour in to the flight, bright light wakes me and I reach to close the shade. Arrested. Beyond the plane stretches a plain of clouds, soft, billowy things, they stop at a range of mountains. I cannot sleep through this. One peak stands above the rest, a single cloud forming from the wind rushing past it, as it rushes past, a pebble in a stream. Could this be Everest? No, it is too soon.

So you want to go to Lijiang? Why not take a sleeper bus from Kunming? Overnight, 140 RMB, arrive in the morning. Makes sense. Take a cab to the bus station, where people run up to you saying "Lijiang?

Walking around China you are bound to come across Chinglish. This special interpretation of Chinese and English is remarkable for its innovations. Here are a few examples.

From a restaurant menu, Beijing:
Welcome the foreign friend combo
The temple explodes the chicken cube (my personal favorite)
The meat mixes the bean curd
Fragrant and hot soil bean silk
The dry fries Huang's flamed fish

Beauty salon, Beijing: Gefvidof mole
Clothing store: Manages each kind of male and female trade
Chocolate bar, Pingyao: The chocolate manufacturer specialize is Apple nice chocolate

Steps, bloody steps. Why do Chinese have to go and ruin a perfectly good hike by puting in an endless number of stairs?

I'm a bit bored in Huashan, so I charge up my new Skype account and call my friend, who should be up by now getting ready for work. Only it's 8am. On Sunday. Proving that I'm an idiot. Well, I have a couple of hours to kill before properly apologizing, so I surf the net and find an article about comet Holmes which suddenly brightened. Look to constellation Perseus in the northeast, or overhead around 2am. This page has a more useful map. Cool.

Huashan is a mountain sacred to Taoism. It's a great big bunch of rocks rising out of the land that people enjoy climbing, especially to see the sunrise. I took the train from Xian, accomplishing ticket buying at the window like a proper Chinese gentleman, along with a soft-sleeper ticket to Chengdu for the next day. A soft seat to Huashan cost 20Y--soft seats are the way to go, and a soft sleeper to Chengdu cost 272Y.

Woohoo! I did it! I found cough drops in China! I'm like the most amazing tourist to ever walk the Great Wall, gawk at the Terracotta Warriors, or hack his way through a fog of smoke in Xian. Yes, Ari totally rocks. Ari figures that if there's no one around to pat him on the back, that shouldn't stop him and he'll do it himself, why thank you.

The Terra Cotta Warriors (TCW) live on. In China, the special guard wear green and stand at attention. Right next to the TCWs, in their image. There is nothing new under the sun. Made with excellent craftmanship, sure to excite the throngs of tourists moving through in waves, enough to crush any resistance in their path, new armies, their leaders waving banners "China Tours", "CITS". Only a small portion excavated, the emperor's resting place remains untouched.

Radio Ari has been temporarily uninterested in broadcasting due to a cold. Our main (and only) reporter caught a nice head cold on his last day in Datong. Much fun was had in the freezing, stinky, room that passed for a hotel room at Wutai Shan. Actually, it was just like a fly trap, only for tourists. The bus from Datong filled the slightly cleaner mountain air with its special aroma of burning white oil. It, amazingly, did not kill any tourists on the way, or cause the bus driver to lose his head, proving that the Chinese are made of a different metal than the rest of us.

Walking down any street in Beijing you will be approached. In the markets, "lookie lookie", or "hello" followed by a strong invitation to enter a store. Along Lotus Road, a strip of restaurants, you are approached for endless "lady bar...massage". Cab drivers stop, run after you. Artists wave blank slates, so you're not even sure what they're selling. Someone tries to sell you a map. A "student" approaches, strikes up a formulaic conversation, invites you to a tea house, an art show.

I met an Israeli girl at the hostel and got to speak more Hebrew in China in a day than I had in years. We went to the Temple of Heaven park on Saturday morning and watched people exercise. Chinese love to exercise. They play a hackie-sack like game well into middle age. This is no small feat. In the US usually only college-aged people play the game. They practice taichi, with or without swords. Push-hands (part of taichi). Paddle-ball, only a more sophisticated version where you have to match the trajectory of the ball with your paddle to catch it. Running. Badminton.

From Beijing I took the train to Datong. The train took 6 hours and left on time. A hard-seat cost 31Y+10Y commission + 29Y taxi to station for 70Y total or less than $10US. A hard seat is really a vinyl covered thing in a row of 3+2 facing, so there really is no room for your feet. Ok for a day trip and how the Chinese travel. Cabin full of smoke, which several hours in had an effect as I calmly surveyed the surroundings until I realized, hey, that's not me, that's the nicotine.

Unlike that terrible Kurt Russel movie from the 80s (90s?), Escape from NY, which managed to even have a few even worse sequels, my escape from Beijing was uneventful. There is a wall, or remnants thereof, but it did nothing to impede the flow of people. I somehow got stuck in Beijing for something like 11 nights (huh???). Stayed at the Red Lantern House and then, after getting sick of that, moved to Leo's Hostel which people say is the best vibe. Whatever.

Haggling with the rickshaw driver, the taxi driver. Information asymmetry, competition in practice. They get more than they should in this market, I get to the places I want to see. At Simiatan the Great Wall is slightly less touristed, a little steeper. Chinese music blares along the river. A vendor attaches herself to me, "farmer, no work, you buy I leave", she trails me.

In the Forbidden City in Beijing, in the Hall of Clocks, there is a clock, a giant thing. A golden carriage pulled by a golden elephant on which are golden figures with spears that attack the thrashing elephant, while the clock keeps its time, the golden elephant suffering forever, its tormentors never satisfied. The clock is not wound, it is a museum piece, the elephant rests, its tormentors wait.

Coming to a new country is still jarring. Yesterday I came to Beijing from Mongolia. You hear all these stories about the train station and all the people and the tearing up of the city and what not.

I went to the train station in UB and hopped on the UB->Beijing express, which means it took 30 hours to go 1600km, and the landscape got flatter and sandy in the Gobi and then really flat, and I waited an hour and a half for a small lunch of a sad fried fish until we came to Erenhot and the crews swapped and the Chinese came on all official looking and ran off with our passports while we went back to a shed and the train went clang-clang-clang until it broke into separate cars and everyone in the train ran to the windows to scratch their heads while big jacks lifted each car and new wheels we

My NY trip was a success. The crazy rains and tornadoes passed. I went to the Indian consulate, arriving around 08:40. There was already a bit of a line. The website says they don't open until 9:15, but they started giving out numbers earlier. I was number 28 or so. Waited in a small basement room with no AC, but it wasn't hot so no big deal. Handed in my passport around 9:45, came back at 11:30am, by which time the room had gotten quite a bit more crowded and hotter, but still bearable. Got in line and by around 12:30 and $60 cash poorer I had my shiny new visa pasted into my passport.