Local Sights

During the last month we have had a couple of fun outings. One was to the Confuscious Temple here in Nanjing. The other was to Yangzhou, a city about an hour and a half from here.

Main Confuscian Temple

The Confuscian Temple is actually several buildings in a large area that is filled with small shops selling souvenirs, restaurants galore, and more people than you'd want to see in a month. It is built along a small tributary river that flows into the Yangzi river here at Nanjing.

Turn arround from the above picture and you will find yourself looking across the river to an ornately decorated wall.

Included in the complex is the Imperial Examination History Museum where scholars once spent months--or years--in tiny (no larger than 4 feet by 4 feet) cells studying Confuscian classics in preparation for civil service examinations. We have seen replicas of the scrolls--very long and amazing works of calligraphy!

Jim with a statue of one of the famous scholars who passed the civil service tests. When someone passed the rigorous tests he was set for life. Working for the government guaranteed success and an important place for your family in the future

Here I am crossing the river along a lantern-decorated bridge. This is the couple who took us to the Confuscian Temple area. We met her because we volunteer at the kindergarten (actually a huge, 300-student nursery school) where she teaches. We go one afternoon a week for an hour and teach the little children songs in English. It is fun and the kids are cute!

They took us to lunch. There are probably 8 kinds of soup, as well as assorted other Chinese dishes. We always leave the table absolutely stuffed when we dine with Chinese people. It is considered impolite to finish everything. Then the host will think he has not fed you enough! Note the chposticks. We are becoming quite handy wtih them. I can now lift individual grains of rice!

Last Sat. we went to Yangzhou. It was once a center of the salt trade in this part of China. One of the salt merchants build a lovely garden and home complex which we visited when we were there. This is in the entry area. Note the lovely flowers. There are many areas of flowers like this in China. The amazing thing is that they are all in pots, never planted directly into the ground. Many of the walkways in the complex were beautiful lmosaics like the one Jim is pointing to.

This complex had several "houses" connected by outdoor walkways and balconies. Here I am on one of the balconies which overlooks a stage where the owner had operas, music and other theatrical activities performed. The water and location make the acoustics amazingly clear for being outside.

Yangzhou is noted for its fried rice and dumplings. For lunch we had both, along with many other Chinese dishes. Once again we ate and ate and ate. You'd think we were getting fat here, but we're not. Jim is drinking soup from a dumpling, the first time we have had that. The soup was quite tasty and we just poked the straw into the dunpling and sucked out the broth.

After lunch we visited Slender West Lake Park. It used to be a moat around the city, but is now just a lovely lake with many bridges. I am standing so you can see Bridge 24, one of the more famous ones.

This is the five pagoda bridge, a rather ornate bridge that has lovely paintings of cranes on the ceilings of the pagodas. The weather was rather cool, cloudy and damp so the pictures are not as good as we take on sunny days.

While walking around the lake, we came upon this group of musicians playing and singing traditional music. It was the perfect ending to a day of travel in China.

Silk Road Trip Final Entry

After taking the overnight train we arrived in Dunhuang where we visited the Mogao Grottos. These caves contain one of the greatest collections of Buddhist art in the world. The traditional date ascribed to the founding of the first cave is 366 AD. At its height, the site housed 18 monasteries, over 1400 monks and nuns, and innumerable artists, translators and caligraphers. The art, carvings, and statues in the caves were amazing. Several of the Buddahs were immense. The caves were carved out of the side of the hills and then the walls were painted and the carvings were made inside the caves. There were huge seated Buddah statues, some reclining Buddahs and other icons of the Buddhist religion. In many of the caves, the colors were still quite brilliant, especially considering how old everything was. One of the reasons for this is that when the silk trade collapsed, the area was abandoned and forgotten. It was not discovered and opened until the 20th century. Along with the various art and statues, the library there contained priceless ancient manuscripts. It is a real treasure!

After we visited the caves we went out to Crescent Lake. With a good imagination one could think he were in an old movie with a desert oasis. The lake (more like a pond) is located among huge sand dunes. If you ignore the blatant commercialism you can almost feel like you are crossing the desert on a camel. So of course, we had to ride a camel out across the dunes to the lake. Sorry the pictures are so small. I got them off the website of one of the other teachers since we didn't take pictures of ourselves. They didn't transfer very well. But we had great fun as we rode across the sand.

The next day we flew to Xi'an, the home of the famous terra cotta warriiors. They live up to their reputation and more.

Here is a picture of one of the most unique warriors. He even smiled as I took the picture.

One of the most amazing things I thought as I looked over the vast array of soldiers, was that not only is the expression on the face of each soldier unique, but that they were all destroyed and have had to be put back together piece by piece. They are an awesome sight.

While in Xi'an we also walked along the city wall. It makes a complete circle around what was the old city--about 9 miles around. It was built about 1370 and has been restored to almost pristine perfection. We spent about an hour walking around on the top of the wall, looking out over the city, (difficult to do because of the smog), and marveling at the workmanship that went into something like that.

In the evening we went to a dumpling dinner and show. The dumplings were interesting and rather tasty, but we've had others that we liked better. However, the show made up for what was lacking in the dinner. It was an amazing display of song, dance and acrobatics from the time of the Tang Dynasty--600-900 AD. We literally had front row seats so were able to really enjoy ourselves.

Dumplings and dessert were artistically displayed.

Musicians and dancers.

So our silk road trip ended on a high note, literally. More on our local adventures on another day.

This is still a little disjointed. Sorry! I have tried to correct it, but to no avail.

Silk Road Trip 2nd installment

From Urumqi we went by bus to Turpan. The scenery is dry, dry desert with dry hills and scrubby plants. There were some wind farms that put the size of the ones we've seen in the US to shame. Turpan is the second lowest place on earth (after the Dead Sea in Israel) so it was very hot even the first of October. Compared to the large cities we've been visiting since we arrived in China, Turpan is small, under 60,000 people. It was a delightful little place. The afternoon we arrived, we went out past the Flaming Mountains--so named because of their color. After the dun colored desert, they are somewhat colorful, but not nearly as bright as the colors in southern Utah or Death Valley. We visited several sites out there. One was an old village with people living in small houses built amidst crumbling ruins. In interesting contrast, to say the least. The people are Muslim in this area so didn't want us to take their pictures, however we did get this picture of bread baking in an outdoor, open oven. The woman stuck the dough on the side of the oven and baked it there. Then she flipped it off the oven into a bowl. It looked like a half bagel and smelled delicious.

We spent quite a while wandering through the town. One of the things we noticed was that many of the houses had beds on the roofs. (A word about beds in China. They are HARD. Many are just a board with a cloth over them.) That was what we saw on top of the houses. Many of the houses just had a bed on the front porch like the ones in the picture. The guide told us it is too hot and dry for mosquitos so the people sleep on the roof to keep cool. Some houses had branches spread over the top to let in air and keep out the sun. We also saw tomatoes drying in the sun by a bed on a roof.

Then we went to Gaochang ruins. Gaochang is the ruins of an ancient city on the silk road. It flourished for about 1400 years from the 1st century BC to the 14th century AD when it burned to the ground. The area has not been restored and it is an interesting series of mounds. We could distinguish a wall in the distance as we rode through the area by donkey cart. We did stop for a few minutes to look around, but it is quite

desolate.

From there we went to some Buddhist caves--they are scattered all throughout northwest China. This area was all Buddhist until it converted to Islam somewhere around 1,000 years ago. Now Islam is the dominant religion in the area. But the caves still remain, although Europeans took many of the finest statues, carvings, etc. back to their museums about a hundred years ago.

In the evening we happened upon a fountain and light show in the town square. What a delightful and unexpected surprise! It was not crowded so we sat on a small wall and watched the fountains and listened to both Western and traditional Chinese music as the fountains sprayed in assorted patterns and the lights played upon the water. I liked it as much as anything I've seen in the US--even in Las Vegas.

The next day we visited some other ruins--a place called Jiaohe. These ruins one of the world's largest, oldest and best preserved ruins. They are located on a high plateau between two rivers. The town was built from the top down, meaning that the people started digging from the top and each floor was cut out below the one above it. An interesting way to build a city. We found a man playing traditional Chinese music and stopped for a picture with him--for a price, of course.

In the afternoon we visited the grape growing area. Here is where all the raisins we saw in Urumqi are grown. It was interesting to see the houses of the people, the huge grape orchards, and taste the different kinds of raisins. Some areas had grape arbors that were 20-30 feet wide and a quarter of a mile long. I guess in the heat, these arbors provide some relief and shade. All tours are required to stop here (you pay whether you stop or not, so we stopped) because the governmnet is trying to promote tourism in the area.

That evening we boarded the train for an overnight trip from Turpan to Dunghuang. We had a "soft sleeper"--an oxymoron if I ever heard of one. The bed was not soft and we did not do much sleeping. This is the best the train offered, however. We had a room for 4 people--two bunks on each side. Fortunately, we knew the other people in our room because our tour group filled one and one half cars. We were fortunate enough to be in the car where we knew everyone, but with the toilets at the end of the car and only one washroom--3 sinks,--we got to know everyone even better. At least there was one "western" toilet which we all used. I wondered about using a "squat" toilet when the train was moving and swaying. It is all part of the adventure of China. We wouldn't miss a minute of it--soft sleeper and all.

Silk Road Trip 1st installment

We returned on Sunday from a week-long trip in northwestern China, an area known as the Silk Road. This is where the caravans carrying goods from China to Europe travelled in ancient times. As we toured, I was continually struck by how young America is and how old China is. Many of the sites were built thousands of years ago and some are still being used. We visited four cities. The first was Urumqi. It is the furtherest place in the world from an ocean. I had a hard time visualizing that but looked on my world map when we got back and realized that is an accurate description. Living in the US we have a western hemisphere focus and until I moved to China, I had no idea the perspective of the rest of the world, particularly inland China and eastern Asia.

Urumqi (pronounced sort of like "oo room a chi") has a population fo 1.5 million people. Like most cities in China it is growing rapidly. We were told that 10 years ago there were no buildings over 8 stories high. Now the skyline is covered by high rise buildings. The first thing we notices was the blue sky and clear dry air. After smoggy, humid Nanjing, it was literally a "breath of fresh air." The population of Urumqi is mostly Muslim and heavily laced with minorities (meaning not Han Chinese, the majority population) from surrounding countries--Mongolia, Kazakhstan Turmenistan, Pakistan, etc. It makes for an interesting population mix.

Above is the mosque near the Muslim market in Urumqi.

We traveled out of the city to Heavenly Lake, an azure blue, glacial lake about an hours drive up into the mountains. Because this is a desert area it was hard to believe we were in China. The scenery as we wound up along a small river looked much like going into the mountains of Utah of Idaho--dry, rocky outcroppings, sparce vegetation. However, instead of tents in campgrounds we saw yurts along the river and were reminded of where we were. Heavenly Lake was lovely but the most interesting thing about it was the 1/2 mile walk from where the transportation ended to the lake. All along the walk we heard beautiful classical music--Clare de Lune, Rustles of Spring to name a couple. It made for a peaceful hike. Where did the music come from? Along the way were speakers disguised as tree trunks--nice music, no ugly amplifiers. The lake is beautiful, as you can see from the picture. We took a boat ride and looked up to see a Buddhist temple on the hillside above the lake. Also the signs in China are unique. We loved the "Keep off the grass" sign.

The food here in Urumqi is an exotic mix of spicy vegetables, and lamb. We had dinner in a restaurant with a show of local dancing and an amazing tightrope walker. The show was great but the food was so spicy that we had to pick carefully what we ate. Fortunately, it was a buffet so if we

found something too hot, we could go back and try something else. It was probably the most difficult meal we had on our trip. Most of the food was absolutely delicious. On the way to the dinner and show we saw lambs being skinned and vegetables being cooked along the streets.

It was pomegranate season in Urumqi and we saw the largest, sweetest pomegranates we've ever seen. We also saw them making ice cream in a large barrel and scooping it out with big wooden paddles onto a plate from which it was sold--a tasty treat on a hot day.

Here is the man squeezing pomegranate juice with the lady selling ice cream in the background. We had to try some of both of them--very tasty.

Jim is standing in the middle of a shop that sells raisins in bins and cashmere shawls which are hanging on the walls, an interesting combination. I had never seen so many colorful raisins before. I thought raisins were either dark or light, but they are every color in between. I will tell more about grapes and raisins as I describe our visit to Turpan.

One last comment. All China is on the same time zone--Bejing time. That meant that when we were in western China the daylight hours were skewed. It stayed light until late evening because Urumqi is at least two time zones to the west. It would be like Idaho keeping the same time as New York. I never did figure out whether the local people use local time or Bejing time. Shops seemed to be open all the time so I guess they just work both ends of the time zones. Interesting.

I hope you can follow this blog. I am still struggling to make what I compose look the same when it is posted. So far I have not had great success. I'll keep trying .Here are two pictures of lamb--one being skinned and one cooked and ready to serve.