On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
JanieM
I spent 5 weeks in China at Spring Festival time in 2010. Since my son was teaching in Yulin, in northern Shaanxi province, I had a local home base and a personal guide and translator for lots of adventures. Plus, we were guests of local families for holiday celebrations, and Jamie’s department got my visa extended so we could could team teach for the first week of spring semester.
We spent the first week in Beijing and the rest of the time in Yulin, by my choice. To travel far and wide, we would have had to spend hours on packed, smoky trains during what is reportedly the world’s largest annual migration. All you had to do to get a feel for it was to walk past a train station and see the crowds.
For me it was the trip of a lifetime. The food was wonderful (I missed it for years afterwards), the people and culture were fascinating, and the chance to live a tiny bit like a local person in a place that is so very, very different from home – that was priceless.
I arrived in Beijing after a sleepless 30-hour journey from my home in rural Maine. Late in the flight we were warned that if we showed any symptoms of swine flu, we’d be taken directly into quarantine. All I could think about as I walked past the gizmos on poles, supposedly detecting fevers in the passing throng, was that if they didn’t let me see Jamie I was going to have a meltdown.
But all was well, and we settled into our tiny hotel room and took an evening walk. I had my first food in China from literally a hole in the wall between two stores, a tiny gap where a man had set up a griddle and would make you a wrap with whatever filling you wanted from his small selection. I don’t remember what we had, but it was tasty, and we ate our wraps as we strolled around looking at shops and people. After that I slept for nineteen hours, until Jamie tapped me on the shoulder and said, “If you don’t get up you’re going to miss Beijing.”
I wrote a travel blog at the time with a lot more about topics like food, bartering, traffic, the holidays, etc. Feel free to go over there for more stories. (The pictures are mostly gone because they were stored on Picasa, which is now, sadly, defunct.)
This first set of pictures is a sampler. Later sets will be more focused, but they’ll all have a smattering of food, Chinglish, air quality, transport . . . and cute kids.
After my long nap we went to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, where this shot was taken. It was February, so we were often walking around in light snow.
A World Heritage site about an hour outside Beijing. We paid a cab driver $50 to take us there and wait while we explored. Jamie chose Mutianyu because the sites closer to the city tended to be more crowded. Between the distance from Beijing and the season, we had Mutianyu almost to ourselves.
A huge “antiques” market, partly open-air, where you could buy almost anything.
The entrance to a hutong, an older type of neighborhood of narrow alleyways.
We spent a day visiting a couple of major temple complexes, the other of which was a Buddhist temple and much more crowded.
Per Wikipedia, “Inside the temple, there are 198 stone tablets positioned on either side of the front courtyard, recording the names of more than 51,624 jinshis (advanced scholars) of the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties.” These are some of the tablets.
The safety sign in our hotel room.
Attitude: guarded but curious. That was the most common attitude I encountered on the streets. I didn’t see many westerners even in Beijing, but we were more or less ignored in the big city. In Yulin (a fair-sized city but nothing like Beijing) there are very few westerners, and we were objects of great interest when we were out in public. Some people glared, but quite a few, especially the younger ones, said a sing-song “Hello, how are you?” and then giggled and kept walking. By national policy, school kids start learning English at around age 8, so most people knew how to say hello. But I was assured that any day now Chinese would replace English as “the” global language. Chinese is so much easier to speak and write . . . right?
raven
Great photos!
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
中国制造
raven
My buddy was a trainer for the Beijing Ducks CBA team for a year. His descriptions of being one of a handful of Americans in gyms in the hinterlands can be scary as shit.
Laura Too
Very cool, thanks!
Mary G
That looks like an amazing trip. Another for my bucket list. The kids are like “you get ready to run if they come at us, but cool to see these weirdos from far away.”
Steve from Mendocino
My two weeks in China when I adopted my daughter were a delight – fascinating and enlightening. Nevertheless, it was with a group, albeit of families of adopting parents. Your experience was so much more intimate and immersive, it reminds me of my visits to France but way more exotic. I envy you. Lovely pictures.
HinTN
Thank you for the visit, part I. I eagerly anticipate the rest of the story.
JanieM
@Mary G: Yeah, I think that’s a good translation. We went to a Spring Festival party/meal at the home of one of Jamie’s colleagues — three generations, the youngest a sixteen-month-old. When we walked in, she took one look at us and started crying. But later in the day I dropped something on the floor and said, “Uh-oh,” and she echoed me, and I laughed, and she laughed, and we were friends after that. Plus she had her first English word.
JanieM
@raven: My son lived over there for five years, and my biggest worry was illness — like, what would happen if he got really sick. He also spoke Mandarin pretty well, and had the umbrella of the university (his employer) giving him, I think, some amount of legitimacy. But you could feel the hostility from individuals out in public sometimes, so I can well imagine that there are contexts/times when things get scary. Among the people my son knew, we were heartily welcomed and well taken care of (sometimes almost too thoroughly — cultures differ….). We were also frequently reminded of China’s superiority to the West, it seems to be on their minds. I do wonder if we would have had a worse time of it now — relations were better in 2010, there was a different guy in charge, etc.
@Steve from Mendocino: Thanks. And thanks for editing the pictures, too. Credit where it’s due!
The experience was immersive, and for that reason I treasure it even though I would never want to live in China. But that’s another series of stories, maybe for later.
susanna
Thanks for these. China photographs often reflect simplicity combining with complexity.
As usual, the kids are a delight.
Elma
I went to China on a very well run tour in 2014. I didn’t much care for the food, except for breakfasts at our 5 star hotels. Of course, it was always a fixed menu served to the group in the back or upper room of some big restaurant. What was being served in the front looked much more interesting. On our last day on the main land, before we went to Hong Kong, we had a free afternoon. A couple of our group found the restaurant where we scheduled for dinner that evening. They came back to report that it was an Italian place. We were all very excited, but NO. Even though they were serving some very attractive pasta dishes downstairs, upstairs we got our regular preordered meal. We did go to a home hosted dinner in one of the hutongs while we were in Beijing, which was wonderful, so I know that it could have been good.
dnfree
Love seeing your photos! We were on a tour in 2008 through the university alumni association where my husband got his MASW (social work). It was very well-run, and we had both a local guide everywhere we went and a university scholar on the trip with us. We loved it, and I especially relate to your comment about the food. Our local Chinese restaurant is…fine…but nothing whatever to compare to the food we had on the trip. We didn’t go there for months after we got home.
I’m a vegetarian, and after a while some people in the group started choosing to sit with us, because our table got more variety, and my food was excellent. The first night we were in Beijing, we had dinner in our hotel, and after we explained the vegetarian thing, they brought me an excellent dinner of celery over rice. Just celery over rice. It was fantastic. I wish I knew how it was prepared.
dnfree
I should add, regarding remote areas, we had a post-tour to the Yellow Mountains. It turned out that everyone else had chosen the other post-tour, so it was just us and a young, enthusiastic guide. There were few “western” tourists in the area. In one small town we encountered some young teens, and they shouted “Michael Jordan” to us. We shouted back (in 2008) “Yao Ming” and they laughed.
JanieM
@dnfree:
That’s great. I’m not that quick-witted; I would have thought of it about three days later, if ever.
Food is a huge topic. There were several things that people kept telling us as if they were reciting a litany, and two of them were: 1) “Chinese” food in America isn’t really Chinese (duh; but how did they know?); and 2) Chinese food has many regional variations.
As to the latter, Yulin is in a region where mutton and goat meat are used a lot. There was one flavor in some of the dishes I ate that I wasn’t all that fond of, and I thought it might be one of those meats. But Jamie wasn’t sure how to interpret the Mandarin vocabulary to distinguish lamb from mutton from goat, so we were never really sure. Anyhow, late in the trip I figured out that the ingredient I didn’t like was the special, famous, best in China, which made it best in the world…..locally fermented bean curd.
Another bemusing thing about the food — we were out to dinner one night with another of the English department’s “foreign teachers” — a young man from the Netherlands who was also there to teach English. So — three foreigners. We ordered a bunch of things but eventually decided we were still hungry, and tried to order another dish. The waitress gave us a lecture that had something to do with hot and cold, this vegie or that vegie….I never did really understand it, beyond the fact that by her lights, we were trying to order the wrong thing in relation to what we had eaten already.
Then there were the hand wipe thingies that you threw on the floor when you were finished with them, and the dice, which were in a little plastic container on the table in every single eating establishment I went into…for drinking games. More on that later, perhaps.
dnfree
@JanieM: We were surprised to find out that beer (low alcohol) was free with lunch most places, and even breakfast, but tea cost extra.
JanieM
@dnfree: Yes! I was taken aback by having to pay for tea as well, and not insignificant prices. What happened to “All the tea in China”!
Not that I’m not willing to pay for what I consume, just that we’re so conditioned over here to having a pot of tea placed on the table in “Chinese” restaurants. I guess maybe that’s part of their not being “really” Chinese.