Hangzhou

My photographs are piling up faster than I am making blog posts. This set is from Hangzhou, which is about two hours from here. Suzhou and Hangzhou are often mentioned together, as both are famously beautiful, and both have at times in history been fabulously wealthy cities. Both are also favorite tourist destinations for the Chinese, although still a bit off the beaten path for Western tourists. That became very clear to me when we went to Beijing, where sometimes it seemed there were as many Europeans and Americans out on the street as there were Chinese.

Here are some photos:

The lake at Hangzhou (West Lake) is very famous. At one spot in the lake, there are some little spires. No one I have asked so far can tell me what they are, but I haven't tried very hard to find out either. In any case, they appear on the back of the 1 Yuan (RMB) note. In fact, the guys trying to sell you boat rides hold up the bills to advertise.

This generated a bit of a family joke that we may try to go visit the scenes on the backs of all of the banknotes. In reality, this wouldn't be to hard, except for the Llasa Palace (50 RMB note), which is in Tibet. We have already seen both West Lake at Hangzhou (1 RMB note), and the Great Hall of the People in Beijing (100 RMB note). If you want to see pictures of all of the bills, you can go to Wikipedia, or to this site.

The Forbidden City

Just a few quick pictures of the Forbidden City from our May trip to Beijing. It really is immense and impressive. However, I did have, in a way, a bit of a strange reaction to it. Generally, this is the first great stop that tourists make in China. Under those circumstances, I can see that it would be quite overwhelming. But after nearly a year of living here, I have to say I felt a bit jaded. We've seen a lot of this sort of thing, just never quite so big.

In any case, it really is a fascinating companion to the some of the other great palaces I've seen, like Versailles and the Medici palace in Florence. Of course, both of those would fit inside with room to spare.

John, on a separate outing from the following pictures (no, we didn't stay until dark and change clothes in the public toilet). On the right is The-Square-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.

The following are some random pictures from within. As a side note, when I was buying tickets, I am quite sure that I guy tried to pick-pocket me and failed. It is among my major lifetime goals to never get pick-pocketed. I've trudged all over France without the Gypsy rings ever getting me, and I'm trying to keep the streak going. So far, I've never seen any street hustling in China that anywhere approaches the kinds of things I've ever seen in Europe.

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This last item is from a clock museum within the Forbidden City. It contains a huge collection of spectacularly ornate clocks that were gifts of state from the European nations to the Chinese emperors. Some of them are ingeniously elaborate, and include such things as singing birds (the songs produced by slide whistles powered by bellows), dancing figurines, fountains, and a golden elephant that swings its articulated trunk as it marches. A few clockworks are actually demonstrated twice a day, but many of the best ones are at least shown in action in a looping video.
The 18th century English clock above was my favorite. When the hour chimes, the mechanical figure writes a few Chinese characters in calligraphy. The actual action is only shown on the video mentioned above, but even still, it honestly ranks as one of the coolest things I've ever seen in a museum.

The Nanjing Massacre Memorial and Museum

This post is all from an outing I took with John about a month and a half ago to Nanjing. It was a different trip from the one shown in an earlier post. Lee and the girls were up to something or other for the day (I can't remember what), so we did a little father and son outing.

John has a book of World War Two sites that can be seen in Asia and the Pacific. Nanjing is the only one on the list that is in easy range of us. The big thing to see there is the Nanjing Massacre Memorial and Museum, and that is where we went.

Upwards of a quarter of a million Chinese in the Nanjing area were killed by the invading Japanese during the war. It is a very sore subject for the Chinese, not only for the horror itself, but for the continuing Japanese tendency to ignore and dismiss wartime atrocities (huge protests broke out a few years ago simply because yet another round of Japanese school textbooks were adopted that whitewashed the whole affair).

I don't have an organized story to go with this, so I will just drop comments as I go. Outside of the museum is a line of rather abstract statues. They have something of the effect, perhaps, of Picasso's Guernica. Each one has a caption that is worth reading, you should be able to read them if you click on them. They kind of capture the general tone of the place, which could just as well be called the "Nanjing Anti-Japanese Memorial". Throughout the memorial and museum, the sense of rage and despair are very palpable.

Past this line of statues (there are several more beyond these four), is the entry to the museum and memorial. At the gate, each guest is asked to write their nationality on a list. I've never had anywhere else ask us to do that. One could assume that this was just for statistical purposes, but I did look through the list quickly and I noted that there were no Japanese on it. Then again, if I were Japanese and coming here, I would sign as a Korean.

The grounds are quite dramatic, and make very good use of space to seem otherworldly.


Here a few pictures of photos and displays within the museum.

The Japanese entry into the city of Nanjing.

The Japanese entry into Suzhou, including a Japanese flag signed by soldiers to commemorate the day.

A torture device, a gibbet of sorts, in which the victim was tumbled. If you look closely, you will see that there are spikes lining the inside. There were actually far more gruesome implements and images, but some of the areas had guards standing by, and the Chinese prohibition of photography is always completely arbitrary. I didn't want to antagonize anyone.

Human remains in an excavation. This is in a different area than the pair that follows.

The centerpiece of the museum is a large excavated area of victims that have been left in situ, and the building has been built around them. It was quite a moving exhibit, even allowing for the distracting horror movie style music playing softly through the PA system.

A very interesting incident occurred for us here. A Chinese woman (probably around age 50), seemed to shadow John for part of the walk. When he stopped part way through, she stepped up to him and said, in English, "Do you believe it is real?!", in a tone that seemed to suggest that he must go forth and bear witness of what he saw there.

As I said, this place brings out real passions for the Chinese.

Miscellany

Some more photos that, considered individually, are not interesting enough to get their own blog entries.

The Suzhou train platforms. On the right is one of the high-speed (150+ mph) trains that runs the Shanghai to Nanjing line.

Left: Taken in Hangzhou. The ugliest outfit ever. It looks like it is made of dead Muppet babies. The purse is a nice touch.

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Right: Taken in Nanjing. The only American-style punk street tagging I have ever seen in China. I'm hoping it never catches on.

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If your Big Mac wasn't enough, treat yourself to a red bean pie next time you go to Mac do do (more or less how it is pronounced in Chinese).

A few more pictures of Zhenjiang

It is a rainy Saturday morning, and I'm stalling before going out to run some errands. Here's some more pictures of varying quality that may nevertheless look interesting to someone out there. All were taken in Zhenjiang.

Zhenjiang

Here is a set of pictures from another outing that I didn't post about previously. In February we spent a couple days in Zhenjiang. It is a smaller city along the Yangtze river to the West. Of course, "smaller city" doesn't quite mean the same thing in China. This one, for example, has a population of around three million. I made some comments about relative city size in a previous post, so I will move on.

Some of you may know that Lee went to China two and a half years ago as part of the Sister Cities organization. This city, Zhenjiang, is where she stayed. It is, therefore, part of the reason we have ended up doing and being where we are right now. Lee's experience helped push both of us to consider teaching overseas. That had always been a eventual plan of ours, and I even tried to apply to the U.S. Department of Defense school system (for military dependents) clear back when I first got my teaching certificate. Back then, it didn't take long for me to figure out that a new teacher with a non-teaching spouse and two dependents was not an attractive candidate. The overseas plan was shelved indefinitely, and had in effect become a retirement plan. The plan resurfaced once we began to feel that the kids could really gain by it, and it would matter for their educational and personal growth. At that point, we decided that it was time to take action, rather than just have them experience it from a distance as something cool that Mom and Dad did long after they had moved out.

From the very beginning, Lee specifically wanted to go to Suzhou (she had visited it that summer). However, although China was the initial inspiration, once the actual job search began, we cast the net far wider. A number of schools took us very seriously as candidates, and with a few twists of fate, we might have ended up in Latvia or Croatia or Lebanon or Turkey or China. Each place, in its turn, inspired great enthusiasm, and since we took each of our interviews very seriously, almost every single one was briefly "my life long dream" of where to live. I will tell you that the mental whiplash of constantly switching between cities, climes, and continents was possibly the most surreal experience of my entire life.

In the end, we ended up only an hour away from Zhenjiang, and in the exact city that Lee had wanted from the beginning. I'll leave it to you whether that represents ironic fate, or the culmination of inspiration, hard work, good preparation, and blessings. I know where we stand on that question.



Zhenjiang is not a major tourist area, but it does have a really nice Buddhist temple. It is an enormous complex of jumbled buildings and twisting stairs. On the left, John is in the photo.



This is another nearby temple, that is on a small island in the Yangtze river. Ann as per your comment, here is further evidence that your mother was actually here (and evidence that I read your comments).


John, hamming it up.


It was a very misty day. This is an evocative scene of a ramshackle old boat on a quiet spur of the Yangtze. One interesting part of the scene is hard to pick out in the photo, so I have a closer view below.


A pig carcass washed up on the shore of the Yangtze.

An evening out at a Hotpot restaurant, a regional tradition from Sichuan province that has become popular nationwide. Basically, it is a big pot of boiling broth, into which everyone puts their selections of tidbits and delicacies, and which everyone then shares. Options include a variety of meats, noodles, vegetables, and dumplings. Strangely, a good Hotpot restaurant is something that we have yet to chase down in Suzhou. We know they are here, but few have English menus. We do occasionally go places without English menus, but it is a lot of work.

In the left photo is Janet (Lee's mother, who was visiting) with Emma. They are displaying their duck feet, if you can't tell. On the right, Lee is with Christine, the teacher who hosted Lee in her home during the exchange in 2006.


One more photo for good measure. A local boy under attack by fearless and overfed pigeons.