goodbye china

I'm uploading a last batch of HK pictures in the hour or so before I leave Hong Kong. There are a couple of photos of a public pool in Kowloon Park where a friend and I swam yesterday. There were sanitizing "water curtains" to prevent disease, and I paid the entry fee with my Octopus (transit) card. The water was almost hot from the broiling sun, artificial rocks gave the pools a lagoon-like vibe, and the lifeguards barely used their whistles because everyone was so well behaved. Quite a different experience from Astoria Pool.



I feel a little sad to be leaving China, and especially this beautiful city. My trip is entering its last stage, and I'm not sure when I'll be able to return to these places again. Maybe someone can work on inventing a cheaper and faster way to travel to the other side of the globe?

On the bright side, I'm about to board a series of very efficient systems and vehicles to carry me to Tokyo. Another wholly new city (and country!) after a bit of familiarity over the past week! Stay tuned.

out of doors

It's harder to know what to write from Hong Kong, as my form of being a tourist in this city is simply to wander from favorite spot to favorite spot. Today, in honor of the sun and my birthday, I eschewed MTR efficiency and rode around the city only on my favorite forms of surface public transportation. First, I took a bus all the way to the west side of Hong Kong Island, Kennedy Town, where the waterfront is calm and some industrial uses remain. I had breakfast there: hot milk tea and thick toast with butter and condensed milk. (Breakfast in Hong Kong is an interesting mix of English and Chinese foods. People around me were eating toast, fried eggs, sausages, congee, and noodles.)



I then took two of the oldest forms of HK transport to get over to Kowloon: the tram and the Star ferry. I finished a stroll through Yau Ma Tei and Jordan on the Avenue of Stars, where the view was impossibly crisp and bright after two days of rain. I spent a little while sitting on the terrace of the promenade Starbucks, drinking iced coffee and feeling happy.



(As an aside, I'm feeling that Hong Kong is very photogenic compared to Beijing and Shanghai, and I'm trying to figure out why. Less pollution-haze? Taller, denser collection of buildings? More colors? My own bias? Opinions welcome.)

change is the only constant

I can still find my favorite mango-themed restaurant in Tsim Sha Tsui, and the black glutinous rice in coconut milk with mango slices is still delicious. Meanwhile, the Star Ferry Pier is in a wholly different location and the Central waterfront looks like the above. The famous Jardine building, Hong Kong's City Hall, and even the Urban Planning exhibition space are now facing an expanse of mud instead of the highway and water that was there before. Land "reclamation" for the Tamar project (that's Central Reclamation Phase III to you) is well underway. And since this is Hong Kong and not New York, I believe them when they say this massive project will be completed in 2011.

shanghai

I am sitting on a rooftop in Hong Kong, enjoying free wireless and access to Blogger, Youtube, and the unfettered world wide web. Goodbye, mainland China!

I was unable to post from Shanghai, where I spent five fabulous days seeing museums, eating, and walking the neighborhoods. After Beijing, it seemed like a Western traveler's wonderland. Although the subway announcements were not delivered with the same clear Midwestern accent as in the Beijing subway, many more people surprised me by speaking English and simply by being helpful to this simple foreigner. When I left my ATM card in a machine one afternoon, I was assisted in translation and negotiations by two Taiwanese students, a girl from Hunan province who had studied in Ireland, and several very kind bank employees. I got my card back the next day, and thanked the heavens that this had happened to me in Shanghai and not Beijing.

The food in Shanghai was also a breath of fresh air. I ate more than a few meals of the soup dumplings that Shanghai is famous for, learning to slurp out the broth before eating the meat and wrapper. Aside from delicious dumplings, street vendors in Shanghai also sell bubble tea and, of course, red bean sesame balls. What more could you need?

The streetscape in Shanghai was reminiscent of Hong Kong in its jumble of old and new, Western and Chinese. Being framed by rivers and water trades, the city is in many ways easier to navigate than enormous Beijing; and it's easier for Western eyes to process the history behind its streetscape, because it's a more familiar story of development. Yet Shanghai seemed just as much a construction site of a city, if not more so than Beijing. They are hosting the 2010 Expo next year, and reminders of this historic event are everywhere, along with its motto: "Better City, Better Life."

I have so much more to say about Shanghai: the fantastic Urban Planning Museum, the beautiful Shanghai Museum, the Jewish Quarter, the Bund-- everything was in flux and modern and utterly different from what I'd seen before. This entry is disjointed as I try to process these differences: leaving Shanghai this morning put me in a small panic that I was leaving China, still so far from understanding it and still having seen so little. When I next visit these cities, they will be unrecognizable.

(On the other hand today, rolling into Hong Kong and seeing the absolute beauty of skyscrapers, green hills, and the harbour, I felt overjoyed to be back here!)

ps

Why didn't anyone comment on the lack of photos in the post about the Forbidden City?! I am behind the Great Firewall until July 3rd and am relying on you to keep my blog accurate.
1. Tourists flocking with me towards the gates
2. Haidian sunset

798

As my departure from Beijing grows ever closer, I've been crossing a few more things off my master list of things to do here. One month as a Beijinger, and I haven't stopped feeling like a total newbie. There is so much I haven't eaten; so many subway lines and stops I haven't been to; so many phrases I still can't tell taxi drivers....

Down a bit on my list was Beijing's arts district, called 798 or Dashanzi. According to the internet, this area was formerly a military electronics compound. The industrial buildings, which are outside the reaches of public transit, now house all sorts of galleries, a couple of museums, and lots of coffee shops. Reading it described as Beijing's answer to SoHo NYC, I was skeptical. I've seen one Beijing interpretation of SoHo already, and it's a fancy mall with skyscrapers. (Actually, maybe that's not too far off...)

Luckily, 798 was nothing like either SoHo. It was kind of like a cross between Santa Fe, Red Hook, and the halls of an architecture school. The aesthetic was a frontier jumble of artsy workspaces, classy establishments, and Chinese street life. And this being Beijing, there was construction and installations going on everywhere.

The art in the galleries was pretty amazing. I saw a piece that compiled the photographed smiles of migrant workers; photographs of Beijing's skyline from inside luxury apartments; neon-colored portraits of an artist's friends in Beijing; gorgeous modern landscape paintings of the Summer Palace grounds; paintings that incorporate China's new architecture as kitchen utensils; and dark paintings of modern Chinese people with brand logos and product labels in sharp color. It was fascinating to see artists' responses to their rapidly changing country.

forbidden

The Forbidden City is proof that enormous stone squares are no new feature of Beijing's cityscape. Despite leaving my apartment well before 9am, I arrived at Tiananmen with swarms of parasol-carrying tourists and the sun already oven-hot. The Forbidden City is a huge complex which housed and was the seat of government for hundreds of years of Chinese emperors. Some English materials call it the more straightforward "Imperial Palace," but when you catch glimpses of the literally hundreds of roofs and wander through the alleys between buildings, it's easy to understand its other (and Chinese) name.

I lasted for about two and a half hours of shoving Chinese tourists (who are not the most polite of groups) and extreme heat with little shade. Quiet squares were few and far between, though finding myself occasionally alone in such an old, beautiful place was wonderfully peaceful and evocative. Soon, though, I got in a taxi and fled to a nearby trendy-ed up hutong called Nanluoguxiang, where I found a plant-filled courtyard restaurant for a relaxed lunch, then browsed the myriad shops along the alley. By late afternoon, I was more than ready for a Chinese massage, just $11 at an upscale place up the road.

See my Flickr stream for more, including photos of an artsy Beijing "open house" featuring a Chinese artist's work in a soon-to-be-demolished old home. The neighborhood is sprouting tall apartment buildings, which stood in formation across the road like a wave ready to crash. The second above photo is a sunset reflection in Haidian, a university-heavy district in the north of Beijing where I met a friend yesterday for local food and karaoke.

cctv

Rem's CCTV building in Beijing is not finished, but you can see its amazing shape from miles away (i.e., my balcony) when the pollution is low. I realized I'd pictured my visit all wrong when I came out of the subway stop to find my view blocked by a big, opaque metal fence that must have been over 15 feet tall. I ended up confronting the building like a tiny ant from below, glimpsing in small doses its imposing top as I navigated the trashed streets around the construction site. The activities of destroying and rebuilding were in effect even on the sidewalks blocks away, the neighborhood undergoing a gradual makeover of its own. Beijing's CBD was planned deliberately to rise in the southeast corner of the city. The very center, the old heart of Beijing, is reserved for Tienanmen and its horizontal, alternately expansive and dense character. The CBD is where verticality goes, although there are still patches of small shopping streets and the kind of restaurant where they cook their rice on the sidewalk.

Puddles and mud, and sidewalks blocked by the construction barriers, made it hard to continue to look up as I walked. But the street level held its own interests. All around were tents to house the migrant workers who are building Rem's majestic vision. I glimpsed a row of cots with dirty blankets inside; a tanned man smoking, shirtless, sitting outside it. Construction workers were welding, digging, laying bricks, and even uprooting trees. Again the idea of ants came to me, working and walking hurriedly in the shadow of a building site so enormous it took me forty five minutes to circumnavigate.

Hopefully I can return when it is finished, and approach a bit closer. By then, the workers will have been sent home.