A day at People's Park - Chengdu

Chengdu is a really nice city. It is more laid back than Beijing and the people seem nicer.

On our 2nd day in Chengdu, we decided to explore the city. The city has a famous park called the People's park. Warren and I were expecting something similar to the Beijing parks we have been too. Calm, old people singing, maybe some birdie hackey-sack. 

What we did not expect was crazy dancing, a talent show and some intense badminton (and a bonsai garden).

The park also had creepy, old rides for kids as seen below:

I watched some people play Badminton but chickened out of asking them and we moved to the bonsai garden. In addition to Warren and his parents enjoying Chinese horticulture, we also found bubbles ! I decided to try out my telephoto lens to take some pictures of bubbles and thus, I made friends with the bubble girls who gladly blew bubbles and posed for me to take pictures. They were a giggly, happy bunch and let me take a bunch of trial and error bubble pictures.
   



After the seeming quiet of the bonsai garden we followed the crowd to hear loud music. Guess what we found - A Chinese talent show ! There was singing and dancing and much applause involved. It was pretty entertaining and Warren and I creeped and took some pictures of the performers. We then saw some tai-chi-esque dancing but nothing prepared us for the crazy line dancing that we were about to enjoy (and participate in).

Following the music we got to this open stage and saw people just breaking it down, Chinese style. Here is a short video for your enjoyment:

Being the only foreigners, one of the guy's made Warren and I join the dancing. The first sequence wasn't too bad, but we gave up when the dance moves got too complex. Next to the dancing, there was a kids fashion show and Warren wanted to steal a baby but compromised by taking pictures of babies.

We found a really cute girl whose dress matched the yellow flowers in the background and her parents were more than happy to let us take her picture and even let Warren pose with her !



After much dancing, laughing, and amazement at the belly dancing Chinese man we moved on to the "boating area". Usually when I think of boating, I think of this:

                                      

          NOT this:

                                     

But I guess it is China.... In their defense though, it was National Holiday and everyone and I mean every single person in China was out and about, traveling.

On our way out, we saw more dancing and the last group was Waltzing. Warren's mom taught him how to square dance - correctly as she believed her son was not doing it right the first time :p

At the exit, I saw some people playing Badminton and mustered up my courage to ask them if I can play. It was fun, the guy went really easy on me and did not make me look like a fool.

Our day ended, by eating at a Chinese restaurant and ordering food without a menu or pointing at pictures. It was eventful to say the least.

If only Piedmont park was as entertaining...

Unfazed by you pointing towards me

After a long day biking, 30 mins one way in Beijing traffic/haze/cold between my lab and the lab with the micro-CT machine at the PKU hospital with my lab mate, I was hungry. My lab mate (let's call him Tom) and I went for lunch at one of the canteens on campus. There Tom met one of his other friends (let's call him Jerry). I got tofu and eggs+tomatoes for lunch; yes I know what I am eating sometimes.

The three of us sat down for lunch and Jerry says hi to me in English and then Tom & Jerry get into their Chinese ramblings. To be honest, I don't understand Mandarin. But with Fluenz lessons, and just immersion, I can pick up a few words here and there. So even if Jerry wasn't jabbing his finger towards me in the air I would still know they were talking about me.

This is what I heard - " Bla bla bla Indian, bla bla bla, English, bla bla bla American, bla bla bla China, bla bla bla food, bla bla bla student, bla bla bla America ", and the entire time Jerry was pointing at me. At least Tom had the courtesy to not point at me.

It is just interesting to notice this now. There was a time when I would have just picked up fewer words and probably wouldn't have thought that they were talking about me (minus the finger pointing). But now, I felt even more weird, because I understand a bit, but not enough. So my imagination fills up the gaps and sometimes they are not filled with the nicest things. I guess if I had a smaller ego/was insecure/cared more about what people thought, I would be disconcerted by my lunch time listening.

When I want to say something about someone behind their back in Hindi to one of my Indian friends, I make sure to use code words and be as un-obvious as possible to make sure that no one else understands what I am saying. But I think the Chinese way is better - "Who cares if the other person cannot speak Chinese, let's talk about them and point at them over lunch, they can deal with it". Okay, that was sarcastic, I think it is still rude to point and talk, but I guess its just one of those cultural things. I am actually beginning to think that I am going to miss all this special attention when I return to Atlanta (where it seems that there are more Indians on campus than off).

I have made my share of faux pas too though. The most embarrassing one was when Warren and I were at the Chinese ballet. There was a couple sitting right in front of me, and they would not stop moving around in their seats (no, they were not making out). But the guy was pretty tall, and I was having trouble watching the show. Exasperated, I said to Warren - "Can't these people just stop moving". And then they just stopped still in their seats, and the guy turned around and said sorry ! I assumed they would't understand English, but I was wrong. I was surprised that the guy apologized and felt pretty bad. I feel that if this had happened somewhere else, the guy would be annoyed at me.

But its China. I guess if shoving and sticking your elbows out is accepted, so is talking about others in front of them or behind their back for that matter and them overhearing you, is not as big of a deal as I have been made to believe...

Tibetan homestay

When we were visiting Jiuzhaigo, we stayed at Zhuo Ma's Cottage.
Zhuo Ma, a local, has converted her house into a home-stay for travelers. And it was a very interesting experience to stay with a local and learn a little more about the Tibetan way of life.

Place where we stayed. You can see Ray and Kim in the window ! (Courtesy Warren)

It was gorgeous at night

Zhuo Ma's mom - Ah Ma is the main caretaker of the place and she is awesome. She has mad skills when it comes to hand gestures and I am sure she could converse without using words if she wanted. Being a home-stay, this place was definitely not luxurious. Also, personally, I think it was a bit over-priced since you could stay at "nicer" hotels in town. But apart from that, I really liked staying there. The place itself is about 20 mins out of town, but Zhuo Ma's brother taxi'd the tourists to and fro.

The cottage is located on top of a hill and the view is gorgeous. The mornings and nights are sort of misty, making the hills surrounding the place look more enigmatic. And we could see stars, lots of stars ! It is a rarity to see stars in Beijing, with all the pollution/haze. And I may have almost gotten a frost-bite since I was wearing flip-flops and star gazing/taking pictures at night, but no lasting harm was done. Sadly no shooting stars :(

One of the best parts of the home-stay was the home-made food. We got breakfast, lunch and dinner and almost everything is home grown. Ah Ma showed us where she collected the honey from and her vegetable garden. From her sign language, we gathered that she gets stung by bees in the process of collecting honey but it doesn't stop her from doing it. Also, yak meat tasted surprisingly better than I imagined. Though yak butter is not my cup of tea. I am not sure where she gets the yak meat from, but I really don't want to know. I think yaks are cute...
FYI: Tibetan version of french fries = best form of potatoes I have ever had.

Tibetan Om nom noms

The other fun part of the home-stay was to get to meet other travelers. Met a guy from Germany, who has moved to China and now owns a travel agency in Xi'an, an American student who is doing ecological research, another American student (half Indian-half Chinese) who is studying Mandarin, and another Indian guy who works in Germany and is now traipsing in China for a holiday. Dinners were fun and there were always good stories to listen to.

All the people were really nice and it was small gestures such as making sure that our cups were always filled with steaming tea and serving us dinner, that made it a very hospitable stay. It was a great experience overall. A little pricey, but worth it for once.

With grandma and little kid !

Also Warren told me that lonely planet did a segment on this place, so it has to be cool :D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmj3CFpNGcQ

PANDAS !!!

I may not be entirely lying if I said that one of my biggest reasons of coming to China was to hug a panda.
(The truth is my reason to come here was to steal a panda but I have realized that is not going to happen).

This national holiday, I traveled to Chengdu with Warren and his parents. Chengdu is where the world's largest panda breeding center is located. They started with 6 pandas and now there are 88 pandas that stay there. They use special panda breeding techniques as they showed us in a documentary. (That documentary in itself was very interesting/funny and I am debating having a post just about that)

Anyway, getting back to PANDAS !

We got to the Panda base at around 8am. It is sort of an exclusive Panda zoo. There are both giant pandas and red pandas as well as the cutest Panda cubs ever. The pandas are lazy. All they did was sit (or sleep) and eat bamboo. No wonder they are going extinct. The most common panda pose was them sitting on their huge behinds, leaning against a tree and munching on bamboo.

Then we walked around to where the panda cubs were. They were the most adorable things ever. They were sleeping in a crib on their pink blanket. It was sometimes hard to figure out what part was their eye and what was their ear as they looked like cute fuzz balls.

After walking around in the bamboo forest, seeing cute pandas and taking a gazillion pictures, it was time to hug a panda. I had to wear gloves and shoe covers before going into the panda enclosure. There was a line of people there. And then the panda arrived ! It sort of waddled halfway and then decided it was tired so just plopped down on the ground. One of the volunteers then picked up the panda and took him to a bench. It was a baby panda, not full grown and hence, could be picked up. To ensure that the panda did not fall asleep/posed for pictures, there was one volunteer whose sole job was to dip bamboo into honey and offer it to the panda. The panda would dutifully chew the bamboo up to the point of where it was dipped in honey and then would promptly throw it away and wait for its next honey dipped bamboo. Still it was the cutest thing ever.

Finally, it was my turn to hug the panda. As soon as I got next to him, the panda had finished munching its honey bamboo and was not paying any attention to the camera/me but wanted more food (disinterested panda in the picture on the left).After the volunteer did his job, the panda was back to pretending to like being hugged, petted and taken pictures with.

I have a ton of panda pictures but won't upload them all. But I ended up buying a panda hat that day which I wore for the next 2 days and pretended that I too was a panda. Albeit one of its kind - a skinny brown panda from India.

                                            

Mosque in China

I have seen a lot of mosques till now, from the outside.
Ironically, the catholic school I went to in India was in a Muslim locality.
For me, the images I have in mind for a mosque and a Muslim person are this:

Google images says these are representative pictures of a mosque and a Muslim man

So you can imagine my surprise, when the great mosque we visited in Xi'an looked like this:

The Great Mosque in Xi'an

And obviously everyone there was Chinese. I could not get a zoomed in picture of a Chinese guy with a taqiyah (muslim hat) on. And I really doubt if Chinese guys can grow a beard that normally one associates with Muslim men. So it was a little weird for me to see this non-stereotypical Muslim man.

And the Quran, the holy Islamic book originally written in Arabic, was in Chinese. The entire Quran was translated into Mandarin and engraved into the walls/pillars/moldings of the mosque in traditional characters. It is impressive, that they not only translated the entire 600 or so pages in Mandarin but engraved them into the walls, characters and all.

Not only was the architecture, the Quran and the crowd authentically Chinese, the food was a whole another story. To put things in perspective, I grew up in Bahrain (in the Middle-East) till my 2nd grade. I don't remember a lot but I do remember Ramadan and people breaking their fast with delicious shawarma, biryani and sevaiyyan to end it. In India, the rickshaw driver who took us kids to school was a Muslim and on Eid, he would get us those delicious home made sevaiyyan with cashews, almonds, saffron and other worldly delicacies.

It was the month of Ramadan when we went to the mosque in Xi'an. We got there after sunset so people were breaking their fast. And no, there was no shawarma, biryani or sevaiyyan. They were eating noodles/rice with chopsticks from a their respective bowls. All my memories of Ramadan and Eid were rattled in that moment.

And then I reminded myself, even if people are reading the namaaz in the background and the chants of allah-hu-akbar are familiar, I am still in China.