the china chronicles 2 -- beijing to hangzhou

so the first day i woke up in beijing was at 5:38 am, which is a lot better than i do with jetlag normally. my brother tends not to deal with jetlag so well and he must have been up since 4 at least, just fidgeting around some but not enough to wake me. i actually woke because i was cold for reasons previously explained. freezing to death in the middle of a beijing summer is the biggest paradox ever.


i already forgot what we did for the first two days because we just stayed home bumming out. my aunt offered to take us places but we instead watched chinese national geographic dvds. my dad was out on a business trip so we had no choice.

when he came back he took us out to see the forbidden city, the tiananmen square building, the laoshe teahouse, peking duck etc. we got sidetracked into a quite fascinating tour through the hutong of beijing by this one taxi driver who knew the place and knew the tourists.

already i was getting weird stares when i spoke english so i switched languages except at home with my cousin. her dad [my uncle] told me to speak more english to her so she could practice. my dad [her uncle] told me to speak more chinese to her so i could practice. obviously i listened to my uncle 'cause he's cooler.

my uncle and i talked a lot about different things. he's really interested in america and the differences between american kids and chinese kids, but that conversation quickly turned into a political discussion on taiwan and china cross-strait relations and the threat of political action and military intervention, etc. i always end up talking to my uncle about these kinds of things, i don't know why. but i get the feeling he likes talking in english about complicated topics with his weird american niece.

he sounds faintly british too, which was a plus. i never understood why and he's never noticed it but then again he says i talk really fast. i never understood that either and i've never noticed either.

then he wished me luck with the thing where i played the thing on the field. he meant marimba in the marching band, at which point i whipped out my camera and showed him the pictures of my marimba and the video of me playing it so i could clear up once and for all what i did in america. [which by the way was what i took those pictures for anyway. they didn't have marching bands or marimbas in china so there we go. their lives were just enriched.]

the last day we went to visit my grandpa which sounds sweet enough until you realize he's a pile of ashes living in a cemetery and i was expected to find his little box among all the other flower-covered boxes living there. i found him. he was number six hundred something? we gave him flowers. i wish i could talk to him but i guess that will just have to pass on that one. not all dreams come true, kids.

we left for hangzhou from nanyang airport, which was the OTHER airport beside the capital airport. it is officially the smallest, skeeziest airport i have ever been in but it was an airport which meant that of course i loved it. and here there were less international travelers so waving around our navy books got us even more stares.

they had us walk out to our plane on the runway. not even like a shuttle bus, they're like GET WALKING. i took a secret picture on the way. and then on the plane i got the emergency row seat, next to some guy who thought he was all hip but his face looked like a pufferfish.

but anyway. the plane landed in hangzhou where we hitched a ride to the hyatt on a really nice company car driven by a nice young man with a polo, straight jeans, leather shoes, and a leather bag which, by the way, was how all the dudes dressed here in hangzhou. we drove for a long time because it's a rule of city planning to make airports the least accessible places ever.

the driver had a car where you could answer the phone directly by talking indiscriminately to the steering wheel. some guy called him from the company saying WHARRGARBLWHARRGARBL and please pick up some toilet paper on your way back which made me think that nice as he was, he must have been a company bitch working at below minimum wage to live a living. sad fact, sad fact.

my dad laughed and asked me if i understood a single thing he had said. i didn't get the wharrgarbl part but obviously i heard enough to draw my conclusions about drivers who drive people around and buy toilet paper to wipe the asses of their bosses for three yuan an hour. i only told him the part about needing more toilet paper, which proceeded to make my dad amazed that i could understand the hangzhou dialect and the driver all amazed that i could speak the mother tongue at all.

we went through the usual routine of

i thought you were american?
yes i am
but you speak chinese.
yes i do
this is quite impressive!
yes it is
wo gao su ni, ah, ni de nu er hai zhen xing, ah.
thanks man. i always thought i was supercool, myself.

right so if that EXACT CONVERSATION didn't happen like 9001 times during this whole trip i don't know what i'm going to do with myself.


so anyway. hangzhou was the first southern city i had been to IN MY LIFE and it was cleaner and more western than beijing, which was interesting. it was also supposedly richer from the trade with the west. there were a lot of trees and it was about 98 degrees at 100% humidity.

the first day we ate at pizza hut for lunch. the hotel was nice and gave us free pears which i ate but didn't like, and i had to sleep on the rolling bed since there weren't enough beds, and i knew i was going to have a very minor cold the next day.

beijing to hangzhou END.