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We've been in China just over two weeks and have seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt a barrage of sensations, often more rapidly than we can assimilate. We wander along as overloaded carts and trucks weave between cars, buses, and throngs of scooters bearing all sorts of riders from young men revving their throttles to elegantly dressed women gliding by in silks and hats. Sometimes entire families pass us, piled onto scooters festooned with large umbrellas for shade. And all the while, every vehicle beeps its horn ceaselessly to broadcast its present location and proclaim its intended future course. It seems chaotic, but since no one goes faster than 30 mph, there is usually plenty of time to make your way without colliding.
We arrived in Shanghai on May 14 and settled into our hotel across the street from the Russian Consulate and a short walk over the Garden Bridge to the beginning of the Bund, a teeming walkway above the stone seawall built along the riverbank of the Huangpu River. Along one side of the river, the imposing buildings of the 19th century bank and trading companies are still standing; on the other side, are the modern
skyscrapers which have sprouted in the past 3 decades. At night, the buildings are illuminated by neon lights like Times Square. The old and the new. In between is the river/harbor, bustling with barges, tankers, and ferries.
We spent two days in Nanjing, the capital of China before it was moved to Beijing in 1949, and where 300,000 civilians were massacred by the Japanese invaders in 1937. We went to a sobering exhibit at the Memorial Hall to the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre by the Japanese Invaders. Today, Nanjing is undergoing a vast urban renewal project; most of the city of eight million has been totally rebuilt. We hiked up to the mauseolum where Dr Sun Yat-Sen is buried. The Chinese universally refer to this man who was the founding father of the Republic of China as Sun Zhongshan (and to the Yangtze River as the Changjiang River).
After leaving Nanjing, we visited Yixing, a village famous for centuries as a pottery center due to the qualities of the local clay, and spent the night in Wuxi, an ancient village on a water alley off the Grand Canal, an 1,100 mile stretch of
continuous waterway from Bejing to Hangzhou built over a span of 14 centuries. Part of an old neighborhood has been preserved by being completely rebuilt in the style of the period. The Chinese government has poured a lot of effort into creating villages in the ancient style so that tourists (both Chinese and foreign) can have the experience of seeing what life in the olden days was like. These buildings have been rebuilt with great attention to detail so that you feel you are walking through the narrow winding lanes of a medieval village built on the site where it has actually existed for centuries, but after visiting several of these restoration/replications, the effect, at least to me, is like the feeling I had at Williamsburg, Virginia of being in a newly-built 18th century town. This, combined with the never-ending onslaught of tourist-trinket sellers, sometimes leads to a sense of sameness which soon becomes tiresome and tends to blur discrete memories. Nevertheless, we have found in every place we have visited something of interest to us. We have learned to walk through the alleys behind the facades or on the streets outside the tourist area where we can see people
going about their daily lives in a more natural setting. Sometimes, a stone bridge or a whitewashed brick wall is all that separates these two worlds.
Once, we found ourselves in an area in Suzhou where the renovation machine had not yet reached, and watched live chickens and ducks selected from their cages by the shopper, trussed and weighed by the butcher, decapitated, plunged into hot water, plucked, cut into parts, wrapped and sold to the waiting buyer. Suzhou is a famed center of silk production and we spent some time at a factory where we saw the entire process from silkworms feeding on mulberry leaves to the unwinding of the cocoons onto spindles of silk thread which is then woven into cloth. We also attended a performance of pingtan, a traditional local musical concert given in a tea shop.
In the water town of Wuzhen, we were ferried to our hotel by a boat powered by two men wielding long bamboo poles. We found a 130 year old library (very quiet, few books, fewer patrons). We also explored the Chinese Footbinding Culture Museum with hundreds of beautifully embroidered shoes of women who had
been victims of this barbaric fetish for a millennium which was finally abolished by Dr Sun Yat-Sun, along with pigtails and the opium trade.
We have eaten quite a variety of foods, including all sorts of steamed buns, vegetables, and green teas. Martha has gotten to be a pro with chopsticks. David is eating rice to his heart's content (each village claims its local variety is the best), although it is often served at the end of the meal for some reason unclear to us. Neither of us has gotten ill to date.
I will tell you about our experiences in Huangshan, Honcun, Hangzhou, and Guilin next time.
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Anne
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So beautiful
I have really enjoyed your blog David. What a wonderful experience. Think about you both so often. Happy trails