In their ineffable wisdom, the wonks at Google allow you to upload photos to Picasaweb via email. All you need to do is go to Picasaweb’s settings and set up a secret email addy. Then you can emails to that address with photos as attachments. The subject line is the name of an existing album.

Sweet!

Because China is blocking Picasaweb and Blogger, both Google services, I have had a hell of time uploading to my Picasaweb albums. For a while, I could upload using Picasa 3, the desktop application, then mysteriously uploads would constantly fail. Either the uploads would stall, or I would get the message, “This account is not enabled for web albums.” First, I suspected a bug in Picasaweb (like THAT would ever happen!), but it appears some service or port is being blocked by the Great Firewall of China.

I can use the latest version of Ultrasurf (v.9.98) to climb the Great Firewall, and access Picasaweb to edit photos and such, but uploads would still fail, either from Picasa 3 or on the website itself. Timeout problems, or connection problems because of the proxy service.

So, as they say, RTFM. I went to the help pages, and lo! You can email your pix to Picasaweb. Duh. I should guesed that.

It’s pretty slow, since I can only send 20 MB at a time (about 10 pix), but at least I can do it. I paid for 80 GB of storage space at Picasaweb, and I’ve barely scratched it.

I’m in the last few days of my summer break. We returned from Beijing on the 23rd. Vanilla and the Americans went to Jishou, while Sally and I stayed in Changde to see the sights. As it turns out, since Sally is from a neighboring town, Hanshou, she is not very familiar with Changde at all. Normally, she travels from the bus station to the train station when traveling between JiDa and home. So, she asked a classmate of hers (whom she hadn’t seen in five years) to be our tour guide.

I wanted to the see Poetry Wall, which people say is quite a marvel, but it was undergoing renovation at the time. We visited Binhu Park and Liuye Lake, though. Both were quite nice, even in the light rain.


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Since returning to JiDa, I’ve helped the American family get settled — their daughter started school today as the only foreign student in the entire school — and prepared for classes, which start Monday. Another task is to proofread a friend’s master’s thesis by Saturday. It’s 14,000 words and I’m about halfway through. She’s a 2009 graduate from our college, now at the University of Durham in the UK.

So, my last week of vacation is pretty filled up with work. Nothing new there.

The Birds Nest at night

Though we had all gone to bed in the wee hours Thursday, we were all surprisingly alert by 9 am. First up, a walking trip to the Bank of China east of the hotel to exchange American greenbacks for Chinese yuan. Then, we took a not-so-successful trip to price cell phones in Zhongguancun 中关村, got lunch at Pizza Hut, and visited Yuanmingyuan 圆明园, which is a short subway ride away.

Yuanmingyuan, also known as the Old Summer Palace, was the site of the Imperial Gardens, which the British and French ransacked and burned to the ground in 1860 during the Second Opium War. Now, the Gardens of Perfect Brightness are one of Beijing’s many tourist attractions, and Westerners — even British and French ones — are welcome to visit.

Friday was our day to visit the Forbidden City. Though Sally, Vanilla and I had been to Tian’anmen Square twice so far, we saved the Forbidden City for the new teachers’ arrival. The Imperial Palace, as it is also known, is a huge place; a thorough visit would take two full days at least. We lasted only a few hours. Between the hot sun, the huge crowds, and wacked-out sleep schedules, all six of us were pretty tired after seeing only a fraction of the grounds. Besides, we also wanted to shop in Xidan 西单 and see the Water Cube and Birds Nest before calling it a day … um, night.

By the way, all of these sights are easily accessible by subway. We all had fare cards, which you can recharge when they run low on funds. The subway costs 2 yuan with cash or card, but the buses, which usually cost 1 yuan, are only 4 jiao (0.40 yuan) with the fare card. So, you don’t really need a lot of cash to navigate Beijing. Since we were all really tired from Friday’s excursions, I put us in two taxis for the trip from the Birds Nest back to the hotel. That fare was just 19 yuan for each cab.

On Saturday, it rained pretty heavily, and the newcomers were too pooped to go out, anyway. So we all stayed in the hotel and watched HBO and the BBC, which lucky Beijingers can get, at least in international hotels.

Blessedly, the weather cleared Sunday. We all agreed we would visit the Great Wall come rain or shine, but sunshine made the excursion much more pleasurable. We were all really excited about going, even me! My friend Orchid, who works in Beijing, had the day off and joined us, so seven happy people took the #919 bus to Badaling.

The cheapest way to get to Badaling is to ride the #919 bus, which with a fare card costs 12 yuan each way. (It’s 40 yuan cash money, though.) These buses leave from Deshengmen 德胜门 as soon as they are full, which doesn’t take long in tourist season. If you don’t mind standing on a crowded bus, it’s cheap and convenient.

After our return, Orchid, Sally and Vanilla went to eat Chinese food, and we Americans went to a trendy little eatery near the hotel, called Planet Cherry, where they like K-pop stars (Korean pop stars) a lot. The place is packed with CD covers, key chains, concert ticket stubs and posters, and the TV shows K-pop music videos all day. The food was really good, even if you don’t know one Korean singer from another.

Monday was our departure day. Vanilla, Sally and I had some chores to do in the morning, so we pried ourselves out of bed by 7:00 to return our fare cards (and get our deposits back), find a cheap breakfast, and find some Peking duck to take back with us. (Five times to Beijing, and I still hadn’t tasted Peking duck!)

Here’s one indication I’ve been in China a while. I actually preferred a Chinese breakfast to the Western-style offered at the hotel. For 30 yuan at the hotel, you could get waffles, eggs and so on, or for 4 yuan, you could get steamed buns (baozi), porridge or beef noodles at one of the shops nearby. Vanilla and Sally of course preferred Chinese style, both for the price and the taste, so in the mornings I usually accompanied them. Our breakfast Monday morning was from a street vendor, who served up a better tasting version of a sausage-and-egg biscuit than the KFC and McDonalds places nearby.

By the way, Peking duck costs 22 yuan ($3, roughly) at a Beijing specialty food store called Daoxiangcun — just in case you get the chance to shop there. (Hat tip to Orchid.)

Our flight to Changde was uneventful. We were met at the airport by Mr Qin, who took the newcomers and Vanilla back to JiDa in time for a huge dinner at the school hotel. Sally and I stayed behind to tour Changde a little before we both headed home. My duties as a tour guide were now over, and I gratefully put myself in the capable hands of my hostess for the next day.

Team JiDa prepares for takeoff

Hoo boy.

A few months ago, my son told me he was going to visit me in China, so I advised him to come in through Beijing. Shortly afterward, I learned that Max, Karen and daughter Haley would be coming to Jishou U. So, I suggested they could arrive about the time my son would leave from Beijing, so I could drop him off and pick them up. Instead, ticket prices rose, and James couldn’t come this year, but I decided to stick to the second part of the plan and visit Beijing anyway.

While I was riding around in a car in Anhui province the week before, I was chatting on QQ. The foreign affairs office at JiDa wants us to fly in and out of Changde now, instead of Changsha, since the Changde airport (though small) is two hours closer to Jishou than Changsha’s. Sally Liu (a student I blogged about a while ago) lives near Changde and was on QQ one day. It occurred to me I could meet her in Changde and see the town before flying to Beijing.

Then I thought, “What the heck? I might as well ask if she wants to go with me.” A translator would make navigating Beijing a lot easier, so on the spur of the moment I asked Sally to come along. Of course, she said yes, since I offered to pay for her airfare and hotel room. This would have been money I had already budgeted for James’ visit, so it was not a big deal. But, her parents said (understandably) that she could only go if another girl went along.

This part was not easy as you might expect, since most of the students at JiDa were working and thus not free to leave with us. In the end, Vanilla (yes, that’s her English name) sent me a text and asked if she could go. Of course, this meant I would have to pay for her airfare, as well. I hesitated, but only briefly. Both of them have good English speaking skills, and are both very personable. I figured we’d make a good hospitality team.

My foreign affairs officers were a little surprised I was dragging two students with me, and even more surprised when I said I was paying their way. But, no one said I couldn’t take them, so on the 16th, Sally, Vanilla and I boarded an Airbus A321 for Beijing.

A few quick words about the Changde airport. It’s so small that people in Changde don’t realize they even have an airport. Changde has a population of about 2 million, but the airport is about the size of an airport in a US city of about 60,000. Until China Southern Airways started flying out of Changde, the only planes using the airport were light planes, like Cessnas.

More surprisingly, China Southern apparently manages to fill the 125-seat Airbus on the Beijing run five times a week. (Only one afternoon flight in or out per day, though.) When I lived in Casper, Wyoming, and Owensboro, Kentucky, the planes I flew in were much smaller prop-jets. Scale matters — more people in China by far.

Sally and Vanilla had never flown before, and in fact had never been to Beijing, so this was a big adventure for them. Both said they were so excited the night before that they couldn’t fall asleep until 2 am, then woke up at 6 am for a 10 am flight.

I had booked two rooms online at a hotel I have used before. It’s close to a subway station, so we could tour Beijing easily until the Americans arrived late Wednesday night. My companions were keen to see Beijing University, Qinghua University and Tian’anmen Square, and we also were to have lunch with a former JiDa student of mine in her home on Tuesday. The three of us nearly wore ourselves out walking around two huge campuses, the Square (in the rain) and Beijing’s subway stations. The Beijing subway is logically laid out and easy to navigate, but there are many long walks, especially at transfer stations.

My master plan was to spend our free time touring, but also to find a comfortable and inexpensive hotel in a Beijing hutong. Beijing’s mass transit shuts down and taxi fares skyrocket after 10:30 (as I found out to my dismay on previous visits), so it was imperative the hotel also offer an airport shuttle service.

After some online research, we settled on visiting the Beijing Hutong Inn near the Bell and Drum Towers and Houhai, north of the Forbidden City. Though the staff there speaks English, Sally and Vanilla arranged for three rooms — including a family room — and the airport shuttle ride far more efficiently than I could have managed. Everything was in place by noontime, so Team JiDa was able to visit Tian’anmen and have a carefree celebratory dinner before meeting the voluble Mr Xiao and his cushy Mercedes airport shuttle van.

(I hesitated a bit at the 300 yuan ($45) price tag for the 40-minute airport run, but after seeing the van and meeting Mr Xiao, I realized it was money well spent. Xiao was really helpful, giving my students clear directions into the airport arrivals hall. Besides, hosts are not supposed to be cheapskates.)

Team JiDa, now doubled in size, stumbled into bed around 2:30 am on Thursday. The following days would include hitting some tourist sites, shopping and arranging our trip back to Changde and Jishou. I’ll blog about all that later on.
 

As tourist attractions, they are somewhat over-rated. Stand anywhere in China, pick up a rock and throw it as hard as you can. Chances are, you will hit an ancient city. I mean, China’s civilization is at least 5,000 years old, and people have lived here since the Stone Age, so of course there are going to be ancient cities helter-skelter all over the countryside.

Some are more or less in their original state, having changed little outwardly in hundreds of years. XiDi is one of those cities. Although people still live there, in buildings that are perhaps a thousand years old, it has not become a tourist trap. We walked around XiDi (and Sanhe and Shexian) free from the hawkers and street vendors that haunt places like the Great Wall at Badaling and the ancient city closest to Jishou, Fenghuang.

Each ancient city has its own architecture and history, which the attentive tourist can perhaps enjoy more than the casual observer, but as attractions they are definitely low-key. Dare I say, they can be boring.

Don’t get me wrong. I really enjoyed visiting the places our hosts took us. Since I’m interested in history and architecture, and in the way people lived long ago, I could appreciate the winding streets and alleys, ornately carved wooden structures in homes, the protective walls around some of the cities, and the general atmosphere of great antiquity in them.

But you have to approach these kind of cities with the right mindset. Don’t expect to be bowled over by their sheer wonderfulness. Just learn to appreciate walking along the same streets on the same stones that people have used for at least 500 years.

On the other end of the scale are places like Fenghuang and CiqiKou, the ancient quarter in Chongqing, that have been commercialized and homogenized to the point of losing much of their original flavor or appeal.

I am not really knocking Fenghuang, which I have visited about eight times now, or even CiqiKou. The old buildings and narrow, winding streets are still there, but on top of the ancient foundations are modern layers of kitsch, hucksterism, barkers, and cheesy, overpriced tourist merchandise. Everyone in these ancient quarters seems only to want make a quick buck off the hapless tourists, and it makes no difference if the tourists are from China, Korea, Japan or the USA. Visiting Fenghuang, and other touristy places, requires determination not to let the rampant commercialism spoil the visit.

People here of course ask me if I like Fenghuang, and say honestly that I do. At night, the ancient quarter changes character entirely. Instead of barkers and hucksters, you can hear music and karaoke (note these are not always the same thing) wafting from the riverside bars. People seem much calmer, more in repose, and not necessarily because they’ve had a few brews after dinner. The atmosphere at night encourages you to slow down and enjoy life.

Just be careful buying the trinkets they sell, because chances are the goods were made in a factory in Guangdong (or even in Vietnam). The colorful handbags, dresses and skirts, hats, cheap jewelry are about as authentic to city X or Y as any other piece of tourist junk made in China and sold in the USA. You can buy the same things in downtown Jishou for half the price of what they are in Fenghuang (or any other ancient town, it seems).

One popular tourist trinket is a stitched leather “cowboy” hat. I’ve seen the same style hat everywhere I have gone in China, from Beijing to Hainan. And I can’t think of a more impractical hat for summer in southern China. No ventilation. You might as well put a plastic bag on your head. It’s cute, though, but it sure advertises you’re a tourist.

(Me, I went with the eminently more practical straw cowboy hat while in Hainan. At least my scalp can breath. Felt cowboy hats, like the kind you can buy it most parts of the US West and South, are completely absent in China, though some are made here. I am the proud owner of a green felt “weekender” hat sold by Minnetonka, which I bought in the States before coming to China. The hat of course was made in China, along with half the other things I brought with me.)

One byproduct of visiting all these historic cities is that I am slowly getting a feel for Chinese history. Folks here rattle off, “this is from the Qing dynasty, and that’s from the Ming, and this is Tang,” as if everyone knows what the hell they mean. I’m still hazy on most of the dynastic sequence, but I can least judge that Ming is older than Qing, and Tang is really really old. Just don’t ask for the exact dates. (Although I do know that the Qing ended in 1911, with the establishment of the Chinese Republic.)

I guess the reason I liked touring the ancient places in Anhui is the lack of commercialism I have learned to identify with “ancient cities” in China. Anhui is less developed than Hunan, which is saying a lot, since they are both largely farming provinces. So, creeping commercialism has blessedly not found its way to XiDi, Sanhe and Shexian. They are really very peaceful.

Midway between these two poles are the ancient towns in Guizhou that I visited in May. Zhenyuan is a reconstructed ancient town, sort of like Fenghuang with more breathing space, with steep mountains right up next to it. It’s commercialized, but with less fervency than Fenghuang. Likewise, Xijiang, “the city of 10,000 Miao homes,” is a real Miao settlement that has been turned into a tourist attraction by adding a shopping street and scheduled (cheesy ethnic) performances*, such as we see in Dehang, the much smaller Miao village outside Jishou. For some reason, the sellers in both places seemed more low key than the ones in Fenghuang or CiqiKou, but they still jacked their prices up for the holiday tourists.

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* These shows give the audience a taste of Miao culture in much the same way Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Shows gave white audiences a taste of Native American life a hundred years ago. That is, the tastes are not so authentic. Though I can’t recall seeing any in the States, some Native American communities might package some cultural performances for tourists in a similar way as the Chinese Miao.

It’s slow, but at least I can use the 80 GB of Picasaweb storage space that I paid for. It also means my photos will automatically get posted to Facebook through the Picasa Facebook app.

So, as I wait for my photos to trickle slowly into my Picasaweb space, I can write some posts. Here’s the first one.

MeiMei is fully bilingual in Chinese and Russian, thanks to several years living in Minsk as a student. Her English (and maybe her Chinese, though I cannot tell) has a Russian accent. In addition, she’s an excellent pianist.

Her job at JiDa was as translator/interpreter for the exchange students and music teachers from Ukraine, but midway through last school year, there was less call for her linguistic abilities. Meanwhile, still unmarried at the age of 30, MeiMei was facing the Chinese cultural pressure to find a husband before she got “too old.” So, she decided to quit her university job, and go back home to Hefei to find a mate, while living with her parents and supporting herself teaching piano and Russian.

About two weeks ago, she and I were chatting on QQ, and she asked about my plans for the future. MeiMei suggested I consider working in Hefei. Then I asked if I could visit her this month to see what Hefei is like. She enthusiastically said yes. So, in short order, I and her other friend and former neighbor, Ailsa, were planning a week’s trip to Hefei.

Hefei is the provincial capital of Anhui, which is northeast of Hunan province. China is building out a high speed rail system at a dizzying pace, starting with the provincial capitals, so Changsha, Hunan, and Hefei are already connected with HSR.

Ailsa had already bought a train ticket to Changsha, where she lives, so rather than taking the bus as I usually do, I agreed to keep her company on the eight-hour (slow) train ride. We booked our tickets to Hefei at the Jishou train station. We were on the D150 train to Wuchang station in Wuhan, and then the D3062 train from Hankou station in Wuhan to Hefei.

The distance between Changsha and Wuhan is about 362 km, and the D150 covers that in three hours, a third of the time the next fastest train (the T98A) takes. That works out to an average speed of 121 km/hr (75 mph). The distance from Wuhan to Hefei is 364 km, but the D3062 covers that in 2:23, also a third of the next fastest time, at an average speed of 156 km/hr (97 mph). The ticket price for each leg was 112 RMB, or about $17.

[Incidentally, you can take the D3062, or one of the other D-class trains, from Wuhan and be in Shanghai 820 km (512 miles) away in six hours. Amazing.]

Our “layover” in Wuhan was about six hours, giving us plenty of time to find our way from Wuchang station to Hankou station across town. We decided to do some sightseeing, since Ailsa had never been to Wuhan. But the heat was oppresive (42 C, or 107 F), so we just hit Yellow Crane Tower (Huanghelou 黄鹤楼), then grabbed an air conditioned cab to the air conditioned train station to recover.

Cities in the USA are lucky to have even one train station, which in a lot of places is now some kind of museum, office building or shopping mall. New York has two train stations, and as far as I know, no city in the States has more than two. By contrast, Wuhan has three railway stations now; the third one, in the northern suburbs, is part of the new G-class HSR trains connecting Wuhan to Changsha South station (also new) and Guangzhou North in Guangdong. The G-class trains zip between Wuhan and Guangzhou North — a distance of 1022 km (639 miles) — in just three and half hours. (That works out to be about 180 mph on average.) Tickets are $76, cheaper than airfares, so the domestic airlines have had to cut their prices to be competitive.

(We rode a G-class train from Wuhan to Changsha (90 minutes) on the way back, because it would allow both of us to grab afternoon buses home. The ticket was $25, only $8 more than the D150 fare.)

Anyway, on to our itinerary. We had dinner first with MeiMei and her husband, went to a KTV, then crashed at a hotel on Changjiang ZhongLu near Suzhou Lu downtown for the night. The next few days were packed with activities, as MeiMei and her parents wanted to show us a lot of sights.

Her dad is partner is a small metal stamping factory in Sanhe. The company supplies parts (brackets and chassis pieces) to JAC, one of China’s domestic auto and truck makers. As a boss, he gets a company car, similar in size and style to a Buick, and a driver, Mr Wang (no relation). So, we were able to tour Anhui in comfort.

We visited ancient cities at Sanhe, She (pronounced “shuh”) county and XiDi, a UNESCO World Heritage Site; the Bao family gardens; the ancestral home of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin; the boyhood home of physicist Yang Zhenning*; the home of Qing dynasty diplomat Li Hongzhang; Fantawild, an amusement park; and the Golden Peacock Spa Resort. We also did some shopping — I needed a new supply of contact lenses, for one thing.

We ate a lot of great food, and drank of lot of expensive and potent Chinese liquor. Ailsa, who weighs all of 90 pounds soaking wet, held her own liquor very well. (One of the popular sayings in China is that Hunan woman are not only the most beautiful in the country, but also the best drinkers. Then again, they say the same thing about the women of all of the other provinces, too.)

Ailsa has been fretting over my newfound bachelorhood, and MeiMei wants us both to move to Hefei, to each find jobs and significant others. MeiMei was trying to fix Ailsa up with at least two young men during our trip, but I don’t think anything clicked. On Wednesday night, the two of them persuaded me to sign up with a Chinese matchmaking site, jiayuan.com (literally, “family garden”). MeiMei and her husband, a busy journalist, confessed that they found each other on jiayuan.com last year, and were both happy with the results.

So, Ailsa helped me navigate the elaborate questionnaires on the site — it’s all in Chinese naturally — and we’ll see what happens.My little precis of myself is all in English, so it’s going to stand out like a sore thumb. I’m not expecting un coup de foudre, but it can’t hurt to try.

Having taken a whirlwind tour of Anhui, which has many other places worth seeing, my next trek is to Beijing to welcome the new American family coming to JiDa. I’ve been to Beijing now five times, so I am almost an old hand at it. This time, I am going with two students from my college, neither of whom has been to Beijing, so I get to be a tour guide to five people. Holy crap. Wish me luck!

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* Yang won the Nobel Prize in 1957 with T.D. Lee, for discovering a key law of the Standard Model of particle physics. Yang and experimental physicist C.S. Wu once gave a symposium at Palmer Labs at Princeton. My freshman year physics classes were in the same building almost four decades later. So maybe there are only a few degrees of separation between Yang and me. Another noteworthy fact about Yang is that, at the age of 82, was engaged to a woman only 28 years old. They married in 2005. Lucky fellow. I suspect they did not use jiayuan.com, though.

Don’t get me wrong, the wp-mail.php script is a great feature of WordPress. You set up a secret email account, point WP to check the account, and it will take plaintext messages and post them on your blog. It didn’t work so smoothly for me, though.

First, my account with China Mobile doesn’t seem to have email services, but I can send multimedia messages. When I tried that with WordPress, it just took the MIME portion of the message and printed it as ASCII gobbledegook. So, I took the same message and sent it first to Gmail, which did display the text. But forwarding that message without the MIME attachment to WP just resulted in a blank post. In the end, I had to use a browser to post the blogs.

Clearly, I need to enable email services on my mobile account. It will make blogging while traveling a little more spontaneous.