Forbidden City

Gugong, the Forbidden City, was closed to local hoi polloi and foreign devils alike for over five hundred years. These days Gugong serves as a public exhibit and occasional movie set, which probably has even greater visual impact when full of extras in period costumes. Which isn't to say that we didn't enjoy our day there, it was great in fact, but the seemingly endless chain of enormous courtyards features such a wealth of open space that one can't help wondering how these expanses were populated during imperial reign. Perhaps a re-screening of the film Hero might straighten this out, as director Zhang Yimou's revisionist Forbidden City fills in the empty spaces quite extravagantly. Actually, I'll never forget a film student friend of mine telling me about Shanghai Triad in college because, for the life of me, I couldn't understand the director's name as pronounced by a California native-- "who the hell is Johnny Moe?" I wondered out loud.

Sadly, the interiors of the Forbidden City are still largely off limits, and on the day we visited the reputedly impressive Hall of Supreme Harmony was closed for tuning, so we missed out on seeing the Dragon Throne, where the Emperor would sit drinking oolong while hosting marathon D&D sessions. The exhibits that were open that day were fairly pedestrian, and the real highlight of the Forbidden City comes at the end when you arrive at its mercifully shaded and inviting Imperial Garden. In fact, if possible, I'd suggest starting here as it's my favorite part. For the Chinese tourists, Vanessa and I seemed a part of Gugong's exotic confines, and several families requested that we join them in there group photos. Sadly, I don't have copies.

The side streets around the Forbidden City are equally interesting, and after passing back through Gugong's towering walls we navigated a constant bombardment of shilling rickshaw pilots, finally turning off the main road, and strolling along a quiet side street. Beijing's Dongcheng area, which is home to Gugong and some of the oldest structures in the city, was bustling with workers, street vendors, some sort of photo shoot, and any number of fellow flâneurs. Stopping in at a few small markets along the way, shopkeepers held fast to insanely inflated prices for beverages, trying to charge us around six times the going rate. Eventually, we flagged down a cab, stopping at a shopping center on the way back to the hotel, where we bought water, beer, and a new pair of sneakers to replace my ill advised white slip-ons, which Dubai had quickly sullied. 

Later that evening we took a cab to a great Thai restaurant called Purple Haze, making our selection not so much in honor of my dorky, Hendrix obsessed 12 year old self, but because it was well recommended and deservedly so. As always, we managed to order way too much food, and left feeling sleepy and sated. In fact, I've rarely slept as wells I did in China, where each day held long stretches of walking punctuated by a series of excellent meals.

Shanhgai Finale

When we boarded the plane for Shanghai I had fairly mild expectations, not because I wasn't excited to visit China, but because the trip had already been rescheduled twice and I'd gotten in the habit of assuming it might not happen at all. Even if I had sat day dreaming of panda bears, chow mein, and firecrackers, I would have been disappointed because we didn't see any of those things.

We did however,  see a host of other things that I have yet to describe. And so, before I start posting pictures of our time in Beijing, I thought I would round things out with the following pictures, which include; a sign that I liked, a jazz club that we found ourselves at, a fencing match that I attended in my complimentary Baolong Home Hotel slippers, and a wall made out of recycled suitcases. These are all actually things that I fully expected to see-- it was so obvious.

Shanghai, day 2

While Vanessa was busy learning about China's informal, yet largely effective recycling program, I made my way to the Shanghai Museum where my fellow explorers were at least as interesting as the exhibits. The Museum offers floor after floor of ceramics, traditional paintings, archaic currencies, seals, furniture and calligraphy, some of which are remarkable not just for their craftsmanship and aesthetic, but also for the distant century in which they were completed.

Directly outside the museum I was approached by the couple pictured below, who initiated a a friendly conversation with me, eventually inviting me to tea. He introduced himself as Tiger, and I can't quite remember what she said her name was, but we can call her Lilly. Tiger and Lilly are tea bandits, desparados who prey upon hapless tourists by luring them into tea houses and ordering delicious food. Actually, they were incredibly nice and helped me figure out how to get to the Youyuan Gardens and Bazaar in Old Town, where I had the most amazing steamed dumplings and paid around a dollar for my entire lunch. Perhaps that helps put the tea house scam into perspective, as they're reputedly quite expensive and the tea bandit's job is to basically get you there, order a lot of food, and then plead poverty when the check arrives. I presume the bandits get a kick back from the tea house, but it could be as simple as a free lunch. In any event, Tiger gave me his digits and offered to hook me up with some sweet tickets to see the Shanghai Acrobats, where his friend has the connect. (Sorry, I watch Weeds, The Wire, and Breaking Bad 18 hours a day, every day, in that order; so the lingo is starting to stick).

Youyan Gardens was only going to be open for an hour longer by the time I found it, as Tiger's directions turned out to be good, but not great. After filling up on dumplings I opted to wander around the market, enjoying the golden hues of the late afternoon.  Old Town was abuzz with street vendors, cyclists, carts, students and laconic cab drivers, one of whom I ultimately overpaid just so that he'd drive my exhausted carcass back to the hotel. Everywhere I looked there seemed to be something interesting going on and I spent much of the afternoon glued to my camera. This proved particularly handy when a knock off watch peddler refused to leave me alone. I turned the camera on him, and by the 9th or 10th shot he wandered off to bother someone else. You can see his picture directly below the shot of Snake Eyes asking a cop for directions.

That evening we tried to visit a particularly well regarded Shanghaiese restaurant, but found that they'd closed early for the approaching May Day holiday. Unfazed, we took a picture in front of its massive facade with our host and his food critic pal. I can't remember the name of the restaurant where we wound up, but it was very good as well, and we had our first taste of jelly fish (tastes exactly like blackberry jam). As with all good traveling experiences, almost every meal in Shanghai was a new and toothsome adventure. Some of my favorite restaurants are taquerias and little noodle shops, so for me China was teeming with great food in just the kind of nondescript locales that I enjoy. 

Shanghai, day 1

Arriving at Shanghai's tidy Pudong airport one is immediately rewarded with that illusive sense of finally being elsewhere, a feeling that is of great relief to those of us who reside in a place that is, maddeningly, both everywhere and nowhere. Within a minute of disembarking we had the camera out and Ness was snapping pictures of the recycling bins. Shanghai, a surprisingly colonial city in appearance, feels bureaucratically communistic and yet aggressively capitalistic, both ancient and modern, eastern and western, and yet wholly Chinese. Refreshingly, China has very little of Dubai's identity crisis, and seems to be a place that is much more comfortable with contradiction.

Jing'an Temple, pictured below, embodies China's history of contradiction, and has survived almost complete destruction twice in the last 200 years, most recently at the hands of Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution. Currently in a state of incomplete renovation, this Buddhist temple's chubby Siddhartha remains exiled in a WWII era bunker that lies beneath the massive stone steps leading to the temple's largest chamber. I spent nearly half a day at the temple taking pictures, and then set out on foot, in thrall to the swarming bicycles, sidewalk marauding moped maneuverers, and overall metropolitan enormity of Shanghai. Excepting an airport hotel in Chicago, I hadn't been anywhere near a real city in around nine months. 

I found the temple accidentally on my first day time foray outside the hotel, when my dual purpose of caffeinating and orienting myself led me to a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on the edge of Shanghai's French Concession. Chain restaurants help make cities and suburban areas into exactly the kind of soulless nowhere and everywhere places that exhaust my inexhaustible patience. I have the patience to stay in bed until it's really time to get up, the patience to watch entire baseball games (really only at the park), and the patience to post photographs first and text later; in other words an unyielding patience that drives more productive people to drink. I do not have the patience to eat at TGIFridays on three continents, or to join those who routinely seek the comfort of the familiar over the tangy, unexpected sweetness of something new. As in all my pursuits, I'm both imperfect and hypocritical, having eaten at more than one Cracker Barrel during my time on the east coast.

And yet for coffee, I make an exception-- such are the compromises of an addict. Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf Shanghai, looks a lot like CB&TL Dubai, which looks a lot like the frat boy/investment banker filled CB&TL on Fillmore in San Francisco which, unsurprisingly, looks a lot like the CB&TL in Los Feliz. And yet the Shanghai branch had one redeeming quality, which is that it afforded a view of the densely packed bicycles and scooters lining the street, which made it impossible to forget that I was in two wheeler loving China, the Costco of human populations.

That night we ate at a Sushi restaurant near the hotel, and wandered into a night club that throbbed with the sound of a competent(ish) funk cover band. The unmistakably cavernous sound of a poorly attended concert stoked both my empathy and resolve to keep it to one drink. With it's koi pond, grasping indoor flora, prayer flags, and chandeliers, the venue itself was infinitely more interesting than the recycled tunes. With The Commodores bouncing around in our heads, we shambled off to the cozy confines of the Baolong Home Hotel.