Adam’s Not Here

3 seems to be my number of the moment. I got back to Shanghai 3 days ago (edit: when I started writing this. I wrote a big long entry and then it got deleted before I could post it, which bummed me out. Hence the delay) after parting ways with Monica and Dad in Hong Kong. The 3 of us had just wrapped up 3 solid weeks of travelling around China. Now I’m back, Mason has moved in and Damien arrives tomorrow. And now the 3 of us have 3 months of madness to look forward to. Sure, it doesn’t mean anything, but all this playing around with numbers after 6/6/6 (June 6, 2006) got me in the mood.

So anyhow, travelling around with Monica and Dad was great. I had meant to blog the journey, but didn’t really get the chance. Unfortunately, I’ve already forgotten lots of the interesting details. Beijing was great, and we managed to do it in such a way that I wasn’t just seeing the same stuff I had seen last October. Living on the 4th and now the 7th floor proved to be great training for the Great Wall, the steep steps were no problem. We also got to check out the Summer Palace, which I had missed last time, as well as take in one the Acrobat shows. From there we headed to Xi’an to check out the Terracotta Warriors, probably the top tourist site in China after the Great Wall and Forbidden City. I think we were all a little disappointed by the Warriors. Sure they were neat, but it’s really just a bunch of statues. You can’t live down travelling China and not seeing the Terracotta Warriors but I think their position near the top of the ‘must-see’ list is undeserved.

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Date: 05/19/2006Views: 444

From Xi’an we made a trip to Huashan, one of China’s holy Taoist mountains. It was kind of late by time we arrived, so we took a cable car up to the first peak (thank god). From there it was still a good 2 or 3 hour climb to the East Peak, where we spent the night. It was a gray and rainy day, so the path was slippery and you had to go slow. A couple sections were literally vertical sections of stone, with foot wedges cut in. You had to grab on to chains along the side and pull yourself up. It was kind of funny because there were so many sections where it would have been pretty easy to fall and break your neck or plummet a thousand metres. We kept on thinking they’d never let people do this back in the West. It’s really kind of fun, coming from a society where we print stuff on plastic bags like, “Caution! Putting this bag over head is dangerous and could lead to suffocation.” Thankfully the weather started to clear up the next day, and we got to see some fabulous scenery on the climb down.

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Date: 05/24/2006Views: 480

From Xi’an we then flew to Guilin, in the Southern part of China. I don’t know if it was the air, the rain, or the scenery, but stepping off the plane in Guilin I instantly felt this vibe that took me back to last summer in Southeast Asia. It was pretty unexpected and gave me this giddy excitement that I hadn’t felt in a while. We didn’t spend much time in Guilin, as we used it as a base for travelling to the neighbouring Dragon’s Backbone Rice Terraces and Yangshuo. The scenery in both these places was absolutely sublime, by far the best I have seen so far in China. The rice terraces were pretty impressive in both their scale and history. They are still tended but what is more or less traditional means, as they have been for the last 800 years or so. In Yangshuo we met up with Tasha and her friend Sharon. Biking through the areas surrounding Yanghsuo proved to be a real treat, especially because of Sharon’s fluent Mandarin. We stopped in an old village and Sharon had a chat with one of the villagers about the history of the place. She was able to relate to us the story of what this man’s family had been through from the time of the Cultural Revolution. His family had been full of prominent local scholars and officials, which became targeted during the Cultural Revolution. They had had their land confiscated, family heirlooms destroyed and were sent to work camps in the North. They were quite fortunate in that all the members of their family survived through the Cultural Revolution and work camps and have since had their old home restored to them. The home still had weather worn slogans spray-painted by the Red Guard on the exterior walls.

China has gone through so much since World War 2 and there are so many people here that have lived through some extraordinary times. While I get the feeling the people around me have so many stories (which they may or may not be comfortable telling), my Mandarin has a long way to go before I can really have this type of conversation. So I really appreciated Sharon’s help in connecting to one of the many stories that lie beneath the surface over here.

The last stop on the trip was Hong Kong, where it rained the whole time. Hong Kong is very different from the rest of China in the same way that Shanghai is, just more so. It’s very modern and westernized, and absolutely packed. It felt much more crowded than Shanghai and was as Monica observed, more like what one expected China to be like. The crowds weren’t unpleasant though, in fact, they were quite the opposite. All the people give Hong Kong a feeling of liveliness and energy that I really love. It was also really interesting to visit from an urban planning perspective. The geography of Hong Kong means that they are really short on space, so they have to use each bit of land as intelligently as possible. There was a lot of great architecture, and the transportation system is probably the best I have ever seen. I’m seriously thinking about using Hong Kong as a case study/example for my Master’s thesis.

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Date: 05/31/2006Views: 437

So in all, the trip was a total success. It was great to see Dad and Monica again, and we got to see some really awesome things. Near the end of the trip (on June 1) also marked 1 year since I have been away from Toronto. That’s nuts.