Shanghai, 19 April, and on to Guilin
Apr. 23rd, 2015 08:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteOne problem with this trip is that we're doing a lot of relocating, which means packing and repacking every few days. It also means a lot of airline travel, which in turn means shifting essentials into our carry-ons in case the checked bags go for an adventure without us. We've noticed that most of the others on our trip have packed larger checked bags than we did, so perhaps if we do this again, we'll bring 2 weeks worth of clothing instead of 1 week plus a wash in the middle.
Tonight, our flight to Guilin was delayed by a couple hours, probably due to weather. When we arrived, our local guide "Summer" told us there'd been a severe rainstorm that dropped the temperature by 15 degrees C and threw in hailstones the size of eggs. Not your typical tropical weather, and no sign of it by the time we arrived, but still... better to hear about this afterwards than experience it in an airplane.
In Guilin, we were staying at the Grand Link Hotel. Pleasant enough place, with an OK breakfast buffet, but disappointingly, still no jiaozi (dumplings) or bao (steamed buns). I asked and confirmed this -- in Mandarin, which is getting better with practice, but still not up to kindergarten level. Back on the bus for our next ride, which gave us a chance to appreciate the scenery, which is Guilin's primary attraction. If you've seen any traditional-style Chinese landscape painting, you know the basic idea: peaks that rear up in the middle of nowhere, rise abruptly to a precipitous peak, and then plunge down the other side again. Some are solitary, some are conjoined in saddles, and others form camel humps. Guilin sits in a bowl between several ranges of these mountains, with a few in town too, and straddles the Li River, which flows sluggishly through town.
After breakfast, our first stop of the day was in downtown Guilin, along the banks of the Li River. (A dozen years ago, I'd stayed a few hundred metres farther down the road in the Sheraton Guilin.) The boardwalk above the river is lovely and shaded by bamboo and a variety of local trees, and pleasantly populated by locals out for a stroll, not to mention tourists. Beautiful sunny and temperate day. Two groups of women were doing different dance variants for their morning exercise: one was doing a kind of tai chi dance, with red fans; the other had what looked like badminton rackets with balls, and they swooped the rackets around in complex and graceful arcs while keeping the ball glued to the raceket, mostly without dropping the ball.
The main visual attraction here is "elephant's trunk hill", a mind of micro version of the big mountains, that bears a surprising resemblance to an elephant kneeling beside the river for a drink. That's due to a washout that leaves a narrow pillar of rock separated from the main body of the hill. Kind of like a Chinese version of Percé Rock in New Brunswick. There's also a local legend about a battle between a giant elephant sent by a Chinese god to accomplish some task against an army composed of a crab general and his shrimp army; the elephant decided he liked Guilin so much that he stayed, and the crab general snuck up on him and stabbed him in the back while the elephant was drinking. The sword hilt is still visible as a rocky knob atop the hill.
We were given time to wander, and from the walk above the river, we took a brief tour of the local lake, which has a nice pagoda beside it. When we returned to the meeting spot, nobody was there. We figured perhaps we'd misheard and that we should be back in an hour, not half an hour, and after looking around to see if we could spot anyone, and failing, we went for a bit more of a walk. Meanwhile, it turned out we'd misheard our tour guide; she'd wanted to meet the whole group in half an hour down on the lower boardwalk by the river. We began to get worried, and tried texting our guide, but didn't manage to connect. But this time we decided to be smart and stay in one place, and Summer came and found us and brought us down to the others.
Just before lunch, we stopped at a tea research center, with a brief stop in the plantation itself. It's still early in the season, so it wasn't as aromatic as the plantation we'd hiked through in India, but still, we had bright sunshine and fresh country air. We had a chance to pick a few tea leaves before being given a lecture by Ling, our host at the plantation, on tea quality. Short version: the smaller and thinner the leaf, the better the tea. The finest white tea, which comes from the tiny spike that will eventually unfurl into a leaf, can take 8000 of the spike/leaves per kilogram; the largest and lowest-quality leaves are fit only for mulch but are still sometimes sold as tea.
After picking a few leaves, our guide took us to show how tea is dried, which involves heating over a hearth in a pan, rolling around with the fingers, then removal from the heat and rolling by hand like bread dough. We then went for a tea-preparation and consumption demo, where everyone sat on the trestles arranged around the edges of the room, ignoring the small cylindrical logs pushed back against the wall. Sadly, the trestles were the tables, though Ling noted we were hardly the first to make this mistake. (I actually suspect this setup is intentional, since it amuses everyone.) We got to taste four types of tea: green tea (familar but very good), yellow tea (high-altitude herbal tea with no caffeine and a very pleasant and mild taste), oolong (spicer and not to my taste, but very popular in China), and "pressed tea" (liu bao = 6 (liu) plus bao = mixture), which was naturally very sweet. The latter is an cheaper and less pungent alternative to the pu er pressed tea that Li Huilin introduced us to a few years ago in Kunming.
Tea preparation notes: First, tea shouldn't be served with fully boiling water; usually 80 to 90C is best, depending on the type of tea. There are also different types of preferred pot (ceramic vs. porcelain vs. glass) for different types, though I didn't take notes on the correct pairings. Also, you should never use the same pot for differrent types if you're a purist (to avoid mixing residual flavors with the flavor from the current batch). In addition, if you're using leaves, you should pour hot water through the leaves once to fill the pot, then discard that first tea before pouring what you'll actually drink. (Need to try that with bagged tea to see if it makes a difference.!) Ling also taught us (presumably with tongue at least partially in cheek) the finger-tap codes you can use at a Chinese tea room. After receiving your tea, you tap your fingers on the table three times to say thanks: if you tap with 1 finger, you mean "thank you, and by the way I'm single", with 2 fingers you just mean thanks, and with 3 fingers, you mean MBA ("married but available").
Needless to say, the tour ended with the inevitable trip through the gift shop. Very nice things there, but expensive -- like $600+ for the really nice ones. China is still cheap by Western standards, but not nearly so cheap as it was 3 to 12 years ago. Also, something Matt would have enjoyed: a little ceramic figurine you could use to test the water temperature. If you pour cold water on it, nothing happens. But if the water is warm enough, it soaks into the figurine, which then proceeds to pee it up into the air.
Our last whole-group trip of the day was to the South China Pearl Museum. We had an interesting lecture on the various attributes of pearls. Nothing much you haven't heard before, except perhaps two things: First, that you can distinguish natural from fake pearls by rubbing them gently together; if you feel a slight catch, it's real, since synthetic products are smoother. Second, that the color of the pearl depends on the trace elements in the water. Presumably they modify the solution chemistry to achieve a range of colors when they farm the oysters, thereby producing a higher quantity of the really pricey colors such as black. There's a surprising range of colors, including blue, violet, caramel, and black, in addition to the standard white.
We also sat through a short "fashion show" intended to show off the pearls. As expected, lovely young Chinese women modeling the wares. Some stared fixedly at the walls as they sashayed down the catwalk, and others made lingering eye contact with the men, with a little extra wiggle of the hips to make the sale. Amusing to see the "hard sell". But best of all was that once we hit the display room, there's a husband parking lot where the men go to wait while their wives shop: an overstuffed leather couch beside an espresso bar.
When we returned to Guilin, we were given the option of some free time or an afternoon massage in a reputable place. (Amusingly, the same one some of our delegation went to 12 years ago. We were warned against the cheapie deals you sometimes see advertised on the street, some of which may involve unhappy endings.) We opted for the massage. The full package totaled about 200 RMB for 1.5 hours (a little less than $30 per hour), which is a decent price, given that it includes the tip (presumably money that goes directly to the staff rather than being shared with the establishment). There were shorter and less expensive options, but the full package was the best barrgain; it included a herbal soak and reflexology for the feet, deep tissue and pressure point massage for muscles, and a head and facial massage. Interestingly, the universal pattern was for female masseuses massaging the men and male masseurs massaging the women, with five of us all in the same room. (The body massage was clothes-on, involving pressure and kneading rather than rubbing back and forth.) The overall experience was very pleasant; despite often being painful when they worked on specific muscle groups, it felt great later once the pain ebbed. Felt sorry for my masseuse, who was a tiny woman with remarkably strong hands. I'm fairly muscular, so I gave her quite a workout.
We had time before dinner to unwind further, so we stopped briefly at the hotel (time enough for shower and puttering) before dinner at Summer's college roomie's restaurant, la Rive Gauche (but still Chinese food despite the name). Pretty good food. Afterwards, we wandered back to the bus, passing through the park by the lake for a view of the lit-up pagodas we'd seen earlier in the day. The grounds were packed with people, since it was a lovely mild night, so lots of pleasant people-watching too.
Exhausting day, so early to bed and asleep in seconds after head hitting the pillow.
Tonight, our flight to Guilin was delayed by a couple hours, probably due to weather. When we arrived, our local guide "Summer" told us there'd been a severe rainstorm that dropped the temperature by 15 degrees C and threw in hailstones the size of eggs. Not your typical tropical weather, and no sign of it by the time we arrived, but still... better to hear about this afterwards than experience it in an airplane.
In Guilin, we were staying at the Grand Link Hotel. Pleasant enough place, with an OK breakfast buffet, but disappointingly, still no jiaozi (dumplings) or bao (steamed buns). I asked and confirmed this -- in Mandarin, which is getting better with practice, but still not up to kindergarten level. Back on the bus for our next ride, which gave us a chance to appreciate the scenery, which is Guilin's primary attraction. If you've seen any traditional-style Chinese landscape painting, you know the basic idea: peaks that rear up in the middle of nowhere, rise abruptly to a precipitous peak, and then plunge down the other side again. Some are solitary, some are conjoined in saddles, and others form camel humps. Guilin sits in a bowl between several ranges of these mountains, with a few in town too, and straddles the Li River, which flows sluggishly through town.
After breakfast, our first stop of the day was in downtown Guilin, along the banks of the Li River. (A dozen years ago, I'd stayed a few hundred metres farther down the road in the Sheraton Guilin.) The boardwalk above the river is lovely and shaded by bamboo and a variety of local trees, and pleasantly populated by locals out for a stroll, not to mention tourists. Beautiful sunny and temperate day. Two groups of women were doing different dance variants for their morning exercise: one was doing a kind of tai chi dance, with red fans; the other had what looked like badminton rackets with balls, and they swooped the rackets around in complex and graceful arcs while keeping the ball glued to the raceket, mostly without dropping the ball.
The main visual attraction here is "elephant's trunk hill", a mind of micro version of the big mountains, that bears a surprising resemblance to an elephant kneeling beside the river for a drink. That's due to a washout that leaves a narrow pillar of rock separated from the main body of the hill. Kind of like a Chinese version of Percé Rock in New Brunswick. There's also a local legend about a battle between a giant elephant sent by a Chinese god to accomplish some task against an army composed of a crab general and his shrimp army; the elephant decided he liked Guilin so much that he stayed, and the crab general snuck up on him and stabbed him in the back while the elephant was drinking. The sword hilt is still visible as a rocky knob atop the hill.
We were given time to wander, and from the walk above the river, we took a brief tour of the local lake, which has a nice pagoda beside it. When we returned to the meeting spot, nobody was there. We figured perhaps we'd misheard and that we should be back in an hour, not half an hour, and after looking around to see if we could spot anyone, and failing, we went for a bit more of a walk. Meanwhile, it turned out we'd misheard our tour guide; she'd wanted to meet the whole group in half an hour down on the lower boardwalk by the river. We began to get worried, and tried texting our guide, but didn't manage to connect. But this time we decided to be smart and stay in one place, and Summer came and found us and brought us down to the others.
Just before lunch, we stopped at a tea research center, with a brief stop in the plantation itself. It's still early in the season, so it wasn't as aromatic as the plantation we'd hiked through in India, but still, we had bright sunshine and fresh country air. We had a chance to pick a few tea leaves before being given a lecture by Ling, our host at the plantation, on tea quality. Short version: the smaller and thinner the leaf, the better the tea. The finest white tea, which comes from the tiny spike that will eventually unfurl into a leaf, can take 8000 of the spike/leaves per kilogram; the largest and lowest-quality leaves are fit only for mulch but are still sometimes sold as tea.
After picking a few leaves, our guide took us to show how tea is dried, which involves heating over a hearth in a pan, rolling around with the fingers, then removal from the heat and rolling by hand like bread dough. We then went for a tea-preparation and consumption demo, where everyone sat on the trestles arranged around the edges of the room, ignoring the small cylindrical logs pushed back against the wall. Sadly, the trestles were the tables, though Ling noted we were hardly the first to make this mistake. (I actually suspect this setup is intentional, since it amuses everyone.) We got to taste four types of tea: green tea (familar but very good), yellow tea (high-altitude herbal tea with no caffeine and a very pleasant and mild taste), oolong (spicer and not to my taste, but very popular in China), and "pressed tea" (liu bao = 6 (liu) plus bao = mixture), which was naturally very sweet. The latter is an cheaper and less pungent alternative to the pu er pressed tea that Li Huilin introduced us to a few years ago in Kunming.
Tea preparation notes: First, tea shouldn't be served with fully boiling water; usually 80 to 90C is best, depending on the type of tea. There are also different types of preferred pot (ceramic vs. porcelain vs. glass) for different types, though I didn't take notes on the correct pairings. Also, you should never use the same pot for differrent types if you're a purist (to avoid mixing residual flavors with the flavor from the current batch). In addition, if you're using leaves, you should pour hot water through the leaves once to fill the pot, then discard that first tea before pouring what you'll actually drink. (Need to try that with bagged tea to see if it makes a difference.!) Ling also taught us (presumably with tongue at least partially in cheek) the finger-tap codes you can use at a Chinese tea room. After receiving your tea, you tap your fingers on the table three times to say thanks: if you tap with 1 finger, you mean "thank you, and by the way I'm single", with 2 fingers you just mean thanks, and with 3 fingers, you mean MBA ("married but available").
Needless to say, the tour ended with the inevitable trip through the gift shop. Very nice things there, but expensive -- like $600+ for the really nice ones. China is still cheap by Western standards, but not nearly so cheap as it was 3 to 12 years ago. Also, something Matt would have enjoyed: a little ceramic figurine you could use to test the water temperature. If you pour cold water on it, nothing happens. But if the water is warm enough, it soaks into the figurine, which then proceeds to pee it up into the air.
Our last whole-group trip of the day was to the South China Pearl Museum. We had an interesting lecture on the various attributes of pearls. Nothing much you haven't heard before, except perhaps two things: First, that you can distinguish natural from fake pearls by rubbing them gently together; if you feel a slight catch, it's real, since synthetic products are smoother. Second, that the color of the pearl depends on the trace elements in the water. Presumably they modify the solution chemistry to achieve a range of colors when they farm the oysters, thereby producing a higher quantity of the really pricey colors such as black. There's a surprising range of colors, including blue, violet, caramel, and black, in addition to the standard white.
We also sat through a short "fashion show" intended to show off the pearls. As expected, lovely young Chinese women modeling the wares. Some stared fixedly at the walls as they sashayed down the catwalk, and others made lingering eye contact with the men, with a little extra wiggle of the hips to make the sale. Amusing to see the "hard sell". But best of all was that once we hit the display room, there's a husband parking lot where the men go to wait while their wives shop: an overstuffed leather couch beside an espresso bar.
When we returned to Guilin, we were given the option of some free time or an afternoon massage in a reputable place. (Amusingly, the same one some of our delegation went to 12 years ago. We were warned against the cheapie deals you sometimes see advertised on the street, some of which may involve unhappy endings.) We opted for the massage. The full package totaled about 200 RMB for 1.5 hours (a little less than $30 per hour), which is a decent price, given that it includes the tip (presumably money that goes directly to the staff rather than being shared with the establishment). There were shorter and less expensive options, but the full package was the best barrgain; it included a herbal soak and reflexology for the feet, deep tissue and pressure point massage for muscles, and a head and facial massage. Interestingly, the universal pattern was for female masseuses massaging the men and male masseurs massaging the women, with five of us all in the same room. (The body massage was clothes-on, involving pressure and kneading rather than rubbing back and forth.) The overall experience was very pleasant; despite often being painful when they worked on specific muscle groups, it felt great later once the pain ebbed. Felt sorry for my masseuse, who was a tiny woman with remarkably strong hands. I'm fairly muscular, so I gave her quite a workout.
We had time before dinner to unwind further, so we stopped briefly at the hotel (time enough for shower and puttering) before dinner at Summer's college roomie's restaurant, la Rive Gauche (but still Chinese food despite the name). Pretty good food. Afterwards, we wandered back to the bus, passing through the park by the lake for a view of the lit-up pagodas we'd seen earlier in the day. The grounds were packed with people, since it was a lovely mild night, so lots of pleasant people-watching too.
Exhausting day, so early to bed and asleep in seconds after head hitting the pillow.