Image Capturing in China

So much for this being a regularly updated blog. Josh and I are on week five in Beijing. I haven't written because I don't know where to start. So I decided to pick something random, small and manageable, and see where it takes me.

There are many things about Beijing and China that I find confusing, and my efforts to make sense of them have largely been foiled. One of them is why some Chinese people like to come up and take their picture with me (me and their whole mishpacha). I made the mistake (only once) of asking a family touring the Great Wall if they wanted me to take a picture of them. I wasn't sure if it was my pathetic Mandarin or simply their excitement, but I soon ended up in a slew of photographs with the family. I then tried again to ask if they wanted me to take a picture of them, and another round of photos began (again, I was not the photographer, much to my chagrin).

I think I find all the picture-taking a little strange because in many places I have traveled and lived, some people do not want their pictures taken, either because they find it intrusive or because they believe the photo will capture their soul (or some similar variation). This makes sense to me, and so I try to be respectful when taking pictures, especially outside of the US. But here something totally different is going on.

A couple weekends ago Josh and I went to the beach at Beidaihe, a few hours from Beijing. There was a whole section of the beach dedicated to wedding photos. Dozens of young Chinese couples, to be married in the coming months, had come to Beidaihe to be photographed at the beach (though the smog reaches Beidaihe, so this was without any beautiful blue skies in the background). They were photographed by professional photographers amid faux shipwrecked boats, grand pianos, and red sports cars who have permanent homes along this stretch of beach (at least on summer weekends). (See example below.) Based on my conversations with a Chinese friend, the young couples are trying to capture the happiness and prosperity they hope to have. (They send these pictures pre-wedding.) Perhaps if you can just create an image of it, it will be yours. Josh says this is why I am a picture magnet for Chinese tourists -- take a picture of me, and they have an American friend. Or something like that. So rather than a snapshot capturing some important part of you and making off with it, here that snapshot can create limitless possibilities.

I am not sure how different this is from our own modus operandi when it comes to picture-taking, but the enthusiasm with which these photographed moments are pursued is striking. In some ways it reminds me of the faux facades we've seen all over the place, after original structures have been torn down. That old mantra still rings true: If you build a storefront that from a distance looks like an old Chinese shop, the tourists will come (Chinese and foreign alike).

Resuscitating

This is an experiment. We started this blog over the summer to keep interested parties informed about our whereabouts while traveling, but since August it has been lying dormant. I decided I'd like to try to resuscitate it. I'm interested to see if anyone will notice (do the people I know check defunct blogs, in the hope that they'll find something new there?), and specifically whether or not the "Jo" in Jolyse will find my online musings.

If you are reading this, I'd be much obliged if you left me a little comment. I might structure my writings differently if I know that I have an audience. I'll suspect, for the time being, that I do not.

When we started this blog, a friend of ours said something along the lines of "I wish I had something interesting to write about so that I could justify having a blog." That made me question whether I should have been setting one up, but it also made me smile because I consider him a very thoughtful, insightful and well-spoken person who could easily fill the pages of a book/blog/etc. with interesting comments and questions for us all to ponder. What makes someone think that her/his thoughts are blog-worthy? I haven't found my answer yet, but I am motivated to try to take this up again for a different set of reasons.

I recently started graduate school. Who would have thought that reading hundreds of pages a week, writing lots of papers, and playing with numbers and statistical software would be a lonely venture? I actually find myself missing the staff meetings and other forced moments of social interaction that peppered my previous work-lives. Now I spend all of my non-class time in front of a book or a computer. It makes me miss people a little bit. After all, isn't that what I came to graduate school to study?

I have mixed feelings about using an internet-based medium, which will inevitably require me to spend more time in front of the computer, to try to connect with friends, family...really anyone who would be willing to read this. But I figure I'll just siphon off some of the time I would otherwise be playing spider solitaire and dedicate that to blog-writing. At least until someone discovers me. And please let me know if you do.

I spent this afternoon at the Chicago Public Library, and I originally wanted to give them a friendly shout-out in my first resuscitated-blog post. In lots of other public libraries, you are not allowed to sleep. One of the staff people often comes around with a big wooden stick and bangs on the tables where people are sitting. It scares the crap out of people. Think of Mr. Bruce gently waking up a sleeping student in his class, for anyone who went to high school with me. I saw a lot of that in the big public library in DC. So I fell asleep today at the library, and woke up with a jolt, afraid that a library employee would be standing over me, about to slam his/her stick down on the table. But no, no one seemed bothered. "Another way that Chicago is a wonderful, welcoming, open-hearted city," I thought to myself. Well, not quite. I actually just got lucky. An hour later, an official-looking man came around to wake everyone up -- though he did do it by gently tapping a pen on the table, instead of scaring the begebies out of everyone. So I'm now wondering if Chicago actually is any different? (in this one respect...) Maybe a little bit nicer around the edges, but still the same anti-homeless people, anti-tired people, anti-student measures at its core. What do you think?

Rice and Rain

One benefit to cross-crossing the region by bus is the brief but telling glimpses into people's daily routines that we've gotten along the way. From my bus-based observations, two central things punctuate these routines during this time of year -- rice planting and rainfall, which themselves go hand in hand. During every ride through Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia, we see people out in the fields, hunched over to replant the small rice plants into larger paddies (they are first grown on a small plot, and then when sufficiently large/the timing is right, they are spread out), and then waiting for the rain to come. The rain starts and stops many things, both in the city and across the rural landscapes -- stops work in much of the city (barring those unaffected in office buildings), starts play in the mud and water for children, starts growing of the rice and other crops, brings traffic nearly to a halt (or at least slows it a great deal). In Cambodia especially the rains have come down in monsoonal sheets -- we looked on, sitting next to local shopkeepers and passersby also escaping the rain, all of us in awe of the sheer quantity, the power to destroy (roads, roofs), and of course to provide an abundance of rice, in all its different varieties.

Our trips through the countryside have also offered us glimpses of families and individuals partaking in other activities, ones I usually think of as those that happen alone or behind the walls of our homes. Around 5 pm, men, women and children begin to bathe (often separated by gender but still in groups) in a nearby river, pond or at a communal water pump -- men in their briefs, women more modestly covered in a sarong which they wear into the water. From the bus, they look to be having a great deal of fun, and our own solitary showers and baths, perhaps more luxurious, seem quite boring in comparison. Once clean, the cooking of dinner begins, a process also visible from the nearby road, and the families ready to sit down for their evening meal. Through I feel a bit like a voyeur, I relish this brief insight into the daily rhythms of these countries still unfamiliar to me.

Phnom Penh

We spent a wonderful two days in Cambodia's capital city, much of our energy focused on sampling what the different food stalls had on offer. For those of you that are reading exclusively for these kinds of details, highlights included a delicious and thick soup (coconut and maybe fish-based, but I hope just coconut), with all kinds of fresh veggies, bean sprouts, etc. mixed in and flavored with chili paste, vinegars, some sugar. Cambodia also featured a new noodle for us, about 3 in long and tapered at both ends, kind of like a big white worm and spectacular in soups and stir fries alike. Anyone seem something like this in the US?

We've also spent time learning a bit more about Cambodia's recent history, which I admit I knew very little about before coming here. There is much to wrap one's head around, but a visit to S-21, a prison, interrogation and torture center established by the Khmer Rouge (ruled the country from 1975-78), began to shed light on the horrors of that time period -- work camps, mass graves, forced separations of families, rooting out of intellectuals. I won't go into detail here as it does not seem the appropriate place, but one must ask how we let this happen again and again, across different countries, and how to stop if from happening again (our bearing witness to past atrocities and genocides not being enough). My limited understanding of this traumatic period also makes me wonder to what extent the actions, lives, decisions of Cambodians today should be understood and filtered through the events that took place during the Khmer Rouge's rule.

Sorry to end on such a serious note -- more (uplifting posts) from us soon.

Moving along the Mekong in Southern Laos

Yes well, posting hasn't really happened as frequently as hoped, but there is either too much excitement or no internet. I'll try to get us up to speed here.

After a surprisingly painless 24 hour bus ride down from Luang Nam Tha to Vientiane and some time in Vientiane getting our Cambodia visas and learning Lao cookery, we made our way down to Champasak, home of Wat Phu Champasak. The wat is a World Heritage Site (our third so far on the trip) and apparently home to the most impressive ruins in Laos. We rented bikes to travel the five miles from our guest house and enjoyed our sunniest day thus far. Of course the blinding sun addled my brain and caused me to forget the camera that day, but I suppose we'll always have our memories...

The temple represents the spread of Hinduism and then Buddhism across the Mekong river and into the Bolavan Plateau, and both of these religions are lumped on top of the animistic beliefs of the Angkor people who lived here. While most of the temple has crumbled, many stunning sculptures of both Hindu and Buddhist dieties are preserved in a nearby museum. It's amazing to see how some of the forms are conserved over time - a new concrete water pump at the Cambodian-Laos border had almost exactly the same design as a fountain of the wat from the 11th century.

That night we found a restaurant all to ourselves where I had a really extraordinary fish soup - lemongrass, a sour flavor, some galanga root (possibly related to ginger?). I'm a bit unclear as to all of the ingredients, but it was a nice way to end the day.

We continued our journey south the next day, once again following the Mekong, this time towards a group of islands in the middle of the river called Si Phan Don, literally "four thousand islands". About the Mekong: we've been traveling along the river for the last week, and while it was fairly wide up in Luang Pra Bang, down here it is absolutely huge (and when we crossed it a few days later on our way to Phenom Penh it was positively ginormous). It's well above the usual banks and a dark muddy brown from the water and sediment brought by all the rain we've had. Despite it all the surface barely ripples.

After waking up to roosters once again, we flagged down a bus heading to a ferry that would take us back across the river. As soon as the bus stopped at the "ferry terminal" (a dirt road leading into the water) it was suddenly full of vendors hawking bamboo skewers loaded with a cornucopia of meat products. I got some chicken and sticky rice. Apparently it was buy two sticks of chicken and get a free stick of the chicken's organs day, but 7am is a little early for chicken heart in my book.

Once across the river the bus headed north without us, leaving us at a dusty intersection where we waited for a southbound public bus, which is fancy word for a pickup truck with some wooden benches and a steel cage over the bed. When the first one arrived we successfully bargained down the foreigner price to the Lao price (we knew we were there when we got furtive thumbs up from bus occupants). Soon I was squished next to an old woman with lips stained red from the betel nut she was chewing, and Elyse sat with a woman who offered her lotus flower seeds and a small boy who offered to drool on her.

Whenever the bus stopped, fresh sticks of bbq'd creatures were once again thrust into our faces. An alarming number of passengers bought an alarming variety of creatures, including crickets on a stick and a variety of small rodents with furry claws still attached. Of course, half the fun of buying crickets on a stick is making the white guy eat one, so I was compelled to crunch and swallow the poor guy. You see, I studied weta in New Zealand for a month way back when, so I have some love for members of the order Orthoptera, but I have to admit the cricket wasn't half bad.

When we return: lounging in Si Phan Don, exploring the charms and terrifying history of Phenom Penh, and the curious incident of the dog in the night time.

Elyse and I are back from what I think have been the best few days of our trip. We made our way up to Luang Nam Tha to do some trekking in Nam Ha, which was Laos' first national park when it was founded in 1993. We arrived here at 9pm on Saturday, after a long day on the bus from Luang Pra Bang. This gave us a whole hour to organize a trek beginning the next morning, find a place to stay, and find something to eat before we collapsed.

The next morning we met our guide Pone and set off on a tuk-tuk ride to start our hike. The rain which has followed us through Laos decided now was as good a time as any to really pick up the pace, so we began what would be a very muddy two days in the jungle. Our destination was an Akha village that would take us about six hours to reach through rice paddies, dense jungle, and once we neared the Akha village, endless slopes of rice planted where the jungle had been recently cut down and burned. This slash and burn agriculture is a traditional use for the three tribes that call the national park home, and it's hard to fault someone who is practicing subsistence agriculture for destroying something that I might value in its untouched state. Recently, Chinese companies have started to pay villagers to farm rubber trees in the park. The companies pay the Lao government as well, and everyone is happy except the forests and the ecotourism industry. The villagers now have money to add meat and vegetables to their diet and to pay for the small solar arrays that a company is installing in the village. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The beauty of this trip was that we were the only gringos we saw for two days, as we walked with Pone and experienced the conflict and confluence between development and conservation. We also experienced the extraordinary hospitality of the Akha people, who were having a merry time when we arrived. It was a day off, a goat had just been slaughtered for the spirits, and the lao lao (rice whiskey) was flowing. We spent some time in the village but stayed in a hut with our guide a couple hundred meters outside the village. This was a really nice setup, because we ate dinner with a few people and got a chance to wander around, but we didn't feel like we were intruders so much as funnylooking houseguests. The food was really fantastic, and I've posted a picture of lunch below. Note the banana leaves that serve as placemats and tupperware:


Just as we arrived a small child carrying his even smaller baby sister on his back came up to us and offered us the berries he was munching on. He hung out with us for a while, as we traded words in English and Lao and I tended to my somewhat battered feet - the mud and leeches had taken their toll; Elyse's somehow came out fairly spry. Our friend, whose name was Pa Tu, is now a sales and brand representative for K.C., and can be seen in the village sporting the sweet apparel that Elyse is modeling below (picture taken with village in the background):


Our walk back the next day was longer and sunnier, and we did our mitzvah for the day by tending to a rather nasty machete cut on a villager's hand. My duct tape magic is probably still keeping that bandage on his palm.

Beautiful wildlife abounds in the jungle:


The walk home through rice paddy mazes:


Wet and having fun in the jungle:


We're now in Vientiane, where we've secured visas for Cambodia and learned the secrets of Lao cookery. We're off to Southern Laos this evening as we continue our long journey following the Mekong.

Orange in Laos

From an internet cafe in Luang Prabrang, I am writing as monks clad in bright orange robes and backpackers donning much less are strolling by outside. The town is sandwiched between the mighty Mekong and a much smaller river, and has the appearance of a place that was immensely peaceful before travelers from all corners of the world added it to their list. (Still a very peaceful place, but I imagine with a very different ambiance 10 years ago.)

We arrived here on Wednesday, needing some peace and quiet after our adventures in northern Viet Nam. Thrilled to be able to sleep in after many days of rising by 5:30, we were slightly exasperated when the family whose guesthouse we are staying at told us that something interesting was going on at, yes, 5:30 the next morning. But as most things that happen at 5:30 am, this was well worth another early wake-up.

Families from around the town lined up along the side of the road, each having prepared a small edible treat to share with the Buddhist monks. Resting on their haunches, family members doled out a sweet rice treat wrapped in banana leaf or a sesame cookie to each of the monks that came passing by in a procession, on their way to a wat (temple) where they will spend the next (rainy) months studying, meditating, etc. Each monk, shoeless and wearing only his long orange robe, carried a metal container that was filled up by these families, presumably with food that would help them get through the next months -- a kind of alms-giving for local families. But others lined up along the street, mostly young, slightly dirtier boys, had empty baskets themselves, and some of the monks would take from their containers and help fill these boys' empty baskets. Though no one explained this to us, it appeared to be some small redistribution on the part of the monks, making sure that those less fortunate had something to eat as well. The child in me couldn't stop thinking of trick-or-treating, but it was clear that we were witnessing a very solemn act of great spiritual importance to these families. It was an honor to watch the procession and see a glimpse of the relationship between the monks scattered throughout the country's wats and the local community.

Exploring the old royal palace and some of Luang Prabang's environs today before heading further north tomorrow.

To Ha Long Bay and Back Again

After a morning spent organizing Lao visas (delayed success) and Lao transportation (definite success, no hungry or angry women) we put our research to the test and headed off the guidebook path towards Luang Yen bus station. A bike rickshaw got us and our packs there relatively quickly, though it would have been faster if I had used the bike pump that Elyse was unable to convince me to bring on our trip. My mistake.

Once finished sweating through the bus ticket negotiation, we went in search of breakfast, which turned out to be a bowl of pho at a small roadside stand. Delicious. We watched the proprietors dump a cow skull into the pot for the next batch of broth. Elyse was unimpressed, but remained more or less unperturbed.

On the bus (which left half an hour early, unaccountably, and was thus probably not exactly our scheduled bus) we bopped along to the blaring and soppy Vietnamese pop, munched lychees, and tried not to be too curious about the woman across the aisle holding the heel of a baguette over her nose. All of a sudden we were told to get off the bus in the middle of Haiphong, at a room containing a desk, a table, and an unhelpful clerk, right next to a store selling light fixtures and bathtubs.

At this point we began to learn an important lesson about traveling in Vietnam. At least in our limited experience, the people we've met haven't been out to take advantage of us. But they also haven't been too keen on explaining anything to us either, even taking into account the rather large language barrier. So we've found that the best we can do is to stay calm (as anyone reading this knows, that is not really a strength for either of us), ask questions, try not to let anyone take our tickets too soon, and try to figure out what too soon means. This lesson really saved us down the road in Sa Pa.

It turned out we had another bus ride to get us to our boat, and eventually that bus turned up to deliver us to a small boat waiting along the coast amidst rice paddies and large shipping facilities. By 4pm we were ensconced in a tent on a hut on the beach near Cat Ba Town. Not too shabby, especially considering that Cat Ba Town is packed with Vietnamese tourists on the weekend and lodging is at a premium.

The sunrise from our tent:


We had traveled here to see the cliffs of Ha Long Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage site situated at the north end of the Gulf of Tonkin. We puttered around the next day on a small junk, stopping to see caves and kayaking through waters protected by the hundreds of islands that dot the bay. Amidst these cliffs are small floating fishing villages constructed out of bamboo, wood, and large styrofoam blocks. Amazing. We stopped at one for some tea and discovered that under the decks were nets filled with fish - aquaculture at its most basic.

A fishing village nestled against the cliffs:


The next morning our tent was of limited use in a torrential downpour that woke us up at 5 in the morning and sent us to huddle in a nearby cafe with the rest of the wet tent dwellers. Ah, monsoon season.

We departed in the rain for the return trip to Hanoi, where I ate the contents of the following picture. You do not want to know the details, and when I learned the details, after having consumed it with relish, I did not want to know them either. I'll leave it at that.