Tandem Bike + Giant Wall = Pretty Awesome.

From the night we arrived in Xi'an, it was tough not to keep getting drawn back to the amazing wall. It surrounds what was the entire city, and is now the city's urban center. At night, it is lined with lights and when walking around town, it is a constant and illuminated backdrop to the city's character. During the day, its surrounding parks are filled with groups performing various Chinese operas to largely older crowds, and you would see people riding bikes along the wall. As soon as I learned we could ride bikes on the wall, and around the entire wall seeing the whole city, I was determined to do it. What made it even more quirky and cute was that you could rent tandem bikes! I'd never tried a tandem bike but have always found them to be cute and absolutely ridiculous so of course, once we made it to the wall, that's was the sweet ride for us! :D




We had the mid-day heat and air pollution to keep us company during our little adventure which further enhanced with the fact that our magical bicycle weighed a cool 3 metric tons, had oil as viscous as molasses, and poorly inflated tires. To put yourself in the moment, imagine you are peddling a rusty Harley Fat-Boy in hundred degree heat with a sack full of dust on your head. In other words, it was pretty fantastic! We didn't let the complications keep us from our destiny, so we peddled on, stopping every so often to down another few bottles of water, (which we seemed to be sweating out faster than we could drink it), catch our breath, and take in the views.




There was so much to see. We were riding around the perfect symbol of the China of today. This immense and ancient wall riding between sky scrapers and temples, was the old and the new. The poor and the rich. We smelled the various food vendors' mind blurring and delicious smells. We listened to the sounds of the opera singers and musicians as one group faded into another on our ride, and all the while were huffing and puffing for air as we neared heat exhaustion and our lungs burned from the particulates in the air. It kind of summed up what is so great, and what is so difficult about the China we experienced.




All-in-all it was not an easy ride, but it was incredibly fulfilling. There was so much to take in that it took a little while to just let the sensations we had absorbed sink in. We didn't really do much that night, (did I mention we were kind of exhausted?). More savory foods, a bunch of water, and a lot of reflection back to both the recent book donation, and the experience of riding our first, and perhaps last, tandem bicycle on the wall in Xi'an. This was the last thing in our to-do list for Xi'an, and it was a nice way to end our time there. The next day we just relaxed and took in the every-day version of Xi'an. We had a nice last meal with Tom, and the following morning, caught our ride to the Xi'an airport to head back towards Beijing for the final stop on our trip.

The Library Project

This trip to China was really built around three things. Seeing as much of the amazing cultural sites and people as we could was of course one of those things. We wanted to spend time and catch up with old friends, and we wanted to help set up a library in one of the rural communities. Over the years, we have donated time/effort/money to our friend Tom's NGO The Libary Project, I designed that logo actually ;) But we both had always wanted to get more hands on at some point. During our travels in Laos, we got our first taste of delivering books and school supplies, those wonderous little springboards of learning and curiosity, to the kids in villages, so to say we were excited for this day was an understatement.

It was a pleasant drive with two Library Project employees, their driver, and two high school students who, like us, were volunteering for the book donation. Our little van wound along the countryside over the small mountains on a clear warm day. After a few hours of driving we got close to the village. Once there, there were a few interesting sites that surprised me. One was a little glimpse of growing up in the Midwest! Almost every home was drying corn cobs outside their houses. In general I was a bit surprised to see how common corn was in China. They tend to just eat it steamed on the cob, enjoying the sweet naturally grassy flavors, but this corn was being dried to feed the household's animals, it was a little thing, but something about it was really comforting and charming. I liked the village already! It was a fairly barren and dusty place with occasional gaps in terrain and buildings treating you with nice vistas of the surrounding hilly countryside. It was a cute rural community and our first real chance to see something other than city life in China. It did make me wish we had more time than we did so we could have spent more time in more rural locations.



Tom's amazing team helped organize even the smallest detail so in the end, we were tasked with manual labor and documenting the occasion which was great fun! We snapped photos non-stop and ended up with thousands of strong images that will be used by the project in promotional and archival endeavors.



There were two libraries to be set up that day and Kerry and I were split into the two teams. Kerry was to go to a smaller school with only four students and I was assigned to the larger school. Kerry's donation initially had a delivery hiccup, but they were able to get things sorted and have a successful setup so quickly that she and her team came back and joined us to set up the larger school's book donation. After setting up shelves, toys, and globes, we stamped all of the books and Tom's team taught the teachers and school leaders how to manage and maintain the collection. Once the prep was done, the kids were allowed to come and start digging in! In an instant, it was a flurry of excitement! It is truly a fantastic thing to see, kids born in an impoverished community getting an opportunity to exercise their curiosity and thirst for knowledge. Their energy was excited, playful, and definitely contagious!



Around noon, a majority of the kids wandered off in different directions towards their homes for a mid-day meal, but there was a painful part of that moment too, for not all of the children were leaving. Not every family can afford to feed their children more than once or twice a day, so while their friends all ran home to fill their bellies, they were stuck at the school to sit and wait until classes would start again. Trying to keep the blue moment from marking the day for the kids, we began to play some games with them. It was a successful diversion and soon everyone was fully engaged and the lunch time breezed by, but it was a sobering moment of reality for me.



The afternoon was spent playing games with the younger of the 100 school children, helping the kids with the books, and answering the inevitable collection of questions from the teachers that Kerry and I had become used to answering as we traveled the country. "How much money do you make?", "Where are you from?", "Do you like Chinese food?", "How much did your tattoo cost?". It was comical and pretty much identical each time, haha! It was a little exposure to the differences in our societal mores for sure.



The day was capped with a nice ceremony where the school had speeches and performances for us, the principal signed the presentation documentation, and we mounted a little sign on one of the book shelves. It was a little hard to leave, for us and the kids. They had so much fun, and got so attached, especially to the two high-school girls who volunteered. There were a tears shed by the kids, but in the end everyone was really happy with the successful day.

We had been super curious to try yangrou paomo, a mutton based soup that Xi'an is famous for and the team was very kind and took us to a tiny local shop that served it. It was clear the shop wasn't used to Western visitor. There was a charming moment when even the cooks in the kitchen came out and nervously asked if they could take a picture with me. We could tell the yangrou paomo was really meant more for a cooler time of year, but it was a hearty and happy bowl of yum. The mutton was tender and flavorful in a richly seasoned, slightly oily broth which was then filled out with a crumbled flat bread that had the effect of dumplings. There was a nice and flavorful chili paste and pickled garlic cloves as condiments which added a little zing and acid to cut the hearty delicious soup. After we finished our meal, we traveled back to the office, shared contact information, hugs, and our goodbyes with the team and volunteers who had shared the special day with us.

The Fascinating Terracotta Warriors

We awoke early to meet with our driver for the day. She and her husband were regular drivers for The Library Project. We had the wife of the duo that day and she was a hoot. She didn't speak a lick of English, and our Mandarin was really poor to horribly poor, but that didn't stop her from talking for about 30 minutes solid to us... we just kept smiling and nodding. Once we arrived at the site of the famed Terracotta Army on the grounds of the absolutely massive mausoleum of the first Qin Emperor we found a wonderful English speaking guide who worked for the museum there. She was extremely knowledgeable, friendly, patient, and only cost us 100rmb which given the service was a bargain. Without her guidance, I'm not sure we would have gotten nearly as much out of the visit. The active archeological site is broken up into four main buildings. Three are buildings built around the massive pits where the warriors are being uncovered and the fourth is a museum. It is difficult to try and describe with a few words how massive some of this stuff is...



The first and largest pit, which is a hanger-like structure is a dwarfing open 16,000sq. meters, (that's over 52,000sq. feet)! The warriors are arranged by rank, and are all hand-crafted and truly unique, and not just in the "oh, one eyebrow is slightly different from the next because of hand imperfections", they are all different shapes and sizes, ranks. Some brave, some hungry, some tall, some short, and all shattered into thousands of fragments that archeologists pour countless hours gluing carefully back into their original form.



With some of the newer excavation, they have found ways of preserving what is really fantastic coloring of each figure. We all see the images and imagine that they were always that gray-ish hue, but actually they were all artistically painted in vibrant colors that with new technology we are all finally able to appreciate. Only a few parts have been treated with this new technique, and hopefully any new additional digging will net some even more spectacular works. Another surprising thing was that there were several other things other than warriors buried in the various pits including very intricate bronze chariots detailed to the point of having articulating parasols, rare birds, and other curious-at-the-time animals.

The site was found by accident, as most of these things usually are, by a group of farmers digging a well. One of those farmers, Yang Junpeng, is still living and the museum employs him which I thought was really cool! We got a picture of him signing the really nice little book we purchased there.



Once we got back into Xi'an, we met back up with Tom and took in the bizarrely white "fog" that surrounds the city from his high-rise in the corner of the city. I say "fog" because there was a very curious moment which made us a bit careful about calling it what it was, pollution from the massive coal burning operations. The government has done a fantastic job portraying the city as fogy, and the population, not having been exposed to actual fog was none-the-wiser. When we were describing San Francisco as cool from the fog, we got confused expressions from the people we were talking to, and had to recover by explaining that our fog in San Francisco, is "cool" fog... not like their "warm" fog... It was a little strange, but in the end, we didn't want to offend anyone. We were cautioned by our friend Tom that many people in China tend to take negative discussions about the country, even if they had no hand or control over it, very personally... but let me say, that "fog" is brutal on the body. Each and every day, we would go to bed with burning eyes, lungs that ached, and would wake up with sore throats. Tom goes to the doctor regularly just to see if he is sick because the regular symptoms are the same as having a rough chest cold so he can't be too sure! Crazy but true!



There was a great treat when walking back through town was to go through a local park. The park was full of apparatus for exercise and stretching, populated by many middle-aged and elderly folks keeping fit. It made me wonder if our culture here in America would ever adopt having jungle gym equipment built for adults in the parks in stead of all of the things being meant for young children... There were also several ping-pong tables set up outside which really got my attention. I watched for a few minutes when one really friendly fellow walked over and chatted us up practicing his English. Sensing my interest, he asked if I'd be willing to play a little. Tom and Kerry were both tired and I think not really very interested in getting their clocks cleaned on the tables, but even if I was doomed to failure, I couldn't pass up the rare opportunity, so I agreed. One nice guy let me borrow his paddle and spot at a table and while I certainly didn't take every point, (we broke even), there was one specific set up and slam that got a lot of smiles and head shakes from the old timers which really made me happy. It was great fun to play outside, and if I hadn't been so zonked from spending all day at the terracotta grounds, I would have played all day!

Remnants of the silk road.

Xi'an rests at starting point for the northern stretch of the silk road. Thanks to that, it has long had a rich influence from the cultures and peoples from the other pieces of the long fabled trade route. There is a wonderful Muslim district in the heart of the city where there is a vast mosque. I found it most fascinating for its architecture which was decidedly Chinese, but every once in a while you'd be reminded where you were with either arabic lettering written on a sign, or you'd pass by a caretaker wearing Muslim garb.



After the mosque, we wondered the streets and alleyways. The sights, sounds, and smells were all very different from what we had seen in China at that point. Things seemed a little more put together. Lots of orderly stalls, and the smells were from great flat breads being baked in clay ovens and roasting lamb.



Even the markets were catering to a different crowd. There were head-scarves being sold with the clothing, and the spices and vegetables were all just a little more Central Asian. It was a really funny thing to cross one street, and immediately be greeted with the modern Han Xi'an world. The Muslim district really was a tiny little self contained world tucked away. It was a great place to explore, and the memory of our little taste of that area lingered pleasantly for quite some time.



Later in that afternoon our friend Tom got a call from another Tom. This new Tom, Tom Honeycutt was another ex-pat working in education and taking some time off to travel around China as well as make a trip back to the US to see if he could still manage his way around the States after having spent so much time in China.



That evening provided some great opportunity to get to know each other and have some great food while sharing some beers. One fantastic small world moment was at the end of the night while we were sharing traveling tales, Tom Honeycutt asked what I did for a living and I mentioned that I made video games. He then followed up by asking if I made things like that game Chocolatier from PlayFirst. After I picked up my jaw from the dirty floor, I replied that not only was it like Chocolatier, I had worked on that game. He then asked if I knew a guy named Jack Murphy, and I do! In fact, he and I have worked at the last two companies together. I sit just a few desks away from him. Well, it turns out, Tom Honeycutt and Jack go back a long long way and have been great friends since first grade. So out of the billions and billions of folks I could have run into and made friends with in China, it happened to be with a childhood friend of a colleague and buddy. Definitely a small world moment, and I can't tell you how much fun it was to come back and watch the reaction on Jack's face as I relayed the news of our run-in. :)

Our first moments in Xi'an

Our flight out of Beijing was pretty simple and we arrived late in the evening in the Xi'an airport. We wanted to travel overland, but given the brevity of our trip and our inability to sleep on bumpy overnight trains, we opted to fly. The flight gave us the added opportunity of meeting in the airport with our great friend Tom Stader as his flight arrived within 30 minutes of ours. He was just flying back to Xi'an, his home base in China, after giving talks at both a TED conference as well as at the Swiss Pavilion in the World Expo in Shanghai! He has been traveling quite a bit helping to support his ever-growing NGO The Library Project. We've supported them over the years, I designed that logo ;), and it is just amazing to see how well it is doing now and moreover, the great impact it has, but more on The Library Project in a few posts.



Once at the airport, Tom helped us snag a cab for a great price and we headed into town to help fill all of our hungry bellies, kick back, and relax our tired bodies with a few drinks. We grabbed some really fantastic street food cooked by a perfectly surly and shirtless grill master outside of Tom's apartment building. Our meal consisted of spicy yet deeply flavored crawdads, skewered chicken wings, skewered beef slices, pickled cucumber salad which was unreal, marinated tofu disks, and a few bottles of local brew. It was yet another moment when the Chinese street food more than delivered! It was dirt cheap, and I'm salivating just thinking about it now. You had to eat the crawdads with supplied plastic gloves. I should add though, the gloves for the crawdads were great for keeping some of the hot oil from getting all over you, but it was better in concept than practice since the hot oils would just eat through the gloves. By the time you were done cracking your crawdads and pealed off your gloves, your hands would be saturated with the savory oils. You just had to remember: DO NOT TOUCH YOUR EYES until you could really wash your hands. Not just typical China, "damp them in a bucket and then dry them with the old rag" wash them, but soak them and use hard-core soap wash them. Any less and you'd be crying for weeks. I'm sure there is no regulation in the amount of spice they put on those things. They were delicious, but that heat could really really build up.



While we were hanging out at the street stalls, we had our first of the many Xi'an encounters with expats from around the globe. Our friend Tom is very well known in the area, and given the small size of the expat community, it was very frequent that we'd run into some of his fellow compatriots. That night we ran into all sorts of folks, mostly teachers, from South Africa, England, and the US, a few were even from Chicago and Ohio which made for some funny common stories from our younger days in the Midwest.





We wondered all around the North-West corner of town visiting a few hot spots after our food. One had a rocking band with a bassist that outside of that setting would have looked very mild mannered and demure, but with her band and bass, she tore it up. In the last stop of the night we spent some time getting to reconnect with our old friend Tom and to learn more about Eugene, a teacher from South Africa, and Erica from Ohio at a very colorful bar with a rather hilarious drink menu we didn't end up testing. It was a really great way to be welcomed into our new stop in China!



Next up, with the rising of the day's sun, we get our first experience with Xi'an's "fog"!



Cheers,
Isaac

The World's Best Flea Market? It Just May Be.

Kerry and I love shopping in crazy outdoor markets when we travel. Often we don't buy anything, it's just the atmosphere that is authentic and electric and the possibility that we could find something special that makes it so cool. So when we read about Panjiayuan we knew it was a must-do for our stay in Beijing.



It was impossible to really capture how big and sprawling this place is. Over the ages it's been added to, and it shows. One section will be blanket after blanket, row after row of people hawking various wunderkammer and antiques (although most are fakes). Next to that you might find three stories of row shops housing jade sculpture, or maybe musical instruments. Then rows, and floors of furniture. Then you will find artists by the dozens if not hundreds followed by even more fields of other sundry crafts and antique-this-and-that. But it is the art I need to elaborate on. China, and Beijing more specifically, surprised and impressed us yet again. While there is a lot of calligraphy and ink painting that one would expect to find from Chinese artists in stalls, the oil painters and sculptors were as surprising as they were talented. Much of the subject matter seemed to be split between various communist themes and image studies of China's cultural past including portraits of minority figures and weathered streets. There are some famous and successful artists coming out of Beijing's art world and the most successful of them are in many cases being directly copied by some of the younger or less successful artists. While some were direct copies, others took painting styles and themes and came up with twists all their own which in some cases was absolutely brilliant. We ended up buying a few of those paintings and spent hours going through the hundreds and hundreds of amazing oils which were at prices that made you almost feel guilty of stealing. Here is a quad-shot of our four favorite artists we ran into. The older master had both booth and a shop and in his shop displayed a truly massive stretched oil painting of a Chinese ceremony of some sort which was rendered so well, and was just so beautiful it would have been a show stopper in any museum in the world. We had no idea where we would show such a painting or how to transport it for that matter, but whatever he was charging it was worth ten times more I'm sure.



One curious thing I noticed was that at several of the row end caps people were selling pairs of walnuts. I'm sure you've all seen the "Chinese Health Balls"sold in random shops in the US before. They are usually chrome or enameled with little chimes inside that you roll in your palms for some esoteric benefit. Well, here, those balls are definitely sold, but what seemed to be more popular were these walnuts. They seemed to like the ones that were really round, about the same size, and heavily pitted with very deep pores. They made a very unique grindy-slidy kind of sound as someone walked around rolling them this way and that in a palm as they perused the stalls.



That night we wondered back the 798 district for a nom-tastic dinner at a pseudo-Western cafe filled with local art figures and ex-pats from France and elsewhere. Before calling it a night we wandered with no direction through the galleries and surreal sculptures found everywhere on the grounds tucked in corners, hanging off of buildings and in some cases in your way. Many of them are large fiberglass pieces painted in a solid coat of high-gloss red.




One artist in particular that blew my mind into little bits of happy was the brilliant work from Xian Yang, a Chinese artist living in the US. The solo exhibition was made from sculptural images often including multicolored strings creating transformative outlines connecting one shape to another. The work centered around this gigantic sculpture portraying the interdependence between China and the US.

It was nice to see the 798 district at night because it really came alive. During the day it is a fairly placid place, but at night, there are concerts, art openings, and a lot more foot traffic with people milling about and sitting amongst the sculpture strewn alleys and courtyards.

Finding our Beijing

Kerry and I moved into a hotel that was adjacent to a really surprising neighborhood in Beijing that we felt right at home in. The district is called 798, and it is the epicenter of Beijing's exploding contemporary art scene. The massive district is chock full of galleries, shops, studios, cafes, and the some-still-functioning relics of the districts history as an industrial hub. You'd walk down one street full of pipes with steam leaking up in the air or on the ground, crazy machinery, and then turn the corner into a 40,000 square foot monstrosity of a loft-style gallery filled with a mix of the beautiful, experimental, subversive, and sometimes ugly. It was the subversive that surprised us the most. In a country so controlled and censored, (we haven't even been able to post to our blog, this has been done in proxy thanks to Marc and Lisa, THANKS AGAIN!), it was really surprising and refreshing to see so many artists able and willing to speak out. There was something about it that felt a bit more genuine to to Kerry and me. While you always find artists, particularly student artists, trying to speak out against a governing power in subversive ways, it just seemed more honest and brave here in China's evolving core in Beijing.

We took breaks now and again in one cafe or another soaking in the art-rich atmosphere. It was fun to see even in the walkways, there were tons of fashion photographers with their crew and models posing in front of the galleries and sculptures.



Once evening started to set in, we headed towards the day's real goal which was to go to a very highly regarded restaurant called Da Li Courtyard, a wonderful Yunnan cuisine place in a great old hutong.



With the encouragement and funding from Jon Laws to make us get out and do a really extravagant dinner while we were in China, we eventually picked this place, and we were definitely not disappointed! It would be hard to have a more romantic meal. It was just beautiful, delicious, and charming from beginning to end. There were seven courses that night, (it changes with the chef's whim), and is a prix fix menu only. Our favorite and most surprising dish turned out to be the first. It was strips of tofu skin and mint leaves covered in an utterly confounding to identify light sauce that was just mind-blowingly tasty. Each dish had a great deal of new and bold flavors for us to try often including lemon grass, small portions of some protein, and some spice.



Once we were fat and happy, we lingered for a while with their unique drinks made from Yunnan rice-based spirits, muddled mint, water, sugar, and muddled lemon chunks making for a citrusy mojito-esque glass of awesomesauce. They made for warm glows and happy moods after a nice meal.




Da Li Courtyard is located near a strip of shops and eateries. We then let ourselves float from shop to shop walking off our large meal and had a really lovely time taking in the vibrant night-life of the neighborhood.



As tended to be the case throughout the trip, we ended our day with a harrowing adventure to find a cab home. After about 3:30pm, it is near impossible to get a cab anywhere in China... In the early evening there is usually a shift change as well as a mix between drivers who don't want to pick up Westerners, (the rumor is that they are afraid we are frustrating and angry to deal with so they avoid us), and that they don't want to drive through rush hour which particularly in Beijing, is just ridiculous. Once we did find an empty+willing to work with us+willing to drive through town cab, we then had the challenge of trying to explain where we were going. Showing them an address and a map only worked a small percent of the time. It often had to be augmented with my stilted and limited Mandarin and charades. We found ourselves changing our plans over and over again to do everything we could to avoid the cab-ventures and I'll be incredibly happy to leave that part of China behind. It does get hard sometimes to remember that you must keep a smile on your face to keep from making your chances of reeling in a cab even harder. Taxi travel here is most definitely more complicated and challenging than anywhere else in the world we've visited. All of that being said, the little challenge to find our end-of-day cab did little to squash our high spirits after such a lovely day and night. With the art-district and great meal, we really found our swing in Beijing.

Summer Palace

We woke up fairly early, still feeling residual "wake up early" benefits from jet lag, and after a nice bao ze, (steamed pork bun with vinegar and chilis), we headed toward the summer palace. The summer palace has a very troubled history thanks in no small part to empress dowager Cixi. She spent gobs of China's funds on the place at a time when the money was needed for the navy to help support the nation. She played a huge roll in the downfall of China into a place of deep corruption at that time. All that being said, the place is absolutely gorgeous! :)

Kerry, Mitch, and I strolled around the lush grounds until we found a nice little gazebo with a few old men singing and played a nice leisurely game of Scrabble with the board and tiles Kerry and I had thoughtfully tucked into our packs this trip. That little slice of time, just sitting listening to the birds and singing, gentle breeze, and slow game made for perhaps the best moment in the whole trip up to that point. It was just such a peaceful place to spend time.



After we wrapped up our game, we decided to head upwards toward the "incense tower" which overlooks a nice sized lake some distance below. Along the way we passed a vast collection of older Chinese folks playing instruments and singing in pockets of shade.



Eventually, we meandered up to the summit and began exploring the shrine seated there.



The view from the top was a really nice place to see vast expanses in China's sea of new, the skyscrapers and hazy sky, as well as the clusters of shrines and classically Chinese boats peddling around the waters. Looking up the hills you'd find green on green, and tall pagodas, and in the valley spilling out to the horizon was nothing but modern high-rise after modern high-rise.



After some popsicles, and some chill time from the heat to take in the site, we headed down the slope and finished out the day with a nice boat ride to the center island which housed an informative little museum which gave a fairly detailed account of the last emperor and the above mentioned empress dowager. The summer palace was definitely the most impressive and beautiful historical site in Beijing, and made for a really nice day!

China, Day 3

Our day started with another crazy cheap, super yummy, meal for breakfast. It was a delicious, saucy, crepe-ish kind of savory thing with a sort of crunchy thing inside. It was full of yum, and a totally new flavor/texture experience which is always fun!



We decided to explore some of the hutongs and the surrounding area. The hutongs are the old-China lanes in the heart of Beijing that represent a small little slice of the historic past that "the people" have decided was worth hanging onto. In the heart of the area are two large historic structures left over from the Mongolian occupation of the city, the drum tower and bell tower. They've been updated and evolved with successive emperors. Once we ascended the kinda-epic stairway in the drum tower we were treated with a tremendous view of the city and the serendipity of a drum demonstration! The performance was pretty awe inspiring. It was five drummers on five perhaps two meter tall drum stands who played very complex rhythms and utilized very inventive techniques to make some unusual percussive sounds. I loved it! :D The pain in the butt was the fact that my loner rechargeable batteries from Mitch died moments into the performance, doh?! So I didn't get a very good audio recording of it. My memory and some of the video we took will have to suffice.



After the tower we started wondering around the hutongs. They were quiet, meandering, and full of charm. We snapped away and had a really nice time just soaking up the feel of the place.



The little lanes were full of these little peaks into even smaller little walkways that lead into the individual residences. They almost always had a bike or two, and makeshift boards and wires patching up decades if not centuries of wear and use. It was definitely, at least at that point, the most peaceful area we had explored in China.



We ended our walk at an area called ho hai which is a pretty touristy but still very cute area full of roof decks and views of roofs and the adjacent ponds. We grabbed a beer, took in the breeze pushing around lanterns, and watched the rickshaws peddle around the travelers up and down the lanes.





Our evening found for us yet another special meal, this time in the form of Chinese hot pot. Mitch and LiNa took us to a very popular local spot where you sit and play board games, (Chinese checkers, Chinese chess, or cards), before your table is ready which was pretty awesome. Once we got in, the meal was really delicious and brought with absolutely superb service. The hotpot meal itself consisted of veggies and meats dropped in either a spicy or mild soup that you then dip in various sauces before eating. Also, I found a baijiu (local spirits made from sorghum), that wasn't completely unpalatable, so win! Ha ha.