Beard off!

My friend Jason challenged me to a "beard off" and when I got back from Xi'an, I found that his Army of One had been shaving right straight along. He got the last laugh. This is what I looked like yesterday:

But now my beard is: OFF!

My Knee is on Fire and other Tales

Before my thirty-hour train ride to Xi'an, I got an adjustment from a local Chinese medicine practitioner. This involved lighting my back on fire and then forty minutes of a leaden, warm herbal compress laid upon my belly followed by some chiropractics. My neck is better than it has been in years and I am happy with the overall result so yesterday I went back to treat my knee and my belly.

They lit my knee on fire! I will go again today for more fire treatment and more acupuncture. I will take ten days of herbal remedy for my belly, as well, which means that I am done traveling.

Hua Shan: The Holy Mountain

Mount Hua or Hua Shan is the most beautiful place I have been in China, with The Bund in Shanghai a close second. They could not be more different despite the fact that both are overrun with humanity.

The bus windows rattled deafeningly while we traversed the switchbacks up and down from the cable cars that would bring us half way up the "Most Precipitous Mountain Under Heaven." A thick fog wrapped the mountain for most of the day.

No idea who these nice people are, but I was amused to notice that one of the revolutionaries appears to be shooting her in the head.

When the wait to get down is more than two hours and the wait to get up at 11AM was close to an hour, one has to wonder if hopping the fence to get in front of nobody is a rational decision.

This gentleman and his friend announced to me and the other three people in our cable car that they were members of the Chinese Olympic Committee with responsibility for judo, wrestling and weight-lifting.

Red ribbons and locks adorn the holy mountain as a way of making a wish for loved ones.

It is said that bottled water has about 1000 times the carbon footprint of tap water. Certainly it deserves a shrine for its huge impact on the world.

Quietude

Not the lower sign's text!

"Bring up your dead!" We passed remarkable old men with twenty foot lengths of ribar perched on their shoulder making their way up the narrow paths.

There are many Taoist shrines on the five peaks, each with an attendant monk who periodically clangs a bell.

Noodle making in action..at altitude.

Yes, it rained and, yes, I bought a disposable poncho because being cold all day was not my idea of fun.

Nothing too remarkable about this sign. There were ones that said "No striding" which means the same thing on this mountain as it does in the subway systems in China--don't hop the fence or you might die.

Mount Washington is not nearly as cool. Sorry, folks. I expect that comment to generate some discussion back home, but the weather station here and the slightly higher peak make this a winner in Coolest Meteorological Sites.

I saw very little litter except one person tossing an empty plastic bottle off a thousand foot precipice. They have done a very tasteful job of trying to stay ahead of it.

With all due respect, I wonder if the sign-makers really knew what ecotope meant. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecotope.

The line to get off the mountain by cable car was very, very, very long.

아버지의 이름으로 or 在父亲的姓名

In Shenyang, on Sunday, my sweetheart and I went to Mass for my first time since coming to the Middle Kingdom and her first time ever. I have mixed feelings about the affair. It was sweltering hot. We showed up at 11AM for the 11:30AM English Mass and a rather unfriendly Chinese woman chased us away, telling us to come back at 2pm. She must have thought I was Korean (though I did not tell her my last name), because the 2PM Mass was for Koreans and neither my fluent Chinese girlfriend nor this fluent English speaker understood a single spoken word. Nevertheless, the order of the mass is such that I could follow most of it.

They counted out the right number of the hosts by having those taking communion raise their hands prior to the Mass.We held hands during the Lord's Prayer, which was sung, and bowed to one another during the passing of the peace.

The Sacred Heart Cathedral of Shenyang is a Roman Catholic cathedral in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, China. It is commonly called Nanguan Catholic Church. The bishop of Shenyang Diocese resides here. In 2006 the Vatican agreed to Paul Pei (Pei Jun Min) being installed as the Bishop of Shenyang.

There were five or six couples there in formal, Western-style wedding garb for photographs despite the wet weather. I posed as a bride here:

Chang'an and the Terra Cotta Warriors

Tomorrow, around 11 PM, I will board a train in Changchun and sit down in the hard seats for thirty hours to travel into China's interior and ancient capital city, Xi'an. Xi'an (西安) is the capital of the Shaanxi province, and a sub-provincial city in the People's Republic of China. One of the oldest cities in China, with more than 3,100 years of history, the city was known as Chang'an before the Ming Dynasty. Xi'an is one of the Four Great Ancient Capitals of China. Xi'an is the eastern terminus of the Silk Road and home to the Terracotta Army. It has a vibrant Muslim quarter and their cuisine, though heavy on wheat products, is famous across China.

As you may recall, I am reading Journey to the West. It is set in Chang'an, in part.

Look for more updates and some pictures of my own in the days to come.

Vacation Day 1: Sculpture Park

My summer vacation is three weeks long and began yesterday with a visit to the Changchun Sculpture Park. Seventy sculptors are here to install seventy new sculptures. I saw a bunch of them the other night at a local ex-pat hangout called Grampas. There is a man from Georgia who looks a tad like Ernest Hemingway; a fellow from Antigua, who does not look at all like Hemingway; and, yesterday in the park, we ran into one from Finland, who was quite the character. "Antero Toikka," he said, handing me his card. He had an interpreter with him who just graduated from college and will go to the United States for further study.

Crisp Autumn by a sculptor from Shenyang, China, where my qin ai de was born. We took a nap beside her in the 90-degree heat.

Lotus leaves.

Black-eyed Susan's are my mother's favorite flowers.

There were numerous couples dressed to the nines in the sweltering heat to have their picture taken.

The Hunchback of Changchun sits on a rock and meditates.

Like father like son

My father, God bless him, may cry in the marital bedroom, but the only times I have seen him cry have been in the movies. In 1985, the family traipsed to see Natty Gann and that was the first and one of the only times I have seen him weep. Like father like son.

Tonight, in the privacy of my own bedroom, I started uncontrollably crying about ten minutes into the film and cried five or six more times throughout the movie. Lew Feldstein commended the movie prior to my departure. Others have since recommended it. Finally, I got myself a copy yesterday and last evening, after two hours at a tea house with my qin ai de, and an hour of walking her home, I took a cab home and settled down to watch the flick.

Mao's Last Dancer is "a drama based on the autobiography by Li Cunxin. At the age of 11, Li was plucked from a poor Chinese village by Madame Mao's cultural delegates and taken to Beijing to study ballet. In 1979, during a cultural exchange to Texas, he fell in love with an American woman. Two years later, he managed to defect and went on to perform as a principal dancer for the Houston Ballet and as a principal artist with the Australian Ballet."

If you want to see something beautiful and learn about the complexities of inter-cultural relationships, this is a must-see.