Heap of white rice

Tibet Day 3

The Drepung Monastery's buildings are painted white and stacked up on the hillside such that they resemble a pile of white rice. The words "dre" and "pung" mean "rice" and "heap."

Along the route up to the main hall, we passed an eternal prayer wheel, which mesmerized me for a long while...



until a ram that had been released as a prayer offering ambled by.

Spotted on the street in Lhasa

For every handmade broom in the corner store, five canisters of Kraft Parmesan Cheese are never made. That's why I buy Kraft brand Parmesan brooms. Between a resourcefully made broom and a waxy, cheese-flavored, food product, it's no contest as to which I'd rather eat.

Tips for high places

Tibet Day 2

We have done very little in Lhasa except for sleep and sit around in the past 48 hours. I'm learning what helps to feel more comfortable at 12,000 feet (and a third less oxygen than at sea level):

1. Don't take a shower (at first). It will only make you sick. Anyway, sweat just disappears into thin air here.
2. Sprinkle water on the floor to counter the arid climate of the steppe. As I mentioned, sweat just disappears into thin air here. My bedside glass of water evaporated a third overnight!
3. Rest. For me, this has meant switching the TV between CCTV 7 and 9 for the sitcoms and travel shows. I am also fascinated by a western Chinese show about antiques. So far today, in between showing off their mediocre dancing and singing talents, the panel of experts discussed a bronze bowl, a jade charm shaped like a twig, and a terracotta camel.
4. Take your Diamox. Or chew your local, high-mountain plant.
5. Make yourself eat even though at high altitude food feels deceivingly pointless. Tonight over a dinner of white radish soup and sauteed yak (more on that later), we met fellow travelers including the manager of a Michelin tire plant. See, that is what you are missing when you don't eat.

Now, if only I hadn't come here already sick. I woke up several times in the night feeling like I just couldn't get enough air. I took a few, very deep breaths as if I were in yoga class and felt a little better. The locals here are flip about complaints other than about headaches, which must be in their experience, precursors to dying, or at least voluminous puking. No headaches for me.

My travel mates are all related to me and so far stumbling down this road of discomfort at mostly the same pace. I am curious to know whether most everyone goes through this rough period, or just those who share my genes?

Altitude and colds don't mix

The only thing rarer than oxygen and hamburgers in the TAR is Internet access, so apologies for these necessarily post-facto posts.

Tibet Day 1
From the instant you step off the plane onto the gangplank, it's clear something is not quite right with your lungs or your head. You notice you're taking two breaths for every step, and everyone seems to be moving faster than you. A guy on the plane who has been traveling in and out of the TAR for the past year offers this wisdom: Say little, move slowly, expect to feel uncomfortable in the middle of the night. Most importantly, don't panic.

We meet our guide who welcomes us with hada, long white scarves that he says, I'm not supposed to step on. I step on it three times as I stumble to the van with my backpack, which suddenly feels ridicuously oversized and overstuffed. I realize I should not have packed a copy of Endless Feasts: Sixty Years of Writing from Gourmet Magazine along with my collection of Chinese and Tibetan language books. I also suddenly realize all I want to do is sleep. The only thing I notice on the way to the hotel is the ring of enormous, charcoal gray mountains encircling us. They are so sharp they are like the jagged teeth of a giant, charred beast. We enter a tunnel that cuts through one of the largest peaks, and we don't see daylight for a full five minutes. On the other side, the mountains are not gray, but bright white, red or green. All along their bases, countless people have painted criss-crossing forms, white lines that look like ladders. They are prayers climbing up to the bluest sky I have ever seen.

Last day at sea level

Back in Shanghai one last night before we leave for the TAR. My cough has not gone away, and so I have taken my impending altitude sickness as cause for one last feast. I won't have much of an appetite when it hits and all. We went to a Hong Kong chain called, Yi Ge Huoguo, 一哥火鍋, or Number One Hotpot, and ordered all-you-can-eat and ate all of this and more.

Note the delicious and still undulating abalone on the white plate in front. If not overcooked, abalone is one of my favorite things. It tastes somewhat like a silky, soft clam without the seaweed aftertaste. Clearly, the taste is very unique. In terms of phylogeny, abalone are snails with a shallow shell, which doesn't bother me, but then again, I eat most everything. I especially like eating, in my sister's words, "foods that feel like clam."

Nanjing in a day

The ruins of the imperial palace, the Ming Gugong, 明故宮, which was the model for the much newer imperial palace in the Forbidden City in Beijing.
As was the fashion with palaces in those days, it was protected by a huge wall and a moat. Sun Yatsen was laid to rest in his fancy mausoleum, 中山陵, in 1929. He asked everyone to keep it simple, but the nice thing about dead people is that you don't have to listen to them.In China, black corn tastes better than yellow corn, but everyone knows there's no better corn than Ohio corn. Everyone who knows what Ohio is, that is.A very tiny child wielding a very long sword.
Beipei was the youngest son of the dragon, and he ended up looking like a turtle instead. Here is a view of his butt.
Where the wild things are. They are helping you to open doors.
Ming Xiaoling, 明孝陵, on the path to the Empress's tomb. They artfully constructed a couple dozen pairs of ten-foot high sculptures of magical beasts to line the road and welcome the dead Empress. Not that she cared at that point.
The Nanjing city wall dates back to the 1300s and is one of the dwindling original walls still standing in China today.

Not pictured: The scalper who then sold us train tickets back to Shanghai.

Good morning, Nanjing

I started off my morning with this tasty yogurt made by the Nanjing Weigang Dairy, which played a big role in my existence but that is a story for another day. It's just a little sweet with a hint of clover and lemon. The yogurt, not my existence.

After all the rain in Suzhou, we're looking forward to a day or so in Nanjing. The streets here are as wide as in Shanghai, sometimes 14 lanes wide, but they are all lined with giant trees and brick sidewalks. The city is bustling but somehow not frenetic.

Our sleepy friend on the steps of Nanjing Teachers' University

Wuxi

On the way to Suzhou, about three hours northwest of Shanghai by train, we pass the town of Wuxi, 无锡. For generations, it's gray-green hills were a source of tin, or xi, 锡, and so for most of history it was known simply as Xi. But eventually the stores were depleted, and the town was wu xi, without tin, and so it became known.

From the dining car, Wuxi looks like many of the growing urban centers just outside of China's main cities. A common sight are scores of identical thirty-story cement and rust high-rises encircling a single patch of communal grass. I imagine the families in the little one-story shanties just outside their perimeter, anticipating the day they will move into a thirty-story cement and rust high-rise encircling a single patch of communal grass of their own.

I checked and there is no town in China, or anywhere in the world, by the name of Wubiyao, 无必要, without want or need.

Foraging in public places

Ah, what is lovelier than a pale pink lotus in bloom? You can find them in freshwater on the edge of lakes and ponds. Or in the middle of a garden crowded with tour guides bellowing into megaphones about the cost of the landscaping in today's dollars and asking visitors to identify which rock formation looks like a lion.

After a few weeks, the flower sheds its petals and turns into a green stalk packed tightly with seeds.

And that is when you eat it.

Glass and stone and fried fish

I.M. Pei, illustrious architect and maker of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has a number of ties to Suzhou, the most recent of which is as the designer of the new Suzhou Museum. Besides being the perfect place to go on a rainy afternoon (admission is free), the museum is worth a visit if only to see the glass and granite courtyard, which is reminiscent of his Pyramide du Louvre but with overt Chinese flair like small rocks shaped like giant mountains and fancy carp.

To our surprise, the lovely woman helping us in the museum shop turned out to be Mr. Pei's niece and, again to our surprise, is a fellow Ohioan! With her help, we picked up some fun souvenirs and a restaurant recommendation: Wumen Renjia, 吴门人家, a converted home and garden specializing in Suzhou cuisine (Read: sweet and fried) at 31 Panru Xiang, 潘儒巷31号. It's just three blocks from the museum. Exit the museum gate and turn east (left) on Dongbei Jie, 東北街, then turn south (right) at the bridge. Walk a block down Yuanling Lu, 园林路, and walk a block. The restaurant is in the quiet alley, just to your right. It looks like this:

Windows

Suzhou is known for its elaborate gardens. These spaces were never intended for the crowds that pass through these days but were instead the private courtyards, usually of scholars, living as long ago as 1000 AD. Those scholars wanted to do their calligraphy in peace, and so the landscape architects of the time accomplished amazing feats with strategically placed trees, water, and stone. Stepping into these gardens today is like donning noise-canceling headphones. Suddenly, the peal of bus brakes and lost tourists gives way to the sounds of a waterfall, a flock of song birds, or the wind, and all you can hear is whatever was meant to be heard.

We visited a number of gardens, each with its own unique aesthetic and ingenious design, but a favorite was Canglang Ting, 沧浪亭, the Great Wave Pavilion, for its 108 windows, no two of which are alike. This garden was also of special interest to my dad, who had read a poem about it as a boy, and seventy years later got to see it.

Itinerary

We are in a holding pattern for a few days until the TAR travel permit comes through. The plan is this:

• A few days around Shanghai (including short trips to Suzhou, Nanjing, and so forth);
• 10 days in Xizhang Province (Tibet);
• 36 hours on the Tibet-Qinghai train from Lhasa to Xi'an;
• A few days in Xi'an; and finally,
• A few days in Chengdu or Shanghai (we have some votes for pandas and some votes for shopping).

Right now, my biggest concern is the cold I have had for three weeks and what will happen when my brain goes from 0 to 14,000 feet when the plane door opens in Lhasa.

A boring but wonderful hotel in Shanghai

Now that I've lived in a variety of condos, service apartments, luxury retreats, and one-star hotels in Shanghai, I can confidently offer a recommendation for the place to stay: Rayfont Shanghai Xuhui Hotel, 瑞峰酒店, 7 Zhaojiabang Road (Ruijin Road), 8621-54077000. As the sign says so plainly, this is not a place for celebrities. It's a place for normal people, you know, celeberities.If you want to experience the delights of traveling abroad that come with, say, design details by a hot New York hotelier, mildewed curtains framing a view of the Bund, or midnight calls from ladies offering massages, try any number of already discovered hotels listed in the guidebooks. If you want an exceptionally soft, clean bed, in-room Internet that works, rooms without the taint of smoke, and decent water pressure, come here.

Rayfont has two other locations in the city, but this one is the newest and in the relatively low-key, southwest corner of the French Concession, in an area that was once the stomping grounds of an organized crime family. If that's not enough, the rooms all have flat screen TVs and delicate ceiling lights made of string.
I recommend booking a suite, as they are designed for long-term stays but are offered at prices ranging from Y480 to Y660 a night. The family suite has two bedrooms, a living room, and kitchen with full-sized refrigerator, stove, and washing machine. You can rent dishes and cookware for Y30 a day, so you can run to the corner market and cook up some crab, which is infinitely more luxurious than a mint.

Mian 麵

While in China, I plan to gorge on mian in its innumerable incarnations. Traditional mian is always made from the same two basic ingredients--wheat flour and water. So, it is the method of forming the noodles that gives each variety of mian a distinctive flavor and texture.

There is mian cut from sheets of dough into very wide strips, micro-thin hairs, or somewhere in between. There is mian pulled by hand into long, thin coils. There is mian made by slicing slivers from dough as hard as a block of wood into a boiling pot of stock. There is mian made by piping a long stream of batter into fragrant oil.  There is mian pulled from a roll of dough into small flecks with chopsticks. And so on.

I have experienced some of my most satisfying bowls of mian (and grilled lamb on a stick) in Muslim restaurants. This afternoon we savored a few different types, including the la mian, 拉麵, or pulled noodles, being made here and later steeped in lamb broth and topped with fresh garlic and black vinegar.

My grandfather used to make la mian for us without much ado. Maybe to him, it was like making a sandwich. Beginning with one coil of dough, he would flick his wrist and suddenly it became two. Then again and two became four. With a few more swift movements and twists, suddenly he had an armful of white noodles, all just the same length, width, and thickness. It was magic.

Getting into the TAR (Tibet Autonomous Region)

Entering Tibet requires a travel permit through the Tibet Tourism Bureau. This red tape guarantees travel agents’ their jobs (permit fee Y50, processing fee Y450) and filters out travelers who can’t plan a week in advance. Since the application requires copies of everyone’s passports, it make things much easier to make PDFs of your passport so you can shoot it over to your travel agent of choice (most in the major cities can handle this, not just those in the jump off points of Xining, Xi'an, or Chengdu). In a pinch, you can also take a snapshot of it and convert that to a PDF. We did it this way and will get ours in four days, including express mail delivery to our hotel in Shanghai.

What I learned at Narita's Quarantine Office

Foghorn Leghorn is, unfortunately, an H1N1 vector.

Three weeks and one bag

I try to be Buddhist about travel: The key is packing light.

Up, up, and away

In preparing for this trip to Tibet, I've been learning about altitude sickness. It is basically what happens when you slowly drown in air. Everyone new to altitudes above 8,000 feet (2,400 meters) will have some symptoms, but genetics are the dividing line between feeling sleep and cerebral edema. Lhasa is more than 12,000 feet (3,600 m) above sea level.

My genes are of the low-land variety and I tend to act mildly drunk for the first few days above 9,000 feet. I kept a journal when I was studying butterflies in the Rocky Mountains in college. Here is a quote: "Gathered butterfly data today and sampled nectar with micro-pipettes. Why aren't they called, 'tiny vacuums'?'"

I got a prescription for Diamox, which is the standard, Western medicine for this sort of thing. Diamox helps by making you breathe like a hamster (hyperventilate without feeling like you are hyperventilating). This helps lessen the drowning effect but if it gets too bad, the only solution is to head down the mountain. My parents are going the Eastern medicine route of chewing on medicinal herbs, so we'll see which works better.

Hello. This is an explanation of what this is all about.

I find that travel advice generally falls into these categories:

1) Step off the beaten path, e.g., Get lost.
2) Don't be stupid, e.g., Avoid guys named "Giacomo" who promise a better exchange rate. Never stand behind a camel.
3) Be respectful, e.g., Don't wear jeans and tennis shoes everywhere. Speak softly. Don't point.
4) Immerse yourself, e.g., Learn the language, or at least a few choice phrases such as, "Help," and "I do not enjoy that." Talk to locals. Ask a lot of questions. Go to restaurants where the menus don't have pictures.
5) Just do what I say (because it can be really scary when things are too weird or new), e.g., Call this travel agent! Stay in Room 217 at the Hilton on Main Street! Don't drink the water!

It's this last bit of wisdom that can kill all the potential of a travel experience. Certainly, I don't advocate drinking giardia-infested water just to make a memory. But travel ought to do more than confirm expectations. In this era of virtual experiences, face-to-face conversations are all the more important for understanding each other and maybe even making this world a better place.

This is a blog about travel for those among us who want to drink the water.