Fenghuang - Travel then riverside

When we arrive in Yichang we are clearly off of the beaten backpacker track. We are not off the track, for there are millions of local Chinese around us, but there are not other foreigners around. Big city, fancy hotel, break from road, used gym twice, 1:30 train to Jishou, lucky evening bus to Fenghuang, girls helped us find cheap room, beautiful old city (new city outside), photographers, took it easy, two nights, bus back to Jishou----ever going to get to leave Jishou?

It is time to go eat dinner now, more to come. We are almost caught up with China entries.

Xián

After several games of Farkle, waking up to a strange Chinese man peering down at my face, and having to sleep in a different section of the train than Tommy, we arrive in Xián. Once again we have survived a smokey, cramped night on a hard-sleeper. Xián is a lot like Pingyao in the fact that it still contains aspects of ancient arcitecture, has a bell tower, a drum tower, and a large wall surrounding the city. It is also like Beijing and Shanghai, with its large population, busy streets, and big buildings. Once again we see a large number of vendors and our faith in "you can buy anything to eat on a stick" is restored. The Muslim Quarter is an interesting area that houses the Great Mosque and several other, smaller mosques. All the mosques, even the Great one, are not very visible from the street and seem to be hidden throughout the Muslim Quarter. There are also a lot of food vendors, where I was able to find, once again, some awesome steamed buns. Tommy found some delicious potatoes that looked to be roasted to perfection. As the cook put the bowl down in front of Tommy, we were both surprised by the jiggling motion the potatoes made as the bowl hit the table. As soon as Tommy took a bite, it was confirmed that he was not eating potatoes. He was in fact eating stir-fried spicy cubes of bean paste, which basically looked like transparent cubes of jello. We found several other food items made of bean - a green bean cake and a tasty looking treat that I thought would be chocolate, but turned out to be rice with dark bean paste. After this, I was done with the food tastings for a while.

WALMART IN CHINA
Tommy and I discovered a Walmart listed on the map of Xián that our hostel provided. We quickly found the large Walmart sign and proceeded to follow sign after sign, arrow after arrow, leading us in circles until we finally found the store, no where near the initial sign or the icon on the map. I cannot compare the prices of large bags of MSG, but for the rest - if you thought an American Walmart was cheap, you should check out Chinese Walmart!! Tommy and I got several bags full of juice, beer, water, and food for $11. We were very excited.

TERRACOTTA WARRIORS
The next day, Tommy and I set out to visit the Terracotta Warriors Museum with a tour group from our hostel. Outside of the museum, there is a gift shop where you can meet the man who discovered the Terracotta Warriors. He use to be a farmer, but has now been given the job of sitting inside at a desk all day signing books bought in the gift shop. By the look on his face, he is rethinking his decision of disclosing his discovery to others. The Terracotta Warriors and Horses are life size and colorless replicas of the warriors, horses, and chariots back in the day (the original colors quickly disappeared from the warriors and horses once unearthed) . It is an incredible excavation site and the process of excavating the warriors and horses is still ongoing. They are working on reconstructing those they excavate. It takes one person one year to restore one warrior. All of the warriors excavated differ slightly from one another, so no two warriors are the same, not even their faces. It was incredible to see all of the warriors and horses lined up in the vast pit. It is quite an experience.

That night we go for a short run around the city. Running on the streets of Xián makes you feel like you are running from someone, since you have to dodge people, jump out of the way of bikes carrying packages the size of refrigerators, steer clear of rabid looking dogs, get out of the way of vendors and their carts, etc. We found our way to the outside of the wall, which has a thin park that wraps around it. Many people come here to practice Tai Chi, meditate, jog, dance, walk backwards, and yell. This was a great people watching area.

The next day, Tommy and I decide we want to go for another run, but somewhere less crowded. We opt to pay the small fee and head up on top of the wall. The wall that surrounds Xián is 13m high and 13 km long. We have a wonderful jog around the wall, where we can see people flying kites, playing in the parks, and going on with daily life. The air is a little tough on the body, between the dry air and the smog. My head started to throb and my throat swelled up thick for the next day. Good luck to all those athletes heading to Beijing! After our run, we headed to the Big Goose Pagoda by bus.


TIBETAN RIOTS CHANGE PLANS
Our last day in Xián, we checked out and sat in the hostel lobby without a plan of where to go next. The riots in Llasa, along with the spreading unrest throughout China, made us reevaluate our plans. We had planned on heading west to Xiahe, which is not actually in Tibet, but has a large Tibetan population. We had heard that the government was not allowing foreigners into this town, along with several other towns we were thinking of heading to. Since all the media was being strictly censored, we were not sure of exactly what towns to the southwest we could head to.

So after a period of indecision due to this uncertain circumstance, our plan of attack was to head to south to Luoyang, Yichang, and Fenghuang. This route was the next most western train line after the one we were origanially planning on taking. This route was not on the Tiebian plateau and appeared to be safely away from the expanding Tibetan protests. Standing in the rain, we get train tickets for the first train out of Xián and run back to the hostel to get our bags. It is pouring rain and we are turned down by every cab driver we asked to take us to the train station. A girl nearby tells us to hop on bus 300 and that will take us to the train station. Tommy and I run for the bus, hop on, and ride out of town towards the station.

After 10 minutes on the bus, we soon take a turn and begin to head in the wrong direction, away from the train station. When shown the word "train station", the ticket attendant motions for us to get off the bus where we are and pointed in the direction of the station. We hop off the bus and start running down the street in the direction of the train station. After a few moments of not being sure if we would make it in time or not and not being able to determire where any of the busses passing us were going, we flag down another bus and point in our book to the word "train station" and the driver motions for us to get on. Two stops later, the bus driver motions for us to get off. We are not at the station, but we think that we can see it. The train will leave in less than 15 minutes. We run until we get to the station and push our way through the mass of people waiting for other trains until we get to ours. The whistle is blowing and our train is just about to take off. We jump on the train and it begins to move. Soaking wet and out of breath, we have made it!

Louyang - Budda Caves and Train Riding

THERE ARE TWO FOREIGNERS ON THE TRAIN
The trip to Louyang was via a "hard seat" on a train. A "hard seat" means that we have an assigned section of a bench seat. There are sets of benches facing each other on either side of a center isle. They are something like a booth at McDonald's but the table between the seats was much smaller. We are pretty sure we were the only foreigners on the whole train, which had around 15 cars of 50 to 150 people per car depending on the type of car. The whole train was full, which meant we were sitting in pretty close quarters with our fellow passengers, something like a full subway car. It was a great experience and I am finding it hard to fully describe the experience here. The other travellers were from a different world. Most seemed to be local farmers or entire families and many did not ride as far as we did. The train stopped every 30 minutes or so to pick up and drop off passengers.

At first it did not appear that anyone could speak any English outside of "Hello". The people in the seat facing us had been communicating with us for a while by pointing, gesturing, and writing in our common language, aribic numerals. We had gathered how old we all were and where we were going and where we had been, but not much more. A couple of hours into the trip fellow around our age showed up with a little note, in good english, asking us our names and where we were from. We wrote our answer and passed the note back. This got everyone around interested. After a few volleys with our mystery english speaker we convinced him to come up and talk with us. He was a PhD student in aerospace engineering on his way to have a meeting with an oil company about some thing the university was helping them with. I did not cease to be amazed at how light the Chinese travel. For this two day and one night trip, four hours from home, he was carrying..... a laptop briefcase. It was big enough for a little bit more than his laptop and power supply, but I doubt it was big enough for even one extra shirt.

Our whole section of the train had a grand time the last hour of the trip. Our new interpreter asked us questions that our traveling companions had been mulling over for the last couple of hours. Did we have any kids? What were our jobs? Did we like China? Did we like President Bush? What did we think about the war with Iraq? (they did not seem to like either of these things, but in general they did seem to like the US). Do you know who Yao Ming is? (we got this question on a number of occations) We saw that even though we were from very different worlds we had plenty of humaness in common. We also had fancy cell phones in common, although many of our traveling buddies outdid us in that regard. Everyone in China seems to have a cell phone that doubles as a music player and mini-PDA, something like a Blackberry but smaller.

The train got into town pretty late, 11PM?, and it was raining. We were convinced to follow on foot a man and a lady who offered to take us to the hotel we had choosen from our guidebook. We weren't sure that it would at first, but this worked out fine, more or less. We were now very clearly off of the international backpacker trail. So far in China we had stayed at backpacker hostels which cateered, more or less, to our English speaking foreinger needs. Our hotel this night spoke enough English to get by, but there was diffently not the same communial feel of our past hostels.

While checking out the next morning we met Brian, a backpacker from Hong Kong who spoke perfect English. He agreed to accompany us to the train station to help us buy our tickets for the next day. This was a godsend. Then he joined us for lunch, where he helped us order from an all Chinese menu. This was one of our best and cheapest meals from anywhere in China. We were all getting along well together and decided to travel together to the big tourist draw of the area, ancient buddist caves outside of town.

We rode bus number 81 to the end of the line and found the other dozen forienrs in town at the budda caves (along with hundreds of Chinese tourists). We were enjoying ourselves, but not overly impressed at first. Then, not expecting much more, we came to the top of a huge steep band of stairs and our jaws dropped. There were the biggest statues I had every seen. Well, I am sure Mount Rushmore is much bigger, but you are not this close to it. I am glad I did not have high expectations so that I could truely be wonderfully surprised by the size and beauty of this mammoths. In total there were tens of thousands of buddas. We wondered around of a few hours and got some good pictures, which almost took themselves.

From Louyang

That night we took a late night train over night to Ychang, around 11 hours away. Our train did not leave until after 1AM which gave us some time to sit around the train station. Because night trains are popular for long routes the train station was rather full of people even at this hour. We were approached by a couple of poeple wanted to say hello and practice their English. We talked to the student below for quite a while. He told us that he was studying English at a local university and that his professors told him to practice his English whenever had got a chance to talk to foreingers. He said we were the first he had ever talked with! He also told us that the way we westerners say "Yao Ming" means "kill you" because we say the words flat and not with the correct tones. We even say Beijing to mean "hurt you". This guy was waiting for a 5 AM bus to go a few hours home for the weekend. He was in great spirits, perhaps because he was traveling so light! At one point he wanted to show us how he had just been listening to some American music on his Ipod, so he pulled it from his over the sholder 'briefcase' type bag. It appeared to be the only thing in the bag! Now that is traveling light.

Pingyao

From Bejing and Pi...

Pingyao is a neat old cirty surrounded by a large wall. It looks like it has been dropped down right in the middle of a booming city, since outside the walls, it seems just like all the other busy cities of China. Inside the walls, motor vehicle traffic is very limited and the streets are quieter, more laid back, and not as smoggy (although it is a very dry area and quite dusty). Although the city of Pingyao consists of the area inside and outside the wall, inside-the-walls locals seem to only acknowledge Pingyao as the area within the walls.

CITY WALLS
We spend our first day exploring the street and walk on top of the large wall that surrounds the city. Solar panels are scattered about the tiled rooftops, as well as piles of corn, chickens, and cats. From the wall, we see a mass of gray buildings splashed with dots of red from the lanterns that line the streets. The slower pace and the quietness is a much needed relief from the large, busy cities we had grown accustom to. Pingyao is the first city of many to come where we hear fireworks set off at noon for a lunch time announcement. In Pingyao, there are not nearly as many food vendors as there were in the larger cities of Shanghai and Beijing, so we eat at several different restaurants that prove to be cheap and convenient. Finding the historical places on our own proves not to be easy. Our first day, we try to find several places of interest without any luck, since everything in this town looks identical! We end up playing with a girl about 8 years old and her toy that is equivalent to our hacky sack. The toy has several bright feathers with a flat disk attatched to the bottom. It is a popular game with the Chinese, and several older adults enthusiastically stopped to kick it a few times with us as well. The little girl seemed to have fun playing with us and sporadically would say either "Thank you very much", "So Sorry", or "Hello". She remained very serious the whole time and only allowed herself to smile and laugh a couple times when she seemed like she couldn't contain it any longer - usually this was after Tommy or I did something ridiculous. The game ended about 45 minutes later when she kicked the toy too high and it landed on the roof. Later, Tommy and I bought another one and found the little girl the next day so that we could give her a new toy. She didn't know what to do, but as we walked away and turned around, she had run in to get her mom to show her mom who had given her the gift.

Pingyao are beautiful at night with red lanterns lighting up the streets. We had a wonderful time roaming the streets until someone tried to tackle Tommy for his water bottle that was still mostly full. Luckily, after a couple of minutes of trying to lose the guy, a shopkeeper came out and yelled at the guy. This guy was one of several people that tried to grab our bottles before they were empty in order to add it to their recycling pile. Who knew you had to conceal your water bottles from theft? But, this gentleman's elevator did not seem to go all the way to the top floor. We saw a few other bottle collectors like this, but most collectors were fairly well dressed and seemed very normal.

The next day we had set out to meet Mr. Lui, who we read about in the Lonely Planet as a recommended tour guide. We had run into him on the street the previous day and he showed us a large stack of business cards he had collected from previous tourists with good reviews written on the backs of each. Since we had had no luck finding places that day, we set up to meet him at 9:30AM the next day. Of course, Tommy and I were running behind. Breakfast took longer for our hostel to make, since the electricity was out. We were 15 minutes late and he was not at our meeting spot. The L.P. listed his hostel, so we headed in search of Mr. Lui. We find him at the hostel and Lo' and Behold, there must be 2 Mr. Lui's because this is not the man we talked to before. The real Mr. Lui gives us a great 3 hour tour of the city. Throughout China, we often went into museums, temples, and other sights without gaining much knowledge since information was given mostly in Chinese, so getting a tour guide when affordable, was very beneficial.

Before hopping on the train for Xián, Tommy and I decide to bike an hour outside of town to visit a temple. It is a stressful ride getting out of the city due to cars, bikes, scooters, and people coming from every direction, but soon we are riding on more of a rural highway and have a nice ride on our flat-tired, loose steering, broken seat, one-speed bikes to the temple. They were top Chinese quality! We only stay at the temple for a short time, since we really did not know what all we are looking at. When we head back into town, the one outside of the city walls, traffic has gotten crazier and we have to walk the rest of the way until we get to the walls.


The beutiful greyness of the city as seen from the city walls. And, yes that is a big screen TV on the wall. It seemed to show videos for Chinese tourists.

Beijing

LESSONS FROM OUR FIRST NIGHT TRAIN
Our first night train experience proved to be a good one. We began to experience and learn several important philosophies held by the Chinese culture.

1. Lines: What's the point in queing? You get where you are going much faster by pushing and jumping people in line. While the gate entrance looks like it can only fit one person through at a time, if you push hard enough, you can get at least 6 people through at once. Wave your ticket wildly up in the air as you squeeze through the gate. You may not have been able to get your ticket punched, but I am sure that the sweaty, exasperated ticket attendant saw yours through the 10 tickets in her face.

2. Time: Although you have plenty of time to walk to get on the train from when the ticket attendant begins to let people through, you should still run like hell and fantically push people out of the way until you get safely on the train. You never know if the train will decide to leave early. On later trains, we learn more....

3. Although the signs say "no smoking", you can still smoke in the doorways and blow smoke into the cabin areas.

4. Spitting: Hoking lugies can be done anywhere, even on the floors of trains. If you want to be more polite and spit in the toilet, just open the bathroom door and let one fly. I am sure you will get close enough.

We also found that people we always more than happy to help us out. Not only did we get help finding our sleepers or seats (usually this consisted of 10 people passing around our tickets and talking to each other for a few minutes before more people came over to see what was going on and then we would find our place), but fellow travellers also deemed it their responsibility to tell us when it was our time to get off the train. Most of the time we had no idea when we should be getting off, since one stop looked like another and we were never at our destination on time. So when we would arrive at our stop, our non-english speaking travellers would point excitedly to the exit and would help pull our bags down from the rack in order to get off the train.

ARRIVE IN BEIJING
So, after a night on the train and a ride on the metro, Tommy and I set out to find the Leo Hostel in Beijing. We quickly found the road that the hostel was off of and proceeded to walk around for hours trying to find the actual road the hostel was on. We began to wander down side streets and finally found the Leo Hostel tucked away in a busy market street. We soon realized that our maps of China would not be very reliable since, not only were the street names different in our book, but there was so much construction throughout every city, things just changed so quickly. Despite this, we still persistantly tried to find locations (hostels, banks, restaurants, etc) that seemed to have vanished.

TIANANMEN SQUARE AND THE FORBIDDEN CITY

We arrived around 10am at the hostel and used our first day in Beijing to explore Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Square, very impressive in size, can hold up to a million people. Bags are searched upon entry into the square, while soldiers patrol on foot throughout. In order to get to the Forbidden City, Tommy and I had to cross through the square first. Once at the Forbidden City, we walked around the grounds for hours. The Forbidden City is very expansive and it would take a whole day to read all of the information provided. This city is where the emperors once lived with all of their wives, family, children, concubines, administrators, etc. We meandered through rooms that had been turned into museums, courtyards and alleys, many different halls, quarters, etc. All of the architecture was beautiful. Some areas we were unable to see do to extensive remodeling.

A REALLY REALLY BIG DINNER

From Bejing and Pi...

Exhausted and hungry after a full day, Tommy and I sat down in a restaurant across the street from our hostel. Not learning from previous experiences, we ordered many different dishes - corn, spring rolls, soup, pork, and peanuts with greens. With all the dishes being a good size dish, we could have done well with just the soup! The amazement of just how cheap the food was blinded us to the fact we were ordering, once again, a large amount of food! We rolled back to the hostel to get to bed early.

THE GREAT WALL

Up at 7am, we head out with 7 others on a tour hosted by Leo Hostel of the Great Wall. We drive for about 1 hr, stopping about 10 minutes before we get there to pick up a little old lady from the local village that was maybe four and a half feet tall and spoke no english. Our minivan driver drops us off in the middle of nowhere and tells us that our guide (the lady from the village) will walk us to the wall. He hops back in the van and takes off. Everyone looks at each other with a look of confusion and amusement. After pointing to her "No Smoking" sign our little lady waves us on and takes off up a path with her walking stick in hand. We hike for about 30 minutes, stopping at times when our guide needs to sit down for a minute, until we finally see the wall. We climb up to it and look in amazement at the remenants of this remarkable structure. Our group continues for about 2 1/2 hours on the wall, only passing one other local man who is out for a stroll. We pass through watchtowers, where we climbed up and could see the Great Wall weaving in and out of small valleys, extending for miles. The whole experience was incredible.

The section of the wall we were walking on was more remote and much, much less visited by tourists than some other more well known sections. Nothing had been restored (we don't think), so some areas were still intact, while others were not. Our guide lead us 30 minutes down another path that brought us to our driver. We headed into a restaurant in a tiny village where the 9 members of our group ate a wonderful local family-style meal of all different meats, veggies, rice, and noodles.

CHINESE ACROBATIC SHOW
Once back in town, we decide to find an acrobatic show recommended by our L.P. book. It takes us more than an hour to find the theatre (eventhough it should have taken 15 minutes. The map in the book showed it over a block away from its actual location) and we buy tickets for the show that night. We figure it must be good since there is a picture outside of the theatre with Mr. Bean and the troupe of acrobats. The show was a lot of fun with some very amazing tricks. There were about 7 or 8 acts, all of which were impressive and used a large spectrum of props, ranging from hats to drums to playing cards to ribbons to hoops, etc. That night at the hostel, Tommy and I got our train tickets for a night train to Pingyao for the following day. We also have Leo Hostel call and get us reservations at their sister hostel in Pingyao, which means they will pick us up from the train station for free!

SHOPPING AND BOMB SHELTERS
The next day, with our bags safely stored at Leo, we set out to explore more of the town. We first head to find some warmer clothes that we have been lacking since getting to China. I find a nice, cheap down jacket and Tommy finds a warm vest. Next we head to the pearl market, where there are more vendors selling the same products than I have ever seen. We have good fun looking around and seeing the different qualities of pearls, but are soon ready to move on. We stumble upon the entrance of Beijing's underground tunnel, which we were looking for, but thought it was somewhere else. We take a quick, but interesting tour beneath the streets of Beijing and through some of the tunnel system. It was built in the Cold War Era as a network of bomb shelters that would hold 300,000 people. After the tour, we headed back to get our bags at the hostel and on to the train station for the night train to Pingyao.

Recap of China - Shanghai

Tommy eating grilled spicy squid on a stick.


EXCUSES FOR DELAY IN BLOG UPDATES
While we just arrived in Thailand yesterday we are just starting our China blogging. This is due to China's tight internet censorship, which includes blogger/blogspot. When we first got to China it looked like we would be able to continue our posts by using some websites that allow you to bypass various types of internet firewalls. They are for people who want to post blogs from China and others who want to visit their Facebook page while at work at IBM. However, about a week into our time in China, just as we were getting comfortable enough with everything that we were ready to spend some time inside blogging, the riots in Tibet started and China really tightened up it's internet censorship. We then found our selves several places with very slow internet, power disruptions, and very few options to communicate in English. Pretty soon we decided to try to start up the blog again in Laos.

Well, when we got to Laos there was too much to do during the day to sit in an internet cafe and the curfew at night kept us from working late. Soon the task of catching up on the blog' began to grow into a labor intensive task that has seemed easier to push out one more day than starting at the stop by an internet cafe to quickly check email. Finally, the time has come to tackle the task. It is very hot, humid, and sunny outside and some time in the AC is a welcome reprieve.

ARRIVAL IN ASIA
Now, Shanghai. Shanghai was our first stop off the beaten path on our own. In Ecuador Phillip and Melissa were always near at hand to translate language and interpret the culture. New Zealand was easy. Now we were in Asia and all on our own. The trip from the airport to the first subway stop was via the world's first maglev (magnetically levitated) train. Very cool! It was a fast smooth ride. The subway was also not too difficult. It was similar to subways in the states. The ticket machines even had an English setting. Things started to get a little bit more harrowing once we were ready to leave the subway.

Now we were about to face the unorganized jittering world of the streets of a Chinese city. People are everywhere, horns of all pitches and volumes are honking everywhere, and it is starting to rain, hard. Our map says that our hostel, which we have already booked online, is about a mile away. We are unsure of who, if anyone speaks English. We had been told different things and had not conversed in English to anyone on our journey from the airport to here. Just as we were happy we had the map correctly oriented and decided we would try to flag down a cab a Chinese man in business attire asked us in perfect accent-free English if we needed any help. Maybe this would be easy after all. Without much trouble, but basically no English, we got a cab to take us right to our hostel. This trip went fairly smoothly and I think gave us a little boast of comfort.

Shanghai was cold, probably in the low to middle 40's. When we got into the hostel lobby, which looked quite nice, it was at least as cold inside as outside. You could clearly see the breath of the lady checking us in. She spoke pretty good English. At least we know we are safe while inside. The room was a little warmer, but not by much. There was no heat to mention of. Tired from an overnight flight (Since she couldn't get to sleep Kristin spent almost the entire flight watching movies on her personal screen attached to the seat in front of her, 4 or 5 movies in total I believe) and the stress of navigating to our hostel in this new world we napped until dinner time.

FIRST MEAL IN CHINA
Dinner time also meant, night time. If we were a little unsure of ourselves on the city streets in the day we were not ready to venture too far out of sight of the hostel at night for fear we may not be able to find it again. We made our way to Steak King just two turns away at the recommendation of the hostel. The staff their spoke English and had a more or less legible English menu. The food was great and we started our trend of ordering too much food. How can a bowl of soup for $1.20 be big enough for 3 people?


The next days were basically spent exploring the city on foot. We quickly learned more or less what to expect and had a pretty easy time getting around. Most poeple did not seem to speak English, at least not more than Hello and Goodbye, but enough people did speak enough English that it was not really a problem. Pretty soon the subway was a piece of cake and we could find food whenever we wanted. We saw and experienced many firsts. Most of these were not really gross, or disgusting, just different from at home. For example our first squat toilet (at least Tommy's first squater was clean, many later toilets have been disgusting), street food, street markets, and overloaded bikes and scooters.

BAD AIR
It was not until an hour or two before sunset during our second day exploring the city that Kristin realizes that maybe that weather forecast we saw last night was correct. That this is a blue sky. The smog in the city was so bad that we had thought that it had been incredibly overcast the last couple of days. Like one of those winter days that just seems to stay dark all day. But, we discovered that if you looked straight up, where you were looking through the least amount of smog, that you could get a hint of blue sky. Thank goodness for the clean air regulations that we do have in the states.

PEOPLE EVERYWHERE
There are people everywhere, really everywhere, but rather few cars. The roads are full, but it is only maybe half car traffic, the rest is bikes, scooters, and the many electric bikes. There were around 4 or 5 million people in all of New Zealand. There were 8 million within the city limits of Shanghai! This was a big change from our recent surroundings!

There were also huge skyscrapers everywhere. Not just in one downtown area like the cities I have been to in the US, but miles from the center of town too. Most of these seem to apartment buildings, 20, 30, or 40 stories high. And in groups of one to ten buildings. We went to an observation deck on the 70th floor of the tallest building in China. Literaly as far as you could see in every direction there were skyscrapers. Granted that due to smog you could not see all that far. Across the street from this building was a nearly completed building which will be the new tallest building in China when completed. The construction rate in Shanghai, and the rest of China, was noticeable and rapid. The area in Shanghai where these two buildings now stand was all farmland just a dozen years ago! The land on which all of these buildings stand was farmland just 12 years ago!


SOME INTERESTING SITES IN SHANGHAI

Many, well most every, street is lined with some sort of vendor. They sell everything from sunglasses to live chickens, and cell phones to live turtles and fish. Here is one vendor's setup where he will sell you a very freshly cleaned turtle or fish. He was just one of several similar vendors on this street. I motioned to ask if I could take this picture and he said it was fine. Then he got up and moved, it appeared he did so not because he did not want to be in the picture but because he did not want to mess up my picture of his 'store' It was a very thoughtful gesture.

STIR FRY RESTAURANT....ON A BICYCLE

Bicycle based (often actually tricycles) businesses were very common here and, we have since learned, across most of Asia as well. Here is a common example of store front and kitchen all built into the back half of a bicycle.

ELECTRIC DELIVERY BICYCLE

Here is a nice example of two sites I could not get enough of: electric bicycles and bicycles carrying what would have looked like an amazing large load before I arrived in China. We saw a couple of bikes carrying loads of chucks of styrofoam that made your jaw drop, but I did not get a picture of them. It looked like an ant carrying a bumble bee.


ACTIVE DECENTRALIZED RECYCLING

I would be willing to bet that over 90%, maybe over 99%, of recyclables in Shanghai (and the other Chinese cities we visited) are recycled. There seemed to be about 1 recyclable collector for every 2 vendors. There were cardboard collectors, many plastic bottle collectors, other plastic collectors, metal collectors, etc. Again, many of these were bicycle based businesses. They dug through trashcans and the cardboard guys rang a bell for shops/vendors to bring out their cardboard as he passed. There were so many of them, especially the people collecting plastic bottles that I would think it rare for a bottle to last 15 minutes in a trash can. There were also many garbage collectors who swept the streets and emptied the many small city trash cans. These folks take their collections to one of the many places that buy the recyclables. From the street view there is nothing centralized about this system at all. Many, many, many independent collectors and many, many independent buyers. If Waste Industries ever comes to China millions of people would be out of work.