Category Archives: Holidays

Day 487 In Beijing: Trip To Tianjin, Part 4.

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I'm a cowboy! On a steel horse I ride!

I’m a cowboy! On a steel horse I ride!

Jill and I are seriously young at heart.

We are both in good health, as far as we know, and we try to keep a positive attitude on life.

I used to be a juggler, back in the day, and used to perform with my older brother, David, in Santa Rosa and Davis.

We also performed a few other places but I can’t really remember.

So much for being young at head.  🙂

Anyway, I tend to like doing silly things and making people laugh.

I never wanted to have kids but I think I always wanted to stay a kid and I’m doing my best to achieve that goal.

In light of that, I thought I’d post this video, from a few nights ago, when we were on our way to dinner with Nuria.

Nuria, as you can see, hops on right after I got off.

The poor machine didn’t move an inch, under our weight, but was just fine after we were done.

The shopkeeper was laughing and smiling at us as we goofed off and seemed to enjoy it.

 

Day 486 In Beijing: Trip To Tianjin, Part 3.

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Traffic, and the traffic lights cameras, at the intersection.

Traffic, and the traffic lights cameras, at the intersection.

Jill, Nuria and I decided to go out to a local Chinese restaurant for dinner.

There are a lot of them around, not just because we are in China, but because we are in a Chinese district of Tianjin.

Tianjin, if you remember, has about 15,000,000 people living in it and yet isn’t really very well known.

It is a second tier city, because of many reasons, and pretty much no one knows about it, outside of China, because it is mostly a factory town.

Expats don’t tend to live here because they aren’t factory workers or middle management.  They are higher up, and therefore, live in Beijing or Shanghai where the business of business happens.

We took a taxi to the restaurant and I noticed that there were loads of flashing lights at the stop light.

I have never seen anything like this so I wanted to get a video of it to show everyone how often these cameras are taking pictures.

We talked to the cabbie, on the taxi ride home, and he said it is to see how busy the traffic is at that moment.

However, in Beijing, since there are too many cars, they have certain days, each week, that you can’t drive.

They use your license plate and if you are caught driving on that day twice in one year, you lose your license.

Pretty harsh.

We asked if that same law applies here in Tianjin and the drive said yes.

So, that means they are also tracking the amount of cars, and the people driving when they shouldn’t be, constantly.

That being said, it was a pretty cool light show.

 

 

Day 485 In Beijing: Trip To Tianjin, Part 2.

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The Ritz-Carlton Hotel in TIanjin.

The Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Tianjin.

Jill, Nuria, and I decided to cruise around Tianjin and check out the sites.

Again, this is a city of 15,000,000 people and there are lots of high rises, just like in Beijing, and we were ready for the same old mega-city yuck of sprawl and “progress.”

Nuria had told us that there are certain areas of Tianjin, since it had been a trading post and had different rules than much of China in the early 1900s, and we would be in for a surprise.

She was right.

We walked around the “British” section and could have sworn we were back in London or a British city.

The buildings definitely did not resemble anything we’d seen in China and we enjoy the quiet and serene walk through Tianjin’s financial district.  The district was pretty dead, since it is the National Holiday, and everyone was off seeing their family but, even so, it was a stark contrast to the constant noise and drama of Beijing.

We absolutely loved the architecture and that these buildings are historical and will be protected instead of being torn down to make room for more skyscrapers.

We then went to lunch and had a nice authentic Chinese meal and the manager of the restaurant came over and started speaking to us in perfect English.

He was super friendly and very kind.

Nuria has lived in China for 6 years and speaks incredible Mandarin but being able to speak to someone in English makes it easier for all of us because she doesn’t have to translate everything.

I have to admit, her translations are hilarious for this one reason: Her native tongue is Spanish and she then, because of her own history, usually translates the Mandarin to me in Spanish.

Now, I know some Spanish, from living in California and being an avid salsa dancer, but I definitely am not fluent.

I am usually able to catch the gist of what she is saying and then say, “Uh, English for Jill, please.”

Nuria, who has the most positive attitude of anyone I’ve ever met, just starts laughing and translates quickly into English.

We then decided to head home and took the subway, which was fairly empty, and bought some fruit off a street merchant and started to get ready to out to the Italian Quarter later that night.

 

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Day 484 In Beijing: Trip to Tianjin, Part 1.

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Another shot of the South Beijing Railway Station.

Another shot of the South Beijing Railway Station.

After spending a week back at work, the Golden Week holidays arrived and we decided to head down to Tianjin to see our dear friend, Nuria.

We bought the train tickets about 4 days ago and love that we can buy tickets, on a High Speed Train, so easily and so cheaply, whenever we want.

The tickets cost us about 60RMB each, or about 10 USD to go 150 kilometers on the fastest possible train in China.

That is really pretty cool.

The only problem with traveling in China during the October Golden Week Holiday is that about 150,000,000 of my closest friends are also traveling at that time.

Just for information’s sake, Golden Week is the world’s largest human migration.

And it happens every single year.

The actual number may be more around 200,000,000 but whose counting 50,000,000 people?

The trip was actually amazingly easy and we have to guess that most of the Chinese nationals actually traveled the night before and were already heading to their destinations.

It was still pretty busy, and there were lots of people, but it wasn’t the insane crowding and pushing we’ve seen on movies and videos.

 

 

The train ride down was great and incredibly smooth.

After we got off the train we found our friend Nuria and hopped on the subway.

We then grabbed a cab to her apartment and had a delicious lunch that she made based on Spanish dishes that mixed in some yummy Chinese foods also.

As we’ve learned, you make do, and make your own recipes, when living in China since so much of what we are used to isn’t available.

It is one of the joys of being an expatriate because you learn to make new things and live outside the box.

We also had a Chinese sparkling wine with lunch and were surprised at how it tasted.  It was a bit too sweet but, overall, was drinkable and an excellent value at 28RMB (about $5 USD).  One can’t argue with that when having a fun meal with a dear friend.

 

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Day 483 In Beijing: HSR to Beijing.

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The nice subway attendant who took Jill's luggage.

The nice subway attendant who took Jill’s luggage.

Jill and I love train travel in China.

It really is fairly simple, fairly fast, and fairly inexpensive.

Especially the HSR.

HSR, which I still call “Bullet Trains” from the time when I lived in Japan (which is a whole different blog post and would be it’s own website since I lived there from 1996-1997 and taught English in the JET program), stands for High Speed Rail here in China.

Therefore, HSR is the abbreviation.

As mentioned previously, we took an overnight train, which took about 13 hours, to Xian but we decided we wanted to be back Friday evening and get a good night’s rest on the return trip so we booked the HSR.

The train ride to Xian, on the slower train, cost about $70 USD.

The HSR back to Beijing, which took about 5.5 hours, cost about $90 USD.

It is about 1000 kilometers away and would cost $180 USD round-trip if we did both ways.

I wish trains in the USA would be so cheap and so easy to use but they aren’t.

I honestly love train travel as you get to meet people, hang out, see the countryside, and just relax.

The beds on the 13 hour train were soft enough, even though they weren’t really that soft, to sleep but we prefer the HSR so we can get where we are going and just be done with it.

It is also very cool to see the speedometer, in each car, showing “304 KPH” as we fly through the countryside.

Speaking of the countryside, and 1000 KMs of it, it is pretty sad.

So much of China is being turned into massive cities, in the middle of nowhere, with these buildings that all look the same and are just huge blocks of boring concrete.

I’m talking about building cities of 10 million people, not 100,000, being made in 5 years.

That is a lot of displacement

China is trying to become a 1st world country, at light year speed, and is actually killing all the culture and style that made China beautiful in the past.

It also is producing loads of toxins, pollution, and waste as they do this.

An example of this is Tianjin.  We will be going there for the October holiday.  It is about 30 minutes, by HSR, from Beijing.

It has over 15,000,000 people living in it.  And I’m guessing you’ve never heard of it.

I know I sure hadn’t until I went there for my job.

And that isn’t even called a “first tier” city in China.

Jill and I really enjoy the quiet side of China and there is less and less of that around as it “progresses” into the 21st century.

We arrived in Beijing at 10:45 pm and were cutting it very tight as the subways all shut down at 11:30 pm here.

We ran to the first subway, caught it as there were 2 more trains after us but we didn’t want to chance it, then got to our transfer station and caught the last subway train to our final transfer and ran like mad to get to it and made it with about 30 seconds to spare or we would have had to get a taxi, on Friday night at 11:29 pm, and that is not easy because so many are full and many won’t stop to pick us up.  So, we sat down on the final train, relaxed as it was almost empty, and then walked to the exit.

As we did this, a nice young gentleman noticed Jill’s slight limp, from her fall that morning, and offered to walk her bag for her.

She accepted and he helped us out of the station and then locked the gates closed for the night.

After 2.5 days of pure madness and wildness, we walked 3 blocks from the station and were home in Beijing.

 

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Day 482 In Beijing: Two And A Half Days In Xian.

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Jill being taken care of the doctors and our two translators, Miranda and Lizzy.

Jill being taken care of the doctors and our two translators, Miranda and Lizzy.

We were getting ready to leave Xi’an after 2.5 days of craziness and insanely busy exhibition hall cruising.

Think about this for a second:

In 2.5 days we had:

1) Taken an overnight train to Xi’an.

2) Seen the Terra Cotta Army.

3) Seen a major exhibition and expo and been a guest of honor by EACHAM.

4) Stayed in a 5 star hotel in Xi’an, all expenses paid.

5) Met the head of the whole expo and been able to drink some amazing wine with him and the winemaker at Kaiwai Vineyards.

6) Been invited to come visit the Kaiwai Winery and stay there if we come back.

7) Jill had been interviewed on Shaanxi television (that is the province where Xi’an is located) about Jill’s company and websites: www.sftourismtips.com and www.allaboutredwine.com.

8)Rode a tandem bicycle on top of all 16 kilometers of the Xi’an wall with new friends from countries including New Zealand, Sweden, Austria.  Later that night we met up with new friends from Germany, Portugal, Russia and Turkey.  14 people (including us): 8 countries.

9) Met two fantastic new friends, Lizzy and Miranda, who served as our interpreters, and got them to try some wine and beer with us at the expo.  Yes, we are bad influences.  Honestly, I think they had as much fun as we did and they will come visit us when we are back in the USA.

10)  Went to a Chinese bar named, “Mexico” which had Micheladas and chips and salsa.  Well, they had chips.  Instead of salsa they had honey mustard dressing.  Yeah, not quite the same thing as in Mexico but you do what you can in a small city of “only” 10 million people in China.

11) I was interviewed for a local Xi’an newspaper on our experience at the expo.

12) Explored the “Muslim quarter” of Xi’an inside the Xi’an wall.

 

Then, to top it all off, just as we were leaving the expo, Jill tripped over an exposed power cord and fell.

And fell HARD.

I was a few feet in front of her and couldn’t do a thing until I saw her sprawled on the ground.

I immediately reached down to check on her and she had hit her knee, then her shoulder and finally, her head.

That is what really scared me.

Her eyebrow started to show signs of bruising immediately and a huge crowd of people gathered about as quickly as someone could say, “DOWN GOES FRAZIER” in China!

Luckily, the people working the expo, including our two translators, Lizzy and Miranda, saw it happen and ran over to help.

The expo people brought over a doctor and he checked Jill out and we waited around for about 30 minutes as they ordered  a private car to take us back to the hotel.

it is a pretty brutal bruise and it was quite a scene at the expo as loads of people started milling around trying to help, give advice and offering us our choice of local hospitals.

Luckily, Jill didn’t have any headaches, dizziness, or blurred vision so it seems as if he eye had gotten the worst of it and her brain was okay.  We decided not to go to a local hospital and wait and see how things go.

If we needed, we could go to where I work and she’d have the best medical care in China.

Call me biased, but it is true.

We took the private car back to the hotel and decided to wait on the second floor balcony overlooking the lobby.

As we waited at the hotel to go home on a high speed train, three women got in a fight in the lobby in full view of everyone sitting there.

Yes, you just read that right: 3 Chinese women in a 5 star hotel started fighting with each other.  It took an expat friend of ours to walk in the middle and break it up.

Seriously, you’d think that Jill and I make this stuff up to add spice to our lives and stories.

We don’t.

This is the reality of living in China.

Honestly, it is nothing out of the ordinary.

Just another day in the life of Jill and Aram in China.

 

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Day 481 In Beijing: Xian and The Muslim Quarter.

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Annie, Jill, me, Eleni, Alena and Phil in front of the Xian Drum Tower.

Annie, Jill, me, Eleni, Alena and Phil in front of the Xian Drum Tower.

Jill, the rest of the group, and I really enjoyed riding around on the wall.

Since it was flat, it wasn’t very strenuous and it was fun.

We had to be done by 6:50 otherwise we couldn’t return our bikes so we spend through the last corner and turned them in.

We also then met up with Emre, from Turkey and Alena, from Russia.

We headed down the stairs and into the walled city so we could meet up with a few other people that were attending the conference and check out the Muslin Quarter and have some dinner.

After taking a few pictures, we were able to find Catarina, from Portugal and Sarah, from Germany.

We also met our “host” Marco, who is from Germany but has lived in Xian for the past 9 years.

He knew every nook and cranny of this city and made sure to show us a good time.

Marco was even kind enough to lead me and Jill on a hunt for good vegetarian food because the dinner place everyone else chose only had meat.  We ended up bringing our food back and enjoying it with them.

We all went out to dinner and then went to a crazy restaurant named, “Mexico” since we wanted to hang out and it is one of Marco’s favorite places.

Jill and I ordered Micheladas and they were quite good, other than being served in beer glasses instead of mugs, but that is where the fun started.  Our friends ordered mojitos that seemed to have been made with Sprite and vodka.  Everyone else said their drinks were fine and we were more than happy with our Micheladas.

We also ordered chips and….honey mustard dressing?  Yep, the chips came with that as a sauce and also with ketsup.  Not really how I remember them being served when I went to Mexico, but, when in China…

Anyway, it was a great night and we had a lot of fun.

Best of all, we made a bunch of new friends, from all over the world, and were able to experience a brand new city.

 

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Day 480 In Beijing: The Xian Wall, Part 2.

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About to dodge an electric car coming our way as we ride our tandem bike on the wall.

About to dodge an electric car coming our way as we ride our tandem bike on the wall.

Jill and I both think it is  fun living in China and getting to do things that we’d never get to do in the USA.

We’ve met people that there is just no chance we would have met if we had stayed at home.

We’ve had experiences we never would have had, both good and bad, if we had stayed at home.

And, we’ve learned things about ourselves, that we never would have learned if we had stayed at home.

They say that the strength of a relationship can be shown when you travel with each other.

Well, Jill and I met 8 days before I moved to China, and her willingness to jump in, move over here, and try a new life, says so much about her.

I guess my willingness to quit my job, move over here, and see what would happen says a lot about me also.

As far as I can tell, if traveling together proves if a relationship can make it, we are gonna make it easily after this journey.

Especially when you add in the extra stress of living in China, and starting a new job, and having almost no connections here when we arrived.

And yet we’ve built a real community and expatriate “family” that I will be very sad to leave when that day comes.

This trip to Xian was just another example of that:

As expatriates, you become close to people, and connect with them, in ways that you wouldn’t back in your home town or country.

In China it is incredibly important to do this because expatriates are so out of place and people can feel so lost, hopeless, and alone.

We definitely count on our expatriate family, which include my eldest brother, Robert, to do that.

Jill’s cousin, Michelle, lives in a city of 400,000 people in Northeastern China.

There are about 20 expatriates living there and 7 of them are one family.

I have no idea how she handles it, but she does, and she is amazing.   Meeting Michelle has been another gift of living in China.

One really doesn’t know who they will meet when they travel.

It allows Jill and me to keep an open mind, and eye, to what may come and how to deal with things that happen to us.

So far, so good.

Enjoy the ride…we sure are!

 

 

Day 479 In Beijing: The Xian Wall, Part 1.

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The gang with our bikes. From left: Jill, Phil, me, Eleni and Annie.

The gang with our bikes. From left: Jill, Phil, me, Eleni and Annie.

Jill and I have been to the Great Wall of China two different times.

We are actually going again in about one week.

We will be going with a bunch of students from Eseune Business School and our dear friend, Nuria.

I actually met Nuria when I first moved here and went salsa dancing.

She’s from Bilbao, Spain, and a wonderful person.

She works at the school and invited us to come along with the new students and stay at a farm house.

We immediately accepted and thought this would be a wonderful way to spend the Autumn Holiday in China.

However, since we were still in Xian, at the conference, we decided to check out the Xian Wall.

Now, it isn’t as long as the Great Wall, obviously, and is actually inside the city itself.

It runs about 16 kilometers long and is about 50 feet high.  It is also formed in the shape of a rectangle that protected much of the old city.

Most of the houses and businesses inside it are the “old style” but they are being torn down, like so much of China, to build new and “civilized”housing which is not very interesting or exciting.

This is the way of progress, I guess, and it makes us quite sad.

We ended up going with a bunch of friends, from many different countries, and riding bikes on top of the wall.

We had been told that it had rained for 2 weeks straight in Xian, and the skies had been hidden by “fog” that whole time.  A word to the wise, when a Chinese National says “fog” they mean smog but they don’t want to admit it.  Trust me, it is smog.

Tonight was absolutely gorgeous and we were able to take a lot of fantastic pictures with our new friends.

Phil is the tall guy and he is from Austria, Eleni is blond and from New Zealand, Annie is a brunette and from Sweden.

 

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Day 478 In Beijing: Guns and Interviews.

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Jill getting interviewed for Shaanxi television!

Jill getting interviewed for Shaanxi television!

Jill and I were just finishing our lunch when Sarah, who is responsible for all of the crazy expatriates on this trip (and there were about 200 of us) asked us to do an interview about our company.

The would be for a Shaanxi television station, which is the province that the city of Xian is located in, and a pretty big deal.

We, of course, agreed and thought it would be a blast.

When we were about to start, the interviewer started talking to me and I made sure that they knew that it was Jill’s company and I was her employee and that they should interview her instead.

I guess this is pretty common, almost anywhere, where men and women work together, that the man is expected to be the head of the company.

I’m glad that I spoke up and made sure they realized that women are just as smart, powerful, and can run a company as well as any man.  And, I know from experience, Jill can run one better than anyone else I’ve met and, without a question, about 1,000,000 times better than I could even think of running one.

The interviewer seemed very pleased to interview Jill and they actually did about a 20 minute interview.

I was able to grab a video of it and I think Jill, and her translator Miranda, did an amazing job!

By the way, they did interview me, for a local Xian newspaper, later in the day.  I had to say we both had fun being interviewed and meeting all the nice people in Xian.

 

I, on the other hand, decided to play with a laser tag rifle at the conference.

It was pretty darn cool.  The idea was to be able to hear the actual “events” going on with the headphones and then fire at the other person.

They only had the guns set up so I was just firing at the guns but the actual laser tag had full gear including armor.

The coolest thing about it is that they actually had, at their manufacturing plant, a 6 foot tall robot that was set up with fully remote controlled laser rifles and directional ability.  In other words, you could hang out, use your remote control, and have this massive robot do your bidding.

You can also sit in the “head” position of it and ride around.

Honestly, this was awesome.

You can see it on the poster beside the gun rack.  Trust me, that thing would be damn scary if it rolled up towards you.