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).

Saigon for kids

ohn:  With Vicki gone to Hanoi for a couple of days--she left at 4 am on our second morning here in Saigon--the agenda turned to chlldren-friendly activities. Of which there are a fair number in Saigon, fortunately. We had read that Vietnamese people love children, and that seems to be true; Aidan and Maeve get a good deal of attention when we are out and about, and it seems like we cannot go into a store for more than a minute before they have candy in their hands (one place, surprisingly, had Lindt truffles--how about some for me?). At the same time, I've also been a little terrified to see children standing in the front of a motorbike hurtling into the traffic--the anxiety over children's safety that is so much a part of our experience with carseats and bicycle helmets is completely absent here.

First stop, the Saigon Zoo. It's fine, though even if we had not been so impressed with the Singapore Zoo just a few days ago, I think we'd sense its limits quickly (though I appreciate its cheapness--admission was about 40 cents apiece, and Maeve was free). It's an old-fashioned zoo, originally laid out by the French in the nineteenth century, with most of the animals in fairly spartan enclosures. I don't get the sense that they're neglected, and they have space, but the environments don't make much effort to replicate their natural habitats. The grounds, though, are nice, functioning as a quiet botanical garden, with specimen trees from all over Asia.

Aidan and Maeve mostly enjoyed the children's playground, which had kiddie rides, a bouncy castle, and one of those enclosures filled with plastic balls:

So yes, we have travelled about 18,000 miles by now to play in plastic balls.

The next, Tuesday, was a case of plans frustrated leading to something surprising and amazing that we could never have anticipated. The plan was to go to a children's amusement park located on the outskirts of Saigon that we had read good things about in the Lonely Planet guide. Our friends Victor, Elizabeth, and their son Josiah were going, too, so we hired a cab and squeezed in. But when we got there, the amusement park was closed; I'm not sure, but it seems as though someone was telling our driver that all of the parks in town were closed on Tuesday. The driver suggested that he take us to another place, the Suoi Tien amusement park, which he said was much better. (All of this sounds a good deal more transparent and fast than it was in reality, since our driver spoke almost precisely no English, and we no precisely no Vietnamese. What he died was write "Soui Tien" on a piece of paper, drew a map, and pantomimed that it would be a place the children would like.) We went all in, and he took us to the Soui Tien park, about an hour's drive outside of town.

Here, in no particular order, are things that are at the Soui Tien amusement park, which is probably about the size of Disneyland:

• a giant roller coaster

• a Ferris wheel

• enormous statues of dragons

• a gorgeous, and active Buddhist temple

• a snow palace (more on this below)

• bumper boats

• Hindu statuary

• a place where you can dip your feet in the water and have fish eat the dead skin off

• a paint ball center

• a water park with slides

• an artificial lake filled with real crocodiles.

And lots more stuff, too. Soui Tien is a Buddhist amusement  park, a genre that none of us had ever imagined before. It's kind of great, but of course deeply weird to our eyes. Since it was a weekday, it was not crowded at all--apparently it is very busy on the weekend. But this is clearly not a place designed for the likes of us--unlike central Saigon, which has a lot of foreign tourists and expatriates, this place is designed for local interests and tastes. The juxtaposition of a Buddhist temple, one in use, with people praying and lighting incense, with amusement park rides, stands selling t-shirts and ice cream, etc., is more strange than anything I could ever come up with on my own. 

Inside one of the many Buddhist temples at the Suoi Tien Amusement Park

Maeve at the entrance to the Suoi Tien amusement park. She was amused quickly.

Surely the moment of greatest surprise, hilarity, and absurdity was the snow palace. We had gotten a tram to take us around, since it was hot and we figured that with limited time, we wouldn't get to see much otherwise. When the tram driver stopped there and gestured that we might like to go in, we figured that it might be interesting.  What would it be? A winter-themed funhouse? a "matterhorn" style ride? We were led to a place where we were given orange coats, white boots, and cloth gloves, and then taken to the heart of the thing--an enormous room, maybe 50' by 50' that was filled with several inches of snow.  Essentially, we were in a giant freezer compartment, minus the frozen food. They had built up a hill, decorated it with plastic snowmen and penguins, and provided tubes for sliding purposes:

Aidan playing in the snow in Saigon. Note the plastic snowmen.

This may be the single strangest thing we have see on this entire trip. But of course it makes sense: Vietnam is tropical, and never sees snow--what could be more fun for Vietnamese children than to get to play in the snow for once? I can't say, though, that this is anything we would ever have expected to see.

Today (Wednesday) we went to the Jade Emperor pagoda, a Taoist temple located north of downtown. It's a cute little temple, with a nice quiet courtyard that is a good respite from the busy commercial neighborhood around it, and a charming statue of the happy Jade Emperor, a key Taoist deity. It was built in 1909 by Cantonese immigrants

The key feature of the temple, though, and the drawing card for us, were the turtles. Turtles are considered to bring good luck in Vietnamese culture, and this temple gives you the chance to "liberate" turtles into a turtle pond. You buy the turtles from a seller at the gate and set it free, after having painted your name on it:

Aidan named our turtle "Castor." We released him into the turtle pond, where we hope that he is set to enjoy a happy life, tended by the temple monks.

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

John: For the first time on our voyage, we're splitting up for a good part of the week we are spending in a port. Vicki is leading a Semester-at-Sea trip to Hanoi in the middle three days while John and the kids are staying here in Ho chi Minh City.  Or Saigon, which is what people still call it except when they're being official about it. Being in Saigon and Hanoi is remarkable enough to us, who still have vivid memories of the time when Vietnam figured in the news as a place of seemingly-constant and intractable warfare. That we are here as students and tourists  amazes, even though we know that this is not at all unusual now; Vietnam has opened itself up to the world in the last twenty years, and it has become a regular stop for the hectic Asian swing of Semester at Sea; a good number of the faculty and administrative staff have been here a couple of times before. Still, of all the places we are visiting, the very fact of being here boggles the imagination most.

So, what's it like? Modern Saigon was largely laid out by the French, and it still shows in the broad boulevards, wide sidewalks, roundabouts, and a number of nineteenth-century monumental buildings that would look at home in Paris. And that makes it very navigable in some ways; the central part of the city, where most of the landmark buildings are, is fairly easily to negotiate, though the city sprawls out in all directions for miles. There's construction everywhere, as modern hotels and office buildings replace older structures; there's a lot of outside money coming into the city as multinational corporations set up shop. There are plenty of symbols here that remind you that the Communists won and are in power here--flags, posters, party buildings, guards in uniform--but there's also a lot of capital coming in from outside and local entrepreneurship; most businesses, a guide told us, are privately owned, but I'm not quite sure that that means the same thing here as in the US. In fact, I really have no idea about how all this works and where the lines of pressure are between the government, business, citizens, etc. Much less do I know how the division between North and South works; this place feels very Westernized in some ways, surely because the decades of French and American influence, but the North has got to be different.

Most of all, Saigon is very busy and active, a fast-moving place. The streets are thronged with motorbikes, the drivers of which seem to be trying to make some kind of massive illustration of quantum mechanics; surely they have some direction, but it feels pretty random. Which makes crossing the street a thrill, and not in the good sense; there are not a lot of traffic lights, and marked crosswalks are treated casually by the motorbikers. You sort of plunge in and expect them to be able to navigate around you, but it's scary.

On the first day, we took a city orientation tour that introduced us to some of the major landmarks in town, like the Notre Dame Cathedral and, interestingly, the Post Office, which has both an enormous painting of Ho Chi Minh and a counter for the US Postal Service. The most interesting of these sites, surely, was the building now known as Reunification Hall. Before the north defeated the south in 1975, it was the presidential palace. It's a beautiful example of modern architecture, but its modernity owes a lot to the instability of the South Vietnamese regime: it was built i 1962 to replace the previous palace, which was bombed by the South Vietnamese air force in its attempt to kill President Diem.  Who survived the attack but didn't live to see this building completed, since he was assassinated for good the next year.

Reunification Hall, the former Presidential Palace for the South Vietnamese President. Tanks famously crashed through this fence in 1975, ending the war.

Perhaps the highlight of the day was going to a restaurant that is staffed by former orphans and street children; the goal is to teach them both English and how to run a restaurant.  They fell in love with Maeve, and basically took her over, passing her from person to person. 

Maeve makes some new friends.

They gave her a manicure, and then finally let us have her back so that we could leave. And the food was good, too.

More posts to come. 

Saigon

Tired after a day in Saigon.