(Shanghai is one of China's representational cities: working fast towards the future... found a picture here... recently China put up its first nuats in space and plans a manned mission to the moon in the very near future... I would not be surprised if they beat us to Mars with a manned mission= China is called a third world country by economists... I don't think it is appropriate anymore... the country has brought more than 100 million people out of extreme poverty more than a decade ago... has a life expectancy that challenges the U.S., a very large portion of U.S. consumer products are made here... and the country has incredible road and communication systems (an estimated 100 million cell phones are thrown away every year... to get new ones mostly advance compared to U.S. standard cell phones... the health issues in the U.S. are daunting and stagnation in the economy back home are making this country about the same kind of place as the U.S. But I would not call it or the U.S a "developed country" until half of electricity and fuel sources are renewable... who will be first? at this rate it could be China and I will show you why I think so in the upcoming blogs.)
Having fun In Shanghai and exploring the streets:
(This is what a city bus can look like... there are so many different types.)
(Walking along the street in Shanghai, ample public transportation, and an infinite number of VW Jetta's China's Taxi car of choice!)
(Construction and McDonald's all over the city.)
(Panda cigs... helping to contribute to carbon dioxide emissions, lots of Chinese people like to smoke.)
The first night I went down to this place called the bund: the riverside district in Shanghai, the colors were neat but still does not compare to all the buildings in Manhattan... I still think New York is the city of all cities.
(maybe if I went to Hong Kong I would feel differently). There are a lot of famous buildings in this district... when looking at it, I got the feeling that it was kind of hoaxy, put up to impress all the foreign visitors. However, I heard from Joseph that the real estate construction yields almost instant occupancy in almost all new downtown high rises... there is a 10 percent increase almost every year. According to him, there was nothing on that side of the river just 25 years before, so it is pretty much instantly. What an amazing thing to see happening, cities being built overnight, and probably being torn down and re-built within one decade. I wanted to take pictures of myself here at the bund,standing with a travelers bag with a suit on. I think this well describes about me taking care of business in the most unlikely of circumstances.
(I did not feel like taking my hiking backpack this time so I brought this duffel bag.)
(This is the Bund)
(Places to recycle plastic cans, where recycle collectors (underclass) come by about every 2-3 minutes checking to see if there is some pet bottles to trade in for money)
(Fresh water, the drinking water from sinks is probably not safe, so almost everyone buys bottled water (citizens and tourists))
(The river water is pretty dirty, this explains pretty much why you can not drink water easily in this city)
Onwards...
I met my friends, Mike, Adnan and Omar that night in downtown in a shopping district at East Nanjing road. It was exciting and relatively easy to meet everyone.
(IU first ran into Adnan and Omar, my friends I met in Los Angeles... we play music together and they are originally from Pakistan.)
(Mike, my friend that I met originally when I lived in Tokyo (we became friends through a musical connection and ended up moving in together in Los Angeles and became really good friends... he is from northern Indiana. We had trouble meeting up at first but eventually were able to do it.)
(We also found a version of McDonalds (in Chinese - my-don-lao) with Mike's name in Shanghai)
We were greeted by a strange boy asking for money that was reciting very advanced English lines not really knowing the meaning, he said: "I am just a boy, I do not want your money, why wont you talk to me?,
if you do not talk to me, I will loose all hope in society." It may be hard to understand, but he did not appear hungry and to hear him saying this was extremely funny...Ever after seeing this kid we started to compile a list of all the funny people we met, I will introduce later. His name eventually "The Boy Who Might Loose All Hope In Society". We decided he was so ridiculous that I created a picture of him using photoshop, and the Chinese character, yep you guessed it means "hope".
(Mike was also greeted by him while waiting for us on East Nanjing Road, he thought he was annoying too.)
For the next few days we explored the streets of Shanghai, stayed at a great cheap youth hostel, found the incredible recycle centers for scrap metals and all the intensive crash course construction projects (as Joseph said, someone will recycle it even if the marginal profit is null, seeing it made me believe it)...and regarding new construction... it is almost like you can turn your head no more than
180 degrees and you are guaranteed to see a construction crane. We also saw an interesting art district where kids were doing what appeared to be legalized grafitti on the wall. The pictures are neat... but the faces of the painters looked numb, probably from inhaling the fumes of the spray paint cans all day.
(The four of us trying to get used to the humid air and thick pollution.)
(This was a neat temple we visited, it had seven floors on it representing the seven levels of consciousness in on a sect of eastern religious thought.)
(The neat art displays in Shanghai's modern art district, graffiti constantly being over-painted, Adnan really enjoyed looking at these displays since he is a animation artist himself.)
(Drinking Chinese 7-Up was refreshing in the heat.)
(Amazing picture arts, I like such winter depictions.)
(A picture of Omar, who is a public school teacher in Los Angeles enjoying the sunset scenery along the river in Shanghai.)
(I really found the blazing sunsets pretty here.)
(As we made our way towards the center of downtown this night we saw all kinds of trash being recycled and one of the most interesting findings was a huge recycle center we virtually every piece of metal you could find was being sorted out... I could not get a picture as the manager was suspicious.)
(A guy moving recycle materials to the recycle center... it's not recycling as we know it back home, but it gives you an idea of how flexible Chinese people can be to make their income... as raw materials and oil prices rise, I expect to see less and less landfill material and more and more circulation such as this (Jyunkangata in Japanese meaning circulation structured society)or what we also refer to as sustainable infrastructure.)
(Same story with foam packing materials.)
(Scrap pluming materials getting ready for re-use.)
After visiting Shanghai we went west to Anqua Province and visited the city of Anching... this was a really interesting place to see. We took a overnight train from Shanghai, it was my first time riding the train like this in China.
Although the guide books said that there was no interesting things to do in this town, we found tons of friendly people, music and events to participate in.
(Oil prices going up here too.)
(People getting gas.)
(More recycle materials being shipped by truck.)
(This was an amazing temple we visited, this display was about three stories tall!)
(Here is a huge bridge that crosses a local river here.)
From the top of the temple I discovered that in fact China is developing extensive use of solar... almost every house is equipped with this hot water producing solar device, see for yourself...
(Solar panels everywhere and not just in this city...)
(Some friends we made at the temple reciting Buddhists chants, we joined along and recieved a sour lemon treat at the end... the people in this town and many other places we went were very interesting.)
We saw live demonstrations of the local opera which is famous throughout the country. This was demonstrated on the street in front of the train station. When the four of us (Mike, Andy, Adnan and Omar) appreared,
we were asked to do some musical performance for them. We sang a Beatles song "Hey Jude" several of our originals and I tried playing the Chinese instrument R-hu (a two stringed instrument). We also sang a few Pakistani classics including Saheen, Bolea and Jani Bahana.
Following this, we went to see this local club with crazy music... where we did karaoke and they had this wild bouncing floor you could dance on (the whole thing was shaking to the music, difficult to dance on but fun once getting used to). It was like a giant bed and underneath it was springs that made it bounce, it resembled the following diagram I made using Adobe Illustrator.
(This was the best experience so far... the excited on this dance floor and their awesome techno music... it was a mind altering experience, really truly. Feeling the vibes of modern China was the most memorable moment and I will never forget that.)
We also made good friends with a local motorcycle repair man Jong Pin (he invited us to the club). The club was also crawling with meanies, there was a nice guy in the club that was beaten up outside by what appeared to be gangsters in the local town with glass bottles over the head, we tried to help get some medical assistance for him but were advised that there could be trouble with the local police. We were pretty sure it was some kind of fight over a girl, people can act like such dorks about that kind of stuff, its ridiculous.
(A picture of us with Jong Pin near the train station.)
In this province we also visited a very interesting place called Jihuashan, a mountain town filled with temples and people trying to sell you overpriced goodies. We road a bus here on bumpy roads at which one point I bounced out of my bed and almost hit the ceiling... it was crazy.
(This was the most interesting looking temple that we visited.)
(Another shot of it.)
Here at the town... we had a nice hike up to some temples see below and a short night of sleep before getting back on a bus and returning to Anching. This mountain temple town was filled with quit bells (not to mbe mistaken for wind chimes) that added a nice touch to the temple views. In the high mountains above the temples we could reach were many more temples that looked spectacular... what an interesting place hardly known to foreigners.
(Beautiful views in the background at the temples.)
(Sunset next to a bell.)
(If you highlight this picture with your mouse you can see the neat trees in the foreground.)
In Anching Jong Pin came to greet us once again before we got on the local bus to Beijing (16 hours) and took off. Before leaving we used the local internet cafe... they are littered with internet junkies playing video games.
The prices were also extremely cheap, about 10 cents per hour to use the internet. However the machines themselves are incredibly advanced... so I think that there might be some government subsidies on such places.
Going to and arriving in Beijing:
The bus ride to Beijing was brutal and very long... we were acquainted by a goofy local fellow managing the bus routes that remarkably resembled Kim Jun Il... in the end he did not drive but his brother did, so we named him
Kim Jung Il's brother... the bus was stuffed full of children at a "secret second stop" .. Kim Jung Ils brother would yell really loud at the kids everytime we would make a pit stop for the bathroom or something. Overall, the experience was very interesting but the bus was not the cleanest and made for a rough ride to the city of the 2008 summer olympics.
(The bus was packed with people and children... probably going home from summer camps.)
Once arriving in Beijing, we were shocked to see the forgery in construction projects (fake old feel looking new Chinese architecture (everything from high rises to street-side shops)) and temporary brand shop avenues built to I guess to satisfy foreign visitors... while witnessing this we took a pit stop and I got a hair cut... decided to die my hair black, blue, white and orange all at the same time at the local Chinese goth punk rock Hair cutting salon. I wish I could speak enough Chinese to tell the stylist that my sister was also in the profession and really good with her highlight techniques.
(No need to argue.)
(Chinese version of Wal Mart in Beijing.)
In some ways it felt pathetic and insulting to ones intelligence to see a unique culture trying so hard to please tourist in the typical way... at one point near the forbidden city, I saw an incredible site, a 6-10 block street under construction. Need I not say more, an entire street of "new" vendor shops was being built for tourists, seemed kind of dumb... what will Beijing look like after the olympics, it is hard to say, but the air pollution is a serious problem, you could hardly see more than 3 blocks in front of you, I hope that Beijing gets to the point where I can visit one day assured that it is proud of what it really is and where it really came from historically. I also hope that by that time the pollution in Beijing will be completely gone... its just in too much of a hurry to look cool like the other world cities.
We stayed at a youth hostel this night and did a performance for a small crowd in the the hostel's cafe. This was a very fun time and very calming... I started to catch a cold but at this time was not that bad. We played the cafe's guitar and hand drums, and I played my hand harp I received from my friend Asel when I was in Japan (from Kyrgyzstan)... by that time I figured out a couple of tricks about playing it, I wondered if it is hard on your teeth as a big piece of metal vibrates on them.
The next day we got on the train and continued on to our next destination, Mongolia, we had a plan to return to the city (Beijing) to do business take care of visas and meeting with others. The train ride to Mongolia would be intense and exciting...
(Omar and Adnan getting snacks at a convenience store (They look a lot like 7-11 chain stores in Japan but cheaper.)
(The sites of industrial areas after getting on the train, could not escape the smog of the area until we got well into Inner Mongolia.)
Early in the ride we made friends with a young, outgoing Mongolian boy that wondered the halls of the train looking for people to talk to. He could speak a little bit of English, Chinese and Mongolian. He was friendly but also grouchy, he would tell us to "shut up" and "go away" but then he would come back in and greet us in a friendly way... I will show pictures in the next blog.
We also met a very nice Mongolian familly (two sisters) travelling back to Mongolia... one was studying in Turkey and the other was studying in Beijing. It is interesting to see so many people studying in so many
different places around the world. These girls originated from a village out in the middle of the steepeland 300 miles west of Ulaanbatar yet they were studying in other countries. What assets and valueble knowledge will they bring back should they decide to settle in Mongolia or their home village in Mongolia? Certainly an enriched life, galvanized since of identity and a broader understanding of other countries...which brings me to my next conversation...
As we approached the border area near the Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia on the Chinese side another interesting thing that we noticed on the way to the border was the frquency of sand storms and blowing sand. One of the Mongolian friends that we met mentioned that it was the affect of global climate change on the area causing desertification. From her point of veiw it was really certain what was causing this phenomena... I got the impression that for young educated Mongolian people, it was only common sense to accept the research findings of climate change experts. As the sun set and we crossed the border we went to sleep for the night and got ready to wake up in the Mongolian grasslands.
The sleeper cars on the train are worth noting, there are four bunks stuck together in one room. This is just enough for the four of us, equipped with a fan and ample storage space for our luggage. At this point on the trip I had a hard time sleeping because there were so many exciting things to do and I ended up getting sick in the respitory, throat and sinus area. A mega cold was coming on,
and I was about to learn the difficulty of travelling while having a cold like that. About midnight, we stopped in the town of Erling, where we went through Chinese and Mongolian customs. That part took a while,
but more than that was the switching of train cars... for whatever reason, the Chinese and Mongolian train car wheels are totally different. (The Mongolian train wheels were switched on with giant jacks, converyors and cranses,
the entire process probably took 2 hours... it was really interesting to see that there was no international standard for train parts... onward to the great Asian steppe!!!
