Shanghai: Hangzhou and Suzhou

End of the week, I just finished a presentation on the 2008 Anti-American beef protests in Korea. I have seen just about every combination of evil cow, sad looking Koreans, American flags, and skull and crossbones that Korean political cartoonists could dream up.

My report on my trip to Shanghai this past summer is long overdue, but consider this post the world premiere, it should be more exciting that way.

I traveled to Shanghai and some nearby cities during my last week before coming to Hawaii this past August. I'd been invited by a friend of mine who was working at the American pavilion at the Expo being held in the city, I figured it was a great opportunity to see this China place everyone has been talking about lately.

In a way, I'm glad I had six months before I uploaded this, the interval has given me time to parse what I saw and gather some conclusions. Obviously, my time in the country was limited to eight days and I did not stray far from Shanghai, but I did try to walk a bit off the beaten path.

To be honest, as my plane took off from Pudong International Airport to return me from whence I came, my impression of Shanghai was this:



I, like thousands of other tourists on the river that night, saw the bright lights and the glitz. On one side I had the Pearl Tower



and on the other, the magnificently restored line of art deco buildings that survive from the era of foreign domination of Shanghai



Suffice it to say, China does a very good job of cleaning itself up for visitors. I got a real kick out of this familiar piece of sculpture, covered with tourists posing for photos.



I had to travel out to one of the satellite cities to see any shred of the China I heard more about as a kid, social realist and authoritarian.



This was part of a little park in Hangzhou, a mere satellite city to Shanghai at 4 million residents. I had a fun day riding around the city and the surrounding tea plantations on these great little rental bikes that you could have for the whole day for a nominal fee, (you can see it below).







For all of my preconceptions of brusque locals and a difficult time traveling alone, I have to say that I had a pretty warm reception wherever I went. I'm sure one reason for the friendliness was the intense push to welcome international tourists during the Expo, but the help I received figuring out the bike rental, getting a room for the night, and figuring out internet cafes seemed genuine and spontaneous.

Hangzhou is also famous for the lake which lies in the center of the city, rightfully so.



From Hangzhou's cavernous train station I took what was supposed to be a two hour trip to another nearby city, Suzhou. With images of Suzhou's famous emerald gardens in mind, I took my seat and got a lot more than I bargained. An hour in, my train came to a slow stop and then stood still for two hours, for what reason I still do not know. As people stood jammed shoulder to shoulder in the aisles and the car gradually grew hotter, I began to feel the strain of my travel schedule. The exit into the darkened Suzhou station convinced me to take the high speed train back to Shanghai twenty-four hours later.

My complaints were forgotten the next morning as I enjoyed the gardens though, one of the few sights I have ever seen where the original beauty has survived decades of tourist overexposure. I regret not taking better photos, but it was hard to capture the attraction of these gardens. Rather than stunning with bright colors or impressive symmetry, their charm lay in their ability to present well-composed views with each new vantage point.









I sincerely enjoyed Hangzhou and Suzhou and appreciated the differences between their relatively raw environments in comparison with Shanghai proper. I'll give a full treatment to my time at the Expo and in the city in the next update.

End of my hardest semester to date

Finals ended this past week. My first days wholly free of obligations and worry have been spent in blissful sleep, sunny beaches, and recovering from the social isolation that became necessary to complete my work. I owe all of you an update, not on the work, which has been challenging, if tedious, but on the brief moments this semester when I have actually done something worth sharing.

In mid-October, one of the few Korean students in my building asked me for help with a big international food festival they have for my dormitory. As our building has students from almost every country in Asia, it was going to be an impressive affair. While my friends who cooked for the American food delegation gave me a hard time about betraying my country and cooking for Korea (they ended up making chicken-fried steak, cinnamon apples, green beans, and tex-mex), I'm glad I had a chance to practice my Korean cuisine.



We were a pretty subdued bunch, especially compared with the Indonesians.



The dormitory, while more of a communal experience than I've had before in terms of housing, has been fun. I quickly discovered that when you are surrounded by people from countries you know embarrassingly little about, the best way to start a conversation is about the food they cook. Just tonight I spent an hour listening to an explanation of why Iraqis eat so many dates and the trouble of being a date farmer.

Thanksgiving was a series of fantastic potluck dinners, similar to the way I spent it last year with friends in Washington. With the few days I had free for the holiday, I also sneaked out of the computer lab to hike near my valley. Past a waterfall that is reputed to have been a favorite of Obama as a child and up Mount Tantalus is a view through the mountain range clear to the other side of Oahu.



You can just barely see the ocean over the wild coffee trees.

As lush as Hawaii is, I have sadly not been able to live out my dreams of eating nothing but tropical fruit. Since almost all of food is imported from the mainland or Asia, even the papayas and pineapples are actually more expensive than they were back in Connecticut. To bring a little local variety into what I eat, I started getting a weekly subscription of produce from a farm on the island. Below you can see one of my first delivery boxes, with basil, limes, eggplant, and green onions.



The only difficulty of getting the deliveries is identifying and finding out how to cook some of the randomized produce I receive.

With the arrival of the winter vacation, as paradoxically as it seems, I have finally started going to the beach. It is a balmy 75 degrees here most days, and the only reminder I have that it is cold on the East Coast is the change in cup designs at the Starbucks.

When I go to the beach, alongside the tourists from the mainland and the far more tan locals, (I'm still pale as can be) there are also many Japanese tourists. Areas of Waikiki feel more oriented toward the Japanese than to Americans. I realized the extent of this when I visited a beach near the heart of Honolulu, which was filled with honeymooning Japanese couples getting their vacation photos taken. I took this picture just as a group of schoolgirls from Japan had discovered a couple and moved into the shot.



It has been very interesting trying to make sense out of the diversity in Honolulu, it's completely different from anywhere else I have lived in America. Being in the minority once again also means that it will be very different readjusting to life in Connecticut when I go back this summer.

I will try to soon post the photos from my trip to Shanghai this past summer, (very very late, I know). Have a great winter everyone!

Views from Honolulu

Nighttime at my university.


A praying mantis flew into my dormitory one night, this guy was about three inches long. He just perched on the curtain and imitated a leaf by slowly swaying from side to side.


The dormitory where I live. I have a single room on the tenth floor with a great view of Diamond Head, an old crater right on the beach.


A hiking path I took up Makiki Valley recently. The event was a field trip with the rest of the people in my department and a few professors.


The flowers bloom all year here.


Another view from the path, the valley is a picture-perfect rainforest


The view from the top of one of the mountains in Makiki, you can see my campus on the left and the ocean way in the background.

Watermelon tastes better at the top

Double Rainbows

Grad school is another level of busy I only could have seen in my nightmares, but I'm optimistic.

Fortunately, Hawaii does its best to cheer me up whenever I venture outside of the library, showing me double rainbows and offering some great views.





This is a view from one of the valleys, I went out with some other students in my program during the orientation week to check out some taro farms.



Trees confuse me here. It seems like they grow about ten feet out of the ground, get confused and try to go back in the earth.

Life has settled into a routine, for good or worse. I burn the midnight oil six days a week, then escape during a weekend day and remember I live in paradise.

Welcome ceremony, the East-West Center

While I am at the University of Hawaii pursuing my M.A., I am also an affiliate member of an educational institute that is attached to the university, called the East-West Center. The center funds graduate students and lots of different cultural exchange programs. I have entered into a program of theirs that allows me to stay in a dormitory in their campus, along with about one hundred and fifty other graduate students from all over Asia and America.

The housing experience has been wild already. As prices are higher in Hawaii than anything I am used to, and as it is relatively convenient, I am cooking my meals with the other students in big communal kitchens built into each floor. Alongside my quasi-Korean dishes are pots of Thai soup, chicken being fried by some Iraqi Phds, along with a half a dozen other dishes I cannot recognize from Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Phillipines.

During the day, I have been going through orientation procedures with the other students. The organizers kicked off the official welcome with a hula ceremony. It was actually very nice, I lost any preconceptions I had of it being a hollow exercise for the sake of tourists.

Afterward, alumni from our program circulated through the audience and gave us lei's.





With my few hours free in the afternoon, I decided to tour around Honolulu and see a little bit more of the city where I will live for the next year. While the first thing I noticed was the unusual makeup of the city, which is composed primarily of Japanese, Hawaiians, Chinese, and Pacific Islanders. While I make the distinction of their origin, what was even more unusual for me was how Americanized it all was, despite the diverse origins.

In terms of the physical city, it reminds me of a tropical Stamford, with a clean if infrequent bus system, low buildings, and plenty of discount stores and bar and grills.

Arrived in Honolulu, backlog of memories

Hello,

I have been quite busy the past two weeks, as I traveled to Shanghai the day after my internship ended, spent a week exploring that city, then left for Honolulu just two days after I returned from Shanghai.

I will try to upload photos and stories as soon as possible, but I don't want to skip too much of the past few weeks, which were an exhausting, memorable time.