任是无情也动人

(Note to self: need a cutesy Shanghai Expo icon to match the Beijing Olympics one...)

Usually, when I travel to China, it's to visit relatives and maybe do a bit of shopping on the side. Thus, I usually only see Shanghai overnight, and then only the inside of shops, before I take the train to Nanjing and basically spend most of my time indoors at home. On this trip, however, I traveled with my aunt and uncle, who are very fond of bombarding our tour guides and any fellow tour-goers who are unfortunate enough to fall into conversation with them with millions of questions about the state of...everything. Thus, I am left with a much more detailed and wide perspective of my motherland.

( Beijing: )

( Shanghai: )

( Pingyao: )

( Xi'an: )

Although our vacation in China isn't wholly over yet, the guided portions of it are. So I thought I'd write a bit about the various tour guides we've had on this journey while they're fresh on my mind, especially since they've been the topic of much discussion among my aunt, uncle, and cousins.

Let's start in order with Shanghai. Although we only had one (and a half if you count the trips from the airport and to the airport) day of guided tour with Kathy, my memories of her were generally ok. She did what a tour guide was supposed to do. Her tour of the French Concession area showed that she knew the area and its history well, and could communicate such just fine with English. Overall, our impressions of her were fair, though not spectacular.

Next was Jessie from Xi'an, who was by far the favorite of the twins and the rest of us. She gave me the impression of a peer much more than Kathy did, though our ages are all about the same, and she could certainly relate to children the best. When the girls joked around about the mistranslations on one of the museums near Yongtai's tomb, Jessie was able to laugh and contribute to the joke. She was also the most loquacious of our guides. On the car trips to/from our tour spots, and even during the tour, she would engage in long and deep conversations with my uncle about every topic under the sun - politics, religion, economy, history, China's place in the world and in the eyes of the people. She wasn't afraid to give her own opinions of everything, and it was very obvious that she loved learning and was a very wide-read scholar as well as well-traveled young lady. She also went above and beyond to accompany us through my aunt's very serious and detailed examinations of every item in a museum even though she must have been walking her feet off much as we had felt the first two Expo days. In fact, even after we left Xi'an, the twins kept comparing the following two tour guides against her and found them wanting. Well, I have to agree...

In Pingyao, our guide was a young man named George. Coming from a much smaller and poorer town, it came as no surprise that his English was not as good as our previous two guides. There were several times where I had to play translator myself between my uncle and our guide. However, he was pretty honest about when he didn't understand something we said. He also put the extra little effort to finding us good restaurants for dinner in the two days we spent there, even though dinner was not included in the tour arrangement we'd originally paid for. My uncle figured that he probably got a kickback from those diners. He was also the only tour guide to actually join us for lunch without a separate receipt (meaning the tour agency paid for his part of lunch too, which is technically against regulations). But since we were happy to find decent (and sanitary!) eateries in such a small town like Pingyao that we really didn't mind the small perks he got out of things. The man did give a general impression of earnestness...

Finally, that brings us to our last tour guide in Beijing, Selena - she who has been the topic of many a dinner conversation. At first impression, she seemed to be very fluent in English and had a pretty impressive resume (lived in Vancouver a few years; lead tours to or in foreign countries). However, the more time we spent on her tours, the more it seemed like...she really isn't suited to her job. Even ignoring the incident at the Forbidden City, and her attempts at talking my aunt to changing her tour program from Mutianyu and Suzhou Street... there are the small things. She would very often lapse into Chinese whenever she wanted to get a point across quickly, despite repeated reminders that we all spoke English as our primary language. She usually addressed only my aunt (half in Chinese), even if it had been my uncle who'd asked the question - as if she expected my aunt to do the translation to the rest of us for her. She hardly spoke a word to the twins and when she spoke to me, it's as if to a high-schooler on a homework assignment rather than an adult vacationing on her own time and money. As well, she would often say that she'd wait for us at such and such a spot for us to be done with taking photos or visiting Such-and-such Hall or climbing a nearby hill to see what was there. She also had a tendency to get picked up in the morning by the driver after we were picked up first, and get dropped off before we were dropped off at our hotel. These are things none of our previous guides had done; they'd always accompanied us no matter where we were dragging them, and saw us from/to our hotel from beginning to end. It just didn't seem quite professional here, since, well, just who's paying for who's time?

I've overheard various other small tour groups with only a few foreigners and an English-speaking tour guide. Most of them act more like Jessie (or Kathy) than like Selena. I guess we just had some bad luck with our last guide. Honestly, I think she'd do better at a desk job arranging schedules than in the field. Other than the last one, I think we had a pretty fair run of guides on the rest of our trip. Anyway, in the end, it's going to be our wallets talking when we do the tipping, and we already know what the math is going to be there.

But, in case anyone else ever thinks about ordering a tour from CTS for Shanghai, Xi'an, Beijing, or with CITS for Pingyao, hopefully this will help you make decisions or know who to request/avoid. :)

Woke up with a lot of mucus and a small case of the sniffles. Decided to start taking the Tylenol to head off the cold. The younger of the twins also had a slight fever and had to stay in the hotel with her dad to see if she could recover by tomorrow (since the girls really wanted to see Princess Yongtai's tomb, so much that we'd actually switched from our day of touring Famen Temple to visiting Qian Ling instead). So today's tour just consisted of me, my aunt, and the elder of the twins.

This morning we went to the 大唐芙蓉园 (Tang Paradise), which is a man-made park showcasing the Tang style architecture. There, we caught several shows - a short intro dance, a drum performance, and a lion dance atop a series of raised platforms. Our tour guide was actually very surprised since even though she's lived in the city all her life and had visited the Tang Paradise before, she'd never even known those shows existed.

The coolest thing we saw at the Tang Paradise was a 3D model map of the city during the hey-day of the Tang Dynasty, with labels of where areas such as the Daminggong, etc. were located. I had fun tracing the waterways that were channeled to the city by probably man-made canals, and which created the city moat, flowed down one of the major streets, and also channeled into several man-made lakes in the parks of the original city.

(Caption: View from 'north' side of the original pre-Daminggong palace 'south' toward the rest of the city. The gate with the sign in front is the original Xuanwumen.)

There was also a bunch of cranes caged in one area of the garden. The cage wires played merry havoc with the camera autofocus while I was trying to get a pic of any of the birds flapping. Oh well; we'll see how well they turn out.

Lunch was at a vegetarian Buddhist place. Food was mediocre, I guess, for vegetarian. Had fun rearranging the fruit/desert dish given us into cutesy patterns.



After lunch, we went to the old city wall (just the south gate portion; we weren't about to circumnavigate the inner city). According to our tour guide, most parts of the city wall dates back to the Ming Dynasty, though there are still some parts dating back to Tang. The tourist area, of course, was modern. :P

It's a pity we couldn't go back and see it at night. The light are supposed to be spectacular.

We were on our own for dinner tonight. At the suggestion of the concierge, we went to a nearby diner called 老西安 (Old Xi'an). Apparently, the traditional old-style cuisine of Xi'an is mule donkey meat (驴肉), cuz that was on most of the menu items. However, we eventually managed to find enough dishes that weren't mule or too spicy, and the food was actually pretty decent.

(In retrospect, we could've ordered one small dish of mule meat just to try it out... but I was outvoted.)

Now I just need to take a pill of Tylenol before I go to bed tonight, just in case the place wasn't as sanitary as it looked. :-/

Full day today on a guided tour of Xi'an. My throat/lungs actually stopped acting up past this morning. I guess the cough must've been due to the shock of the sudden arrival to this environment, and my system just needed some time to adapt. But just in case, I'm glad I packed a bag of extra strength Halls with me.

It seems we're starting off on the first day in a sort of chronological order. First destination today was to the site of the ancient village of Banpo, which dates back over 6000-7000 years ago to pre-history. Short of seeing the neanderthal caves in Europe or Africa, this is probably the oldest artifacts of human history that I'm likely ever going to see. It's interesting to learn that the society of those days were matriarchal. Since there was no controls over who slept with who, most people only knew who their mothers were, but not the fathers, thus family was defined by the mothers. Pity that patriarchy eventually took over by the Shang/Zhou/etc. :P

Next stop was the Qinshihuang Mausoleum, where they show off all the terra cotta soldiers (and horses and other food animals). It's much bigger than I imagined, and yes, it was impressive. One of the two complete bronze chariots there was actually a replica, with the original having been shipped to the China pavilion at the Shanghai Expo - which I'd already seen. :) The rest were the usual terra cotta soldiers, the clay horses for the cavalry, and the ox/sheep/goat/dog/pig/chicken food animals. Gotta say, that emperor sure knew how to go out with style.

Dinner was arranged at the Xi'an grand theater (or something like that; I didn't get the exact name of the place). It includes first a show of several Tang style dances and musical pieces. The girls weren't too impressed with Chinese classical instruments, but they loved the dances and the dancing girls. One of them was actually the same song/dance performed at the Shaanxi province mini-pavillion at the Expo!

I took several pics and my aunt bought the DVD afterward. It was followed by dinner which was a wide variety of different style dumplings, which Xi'an is apparently known for. Even eating one of each style they served, I got full quickly. And unfortunately, I'm not much of a food connoisseur, so the only difference I can taste out of those dumplings is if they were meat or veggie, sweet or spicy... but it was still cool. ^^;

(I was also impressed with our waitress, who was serving several different tables in different languages. Ours was English, and our neighboring table was French. She had a strong accent, but was still pretty understandable at least in the English.)

In general, pollution aside, Xi'an is a cool place. It might not have the amount of "recent" imperial buildings left over that Beijing does, but as the capital (or practically right next to the capital) from Qin to Tang, and court to 72 emperors, you can't go far (or try to build a factory) in any direction without tripping over an archaeological treasure-house. And you gotta admit, when it comes to 'prettehs' and creature-comforts, the Tang really knew their stuff. :P