Category: Travel

13 November 2015 Friday Taxis & Buses

上海 SHANGHAI

Friday 13 November 2015

When you get off the long distance bus and step into a puddle with your white shoes and are standing in the rain without your umbrella because you cannot get it because it is still in the luggage compartment of the long distance bus behind an enormous black bag that is laden with rocks; when you are standing there, gradually becoming sodden, and a nice man with a engaging smile and an umbrella rushes up to you and seizes your luggage from behind the enormous black bag and says, “Taxi! Taxi!” and motions for you to follow him and holds the umbrella solicitously over your now dripping hair, do NOT follow him. He could be, at worst, a kidnapper and hold you for ramsom or, at best, merely a smiling man who will charge you four times the going rate of taxi transportation. If you do not mind paying four times the going rate and prefer to be out of the rain, then get into his private car and pay the money. But if he could possibly be a kidnapper, perhaps you had better not take the risk.

When you are standing in the rain outside a temple (it always rains when I go to a temple) thronged with tourists spilling into the street, and the taxis, one after another, go whizzing past, until a policeman somehow makes you understand that taxis are not allowed to stop at this location, then you walk to the taxi-stopping location and wait and wait and wait, while the taxis continue to whiz by you, and when a clean car drives up to you and the driver leans out the window (but does not get out of the car with an umbrella) and says, “Hello! Hello!” in a strange sort of English, you ask him how much? He says, “Twenty.” When you get in the car with your friend and give him twenty, he says, “Twenty. Twenty.” Twenty for you and twenty for your friend. Now this is only twice the going rate, so If you are tired of waiting for taxis that continue to whiz past and want to pay two times the going rate, pay the money and enjoy being out of the rain But perhaps he, too, is a kidnapper. So you get out of the car and continue to stand in the rain.

When a van pulls up with the same offer and you get in the van, the driver spends the next half hour driving you around and calling out the window to other ignorant tourists, trying to entice more passengers. After going nowhere for a half hour, you and your friend get out of the van and return to the same spot in the rain that you started from.

Eventually, a taxi with a green light will stop. When you show him the kanji for your address, which has been carefully written down on your little slip of now wet, limp paper, he may shake his head and drive off. But eventually a driver will nod, “yes.” You will then wrestle your overloaded luggage with the too many books that – again – you should not have bought, into the trunk of the cab, and he will then take you to somewhere in the general vicinity of your destination. When you have arrived at wherever it is that he has decided is close enough, he will stop the cab with a jerk, yell *&^#$$@!!” at you at the top of his lungs, and point angrily in several directions. You will wrestle your luggage out of the trunk – in the rain – and splash down this unknown street until, eventually you see something vaguely familiar, and you find your hotel. It may be a long walk, but you have not been kidnapped, and you have not paid four times or two times the going rate.

It is not entirely unreasonable that the driver does not bring you to the door of your destination because the traffic is always more than any living person should have to endure, and left turns, if they are possible, can be impossible. The driver is driving twelve hours a day and needs to get as many jobs each day as possible to live. And shouting is the normal level of speech, whether happily joking with friends or giving directions, and can be distinguished from full-out anger by its speed and fierce intensity.You just do not take these things personally.



We had a photo taken by Clarence and Sidney Gamble of the gate of the Imperial Library as it stood in 1908. Now we wanted to see what it looked like today. That is why we were dealing with all these taxis, or trying to do so, running all over Hangzhou to find these temples and monuments that the Gambles had once seen. We had been told where it was, and we had the photo. Easy enough to find, yes? After much wandering around and questioning, directions given and received, we found what we were told was the gate wasa reconstruction in part of the uppermost roof of the original gate, a far cry from the entire magnificent monument in our photo



But when it came to the reconstruction of the Lei Feng Pagoda. nothing was partial. The original fell in 1924, The current Lei Feng pagoda is monumental and massive,as are all of China’s monuments with – what else – an escalator to take you to the top of the hill where the pagoda stands. Elevatos within the pagoda take you to the top of the pagoda itself, and the views from every part of the top-most balcony are beautiful, .



Our bird’s eye view from the Lei Feng Pagoda of the layout of the Jingci Temple prepared us for our final stop. a second visit to the Main Hall of the Jingci Temple, where an older woman with a most beatific smile was sweeping with one of those strange Chinese brooms, making the area tidy. Her smile lit up the gray day. And we were ready to call it a day. We took one more photo and back to our hotel we went, to pack and to ready for plane travel.

November 13, 2015
12 November 2015 Thursday Ling Yin Temple in the Rain. Again

杭 HANGZHOU

Thursday 12 November 1015

So at seven in the morning, we are checking out of the hotel in Shanghai and arguing about whether to take metro (7 RMB, one hour and 20 minutes) or taxi (200 RMB, one hour), when the desk clerk calls to another customer, “Your taxi is here.” And where was this customer going? To the Pudong airport. And was he willing to share his cab? He was. What lovely synchronicity. It was the best taxi ride ever. The driver was in a uniform. He actually helped with the luggage. The cab was clean, and the ride smooth. How very very nice.

The day continued to be full of surprises. My seat mate on the bus from Shanghai to zHangzhou had just arrived from a conference in Las Vegas. He spoke good English and knew Hangzhou well. He located on the map all the sites we were coming to visit, translated the kanji into pinyin; gave me a Mandarin lesson, and recommended the brand name of a good portable charger.

In Hangzhou, early checkin was possible at the hotel, and the manager knew of a good bookstore where I could buy a present for Mr.Xue.

We wanted to take the present to Mr.Xue, and the hotel manger called him (Mr.Xue does not speak English) to ask if we could come to the Temple. Mr. Xue said it would be difficult for us to find him because we do not speak Mandarin And then the hotel manager offered to come with us and be the translator.

So off we went, the three of us, driving around beautiful Westlake to Ling Yin Temple in the rain (it always rains when I go to a temple, but no matter, they give us umbrellas). After present-giving and tea-drinking and lengthy discussion of Clarence James Gamble and his LingYin photos, Mr. Xue took us on a tour (in the rain) of rock carvings that go back to the North Song Dynasty (960-1279): Buddhas carved in the nocks and crannies of the caves, big Budders and rows of little Buddhas, all sizes and so many. We splashed about and had to duck our heads under the down-hanging spits of rock. We used the flashlights on our smart phones to see the bas relief figures hidden in the darkness of the cave’s shadows.

I was so enthralled, I forgot to take photos. The featured photo in the header is what we saw as given on Wikipedia. But above is the photo that I did take just outside a cave: this tree had looped itself up and back and over. What was that tree thinking?

November 12, 2015
11 November 2015 Wednesday Southgate High School & St. John’s University

上海 SHANGHAI

Wednesday 11 November 2015

On their second day in Shanghai in 1908. the Gambles visited Southgate School, which was run by missionaries. Today, Shanghai Southgate High School exists on the same site as did the original Christian missionary Southgate School. It is difficult to think of this 30s-retro building as a high school, but the signs say as much.

On that second day in Shanghai, the Gambles also visited St. John’s University, founded by the Episopalians as St. John’s College in 1879 and in 1905 becoming St. John’s University. St. John’s was known as the “Harvard” of China and graduated seventy-three classes of highly educated individuals, fluent in Chinese and English, familiar with both Asian and Western culture, who became the international elite, excelling in all fields of endeavor, in education, law, international diplomacy, finance, government, science, engineering, linguistics, entertainment. In 1952, St. John’s was taken over by the Chinese government.

In the 1980s, when the Chinese government wanted to normalize relations with the West, it was the St. john’s graduates to whom they turned, tracking them down in all corners of the globe, engaging them to return to China and teach their expertise and what they knew of the West to the newly open Chinese nation.

St. John’s is now the East China University of Political Science and Law. In 2015, the campus is a refreshing change from the congested city, the many skyscrapers, and the lanes of city traffic. Over the century, the plantings have flourished. The campus is beautiful with its paved stone walkways, green lawns, shrubbery, and tall trees.

Although the chapel was long ago razed, several buildings, clearly from the early 1900s and of Western architectural design, along with the Si Meng Building, remain, obviously being occupied and put to use.

The Si Meng building was erected in 1909 and bears the original inscribed cornerstone, with etching and inscribed writing obviously having been scraped away. On the stone, “St John’s University” can still be made out, and originally there was written “our Lord” as part of a quote from a verse in the Bible, this verse mostly defaced.

The Si Meng building was built with funds from Yale graduates to honor the Preacher Arthur Thomas Mann, who arrived at St. John’s in 1902 to teach Philosophy. He died in July of 1907, drowning while trying to save a Chinese friend. The brass plaque adjacent to the corner of the St. John’s stone was put up by Yale graduates (Mann was a Yale man) and gives full details of his life and death.

November 11, 2015
10 November 2015 Tuesday Shanghai Apple Store & Print Outs

上海 SHANGHAI

Tuesday 10 November 2015

It seems silly to travel six thousand miles just to sit in a dowdy hotel room with terrible lighting all day. But there it is. Most of Tuesday was spent sitting in a dowdy hotel room with terrible lighting, puling together the pieces of research that will go into producing “China 1908.”

Happily, two brief adventures were enjoyed: in the morning, it was necessary to take a trip to the Apple Store, where hundreds of people were jam-packed on all six ( I think it is six) stories of the Apple sales and support rooms. I now have three different explanations of how to set up my brand new I Phone for use in foreign countries. If my Verizon bill is horrendous, I will know they were all wrong.

The second adventure took the form of a search for a print out and a trip to a tiny hole-in-the-wall shop with concrete floor and three standard printing-xerox machines that took up most of the space. The rest of the space was claimed by a cheery young mother with a pony tail and two adorable toddlers, who were running through her legs.

The tiniest shops are full of stuff. It spills out over the walls and on to the sidewalks. Everywhere, people are moving and unpacking boxes of who-knows what. Because things are so crowded and squeezed in together, you are especially conscious of so much stuff.

The streets do not appear especially clean, for everywhere small and large construction jobs are under way, though you see little litter. Perhaps it is just to create jobs, but all day long on many of the sidewalks are women and men in oversized jumpsuits with strange brooms sweeping up a leaf or a twig. No air blowers here.

November 10, 2015
9 November 2015 Monday Meeting Mr. Lin & Night Markets

上海 SHANGHAI

9 November 2015

And so it all worked out very nicely. The Astor House Hotel did not have our Monday night reservation. Mr.Lin could only come on Monday. Dear Mr. Lin, who can speak Chinese and who lives in China and who can read kanji and who functions in a Chinese society as only a Chinese person is able to do. Dear Mr. Lin helped us with our luggage and told the taxi driver where to go and checked us into the new hotel and told us where the restaurant and the bank and the Apple store were located and led us through the blare of noise and the maze of cars and motor scooters and bicycles that come at you from all directions and I want to go home.

It is lovely when the natives pick you up in cars and take you places and translate what you want into Chinese. It is less lovely to navigate this boisterous, crowded traffic-marathon, people-compounded streets all by one’s English- speaking self. I never did believe it when someone would say, “Oh, don’t worry about it. Everyone speaks English.” Not Not Not. I have ,in tact, learned a lot of Mandarin with Pimsleur, but Pimsleur is building a foundation, and my sentences are limited to “My wife wants to eat dinner with me tonight,” which is not the instant vocabulary I need when I want to order rice at the restaurant.

Nevertheless, thanks to Mr Lin, we are in a clean hotel and have access to food and a bank. I have the addresses I need for my research carefully written in kanji to show to the taxi driver. Will I know if he is actually taking me to Southgate and not Northgate?

We had the most delicious lunch. The food is wonderful, whether on the street or in the restaurant. But later we were hungry again. Tsutae went next door to get some soup at 9:30 this evening and came back with a pair of lively colored cotton socks. Only 10 RMB. She was so pleased.

In the evening, after the local stores close down, street repair begin and the night market open.s Suddenly, where there were streets devoted only to the aggressive bicycle-motor scooter-cars-delivery truck traffic, suddenly, after dark, mini-restaurants spring up on sidewalks. Folding chairs and folding tables are unfolded, canopies are set over long unfolded folding tables, every inch laden: skewers of chicken, beef, pork; piles of vegetables; condiments; invitations to make your own soup (these vendors do not tell you to get out of their shops); oranges and watermelon; along with socks and great piles of shoes; T shirts, pants – the necessities for Chinese life. The food is so good. It must be local. It is not Montsanto-grown Thankfully, the Chinese never bought into the cholesterol myth. Their food is cooked in oil and fat and has taste. The night market is for sustenance of Chinese life, not for tourists.

How do they live, these hard-working vendors? Unpacking piles and piles of vegetables, clothes. fruit. shoes, selling for so little. How much can they earn in one night? But no one looks poor or unkempt. Casual Los Angeles style, perhaps, but not poor. No one is going hungry that I could see.

Later, Tsutae spent another ten RMB, and this time, that same sum of ten RMB bought three pairs of lively colored cotton socks. She was even more pleased.

November 9, 2015