slowly, slowly

Slowly, Slowly

29 September 2010

Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region, China

There are 890 UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the world. This morning I saw my 29^th, “the Historical Ensemble of the Potala Palace.” Potala Palace and Drepung Monastery.

When I woke up, I felt the altitude. I had taken my first Diamoxx on the plane. I think the Diamoxx is helping because I haven’t yet felt like I did when I got altitude sickness in Peru, but it certainly is no golden ticket. Before we left the Cool Yak Hotel, I went back upstairs to grab something and my head started throbbing.

So, as we stood at the base of Potala Palace, looking up, I asked our guide, Bemba, “How many elevators are there?”

He didn’t get it.

The seven of us climbed the 460 steps at varying speed. I tied for last. One of my companions who had recently climbed Mount Kilimanjaro told us their guides taught them a mantra for climbing the mountain without inciting the evils of altitude sickness: “Poli, poli.”

“Slowly, slowly.”

Slowly, slowly, I reached the top: 3,490 meters.

Our guide’s English made the laundry list of Buddhas and Boddhivistas extremely hard to follow, but the chambers were beautiful. We slipped in and out of them through colorful door curtains covered in geometric doodles, passing over terraces and into yet another chamber of another blessed being.
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On the way out, he explained ༀམཎིཔདྨེཧཱུྃ། or “om mani beh meh hung.” Bemba’s translation left me thinking it meant something along the lines of a plea not to be sent to hell. After looking it up in all-knowing Wikipedia, I’m not sure it was so simple, but at any rate, it is a beautiful spiritual phrase plastered and heard all over Tibet.

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I asked Bemba to take us out to a Tibetan club, and, oh, did he! Yves ordered a bottle of whiskey, and Bemba had a shot but later blamed that one taste for his entire hangover. The bottle of whiskey was befriended by several cases of Tibetan beer. Bemba invited several Tibetan girls to keep us company, and my Brazilian friend resorted to tickling as a flirting tactic after none of his languages made any headway.

The club had a show, which was performed in front of an image of Potala Palace that covered the wall from floor to ceiling. First there were traditional Tibetan dances, with women and men dancing in tandem in wildly colored outfits and sometimes exceptional hats. One of the hats looked like a dislodged part of Angkor Wat. Then singular singers took turns singing songs in Tibetan. When a singer sings a song you really like in Memphis neighborhood blues clubs, you walk up to the singer while they are singing and hand them cash. In Tibet, you walk up to them in the midst of their song, but you drape a silvery Tibetan prayer scarf around their shoulders. The best singer of the night finished what seemed to be a classic with about a dozen scarves draping him.

Both the acts and the singers were really good. But neither were anywhere near as good as the Tibetan square dancing that followed.

The moves were surprisingly hard, but the real Tibetans were all but ignoring the imposter Westerners, so I was hardly noticed when I really stared and tried to copy my Tibetan brethren. Finally I got one, though it was by far the easiest of the night and made the Macarena look like a Viennese waltz. Regardless, I cannot describe how upset I was when my companions led me off the floor to go home right after I’d conquered my first Tibetan dance moves.

Pictures: Potala Palace (3: front, back, and back with prayerwheels); Drepung Monastery (3: roof, colorful columns, monk with gong); Tibetan ladies chatting in the market; om mani beh meh hung in a wall near Potala Palace; Tibetan nightclub (2: Tibetan dance, Tibetan singer just given prayer scarf) --- Unfortunately Tibetan square dancing is not pictured.

Vamos á Lhasa

Vamos á Lhasa

28 September 2010

Lhasa, Tibet Autonomous Region, China

This morning, Carissa and Greg picked me up in a taxi, and we headed to Pudong Airport. There we met with our fellow travelers, Yves from Switzerland, Richard from Melbourne, Felipe from Brazil. Check-in was only complicated by the fact that Richard’s passport number had been listed by his booking website as “123456789.” This was potentially a big deal. The gate agent told Richard he had to call the booking agent (which conveniently does not seem to have a phone number, or at any rate not one that is listed on their confirmation email). At length, we convinced the gate agent to change it in his own computer, and we were left to wonder why he wouldn’t do that in the first place if he could… at any rate, the lessons learned were 1) make sure your passport number is right when you travel in China and 2) if you do not like the first answer, ask and ask again.

The second slight complication was that our permits to enter Tibet were actually one permit covering all six of us. This was lesson three of the day: travel together if you are headed to Tibet and make sure no one misses the plane! (Alternatively, make sure the agency provides divisible permits.)

We had a layover in Xi’an, a place I would like to revisit. For now, though, I can report that the Xi’an airport had great noodles and horrible beer. It tasted like carbonated dirty water and had big bubbles like happy Heidsieck. Anyway, it’s a good thing about the great noodles because the airplane food was less edible than any I’ve ever seen, with the exception of the Haibao dessert cake.

The views into Lhasa were beautiful, though the mountains didn’t challenge my memories of flying over the Andes in Peru. What I’ll remember more vividly is the wide, muddy, and seemingly shallow rivers coming from slivers between mountains into a superhighway that we followed to the airport. On the banks, families of birches were green and turning yellow, and there was not one boat to be seen. Up here in the middle of the Himalayas, the river looked like a delta fanning out before it meets the sea.

Our guide, Bemba, greeted us with white Tibetan scarves and led us to our van, which looked like something Jerry Garcia would love. Our driver’s name was also Bemba, which means Saturday in Tibetan. We stopped at one sacred place on the way into town, and there we checked into the Cool Yak Hotel. For dinner that night we went to a Tibetan steak house and tried yak for the first time. Richard ordered best, and his yak steak tasted as good as a fine beef steak. After dinner, we went to a bar called Texas Bar, where some of the guys took burning shots while country music played. Then Yves impressed me by taking the guitar off the wall and playing the blues. We could have been anywhere.

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Pictures: Team Tibet; the view flying into Lhasa (2); inedible airplane food with one adorable and yummy Haibao dessert cake (Haibao is the mascot of the Shanghai World Expo); guitar waiting on the wall at Lhasa's Texas Bar

Pho Real

Pho Real

23-26 September 2010

Shanghai, China

This week was mostly spent preparing job applications mixed in with some paid work --- which entails reading articles on investment anomalies and summarizing them. Alongside these real world efforts, I dropped into habits for the week, and each day I went on a run through the French Concession and ate at my latest favorite Vietnamese place, Pho Real.

One other very exciting thing happened: I broke through the Great Chinese Firewall! I did this by buying a personal VPN from Witopia for about $60 for the year (no monthly option). Now, when I open Internet Explorer, it opens to Google Netherlands because my computer thinks I’m in Amsterdam. (With the personal VPN, I get to choose to connect to a VPN from a long list of cities around the world.)

It was a funny feeling to sign into the facebook for the first time in a month and, more importantly, I was able to access my blog myself. (Before this point, I was emailing blog entries to a friend, who was then posting them.) This also allowed me to check my blog stats for the first time, and it was particularly interesting to see where the audience is. For the last month, I had the following hits:

Past Month Blog Hits
United States	247
Spain	90
United Kingdom	22
Netherlands	15
France	10
Japan	9
Germany	5
Canada	4
China	3
Cambodia	3

When I just looked at hits for today, Romania, Denmark, and Hong Kong also come up.

Anyway, back to the real world. The result of the week’s efforts were that I submitted 15 job applications, mostly for management consulting. Fingers crossed. I am trying to follow my friend Hardy’s advice: “Find a job so we can travel around China.”

Job Hunting Holiday

Job Hunting Holiday
22 September 2010

Mid-Autumn Festival

Shanghai, China<>
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Yesterday I was supposed to go to Beijing. But my job applications are due this Sunday, and I am not as far along on them as I needed to be to finish in Beijing. So I called Hardy and cancelled with apologies and ate the $50 train ticket. I will go to Beijing in November instead.
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Today was a perfect quotidian day. I was productive working on my job applications that are due this weekend, and I went on a nice run around my neighborhood. I was warned not to expect to go running outdoors in Shanghai, due to the number of people and level of pollution, but I had a nice jog. It may have helped that it was overcast and occasionally drizzling, but it was a nice run. I had gone to the fantastic Vietnamese place down the street, Pho Real, for lunch but the serving was enough to act as dinner as well, so I finished that meal before meeting up with Monica and company to go to the Expo. It was my first time at the Expo. I only made it to two pavilions, Chile and Australia. I also got my photo taken outside of the USA pavilion. At the Chile pavilion, there is a great wine bar, though we did not pick a great wine. We also had empanadas and mini pisco sours. There we met a throng of Chileans, acquired Chile flags, and joined forces to attend the party at the Australian pavilion. It was meant to be for Expo staff only, but a friend of a friend got us in. It was good times and great oldies, even if the night was more Chile than down under.

It is a holiday in China, the Mid-Autumn Festival, which includes three days off. I should probably eat a mooncake, though I tried one a few weeks ago and was not particularly taken by them. Yesterday was incredibly busy, and there was far more traffic in the streets than I have seen yet, but today was peaceful and one had the feeling many more people left Shanghai than came for the holiday. No stores or restaurants I tried to visit had closed for the holiday.

In China, if you have a mid-week holiday, you work on the weekend to make up for it. So much for well-timed holidays making for long weekends! Luckily, I am not effected by this scheduling phenomenon at school and do not have class again until Monday.

Pictures: with the Wake Forest crew at the USA Pavilion; viva Chile (for this week's edition of it's a small world, the Chilean in the picture happens to be the nephew of my econ professor/the head of my MBA program back in Barcelona)

Tibet Trip Planning

Tibet Trip Planning

20 September 2010

Shanghai, China

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Apart from a weariness about group tours in general, I was reminded today of how fun planning stuff for a group of people you don’t know well can be. Even though we’ve already bought expensive one-way tickets to Lhasa, the number of people changed twice today, including a guy bailing complaining about a minor price variance --- a guy who works at a prestigious consulting firm in his real life and was recently overhead boasting that a Japan trip was fine as long as it “wasn’t more than 5,000 Euros.” Oh, the joys of planning travel for near strangers.

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The frustrations planning a trip to Tibet are many. First of all, the economy class tickets cost 2760 Renminbi. No deals. No early bird specials. No student rate. Each leg to Tibet simply costs about $400. You pay or you take the train. When the economy tickets run out, you can pay about double to fly first class. These prices haven’t changed since my old China Let’s Go guide was printed in 2004. How’s that for economic planning?

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The second frustration is that you can only travel in Tibet on an organized tour. The good news is that the norm is private tours, for which you have a small group and a car, driver, and guide, and you go on an itinerary of your choice. The bad news is that the devils in the details. Somehow we went unknowingly from a Land Cruiser chariot to some sort of minivan, but Tibet will still be Tibet…

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The group, however, albeit mostly unknown, seems to be a good group. It includes six exchange students at CEIBS from [xx] different schools, including London Business School and Wharton. Everyone seems like they’ll be fun to get to know, and it’s a good thing, because the train back from Lhasa to Shanghai takes 51 hours. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who loves trains. This fall that is being put to the test.

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We are using a tour agency called Access Tibet Tours and here is our itinerary:

Calendar	Transportation	Distance for driving/km	Program	Accommodation
2010-9-28	Arrive in Lhasa	70	Airport pick up	Cool Yak Hotel
2010-9-29	Lhasa City Tour	80	Jokhang temple/Potala palace/Drepung monastery	Cool Yak Hotel
2010-9-30	Lhasa-Ganden monastery-Lhasa	130	Ganden monastery, Drak yerpa	Cool yak Hotel
2010-10-1	Lhasa-Yamdrok lake-Lhasa	250	Karola glacier/yamdrok lake/ Visit a Tibetan family on the way	Cool Yak hotel
2010-10-2	Lhasa city tour	80	Sera monastery/ Ani Sangkhung Nunnery tea house/ a short hiking into Tibet nature	Cool yak hotel
2010-10-3	Lhasa- Namtso lake	250	Namtso lake, Yampachen hot spring	Tent or local guesthouse
2010-10-4	Namtso lake-Lhasa	250	Shot the sunrise of Namtso lake	Cool Yak Hotel
2010-10-5	Take train to Shanghai	30	Airport transfer

A: The suggested itinerary based on 6 PAX is RMB 4645 (equal to US$693) per person. It is based on 2 Four Wheel drive vehicles.

B: The suggested itinerary based on 6 PAX is RMB 3858 (equal to US$576) per person. It is based on 1 Minivan

Now your mind might be racing with all sorts of questions about these places… mine certainly is. It’s also racing thinking about what sorts of new birds I can see in Tibet…

Water Town

Water Town

19 September 2010

Nan Xun, Zhejiang, China

CEIBS invited the exchange students on a trip to one of the so-called water towns near Shanghai. We met at CEIBS at around 9 AM and loaded into two buses for a two-hour ride to Nan Xun. It was a beautiful day, and it gave me the chance to get to know a few more people on exchange.

On the way there, we were treated to a Chinese lunch. (See pictures.)

Nan Xun is in Zhejiang Province, one of the two provinces that abuts Shanghai municipality. It is built around a series of canals and is linked by stone bridges. It was established in the 8^th century and at one point bustled with the silk trade. It also boasts the largest calligraphy brush in existence!

We toured several old mansions. In one there was a man with no arms who was painting beautiful fans with his feet. I bought two, a folding one with two swallows on it and a stiff fan with a beautiful green bird leaning back like a nuthatch. For me, the most beautiful sight was the large lotus pond, though I would have liked it even better if there had been a chill bar on its perimeter instead of a vacant tea house. I also really enjoyed our boat ride through the canals. My first boat ride in China!

Pictures: large lotus pond, lunch on the way, Nan Xun canal, the Fan Man, ecl at the gate, my new lotus leaf hat, the best spot to photograph, ecl at the small lotus pond