3-1-09

 

We came into the train station tired. We’d already decided to take the day off. Shirley in Qingdao helped us book a hotel room for $20. We found it without too much trouble (because she wrote down the Chinese characters). We get in the room and I sprawled out on the bed. It’s a small room, but there’s an Ethernet wire, a water cooler (full of city water), and a little bathroom with a good shower. I wanted to rest really bad but Rachel was hungry and we needed to find some food and hopefully beer. This city isn’t much different than Qingdao. It’s China. We walk around and begin reliving the same, “Where the hell do we eat?” feeling we had in Qingdao. Lonely Planet points us to a dumpling joint. It’s empty (of course). Some people shuffle out of the back and point at the pictures of food they can actually make. We get some dumplings and show them some Chinese characters of things they supposedly offer. They initially turned us down and then started bringing things we never ordered, we eat them thinking that they are being nice for having nothing to offer, have to flat out refuse some green egg dish, then end up paying for everything. Whatever. $5

We are tired and want to get back, Rachel sees a place in the distance that might sell us beer or ramen. Turns out to have nearly nothing, but leads us to a supermarket which wouldn’t fit the traditional sense of the word, but they did have food. We bought beer, ramen, and onion crackers, went back to the room, closed the curtains, turned on a soft light, took showers and really enjoyed our first moments, warm, connected to the internet, after a hot shower, buzzed, and horizontal.

 

3-2-09

 

The next day we felt rested up and set out to find train tickets to Beijing. After a lot of back and forth, hand gestures, and patience on both sides, we realized that they didn’t offer any times that would work for the couchsurfer that accepted us so we headed for the long-distance bus station to find the local one on accident. The buses looked worn out and unable to make the 500km to Beijing and they said they’d take us there in 12 hours, about 8 more than we expected. We get frustrated and back track to a Mr. Lee’s that we saw around the corner. Again, we’d eat somewhere else but … nothing appears to be open and we wouldn’t be able to communicate or read the menu’s anyways. Beef noodle soup is all they are serving on the menu, OK, we’ll take that.

 

Rachel realizes the mistake I made with the local bus station and then we notice another one about 200 meters away. They have tickets, we get em, go to a nice bakery, buy some bread and muffins and get into a taxi to the mountain, Tai Shan. I should have told the taxi driver exactly where we wanted to go because she took us to the west entrance used for cars. We hike up the road for about a kilometer before we realize that we’re about 2.5 kilometers from where we want to be. So we make the cold walk back down to the street and catch a taxi to the “real” entrance. We’re getting worried that we might not have enough time to hike the mountain because the Lonely Planet says we should allow 2 hours to get to “Mid-Heaven” and that it will take us another 2 to get to the “South Gate to Heaven”. The admission ticket is a ridiculous $20 each but we pay it begrudgingly and begin the hardest climb we’ve ever made.

 

A wide stone path guided up 6660 steps over the course of 3.5 hours. Near the top we were stopping to rest almost every 20-25 steps. It was grueling. The weather was cool but not as bad as we’d feared due to the heat being generated by our bodies. We were covered in sweat and had to encourage each other onward. There were points where I was thinking, “Aw, to hell with this”. But the legend is that if you can make the climb, you’ll live to be 100 years old. We did make it, and luckily the high winds the night before had blown away a lot of the “fog” so we had a semi-clear view of the city and surrounding nature. It was beautiful and rewarding. We made it to the top and saw the other side of the mountain, got solicited by hotels up there and began to get really cold from the sweat, cold, and high winds up there. We went up some more stairs because I wanted to be at the very top where this white pagoda was. Once we reached it … complaining, I looked to my left and saw another large flight of stairs leading to a concrete complex. I looked at Rachel and she looked at me and we both agreed that it wasn’t possible for us to climb another step. We’d gone as far as we could go, we were cold, tired, and had 6660 steps and 5 kilometers to go down to get home. There was a cable car lift but Rachel refused to use it. So we began scaling down the steps to the dismay of our quadriceps.

 

At mid-way to heaven and 45 minutes later we were praying that the buses hadn’t stopped running because we were in no condition to do the last half on foot. We lucked out and after waiting for our small white bus to fill up, they drove us the rest of the way down. We got out of the bus and were really cold. This has been an ongoing condition in China actually. We found a taxi willing to drive us the short distance to our hotel. We eventually convinced him that we’d rather go to that “supermarket” again to stock up on beer, water, ramen, and Chinese doughnuts. After a short, cold walk home we both fell on the bed and turned the heater on full blast. It was a nice night, I talked to my buddy Bo, drank beer and told him about our conquest. Rachel texted Sylvia while I played Nintendo DS and passed out.

 

3-3-09

 

We woke up around 7 the next morning. Took another hot shower and headed out to Dai Temple in the middle of town. It was an excellent, fortified temple complex that we practically had to ourselves. We got to see all the temples inside, some of which are over a thousand years old. Unfortunately, they have been filled with trinkets, soda, and bottled water. Instead of enjoying the spirituality they were intended for, you get the hassle of refusing to buy stuff. Anyways, we ran along the walls which were four feet across at the top and built to withstand attacks and support archers. There was calligraphy everywhere and I wished I could read some of it. I’m really glad that we made it to this place because we almost missed our opportunity because we were just too tired the first day.

 

We headed back to the hotel, grabbed all our stuff and headed over to the bus station. We still had some time so went to eat some more noodles at Mr. Lee’s but this morning there was another place open next door and it had a decent amount of business inside (always a good sign). Rachel was cautious but we went in and there were a bunch of pictures on the wall of good looking food. We ordered something that looked like fried rice and realized that it was a Muslim run place. The Chinese were only eating the beef noodles that the youngish looking man was making by hand. I think that his wife/sister only agreed to make the fried rice because we were foreigners. Their daughter/younger sister came back through the front of the restaurant with two bags of rice after, apparently, buying the steamed rice from somewhere else. I kept watching the man running the front of the place. He expertly removed and replaced the coals that kept the steam from the broth pouring out of the front doors to attract potential customers walking by. He adjusted all the vents and handled the whole area like an artist, you could tell that he took pride in his work even though his facial expression never changed. The lady brought out some egg and vegetable fried rice, brought us some of the cilantro beef broth and it was a perfect breakfast.

 

We headed over to a bakery for more some muffin type things and water afterward. The lady at the bus ticket office kinda screwed us out of good seats by making us wait inside until the bus was ready to leave, and then we left Tai An under a speaker blaring Chinese pop music (which is surprisingly decent compared to the Korean variety). After an hour, our bus stopped at a rest area with a buffet restaurant that I would have enjoyed eating at, had I been hungry. We are getting cold again. Rachel watches a father encourage his 7 year old son to piss in front of the bus rather than in the public restroom which is 40 meters away, we wait outside the bus in the cold with all the other passengers while the drivers finish their meals. Then we’re off again.

 

Now I’m sitting with an apparently homeless woman on some steps at the back of the bus because my seat is too small for me to be in comfortably. Rachel is asleep, and we’re feeling pretty good I suppose.  

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Our bus pulls into Beijing, or at least we think it is, I show the guy the symbols for the city and he nods. We get off at a bus station but have no idea where it is in relation to everything else. The most incredible thing we can’t help but notice is the awful air. There is a thick haze that covers the entire city, it stretches unbroken from Beijing to Qingdao, which is a distance of over 800 kilometers. I can’t understand it. It seems to be such a contradiction to the first paragraph of a book I picked up in Qingdao about Chinese culture. It said that the foundation of Chinese culture is harmony with nature and family. This is the most blatant contempt toward the environment that I’ve ever seen and I have trouble understanding how it could be allowed to get so bad. Our host later said that today is particularly bad, but we lived in Seoul (which is larger) and never saw anything that could compare to this. I don’t want to harp on it, but it is magnificently out of control, much worse than I could have imagined, and common sense tells me that I shouldn’t breathe it for any longer than I have to. If this is a glimpse of the future, then we as a species are putting ourselves in grave danger.  I’m interested to see what health effects it creates and apparently it has been estimated that just breathing the air here is equivalent to smoking three and half packs of cigarettes a day.