Pomp and Ceremony

So while my lack of entries may lead you to believe that I have been endlessly busy exploring every corner of Asia, hiking over the Himalayas and sailing down the Yantze River and discovering 5000-year-old temples, conversing with the Chinese elite in my flawless Mandarin, hanging out with Jackie Chan, while still managing to teach 750 Grade 8 students how to sing Michael Jackson songs, well you're partially right. But only on the last two points.

I am still teaching away, and really that's all I've been doing the last few weeks. Nothing exciting, just life as usual. This past weekend, however, all of us waiguorens got to get on a bus to Guangzhou, the capital city of Guangdong Province, and attend the opening ceremonies of the Guangdong International Tourism and Culture Festival held in the huge stadium, Tianhe Sports Centre. This festival is all about promoting tourism in Guangzhou and the surrounding region and reminding visitors that there is more to China than the Great Wall and the Terracotta Warriors.

Guangzhou's (known to the 19th century English-speaking expats as "Canton City") history stretches back about 2200 years. It fostered important trade links with the European world from the 16th century onwards as a busy port city at the mouth of the Pearl River. The British were especially active traders in this region and eagerly pushed the import of opium to balance their trade deficit with China. The Chinese government was rather against the use of this drug and its degrading effects on society and tried to outlaw trade, leading to the infamous Opium Wars of the mid-1800s. In the aftermath, China was forced to sign unfair treaties with Britain and several other countries intervened to force more trade within China.
Source

How things change over a century and a half! From the fall of the emperors to the rise of communism and the closing off of China to the rest of the world to its subsequent re-opening and remarkable, almost frenzied, push for economic reform. History is a volatile thing.

So back to the opening ceremonies - they were impressive, I can't deny that, but SO overdone! The government can't do anything festive without first putting on the most opulent display of fireworks, acrobats, colours, lights, animals, dancers, singers, musicians - just thousands of people performing from girls dressed from head to toe in gold to martial arts to people re-enacting the imperial army complete with galloping horses and riders doing stunts on their back. . . they even had real birds swimming in this artificial moat where all the fireworks were going off. This went on for hours. How long did it take to plan this? And how much did each one of those 1000 performers get paid? And if this is what they do for the opening of an annual tourism festival in one city, what the hell are the opening ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Olympics gonna be like?? One can only speculate. . .

So it was interesting and fun to go to the provincial capital, although we didn't see much of it. We did see Jackie Chan though! He came out at the end of the ceremonies on this big float to perform this duet with Song Zuying, a famous Chinese singer. And then he was gone. And we were gone, back to Shenzhen. The next day all the foreign teachers gathered for a massive Thanksgiving potluck (American Thanksgiving, that is). We had everything - turkey, mashed potatoes, yams, cranberries, pumpkin pie, as well as some more untraditional things like sushi and fruit and bread and cheese. Western food - enough said. It was a blast.

And now it's back to teaching. Am I enjoying it still? Yes, it is always challenging and entertaining but sometimes I just need a vacation. Our big break is Jan/Feb for Chinese New Year and we are already counting the days. Of course, in the Chinese fashion, they are rather vague as to WHEN exactly we will be done, and will most likely tell us the day before. But as soon as they say the magic words, I am outta here! First to see more of China, and then perhaps, south to explore some more countries.

Tai Long Wan

Went on a hiking adventure in the New Territories this past weekend - we took the train into Hong Kong territory, hopped on a bus, took a cab, and then a mild hike through mostly rural territory to the stunning Tai Long Wan (Big Wave Bay). I loved it because the most we saw on our trek in were a few other hikers and some sleepy little hamlets. The trails were paved and marked, however, so it wasn't exactly Lewis and Clark, but still refreshing to escape the dense bustle of the cities. It's amazing that all this lies a mere few miles from crowded Kowloon and Hong Kong Island. Thus far, the hungry developers have been resisted from sinking their teeth into this beautiful territory and so other than the few houses, noodle huts, and hiking trails, it remains largely untouched, and I hope it stays this way.


Tai Long Wan

I had to leave that same night with Devi, while the others stayed behind to camp. Not quite knowing where we were going or how we were to find our way all the way back to the train, we enlisted the help of one of the restaurant owners, his English-speaking daughter, and Aussie boyfriend. They told us they would call the speedboat for us and pointed us in the direction of the peer, about an hour's hike north, through another village and over a hill (which felt more like mountain). The kindly old owner even gave Devi a bamboo hiking stick, and with that and my flashlight which I had wisely purchased earlier at the bus terminal, we took off for the peer. Once there, we had no idea where the boat was but luckily ran into this peculiar group of Cantonese people who were wandering around wearing those flashlight headbands (the kind of thing you wear to go spelunking) and they immediately and without any reservation made it their sole purpose to get us on a speedboat, escorting us from one end of the peer to the other, calling their friends, and finally flagging down a boat. We hopped on and were off, speeding across the bay to Wong Shek Pier on the other side. The speedboat through the still darkness of the water was the highlight of the weekend.

From Wong Shek Pier we found a bus back to Sai Kung bus terminal and another bus to Sha Tin Central, a huge ritzy shopping mall. After a day of hiking and swimming and a long, tiring journey back, I don't think we quite fit the description of mall goers at this point, so naturally we had to take some pictures of our disheveled selves against the backdrop of Estee Lauder and Clinique. Hey, you never know when you might need a bamboo stick to go shopping. . .

So after that it was the train back to the border and into Shenzhen, a long ride on the Shenzhen metro, and another busride to Nanshan District. We ended our adventurous day with the wonderful street food (stir-fried rice noodles - perhaps better known as Chow Mein) that is a hallmark of the Chinese street scene.

Just a quick little adventure to break up the weekday routine!

(I still can't get this new version of blogger to work properly, but thanks to my neighbour, I have found a new way to post photos. You can't change the size or the alignment of them, however, so it's just basically a list of photos. Hopefully blogger will work out these glitches sooner rather than later. Enjoy!)


On the trail to Tai Long Wan


Stunning colours


Lonely boats on the beach


Traversing the rugged terrain of Sha Tin Central


You can accomplish anything when you have a bamboo stick


Ahhh MSG-laden street food makes everything better

Hmmmm. . .

I just switched to a new version of blogger and so for no good - there seems to be no way to post pictures! Let's hope they get this sorted out soon, as I have some beauties of Tai Long Wan, a remote beach in northeastern Hong Kong territory, to post.

The Fragrant Harbour

My first visit to Hong Kong was brief and hurried. I need to linger in the Fragrant Harbour a little longer and take in everything - the markets, food, the people. About 70% of Hong Kong region is rural, so lots of places to hike! I will return soon with more to tell about this city.


Why is this city the Fragrant Harbour (the meaning of words Hong Kong, or, as they are pronounced in Mandarin, Xiāng Găng 香港)? Well there are a few ideas - there used to be fragrant trees lining Hong Kong Island, the main island lying south across Victoria Harbour from Kowloon, and a good amount of incense was exported from the ports. Sadly and ironically, the Hong Kong of today is most often shrouded in a haze that just seems to hang there - the populated parts of the region are dense and polluted. My picture below, taken from the top of Victoria Peak, the highest point in Hong Kong, illustrates the problem. Nonetheless, Hong Kong still has a persona of beauty and cosmopolitanism surrounding it as a world marketplace, a shopping mecca and a historic harbour. Of course it's natural setting - the lush mountains and the harbour - is stunning. Many see this city as an exciting blend of eastern and western elements, and coming across the border from Shenzhen felt like stepping into a new country (complete with crowded immigration checkpoints!).

"There's something just not right about strolling around the former Imperial Court with a cappuccino in hand."

So says Kirk Kenny, a freelance contributor to CBC's Viewpoint. In a mixture of homesickness and a desire to expand the little bubble of life I lead in Longgang, I was scouring the CBC website and came across Kenny's article, "Beijing on parade", a piece summating the often grim effects of modernization and unrelenting development on this historic city's cultural fabric.

To me, this article did well in articulating how foreigners like myself feel when we land in a world that is undeniably different in terms of language, values, government, and cultural temperament, and yet at times strangely, almost disturbingly, familiar. This strange familiarity is really only on the surface, however - a thin veil masking the darker realities beneath. It lies in the Wal-Marts and McDonalds and other corporate franchises, the western-style restaurants and grocery stores and modern high-rises. I use the word "disturbingly" because, although we most often equate the concept of familiarity with feelings of comfort, this familiarity is far from comforting. It points instead to the corporate takeover, the harsh reality of an increasingly globalized world threatening to erode the truer cultural fabric of nations when historic sectors of a city are razed to make way for towering skyscrapers and people rely more and more on KFC and Wal-mart to meet their everyday needs. Cultural identities and values threaten to fade away in wake of this mad rush for development, a rush that seems to leave more and more people behind in its frenzy to move ahead.

But am I playing the selfish tourist when I wish all the McDonalds and Starbucks would just go away so I could see instead the "real" China? Pico Iyer, in his beautifully searching essay titled "Why We Travel", takes a more optimistic outlook when he says "the way in which each culture takes in this common pool of references tells you as much about them as their indigenous products might. . . these days a whole new realm of exotica arises out of the way one culture colors and appropriates the products of another". At times, it’s not so much a blatant replacement of traditional heritage with cold, unrelenting modernization, but more a peculiar, even fascinating, mixture of the two.

From studying history and archaeology I realize that no culture develops in isolation to the ones surrounding it, and this is particularly true of today's globalized world, as more and more nations rise up to gain an economic foothold in the global market and modernize their infrastructure. It is silly to think with all this interconnectedness that a country like China would remain essentially unchanged. So alongside the rice paddies and water buffaloes, pagodas and Buddhist shrines, bicycles and street vendors come towering skyscrapers, inner-city highways laden with traffic and glitzy shopping malls. This is the "real" China - the China of the 21st century, a country that has come to have a huge impact on the modern world as much as the modern world is influencing China. I can't say I like it, or that I'm OK with it, but I can be more optimistic and believe that somewhere amidst all this frenetic change and meeting of cultures eastern and western, ancient and modern, there are some lessons to be learned, like how to modernize a nation without so much environmental and cultural degredation. I just hope that we can learn these lessons ourselves and not leave them up to the historians of the future to learn for us.

A Spa, a Temple, and Some Streetfare

So I must tell you all about our luxurious yet slightly unexpected spa weekend a few hours north! My friends Steve, Diana, Jen and I embarked on a 4-hour busride last weekend to the town of Chaozhou, on the Huanggang River. Steve's and Diana's families originally came from that area. The bus dropped us off in a town about an hour away and after a huge dinner with Steve's teacher friend and her fiance, we piled into a cab and off-roaded for an hour and finally made it to Chaozhou. I say "off-roaded" because that's what driving on this highway was like - it consisted of rubble and big piles of dirt. The taxi man told us they have been working on this road for 6 years! I will never complain about an unplowed side street in the Canadian winter again after this.
So our "hotel" we planned to stay in actually turned out to be a spa. After some initial confusion as to why they wanted us to take our clothes off and bathe before we were allowed to do anything else, it turned out to be great fun! We got access to showers, hot tub, and sauna, had a bath of milk and rose petals, a full body massage, a foot massage and pedicure. They gave us these hilarious pj's to wear (see pictures) and we got to lounge around in these huge chairs, watch Asian MTV, and eat fruit and drink tea. We slept in these little cubby-holes (again, see pictures) and even had breakfast in the morning. And it maybe cost us each about $40 CAD. It was the first time I've ever been to a spa. Do they come this cheap back home??
Our time out was spent trying to get around Chaozhou. Steve and Diana speak the local dialect, but it turns out most people speak Mandarin here. I think because so many migrant workers have infiltrated Guandong Province in the last few years. We managed to visit a Buddhist Temple, lounge around pagodas at the city park, and try our luck with the local cuisine. A hilarious but tiring weekend, and it was nice to venture outside of Shenzhen and see more of China. Tomorrow I am heading to Hong Kong with my camera in tow.
I hope you all are well, wherever you are and whatever you are getting yourself into!

Lean 'n' mean in our jammies! Time for bed :D

Diana, Jen, and Steve at Xiangzi Bridge

Xiangzi Bridge in Chaozhou

Kaiyuan Buddhist Temple

Incense burning at the Kaiyuan Temple

Street scene - Chaozhou

Aahh street food! Cheap and delicious!

Yes, I ate another crab. I think this guy cost almost as much as a weekend at the spa. But it was a local specialty! The other dish is a taro paste (a staple vegetable in tropical climates) - a very gooey dessert (Chaozhou is one of the few Chinese cuisines to feature desserts on its menus).



At a rest stop on the way back to Shenzhen