***CENSORED***

"Page Timeout" is an error all too commonly encountered while browsing the web here in China. Yes, our internet is a little on the slow side, but it's not THAT slow. In fact, this is the most common sign that the site you're trying to access has been censored. The Great Firewall of China as it's (not so) fondly called is set up by their (not so) fearless leaders to try to limit access to objectionable information.

This week was the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre and censorship has been particularly egregious. God forbid anyone should find out what the government did to its own people because they dared to speak out. They seem to have been pretty successful at keeping information flow to a minimum. The day after the anniversary one of my Chinese teachers happened to write out a list of dates of historical importance in China. June 4 wasn't on it. When I added June 4 to the list she paused, noticeably puzzled, before finally adding the year, 1989. She told me that, while mentioned in the history books, the day of the Tiananmen Square Massacre gets not more than about two sentences in school text books.

But, back to the censorship...

YouTube's been blocked for several months, we think because someone posted a video in support of Tibet. We've gotten used to that. News sites (New York Times, etc.) are routinely blocked for short periods, but rarely for more than a few days. This week, though, the shit hit the fan. Twitter is down, blogger is down (I'll tell you in a moment how I'm writing this post), YouTube, of course, is still down. Facebook, for some reason has been left in peace. Most peculiar of all, our wedding photographer's print ordering site is blocked. Can't have anyone ordering highly subversive wedding pictures! Censorship isn't limited to the web, either. Chinese newspapers (English language ones included) are, of course, heavily censored. We do, however, get several international channels (CNN, BBC, etc.) via satellite television. This week, though, they've been unreliable, blacking out frequently, generally for periods of 2-4 minutes. Funny that's just about the time it takes to run a story on the anniversary of the week.

Back to the internet, though. I have the folks that run the best VPN service out there to thank for the fact that I'm posting today. VPN is a go-between service that masks your internet address and, incedentally, allows you to access blocked content by (more-or-less) making the HTML requests for you, then passing the results back. So long as you can connect to the VPN and the VPN is outside China you should be able to access blocked content. Of course, when I tried to connect to my trusty VPN this afternoon it was...you guess it...blocked. I get what I pay for, though, and a few minutes after contacting customer service on livechat, I was up and runniung again on a server the Chinese have not yet tracked down and blocked. To avoid ruining a good thing, I'm not going to post the service's name here directly. Instead I'll give you a few clues and you can look them up yourself.

Unbeaten for now...

Clues to find the best-ever VPN service:
2 words...first word starts with a letter in the second half of the alphabet and is, roughly, a synonym for dependable. It is also the adjective form of a four-letter verb starting with the same first three letters. The second word is the gerund (-ing) form of the four-letter verb that describes what you are doing when you throw a party. The verb in question also forms the important part of the word (ending in 'ess') that describes the lady of the house where the party is thrown. The product I use from this company is a VPN. The first word in the name is an adjective that describes a guy (or girl) who can lift very heavy things.

Shanghai and Suzhou Pictures

I've posted some pictures from Shanghai and Suzhou:

Shanghai
Suzhou

An Adventure on the N. Korean Border

I woke up that Friday expecting to take a late-afternoon train to Shenyang where I would join Ben for the weekend. Moments later, though, he called to ask me to catch an earlier train. 1:30 found me standing at the ticket counter to trade in my 5:30 train ticket for a ticket on the 2:10.

Ben and Glen met me at the Shenyang station and we hustled to catch another train. No peaceful weekend for us. Instead we took a 14 hour hard-sleeper to Yanji, a small city on the northern end of the China-N. Korea border. We checked into a cheap hotel for a quick shower before heading out to see what we could see.

First stop was the local Korean university, the Yanbian University of Science and Technology, where, even on Saturday, we found several faculty members happy to answer (most) questions about the school. Then out of town to the border crossing where we stood looking into North Korea from just across the river. The difference was depressing. While Yanji isn't exactly modern and sparkling-clean by Western standards, compared to the filthy, dilapidated, colorless buildings across the river, it looked like paradise.


No time to linger, though...it was late Saturday afternoon, but we still had another town to visit before heading home Sunday evening. I gather the plan had been an overnight bus from Yanji to Dandong. Unfortunately, Saturday morning inquiries at the bus station proved that no such bus existed. Since I had to be back at work on Monday and Ben was determined to visit Dandong, we hired a driver. After an early hot-pot supper, we set off for what turned out to be a 12 hour, overnight ride in a small sedan.

6:30 AM saw us checking into another cheap hotel for a couple of hours of decent sleep and a shower before exploring Dandong. The highlight, if you can call it that, of Dandong is the monument/museum on what we call the Korean War, but the Chinese apparently call the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea. As I found with the Rape of Nanjing Memorial, the most interesting feature of the museum was not its content but its rhetoric. It seems to be a consistent difference between how information is presented here and how I am more accustomed to seeing it presented in the West. While most of us doubtless harbor strong beliefs about who was wrong and who was right in conflicts our country has engaged in, we make an effort in our national dialog to be dispassionate. Our wars are named for when or where they happened, or, occasionally, for the type of conflict. So, we have the Civil War, the War of 1812, the World Wars, the Korean War, etc. Here, though, wars are named to evoke feelings. To wit, the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea. I guess that makes sense in a place where the word 'propaganda' has no negative connotations.


We followed a quick lunch with a short stroll to look at the border and then a dash for the bus station to catch our bus to Dalian. We had just time for our third Korean meal of the weekend before heading to the Dalian airport for our flight home.

Nanjing

We thoroughly enjoyed Nanjing despite the late-winter chill. Its art museum is definitely one of the best in China with lovely displays of porcelain, textiles, bronzes, laquerware and more. The textiles were especially nice and the exhibit included a traditional brocade-loom. Quite a contraption! Unfortunately its operators were at lunch so we didn't get to see it in action and photographs were not permitted so I can't show it to you.

We naturally went to see the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum (http://www.nj1937.org/english/default.asp). [picture coming soon] It's design is clearly reminiscent of the design of other Holocaust memorial museums - lots of grey and black stone, sharp edges, candles, etc. The main exhibition hall contains a plethora of photographs from the period of the massacre as well as some artifacts. The photos are copiously annotated with far more text than we could reasonably read. To me, the most fascinating thing about the museum was how different it is from most Holocaust museums I have been to. While it is aesthetically quite similar, the content and tone is very different. Holocaust museums I have visited celebrate the victims and remain remarkably neutral in tone about the Nazis. Not that they paint the Nazis in an attractive light, but they tend to let the facts speak for themselves. Exhibits generally consist of heartbreaking photographs of the victims and artifacts from the camps and/or the ghettos. Not so at the Nanjing Massacre Museum. Although there are a few photographs of the victims, most are of the invaders. Essentially all of the artifacts are Japanese - uniforms, equipment, weapons, rank insignia, etc. Without the text you would be more likely to guess that the museum celebrated the conquest than that it repudiated the destruction. The text leaves no doubt, though. While Holocaust museums tend to avoid the language of hate, this museum refers unabashedly to the "Japanese Forces of Aggression," the "beastly atrocities" committed by the "Japanese militarists," etc.

Moving on to happier topics...the highlight of our stay in Nanjing was the Nanjing opera performance we attended Saturday night. Nanjing opera is wonderful and weird. I don't really have any notion of how to communicate what it is like except to say go see for yourself! It happens that the company we saw has an English translator on staff and provided quite good program notes and titles in English. Even without that, though, I think I would have been riveted. We saw 3 scenes - 2 comic scenes and a tragedy. The tragic scene was so haunting it actually gave me nightmares. I can still hear the otherworldy wailing in my head. Much more frightening than any horror movie!

And with that...back to this world in Beijing...

Visiting China?

I've just written to a relative who will be visiting soon with advice about planning her trip. I thought I'd share my thoughts with all of you.

Our experience has been that with very few exceptions two days has been as much time as we really wanted in any city we've visited. To be fair, we've now traveled to a lot of places and the eight-hundredth Buddhist temple is somehow quite a lot less exciting than the first, so on our first visit we might have found ourselves entertained for longer in a single city. Chinese cities tend to consist of vast expanses of totally lack-luster modern high-rises. As a general rule of thumb, most cities will have enough to keep you busy in town for a day (typically a museum, a park, a couple of temples/monuments and a street market/pedestrian zone) and about a day's worth of "in the surrounding area" activities which are most easily seen by hiring a car and driver for the day. The guidebooks will tend to list rather more sites, but we havefound that if the books lists 3 parks that all sound fantastic we tend to enjoy the first, get bored after a very short visit to the second and, if we make it to the third at all, we leave without going in. The same applies to any other category of site. It is not that any of the sites is necessarily uninteresting, but only that they tend to be enough alike that one in a day or two is plenty.

As you make your plans, keep in mind that China is BIG and that train travel here bears little resemblance to train travel in Europe. Trains tend to be crowded, noisy, and slow. Don't get me wrong, it is kind of fun to take the train (and I hate trains in general), but you might not want to take trains everywhere, especially not for very long-distance trips (Hong Kong to Beijing, for example would probably not be a pleasant trip by train). We have very few high-speed trains here, so it can often take 10+ hours to travel between cities which are less than an hour apart by air. Unlike in Europe where train stations tend to be located conveniently close to where you're likely to be going as a tourist, that is not the case in China and train stations may be just as far from your final destination as the airport is.

Of the three travel approaches (a reasonably long time in a few carefully selected cities, barnstorming, or base-camp + day-trips), I would advise something between the first two (with the caveat that the best sites in some cities are actually sort of outside the city and require a day-trip, e.g. Great Wall in Beijing, Terracotta Warriors in Xi'an).

If I were putting together a "highlights of China" itinerary for 2 weeks (or maybe a little more) I think it would look something like this:

Hong Kong: 3 full days (you could easily spend more, but 3 days is probably enough to avoid feeling like you really missed out)
Xi'an: 1.5-2 days
Beijing: 4-5 days
Shanghai: 4 days
Hangzhou: 1.5-2 days
Suzhou: 1 day
Nanjing: 2-3 days

I haven't yet been to Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou or Nanjing, so these estimates might change. They are close enough together that you can probably reasonably transfer among them by train. Suzhou can also be done as a day trip from Shanghai (at least Ben is planning to do that in a couple of weeks).

To me, this selection captures most of the highlights of China (with the notable exception of the Yangtze River & 3 Gorges Damn...something to come back for). Hong Kong is its own, unique city. Xi'an has the Terracotta Warriors (one of my very favorite sites in China) and will give you a taste of Muslim-Chinese culture. Beijing has the Great Wall, Forbidden City, etc. and is the heart of northern Chinese food & culture. Shanghai, etc. will give you a sense of southern China. Hangzhou and Suzhou are supposed to be the two most beautiful cities in China and Nanjing, of course, has the WWII history.

Happy Niu Year!

It is shortly after midnight and fireworks still light the sky as Beijing welcomes the Year of the Ox (Niu) with a bang. We started hearing fireworks a week ago, but today they really went wild. The sound woke me this morning and the racket hasn't stopped since.

Fireworks are legal here and clearly form an integral part of everyone's celebration. Unlike in the States where fireworks are a communal celebration usually sponsored by the city and carefully supervised by the fire department, here they are available for purchase on every street corner and families set them off in the streets by the case.

During the day the excitement was mostly confined to low-level noise makers, but starting around seven the sky was steadily lit by the flair of rockets bursting. I have seen more spectacular fireworks shows, choreographed to music, designed to paint pictures in the sky and so forth, but I've never seen the volume of fireworks in one place that I've seen tonight.

Shortly before midnight I glanced out the window to check on the latest round and noticed people out on the street in front of our building lining up cases of fireworks. As midnight hit they lit the lot...literally 3 dozen cases of fireworks hit the sky simultaneously! And that was just one location, on the corner two other volleys were going from the vacant lot. The next block had it's own batch, there were fireworks appearing behind the building across the street from us, in the park at the other corner, and reflections in the windows showed a batch just around the corner. Looking from another window we could see two more sets on the other side of our complex, and literally dozens of locations further away (and that's just through the narrow gaps between the high-rises that let us see further).

By midnight the smoke was so thick we could no longer see the brightly lit buildings in the next block. As the fireworks rose from the street in front of us they warmed the air so much that despite temperatures well below zero, the air blowing in the window was warm on my face.

This video is probably not very good, but might give you a sense of what we've been listening to all day.



Off to wash the smoke out of my hair...

Video Added

Check out the video I finally added to the Habitat for Humanity post.