China 2019, day 17: San Francisco!

Not a lot happened today. After breakfast, we took a short walk in the hotel's inner courtyard, which is really cute:

We finished packing, left the luggage with the hotel, and went to check out Wudaoying Hutong. "Hutong" means "alley", and this one is an example of what alleys used to look like before modern construction started changing the city's landscape. Some people called for preservation of more traditional building style and Wudaoying Hutong is a result of that.

It's a very trendy street, with stylish designer clothes stores, coffee shops, and bars. We came too early and most of everything was closed, so we got some coffee in one of the only places that was open.

Then we walked over to the Confucius Temple. It is, indeed, a temple.

And that was that. We went back to the hotel area, got lunch there, went to the hotel to pick up our stuff, and went to the airport. The flight was pretty hard. Ada pooped all over me right after we took off, and after that all of us were cold and uncomfortable - mostly Julia, who was stuck under the very intermittently sleeping Ada the entire flight.

So - yay, we're done!
Not that we didn't have fun, but if you've been following the whole thing, you realize that this was not really a vacation, and large portions of this were hard, frustrating, and challenging. I loved China in our previous two visits, and I think visiting with a small child changed my relationship with China and made it more complex. I'm definitely more protective and have less tolerance for people's bullshit, regardless if this bullshit is their way of showing concern, a part of their culture, or just them being dicks. It's hard for me to buy the whole "it's a part of the culture" thing. There have been quite a few, even if not a lot, people who showed concern, even while being somewhat overbearing, while doing so with warmth and compassion to both Ada and us.
At the end of the day, we did what we came to do, which is have Ada meet her extended family. That part of the visit went very well, and that's the most important thing. Another positive thing is that the more complex and challenging the trip is, the better, I think, the blog is, so I hope you appreciate what I'm going through for you.
Julia and I have been discussing this, and we're thinking of moving this blog out of the Blogger platform, perhaps to something we build ourselves, so stay tuned for that. If it works out, I'm sure you'll enjoy the blog even more the next time I'll be a
Person
On
The
Roaaad!
(stu-gu-du-gu-da-gum -- tshhhhhh)

China 2019, day 16: The Great Wall

We got up and went through the schedule again: today we were going to make sure that Ada gets all her naps and meals on time. We ate yet another mediocre breakfast at the hotel, took the subway, and found the stop for the bus that goes to the Great Wall. The bus ride takes about an hour and we timed it perfectly for Ada's first nap. However, it was incredibly warm on the bus. In fact, it is incredibly warm almost everywhere in Beijing: malls, the subway, the subway stations, stores, and our hotel rooms - everything is heated beyond what I would consider comfortable. That doesn't stop everyone from wearing multiple layers, beanies, and scarfs. Don't even get me started with the babies that are being dressed in sweaters and puffy jackets.
Anyway, Ada, just like us, was melting, so she was very upset and couldn't sleep. We completely undressed her and left her only with her diaper. She was finally happy and fell asleep. Other passengers on the bus were, of course, very concerned about her warmth, but I kindly told them to mind their own business and waved with my biggest awkward smile to those too far to hear me.
Then we got to the Great Wall. First, the bus dropped us off in the parking lot, where dozens of tour guides who wear portable speakers yell into their microphones. The noise levels are out of this world. To get up on the wall, one can either walk, take a sliding car from the parking lot, or take a gondola from a different parking lot. We bought tickets for the sliding car and started walking towards it. The first thing you encounter is a pit of bears. I can't imagine that they're very happy there.

Then we found the sliding car. It's pretty awesome - it's a lot like a roller coaster, but without the screaming.

The wall itself, what can I say, is pretty great. We had pretty bad visibility at first, but it cleared up a little bit as we walked around.

Julia and I often ask ourselves what ethnicity does Ada look like and do her Chinese genes show. We got an answer to that when we overheard a young boy ask his mother "why does this white man carry a Chinese baby? What does it mean?". To be honest, that is actually a very good question which I often ask myself as well.

As far as I gathered, there's only one place to buy food on the wall itself, which is where the gondola stop is, and we got there right when it was time for lunch - so far so good! Among other random stuff, they sell pre-wrapped hamburgers and chicken sandwiches, which may look like they have little potential, but they're actually pretty great. They also sell popcorn chicken which we thought would be great for Ada, but when she started eating it and protested vocally, we realized they were pretty spicy. We also bought pork buns so she ate those instead and was pretty happy.

We walked a little bit further and touched the wall of a tower that felt high enough for us to be satisfied and turn around. It started to get pretty drizzly, but we didn't mind too much.

We waked all the way back to the sliding car and rode it down the mountain. We got to the bus right when it was time for Ada's second nap, and she fell asleep pretty quickly. We were killing it! 

We got back to Beijing with plenty of time to kill, so because Ada was stuck in her carrier all day, we went back to the mall and let her play in the indoor playground again. This is her, with a stuffed octopus, sitting in a bath full of foam balls, in the urban warfare section of the playground. That's just how she rolls:

From there, we went to Shichahai, the touristy shopping area that's close to our hotel. We bought Ada two adorable dresses, and then went to get dinner - again, right on time. Finally, we felt adequate again as parents.

Then we went to our hotel, put Ada to sleep, and packed.  Tomorrow we go home! I'm so ready to go home.

China 2019, day 15: Beijing

We were better parents today, but we still messed up. We started the day by taking the subway to the Beijing Google office to have breakfast. It was great. Then we took a taxi to the mall, and Ada took her first nap when we got there. We walked around the mall, located not one, but two indoor playgrounds, and got ourselves coffees at Starbucks. I never have Starbucks in the US. It’s really terrible, but in China the options are not that great when it comes to coffee. Then we walked around and looked at around at baby clothes and desks for young children.

When Ada woke up, we took her to the bigger playground. It’s great: it’s has a kind of a militaristic theme to it, but in a very subtle way: they use stencil fonts, and the play areas are loosely inspired by tanks, airplanes, and submarines:

There are even canons (which were not operational when we were there) that shoot balls to the ball pit and ziplines. The subtlety stops when you get to the urban warfare area:

We took a break for lunch at the mall and came back. Ada had fun, and I had blast. Then I started trying some more daring stuff with Ada, like letting her slide with me only grabbing her shirt, but that didn’t work very well, and I had to save her by pulling her up by the collar before she smashed her head to the ground. I tried having her on my knees as I went down the zipline, and when I landed, she almost flew away from me, but I caught her just before launched into the padded wall. Hey, I caught her and that what matters.  Then Julia said “ok, we’re tired”, and by that she meant that she’s tired of me trying to kill our daughter.

The next stop was Baigongfang. We could either take the subway or a taxi, and we reckoned that a taxi would be faster – we’d get there quickly and put Ada down for her second nap. But we messed up, again: with pretty bad traffic, the ride took 45 minutes, Ada started bawling just after we got into the cab, and wouldn’t you know it, I left her pacifier attached to the stroller that was in the trunk. This was one of the hardest things I had to go through as a parent. Ada was screaming her lungs out, and there was nothing I could do.

When we finally got out of the taxi, Julia tipped the taxi driver generously for the terrible experience. We put Ada down in her stroller with her pacifier, and she fell asleep immediately, still gasping to find her breath. We felt terrible, but Julia took it harder, and the stress manifested physically, to the point where she couldn’t think straight. I took over, rushing us to find a bathroom, and when we did, Julia threw up. It was that bad. We regrouped, I did my best to cheer Julia up, and we walked over to the Baigongfang.

Baigongfang, literally meaning “100 handicrafts workshop”, is home to dozens of small studios that specialize in old forms of Chinese craftsmanship, from jade carving to paper cuts. Every studio we walked into was extremely welcoming, and the art is really impressive:

We walked back to the subway and headed back to our hotel’s area. Ada, who slept through the whole thing, woke up just in time for the ride. Navigating the subway is tricky for many reasons, but mostly because people, in a way that is significantly more pronounced than the US, have their eyes glued to their phones. As they walk around the subway station, they watch videos, play games, and video chat. I have made this into a game months ago, where I deliberately lead the stroller in the path of people who don’t look where they’re going. Over the past few days in China I broke my personal record multiple times. Also, if you have an idea for a name for this game, I’d like to hear it. “iChicken” is the best I could come up with so far.

Then, there’s the problem of people shoving their way into the train before letting people out. I’m done being polite about this. Coming out of the train at our stop, I held Ada in one arm, extended both my elbows, and launched myself in a straight line out of the car. I heard the protests of at least five assholes who were not willing to let me out and now paid the price in the shape of my elbow in their ribs, but they didn’t realize that with each shriek they make, my powers get stronger. I managed out of the car, but Julia was still stuck inside with the stroller. I shoved one person out of her way and held the doors from closing. When she was out, an attendant told her that she should have planned better to get out. Julia yelled at her that people would just not let her out.

I feel totally fine with physically hurting people who act this way. They do this because there is no price that they have to pay for being dicks. I am bringing something new by setting a price range that is between a stroller hitting your shin bone to an elbow to ribs, and I hope more people adopt my pricing system. It’s the only way people would start considering whether it’s worth it for them to block other people from getting off the train or not.

We got out of the hotel, regrouped, and found a tiny restaurant, with only 4 tables, that served us simple yet fantastic food.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow we’ll be good parents.

China 2019, day 14: Beijing

One more rough day to the collection. The plan for today was to go to Tiananmen square, then to the Forbidden City, and then, finally, find Ada a nice indoor playground. 

Although our hotel is really nice, breakfast is kind of shitty, but that’s not really an issue. We started off by taking the wrong subway line. When Julia realized what we did, we got off the subway train, took the train back, and switched lines. Then we switched to the 2 line, that goes in a circle, but for some reason, it stopped after two stations, and we had to get off and wait for the next train. When we got to the Tiananmen station, we had to go up to the street level, then go back down to an underground passage to cross the street, repeat that process again, pass through security, go through one more underground passage and finally get to the square. Mind you, all this is with me carrying Ada in her stroller up and down the stairs, because god forbid they install any escalators or elevators for the tens of thousands of people who visit the site every day.

Anyway, we hung out in the square a little bit, and took the mandatory pictures. There are museums around the square, but we really don’t have time for them this visit. We decided that when Ada is older and we come to visit the family again, we’ll stop in Beijing for longer and spend more time exploring.

Then we went into the Forbidden City. Again, we decided to not spend too much time there. The Forbidden City is huge, and you can easily spend a whole day there, but we decided to move in a straight line, and only take a detour for the clocks and watches collection and for the treasure collection. 

Another cool section we stumbled upon was the calligraphy studio we:

We messed up though. Because of all the unexpected delays, we only entered the Forbidden City at noon, which meant that Ada already skipped her morning nap, and we didn’t have lunch yet. So, we decided to move forward even faster, and try to get Ada to nap, so that she wakes up when we exit the Forbidden City right in time for a late lunch.

It took ages to get Ada to fall asleep: 

She did, eventually, fall asleep when Julia put her in her carrier on Julia’s back. However, half an hour later, an old Chinese lady, in a typical move for old Chinese ladies, somehow thought she had to squeeze in to see one of the artifacts we were looking at, bumped into Ada, and woke her up. We were so mad and frustrated, but what could we do? 

We sped things up a little and got out of the Forbidden City. We found a restaurant nearby and had our late lunch. Eating with Ada when she sits on my lap is my favorite thing now:

You may notice that behind us there’s a phone on a tripod. That’s a young lady live-streaming herself eating on a Twitch-like app. Mind you, she is sitting with a friend, and they are eating together, but do not exchange a word. It was Gottfried Liebniz who said that this is the best of all possible worlds. I’ll bet you twenty bucks that if he was in that restaurant with us today, he would have liked to reconsider.

Everyone was fed and mostly happy. All we had to do now is find that playground. Julia googled a mall and found one relatively close by called “Joy City”. We took a taxi there, but the mall was a huge disappointment. It had a pretty cool area for young teenagers, with a VR room, karaoke booths, and a fast-food place where all the servers are dressed as characters from Mario Bros. There were a bunch of other malls on the same block, but none of them had anything for babies at all, and we had already wasted way too much time in that area. 

We decided to try a mall at a completely different area, so we got back on the subway. However, when got off the train we realized that Julia made a mistake, misread the subway stops, and we took the wrong subway line again. It was getting late, Julia’s phone was dying, and to top it off, Ada produced a massive poop and we had to change her in an alley. We messed up. Julia used my phone to communicate with her dad, who already got to Beijing. They set to meet somewhere between where we were and the hotel. And we got back on the subway.

We met up with Tize, and walked around to find a restaurant. When we found one, we realized Ada had just fallen asleep. We messed up once more, and we didn’t know what to do: should we wake her up for dinner, or let her sleep? The problem is that Ada needs two naps a day, and she missed her second one. However, if we were to let her sleep now, she would wake up in the middle of the night. We decided to let her sleep just a little bit and wake her up when all our food shows up.

This was a disaster, even though I’m not convinced it was the wrong decision. Ada screamed in protest for a quite a while, and I had to take her out of the restaurant to calm her down. Eventually she did, and we had a nice dinner. Julia ordered me a beer, and this is what showed up:

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Then we decided to split: Tize and Julia will inspect another mall to see if there’s a playground we can take Ada to tomorrow, while I take Ada back to the hotel. We got to the hotel, Ada was got a second wind and wanted to play, which was great, until it wasn’t. At some point she started screaming again. It was getting late, and she hasn’t got much sleep during the day at all. I tried to put her to sleep, but she wouldn’t. Mostly because the room was incredibly hot. Later, Tize would tell me that the entire city of Beijing is connected to a central heating system. The radiator in our room was emitting heat, and I didn’t want to mess with it, so I went to the front desk and asked them to shut off the heating, and they took care of it pretty quickly. After Ada finally fell asleep, Julia came and said that although they didn’t find a playground in the mall they went to, they got pretty good leads on a mall that does have one. We decided to take Ada there tomorrow morning and be better about timing her naps and meals.

China 2019, day 13: Beijing

We had a really rough night. Since Ada was playing with the air conditioner remote control yesterday, I took out the batteries. When I put them back in, we didn’t notice that the settings were reset, and now the air conditioner was set to cooling. We woke up in the middle of the night freezing, and fought with the remote, that had only Chinese on it, to get it back to heating. After an hour, we finally got it, but Julia didn’t trust the temperature settings, so she left it on the highest temperature. It was hard for both of us to fall back asleep, and of course, we woke up melting a couple of hours later. I lowered the temperature back, but soon after it was time to get up.

It was super early, and we were exhausted from the night. We finished packing quickly and Tize knocked on our door. Outside, Sanda was waiting in his taxi to drive us to the train station. It was sad to leave Xingxian. Tize’s family is so nice and warm to us, and they’re super chill about everything. It’s a very noticeable difference from what we experienced with the Chengdu-based side of the family.

It was 6:45 in the morning, and we were about to get through the little carousel thing to the railway station. With us there were maybe eight more people. There was plenty of time until the train was supposed to leave. And yet, those eight people were trying to cut in front of us to the carousel. I blocked them with the stroller, but when I looked back, I saw that one of them managed to squeeze himself in the same slot as Sanda, and another on with the same slot as Tize. “What’s the rush?” I asked Tize, “Why does everybody push and try to cut you in line all the time?”. “It’s a way of life.” Tize reply. I like Tize a lot. He has many qualities that I appreciate, but he doesn’t really have a sense of humor, which somehow made this response even funnier to me.

But I guess he’s right. Everybody will try to cut you off and get there first (wherever “there” is), even in situations where it makes no difference at all. And I got tired of it.  In our case, this is not just rude, it disrupts how we travel: when you enter a train station here, first you present your ticket and ID. For most people, this works with an automatic gate where you stick your ticket in a slot, scan your ID, and the gate opens. We need to find the gate that has a person next to it who checks our passports. Julia leads with our passports and tickets and manages the conversation, and once we pass the inspection, I follow with Ada in her stroller. When somebody tries to jam themselves between us, everybody gets confused. This, of course, happened this morning, so I simply shoved the guy out of the way. Fuck him.

Then you put your luggage through the screening machine. Julia put our luggage, and some woman ran past me and put her luggage right on the conveyer belt. I took it off the conveyer belt and put my backpack instead. She mumbled something in protest, but hey – fuck her. 

The train from Xingxian to Taiyuan takes 4 hours. It’s the regular train with the terrible seats. However, it went by pretty fast, and when we got to Taiyuan we took a taxi to the bullet train station. I am getting better at blocking people from cutting me off, mostly using Ada’s stroller. 

I also noticed that accessibility is not really a consideration in China. When we travel, I almost always have to carry the stroller with Ada in it on and off the train, down to the subway, and into tourist attractions. The bullet train terminal in Taiyuan, for example, has two levels: the main level, and the shopping level that is mostly for dining. The only way to get up to the shopping level is with the escalators. There’s no elevator. Being the terrible parents that we are, we took the stroller up on the escalator to have lunch. 

Julia says her Chinese is not great, and usually I find that hard to believe, but then she orders food for us and we end up with three huge bowls of soup:

Then we boarded. Even though there’s plenty of time to board and everybody has their assigned seat, hundreds of people stormed the automatic gates. However, we looked for the gate with the person next to it, which for some reason nobody else realized they can use too. As soon as Julia started to talk to the lady at the gate, people stormed that gate as well. I blocked them with the stroller and moved the bag that some lady shoved between Julia and me out of the way. She’ll need that bag when she goes to fuck herself. Then, to get to the train itself, one can either take the escalators, or, finally, an elevator. We went in and some guy in his 60s ran in as well, ramming me and the stroller with his suitcase. I yelled at him “baobao!” (“baby!”) and he mumbled in Chinese that he only touched the strollers handles and gave a demonstration. I don’t understand Chinese, so I shoved him and told him in Hebrew that if doesn’t touch the stroller again we’ll get along just fine. Hey, don’t judge me - he was probably only in his early 60s.

I think I wrote about it in the blog last time we travelled here. People don’t mind aggression as long it’s the type of the aggression they know. If their aggression is met by a different kind of aggression, like mine, for instance, they only see mine, not theirs. I don’t care. Fuck them. Fuck them all.

After another 3 hours we were finally in Beijing. We took a taxi to the hotel and checked in. This hotel is really nice, and we totally deserve it after the last one. Ada was amazing this entire day, and we felt bad that she had to be locked in train cars and strapped in her seat for so many hours today, so we wanted to find her a mall with an indoor playground, but it turned out that we’re in the wrong part of town for that. We’re in Gulou, which is an older part of the city, but it’s very trendy here. So, we walked over to Shichahai, an area of small streets with souvenir shops and bars that are very similar to the ones we saw in Chengdu on our previous visit: all the bars had young musicians, usually one or two, playing live music. This was not what we needed, though. We turned around and found an awesome BBQ place, where they cook your food in front of you on a cast iron griddle. Julia, as she often does, ordered too much food:

But it was great, and we did a good job eating it.

Then we came back to the hotel early enough to let Ada crawl around and release some energy. 

China 2019, day 12: Xingxian

Everybody went to visit the family burial plot. Last time we were here, we went along, but this time we were excused, so we woke up slowly, had breakfast at the hotel, and went back to our room to watch Chinese TV. There’s a lot of propaganda, not just on TV, but also on signage everywhere, and this is even more pronounced this year, as China is celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Chinese revolution. We watched a little bit of sports – China is hosting the Military World Games, which is like the Olympic games, but for militaries. We also watched some weird drama show about a student who is obsessed with her art teacher. It had English subtitles.

Then we walked over to Nainai’s house, and everybody came back from the burial plot too. 

Finally, we got to open all the packages that Julia’s mom sent. First, we lay them all on the big bed, as if we were some special police force that just raided a big drug operation.

Then we opened everything.

There was a lot of camping gear: two tents, pots and pans, a backpack, a jacket, fishing gear, two portable stoves, and probably some more crap that I don’t remember. Also, there were a lot of snacks and candy.

We had lunch, and then Tize took us to the market. We told Tize that we wanted to buy Sanda a bottle of Baijiu, as a token of gratitude and because I’ve been drinking everything that he had. Tize tried to convince us not to, for various reasons: we can’t tell if a store is selling real or fake stuff, we don’t know what Sanda likes, and we shouldn’t feel grateful because Sanda is family and that’s just what family does – they let you drink their Baijiu. But then we walked by a small supermarket, and I said that their stuff must be real, I’m sure Sanda will drink whatever we bring him, and we can just say that we brought it for dinner. Tize agreed, and we walked in. We walked around in the supermarket, just to see if there’s anything else that is interesting or that we’d like, and three employees followed us everywhere we went. I suggested that we split, to see if we can shake off our tail. It didn’t really work.

- “Why are they following us?” I asked Tize.

- “To see if you need help.”

- “OK, let’s say I do need help, can they actually help me?”

Tize and Julia agreed that I had a good point. 

We bought hot pepper that they ground for us on the spot.

Then we walked to the town square. I’m still very confused about Xingxian as an entity. Tize says that Xingxian’s population is 200,000. That’s a quarter of San Francisco. Yet it feels way smaller. If you look at maps, it says that we’re actually in Weifenzheng, which is a part Xingxian. From what it looks like, Xingxian is a bunch of villages that fused into Xingxian. Anyway, when I say we went to the town’s square, I’m not sure that it’s the central square of all Xingxian. Just to be clear.

Anyway, at the square you find old and unemployed people playing cards and Chinese chess, as they don’t have anything else to do. That changes when I showed up. Like an army of zombies, a whole bunch of expressionless Xingxian-ers slowly gathered around us. I tried my new awkward wave a couple of times, and when a couple of women took my picture, I retaliated by taking theirs. This whole event wasn’t really fun. Tize went to Nainai’s and we continued to explore.

We hit the river and found that there’s a really nice boardwalk along it. We walked on the boardwalk for a while, then went back to the main road, moving quickly around the square, and then to the market street that leads to Nainai’s house. This was the opportunity that I was waiting for: on the street that leads from the market to Nainai’s house, there’s a store that sells fried dough. I’ve noticed that they had a thing that has chicken in it, and I’ve be scheming to get it ever since we got here. We got two, and it was everything I hoped for: Imagine a pita (say “pita bread” and I will never speak to you again) that’s made of fried dough. Like a thinner type of Berliner. In it, there’s a red-pink slice of cooked chicken breast, and big leaf of lettuce. Then there’s a little bit of unidentified white sauce. It was fantastic.  I consider the most Israeli food to be chicken schnitzel in a pita, and it’s one of my favorite things to eat. This was similar in concept, but with every ingredient being slightly different, so it tasted familiar and new at the same time.

Then we went back to the house, and at this point, most people have already left. I had a long conversation with Tize about Chinese language and history. He’s a very knowledgeable person, and he’s very kind. He’s a lot of fun to talk to, and I like him a lot.

We had dinner, and Sanda and I drank a lot. When I’m around here, every time I think that I’m done eating, somebody shows up and puts a bowl of soup in front of me. Today I learned why: In China, consumption of cold and hot liquids at the same time is thought to be unhealthy, so only when you’re done with your alcohol, you can have your soup. We said our goodbyes, and Nainai cried a little, which was heartbreaking. We went back to the hotel and packed. Tomorrow we leave for Beijing.