Tag along

A few weeks ago Chenchen invited me to accompany her to a famous scenic area about 45 minutes from here call Xikou (shee-koe). Chenchen and I are the two people responsible for the new product development here, but of the people I associate with on a day-to-day basis, her English is the worst, we rarely use any at all so it looked like a good opportunity for us to practice some critical vocab. Still she is friendly and patient and we both respect each other’s job function despite each of our limited understanding of each other’s processes and specific duties. Her boyfriend is a guide at Xikou and she, knowing I like to the outdoors, invited me along. That morning we met at the bus stop and another coworker, Weiwei, Chenchen’s roommate showed up to. They’re both known around the office to be very fashionable, but I couldn’t help but crack up a bit when I saw their outfits – I’m taking learning about Chinese tastes seriously so I kept it to myself. I once before made an attempt to ride to Xikou, but couldn’t figure out how to get there w/o getting on an interstate so turned back, turns out I had just missed a small connecting road under the new interstate. Have I mentioned before that it's been difficult finding any decent maps of the area?

As I was hiking back from the historic house I passed one of the man-made ponds and noticed two pigs nervously moving about at the end of a sagging plank over the water. A handler was yelling furiously at them, when one finally slid in, the other jumped in. The pigs then swam the length of the pond to a built-in pathway back to their pen. I was a little sad to see them run from their handler after they got out, but I couldn't resist the photo op of such a strange (even the others agreed) show.

Once we got to the main entrance the two of them went to a barbeque and I went for a hike with three people who we shared our van with along a long winding road to the main tourist area and entrance. The trails weren’t particularly exciting, just sidewalks leading through the forest, but there weren’t many people out and it was clean and cool so was pleasant. My three new friends were all living in Ningbo, one was a banker, the other a lawyer and the other in the clothing business. Their English was okay so they were able to help me with some business vocabulary and answered questions I had about business practices in China, especially hiring etc. At the top of a series of trails was an old large house ChanghaiChek used to live in (the leader who was defeated by Mao and escaped to Taiwan). Again, not to exciting, but pleasant. The most interesting part was his bomb shelter behind the house.

You fill in the caption. “Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff…”

Back with Chenchen and Weiwei on the way back to the town of Xikou we stopped at a Buddhist temple and tourist attraction. Unfortunately we weren’t able to stop at any of the waterfalls or cliffs I’d seen on the tourist guides, but I was in no position to complain being their guest. Here are a couple pictures of the outside the gates.

I didn’t know before, but they both had some devotion to Buddhism. They mostly clowned around with the different sculptures, the 1000+ year old tree, but they did the kneel – bow – routine in front of the big golden Buddha. Since then I’ve been reading up on it more to try to understand the significance of a few common features are, for example most of the temples are pained a pleasant mustard color. So, not without a little smirking and clowning, they lit some incants and put it in ash-filled object (anybody know what it’s called?), did some prayers (another point I don’t understand, isn’t Buddism non-theistic?) and even started to go in to the ceremony. While this is a tourist attraction, it is also an active monastery. There was a ‘church service’ most of the time we were there (not sure what else to call it, my vocabulary reflects my Christian frame of reference) complete with the singing and steady drumming which reminded me of music I’ve heard from Catholic monks. I broke the rules and snuck a picture of the Buddha who was alone in another building, but they didn’t mind us taking pictures as long as it wasn’t disruptive. I didn’t want to be disrespectful of them, but a few still smirked at the camera. We walked around the back of the building and saw this jolly looking wooden carving, the craftsmanship was quite impressive. From there they wanted to go in to the meeting. I didn’t want to go in and in my clamoring for a good explanation, I meant to say “it would be disrespectful for me, not a Buddhist to go in and not participate” but it came as more of an embarrassed refusal, so I unintentionally kept them from going in.

This wooden Buddha statue showed quite a high level of craftsmanship. It was at the back of the main temple where I balked at my invitation to enter.

The layout of many of these compounds, especially the older ones (this one was 1500 years old!!!) is a rectangular wall sometimes with a moat, small rooms around the sides and a couple of large buildings in the middle housing the statues etc. Similar to the forbidden city, though there the god was the emperor. The monks lived in these small rooms and in one with a the windows open, or the top half of the wall open was a long table lined with about a dozen rhythmically practicing reading the old scripts with one tapping a rhythm on a gourd at the end.














Last week, I’m writing this about three weeks after the fact was Weiwei’s last week at Shijia. She’s moving to Shanghai to study English for a year so she can pass the TOFL a pre-req for a fashion/apparel school in Singapore she plans to attend.

(Yes, that is a Nascar hat)

My New Favorite Place in Town

My new favorite place in (or maybe just very near) Fenghua is a park on the western edge of town, the entrance of which is about a mile from my door. At night you can easily see a radio tower stung with lights that stands at the top of a steep hill, it kinda reminds me of the Eiffel Tower. The steep base of the hill is precisely where the city stops and the fauna starts. The terrain here is very flat, like the Mississippi delta, and the hills are generally abrupt and very steep. The park is covered in trees with the exception of an old mansion and a couple of old style gazebos. Though it’s not a long run it is still quite a challenge to make it to the top without stopping. It took me a few tries to find my way up through the maze of paths, up the endless stairs. On the far side of the park is a saddle where I usually continue my run by climbing over a wall to get on another trail up long ridge traveling north.

The first photos is from the park looking up the ridge, the second is a photo from part of the way up the hill on the far side of the park looking down on the park and the city. While I’m aware that this isn’t the most beautiful spot around I was thrilled to find a place so close to town, where I can so quickly be away from everyone, get some fresh air and a real challenge.

The trail up the ridge was probably first made by porters carrying the components for power line towers up the ridge. The second time I ran in the park was early in the morning and I found out why the trail looked so worn, when, during my previous trip in the afternoon I hadn’t seen anyone else there. From before dawn until after 7:15, the latest I’ve been there in the morning, it is swarming with old people. They are walking quickly and pacing about, doing high kicks, taichee, stretching etc. Every low wall in the park had a few people with one heel propped up on it stretching their hamstrings. They’re considerate and it was very different from the dreaded hoards of school children I occasionally encounter, I’ve since learned to avoid the schools. I didn’t see anyone there I would guess was younger than 40, and everyone was polite. On another trip in the afternoon a group of five or so adolescent children followed me around as I tried to figure out the trail systems (they don’t go in straight lines, otherwise I would’ve only seen them once) screaming to each other and yelling “lao wai” pointing and generally loudly trailing me. I had been trying to discreetly loose them, but I finally made a deliberate turn to them and said, “please be quiet/peaceful", using a phrase I hadn't used before. If that hadn't worked, I was ready to say “scram”, but they, without any indication of being insulted said okay and stopped following me. It was suprisingly effective and seemingly polite.

From the ridge you can get a great panorama of town, I’ve discovered a running track, and some roads I previously didn’t know existed.

I marked North, South, my apartment and the top of my company about 10km away behind some small hills, but I think photobucket downsampled the image too much to clearly see the marks. It still might give you an idea of what Fenghua looks like. My apartment is in the white building close to the center of the photo in front of the very tall, dark building. The end of my apartments, I noticed from here, look like big upside down U's.

This is the sunset from one of the points on the ridge. The trail is very rocky and steep, but has been cleared enough to offer a great view during the entire traverse. If you look closely, though maybe the down sampling from photobucket obscures it, you may see two spires on the horizon in the right center of the photo. I saw these on my attempt to ride to Xikou, but from the other side and have been trying to figure out how to get there ever since. I was very interested to notice this from the other side. It’s tough to keep your bearings of these features when w/o a map. It is quite distinct, and I’m really looking forward to climbing there.

This bare rock section of the ridge requires quite a steep hike to reach abut there were still four others at different points, chatting, stretching and meditating alone on my first morning run along it. I use run loosely here. When I first moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas I had a running goal of making it all the way up Mt. Sequoia without stopping. That’s my goal for this ridge, but I think it’s going to be a while. From an athletic standpoint it’s great to have places like this, especially when I don’t have anyone to run with to challenge me, because trying to get up this hill is guaranteed to put me in the 90% zone any day.

I later noticed from in the valley through which I view the sunset that the far side of the ridge is steeper than I thought having many bare rock faces and boulders. I'll be posting photos of that later this weekend.

This morning while running to the park I took a road up that I don't usually use, I think it's a service road, but let's me get into the park faster. All the lights in the park, including the tower, were off, it was still quite dark, but the usual older crowd was already there and grounds keepers were out. A set of double doors in a concrete wall I had never noticed next to the road were open. Because of the stark contrast between the early morning darkness the light from a square tunnel was quite noticable. The tunnel about 5' tall and wide had been cut into the rock straight into the base of the hill. It slowly curved out of sight about 80' away. I would have gone and looked around, but a man was sleeping on a cot just inside the door and my coworker, who I met for the hike up the hill wasn't interested in going in. I'll have to take a picture next time. Now that I've found cool places to run and bike, stopping to take pictures of all the cool sights seems to be my biggest slowdown. I asked her what it was used for and she said it was for safety from fires, but I suspect it was a bomb shelter, maybe that was just lost in translation.

Funny thing...

...is I can't access my own blog from here. I think it might be censored. It, as well as Myspace, quite often 'time out', almost immediately. Via proxy from the U.S. I did a breif search and if this is the case, I'm not the only one. I think I can continue to upload, knock on wood, and post because the url for the dashboard (the management page) is generic, blogger identifies me with a login and a cookie. I'm not aware of posting anything controversial, actually I've made a point to do keep it neutral but who knows, maybe I used a keyword...

So if the formatting is funny, or something else isn't right on the page, that's my card (excuse). The only means I have to Google freely (as you might have read, Google and a few other engines now self-censor to Chinese ip addresses), read some controversial news articles, or look at isrealholby.blogspot.com is by proxy, that is through a computer in the U.S. If anyone has much experience setting up proxy servers, please email to me, I currently just use the basic Remote Desktop method on my other destop pc. I haven't refined the system much yet.

The pasta man

Slicing pasta.

























The tools of the trade.














On Xiwu’s ‘restaurant row’ as I like to call think of it, I have two favorite restaurants. The first of which I am writing about here. The owner and cook is from Lanzhou, which is the capitol of the Gansu in northwestern China. You can tell by his facial features that he isn’t a Han. He also doesn’t speak the local Fenghua dialect so it’s a little easier for me to communicate with him, though he isn’t much of a talker, besides he’s too busy. He has a wife and two children there. He came here because the money is better. He also happens to be one of the four males I’ve met here that don’t smoke.

I’m not sure what it is, but there is something intriguing about his steady, hard work. I’ve noticed others watching him work, though it’s not unique to him. I’ve been to two other restaurants that sell this style of noodles (oh did I finally mention what kind of food it is) in Fenghua, though this is my favorite.

He makes two dishes, though occasionally, and it seems as though he doesn’t particularly enjoy departure from his routine, makes a noodle dish w/o the broth. I like them all. He lives in the back of the restaurant in a small room where he prepares the vegetables and also has a bunk complete with a split-cane ‘mattress’ no where near as comfortable as the ones I snubbed when shopping for my own mattress. (back to the food) The two main choices are thin or wide pasta noodles. The wide noodles are made by draping a wad of dough over a dowel and slicing off thin strips into a large pot of water he keeps boiling all day. I took the photo in the middle of the afternoon, thus the smaller container of boiling water. The slices are flipped as they are cut into the pot. The second option is a small spaghetti-sized noodle that is made by stretching the dough over and over, like taffy until it is small enough. His kneading process is quite rigorous including drawing a lump of down apart horizontally between his hands and slapping down the dough drooping down between on the table. The noodles are great, I told him if you want fresh noodles like this in the U.S. you have to go to an expensive restaurant or make them yourself. So after the noodles are cooked he uses a strainer to draw them out, and fills a bowl with broth, the noodles, cilantro, I’m guessing about two ounces of sliced beef and if you want some hot pepper sauce. Per my picky western standards it isn’t quite a balanced meal, but it’s delicious, fills you up and costs 3 RMB (yes, about $.37).

I’ve been asked what they use for fuel. Generally copious amounts of gas (I’ll post some photos in the next food entry of flames making it all the way up to the top of a wok) and coal. The coal has been pressed into cylinders and is used everywhere. Most often the gas is used for fast, very hot cooking, and the coal is used for slower cooking, keeping water hot. The coal cylinders are stacked into vertical, semi-portable stoves or dumped into the ovens. Some small restaurants (for lack of a better word) use several stacks of them to produce a very hot, intense heat source. It burns quite clean. Afterward they are discarded on the street, trash bins, etc with all the other trash. These brown ones are spent.

This is a view of the oven used to heat the coal for the walk-though breakfast I wrote about earlier, which also uses these coal casks.