Nanluogo Xiang Street

One of my favorite spots in Beijing was this absolutely funky little street, fairly close to the Forbidden City, called Nanluogo Xiang Street. My friend Craig found it in his research about Beijing. It is tree-lined and full of shops (including a great Mao-themed shop that you run into right away - bought some great gifts there), restaurants, bars (including one run by some Australian ex-pats) and places to get traditional Chinese massage. We actually went to the street twice. On one of the trips we ate at a trendy Tibet place - we had no individual plates, just dug into everything communally with our chopsticks. While there I had a canned drink called Tibetan Capterpillar Fungus Drink, which I was roundly mocked for ordering, although it was actually pretty tasty - sort of like vanilla. It became my quest to find it again on the rest of the trip, but I never did and it began to fade into mythology. However, when I later visited the Tibetan Medicine Museum I found that there is such a thing, which goes by the lovely flowing Chinese name of Winter Worm Summer Grass (although not the zum lindwurm of Klagenfurt), which is supposed to be quite good for you. You can buy some of the Capterpillar Funger and put about an inch in the bottom of a bottle of hard liquor and let it sit for a couple months, and then have a little drink every day. While on our first trip to the street Kathy, Susyn and Craig decided to get a massage, while I, wisely as it turns out, went across the street to a rooftop bar to drink some Chinese beer and eat some surprisingly good french fries. Craig stumbled back an hour later, bruised from a brutal massage and covered with the remnants of a traditional Chinese cupping, which he had not realized he had signed up for. His back was covered with dozens of these raised round welts, caused by placing heated glass bulgs on his back. When I saw him they were each raised about an inch (which led us to immediately give him the nickname turlteboy). Unfortunately, it was the one time on the trip when I didn't have a camera, so I'm waiting for some other shots. When I get them I'll fill in the story in greater detail.

University of Klagenfurt

Much like Billy Pilgrim, I think I am unstuck in time. Yesterday I had a great visit to the University of Klagenfurt, and today I am packing up to head back up to Vienna for meetings with the University of Vienna, before heading out the next day for Budapest for meetings there. At the same time I am trying to post as much information about the China trip as possible, before it all fades away. Let me post a couple pictures from Klagenfurt, where we started out with a lovely lunch at a local college hang-out, the Uni-Pizzeria. There are pictures of Caroline (who ran a Global Module with Champlain this last spring - she and her husband are expecting their first baby in the next couple months, so congratulations!) and her colleague Eva, and then one of me, Eva and Elizabeth, another colleague, (who will be running a GM with us next spring). I also had a series of meetings with administrators where we made more agreements, but they didn't result in any nice pictures (grin).

Great Wall

I don't know what I could possibly say about the Great Wall that could begin to do it justice. Later I'll include some pictures of one of the original stretches of the Great Wall, this one dating from the Han dynasty, that I took in western China, which gives you a sense of how it has changed. Although the Chinese have been building walls since the time of the Qin and the unification under the first emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, the Great Wall that everyone recognizes today is a product of the Ming repairing it starting in the 14th century - whereas the first walls go back over two-thousand years. We visited on a dreadfully rainy and foggy day, which actually made some of the shots even better, although, obviously, we couldn't see very far. It was a horrible weather day, and we were on a stretch of the Great Wall which is not as popular as others, and it was still packed. It was a serious climb up and down, and my colleague Susyn from Champlain, was happy for the fog because she has real issues with high places. The odd thing is that you could look across the valley, on another section of the Great Wall where we were not allowed to climb, and we could see a few people walking - don't know who they had to bribe to get that quiet walk, but it would have been worth the yuan.

I'm Betting on the Dragon

Here is a picture of the very bourgeois Austrian Hercules squaring off with the true symbol of Klagenfurt, zum lundwurm.

A Real Journey

OK, let me take a break from these unimportant trips to a journey of much greater significance. Here's a picture of my nephew Garrett and my son, Gary, at Garrett's high school graduation. I am very proud of both of them. My son is the best thing that ever happened to me, and someday, I have no doubt, I will only be remembered as being his father.

Floating in Klagenfurt

If you've been following the news you know that southern Austria has been suffering from some terrible flooding. No sign of it in Klagenfurt, although they've been getting a ton of rain. I'm sitting in the Cafe Bergmann, a little place around the corner from the bus stand, trying to stay out of the rain, and enjoying a pastry and a melange (essentially a cafe latte). They always serve the melange with a little wafer and a small glass of water (it doesn't seem to matter where you are in Austria). I had a great day of meetings at Klagenfurt University, and now I'm waiting for the rain to stop so that I can go work-out (I found a place a few blocks from my hotel). After that I'll grab something to eat, and then back to my room to repack - tomorrow morning I catch the train back north to Vienna.

Austria and Vermont

I am sitting in a little cafe next to Klagenfurt University, nursing a melange and waiting for a meeting to start. It's always funny to me how much Austria reminds me of Vermont, at least the countryside. I'm not in the part of Austria with the taller mountains, and the train ride down from Vienna to Klagenfurt sort of felt like I was driving to the Tunbrudge World's Fair. The biggest difference, of course, is that Austrians are much nicer than Vermonters. In both places the drivers are unfailingly polite and will always stop to let folks cross the street (unlike a lot of places overseas where pedestrians are fair game). The big difference in regards to pedestrians is that the Austrian variety will not cross against the light - you can be standing on a little side street at 10:00 at night without a car in sight and a crowd of Austrians will simply wait for the light to change.

Summer Palace Pictures

Summer Palace

The first truly historic place that I visited was the Summer Palace, which I actually visited twice, first with my friend and colleague Craig, and then again the next day with two more friends and professors from Champlain. Susyn and Kathy. There was a little overlap, but it is so huge that in other ways the two trips were completely different. The Summer Palace was the place where the the emperors would go to get away from the chaos of the Forbidden City - essentially, it was the little weekend get away place, which sort of boggled the mind and prepared me to visit the enormity of the Forbidden City. You could, and I did, spend hours walking around the Summer Palace, which stretches around a huge lake. There is way too much try and explain in this brief blog - sitting here in the front room of the Goldenener Brunnen Hotel because the wifi is not picking up in my room. Probably my favorite part of the Summer Palace was the long corridor, which, as the name suggested, is a very long covered walkway that runs along the lake. There are literally hundreds of paintings along the Long Corridor, and Craig actually bought a book that explained all of them. I think I took dozens of pictures of them - some of them were historical and some were traditional Chinese landscape paintings and others were drawn from mythology and others were obviously influenced by modern European concepts (and thus really stood out). I also like going to the other side of the lake, which Susyn and Kathy and I did, to walk over the seven distinct bridges along the causeway - we also took a boat back across the lake. You can also walk to the top of the hill and visit a couple Buddhist temples, including the Temple of the Multitudinous Fragrances, which is the first of a whole series of beautifully named Chinese temples and buildings, especially when you get to the Forbidden City. You can buy, for only 10 yuan, these remarkably nice maps (good enough for framing) which give you some history. I would definitely go back again. The first day was mainly Craig and I on a forced march so we could get back and catch a couple late sessions at the conference, and second day was a more leisurely stroll with Susyn and Kathy, including some noodles in a little shop, which were prepared by the girls of the shop (who probably figured that an American was way too stupid to actually make their own noodles). Unfortunately, the stupid bloody blogspot site is not letting me download pictures at the moment so I guess they will have to wait.

Klagenfurt

As I begin to get caught up with the China stories I guess I need to keep the thread going with what I'm doing right now. After my three train journey from the wilds of Slovakia, through Bratislava and Vienna, I made it safely to Klagenfurt, although I did fall asleep and literally woke up sitting at the Klagenfurt station - and the train only stops for two minutes - and the Austrian trains are completely and totally on time - so I had to grab everything and jump off the train in a hurry. I'm staying at the Goldener Brunnen Hotel here in Klagenfurt, where I stayed about three years ago. Tomorow I have a series of meetings with representatives from Klagenfurt University, which is one of the first places I ran GMs with, and which, after a period of quiet, have suddenly popped up and are interested in expanding our connections. Klagenfurt is an immacutely clean town Austrian town. It is known for its dragon history, and there are lots of statues of dragons including one of Hercules fighting a dragon which is in the central square. It is supposed to be Hercules, but, appropriately enough, it looks much more like a bourgeois Austrian merchant - think of a middle class watch repairman who stepped out of his shop to fight a dragon. It's a very nice town and I went for a long walk this afternoon, trying to figure out where there might be somewhere to work out. Along the way I was propositioned by an exotic dancer, which was both a first for me and not exactly the workout I was looking for.

Beijing

It's hard to believe that I initially landed in Beijing almost a month ago. I flew in from Dubai on 1 June on China Southern Air, which I thought was about the worst airlines I had ever flown on - little did I know that by the end of my trip I'd be looking back on that first flight with them as a golden age, but that's another story for another time, and I don't want to get ahead of myself. Beijing is an odd city, and it's just about the most welcoming huge city I've ever visited, if that makes any sense.. There are some cities, mainly places like Mumbai or Cairo, which are so daunting that it is almost hard to leave the airport, at least on your first time there. Beijing is huge, but laid out in a very rational fashion, which also, sadly, means that a lot of the history has been bulldozed - a lot of the chaos of a big city is, by definition, history. There are taxis everywhere and, unlike the Middle East where every trip is an adventure in negotiating, all the cabs automatically turn on the meter and will print you off a receipt (I'm sure this is a direct result of the Olympics coming to China). I stayed in the Beijing Friendship Hotel, which is right across the street from a very modern department store and which is surrounded by a ton of restaurants and shops. If you were walking along the street you could easily just think that you were in any large American city, and that was especially jarring coming in directly from the Middle East. The Chinese seem to have adapted much more easily and readily to the west than you ever see in the Middle East. I saw no one wearing any thing remotely "traditional" and most of the women favored very short skirts. There are a lot of great places to eat, some of which are very expensive - mainly the first place that I visited with my friend Craig, a hotpot place that was our first meal in Beijing - but others are which are very reasonable. I'm including an early picture - one of a street scene walking back from a restaurant. I'll include a lot more pictures later on, especially from the time I spent outside of Beijing, but this will get me started.

On the Train Again

This is an odd little section of this trip in that I am going to be on trains a lot, as I hop around between, mainly, Bratislava, Vienna and Budapest, which is fine because the European train system is so fantastic. I just finished several days at a conference in Ruzemberok, Slovakia, as well as visiting the Catholic University there. First off, I can say without hesitation that it is the best I have ever been treated at a conference - they were fantastic - including devoting all of the weekend after the conclusion of the conference driving the featured speakers around Slovakia on a tour. I will try and post some pictures later. Last night my new friends Janka, Katarina and Nora took a break from the touring to drive me over to Poprot (including taking a detour into Poland so that I could enter it into my list of countries visit) to put me on a sleeper train. I took the sleeper train to Bratislava, where I switched trains and I'm on my way to Vienna, and then I'll switch trains again and head down to Klagenfurt in southern Austria.

Leaving Lanzhou

I'm still alive, just a victim of the dreaded Chinese Internet firewall - which blocks access to blogspot (although, oddly, not Facebook). I've moved on to Europe, and am currently on a train heading from Bratislava out into the Slovakian countryside to present at a conference in Rezemberok. The countryside is beautiful and, not surprisingly, looks much like the Austrian and especially Hungarian areas that I'm more familiar with. I didn't see much of Bratislava, just a taxi ride from the airport to the train station, but it seemed pretty seedy - although, to be fair, don't all areas around all train stations seem seedy? It's a universal phenomenon.

It's amazing to think that yesterday at 4:30 Beijing time (and all of China, huge country that it is, is on Beijing time - which meant that in far western China it was still light at 11:30 at night, although they are "unofficially" on a two hour time difference, but I'll try and explain that one later) I was waking up in Lanzhou, China and now I'm on a train in the middle of Slovakia. It wasn't easy, of course. The trip from Beijing to Frankfurt was two hours late, which meant that I missed my connecting flight last night. However, Air China, not being an American airline, just apologized and paid for a hotel and a couple meals. This morning started out a little rough when Czech Airlines didn't have any record of my reservation from Prague to Bratislava (related somehow to me being late and missing my flight and Air China cancelling one flight and not the other, and it being my responsibility to cancel the second one - very confusing) and said there was nothing to be done other than buy a new ticket - so I just lapsed into my persona of large angry American and refused to move until they fixed the problem. Eventually I was granted some special dispensation and everything was taken care of, although took close to an hour and a half.

I'll fill in the China story, which was amazing, now that I'm free of the firewall.