Cherry Blossoms

Aidan:  I went to Japan when the cherry blossoms look best. In Japan you see cherry blossoms everywhere. The tree itself is huge but the blossoms are very small. The blossoms were white and light pink as colors. The blossoms were beautiful and I would like to see them again.

Japan: Kobe to Kyoto

John:  Japan is our last stop before heading home to the US; after here, we head across the Pacific to San Diego, stopping only for a day in Hawaii to refuel. So there is some melancholy attached to this port, a sense of a good thing approaching the end. And there is some fatigue as well; if Japan were our first stop rather than our last, we would surely be more excited and prepared with plans for what to see and do. As it is, after being in Singapore, Vietnam, and three different cities in China all in the course of the last two weeks, we are a little wiped out and need to dig deep to summon the energy we need to explore this new place.

Still, Japan! A place that we have never been, never realistically expected to visit, and that has much to explore than we could possibly accomplish in a year, much less a week. That is more than enough to overcome our tiredness. And, too, we are arriving right at the peak of cherry-blossom season, which is a special time of year here. The Explorer is set to dock in two ports, Kobe and Yokohama. We arrived in Kobe on Tuesday morning to some fanfare: the city sent out a fire boat, and we were greeted by a brass band:

Arrival in Kobe, 7 am. That's the fireboat ahead, its plumes of water leading us into the dock. 

We ended up not seeing much of Kobe, though, in the two days that the ship was docked here. And that's too bad; it's a nice city, a port city with a dramatic backdrop of mountains, and it has completely recovered from a very powerful earthquake that leveled a big part of the city and killed thousands of people about fifteen years ago. But the kind of historical monuments that we wanted to see were more in Kyoto, which is not far. So we booked a hotel in Kyoto (about which more later) and took the train there. Not a bullet train this time--such a thing does not run between Kobe and Kyoto--but a regular fast train, which is still a lot faster and more efficient than anything we are used to in the US. We crowded in between the commuters, many of them men in what seems to be the business uniform of dark suit, white shirt, tie; clearly business dress here is pretty conservative. Overall, people dressed here a lot like Americans, although occasionally we saw women in beautiful traditional kimonos.

(Editorial warning: yet another history lesson ahead.) Kyoto was the capital of Japan for centuries until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Japan was forcibly opened to foreign trade (by American gunboats), the shogunate fell, and the capital was moved to Tokyo. The city was never bombed in WWII, so there are still some older structures here, though most of them are on the perimeter of the city; the center of Kyoto is often fairly drab, cherry blossoms notwithstanding. But it's all laid out on a grid, so it's navigable, and in fact we had very little trouble traveling around the city by bus; Kyoto has a good and efficient bus system, and, crucially for us, the best bus maps I've ever seen.  Every stop is announced in Japanese, English, and Chinese, making the bus, for once, a better choice than the taxi cabs we have often been taking.

We headed out to the Kiyomizu-dera temple complex, a Buddhist temple dating to the eighth century that enjoys a stunning situation on hills over the city, and right now is decorated beautifully with cherry trees in full bloom:

The "hondo" or main building at the Kiyomizu-dera temple. This was built in 1633, and apparently it's considered a remarkable example of this kind of construction.

Aidan purifying his hands before entering the temple.

We walked from there as it started to get dark to the Gion neighborhood, which has shopping and nightlife, including Kyoto's geisha district, which is one of the last of these in Japan. And we saw a geisha! She was being led to a black car by an older businessman, and there was a row of similar black cars with drivers outside a building that we took to be a geisha house, a premise confirmed by a check with Wikipedia; there were tourists outside waiting for other geishas to come out with other rich guys. Mostly, the street consists of older buildings that are now restaurants with eye-popping prices. We found a delicious and more affordable dinner a couple of blocks away.

Our hotel in Kyoto was billed as a traditional Japanese-style hotel, which was sort of true; rather than Western-style beds, it had futon mattresses laid out on tatami mats. The clientele, though, was Western backpacker-types attracted by the (for Japan) cheap prices and proximity to the train station. We all uncurled our mattresses and went to sleep together:

Our room in the Sparkling Dolphin Inn, so called, we realized when we turned out the lights, because of the glow-in-the-dark dolphins and stars on the ceiling.

The next day, we went to the Golden Pavilion, another famous temple on the periphery of town. And gold here is not a metaphor--the Pavilion is covered in gold leaf:

The Golden Pavilion.

From there, we went to the Nijo Castle at the center of town. This was the home base of the shogun, who really had the power in Japan. There are no pictures allowed of the interior, and it was pouring rain, so we could not get good pictures of the exterior, but it's a remarkably beautiful and serene building inside. It's easy to see here why and how modernist architects drew inspiration from traditional Japanese buildings--the spaces are somehow impressive without being showy, and the use of natural materials--wood, bamboo, matting--creates a sense of warmth.

On to Yokohama!

Maeve and the Paparazzi

Maeve: People in China and Japan are constantly taking my picture! Every time I stop and sit down, there are a bunch of people standing around with cameras. Sometimes they ask my mommy or daddy if it's OK, but a lot of times, they just take my picture. Most of the time, I'm pretty happy with it. But it's really strange. It's as if they don't see too many little girls with blonde hair and blue eyes like me.

Maeve and the paparazzi in Hanzhou, China.

Shanghai

John: We went to Shanghai from Hangzhou in a way that is unavailable at home: bullet train! 300 kilometers per hour, smooth as glass, cool and comfortable. Also relatively cheap. This is something we need in the US.

Shanghai is enormous; there are something between 15 and 23 million people here, depending on how you draw the perimeter and how the government decides to do the counting (there are apparently a lot of people living here illegally, and the government is not eager to have them as part of the official count.) Enormous tall apartment buildings go on for miles. There's a brand-new metro system, with three new lines opening this year alone. For a long time, it has been one of the most Western-oriented of the cities of China; in the early twentieth century, much of the city was divided up between foreign powers that had sovereignty over their own areas; the area known as the Bund is where the Western banks and businesses were headquartered then, and the architecture in that area, dating to the 1920s and 30s, feels a lot like Chicago. The neighborhood once known as the French Concession is now filled with pricey condos, nice restaurants, and stores with familiar high-end brands: Prada, Apple, Jaguar. There's a whole lot of capitalist consuming going on around there in the city that was once the headquarters for the Gang of Four.

We got to town in the evening, and went immediately started doing some consuming ourselves, going to dinner (of course!) at a fantastic dim sum restaurant, one that had pictures of people like Jackie Chan and Mel Gibson eating there on the walls. All I can say is that you haven't lived until you've had dumplings made with chicken and truffle. 

With (as always) limited time in the city, we went the next day to the Yu Gardens Market, a cluster of old buildings in the center of town. It's packed with shops selling all sorts of things; we got Aidan a beautiful Chinese suit with a dragon on the front, and also a marble stamp with his name engraved on it in Chinese characters. It's a crowded and interesting, with temples and gardens intermixed with shops in narrow alleys:

One of the alleys in the labyrinth of Yu Gardens Market.

The central square of the market; note the Starbucks in the lower right.

We went to the temple of the city gods, which was unimpressive compared to the Linyin temple in Hangzhou, perhaps because it looks very much like the statues are recent and not very artistic recreations of older statues; maybe the originals were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution--that happened in a lot of places. (We learned in Hangzhou that the temples were largely spared there because Chou En-Lai was a resident, and he prevented the kind of destruction that was common elsewhere.) The streets around are filled with markets selling odder bric-a-brac: kites and fans, but also things like Cultural Revolution playing cards and statues of Mao, which read in context more as kitsch than anything else. Or at least that is how it seemed to me; we didn't get into any conversations about how people feel about Mao these days. Nor could we if we wanted to, since the language barrier was pretty profound much of the time even in so modern and outward-looking a city as Shanghai. We traveled from the ship to town by taxi, and had to do with slips of paper that the travel agent who came on the ship (as they usually do in port) wrote out for us with destinations in Chinese characters.

In front of the Shanghai Museum, a very nice museum of Chinese art.

And we wandered--to a couple of very nice parks, each of which had some amusement-park style rides (including some bumper cars that decidedly did not meet US standards of safety), to the Shanghai Museum, to various areas, on and off the beaten paths for tourists. We know that we barely scratched the surface here--it's a huge and exciting city.  Stuff is happening here--there are new building projects everywhere, and there's a lot of energy around the place. The Pudong area, which we did not enter, is the city's business and financial district. It's across the river from the Bund, on land that until 1989, was farmland and a chemical factory.  Here it is now:

That is, everything behind us here was build in the last 20 years or so. It will be interesting to return here; I hope we get the chance.

Hangzhou

John:  I had never heard of Hangzhou until a couple of months ago, and in that I'm probably like most Americans. Which mostly reveals my and our ignorance, because Hangzhou is enormous, with something like seven or eight million people--that is, it is as big as New York. It's an old city, with a long history; it was once the capital of China, and for a while in what Europeans think of as the Middle Ages it may have been the most populous city on earth. Marco Polo visited here, and thought it was the most impressive city he had ever seen.

It's also a city that is beloved by Chinese people, who flock here in droves as tourists: more than 63 million Chinese tourists came to Hangzhou last year. That's three times as many people who visit Venice, for example. The Chinese think of it as a beautiful city, and even have a proverbial expression to the effect of "there's one heaven above, but on earth we have Hangzhou and Suzhou" (the second being another garden city, one tp which Vicki is in fact leading a student trip). That may be an exaggeration, but it's still the case that Hangzhou occupies a pretty big place in the Chinese imagination, so it is well touristed. And we happened to arrive during the annual three-day holiday where people in China are supposed to clean their ancestors' graves. Or, if you no longer live near your ancestors' graves, you can go to Hong Kong Disneyland maybe, or perhaps Hangzhou. The sites were pretty crowded, which was interesting in itself, though it meant that traffic was thick and getting around was sometimes a little tricky.

We came here from Hong Kong in part so as to get off the ship, which was going to be in transit for two days between Hong Kong and Shanghai. We've spent enough time on the ship, and with the long Pacific crossing looming ahead of us, we are eager not to have to be at sea for any longer than is necessary. A lot of people on the voyage went to Beijing, for the obvious reasons.  But that seemed like a long trip to us, and one that Maeve in particular might find to be a challenge.  Hengzhou, though, is conveniently between Hong Kong and Shanghai. And, too it's a place that is off the beaten path for Western tourists, which Beijing is not. Which led to some challenges; not too many people in Hangzhou speak any English at all, and even the staff at the hotel we booked, one that is designed to cater to Western business people who are in Hangzhou on business, had limited English skills. (But of course even their English is way better than our Chinese, which largely consists of saying "Thank you" and "I'm sorry"--that at least covers two of the more important bases of conversation.) 

As I say, Hangzhou has a reputation in China of being a place of great beauty. The urban areas of the city itself are not remarkably beautiful; it does not have a lovely skyline or architecturally interesting public spaces. But it has West Lake, which is quite lovely. It's a large lake in the middle of the city that over the centuries has been tended and manicured; there are gardens, plantings, tea-houses, causeways, bridges--it's all sort of an enormous garden with appealing vistas at every turn.

Aidan at West Lake, Hangzhou. The willows are budding--it's really very pretty

The other attraction in Hengzhou is the Lingyin temple. It's one of the largest and most important Buddhist temples in China, which was established in  326. The buildings themselves--and there are a number of them, one more impressive than the next--are much newer, since the temple has been destroyed and rebuilt something like fifteen times over the centuries, but the place is incredible--amazingly serene, with beautiful carvings and statuary. 

Maybe the most impressive part of the complex is outside, though, in the form of rock carvings into the hillside adjacent to the temple. There are over 300 of them, many of them of different incarnations of the Buddha. Everyone's favorite is surely the laughing Buddha:

The Laughing Buddha--it's an amazing sight, right in the all of the mountain.

The temple complex and the stone carvings were were the trip. We're really glad that we got to see Hangzhou.

We love Hong Kong

An incomplete version of this post went up last night by accident; this is a full version. Access to this blog, which is supported by Google, was blocked in China, so we'll be catching up over the next couple of days. As I write, we're on the way to Japan.


John: We do. It's an exciting, interesting city, one that feels like a combination of some of the most interesting parts of San Francisco, New York, and London, while of course being very much itself at the same time. It's both modern, with skyscrapers and a fantastic metro system, and also sort of quant in spots--the crewmen on the Star Ferry, which goes between the mainland and Hong Kong island, wear what look like British sailor suits, circa 1930. It's a very international place, with many expatriates living and working here; it was easy to feel at home pretty quickly.

Maeve and Aidan  on the top deck of the ship with Hong Kong Island behind them. As is usual with a  new port, we arrived in Hong Kong first thing in the morning; it's always exciting to wake up arriving in a new city.

It will not surprise any reader of this blog that we have spent a fair amount of time at children's parks and the zoo. We're now experts in Asian zoos, and can report that the Hong Kong zoo is not all that elaborate compared to the Singapore Zoo, and it's smaller than the Saigon Zoo as well. But it's free, centrally located, and very pleasant, with lots of monkeys. And also a raccoon, which here is an exotic animal, but of course is a pest around our garbage cans.

Maeve got tired of walking at the Hong Kong Zoo.

Our biggest excursion was to Hong Kong Disneyland. Yes, there is a Hong Kong Disneyland:

Aidan with the Hong Kong Disneyland castle.

And it's kind of like every other Disneyland, though smaller than the ones in the US. There is a castle, depicted above, a Space Mountain, a jungle boat ride, a small world ride, and so on. It also has some of the features I've tended to suppress from memories of visits to the Disney parks in the US, like big crowds and long lines for everything (Maeve fell asleep in my arms as we were waiting to get on a Buzz Lightyear ride.) After being at the Buddhist amusement park in Saigon a few days ago, Disneyland looked newly strange, I think, and it's a puzzle to me why people in Hong Kong would be interested in visiting such an artificial version of America.

In the evening, Vicki and I went out to a great Japanese restaurant to celebrate my birthday. That was good, grown-up fun.

Pardon the interruption

John: We're sorry not to have kept up with new posts, but 1) we've been busy in China and 2) it's been mysteriously difficult to log on to Google blogs here in the People's Republic. Facebook, too. Hmmm.  We'll be catching up with posts about Hong Kong, Hangzhou, and Shanghai (which is where I'm writing from).