October 1 is China’s National Holiday, rather like the Fourth of July. We got a week-long vacation, which I spent traveling to nearby places in Hunan. Officially, the National Holiday is only five days long, but universities typically move weekday classes to the following weekend to extend the holiday. The downside of this reshuffling is needing to teach for seven days straight after a seven-day holiday.

That post-vacation marathon coincided with the beginning of classes for the freshmen, so I had 32 classes from the 8th until yesterday the 14th. Needless to say, I was a little drained by the time I finished teaching at noon yesterday. Next week, I’ll have a more manageable 22 classes in a week, a schedule I only need to keep until the new foreign teacher arrives in a few weeks.

My only plan for the holiday was to visit a friend in Yueyang 岳阳, several hours away by bus or train, and just north of the provincial capital, Changsha 长沙. A couple of days before the holiday started, I dropped by another friend’s shop in Jishou to say hello. We soon discovered we were heading in the same direction. Tina and her husband were driving to his hometown, Huarong 华容, for his sister’s wedding. If I didn’t mind hanging out for a couple of days at the wedding, I could come along, then they’d drive me to Yueyang, 30 minutes away.

So, Friday, Saturday and Sunday were spent in Huarong and Tianyi (the groom’s hometown, right by the Yangtze River (the Xiangjiang 长江) as part of a ginormous wedding party. Though it was the bride’s second marriage, it was still a big affair, with lots of food, baijiu, beer and fireworks.

Tina and Jeremy have been married almost two years. As part of his marriage promises, he had built a small house for the two of them in Huarong. That’s where we stayed Friday night. The next morning we had a big lunch with his side of the family, then drove to Tianyi for dinner with the groom’s side of the family. We stayed there overnight, and after a big brunch with what seemed to be half the town, we headed back to Huarong to fetch our stuff and drove to Yueyang.

The happy couple

Only one wedding I have attended (Tina and Jeremy’s) included an actual ceremony, during which the couple exchange vows. Most have involved traditional customs, such as bringing the bride ceremoniously to the groom’s home, often with an umbrella over her to ward off bad luck, or watching outside the bride’s bedroom as the groom petitions to see his fiancee, sometimes bargaining with cash “bribes” to her attendants to open the door. A Tujia custom, which I haven’t seen yet, is the wailing of the bride as she leaves her home. Traditionally, the longer and louder she cries to her parents, the more luck will come to the marriage.

The actual marriage occurs in a government office weeks or months before the actual celebration. The couple apply for a marriage license and pose together for an official photo to be affixed to their marriage document. There is no officiant, like a justice of the peace or judge. A clerk just signs off on a document attesting to the fact that Mr X and Miss Y are now husband and wife.

Some marriages are (ahem) quickened by a pregnancy, either planned or unplanned. The wedding party may even be delayed until after the baby is born, if circumstances require it. There is little of the approbrium that would accompany such scheduling in the USA, it seems. More important are the symbolic joining of two families and the birth of a child. The order of events is not so important.

After the wedding festivities, I spent another couple of days in Yueyang to hang out with a teacher friend there. We visited Junshan Island 君山岛, a scenic park in the middle of Dongting Lake, when the chilly rain that started the holiday week finally ended.

Junshan has a number of legends surrounding it. The name literally means Princesses’ Mountain island. The bamboo that grows on the island is unique — its stems are blotched with dark spots. Legends say that the Xiang River Goddesses, who had been daughters of the Emperor Yao (ca. 2356-2255 BC), cried when their husband, the Emperor Shun, died. Their tears fell on the bamboo, discoloring it forever.

Bamboo stained by the River Goddesses' tears

Silver-needle tea, which is exceptionally pricey, is a variety of green tea. When dried, the leaves roll up into little tubes. When hot water is poured over them, the leaves remain tightly rolled, and then sink stem-end down to the bottom of the cup. They look like a stand of pine trees.

After Yueyang, I came back to Jishou midweek to avoid the holiday crush on the trains and buses. On the way, I got an invitation to visit Sangzhi 桑植, a county near the tourist city of Zhangjiajie 张家界, two hours from Jishou. Sangzhi has two principal tourist sites: the home of the revolutionary He Long and JiuTian Cave. We visited both.

He Long was a contemporary of Mao Zedong, also a Hunan native. After the founding of Communist China in 1949, He Long became a high ranking member of the government, but his progressive ideas ran him afoul of the party members responsible for the Cultural Revolution. He was imprisoned in 1966 as a counter-revolutionary, and died at age 74 three years later, still in prison. It wasn’t until 2009, forty years after his death, that He Long was given an official state funeral and burial. His home in Sangzhi is now a national shrine, and a small museum has been built alongside it.

JiuTian Cave is advertised as China’s “Number 1″ cave, but in fact it’s not the largest or longest. It’s the fourth karst cave I’ve visited in this part of China, and I have to say the previous three, especially HuangLong Cave in Zhangjiajie, are better. They all feature garish multi-colored lighting and formations that resemble animals, vegetables or famous figures in history and legend. On the day we visited, the cave was as usual cool and damp, but the air above was warm and dry. So, when I emerged from climbing up a long set of stairs, the sunlight caught the cloud of steam rising from my head. I ran that photo a few days ago.

I was back in Jishou the next day, giving me a day to recuperate, wash my clothes and prepare for the eight classes I had to teach on Saturday. I’ll write about my marathon week of teaching in the next post.

This photo is from August, when I visited Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in LA. Somehow teaching classes got in the way of posting it.

Somehow, yelling "Flame on!" just doesn't work

But it works for the Human Torch.

SANGZHI, HUNAN — OK, so I’m not really Johnny Storm, but it’s a cool photo, anyway. My friend snapped it as we were leaving Jiutian Cave here. After a long climb out of the cool, humid cave into the warm, drier surface air, I was sweating and my head was literally steaming.

The cave trip Thursday was my last excursion for the week-long National Holiday. Earlier in the week, I accompanied two friends (a young married couple) to a wedding in Huarong, a small city near Yueyang, Hunan. Then they drove me to Yueyang, where I met another friend and visited that city for two days. When I came back to Jishou on Wednesday, I literally turned right around and headed out again to Sangzhi with another friend, her cousin, aunt and uncle.

We also visited the reconstructed home of He Long, a revolutionary leader who was later purged during the Cultural Revolution. He was thrown into prison (where he died at age 74), his original home was razed, and his siblings were prevented from attending university. He didn’t get a formal state burial until 40 years after his death.

On our way back to Jishou, we stopped at a roadside marker for the Guzhang County “Golden Spike” — an international reference point for the sedimentary layer corresponding to stage 7* of the Cambrian Period beginning 503 million years ago. The rather elaborate marker includes relief images of Lejopyge laevigata trilobites, which made their first appearance at this time.

Interestingly enough, I live near another Golden Spike for the next stage of the Cambrian, about 499 million years ago, when Glyptagnostus reticulatus trilobotes first made their appearance. That Golden Spike is in Paibi, in Huayuan, the county just west of Jishou.

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* Stage 7 apparently has two names: Guzhangian and Dresbachian (for a town in Minnesota). During the Cambrian Period, of course, such names had no meaning, since there was only one big continent (Gondwanaland) and a few smaller landmasses.

It works like this. You move to a different country (hell, you could move to a different state and still feel culture shock) and live there for several months, or years. At the beginning, everything is new, or weird, and you experience culture shock. How you expect the world/society/people/friends/lovers should behave is completely different from what you have experienced in the past. Successful ex-patriates revel in the new milieu and move on. Others go bonkers and move back to the States as soon as possible.

Assuming you’re the type who stays, eventually the new cultural milieu becomes second nature to you. As a trivial example, I no longer expect to see a knife, fork and spoon alongside my plate at a restaurant. In most Chinese eateries, you get a pair of plastic chopsticks in a paper or plastic envelope and a set of ceramic dishes with a ceramic soup spoon shrink-wrapped in plastic. (Most restaurants outsource their dish washing to a third party, who cleans and sterilizes everything and seals it in plastic.) In addition, every table gets a pot of tea or hot water. And rarely, you also get a packet of paper napkins or at less upscale places, a plastic container with a roll of tissue paper inside. (Kleenex on the cob, as a former student — Emily Plant, was it you? — once described it).

Since high school, I have associated Chinese food with chopsticks. In fact, I learned how to eat with chopsticks while in high school, which always surprises my Chinese acquaintances. I made a conscious choice to only use chopsticks for eating here. In my apartment, I have lots of chopsticks, since I often have guests over for meals, but just one fork (which I only acquired a few months ago), two table knives and four western-style spoons. After three years nearly continuous use, using chopsticks has become second nature.

So, when I come back to the USA, part of my brain automatically looks for the chopsticks, and there’s a momentary glitch when another part of my brain, “Hey, stupid! You’re in America now.” I can still use a knife, fork and spoon, of course, but part of me still wants to use chopsticks.

That’s an example of reverse culture shock. A trivial one, but it happens to me every time I come back. I have to deliberately switch mental gears.

Here’s a bigger problem. Public transportation in the USA sucks, big time. In China, I don’t need a car. There are so many taxis, buses, trains and drivers-for-hire at affordable prices that having a car would be just a luxury, not a necessity.

But try navigating from, say, Los Angeles, to somewhere not directly served by air service, like, say, Lafayette, Indiana. LA has an OK public transportation system — though the Metro could be signed more clearly — so getting around without a car is feasible. Getting to LAX is also no problem. Getting from Chicago to Lafayette is not.

My first plan was to take Amtrak from LA to Lafayette, but the cost ($600+) and the time involved put me off the idea. Riding Greyhound was another, cheaper option, but spending several days in a bus is not my cup of tea. I couldn’t rent a car because of my credit card glitch, so flying was the only option.

And as I found out, the only way for me to get from and to O’Hare was by car, my children’s cars. In other words, in China I can be an independent traveler sans car. In the USA, without a rental car, I have to rely on others to provide transport, because alternatives just don’t exist (except for Greyhound). And that frankly drives me a little batty.

On the other hand, I appreciate the American habit of punctuality, which many Chinese just don’t understand, especially those in the upper echelons of management. I have often been at events that start 30 minutes or more late because we have to wait for some mucky-muck to tear himself away from some other face-making event. For leaders in China, appointment times are advisory only, not mandatory. I wonder how government works in Beijing.

Likewise, getting repairs done in a timely manner is lot more possible in the States than it seems to be here. Having lived in South Africa for a year, I know about “Africa time,” which means things will get done when they get done, as the Fates allow. Well, it works the same way in China. I had no Internet service in my flat for three days, because the simple task of restarting a network switch was not a priority task for the campus IT crew. (They advised me to restart the switch myself, but since it’s locked up in a metal security box downstairs, the advice was useless to me.)

Adaptability and patience are the keys here. If little things stress you out, don’t try living in a very different culture. You’ll end up hating it, and yearn for the first chance to go home. If you can let the little things pass you by, and accept the bigger challenges as just part of life, you’ll do fine.

Courtesy of Google Maps and some amateur Photoshopping, here is the route I took. Shanghai is at center right and Changsha is bottom left. Jishou is off the map, to the left (west) of Changsha. The route represents about 1,200 km (740 miles) of rail travel in 9 hours, including an hour of transfer time between the two Wuhan railway stations.

Major cities along my high speed rail route

There is a handy English language website, www.cnvol.com, that keeps a comprehensive, up-to-date search engine for Chinese trains. I use it to plan my travel and to specify which train I want when I buy tickets at the ticketing office. This map of the Chinese rail system is from cnvol.com.

China Railway Map, from www.cnvol.com

By this time, I’m almost an old hand in Beijing, having visited several times now. The travel books say Beijing and Shanghai are both immense, crowded cities, but there the similarities end. It’s like comparing Washington, D.C., with New York City.

This city has a completely different feel from Beijing. While Beijing is steeped with hundreds of years of history, Shanghai is a relative upstart, imbued with just over a century of international wheeling dealing. Western dominance of Shanghai ended decades ago, but the West never really ever left. Maybe that’s why Shanghai feels more cosmopolitan and “with-it” than Beijing, which is no slacker either.

The Shanghai World Financial Center behind the Jin Mao Tower

I did the typical touristy things, visiting the Bund (Wai Tan), the Pudong skyscraper district, where I rode to the 100th floor of John Bunyan’s bottle opener, the World Financial Center, and Yuyuan Bazaar, which offers a smorgasbord of Chinese food and handcrafts. Time did not permit visiting Yuyuan Gardens or the Temple of the City God, both nearby.

But I also chilled for a morning in a nearby Starbucks for the WiFi availability, visited the Zheng Da Shopping Mall in Pudong and walked around the neighborhood of my hotel, which was conveniently right next to a Metro stop. I also successfully navigated my way to the train station to buy my ticket. (It took an hour by subway from my hotel. Shanghai is a bit big.)

For my return to Hunan, I opted to take the high speed train to Wuhan, a six-hour ride, and then hop another bullet train to Changsha, a 90-minute ride. The regular trains cover the same distance in 15-18 hours, and are invariably booked up days in advance. Since the high speed trains do not accept standees and cost more, there is not a crush of humanity vying for tickets. I went to Hongqiao Station on Tuesday and got a ticket for Thursday. On a lark, I decided to get a first-class ticket to Wuhan for 335 yuan (about $50), having never traveled first class in my life. (Well, one time I got bumped into a first-class seat on an airplane trip, only because coach was overbooked. This was in the dim times, when US airlines treated passengers less like cattle and more like people.) The first class seats are roomier and more comfy. Second class seats are not bad either, about the same as an airliner seat but with more legroom and slightly wider spacing. Truthfully, the second-class seats are just as good as the first-class ones, so the extra money was a bit of a waste.

The eventual goal of China’s high speed rail is to connect the provincial capitals with the megalopolises and other important cities. My first train covered just over 800 km (500 miles) in nearly 6 hours, stopping in Nanjing and Hefei, and smaller cities, and terminating in Wuhan. There are three train stations in Wuhan; the newest one (Wuhan station) handles mostly the traffic on the Shanghai-Wuhan route. Wuchang station is one terminus of the Wuhan-Guangzhou bullet train. Hankou station handles mostly regular train traffic.

In an ideal world, it would be easy to get from Wuhan station to Wuchang station. But that ease is not in place yet. Wuhan is building its own subway (as is Changsha), but so far it’s just big holes in the ground disrupting surface traffic. You can take a bus (#540) from one station to the other, but it’s not an express bus and it takes an hour or more to traverse Wuhan. Since I arrived around rush hour, with two heavy bags, I decided a taxi was a wiser choice.

The Wuhan-Guangzhou bullet train runs every hour, which seems like overkill until you count how many people live in China. As it is, those trains are nearly full for every run. I figured that, even without a reservation, I could book a ticket on one of several evening trains and still get to Changsha before 10 pm. Good guess. I asked for my ticket at 5:45 pm, and the agent gave me a ticket for the 6:10 train. (Cost was 165 yuan, or about $25.)

Top speed on this train is 330 km/hr (206 mph), the same as for the trains that collided near Wenzhou a few weeks ago. The railway temporarily slowed all the bullet trains to a maximum speed of 250 km/hr after the accident, pending an investigation of the causes of the accident. (Poorly designed signaling systems are the ostensible cause, but some riders suspect shoddy implementation, too.) In any event, my train hit 330 km/hr on its way to Changsha.

In Changsha, I did a little shopping (good quality lightweight hiking shoes for $30 and a leather shoulder bag suitable for toting a 7-inch Android tablet and other stuff for $40), but mostly just rested a day before taking the bus to Jishou. My five weeks of living out of a suitcase were coming to an end (as was my travel money cache), and I was ready for a couple of weeks of stationary life before classes start. Homeward bound was I.

SOMEWHERE OVER THE ALEUTIANS, Aug. 14 — One of the problems in spur-of-the-moment traveling is coping with glitches. While my arrival in and departure from the US were all arranged, travel in between was a bit murky.

My plans were hang out in Los Angeles for a few days, fly to Chicago, see my son graduate from Purdue, do stuff depending on the plans of my family members, and then leave from Chicago Aug. 13.

Complicating this grand, if somewhat sketchy plan was a glitch with my credit card. My account was locked out because I made the honest mistake while in LA of changing my phone number and password at the same time. Dumb. The company’s fraud bots locked me out and the only way to unlock it was to send proof of my legal address in the States, which I wouldn’t have until I got to Indiana.

So I went the old-fashioned route –a human-based travel agency and cash payment.

But which one? My friend Isabella’s friendly security guard offered to help, but all he did was try to do the travel agency work himself online, which I had already done with better success, I might add. Not only that, he seemed more willing to talk to the pretty Chinese girl than the middle-aged guy about the whole thing. Can’t imagine why.

(Putting on my grumpy old man hat now: our specific request was, could he recommend a local travel agency near Isabella’s apartment complex? Did he follow through with that request? Of course not. Too easy. We were near effing Wilshire Boulevard, which is teeming with travel agencies. I assumed a local guy could suggest one. Instead, he tried to play the hero and found a fare online with Southwest Airlines for more than $800. Thanks, buddy. Stick to being a security guard.)

A little googling turned up a nearby agency, Senator Travel, that had some glowing recommendations. My agent Evelyn found me a better flight for half Mr. Security Guard’s that fit my timetable perfectly. Of course, since I had wasted a day fiddling with the CC company, the price had gone up by almost $100.

But at least I had a way to O’Hare. My vacation schedule had only three non-negotiable appointments: arrival, departure and the graduation Aug. 6. Fortunately, I had a big enough budget to compensate for such undue surprises. (An important piece of advice for travelers. Have enough money to recover from unhappy surprises.) With a definite flight out, I could enjoy the rest of my stay in LA and also calm my daughter, who was going to pick me up on her way from Iowa to Indiana.

Post-graduation: This part was also unplanned, since I and my son had earlier had no idea what would happen after the weekend. As it turned out, he was going to start a new job in just a week and would have to move. So for various reasons, I ended up at my former in-law’s house in southern Indiana for a few days. A day after I arrived, we five were joined by five more, as my niece’s power had gone out and her family and a freezer full of food needed a place to stay for two nights. So we had a little impromptu family reunion. I spent more time with six of my nieces, grandnieces and nephew than I had guess I ever had before. I am grateful that they are all really wonderful kids. Things could have been a lot worse.

Friday was the designated departure time. I had booked a hotel room near O’Hare for the night before. My son, who superhumanly was also moving into his new digs the same day, had offered to drive me to the airport — a five-hour drive. (This meant he was going to criss-cross Indiana four times in one day. Ah, youth!) Thanks to www.hotels.com I got a sweet deal on a room which I booked online with my now working credit card.

We got there at 2 am. I had called twice on the road to make sure they would hold the room. Both times the ever-cheerful night clerk assured me there was no problem. (I concluded after dealing with this woman that her cheerfulness quotient far exceeded her actual helpfulness quotient.) At no time did she mention, gee golly, the hotel was actually overbooked. So, we arrived only to find that our room in the cushy hotel was not available but another would be provided AT NO CHARGE at the nearby Comfort Inn. A step down in star-rating, but a free room with free breakfast. OK. I can live with that.

So, we finally crashed for the night. I only had enough time for four and a half hour’s sleep, so I left my son and his girlfriend to sleep in while I dragged my sleepy self to the terminal on the free shuttle. There were no other surprises, even from the dreaded TSA, who waved me and a college girl through the body scanner on our way to terminal E, which is about halfway to Wisconsin. I swear O’Hare gets bigger every time I pass through.

My next destination was Shanghai, via Tokyo Narita Airport. While I have passed through Shanghai several times, this would be my first real visit, with two student friends as guides.