You have to go there

I got back from my trip to china yesterday and am now hit with severe jetlag, wide awake at 5 in the morning.

China was amazing.

It’s like discovering a whole new Europe or a whole new US, full of amazing places and scenes and attractions I knew nothing about. China is so… I don’t know what I was expecting – big cities and rice fields and that’s all, I guess. But it’s a whole other culture thjat is as old and rich as the whole western culture is. and we knew nothing about it. We covered in our trip and area almost equal to the whole of western Europe – imagine flying for a 3 week trip that included, for instance, the Fjords in Norway, Venice, London, Tuscany, Paris, Prague, Provance and Barcelona – with all of them being completely new to you – you’d never even heard of any of them. That’s how this trip was. People have been writing poems about the beauty of Gueilin as long as they’ve been writing them about Jerusalem. But I didn’t even know there was a Guelin.

And the Chinese…. I was expecting, I guess, a nation of people who would look all the same to me, and would be all dressed in the same kind of blue wool vests and look like Chinese harvard students… well, surprise surprise, there are as many kinds of chinese "looks" than there are western looks. There are so many colors and shapes and styles of Chinese faces and bodies, and yes – they all have the distinctive eyes, but that’s pretty much it. We met amazingly good hearted, helpful people, and also a bunch of liars and crooks – I guess every country has them. If someone from China is reading this they’re probably like "well, what did you expect, you weird forgeiner…". But I jus didn’t know anything about China, so I didn’t really know what to expect.

We landed in Beijing and Immediately we realized that hardly anyone speaks english and there are no signs in English at all. Hardly an English map from which most of the small streets have gone missing…  We had to go step by step by what the lonely planet (actually, the "rough guide") said to do. It took us a bus, a metro and a taxi to get to our hotel. Bejing is h-u-g-e and very hard to get around… you start walking and find out it’s going to take hours… and how can you get on a bus when you can’t ask anyone if it’s actually going to where you want and where you should get off? Becaus of the different accents, even if you do know how to say "the forbidden palace" in Chinese, no one will understand you…

The thing is with being a tourist in China – there are always, anywhere, a hundred million more local tourists (chinese from other areas of the country) than foreign tourists. So why bother learning English, why make signs in English? Some Even in museums there aren’t always signs in English telling you what the place is. So it was a very visual trip as opposed to conceptual. I saw many beautiful things but hardly understood any meanings. I actually know very little about Chineese culture and ways of life considering the time I spent there. I know how to travel in China but not how to live in China. I know how to deal with Chinese but not what’s going through their minds. I understood pretty early in the trip that it’s no use to try to understand why this guy is climbing the mountain backwards or what made that slaeslady mad at us… so I stopped trying to understand. It actually gave my mind a rest for a few weeks, which was nice.
Our hotel in Beijing was, thank god, in an excelent location near one of the more fassionable streets. We arrived at 18:00 or so and there were maybe a million chinese young people just in this street… The street itself was full of all of the big American and European brands… nine west, starbucks… but then when you turn a corner… a tiny little street full of food stalls that actually sell boiled mice on a stick and all kinds of edible insects. We bought a vegetarian dumpling at one of the stalls and I asked Nir to give me a bite of the onion and he said "onion? I think it’s mosquito wings" and I just spat the thing out so fast…. It was embarassing.

The chinese people in Beijing dress amazing and the clothes in the shops are amazing. . They have their hair cut in all kinds of weird ways. I guess it’s how you deal with being one in 1.2 billion all with straight black hair. I stood out with my brown hair like a lantern.  The chinese young people seemed obssesed with hair – one of every three shops is a barbar shop. all open through the middle of the night. And then there are shops that sell only combs! a hundred different kinds! And the girls actually stand there and pick out exactly the right comb, very seriously. 

In most cities we visited, the nightlife (rather – evening life) was amazing. The streets completely full of people at 11 pm, most of the shops are open until 11pm … every street looks like a main street – a combination of stalls selling fried i-don’t-know-and-I-don’t-want-to know and the kids with the high tech haircuts and wearing nike…

It”s very difficult to get fed in China. Everything seems full of frogs or dogs… or it’s really oily or it’s very spicy. Very difficult to get breakfast. The food is yummy but it’s hard to eat when you have no idea what you are getting, or what it will eventually taste like, when everything is fried together in a big pot, no matter what. We discovered that a lot of what we enjoy about food is getting the taste we expect. A lot of good food was wasted on us because we got something sweet when craving something salty or the opposite… eventualy we’d go for a fruit or vegetable.. because a banana is always a banana. What you see is (usually) what you get. It was a relief to figure that part out. So at the end of the trip we were pretty well fed, though we still always made a mess with the chopsticks and ate the wrong things in the wrong order and everyone laughed at us….

October has great weather all around China, but what’s up with the smog? Beigin was smoggy. Xian was smoggier yet… you look up and there’s no sky. It all filth. Some of the cities are beautiful, and then on the outskirts you see "suburbs" that look like they’ve been through a nuclear war – smog and stink. We went through some of the stinkiest filthiest places i’ve seen in my life. 100 different kinds of industrial stink. I can’t be possible that this filth exists and the world doesn’t do anything about it. i’m sure people who live there are dying young. It made me semi-comitted to environmentalism. It seems like there’s no getting around it – populations will rise, people will create pollution and at some point – none of use will see a blue sky ever again. Unless we’re very very careful. And even then we’re probably just putting it off, not solving the problem.
 
On the happy environmental front, there is a lot of effort going into conserving endangered animal species. We saw amazing animals on this trip – monkeys and pandas (Maddie, I have a picture of a red panda just for you….) and frogs and squirrels and birds and gigantic butterflies – all a little bit different than what we’re used to

It was a wonderful honey moon. We didn’t almost have time to do any honey-moonish things, because there was so much to do outside, but for most of the trip we got along very well, wanted the same things and were very considerate of each other, so I think we built a very good beginning for a good marriage. (Though there were parts at the end of the trip where I found myself talking in this cynical tone that my dad uses that I hate… I hope i never ge sucked up into that mindframe again, but it just goes to show how much peple do pick up from their parents involountarily).

It’s very very difficult to get back to life’s time constraints and work pressures. It’s sad to say there was very little I missed about my Israeli life after 3 and a half weeks. I would have gladly gone on for 3 more. I think I missed most my privacy… just being alone. and my friends and family, and that’s pretty much it. Coming back to our house was weird. I feels so big after those tiny hotel rooms, and for a minute it fealt like not really my house. Yeah, I have a green door in the kitchen. I didn’t remember that….

 I spent my time there re-evaluating my life and thinking of a few changes I want to make… I hope I’ll be up to it. I want to worry less, take things easy, do only one thing at one time and stop ripping myself in a million different directions. I want to stop listening to the news and advertisements… more music. I want to be more focused at wor so I can be more free in my spare time. This has nothing to with China but more with seeing my life from a differnet perspctive. From the outside. The next time I go away for so long, I want to miss my life more…