Thursday, December 22, 2011

Busan Journal, bloggus interruptus

Down at Heels

We sought advice before we left for London in 26 August 2010. What to take, what to anticipate, how to pack. Perhaps the best piece of advice that came from our seeking was Jim Wardwell's advice to take two pair of comfortable shoes.  Why two?  Because experience told him that one pair was bound to get wet in the well-know English rain and I would need a second pair as a dry backup.





He gave good advice. I took two pair of comfortable footwear to see me through an inclement English autumn. One pair was my New Balance cross-trainers, useful for running, walking, and just kicking around. I own several pair of what we call "school shoes" or dress shoes for wearing to the office or to church on Sunday.  But none of these actually fit the "comfortable" category when the walking, as I imagined it, would involve lots of city streets and sidewalks, the occasional journey to outlying towns and villages, and perhaps a hike or two somewhere in the country.



More recently -- over the recent Thanksgiving holiday my youngest son asked me if I had finished with my travel blog.  He may have used the word abandoned.

No, I responded, perhaps too quickly, I have plenty of material I want to write about.  I want to get back to the Busan Journal.

For complex reasons, however, I have let the blog suffer what I hope is not a career ending hiatus. As with the comfortable shoe story left unfinished above, I fully expect to return to the blog project, this travel account, my impressions of a year away from home. In making the adjustment back to my sedentary life of teaching in the little New York village I have lived in for 27 years, I have discovered that my paying job keeps getting in the way. Adjustment, like the blog, is incomplete, in process.

Well, now the semester is over, the papers are read, the grades have been agonized over and entered into the computer.  During this Christmas break, I plan to resume my blog, to finish my China story and to write a few pieces dealing with my impressions of Korea. I may also, before too much more time has elapsed, write a few pieces about this year of travels generally and, I think now, even compare London with Busan.




As with the blog, I must return to the story I began with. The end of the comfortable shoe story is simply this: following the good Wardwell's advice, I bought a pair of Merrill's before we left for London and I wore them every day.  They are by far the most comfortable and durable shoes I have ever owned.

The heels of these shoes showed very little wear after four months of tramping about London. Bearing in mind that I generally abuse the heels of my shoes, that I wore my cross-trainers only twice, and that we either walked or took public transport for our daily touring, the durability of my shoes, including heels, was remarkable.

So remarkable, in fact, that I took the same comfortable shoes to Korea and wore them for nearly five months, again without benefit of a car. In Busan we did get caught out in the rain on several occasions, and I came home with sopping feet.  But the shoes dried quickly.  If I loosened the laces and pulled the tongue forward, they always dried over night. I actually needed my back-up footwear on very few occasions.
 
I am still wearing the globe-trotting Merrill's, although they have developed a few worn spots in the usual places.

For those of you who have traveled with me from my first posts back in September 2010, thank you. I have a few more bits to write and post, so I hope you will come along.  My intention is to post more regularly and avoid the kind of gap that exists between this post and the last. That is, I hope to be a better person.  Starting now.

As for my trusty Merrill's, I will likely wear them until either the shoes or the comfort level disintegrate.  But I did buy a new pair last week, which will serve for the time being as my back-up pair.  It is my hope to raise their status to first pair the next time I am in London or Busan.

Friday, October 14, 2011

Busan Journal,China Adventure, Part IV: Edward's House

The Family House

When I picture a house in China, the image I usually summon is a quaint old single-story row house with a curving roof line on a crowded, crooked alley.Or maybe in a modern city, an apartment in a high rise with narrow hallways and small rooms. Like most people of our time who have not traveled, my brain pulls together a lot of notions from movies I have seen. Impressions of America are compiled in the same fragmented and haphazard way I should think.

Edward's family apartment, where we went to meet his grandmother on the evening of our second night in Shenzhen comes close to what I had imagined, although the rooms were bigger and more numerous.  It was good to see a real family dwelling to replace what I had inaccurately imagined
.



Just before noon of that day, after our visit to the cultural center of Shenzhen and meeting up with "our kids," we got into cars for a ride to the development where Edward's parents are building a new house. I use the word "development" here, but here too what we found is not what I usually think of in American terms as a development.  It is in fact a huge gated community, with the amenities of a city on the premises.

These amenities would include six golf courses and the "country club" complex where we had "lunch"  before we actually visited the house itself. I took pictures of everything in sight, of course, including the huge scale model of the community.


Lunch was a buffet that defies description.  I was so impressed that a noodle chef, one among many chefs, was actually making "fresh" noodles as we browsed the food options that I stopped to make a video of his performance.  My interest was greeted with laughter from the other chefs, who applauded when I finished. I think maybe the video may have brought him some teasing, too.




There was enough physical drama involved in turning a lump of noodle dough into the long thin uniform noodles we are used to eating to keep an army of kids entertained.




While I am aware that noodles do not originate in cellophane packages on grocery store shelves, I have never seen them made before.  I suppose it is a little like the proverbial city kid who has never gotten closer to a cow than the milk carton in a store. What a treat.

After eating we headed for the new Zhang house, which has a gate of its own off a cobblestone residential street. As one impressive sign of China's growing affluence, there are quite a few of these houses being built and occupied in this newly developed area.



The house has four floors with each floor being designated by its function or by the family members occupying the floor.  Edward and his brother, for example, have a floor, with their own bedrooms, sitting room, and game room.  His parents have another floor.  As the house was not yet occupied and at that point only partially furnished, many of the rooms have a similar look in my photographs. But we spent quite a bit of time touring room to room, floor to floor.




The central living room is dominated by a twenty foot ceiling and a huge chandelier. Midway to the ceiling along the back wall is the balcony overlook of the floor Edward and his brother will occupy.



Due to its stage in the process of being furnished, as I have said, much of what we saw had to be filled in with explanation as to what would be added before the family moved in, as with this bedroom.


The marble walls, hardwood floors, ornamented wood furniture styles are all apparent, although the stuff of family life had not arrived.



We were, of course, all impressed and envious of the video room with its high tech cushioned seats,


and the Olympic sized pool table,


and the sitting room between the two where Edward's mother served us tea and snacks.



It is hard to construct an adequate picture of the house even using pictures.  There was a huge kitchen, two dining rooms (dedicated to Chinese style eating or western style eating), laundry room, maids' rooms, sitting areas, an elevator, flat screen TVs on the wall in nearly every room in the house, bathrooms everywhere, a huge garage, and places we didn't even get to.

It seemed a little too much for one family of four, which is the way an American mind works.  But a better way to think about it is that it is a family home for the extended family.  This means that when uncles and aunts and cousins, brothers and sisters and spouses, grandparents, family friends and invited guests come, as is likely, on holidays or festival days, there is room for everyone to eat, play, talk, sleep, and hang out.  I'm not sure how the modern term "hang out" fits the traditional Chinese occasions to gather as a family, but it is a similar idea.





Outside, the house offers many different looks.  The architecture is interesting, and I got better photographs from the yard or looking toward the neighborhood than I did inside.  Sadly, my skills are not always up to the task at hand.




This view from the back yard almost shows the chandelier through the tall windows middle right. The central ground floor glass doors leads straight to the pool table. But the highlight of the back yard is the fish pond to the left of where this picture is taken,


an outdoor sitting area in the other direction,


and a golf course beyond the wall, giving the view from the house a feel of being out in the wild and well-tended countryside.


Then it was back to the Shenzhen center for another big royal feast and introductions to Edward's grandmother.


Probably the most astonishing thing about the house for us was when Edward told us that his father was under the impression that this was how most Americans lived.  An interesting observation, not all that different in its way from how I had imagined the Chinese live.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Busan Journal, China Adventure, Part III: Shenzhen

The New China: Buildings, Food, and our Kids

Between Hong Kong and Shenzhen lies a border that is like national borders everywhere. Access to Hong Kong or access to "the mainland" from Hong Kong is managed efficiently this way.  Hong Kong can remain the international city it has always been, and China can maintain control over who gets to enter or leave its own space.  It appears to be mutually advantageous. Fears in the west about what would happen to Hong Kong once the British turned over management to China a little more than a decade ago largely failed to play out.


With visas in hand, we left Hong Kong with Edward in a van driven by a family friend as dusk settled into darkness. We saw very little except for lights.  The highway we traveled had all the charm of an American interstate.  Nevertheless, once we had passed beyond the border station where our newly issued visas were examined, we felt suddenly overwhelmed.  It was a true can-you-believe-it experience.  We are actually in China! Imagine that!!!

I had had a similar feeling in 2004 when a group of us, middle-aged men and our teen-aged basketball-playing sons, had traveled to Russia to help the Wesleyan Church in Vladimir.  The teenagers were suitably impressed, I suppose, but for those of us who grew up during the black and white days of the Cold War, being in Russia was almost too much to take in.

China was even more unimaginable -- if that is possible.



Yet there we were.  China!

We were met in Shenzhen by Edward's parents, who put us up in the Elite Hotel, near their apartment building. We ate the first of a series of grand meals, with real Chinese food -- not the fake Chinese food we Americans are so fond of.


Apart from eating, our first morning in Shenzhen was spent visiting the cultural center near the city hall.  Shenzhen is a new city, a modern city.  Since it has been built from the ground up in the last three decades, all the buildings are recent and spectacular.




The Shenzhen City Hall is built with a flowing roof to suggest an eagle in flight. Across this wet plaza a young couple posed for photographers, in a scene that could have come from any city in America.



The cultural center itself houses many attractions, from stores to a library to performance halls.  A bronze statue of Pavarotti welcomes visitors to the complex.



We stopped in the midst of the plaza to have our picture taken with Edward's mother and father.



Edward's mother made sure we were well taken care of.  She led Donna by the hand everywhere we went. It was, I think, good insurance for my wife, a woman who tends to be navigationally at risk.





We visited a very large bookstore with scores of people sitting on the floor reading. Nearby was a library with a huge map of the city in the foyer.



Edward agreed to explain its geography. Well, he explained the geography without prompting; but what he actually agreed to do for me was to pose for a picture.



In a passage between buildings we found a street musician playing haunting traditional melodies on an electrified erhu.  Like the little girl, I am drawn to performances of this kind, but I am not bold enough to stand as close as she was. 

In the performance center itself I found many things to catch my attention, including a fascinating ceiling made of hundreds of glass panes and dozens of angles.


Apparently, I was unaware that my photography interests were pushing us off schedule.  When I finally did catch on, we zipped back to the hotel where we were surprised to find a number of former Houghton Academy students waiting to greet us.



Seeing Yujia, Simba, Yi, and Syan coming toward us on the sidewalk made us feel just like old times in Houghton.  If it had not been for the tropical air, we might have thought we were home.

We were not going to see the Great Wall or the ancient cities, but we were able to see what we had come for -- our kids!

Friday, September 9, 2011

Busan Journal, China Adventure, Hong Kong

Hong Kong and the Real China

It all happened so fast, both our trip to China and our twenty-two hours in Hong Kong, that it remains just a tad blurry in my mind.



Edward, whose name (when he is not posing as an American) is Zhang Zhijie, guided us through the necessary steps for an expedited visa, shepherded us to the hotel, and got up early the next morning to show us some sights in Hong Kong before the visas were ready and we would leave for Shenzhen.
Hong Kong is well-known for its hi-rise buildings.  We were expecting a few looks from way up. Still, the view from our hotel room was somewhere between overwhelming and dizzying.



Street level was no less awe-inspiring for country folks like us, even after four months in London and four more in Busan, a city of 3.7 million.



We were more than a bit surprised by the laundry hanging out above the streets. What happens if you fumble Dad's favorite shirt or fail to pin Mom's floral unmentionables as you try to attach them to the line?  What is the word for the sudden fear that rises into your throat as the lost garment flutters into traffic below?

Mist and rain made it difficult to get better pictures of this laundry phenomenon.




The British influence from its 99 year "lease" of Hong Kong were visible in many things, from the English place names on signs to the double decker buses and the Victoria Park, a huge tropical garden that we wandered through after the early deluge forced us to delay our visit to the Walk of Stars.



On a future visit to Hong Kong, preferably in a cooler, drier season, I would like to tour the gardens again to look more closely at the gigantic trees and bushes and flowers that do not grow in our more temperate climate.


Eventually the showers ended for the day and Edward took us from the Victoria Park to Hong Kong's famous Avenue of Stars, where we found someone willing to take a picture of the three of us.




Further down the Avenue of Stars we came across both a coffee shop, which are common in Korea but hard to find in China, and the Hong Kong Dragon Boat races.


The dragon boats resemble sculls, although they are paddled like canoes. A drummer in the bow sets the pace for the crew. Sad to say, as the humidity was exceptionally high from the morning downpours and as we have an exceptional intolerance of humidity, we opted for a half hour in the air conditioned coffee shop rather than a seat on the bleachers to watch the races.



We did spend a few minutes watching another race, a single boat we found at a small pond in Victoria Park being operated by remote control. The man with the boat simply flung it into the water and raced it back and forth from one stone edge to the other.  The boat flew along the water so fast and the man with the controls waited so long to turn the boat, I kept expecting it to crash before it turned.


I don't know whether the boys sitting on the wall behind him were his sons, but I found myself watching them as they watched the boat flash back and forth with its dramatic rooster tail.



Mid-afternoon we took a taxi to another part of the city, where the travel agency promised to return our visas and passports.  They were not ready yet.  They were on the way.  It would be an hour.  Or two.  A little bit longer.

But it was OK -- Edward did not seem concerned. We just needed an air-conditioned place to pass the time.



Eventually, we just got into the van that Edward's father had sent to take us to Shenzhen since it was waiting and the airconditioner was running.  Then with passports and visas in hand, Edward popped out of the crowd on the sidewalk, climbed into the van, and we took off, winding our way out of Hong Kong in the fading afternoon toward Shenzhen and the real China.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Busan Journal, China Adventure, Part 2

 Busan to Shanghai to Hong Kong

It's a simple matter really.  You book a flight, you get on the plane, and you go. So, with our newly returned passports in hand and Alien Registration cards we did not need, we were ready for our trip. To China!

At Gimpo, the Busan airport, we reached our gate far earlier than we expected. Security was fairly straight-foward and efficient, so we did not have to stand in any long lines or take off our shoes and so forth. Even with our language limitations, it was easier than O'Hare.

Aside from the pure joy of going to China and the relief of finally seeing Edward in Hong Kong, our day was memorable for two unexpected events.

The Gimpo terminal itself is huge, with departure gates along one side, shops along the other, and a wide center "aisle." We found our gate near a little display of traditional Korean life (more of less) and then dragged our carry-on bags across the aisle to buy lunch.


With lunch in hand, we looked around for a place to sit. The center aisle was dominated by a big screen TV broadcasting what appeared to be an ice hockey game.  The benches in front of the TV would accommodate probably sixty people, but they were empty. I suggested we go over to watch hockey while we ate.

Years ago, when we were dating, we went to a lot of hockey games. In person, ice hockey is about as engaging a sport as I can imagine.  When it is well-played, it is fast, graceful, and visceral. To see, oh, let's say, a player like Bobby Orr take the puck from behind his own net and rush the length of the ice, weaving in and out of opponents to shoot or set up a shot on goal is about as breathtaking as a sport gets. For the record, we did see Bobby Orr make some of his famous rushes forty years ago at the Oakland Colliseum.



The game on the TV was the 7th game of the Stanley Cup Finals, just after the 3rd period face-off.  Boston Bruins, our old home team, verses Vancouver. Boston was leading by a goal. Boston had not won the Stanley Cup since, well, since Bobby Orr was on the team.

This was the kind of coincidence that would raise suspicion if it appeared as fiction. Nevertheless.

Two things came immediately to my mind.  One is that I had not followed American sports at all since we left New York in February, so I did not even know the Stanley Cup was in progress, let along that the Bruins were playing.  Second is that the Bruins have had disappointing teams for a number of years recently, so how was I to know they had a good team this year?

We were the only people in that airport, apparently, with any interest in this game; but we were glued.  We finished our lunch.  Then, as if scripted, the game ended, followed within minutes by our boarding call. The Bruins won. We did not need to watch the on-ice celebrations. We tossed our empty lunch bag and got on the plane.



The second unexpected event occurred after we landed in Shanghai to change planes for a connecting flight to Hong Kong.  We deplaned, followed the crowd through customs, and then approached an airline counter with two red-uniformed airline agents.

As I recall, it was a big room with nothing in it except a customer counter and these two female agents.  No signs, not even in Chinese.  I handed my tickets to one of the agents, who glanced at them, tore them in half, and dropped the pieces into a waste basket behind the counter.

"Flight canceled," she said.

We were stunned. 

OK, the flight is canceled, but what do we do now? When a flight is canceled, something else is supposed to happen.  A new flight, for example. A procedure to follow or a different counter to visit.  Words of regret or explanation.

Apparently, however, "flight canceled" was the only English these agents could come up with.  Even after a Stanley Cup victory, this was a deflating experience.



After several attempts to explain our plight to someone, to anyone, actually, who could help us out, we found ourselves on another floor in another nearly empty room -- the size of a hangar.  We walked past numerous counters with computers and signs but no agents before we came to one that did have agents. From this desk, after another careful and time-consuming examination of our passports, we were sent to yet another floor and another series of counters where other passengers with our particular predicament had gathered. 

Unlike us, they had apparently understood the directions and went straight to this gathering point for the bus ride to a second airport and a new flight to Hong Kong. We felt fortunate to have stumbled upon the right spot in time to catch the bus without actually understanding any of the directions given to us.

To compound matters, we were not able to call Edward to tell him our flight had been changed.  Our phone would not connect us to his number. And Edward faced a similar problem. When he arrived at the airport in Hong Kong, all he could learn was that the flight had been canceled.  We were not listed as passengers on flights arriving from our original airport in Shanghai, so he was not even sure we were coming.


Much to our relief, when we finally proceeded through the gates into the waiting area in Hong Kong, there was Edward, smiling and waving.  It was so good to see him, and not just because he ended our hours of uncertain and hesitant wandering and wondering what lay beyond the next set of swinging doors. Edward is a prince of a young man, as the saying goes. He is friendly, kind, generous, helpful, hardworking, funny, and many other good things.  He is enough to make even former home-stay parents proud.

And his translation skills aren't too shabby either.  Shay shay.