Because we went trekking with camels I had the luxury of packing some heavier items — which, in this case, and to my supreme delight, included the weighty Hasselblad camera. Below are some favorite photos that were captured on film:
Posts Tagged 'China'
Pack camels and heavy cameras
Published 25 June 2009 Uncategorized 1 CommentTags: China, hasselblad, photography, Xinjiang
To the Desert Planet (trekking beginnings)
Published 24 June 2009 Uncategorized 1 CommentTags: camels, China, Karakul, Mutzagh-Ata, trekking, Xinjiang
After our initial foray into Kashgar, we left the next morning to head for the hills (literally). Our whole trip was organized with the help of the Beijing Hikers, so all we had to do was role out of bed in the morning and head down stairs to meet our local guides and bus, along with our four other traveling companions (Steffan, Chuck, Han Ye, and Jo).
We drove out of the poplar-lined city of Kashgar and towards the Pamir mountain range on the far western border of China. The 3 1/2 hour drive along the Karakoram Highway was beautiful, through fruit market filled towns and past golden fields of wheat (we were there during harvest time), towards white, snow-capped mountains. After stopping for a few photo ops along the way (at the red and sand mountains, respectively, pictured below), we ended at the incredibly beautiful Karakul Lake. The lake is home to a large Kyrgyz settlement and is the starting point for many camel treks into the surrounding mountains. As such we were no novelties to the locals, who swarmed around our bus and seemed to haggle with our local guides on all manner of camel-loading (I think…) related issues. For our four-day trek around Karakul Lake and to the base of Mutzagh-Ata we loaded up five camels (who did not spit at me, despite several warnings to the contrary, and who I thought were pretty awesome) and set out from the lake at just before 2 o’clock to begin the trekking part of our adventure.
The first day we hiked about five hours around the lake and through a dry riverbed to our first camp of the trip. After getting in to camp we were all pretty exhausted and a little out of it from the altitude (about 3,900 meters), so we spent most of the (very chilly) evening resting in our tents. By the time we had rolled in to camp the clouds had rolled in, too, so it was an awesome surprise to wake up in the middle of the night to a serenely starry sky lighting up Mutzagh-Ata (Father Ice Mountain, in Uighur) in the background. I made Craig get up too, and we wandered out of our tent to spend a cold twenty minutes admiring the moonlit mountain and the incredibly quiet beauty of the valley. In the morning we poked our heads out of our tent again to see the picture above — soft sunlight rolling across the snowy mountains, shaking us from our sleepy stupor with its beauty.
The second day we backtracked slightly from our riverbed camp and walked through the valley floor, stopping along the way at a Kyrgyz village where our local guide happened to know a family who let us in and graciously shared their food; bread and yak yoghurt, the local specialty, which were incredibly tasty after a long morning’s hike. Most of the area locals are nomads and walking out of the village we saw many herds of sheep and goats and yaks across the valley floor. It was walking among these many animals across the increasingly lush (and wet…) valley that we came upon our second night’s camp, nestled in the outskirts of another small Kyrgyz village. After an incredibly delicious dinner of a western pasta and a local lamb dish served with naan, we went to bed to rest up for our hard climb up to Mutzagh-Ata’s base camp the following morning.
For more photos from the trip (yes! there are so many more), view my Picasa page here. More updates on the remainder of the trip coming soon!
Mosques, meats and Mao in Kashgar
Published 22 June 2009 Uncategorized 4 CommentsTags: China, Kashgar, Xinjiang
We took an early flight out of Beijing and after a brief layover in Urumqi our plane made a dusty landing at the Kashgar International Airport. We were met by our local Uighur guide, Petidin Abdul Kiyum or simply “Patty,” and bussed downtown to our hotel. Although it’s thousands of kilometers east of China’s capital, the Xinjiang province, like the rest of the PRC, runs on Běijīng shíjiān (“Beijing time”) and the sun doesn’t set until well after 10 pm. With the extra daylight we got to thoroughly explore Kashgar’s deliciously-greasy, cart- and kebab-filled downtown.
In the center of town sits the Idgah Mosque, the largest in China, where the large Muslim local population comes to pray several times a day. The temple’s thick, orange walls and densely planted poplars make the mosque’s open air interior a true sanctuary from the hustle and bustle outside. We padded around in bare feet for a while before heading back out through the enormous, copper-covered front doors.
The nearby streets are cluttered with electric bicycles, hawkers offering fresh melon by the slice and the occasional livestock. Local Muslim women often wear a full veil while the recent Han Chinese immigrants are more partial to the miniskirt and heels. It was apricot season while we were there so we loaded up on the sweet little fruits and also noshed on some kebabs and salty bagels, but we steered clear of the stewed goat head being ladled up fresh and steaming.
Following a loud and constant tapping sound, we headed down the street to find several copper smiths hammering smooth some enormous bowls sold by weight. We picked up a beautiful slotted copper spoon, perfect for fishing cooked jiaozi out of boiling water.
After some fresh fruit, a new kitchen implement and one last shower, we got into our (“Chinese firm”) bed and nodded off at around 11:00 as the last streaks of sunset slipped over the horizon, right behind the gigantic statue of Mao looming across the street from our hotel.
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- Kashgar recycling center
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- Tying cherries into bunches
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- Melon by the slice
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- A pathway through poplars
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- The gatekeepers
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- Idgah Mosque
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- PROPAGANDA!
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- Courtyard soccer star
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- Scythes and stares
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- Nuts!
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- Kebab noms
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- Our spoon in in the middle of the second row
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- Grandma’s bagels
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- Bread or wheels?
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- Three for me
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- Piddle sticks
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- Pee pot potter
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- Sufei’s a new, old age girl
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- Tiny Uighur hats cannot contain my head
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- Building him up
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- Salute!
A week in Xinjiang…
Published 21 June 2009 Uncategorized 2 CommentsTags: China, Han, Karakul, Mutzagh-Ata, Uighur, Xinjiang
Crank and I just got back from a week-long excursion to the Xinjiang province of China. Though many probably haven’t heard of Xinjiang, it is actually China’s largest province and has an incredibly rich history, steeped in the heart of the Silk Road, which I knew nothing about before visiting. Turns out: Xinjiang is hugely important to China. One-sixth the total size of the country, rich in natural resources like oil, gas and minerals, and bordering eight different countries, Xinjiang is a target for intense PRC scrutiny. Although it does not have the media profile of Tibet, Xinjiang has similarly been a target of ethnic conflict and at times cultural suppression. The area is ethnically quite different from the rest of the mainland, with a completely different linguistic family and alphabet (part of the Turkic languages). The majority of the population is Uighur (Turkic Muslims), with small pockets of Kazakh, Hui, Kyrgyz, and other ethnicities. Over the last century more and more Han Chinese have moved into the west, so that now Han Chinese are the second largest ethnic group in the region (second to the Uighurs).
I feel ill-equipped to adequately address the political and ethnic tensions that underlie the vast Xinjiang province. I know that a similar story afflicts Xinjiang that is prevalent in so many areas where different cultures and politics come to a head. I can really only speak to our narrow experience, which introduced us to Han, Uighur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz people. To us, evidence of tension seemed sporadic but was there — terse discussions of Mao’s influence on the Xinjiang people while driving past his statue looming over the town’s square; road signs that we learned were changed into a new language to prevent locals from learning English; our guide’s brief mention that he is unable to get a passport or leave the country. But for each strange tense episode there was evidence of different, less politically divided real life — our Uighur guide joking with our Han cooks; local Kyrgyz villagers conversing with American travelers in broken Chinese. For now it seems China’s relationship with the Xinjiang people and province will remain a quixotic one — them continuing to keep hold of an important strategic resource and encouraging development of the area while trying to protect the value of the region’s unique cultural history.
More posts soon on some of our specific exploits in camels and kebabs and windy old town streets, but for now a brief itinerary of our travels and some teaser photos:
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Day 1: Flew from Beijing to Urumqi (capital of Xinjiang), and then on to Kashgar.
Day 2: Left Kashgar for the incredibly beautiful Karakul Lake, close to the border of Kyrgysztan. Met up with our camels and began trekking!
Day 3: After breaking camp from our riverbed site (with amazing views of the mountain) we continued trekking, today through two new Kyrgyz villages.
Day 4: The plan: Walk up to the basecamp of Mutzagh-Ata, camp for the night. The reality: Stepho gets horribly ill, we spend the day and night camped out in the home of a Kyrgyz nomad while Stepho lies unmoving for 36-hours, trying to recover. Family thinks she has swine flu. She does not.
Day 5: We drive back to Kashgar. Some people continue to explore the city, others continue to explore the fascinating reaches of the hotel bed.
Day 6: Spend the morning visiting the Old City of Kashgar, filled with winding roads and hundreds of Uighur families, and then head to the airport for our flights back home.
The Baby-Butt Phenomenon
Published 15 June 2009 Uncategorized 6 CommentsTags: butt-less pants, China, diapers
Among the many interesting cultural phenomenons we have come across in our time here, one of my all-time favorites is the butt-less baby pants. Perhaps you’ve seen them before — all manner of clothes, from baby-snugglies to cargo shorts to girls’ leggings (a personal favorite, see photo above), simply missing their middle.
To me it started as a comical site — adorable children, running around with their baby butts hanging out. What could be cuter? But I have grown increasingly curious about this custom, including its cultural background, its health implications, and its impact on the economy of diapers.
Though it seems that the trend might be slowing, particularly among the upper-middle class, the butt-less pants are still incredibly prevalent almost everywhere in China we’ve traveled, on children ranging in age from zero to three. To me one of the most fascinating things is the implications the clothes have on the rearing and potty-training of children. Where most parents in the U.S. slap a diaper on their kids and wait until they are around 24 months to start potty training, it seems many Chinese parents begin this conditioning right after birth. (Except it’s not really potty training, it’s often training to potty in the most public of places). Probably my favorite viewing of this in action was atop the Summer Palace, where a mother was encouraging her diaper-less, semi-clad infant to pee in front of a crowd of dozens and dozens of people passing by. Besides trying not to step in his pee, I was mostly in awe that this several week old child was being conditioned to go to the bathroom on command.
Perhaps I am amaze by these things because I was a late bloomer when it came to potty training (I stubbornly refused to take off diapers until my preschool threatened to not enroll me at the age of over three…). Nevertheless, it has made me question our insistence on diapers and makes me wonder at the capabilities of children to absorb conditioning and knowledge from such an early age.
Also, I think it will just be one of those cultural differences that never fails to make me smile.
Top 5 iPhone Apps for Traveling in China
Published 12 June 2009 Uncategorized 3 CommentsTags: app store, China, chinese apps, iPhone, iphone 3.0, iphone app
While the iPhone hasn’t officially yet come to mainland China (to the glee of black marketeers) Apple’s shiny wonder brick is the modern traveler’s best friend. Beyond the conveniences of Skype, news and weather, here are some Sino-specific apps that have been helpful during our travels in China.
Qingwen Chinese Dictionary – This impressively large dictionary contains over 80,000 entries, ranging from “check please” (maidan) to “Stephanopolous” (“Sitefannuopuluosi”). Mr. Stephanopolous has yet to come up in conversation, but I like to be prepared. Qingwen has been utterly indispensable in our studies here. We downloaded it when it was free, but today at $4.99 the app is still a total steal. Many of the students at our school are using extremely similar dedicated electronic dictionaries that cost upwards of a hundred bucks that don’t do too much more than Qingwen. DianHua Dictionary is a good, free alternative. It’s not as slick as Qingwen but its search function does allow for mixing characters, Pinyin and English.
Currency – There are many currency converter apps out there that want to charge you 99 cents. This one is free, simpler and, therefore, better than all the rest. Enough said.
Lonley Planet Mandarin Phrasebook – There’s lots of phrasebooks scattered across the sprawling app store, but LP’s is the slickest one. With over 600 phrases, easy search and helpful categories, you can quickly find the phrase you’re looking for. Each phrase is written in English, Pinyin and simplified Mandarin characters and also includes an audio option where a native speaker says aloud the phrase. For getting around the country or ordering food it’s quite useful. World Nomads Mandarin Language Guide is a decent, free alternative.
Panda Words – Learning to correctly write Mandarin characters requires three things – practice, practice, practice. But to practice you’ve got to know what order to draw the strokes. Panda words has animated demonstrations of hundreds characters so you can see how it’s done. The app lets you practice write on the screen but if you don’t want your characters looking like they were drawn by a toddler using MS Paint, I recommend sticking with pen and paper.
Beijing Metro – For 99 cents, it’s worth having a complete map of Beijing’s sprawling, and growing, metro in your pocket. All the stations are labeled in Pinyin as well as Mandarin characters. It’s even got a built in taxi card generator, so if you need to get from the hotel to the nearest subway station you can just show your phone to the driver and he’ll be able to read where you want to go.
Food, glorious food (and tea, too). Part 11
Published 10 June 2009 food 5 CommentsTags: Beijing, China, Maliandao, tea, tea street
Longjing, a green tea varietal
Last week Craig and I took a “Tea Tasting Safari” tour of Maliandao Street with the culinary tour company Hias Gourmet. Maliandao, located in the south-west of the city, is an area that boasts nearly one thousand tea shops on a kilometer-long stretch of road. The area is now quite developed, with lots of well-established shops and even large mall-complexes with hundreds of tea shops each, but this was not so several years ago. Before concerted government development in 1996, the area used to draw farmers who came with enormous bags of loose teas and sold them on the open street. Now the area, which is right next to the Beijing West Railway Station, still draws farmers from around the country, but they instead are selling to the hundreds of tea shops that now line the street.
Our first stop on the tour was into one of the “tea malls” on Maliandao. Walking in to the building I was daunted, to say the least. Having grown up on Lipton and Celestial Seasonings, my knowledge of tea was pretty much confined to how to put a tea bag in hot water (and even that I often managed to foil, somehow), so the thought of hundreds of stores with even more varieties of loose leaf teas…well it made me thrilled to have a guide at my side, I’ll say that.
A quick background on the many varieties of tea: there are a total of seven tea varieties, which are distinguished by their methods of processing, and each of which have their own distinctive flavors. These are:
- Green tea (lù chá 绿茶): Most common tea in China. The tea is unfermented and the leaves are pan-fried right after being picked. The leaves are also commonly used to make balls of flower tea.
- White tea (bái chá 白茶): White tea is made exclusively in China. It is slightly fermented.
- Red tea (hóng chá 红茶): Red tea is a fermented tea; it is what we in the West refer to as English black tea.
- Yellow tea (huáng chá 黄茶): Another slightly fermented tea that goes through a process of “smothering” which turns the leaves from green to yellow.
- Puer tea (pŭ’ĕr chá 普洱茶): Puer tea can be made from green, oolong, or black teas. It has a very strong, distinctive flavor which places the tea in its own category. The tea is fermented and unlike other teas ages well.
- Oolong tea (wū lóng chá 乌龙茶): A partially fermented tea somewhere between green and black teas.
- Black tea (hēi chá 黑茶): Chinese black tea is fully fermented. It should be distinguished from the English and Irish teas we commonly refer to as black, which in China are red teas.
Our first stop in the building was the Cha De Fang tea shop, where we tasted our first “hua cha”, or flower tea. You might notice that this isn’t in the list I just mentioned, which is of course a little confusing. The ball-like teas that expand in water to become beautiful flowers (photos below) are actually green tea; they are handmade by sewing green tea leaves around flower buds (so crazy!!). From Cha De Fang we moved on to various other tea shops, sampling their varieties and learning about various aspects of tea culture and methods of serving tea. Some of my favorites of the day, for flavor and also for name, were Love at First Sight (a flower tea) and Iron Goddess of Mercy (an oolong variety). We also tasted longjing, one of the most famous green tea varieties, and a three-year old “imperial grade” (higher quality, more finely shredded) Pu’er tea from the Yunnan province of China.
I have to say all of the teas we sampled were incredibly tasty and made me want to swear off Liptons forever. Going in to the tea shops I was daunted by the incredible variety on offer and wondered at how to choose from among the hundreds on-hand. My biggest lesson from our tour was that “quality” in tea is really a subjective thing — in fact buyers will almost always wait for you to taste the teas, see which ones you like best, and then price accordingly.
I would definitely recommend a trip to Maliandao to experience the incredible variety and deliciousness of teas that China has to offer. A couple of tips for prospective buyers:
- Ask to taste! Shop owners seemed happy to serve you tea, and you should really only buy something after you’ve tasted it. If it’s your first time with Chinese teas ask to taste a sampling — green, oolong, flower teas. You will leave happy.
- If you’re not sure on prices, ask to taste a low-end tea, and then ask to taste a high-end tea. If you taste the two ends of the spectrum you can see what suits you and hopefully be given a fair price for what you buy.
- Buy what you like — there is really no standard on quality. The five qualities for judging tea are: smell; color; shape of leaves; taste; aftertaste. But really, whatever is most delicious to you is the thing to buy.
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- “Love at First Sight” hua cha
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- Chrysanthemum hua cha
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- Another flower tea
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- Hua cha (flower tea)
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- Longjing, a green tea varietal
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- Imperial grade Puer tea
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- Zhi sa, the stone used in making traditional Chinese tea pots
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- A collection of traditional tea pots
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- Jasmine tea
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- Craig smelling green tea leaves
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- Puer tea (all the hardened tea in a disc shape is Puer)
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- In front of a tea shop on Maliando Street
The World of Chinese Warcraft
Published 9 June 2009 Uncategorized Leave a CommentTags: Beijing, China, online game, World of Warcraft, WoW, WoW China, Zhongguancun
In moving to Beijing’s Haidian district, we swapped California’s Silicon Valley for China’s own Silicon Alley. We live right next to Zhōngguāncūn, the city’s technology hub, and can see Microsoft, Google and Sun Microsystem buildings from our apartment. Lenovo’s global HQ is just up the street while AMD and Intel have side-by-side campuses around the corner. In the midst of all this are five technology bazaars where a geek with some hardnosed bargaining skills can haggle for anything computer related.
But in the basement of these mall-sized computer markets are huge playgrounds for video game nerds where hundreds of HDTVs have Wiis, Xboxes and PS3 dangling from them. Meanwhile, internet cafes full of PCs rent access to virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and EverQuest by the hour.
The Saturday afternoon I was there was particularly intriguing as two professional video game teams battled it out in front of an audience complete with streaming video to huge-screen TVs, bleachers and even commentators. Run by GTV.com.cn, the two teams of five each battled old-school style, in the world of WarCraft III’s Azeroth (pictured here).
The popularity of arcades and huge gaming halls is, like so many things in China, in part driven by harsh government regulation. Console video game systems (Nintenos, Xboxes and Playstations) have been officially banned since 2000. Meanwhile, PC games have to be approved by the State Press and Publication Administration. Games like World of Warcraft have been repeatedly denied approval and need to have “offensive” material removed before entering the immense and growing Chinese market. The government has also cracked down on unlicensed internet cafes, closing an estimated 15,000 “shàngwăng bā” last year.
Of course, like any good prohibition, these bans have simply made the business of video games all the more lucrative for the enterprising individual. The gray and black markets for video games, both real and pirated, have been flourishing. Console video game sales soared to $4.7 billion last year, up from $3.2 billion in 2007, according to a report by China Software Industry Association. Meanwhile, online gaming posted record sales in 2008 of $2.75 billion in 2008, up 61% over 2007, according to the research firm Niko Partners.
But the PRC will not sit idly by while its youth are sucked into virtual worlds. The government has been setting up internet addict clinics for youth who spend hours blasting foes online. “Led by Tao Ran, a military researcher who built his career by treating heroin addicts, the clinic uses a tough-love approach that includes counseling, military discipline, drugs, hypnosis and mild electric shocks.”
These draconian methods have not deterred gamers, who number nearly 60 million. And the number is growing quicker here than nearly anywhere else in the world, likely surpassing the number of US gamers this year, to the notice of game makers. Giant billboards for World of Warcraft soar above busy Beijing streets while WoW has even earned a spot in my electronic Mandarin dictionary – 魔獸世界 or “Móshòushìjiè.”
However, since this past weekend, Chinese WoWers have been without their fix as the makers of the game are sloppily transitioning from one licensing company to another to host their Chinese operations. When the lights in Azeroth come back on at the end of the month we’ll see how many Chinese paladins return to smite the nonbelievers.
Happy Birthday Christmas dinners
Published 8 June 2009
food
1 Comment
Tags: Beijing, birthday, China, food, Le Quai, restaurants
25!
For Crank’s birthday this past Saturday we celebrated by visiting Le Quai restaurant, a modern Chinese restaurant with French influence located next to the Worker’s Stadium.
The meal was, for the most part, incredibly delicious (minus one appetizer that brought to mind jello-molds of raw chicken…). We started off drinking some tasty Chilean wine, a Cabernet-Merlot mix that was way better than anything we’ve been finding on the supermarket shelves. After our jello-molded “Sichuan flavor” chicken (which I’d prefer to forget about), the meal started with a delicious battered shrimp, two ways — with a peach-honey glaze and a panko crusted wasabi coating. This was followed by a crispy duck dish infused with black tea (tasty, though not as good as the Peking-style duck the city is famous for). We also had a Beijing-style noodle dish with some meaty-sauce that was definitely on the list of most-tasty-bites of the evening. My favorite dish of the evening was probably the green beans, though, which were served with steamed bread to make tasty little sandwiches and were incredibly flavorful.
The whole evening was great — the food was tasty, the presentation was elegant, and the restaurant itself was incredibly beautiful, with an entrance filled with intricate woodwork and sculptures. The one caveat to the ambiance, which ended up being mostly humourous, was that the soundtrack to our entire evening was a Christmas-hits compilation they decided to loop continuously. Ohh Jingle-Bells. How you remind me of warm, June evenings….
Merry Christmas Craig! (And Happy Birthday, too…)
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- View from the outside
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- Apparently a Slow Food restaurant!
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- Inside the restaurant
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- Chilean Cabernet/Merlot, for celebrating
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- The birthday guy
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- Crusted shrimp with honey peach glaze
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- Crispy black tea duck
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- String beans with deliciousness.
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- Beijing-style noodles
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- Our sandwich creations.
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- Stepho
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- The outside deck
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- Birthday Card Pounce
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- Behold the strange animal cakes of China!
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- Unfortunately…it tasted pretty awful.
China vs. the Internet
Published 8 June 2009 Uncategorized 2 CommentsTags: Beijing, Censorship, China, Great China Firewall, Internet
You’ve heard me complain about China’s internet censorship before, but with the recent twentieth anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square the PRC has redoubled its efforts to block a huge amount of content online that might fracture China’s official historical record.
Consequently, Steph and I have been having a hard time logging on to update the blog. It seems that things are back up and working now so we’ll be putting up a bunch of new content soon. But first, here’s a list of recently blocked sites dubbed as threats to the peace and prosperity of the People’s Republic of China:
- Self-indulgent ramblings of hipsters (Twitter.com)
- Susan Boyle (YouTube.com)
- Your eight-year-old brother’s blog (Blogger.com)
- Ceiling and basement cat (icanhascheezburger.com)
- Your vacation photos (Flickr.com)
- Your grandma’s email (Hotmail.com)
- StephoandCrank.com (WordPress.com)
