Lijiang

I've shown you kids and old ladies from Lijiang, so maybe it is time to give you a little sense of Lijiang. Lijiang is located at the tail end of the Himalayas where they sort of peter out on their eastern side, it is at about 8,000 feet altitude. It was hit by a large earthquake about 15 years ago which pretty much destroyed the town except for the old quarter where all the houses were built of wood and somehow managed to ride out the quake. At that point someone realized that old Lijiang was pretty cool and that maybe they should make some attempt to keep it around, an uncommon idea in China where almost all towns and cities are being rebuilt at a frenetic pace (I've read that 70% of all tall cranes and 50% of all the cement in the world are in China, and when you are there both estimates seem low).

Here is a peak into a courtyard in Lijiang, most of the houses are built around open courts.

It had a lively market, and when we walked in the first thing on display were copper pots. If it were easy to ship home 200 pounds of stuff from Lijiang I would probably be the proud owner of various copper woks, hot pots, and other stuff. As it was I just lusted...

These women were selling walnuts, the baskets are filled with whole, shelled walnuts. The women in the back with a cleaver (a very sharp cleaver) is taking off the outside shell with 4 precise whacks, something I would not have thought possible if I hadn't seen her do it about 20 times. Not one crushed walnut to be seen. The local restaurants served the walnuts lightly fried and sugared, they went great with beer.

This gives you an overview of old Lijiang (though I just realized that this is the part made out of stone and concrete, rebuilt after the quake to look just like it had before). The streets are narrow and no cars are allowed, it is sort of a non-watery, Chinese version of Venice, I guess. It is surrounded by snow-capped peaks (even in Summer, we're told, due to glaciers), but it was overcast the whole time we were there so we didn't get to see any peaks, we'll have to go back someday.

Old Ladies in Lijiang

Well, we're 3 days into Hanoi and I'm still blogging about China, the good news is that I'm not spending much time in front of my computer, which sort of equates to work in my head, so I must be on vacation.

Anyway, to accompany the pictures of kids, here are some pictures of old ladies. The first women was carefully picking out which vegetables to buy, older men and women clearly spent more time doing this than younger customers.

This women was selling live fish and eels of various sorts, and was doing a lively business.

This woman was walking so determinedly through the market that I had to take her picture, even if only in profile. She was wearing a bandanna-like face mask over her face to protect her from pollution, a common site in China (though there was no pollution to speak of in Lijiang).

This was another common site, 2 women (or men) walking slowly together doing their morning errands. They are walking in what I think of as the distinctive Chinese style (at least for older Chinese) with their hands clasped behind their backs. Kathy and I could crack up our colleagues just by imitating this slow-gaited walk.

Kids in Lijiang

Kathy is big on me taking pictures of either kids or old people, not sure what this says about her, but it makes for some good pictures. We spent two days in the mountain town of Lijiang (of which more later), and here are some pictures of kids.

These three were on some sort of school assignment where they were asking tourists (both Chinese and non-Chinese) to write their names down in a notebook. A young teacher was silently following them around as they did it. No explanation was given for the military dress. The boy in the middle was quite happy until the moment the photo was taken, I was quite surprised out the outcome.

These kids were in class learning to write, a quite complicated task in China given the thousands of characters one needs to learn.

This was the very happy child of a vegetable vendor in the market.

Another market vendor's child, he is already learning how to go to work picking up garbage.

Odds and Ends

As you can see, I've been fiddling a bit with the layout of the blog, and I found a layout that uses the full screen width, which I like better than the narrower layout I was using, so, thanks to Google Bloggger, presto, a new look.

Another impressive part of Blogger is that it appears to be adapted to half of the languages known to man. When I was in China all of the instructions appeared as Chinese ideograms, and here in Hanoi they appear in Thai, luckily I've learned that if I hit the uppermost right hand corner it sends me back to post in our blog with English back as the primary language. Truly revolutionary I think, when people the world round can easily post their whims and ideas into a free market of thought. I wonder when they will get a Burmese version out...

Speaking of language, you haven't experienced language until you've read Chinglish, the literal translations that the Chinese use on signs all over China. Some examples:

"Beware of the landslide" - beneath a stick drawing of a man slipping on a wet floor (I mean, I know I'm a bit overweight, but a landslide?)

"Warm and Fragrant Hint" - the phrase frequently used before any behavioral request, like "Don't grind out your cigarette butts in the carpet"

"Baoshan Airport Chagning" - I think they met "changing", and were using it as we would use "exit". But this is pretty surprising considering that the freeway it was on was one of the most amazing feats of engineering I have ever seen, miles and miles of concrete cantilevered off of the side of near cliff faces, essentially bridges. Untold tens of millions of dollars (or hundreds of millions of Renmibi) to build the road and 50 cents for the sign translations.

"Genitl Emen" - signaling the way to a male toilet

Speaking of toilets... China may be booming and halfway to taking over the world, but they have to be close to dead last in toilet facilities. It is absolutely amazing how foul the average Chinese toilet manages to get over the course of time, say a day or so. I suppose it has something to do with their fondness for "night soil", i.e. fecal waste has been used a fertilizer in China for centuries. So they don't believe in pit latrines, your average rural Chinese toilet just rolls the waste out the back for easy collection by local farmers. And they still have a strong preference for squatting over sitting, so even modern sit down flush toilets tend to be disgusting because many of the people that preceded you squatted on the rim instead of sitting down.

I figured you would all want to know, remember, I wrote a page and half about Moroccan bathrooms in one of our Christmas letters a while back. It seems that toilets are something I keep track of. And you readers reap the benefits...

The "Stone Forest"

It has been a while since we've posted, and we're now in Hanoi, but I am going to try and catch us up over the next 24 hours or so. Last Monday we traveled from Kunming to Mi Le for a retreat, and we just happened to drive by the biggest tourist attraction in Yunnan Province, the UNESCO-anointed natural wonder of the world, the Stone Forest. The Chinese are really into being tourists, and they like natural stuff, so the Stone Forest is a big winner. It was as crowded as Disneyland, which you can tell from the picture below if you look closely at how many people are crowded onto the observation tower/pagoda.

The Chinese make Americans look like slugs when it comes to getting around such sites, this one was laid out in a way that it was about a 2 mile walk (minimum) to get around it, and that involved walking up and down hundreds of stone stairs. And everybody does it, teenagers (much less jaded than their American counterparts), ladies in high heels, really old grandmothers and grandfathers, I mean, everybody. Pretty impressive. The forest was formed by water eroding the limestone at different speeds, the following picture shows a pillar that had an official name (I forget what, something poetic) but it caused a lot of snickers and chuckles and everybody took a picture, because it doesn't really take a poet to figure out what it really looks like.

Between the rocks they did a very good job maintaining the gardens.

And more pillars, this was a big place, probably a mile square. The surrounding countryside was covered with smaller pillars, but for some reason they were really concentrated in this one area, much to the delight of thousands of Chinese tourists.

Tomorrow, Lijiang.

On the Road in Dehong and Tenchong Prefecture

Our first week in China was spent on a field trip with the Yunnan AIDS Care Center, the group that we fund to do PMTCT (Prevention of Maternal to Child Transmission of HIV) work in 6 counties in Yunnan Province hard up on the border with Myanmar.

This first picture shows us all in Luxi, the Prefecture seat of Dehong. The group includes those of us that flew in from Kunming and local representatives from the MCH and General hospitals. The director of the Yunnan AIDS Care Center, Dr. Zhou, is two people to the left of me. His wife, Dr. Chen, is in the red shirt over my shoulder.

The Chinese are really into cheesy touristy stuff. We had dinner in a Dai restaurant (an ethnic minority that lives in this area) and they hauled everybody up to dance afterwards. Here our translator, Haoyu, cuts the rug.

Just to show that we do some real work, at least some of the time, this is a support group for AIDS and intravenous drug user (IDU) orphans. Most are living with their grandparents and the local village doctor brought them together so that they would see that they weren't alone. They learn to sing and dance, and do various handicrafts when they meet. The girl int he middle (in the yellow jacket with blue and white trim) is HIV positive and has been on ARVs for the past 2 years. She never stopped smiling and laughing, it really puts one's own problems in perspective.

This is the same group of girls dressed in Ching-Po ethnic clothing for a village HIV Awareness Festival later that evening. 6 or 7 dance groups performed, interspersed with educational messages and some singers, two of which were reformed IDUs singing about how one shouldn't use drugs (they looked pretty beaten down, even while singing, it was probably a pretty effective message).

The two counties we visited are right next to the Myanmar border so a lot of heroin passes over as it is smuggled to the China coast to spread around the world. Enough falls off the trucks to lead to a lot of heroin addicts which is what initially drove the HIV epidemic here, the scary part is that the epidemic is now spreading into the general population.

That's all for now, we're off to dinner. There are more picture posted at http://picasaweb.google.com/cgrundmann/DehongFieldVisit/

Sunday photos from Kunming

Kathy and I took a stroll in the neighborhood around our hotel this morning to shake off jet lag. So here are some scenes of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province in Southwest China.

The local market a couple of blocks from our hotel. Sort of hidden behind the man talking to the vendor you can just see the legs of the local delicacy, black chicken, Mmm, we're going to be eating a lot of that over the next couple of weeks, the guest of honor always gets to eat the best part, the head and the feet...

We strolled through Kunming University, a rather idyllic setting.

From the university we walked over to Green Lake, along with thousands of Kunming residents out for their Sunday constitutionals. This photo is looking back towards our hotel, which is the building with the sort of flying sauce bar on the top.

And what would a Chinese park be without a group of people doing Tai Chi? What I have never figured out that is Tai Chi seems to be practiced solely by people over the age of 60, but everybody seems to know how to do it (this group was all moving together). Where and when do people learn Tai Chi?

So we'll be blogging away fairly regularly on this trip. We leave in a few hours for Luxi, the capital of Dehong prefecture. I'll take photos every day, and we'll post when we have an internet connection.