Tokyo Transport

Fresh from the high humidity and temperatures of the tropics Tokyo greeted us with cold, pelting rain and confusion. What fell wasn't a 3 month long annoying Seattle drizzle mist, it was a cold, heavy penetrating, soaking downpour that sopped through my shoes, socks, pants and sweatshirt. After spending time in Thailand and Malaysia what I know that rain in the tropics is that it announces itself with a darkening sky and if that doesn't make you take heed it's followed by thunder and lightning. Then it'll rain like a sonofabitch for perhaps an hour and then all is forgiven and the day resumes a few degrees cooler. The Tokyo rain lasted all day and then it was spent, the next morning the sky turned blue and the temperature eventually jumped to a summer like 80F.

Japanese stores hand out free umbrella condoms for all customers and/or have communal umbrella stands. Some urinals in public men's rooms in Tokyo have small metal hooks alongside to hang your umbrella allowing you to conduct your personal business with both hands and to help you to keep your aim true. The sinks in Japanese men's rooms often have 2 spigots and both are motion sensitive. The one on the left squirts a generous helping of soap into your hand like an excited 16 year old boy on a hot date and the one on the right dispenses water. Everything I saw was clean, clean, clean, very little of the stink of a pay toilet squat house typical all over China. In Tokyo public rest rooms seemed to be plentiful free and unabused. 

We got around Tokyo by train. Tokyo has an amazing network of trains running with great frequency. Miss one and there's another right behind it. I never figured out who or what was in charge of which trains. Some lines are the Tokyo Metro, some are JR trains and still others belong to different railways private like Tokyu. Most of the lines intersect and some transfers are free, some are discounted and some transfers are full price. The system is massive so nothing is simple, there's organized chaos down there. Sometimes we bucked never ending rivers of salarymen to find the path to the next train or to the surface but we managed without getting too waylayed.

There seems to be a code of conduct that nearly all passengers adhere to.  There are signs in the train cars in English and Japanese requesting that people refrain from talking on their cells phones.  The only time I heard anyone on a call phone on a train the offender was speaking Mandarin.  Locals certainly don't ignore their phones, everyone is preoccupied with game playing and texting but there's no cell phone talking.  Very few people hold face to face conversations, it's all manners and decorum packed into a very large can.


The trains have a common payments card called Suica. Foreigners get a break on a special foreigner only Suica at the airport upon presentation of a passport and purchase of a ticket to and/or from Narita airport and I imagine the tourist authorities get data on where foreign tourists like to go in return. Recharge machines can also check on the amount of funds left on the card and upon request will deliver an accounting of all of your trips for the week, that's mine to the right.  Suica payment is good on trains, buses, some 7/11 stores and many other convenience stores and fast food restaurants.  Not much is cheap in Tokyo, our Suica cards arrived with 1500 yen installed and we quickly chewed that down and had to add funds twice. Recharges are performed by machines that have an English menu upon request and take cash and plastic.  Station announcements are often in English and signage is almost always bilingual.

As a result of the March 2011 tsunami and meltdown of a nuclear power plant north of Tokyo in Sendai all of the nuclear power stations in Japan have been pulled from the grid and shut down. The result is an electricity shortage. Stores are warm inside and so is the Tokyo Metro since air conditioning draws lots of juice that the Japanese grid can't provide. A new train, the Tokyo Metro 100 series, has just been put into service on the Ginza line that has LED lighting inside and out and flat panel displays for advertisements and station announcements.

In Asia How Do You Know When is Tap Water Safe to Drink?

That's easy, 7/11's are everywhere so just drop in and price a liter of water.  If it works out to .30 then use tap water for bathing and stick to drinking bottled water.  At a 7/11 here in Tokyo I saw 1.5 liters of water for sale for nearly $4.  In Bangkok bottled water is cheap and there are lots of things to do in Bangkok but drinking water from the tap isn't one of them.  In Tokyo I drink water straight from the tap, it's delicious.

This method had also guided me to drink tap water in Hong Kong, Taipei and Singapore.

Wat Arun

I turned 60 on the flight to Bangkok and now I have a feeling of what the future might bring. Wat Arun is one of the grandest and most distinctive of Bangkok's many Wats.
 
See this?  Big, isn't it? It's Wat Arun, also known as the Temple of Dawn and if you're inclined to climb it you're supposed to do it at dawn. It's on the western side of the Chao Phrya river and is accessable from central Bangkok by ferry.

We took several ferries to get to it and thought that everything else on the grounds and the structure itself were best appreciated at ground level. Eleanor doesn't climb, she balked at the Great Wall in Beijing so there was no way she was taking on Wat Arun.  I took lots of pictures on the grounds at Wat Arun and we ferried out of there to continue our ride up the Chao Phrya river to Nonthaburi and later to some well deserved hotel air conditioning

But the next day I returned to Wat Arun on my own. The grounds are free to roam and there's plenty to see but access to the structure cost me 150 baht (around $4.50). And I was free to climb in spite of the fact that it was late morning, it was 100 degrees and the sun was just rocking down out of the mid day tropical sky. As I contemplated my climb I waited for a small Japanese woman to descend the upper steep stairway. She was slow and deliberate and when she finally got down off of the stairs she was shaking and looked petrified. Hey, how bad could it be?

I went up. You can go up about half way to the top but the stairs are slippery from years of people climbing, narrow and steep. I had no trouble getting up although the metal handrails that I assume were added after the Thai ancients built this sky phallus were burning hot. How steep is the staircase?  Look to the left, see the stairs above the decending monks?  That steep. 

The view up there is tremendous. I took lots of pictures and started going down the steep stairs.  But I couldn't do it. It was steep and I wanted to treat the decent as I would coming down a ladder.  I turned my back to the river and my face to the steps but there were no rungs and the stone steps were hot.  I retreated to take more pictures and to contemplate my next move.  I'm afraid of heights and it's all stone so if I fell down the stairs I'd be lucky to survive.

I made it. I did it slowly, deliberately and with the constant thought that one slip could be life altering/ending. I burned my hands death gripping the hot metal railing. I used every ounce of strength to get this done and  my thighs still ache. 

But here's the point: when I got down to the ground my first thought was that this what old age is like and that I had just crossed the boundary between the days when I could do such a strenuous task and now I'll never be able to do this again. That stage of my life is over. A man's got to know his limitations and now at 60 I'll be knowing some new ones.

Watch This Space

Why? Because soon we're going to west to head to the far east one more time.  My personal odometer is about to turn 60 (!) around the same time that Eleanor and I celebrate our first year complete go round after getting married and we're going to see those days in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and then we cool off with 5 days in Tokyo.

Assuming we survive another killer trans Pacific flight we'll be eating tropical fruits such as mangosteen and durian, dine on Nasi Kandar food and shop at Tokyu Hands.

Sure, we've been to these 3 Asian countries before, how about some new ones for a change?  I gave some thought to going to the Philippines.  I've read that the people are friendly, they speak something resembling English and it's as tropical as anywhere in Thailand.  But I've also read that the Philippines is the street and petty crime capital of Asia and how the city of Hong Kong (population 7 million) has more police than the entire Philippines (population 94 million).  Some of my wife's family lives in the Philippines and in one breath they've told me how beautiful it is and in the next breath told me of neighbors or friends who were robbed, mugged or carjacked. 

Indonesia sounds interesting, kind of like Malaysia, but with less English and more Islam.  There are still some countries in Asia on my to do list such as India, Myanmar and Sri Lanka but they're just too big, difficult and too damned far for a 60 year old guy to do them justice during a 2+ weeks off of the work leash.  Good health willing that's what retirement years are for.

White Coffee

Each of Malaysia's three main cultures has a distinct food style which sometimes gets mixed.  Kueh Teow is a Chinese rice strip dish that changes into something with a new twist when eaten at an Indian restaurant. 

The food in Malaysia is great. So what's to drink?  In spite of being a Muslim country alcoholic beverages are readily available.  There are all kinds of tasty tropical juice drinks too.  But what everyone seems to want in Malaysia is something they call "white coffee".  There are several national chains that base their reputation on their white coffee.  I tried it, it's nothing special.  So, what's white coffee?

White coffee is heavily pedaled in Malaysian supermarkets.  So I stood in the aisle and read the ingredients on the label.  Essentially it's instant coffee mixed with non dairy creamer and sugar and plenty of chemicals.  According to the Wikipedia entry white coffee in Malaysia started as coffee beans roasted in margarine but has deteriorated into what I found in the supermarket. 

Malaysia Wrap

On previous trips to Asia dinner was sometimes a hunk of tofu and some yogurt and fruit from the local supermarket because I couldn't decipher the menu in restaurants or I couldn't stomach the possibility of eating dog or donkey.

I ate in real restaurants in Malaysia.  English is something of a bridge language between the races in Malaysia as well as a mark of class and prestige so restaurant menus are in English. The British had a colonial history in Malaysia so it's real English that almost always makes sense to my American eyes and ears. And the food is belt busting great too. There are plenty of Indians so there are Indian restaurants as well as those great Nasi Kandar joints. The Chinese are very big in Malaysia and many of them are Eleanor's Fujian peeps to boot so she quizzed the waiters and ordered for us off the menu. 

I'd like to know more about race relations here but two weeks won't be enough. The Chinese are the economic engine where ever in Asia their diaspora has taken them and Malaysia is no exception. Many Chinese seem to live their whole lives in Malaysia apart from the majority Malay.  Among their own kind they speak their Chinese dialect at home and among their own and English in business. We were befriended by a Malaysian Chinese woman on the bus to Penang who told us flat out that she spoke Hokkien and English but not the national language of Bahasa Malaysia.  A Cantonese man in Penang told us casually over dinner that in his opinion without the Chinese Malaysia would be Iraq.

Many of the Chinese seem to be one flavor or another of Christian, yet another factor that differentiates them from the majority Malay Muslims. Malaysian Indians do much the same although some of them are Muslim.  My guess is that the Malay resent the Chinese to this day (and vice versa), in 1969 that resentment was made formal in race riots that officially killed nearly 200.  Majority Chinese Singapore was once part of Malaysia but broke away after an earlier series of anti-Chinese race riots.

The Malay feel threatened by the success of the Chinese and the other non Malay ethnic groups in Malaysia. The majority Malay control the government and have made Islam the official state religion.  Each day the local English language newspapers are filled with domestic political stories and photos, almost always of  Muslim women politicans in their head covering or male Muslim politicians wearing their chosen headgear of a black pillbox hat.

But this isn't Saudi Arabia, you're free to buy pork, wash it down with a beer and then stumble into the street and get hit by a car driven by a woman. Strange to me, the public spaces have been full of the sounds of Christmas, including some very religious Christmas songs and displays that in the States would make the ACLU wail all the way to the Supreme Court. 

But there are in your face reminders that Islam is the state religion. In our hotel there was a quran by the bedside.  We stayed in a part of town called KLCC.  It's an immaculately tidy government created showcase mega-development anchored by very upscale shopping and the Petronas Towers, which represent the state owned oil company. There's a beautiful park in KLCC and inside the park is a mosque which blasts sermons and calls to prayer at daybreak.  Many women wear a kind of head and neck covering open balaclava that leaves only the face visible.  Women visiting from the Middle East are easy to spot, they dress for Islamic success in a head to toe in a black shroud with only a slit showing to the world for their eyes.

One other ethnic group that I had never heard of before is the Kristang.  They seem to be non Malay mutts, a product of Malaysia's European colonial past.  Tony Fernandes, head of Air Asia and one of Malaysia's most prominent entrepreneurs is Kristang.

So Malaysia has had a difficult and somewhat bloody multicultural history.  What else?  People smoke, even in Starbucks.  It gets two showers a day, smotheringly equatorial hot.  Forget about winter, Kuala Lumpur is less than 250 miles from the equator so the sun is up at 7am and down at 7pm with only slight variations throughout the year.

Penang Eats

Penang has a great reputation for great eating and I'm finding that it's deserved.  One afternoon Eleanor and I went to a Nasi Kandar restaurant on Jalan Penang named Jaya.  There's no A/C and no wifi.  It's open in the front with no door and it's open 24/7. 

Here's what we had for lunch. 

 

One tandoori set meal at 8.50 RM.

One lime water at 1.50 RM

One mango lassi at 3.50 RM

One Nescafe Shake at 2.20 RM

One Roti Chicken Roll at 5 RM

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That's 20.70 Malaysian Ringgits for a delicious lunch for two. 

In US money that a grand total of $6.61

Here's the bill:

Georgetown, Penang

Eleanor really can speak Hokkien.  Georgetown is supposedly around 40% Chinese and many of them are Hokkien speakers.  On the way from the Georgetown bus station we were shown around town by our Hokkien speaking cab driver.  I haven't a clue what he said but he supposedly told Eleanor where to eat and what to avoid.

We didn't know how good we had it in Kuala Lumpur.  We were staying in a new 5 star hotel in the 5 star part of town and quickly grew used to it.  Jet lagged we'd wander each morning in the dark past the Petronas Towers to our roti and mee noodle breakfast at the 24 hour ever hopping Nasi Kandar Pelita, with free wifi!

In comparison Georgetown, especially the old part of the city at first glance appears kind of third worldy, grimy, mildewed and tumble down.  The sidewalks are falling apart.   Our hotel is a renovated old Chinese shop house brought up to date with solar power, sensor activated compact florescent lighting, in room jacuzzi and much needed and appreciated air conditioning.  The furniture has been restored but the wifi is weak, slow and goes out entirely every few hours. 

Slowly some of the stronger points of Georgetown have made themselves evident.  There is wonderful Indian and Chinese food here.  We haven't had a bad meal since arriving, a great meal for 2 can cost $12 US.  The city has a British history reflected in some of the street names that the Malaysians haven't wanted to or have been able to change.  The capital of Penang state is still called Georgetown and the city that faces it on the mainland is still called Butterworth.  Posted streets are still known as Hamilton, Dickens, and  Campbell.  Our hotel is on Jalan Hutton.

Kuala Lumpur: Want to Get Away?

Gosh, do I ever.  It’s been a rough year for me with a death in the family and all that being an executor of an estate entails.  It’s coming up on a the one year anniversary of my Mother’s death and I’ve overseen the distribution of house and property in the way that my Mother wished.  Seattle is cold, wet and dark this time of year.  Escape beckons.

Kuala Lumpur is more than 8000 miles from Seattle.  In flying here I easily lapped myself at more than 30 hours of being awake.  But it’s a world away and that’s what I wanted and what I really need.  To crawl the streets of a steamy tropical metropolis just north of the equator.  To stuff my face with fragrant, creamy durian.  To relax when the withering sun saps my strength. 

There’s fresh durian (but unlike Thailand there's none in the supermarkets) and I’m also eating durian ice cream.  But temps are in the sticky 90’s, the food is great, our hotel has the pool in the middle of their bar which is a great escape from the steamy streets and having the sun rock down out of the sky and beat down on my poor balding head.  To hear the Muslim call to prayer as the morning sun lights up the Petronas Towers on the way to our roti breakfast.

Lessons Learned

Now that I’m safely back at home in North America here are some conclusions and lessons learned:

1. Three weeks of a seat of the pants touring may have been too much of a good thing. What I found adventurous when I was younger and more full of piss and vinegar is now more of a grind.  Wandering was more satisfying when I didn’t get sore feet and when I didn’t conk out as easily. But I’m still not ready for a ring through my nose organized tour.

2. Because I arrived in China without maps I had to take the time to find a map in English in each city. That meant seeking out a book store and having Eleanor ask in Mandarin if they carried any city maps in English, a time consuming chore.

3. One nice tool that I had in my travel arsenal was a WiFi equipped cell phone loaded with Fring and Onesuite. When I needed to call customer service to bitch at Orbitz when our hotel in Shenzhen didn’t have our prepaid reservation my 120 minutes of phone frustration to a phone number in Chicago cost me a cool $3. Sprint says that they charge $2.29 per minute (plus taxes and fees) to call home from China so 120 minutes would’ve cost me a frightening $274.80. Fring just reaches down into the contact list of my phone so no editing, no addition and then links you to the SIP provider of your choice. Once I had WiFi I could call any phone number in the US for a cool 2.5 cents per minute.

4. I used Boingo to access WiFi sites in China with mixed results. In Chengdu and Shanghai I was easily able to roam on China Mobile, in Shenzhen only in Starbucks. In Hong Kong outside of Starbucks Boingo was worse than useless. That’s because most of Hong Kong, including MTR stations, is covered by PCCW WiFi. The Boingo app would vibrate and chirp my phone, sometimes every few seconds, to ask me if I wanted to roam on PCCW, only to fail and spit up an error screen.  It would then ask that I send the error report back to Boingo. But without access to WiFi, Boingo’s only purpose, that isn’t possible. Then the phone would chirp, vibrate and start the whole annoying process all over again. 

*Update*  Boingo's customer service folks found this critique of their service almost instantly and as you can see below they requested more information, which I provided.  And I never heard from them again.  When I first signed up for Boingo I had an annoying problem with their software on my Android phone, it totally disarmed all wifi access on my HTC Hero.  The only cure was to wipe the phone and start all over again which I found highly annoying.  I called Boingo and they sounded very concerned and requested a detailed trouble report, which I quickly sent to the address that Boingo provided.  And I didn't hear from them again until they read the paragraph above and commented below.  Result: I cancelled Boingo.  Nice idea, poor execution.  Concerned sounding customer service is no substitute for actual tech support.

5. This ain’t your Father’s communism. I was hard pressed to find so much as a hammer and sickle in China, in three weeks I spotted just one.  Chairman Mao wouldn’t recognize the place.  I’m sure that the Chinese Communist Party is firmly in control of the country and would stomp any and all domestic challengers with the full force of the one party state. Security was tight in spots and being behind the Great Firewall is a great pain in the ass.  But China seems too busy making money or looking for ways to spend it. Who thought that China would be shopping at Wal-Mart or preoccupied with this kind of cultural revolution on state run TV?

6. I may not go back to China. The cultural gulf is so wide and the language so unintelligible that my ability to understand what I see and hear is stunted and more visits might only give me more jet lag on both ends.  At some point I just to have to shrug my shoulders and admit that there’s much I’ll just never understand.  But no organized tour could fill these gaps for me.

China’s 2 Richest Cities – Shenzhen & Hong Kong

For years Shenzhen has been the richest city in on the mainland. It's one of the biggest cities you've never heard of with a population of over 10 million people with a stock exchange, a subway system, parks, luxury hotels. Shenzhen is a factory town, the final assembly point of the iPhone and many other things in your house. The Taiwanese company responsible for iPhone assembly, Foxconn, has 800,00 employees in China, 400,000 of them in Shenzhen alone. 

30 years ago Shenzhen had a population of around 20,000. When Deng Xiaoping took over China after Chairman Mao finally shuffled off to that great collective farm in the sky he probably noticed how prosperous communism free Chinese places such as Hong Kong and Taiwan were and wanted to see what would happen if he allowed some of that capitalist evil in a corner of his kingdom. He did this first in Shenzhen and once the special economic zone was established money, factories and jobs poured over the border from higher wage Hong Kong. This transformed Shenzhen from absolutely nothing to a madhouse migrant city and Hong Kong from a city with a manufacturing economy to a city with a mostly service economy.

There's plenty of wealth out where people can see it in Shenzhen in the form of Audis, Mercedes, BMWs, Porsches and even a few Cadillacs. There's a fair amount of luxury cars tooling around on Shenzhen's wide streets with right hand drive and sets of license plates for both Hong Kong SAR and Guangdong province. While Shenzhen might be the richest city on the mainland it's the poor sister to the richest city in all of China, Hong Kong. It's a gigantic Tijuana with Hong Kong SAR playing the role of Asian San Diego. Shenzhen is a city built on hard work and other peoples money and it's paid off for many of the locals and investors. Glitzy wide shopping boulevards slowly dissolve into migrant laborer alley hells.

The women in Hong Kong are the picture of affluent fashion, their less well to do sisters in Shenzhen they seem to make it up as they go along.  After I saw the third woman in Shenzhen wearing thick, black Larry King frames without any lenses (I saw one woman stick a finger through the empty lens opening to rub her eye) I knew it wasn’t a one off aberration. 

Even with China's one child policy one thing that I've seen all over China are babies and pregnant women and Shenzhen is no exception. But due to the high cost of living babies in Hong Kong are few and far between. By day the familiar bellowing and barking of Chinese dialects on the mainland dissolves across the Hong Kong SAR border into another language. No, not Cantonese, the dialect most spoken in Hong Kong; it's the familiar puck-puck-puck of Pilipino. Hong Kong is packed with Filipinas. Although I'm sure they're out there somewhere it seems most of the male Filipinos are back home in Manila. Filipinas in Hong Kong serve as maids and nannies (as well as ply the world's oldest profession). Just as in Southern California the first words of a rich kid might be in Spanish, in Hong Kong his first words might be in Tagalog.

Unlike anywhere I’ve ever been in China, in Hong Kong you can drink the water straight from the tap. I drank Hong Kong tap and while it might be just a coincidence within 24 hours I had a roaring case of Chairman Mao's revenge. I knew I that eau de tap was graded as fit for human consumption the minute I went to a 7/11. In China 550 ml (roughly a pint) of bottled water can cost under .15 US, in fashionable Hong Kong it's .75 to a $1 US. Hotels in China usually spot their guests 2 bottles of water, in Hong Kong you can get all the water you want straight from the tap.

Hong Kong’s MTR is perhaps the best subway system in the world and riding it is a breeze.  The announcements are in 3 languages; Cantonese, Mandarin and British English.  Click here  and here for samples.

Shanghai – Better City, Better Life

Better City, Better Life. That's the official phrase of Expo 2010. It's plastered in English all over Shanghai along with their rendition of Gumby which they call Haibao. Haibao appears in neighborhood squares sculpted out of bushes, in both male and female form, unlicensed bootleg stuffed Haibaos are sold by hawkers on the stairways down into subway stations. You can buy a tiny Haibao to hang from your cellphone, blow up Haibaos, all sorts of Haibao shirts, there are Haibaos that wear a Mexican sombrero, Haibaos that play the bagpipes; collect the set! Olympic tchotchkes are for sale at official souvenir stands. The Chinese public has been whipped up into a nationalistic frenzy over Expo 2010 in a similar fashion to their fervor over the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

The Chinese government supposedly spent the equivalent of $60 billion US dollars on Expo 2010, rivaling or exceeding what they spent on the 2008 Olympics. Thousands of people and business were uprooted from what is now the Expo site, new subway lines were built and brought in. There are Expo information desks staffed with young English and Chinese speakers wearing white Expo 2010 uniforms set up in subway stations, hotels, airports, shopping malls and street corners. Handles for standees on the Shanghai subway bear the Expo logo. There's an official Expo song by Jackie Chan (who also appears in ads plastered all over China and all over town for frozen dumplings, appliances, Canon and some kind of Chinese herbal hair darkening shampoo for men called Bawang. Is there anything that Jackie Chan won't shill?). Attendance figures are updated the days Expo highlights are transmitted to displays inside Shanghai's subway cars on the Shanghai Metro's TV channel every 15 minutes.

So after the Chinese government unloaded their fat piggy bank on Shanghai what's the Expo like? I found it sterile. Security is tight, tighter than any recent US domestic flight I've taken since 9/11. My possessions were x-rayed and I was fully wanded before my $13 US ticket for evening admission was accepted (a whole day at Expo 2010 costs a steep $23.50 US).

The first thing I saw after passing through the turnstile was the China pavilion. It's a massive, in your face, upside down red pyramid of a structure and very popular with Chinese fair goers. I saw no reason to go inside, it had a giant line snaking around it and I was already inside China. For me being in China is sort of like a visit to a giant China pavilion anyway so why brave the lines to see in miniature what was already before me?

The European and USA pavilions were very popular as well with lines snaking around them. But unlike most of the Chinese visitors to Expo 2010 I can probably go to these places if I want to. For most Chinese today world travel is just a dream. It's a dream that's closer to reality for your average Chinese national than it was 20 years ago and China's rich and well connected does travel internationally but for most of China's 1.3 billion it's out of reach and will remain so for their lifetimes. Expo 2010's expensive day pass will be as close as they come to seeing the cultures of the world.

With that in mind I chose to avoid most of the pavilions and exhibits. But while the throngs of Chinese fair goers had no desire to see one particular pavilion, I did. No waiting! The North Korean pavilion was much smaller and more sparsely attended than the one from South Korea but it was the #1 pavilion on my to do list. For a follower of all things DPRK such as myself who has come as close as a cruise on the Yalu river it might be as close as I come to actually experiencing the closed land of Juche. What's inside? Not much. North Korea must be a pretty boring place. There's a model of the Tower of the Juche Idea in front of a large mural of Pyongyang and a few other cheap statues, artworks and recreation. Any good souvenirs for sale? Kim pins are mandatory for DPRK citizens, maybe I could buy one to go with the one I bought years ago in Dandong? Nope, just some postage stamps and a small gaggle of Chinese Expo fanatics wanting to have their Expo 2010 passports stamped. Whoever was in charge of the placement of the national pavilions either has a sense of humor or once worked in the Bush administration, or both. Yes, Expo 2010 has its very own Axis of Evil section. Right next to the DPRK discount house of dioramas was the pavilion of the Islamic Republic of Iran, howdy nuclear neighbor!

Without the Expo Shanghai is a bustling city of 20 million or 25 million, nobody's really sure. There are many more subway lines than when I was last in Shanghai a few years ago and trains are frequent, cheap and backside to navel SRO any time of the day. The food in restaurants ranges from Chinese and American chain fast food to what to North American eyes is most unusual. A sharply dressed middle class is on the move. The women are sharp dressers who tend to wear more cosmetics, higher heels and show more skin than their poorer and more peasant western sisters in Chengdu. Thanks to the Treaty of Nanking Shanghai has more western influence than perhaps any other Chinese city except for Hong Kong. Some of old Shanghai hasn't fallen to the wrecking ball and the historic Bund along the Huangpu river has just completed an expensive makeover.

As when we took the high speed CRH train to Tianjin I had wanted to take a CRH train for a day trip to a different Chinese city. Nanjing is 2 hours from Shanghai by CRH, other cities are closer. These trains leave from Shanghai's North railway station but unlike Beijing's sedate and organized railway station Shanghai's was a madhouse of peasant migrants with stained decaying teeth bearing huge cheap plaid bundles made out of a shiny cheap tablecloth material full of god knows what along with buckets of bottled water and packages of instant noodles for their long journey on the what the Chinese call “Iron Big Brother” to the provinces. Security was tight as it is at most Chinese transit facilities so we couldn't even investigate buying tickets without waiting on long slowly moving security lines where the peasants got wanded and their bundles x-rayed so we gave up, it was simply too much of gauntlet to run.


Shanghai pictures are here
Panda pictures are here

Chengdu – A 2nd Tier Chinese City

Beijing and Shanghai have had billions of dollars lavished on them for recent or ongoing international events and their citizens have been taken to charm school to smooth over bad habits such as suicidal driving, Chinglish and loud public spitting. So what about a large Chinese city that isn't on the prosperous coast and that hasn't had the benefits of the international spotlight?

Welcome to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in China's interior. No obvious sophistication here, the start/end route information on the side of the #6 bus route says it all, and in English: “Engine Plant → Sewage Treatment Plant”. Chengdu has only one real internationally known attraction, the Chengdu Panda Base just outside of town. There foreigners and Chinese tourists alike oh and ah over the local and endangered bamboo eating bears with stubby legs and cute coloring. Otherwise Chengdu is a large city deep in the Chinese interior that hasn't had a reason for the central government in Beijing to put it through finishing school. People fire up butts almost everywhere, smoke free sections in local restaurants are unknown. People spit in a very loud public trumpeting exuberant phlegm clearing way that is so common that it has been described by Western expats here as the Chinese National Anthem. It sounds gross and it is too. Going for a walk? Best to forget the sandals. We rode a packed Chengdu city bus and heard a grumpy passenger go off on the driver. She screamed back at him for the entire ride. Chinglish abounds.

There's no subway yet (it's scheduled to open in October) so we took buses and cabs. Traffic is hellish. The cab drivers all drive like Stevie Wonder, in NASCAR, on meth. Which doesn't really differentiate them all that much from other local drivers. Unlike Beijing there are a fair amount of bicycles, pedicabs, mopeds and three wheeled trucks in the traffic mix too. The driver of the cabs we hailed all seem to like weaving in and out of lanes and cutting over double yellow lines to play chicken with oncoming packed city buses. Near misses seem to be the rule and it's a ballet of organized chaos that all the locals, drivers and pedestrians alike, seem to be in on. I don't pity the pedestrians, they're as fearless as the drivers and have more to lose.

For anyone who melts at the sight of a panda Chengdu is the panda Vatican. It's the headwaters of panda, the home office of cute. The pandas live up to their advance billing too, they are cute, they spend their days in captivity on display in open areas surrounded by people clicking camera shutters. The pandas don't have much to do, bamboo is delivered to them and they spend their days either playing with each other, climbing trees or on their backs chomping bamboo. Keepers dressed in blue smocks enter the enclosures when the pandas aren't looking and whisk away the panda poo. Pandas are cute but they're still powerful wild animals and when a panda decides he wants something he gets it. Tourists come from overseas, stay in nice hotels and are bused to and from the panda reserve in plush tourist buses. I imagine that other than the pandas the overseas tourists have very little contact or interactions with the locals. Just to be different Eleanor and I took a cab to the reserve and took public transit back to town. I didn't come all this distance to be isolated, if I want that I can vacation in a guarded camp.

Other than the pandas there's not much going on in Chengdu for someone who has no other reason for being there, doesn't know the place and can't pierce the language barrier. There's upscale shopping, there's middle class shopping with all of the worlds chains, there's Wal-Mart, Carrefour and their Chinese imitators like Ren Ren Le (which has shamelessly appropriated Wal-Mart's trademarked yellow smiley face) and there's shopping for the poor; a gigantic local market near the north railway station which has nearly everything at dollar store prices with dollar store quality. I bought a few Chinglish shirts but this place has everything you wouldn't want: rabbits and gerbils (rodent: it's what's for dinner), baby chicks dyed in dayglo colors that nature never intended for poultry, stuffed animals, cheap shoes, cheaper clothing, and all kinds of knock off cosmetics that fell off the back of a homemade three wheeled truck.

The food in Chengdu is outstanding and cheap and we didn't even try the local hotpot Sichuan province is famous for. Eleanor speaks enough Mandarin to make sure that we didn't order dog or chicken feet or pig blood pudding any other local specialties that might offend our (well, my) tender North American sensibilities. But some of the locals seem to take a little too well to fast food chain restaurants. KFC and McDonald's are very popular along with some Asian chains (like Dicos) and local knock-offs. Eating at these joints is somehow trendy but a burger, fries and a Coke not only is crap, it costs more than a belly plumping local lunch for two at a nice restaurant. A grande drip at Starbucks costs close to $3 US and most locals drink tea but trendy types manage to drink and be seen with the other local beautiful people at Starbucks.

Except for one slightly surly cab driver the locals were great. The folks at the Buddhazen Hotel went out of their way to help us. When we wanted to take the local bus the hotel manager didn't try to talk us out of such folly, he walked us the 3 blocks to the right bus stop. When we were looking for a nice place to go in the evening the manager took us in a cab with his girlfriend to what turned out to be a fast food chain preserve. But without Eleanor and her grade school Mandarin none of this would've happened. When I'm alone in a place like this I'm like a dog with a wallet. I can buy things but, what? I can't read (she can't either), I can't write and I can't say anything that anybody in a position to help me can understand. I can pantomime but unless you're Marcel Marceau that looks stupid. Besides, I long ago got tired of the various kind of gestures I've thought up when I really need the mens room.

More China awaits. Next stop: Shanghai and the World Expo.

Click here for Chengdu pictures.
Click here for panda pictures & video.

Beijing: It’s at the 中of Everything

Beijing is more colorful, more organized and less Chinglish riddled than I remember. The glow of the lavish Beijing Olympics doesn't stop there, there's much less lusty throat clearing and public sidewalk spit splashing too. For that alone the $50 billion or whatever fortune they spent on the 2008 Olympic games was worth it.
Beijing driving is a bit less aggressive too, it's still dangerous to cross the street but the drivers are a little more Miss Manners and little less Stevie Wonder.  As everywhere in China Beijingers still bellow into their cell phones in public places, on the subway, in parks and restaurants; oblivious of those around them.  The saving grace for me is that I have no idea what they're yelling about.

We experienced no gruesome amputees sprawled across our path on the sidewalk, people with burned off faces and ears and just one dirty Mom begging with a little screaming infant that might or might not be hers and just a few blind grannies working the always crowded subway cars.

In the run up to the Olympics the government tried to infuse the locals with some manners and in some regards such as spitting they've been moderately successful. The subway now has people standing in front of the doors of subway trains telling the waiting masses to queue up on the sides of the opening doors and to leave the center for people leaving the subway car. This works beautifully and unmonitored on the orderly Taipei Metro but so far there are mixed results in Beijing. Some people queue up on the side but to enter or leave a subway car it's still best to put your head down and pretend that you're an NFL linebacker.

In the past I remember sidewalk vendors and storefronts chock full of pirated DVD's, this time I saw just one lone street DVD vendor. Plastic bags? They're not blowing in Beijing's stiff Gobi desert breeze anymore, the government decreed that stores charge .20Y (around a penny and 1/3 US) if you don't bring your own plastic bag with you to the store.

The central government dictates other behavior as well. What else am I too think when the local police look the other way at jaywalkers, suicidal driving and driving on the sidewalk but bans the use of air conditioners by calendar date and not by temperature?

The Chinese government also decides what people can and can't see on the Internet. This has been a minor pain in the ass for me as some of the pictures I upload to Flickr appear to me to be empty blue boxes. There appears to be no rhyme or reason to the logic of the Great Firewall, if I upload 3 pictures of the Beijing subway 2 might be scrubbed while the third comes through unmolested. I can read the NY Times and the Seattle Times but not http://www.publicola.net/. Even though Google left China it functions fairly normally in English but without Blogger or YouTube. There will be no blogging as the Golden Shield Project or Great Firewall has Blogger and YouTube hermetically sealed off from the 1.3 billion people within China's borders. I overcame this on previous trips to China but they seem to have plugged all of the leaks, this Blogger entry had to be uploaded later in the trip on a stopover in Hong Kong.

One positive aspect of a powerful central government is that large building projects get done in a timely fashion, the government simply decides what's best and organizes it unencumbered by lawsuits or the cries of the uprooted people in the way, they suffer for the perceived greater good. People living in the path of an office building, shopping mall or train line are sometimes given a token payment and told to be gone in 30 days. China is currently engaged in a crash program of building high speed train lines connecting its cities.

One of the first to enter service was the Beijing/Tianjin line which covers the 75 miles between the two cities in around 30 minutes at a top speed of 338 kph (observed). That's around 210 miles per hour for us non metric North American types and fast for anyone not used to measuring speed in light years. At first glance this would be wonderful for us in the US but even after having ridden China's high speed rails I'd be against duplicating this in the US. Projects like this would be tied up with lawyers feasting on them in the courts for a generation. China has more than four times the population of the US and they're concentrated predominantly in the eastern half of the country. Imagine a US with more than 4 times the people all stuffed east of the Mississippi river and you'll have an idea of what kind of density is conducive to high speed rail.

Back in Beijing we tried to see Chairman Mao in his glass casket in his mausoleum in Tiananmen Sq. He's open between 8 am and noon Tuesday through Sunday so we joined a seemingly endless line of peasants in cotton shoes and worker cadres with brown and furry teeth but halfway through the fast moving line to the old dictator a Chinese man with white gloves and a megaphone told us in Mandarin and broken English that we could bring nothing in with us. Nothing; no camera, no belt bag with wallet and passport; nothing. Of course they had a budding business of babysitting these things for a fee but I'm not leaving my consumer goodies or passport & wallet with any strangers ever.

So we wandered off to a tourist area just off of Tiananmen Sq selling Chinese tourist tchotchkes. T-shirts, caps, Chinese style blouses, panda refrigerator magnets. Eleanor likes this stuff and she indulged me two tries at seeing Mao without even a whimper of protest so I held my usual disdain for organized tourist activities and shops and did it.  This section of Beijing reminded me of any Chinatown in any city I've ever visited except this one was less than a mile from the Forbidden City, even closer to Mao's glass casket and the Vatican of the Chinese People's revolution. It's a strange world indeed.


Pictures of Beijing are here.

Next stop: Chengdu, home office of the Giant Panda.

Is Nothing Sacred?

I've joined my local YMCA.  It's a Pacific Northwest, new agey YMCA which doesn't care whether members are Christian or a same sex couple and they're even open on the Lord's designated day of rest (other local YMCA's are not open on Sunday).  There's no mention in person or on the walls of the "C" in YMCA.  I wear my MP3 player and I sweat to the oldies with the rest of the overweight guys and hausfraus, doing my part to nullify the “Y” in YMCA. 
  
My local YMCA doesn’t dwell on the “M” in YMCA either. Some genius Dad recently brought in his 4 kids, a boy and 3 little girls into the Men’s locker room.  I wanted to peel off my sweaty clothes but I felt modest in front of the little girls, none was probably older than 5 or 6 and all were clothed, including Dad.  I held off for awhile while the kids played at a large scale off to my left.  Dad saw that I was there and that I was about to pull off my sweaty shorts and reveal my full frontal birthday suit so he called his flock away.

 But one little girl had many questions about the scale and sensitive, new age Dad felt he had to give her all the time she needed, even in the Men’s locker room.  I had enough and stripped.  I was in the right place to be doing that too, if I can’t strip down to my birthday suit to shower and change in the Men’s locker room for fear of offending underage females and being labeled a perv then I might as well wear a burka or just stay home.

My local YMCA has three locker rooms, Men’s, Women's and and one labeled “Family”.  Signs posted at the entrance to each explains that boys younger than 5 are permitted entry into the Women’s locker room.  But as you can see from the outlines on the picture above the Men’s locker room is very inclusive.  Boys, girls and Men and the wheelchair bound are all welcome. 

I went to the showers but Dad had already waddled in there with his brood.  They were all wearing bathing suits, probably washing up before going into the pool.  This Men’s locker room at my YMCA has shower stalls fronted with plastic shower curtains but I came out of my stall wearing nothing but water when I realized that I had forgotten my razor.  One little girl stared at full frontal naked me in amazement.  One of us didn’t belong in there, can you guess which one? 

But it probably doesn’t matter.  I’m sure that the day is coming when men will be encouraged, and persuaded by well meaning laws if necessary to refrain from nakedness and being offensive with their mere presence to young girls in the Men’s locker room.

Still More on Phnom Penh & Cambodia

I'm not sure how they deal with their genocidal past in Camrybodia.  S21/Tuol Sleng where the Khmer Rouge did their photographing and some of their torturing is something of a tourist attraction.  Most of the people I saw visiting inside were foreigners like me but I did see a few locals.  All of the people outside were aggressive beggars waiting to pounce on the foreigners leaving. 

Pol Pot died of old age a free man and his henchmen are either free men or in the current government.  Most of Asia runs on an undercurrent of corruption that would be astonishing by US standards but in Cambodia it's right out there in in the open in such a festering cesspool that even I could smell it.  If a citizen attracts the attention of the Cambodian government and speaks out the government will sue them for defamation, and win.  If you sue them for defamation they'll sue you back for defamation for having sued them and they'll win. 

Another big problem in Cambodia is acid.  They supposedly use it in a process on rubber plantations but it has other more social uses.  Have a grudge against someone?  Just hire some goons, arm them with acid and with just a splash your victim will be taught a lesson they'll never forget (if they live).  Stories like this are easy to find:
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2009102329141/National-news/acid-attack-appeal-scheduled.html
http://www.camnet.com.kh/cambodia.daily/selected_features/acid_laced_vengeance.htm

There's a whole network of charities just for acid attack survivors.

Phnom Penh still suffers from the Khmer Rouge period.  Phnom Penh was abandoned for a few years and anyone who knew anything about maintaining it (plumbers, electricians, masons, mechanics, elevator repairmen, traffic engineers and planners, etc) was executed.  Today much of Phnom Penh's houses have no electricity, business all keep generators about the size of a small pickup truck out front or out back.  The country has no electric grid.  The government runs what electricity production and importation (from Thailand & VN) there is and charges at the meter about 4 times what electrical service costs in Thailand & VN but hey, someone has to pay for those $80,000 Lexus SUV's and fenced compounds I saw in Phnom Penh.

I flew to Phnom Penh from Bangkok, Phnom Penh makes Bangkok seem like the city of the future.  Bangkok is still a chaotic but loveable mess of a 3rd world city but it has reliable electricity, well stocked stores, modern rail mass transit, even taxis.  Phnom Penh, a national capital of 2 million has none of these things, not even so much as a city bus.  Gangs of street kids aggressively and persistently beg, in English, to pasty white faced me.  I've read that their money goes to glue and gasoline to sniff.

But for a foreigner like me Phnom Penh was memorable fun.  Good food, dollar beer, lots to see but I stayed in the part of town where the UN and the do-gooder NGO's live.  Parts of Phnom Penh that I saw to and from the airport unfortunately looked like 3rd world hell holes.

In Thailand Mr Gray Gets Play

Come to Bangkok and you’ll notice it right away, older White guys with much younger partners.  To my eye the White guys have a much younger woman Thai woman on their arms but sometimes the older white guy is being accompanied by a much younger Thai man.  This situation was much less noticeable in Singapore.  So what’s going on here?

Just as the US has different ethnic groups that have been drawn at different times to different areas of the country (such as Blacks leaving the South for the opportunity in the industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest) the same is true for Thailand.  Darker skinned country people are drawn to the wealth, glitter and jobs in Bangkok, leaving the farm, poverty and traditional Thai village life.  Thai men get traditional Thai male jobs and women often find their fortunes administering traditional Thai massage, which, depending on the situation may or may not be prostitution.  I’ve been approached over and over for “massasse”.  I didn’t pursue which propositions were for massage and which were for the world’s oldest profession.  But some looked like country girls and some looked like workin’ girls.

So what about the farang men (I suppose it happens but I’ve yet to see an older Thai man with a young white woman on his arm)?  They’re often gray haired, bald, bubble bellied and/or gimpy.  Back in Europe or Australia he’d be Grandpa and no chance to be in the company of a much younger man or woman, much less live with and sleep with them.  Back at home there’d be no play for Mr Gray. 

It’s also a great opportunity for the woman to play Thai social leapfrog.  Darker skinned northern Isan women seem to be at the lower levels of the Thai social pecking order.  Skin color seems to be very important in Thailand, skin whitening and lightening creams are advertised on billboards and in TV commercials that end with a woman finding love only after she finds lighter skin.  With an older white man in her life she can dress better, wear cosmetics and have lighter skinned hapa children.  It seems to be win/win for everybody.  And everybody deserves the chance to be happy.

Phnom Penh – Where Old Camrys Go to Die

What do you call a country where everything is priced in US dollars, where a beer costs just $1 (.75 during happy hour) but signs in English warn you to not patronize the country’s infamous child sex industry? Here’s a hint, I found it in my hotel room but I’m seeing it all over town:

Cambodia is still recovering from wars involving the United States, its neighbor to the east Vietnam and a civil war which culminated in a genocide that wiped out a generation and targeted anyone with any knowledge (doctors, teachers, engineers) about anything beyond day to day farming and peasantry for death.  2 million Cambodians perished at the hands of their countrymen.

Here's a story that ties obvious corruption and a convicted Russian pedophile in one nasty little package: Pedophile Was Permitted To Leave Prison  Why?  To go visit one of his many investments,of course.

The present government of Cambodia is a corrupt mess but I’m sure that most Cambodians find that preferable to the genocidal government that it replaced.  So Cambodia is a land of dollar beer and no local industry to speak of other than tuk-tuk taxi driving and child prostitution.  So why are the streets choked with Lexus cars, motorbikes and tuk-tuks?  And why are a majority of the cars I see in Phnom Penh Toyotas and why are the lions share of those Lexus SUV’s and Toyota Land Cruisers and Camrys yet there are no Honda Accords (but plenty of Honda CRV’s)?  

But wait, it gets stranger.  The Camrys are all American spec with US 2.5 MPH bumpers and I’d bet every last one of them popped out of Toyota’s assembly plant in Georgetown, Kentucky.  They look very different from the Thai assembled Camrys I saw in Bangkok and that Toyota sells in most of the world outside of North America.  I rode in one from the Phnom Penh airport to my hotel and noticed that the speedo showed MPH, not KPH.  Then I started noticing that some of the Camrys on Phnom Penh’s streets carried stickers on their rumps from dealers in places like Miami, FL and Norman, OK.  A few had California license plates, one a Colorado tag.  I’ve combed through the Internet and other travelers have noticed the dominance of the Camry here but nobody has an explanation why. 

My best guess is that these Camrys were indeed built and bought either new or more likely used in America by Cambodians or Cambodian Americans and sent home to the rest of the family. That would also explain the Toyota Tacomas I’m seeing.  Outside of North America the Toyota pickup is known as the Hi-Lux and I’ve seen a few of those along with a few other North America only models such as the Toyota Matrix.

I have no explanation for all of the Toyota Land Cruisers I see in Phnom Penh in both Toyota and Lexus dress.  Most are late model and the Land Cruiser sells for around $65,000 new in the US, the Lexus variant costs around $76,000.  They have big thirsty V-8’s, all of this in a country with next to no economy and no Lexus dealers.

Getting Out of the Tropical Sun

While out for a stroll in Bangkok this morning I notice a part of the street was covered.  See the covered area, right above the blue bus?  Refuge for me.

The sun was bright ands broiling, the air was thick and smothering with humidity and diesel exhaust and I was going to walk down that street anyway, I wonder what’s going on under there?
Well, it’s a kind of local market.  Not the kind of market I’m used to with a dairy section, frozen vegetables and ice cream.  But there was plenty of fresh produce and an abundance of of meat.  Chickens and ducks were crammed into cages and were cackling and calling .  Live frogs encased together in nets that were as big as soccer balls.  Tubs full of squirming eels wriggled in desperation.  Catfish were being grabbed and having their heads hacked off with cleavers.  Turtles were climbing over each other trying to escape.  The sidewalk was slippery with a residue of guts and blood.  It was just another day at the market for the locals in the tin shacks who were gathering up the ingredients of their next few meals.

Viva La Revolucion!

Bangkok seems to have an attraction to Che Guevara.  Locals wear the famous Che shirt and there’s no reason that the attraction should be any less in Bangkok than it is back home in Seattle where an expensive clothing store for children at Pike Place Market sells them to well healed high earning revolutionary parents in baby sizes.  This stall at the Chatujak Market in Bangkok can fill the reddest of cadre’s Marxist-Leninist needs with posters and T shirts.

But Thailand is a monarchy, Massachusetts born King Bhumibol Adulyadej is currently the world’s longest reigning monarch.  The people of Thailand revere their King and the government in Thailand is famously intolerant of dissent on the subject of the King and the royal family.  The Internet is routinely searched for any signs of lèse majesté and those who brave or foolhardy enough speak out against the monarchy are hunted down, found and tossed into a prison system so harsh that even the most conservative or senile member of the US Supreme Court would be sure to find it cruel and inhuman.

Here’s what you see if you try and research the subject of the King of Thailand, even in English, from within Thailand:

Here’s the URL that I was delivered to: http://58.97.5.29/court.html  It seems that it’s not only the Chicoms that have a Great Firewall

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