Secret Santa

 Christmas is not a holiday in China, at least not in the traditional sense.    But everyone seems to know about Christmas...well, the gift-giving part of Christmas.  Chinese culture loves to exchange gifts - on holidays, weddings, graduations, birthdays. Gifts are also important to professional relationships, which brings a whole set of unwritten rules known as "guanxi".  So it is no surprise that the Chinese are more and more growing to love Christmas.

Our little team at work organized a "Secret Santa" gift exchange...complete with decorations and an artificial tree.  (Same stuff you would buy in the U.S.....it's all made here anyway.)  For most of the folks, this was their first time ever to do such an Christmas exchange.  The beauty of Christmas is that it is so egalitarian - gifts are given to everyone and not just a special guest of honor.  So everyone had a chance to give and to receive and to enjoy.

The Expat Christmas Party

 We returned from Kobe to Suzhou on December 9th....just in time to prepare for the Suzhou Expats Association Christmas party on December 10th.  We weren't hosting the party...but just attending.   I wouldn't think much preparation would be needed for that.  Wrong again.  There were dresses to be picked up from the dressmakers and nails to be done and hair to be styled.  NASA moon launches had less complex logistics.

 The Renaissance Hotel hosted the party, as it does most other EAS functions.  They did a great job of decorating for the season.  If you woke up with amnesia calling "where am I?", you'd have no clue that you were in China.   The crowd of partiers would not have been a clue either, as it was an overwhelmingly Western group that could just as easily have been gathering in Melbourne or Strasbourg or Peoria, Illinois.

 The party is actually a charitable event - you buy tickets that entitle you to drinks, dinner, and dancing.  Any profits go for local orphanages and such.  They sold exactly 100 tickets this year, which they said was the most ever.  Evidently there are more expats in Suzhou this year....or at least more that are homesick for Christmas.  The photo above shows Theresa with Ed and Delores.   They are a lovely couple - he from England and she from Ireland - who've been living in Asia for quite a while now.   Their apartment is three floors above ours, and from time-to-time we see what trouble we can get into together.

The photo above is from the dessert table.  Amongst the gingerbread houses and Christmas puddings, this was the only thing that seemed to be a little odd.  It is a watermelon sculpture.  Maybe watermelon is a traditional Christmas food someplace -in Australia or South Africa, I don't know.  But given the Chinese love for the melon, I'm guessing this is a local spin on holiday dessert.

More Trains

We've talked about the trains of China before, so it is only fair to give some time to the trains of Japan.  The photo above shows a Shinkansen train, one of their famous "bullet-trains".  They run at speeds up to 300 kilometers/hour, which is roughly the same as the Chinese fast trains.  For travel in an island the size of Japan, the bullet-train is more confortable, more convenient, and often faster than going by air. 

Himeji Castle

 Himeji Castle is located in....well, Himeji.  It's about 30 miles West of Kobe.  There has been a castle on the site for about 800 years and the current version dates back to around 1600.  It's one of the best preserved historical sites in Japan.  Unfortunately, it's in the process of becoming better preserved.

 The castle is being renovated from top to bottom.  Normally, you would see the castle rising from it's hill-top with it's tiled roof reaching five or six stories high.  Right now, though, you see only the image of the castle printed on the cloth windbreak that shrouds the scaffolding-encased structure.  It takes a bit from the "wow" factor, but there is still a lot of history to be seen.

 Himeji is a small town.  In the late 19th century, cities such as Kobe and Osaka began to grow large as a result of Japan's opening to the West and its rapid modernization.  For some reason - maybe because it does not have a port - Himeji remained frozen in the past.  But there was a silver lining - Himeji was not significant enough to draw the cross hairs of the bombsights during WWII.  So it survived to remain frozen in the past for the tourism industry of today.

 Theresa always told me that, when she was young and in Japan, she was always being stopped by people to have her picture taken with them.   The photo above shows that she hasn't lost any of that attraction to the locals.

 The castle grounds are protected by rings of moats and stone walls.  You can see that in the photos above and below.   The remaining photos show some of the restoration going on inside the shrouded scaffolding.  Also, they show the view from the top (Note the windows at the top of the scaffolding below...that's where the photos were taken.)   The final photo shows some of the brilliant foliage.  December seems a bit  late for fall colors, but it is actually peak season in this part of Japan.

Kobe Miscellany

 The food in China is very good, but it was a nice break to be in Japan to enjoy something different.  From what I can tell, all of the Asian countries are passionate about their food.  Also, from what I can tell, the American versions of Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and other Asian foods bear little resemblance to the authentic, home-country cooking.

Shabu-shabu is the Japanese version of a "hot pot".  In Suzhou, we've had the Chinese and Korean versions.   In all variations, you have a table top burner upon which boils some broth in which you cook vegetables and thinly-sliced strips of meat.  In Kobe, we enjoyed a true Japanese shabu-shabu that included some Kobe beef and some seafood.  All the ingredients were of highest quality, as you would expect in Japan.  It was a delicious feast.

The photo at top shows us dining in a little shabu-shabu place that is tucked in the basement of an office building.   I would never have found the place on my own.  But Moriyama-san, the lady in the left-rear of the top photo, claims it as one of her favorites. The others in the photo are colleagues - Laurence Degan at right-front and Dana McKinney to the left.  Theresa, of course, is in the back center.

 In Kobe, we got a chance to eat many of the dishes Theresa remembers from her childhood years in Japan. Of course, there was a lot of sushi and sashimi. Also, almost every day Theresa got a tonkatsu for lunch.  Tonkatsu is actually a Western import...the Japanese version of German schnitzel.  It's a breaded pork cutlet, pounded to about 1/4 inch thickness and fried.  It's served with a special sauce and rice and all the other things you see in the photo above.

  The photo above shows another one of her favorites cooking - okonomiyaki - which is best described as an omelet of scrambled eggs, shredded cabbage, and whatever else the cook wants to throw in.  Osaka, which is not so far from Kobe, is the traditional birthplace of okonomiyaki.  So it wasn't too hard to find a good one.  You slather the thing in mayonnaise or sweet-sauce before eating.  Anything slathered in those sauces would taste good.

Finally, we change the subject away from food.  The photo above shows the "escape hatch" in our hotel room.  It allows you to climb out onto a narrow balcony.  We were 26 floors up...so I hope that the balcony led to a ladder or some other means to safely get down to the ground.  Japan is the only place I've seen such a thing.   I'm not sure if it's provided out of fear of earthquakes or fire.  In any case, it's not sized for the typical American wide-bottom to fit through.

Kobe, Japan

Theresa and I travelled to Kobe, Japan for the first week of December.  Kobe was my last stop before entering China last February.  And this trip marked the first time that I'd been outside of China since then.

Kobe is a bustling city built on a small strip of flat land between Osaka Bay and the mountains that pop up a kilometer or so inland.   When you're in Kobe you can occasionally glimpse the mountains between the buildings - downtown Kobe is a forest of commercial towers and high rise apartments.  And when you're walking in Kobe, you always know that if you're walking uphill then you are walking North, toward the mountains.  If you walk far enough uphill, then you will come to the dividing line where the city ends and the forests of the mountainside begins.

 There are several places where you can take a cable car up the side of the mountain.  I had to work, but Theresa did not...so she found the time to take the cable car.  This is the first week of December, and you can see the trees are sporting their fall colors.  The temperatures in Kobe are almost always the same in Suzhou, which means that at this time the mercury had just started dipping into the 30s (Fahrenheit) at night.  The prime colors are a couple of weeks away.  But it is already beautiful.

 From the top you can see city and Kobe harbor and the islands (Harbor and Rokko Islands) beyond.  Japan is country of amazing landscapes and beauty.  These photos give just a small taste.

Street Food

 You can find a lot of street food for sale in old Suzhou, especially in the places where there are crowds.  If the crowds are normally shoppers or tourists, then the street food will be more exotic or indulgent.  You can get working man's food near the construction sites.  Tourists and shoppers want empty calories...the Chinese analog of a deep-fried-twinkie. 

Just outside of the Lion Grove Garden, we found this couple selling steamed sticky rice cakes.  The lady would fill a little wooden bowl with sticky rise flour and then the man would top the bowl with your choice dried fruits or nuts.  The mixture was placed on a steamer for five minutes and then, viola! - you had a glob of hot, sticky, sweet, goodness.

The cost for each cake was 2 or 3 RMB (thirty to forty cents) depending upon the type of topping.  Theresa and I bought a couple of cakes.  They were very tasty.  It was a good sign that the Chinese folks were lined up three or four deep waiting for their chance to order.  You have to approach the street food with a little bit of caution.  A line of waiting customers is always a good sign.  And a cooking process that kills gut-tumbling germs..like five minutes of steaming...that is enough to seal the deal. 

The Lion Grove Garden

 The last week-end in November was our last taste of Indian Summer in Suzhou.  The temperatures were in the mid-60s... and may have even broke 70.  The sun was out and the skies were clear.  So Theresa and I went to the old city, to the Lion Grove Garden.

 Suzhou has quite a few gardens and most folks say that if you've seen one then you've seen them all.  A student of classical Chinese gardens could talk for hours about the differences in design and architecture.  Your typical tourist is hugely impressed with the first one they see, but has trouble maintaining the same level of excitement for numbers two, three, four, and on and on.  I've heard tourists to Europe say the same thing about the Gothic Cathedrals.  "Cathedral overload", they call it.  "Garden overload" is a similar thing.

 The Lion Grove Garden is special treat for those suffering from "garden overload".  Though among the smaller gardens in Suzhou, it is one of the most loved because of its unique and playful use of rocks.  The "rockery", as they call it, includes maze of paths and puzzles for visitors to climb over and climb through.  It's like a jungle gym for adults.

 On the Sunday afternoon of our visit, the garden was packed with rockery climbers.  There were not a lot of tour buses in the parking lot and most of the folks looked to be locals.  Everyone, it seems, came out to enjoy a last chance at the warm weather and sun.

 The Lion Grove Garden takes its name from the rocks... in an indirect way that is so typical of the Chinese.  The rocks, they say, look like lions.  (I can't see it....but I'll trust them on that.)  The forest of rocks looks like a forest of lions.  So in Chinese the call it 狮子林园, which literally translates as something like "the forest of lions garden".  The tourism bureau must have decided that "Lion Grove Garden" as a more posh translation.

 The garden was initially built about 700 years ago by a Buddhist monk, as part of a monastery complex.  The limestone rocks come from hills surrounding nearby Taihu lake, where they were carved by the combination of time, water, and gravity.  In building the garden, the most exotically shaped rocks were chosen and carefully piled into even more exotic combinations.  Toss in a lake and some trees and some pavilions to go with the rock piles and you have the garden that you see today.

 During the hard years of the 1800s, the garden fell into disrepair.  In the early 1900's, the property was bought by a member of the wealthy Pei family, who restored the grounds and made the garden the home for his family.  Each summer, he would host his relatives from Shanghai, among whom was a boy named Ieoh Ming.  When the boy got older he went to the U.S. for university studies.  He must have tired of having his name mispronounced because he started using just his initials - I.M.

I.M. Pei went on to get a degree in architecture and to design a bunch of buildings that architects love to talk about including that silly glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris.  (I guess this also makes him complicit in the DaVinci Code conspiracy.)  Perhaps his time amidst the splendor of the Lion Grove Garden helped inspire his architectural genius...though there is nothing at the Lion Grove Garden that remotely looks like a glass pyramid. 

He did come back to Suzhou, in his twilight years, to design the Suzhou Museum.  The Suzhou Museum may be his final project, though I'm not sure.  He designed the courtyard of the museum as a modern echo of the classical Chinese garden - with greenery and rockery and water. (watery?)   Ironically, the museum is only a short walk away from where he spent his youthful summers - two blocks from the Lion Grove Garden.  So to say his career finished where it started is not just a metaphor; it is a geographical fact.

Ladies and Gentlemen - The Beatles !

 Last Saturday, Theresa and I saw the Beatles, as played by four Japanese guys, at a TexMex Bar in Suzhou, China.  Think about that for a second.  There are more bizarre twists in that plot than your average episode of the Twilight Zone  It's only one samurai sword shy of a Quentin Tarantino film.

Zapata's was the venue.  The band really did come from Japan.  These four guys took it seriously too.  The instruments are the same as used by the real Beatles....at least the 1964 incarnation of the band.  The suits and shoes are straight off the Ed Sullivan show.  The haircuts too.  The base player, the ersatz Paul McCartney, he is right-handed but learned to play left-handed in order to look just like Paul.  Each one played his character like a method actor.  Except for the drummer.  Poor Ringo can't get any respect anywhere.

It's a funny thing about English.  People say it is the language of science and global business.  But in truth, it's the language of music, the language of movies, the language of global cool.  Marcelo, an old friend from Brazil, told me he learned to speak English by singing along to Pink Floyd albums until the needles wore the grooves out.  In Strasbourg, people told me how they'd learned English by tuning in the Armed Forces Radio from Germany and singing along to Rock Music of the 60s and 70s.  In China, the best English speakers are the ones who spent their college nights in the KTVs...the karaoke joints...learning the songs of Bon Jovi and Madonna.

In China, more than any other country I've been to, they are rabid consumers of English culture.  The cheapest entertainment comes from American movies and TV shows downloaded from the internet.  DVDs are cheap and the typical Chinese shop has more variety than in most U.S. shops. The Chinese music videos that run on the local version of MTV look and sound exactly like the videos you see in the U.S.....even though the words are in Chinese.

This is not to say that the modern generation is abandoning the culture of China.  Not at all.  But if they have to learn English, then it's a lot more fun to learn it from a Hollywood film than from a language instructor.  The only downside is that folks are left with the impression that, in the U.S., everybody carries a gun, that all corporations are evil, and that the movie Twister is an accurate representation of normal Midwestern weather.

Anyway, the Beatles tribute band was a good time.  They weren't perfect.  The accent was more Kyoto than Liverpool.  (Think: Love Love Me Do).  And a couple of times the guitar playing was rough.  But they were good.  The best Japanese Beatles band I've ever seen in Chinese TexMex bar.

The Han Tombs Tombs of Xi'an

We've been seeing our share of tombs lately.  It started in Nanjing, with the tomb of the first Ming Emperor.  Then our first stop in Xi'an was the terracotta army near the tomb of the first Qin Emperor.  Our last stop in Xi'an was, and the subject of this post is, the tomb of Emperor Liu Qu of the Han Dyanasty.  Things come in threes, they say.

Each of the tombs is, in essence, a big pile of dirt with a dead king underneath.  Originally, the mound would have been shaped like a pyramid.  Weather and gravity have, over the years, rounded off the corners and subtracted from the height.  But if you look at Liu Qu's tomb, in the top photo behind Theresa, you can almost see a pyramid shape in there somewhere.

You have to wonder what led the ancients all over the world to build pyramid tombs and temples.  The Egyptians and Aztecs and Chinese all did it.  Independently they came up with the idea, it seems, since they were on three widely-separated continents.  Was it because these civilizations were founded by the survivors of Atlantis?  Or maybe they were all taught by the same visitors from outer space?

The answer, I think, is much more primitive.   Back in those days, if you were going to bury your king then you were going to bury a lot of good stuff....expensive stuff...in the tomb with him.  A lot of people would like to steal that stuff.  So, the most obvious way to protect the good stuff from the thieves is to pile a bunch of dirt or stones on top of it.  A LOT of dirt and/or stones.  If it takes 20,000 people and several years to pile the stuff up, then it's going take a long time for a few thieves to unpile it.  The math is against them.

And while you're making the pile, why not shape it like a pyramid?  It's attractive to the eye.  And it's probably a lot easier than building a perfectly round cone.  Straight surfaces are easier to manage than curved ones.

China has more tombs than you can shake a stick at, and it's just now getting around to seriously excavating them.  Most of the really good stuff is gone - long stolen by tomb robbers. (The big pile of dirt was a good idea, in theory, but it required guards to come around periodically to chase off the people with shovels.  And the guards eventually got tired of guarding the big mounds of dirt.  Time was on the side of the thieves.)  There is still a lot of good stuff left, though.  Not gold and jewels, but stuff that is priceless in its own way. 

They've started to excavate the tomb by tunneling in from the sides.  For the tourists, they've converted some of the excavations into permanent displays.  (It's actually a very nice underground museum, complete with rest rooms and gift shops.)  The second photo shows one of these excavation pits.  Those aren't bones in the pit, but rather they are the scattered remnants of clay dolls.  Each of the dolls looked to be about two feet high.  The third photo shows them a little more clearly.  An multitude of little, armless, naked people with their farm animals.

Now, the thought of Chinese emperor buried with little naked dolls might sound a bit repulsive and maybe even prosecutable.  But understand that originally all these dolls were fitted with wooden arms, silken clothing, and painted faces.  But nearly 2000 years of being buried under a big pile of dirt has caused the wood to decay, the silk to rot away, and the paint to fade.  At one time, it was a fabulously colored display of the king's happy and prosperous subjects.  The photo immediately above shows a scene of dolls restored to their original specifications.

In the scheme of things, the burial objects of the Han tomb mark a well-evolved level of culture when compared with the ones that came before.  The objects in this tomb are all happy farmers and ordinary citizens.  The Qin Tomb, which came 300 or 400 years before, included a life-sized army of fierce soldiers.  The tombs which came 500 to 1000 years before that are all filled with human bones.   So there you see the arc of civilization....from human sacrifice to military statues to peaceful figurines.

The photo above doesn't come out very well, because of the dim lighting.  (Try clicking on it to enlarge.)  It shows a parade of animals - dogs, sheep, cows, and elephants.  There are thousands of them marching in straight rows.  The emperor must have wanted to have representations of all his subjects, whether beast or human.

Miscellaneous Xi'an

 In the city center of Xi'an, there is a fabulous museum with the finest of artifacts from the area.  The pieces date back thousands of years.  The displays include the most exotic finds from the Qin Dynasty tombs (aka the terracotta warriors) as well as from the Han and Tang dynasties.  Bronze, clay, jade, and gold.  These are things I've seen in National Geographic Magazine, but never expected to see in real life.  In truth, it's just a bunch of old stuff.  But it is really, really, interesting old stuff.

 But forget the old stuff.  One of the more interesting things was our tour guide.  He was a young fellow, maybe 25 year old at most.  We picked him up at the train station and he was with us for the entire two days of our visit to Xi'an.  He was able to tell us the history of all the ancient sites.  But his stories of contemporary times, of his lifetime, were just as interesting. 

 Xi'an is the capital of Shaanxi province, on the loess plains of the Yellow River.  In Shaanxi province, it is estimated that  40 million people live in caves.  Earth-Sheltered-Dwellings would be the more modern term.  But by any definition, these are people living in caves.  Farmers dig the caves into the cliffs and hillsides.  We saw a few of them from the train as it approached Xi'an.

The land around Xi'an is devoid of timber and stone.  In these parts, a dug-out home makes as much sense as does an igloo to an Eskimo.  You make do with what you've got.  So a cave home is not as primitive as it might at first appear. 

Our tour guide was a farmer's son.  He was not originally from Xi'an, but came to the city from the surrounding countryside to go to University.  Once there, he stayed because the economic prospects in Xi'an were better than in his home village.  His degree was in international business.  His hopes are to land a permanent job with an international bank. For now, he seems happy to work as a tour guide for the Western visitors who come to see the terracotta soldiers.

 Our tour guide said he didn't live in a cave, but he had plenty of friends in college who did.  He reassured us that the cave houses these days are fully modern....wired for electricity and Internet.  The floors are no longer dirt, but rather covered in tile and carpet.  But the people are mostly poor....living on an annual income of one or two thousand dollars per year.

 Our tour guide has two brothers.  This made life rather complicated for his parents, given the "one child" policy of China.  The one child policy became law back in the late 1970s.  But at first it was applied only to urban families and it took a while to be rolled out to the rural areas.  Our tour guide was born in the late 1980's as the second son to his parents.  Since they were farmers, they were allowed two children at the time.  A few years later, his third brother was born.  For his parents, this was a big problem.  They were forced to pay a fine of 3000 RMB, about half their annual income.

Our guide said that his father accepted these circumstances with a sense of humor.  He said that when ever his youngest brother was disobedient, his parents would tell him....'it is OK for your older brothers to disobey, since we gave nothing for them.  But you should obey, since we paid good money for you."

 He said that many farmers still have more children than officially allowed.  But to avoid the steep fines, they simply do not report the birth of their children.  (Even though it is legally required to report the births to the local police station.)  In secluded areas, this works out well...for a while.  But the age of 17 or 18 is the time when adolescents have to obtain their national identity cards.  This can be a real problem if your birth was not registered.  These young adults become illegal immigrants in the only country they've ever known.

 Speaking of immigrants, Xi'an has been a magnet for immigrants for 2000 years.  Chang'an, ancient Xi'an, was the largest city in the world and the Eastern terminus of the silk road.  The lure of profits brought many a merchant to town.  In the old days, many of the immigrants were Muslims from Arab lands of Turkey or Iraq.  These Arabs settled in Xi'an and maintained their religious traditions in diaspora. 

In Xi'an today, there is still a Muslim quarter.  The Muslims have lived in Xi'an for several generations, but they still retain their traditions and beliefs. You can recognize the observants by their circular head coverings (for men) and by their scarves (for women).

 The Muslim quarter also gives Xi'an a famous line of cuisine...grilled lamb and mutton and goat.  The rest of China eats pork.  The Muslim restaurants serve up a welcome alternative to the barbecued pork ribs and stewed bacon.

 The photos in this post show a variety of scenes from the Xi'an museum and from the streets of Xi'an itself.  You can see that everybody is hustling.  Even the tricycle taxis, below, are conspiring as they wait for the next client.