Sabino Canyon in Two Days

[PSA: I realize that the vertical pictures didn't rotate. I will fix this. Later. Right now I'm done with Computer Time.]

Yesterday I went for a little hike in Sabino Canyon with my back-from-back-East friends, and then today I went again with the family. And what a difference a day makes, as yesterday was beautiful, mid-70s and sunny, but last night/today it snowed in all the mountain ranges around Tucson. See the following:

Yesterday looked like this:

And today looked like this:


We were originally going to head up Mt. Lemmon today but the road closed because of the snow! No go. We got some nice pics, though, which is what it's all about, right? Suuuure. Also, we took the tram into Sabino Canyon today, something that I made fun of people for doing yesterday. ::hangs head sheepishly:: The deal with the tram is that it goes the first 2 miles of the paved trail and then you hike in the rest of the 3.8 miles to where the road got washed away by the flood last summer. I'm not sure if you can continue after that (ie, if they've repaired enough of the trail yet). I *think* you can.

I took this one...
...and Dad got this one.

Road Trip to NM

Cassalyn and I went to New Mexico for a little road trip -->
This is the view looking onto White Sands National Monument from Cloudcroft, a mountain town with lots of second homes in Lincoln National Forest. Did you know that Lincoln National Forest is the birthplace of Smokey the Bear? Now you know.
Ah, the lovely gypsum sands of White Sands National Monument. Did you know that the sands are almost always cold or cool due to their white color and gypsum makeup?
White Sands was flooded from rains...in August. Did you know that the water table here is only about two or three feet below the surface? Hence...
...cottonwoods grow here. This is the top of a 30 or 40 foot tall tree that has survived the shifting sands because it is taller than most dunes.
We needed a sled. This method did not work at all. Next time, white mountains...next time.
The New Mexico crew.

I went to Harbin again for work, and it's already cold there!

Man I'm glad I don't live in Harbin anymore! It's already fleece and jacket weather, ewww. A few snapshots of the work trip:

Topiaries!

We went to dinner at a special Dongbei (northeastern-style food) restaurant where they have a floor show. It included:

A man playing the hulusi through tubes in his nose, quite a talent.

Let's sing old propaganda songs together, comrades! I remember seeing a show like this when I lived in Harbin before, and I couldn't believe people where allowed to do this. By this, I mean brazenly make fun of the old style Mao-worship.
Let's pull the silly foriegner on stage to sing propaganda songs, ha ha ha!

Scary, scary fat man who later sang a famous love song to me about an inch from my face while everyone in the restaurant went nuts. That's what I get for reserving a table in the front row, I guess!

And the Songhua River that runs next to Harbin. Lovely, isn't it? It was frozen when I was there. You could go down a 30-foot ice slide onto the river.

Night at Lao She Teahouse

Mom and I just spent a lovely evening watching the variety show at the Lao She Teahouse. There was Beijing Opera......kuaiban, fast talk, where the performer speaks in time with clacker things, usually tells a joke with lots of puns in it, I love it, I will learn it, just you wait and see......acrobatics......bianlian, face change, where the performer changes masks all the time, so fast that you can't see him do it, very cool...
Now I'm off to bed. Tomorrow I go back to work (boooo) and mom goes on a tour to see the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall (yaaaay).

Afternoon with the Ma

Important Photos from the Afternoon

It was clear out! And blue!
Delicious 'modern Brazilian' food at Alameda:
Beijing public phones, always the memorable orange clamshell:

My mom is visiting here in China

Mom's visiting, and we've done some fun stuff (even though during the week I have to be at work). It's actually worked out quite well, Mom can go on her own during the day to the tourist sites I've already seen and have no desire to see again, and then we go out to dinner and do stuff at night when I'm off work. Brilliant! Here was one of our first dinners at a vegetarian place where the food presentation is half the fun:The veggie restaurant has a Buddhist theme, please see the following menu excerpt for the 'Fire of Ignorance Tofu' we ordered.

I had a three-day weekend on account of Labor Day, so we took the opportunity to head to Pingyao, the city I missed out on seeing a few weekends ago on account of there being no train tickets. This time, I was smarter and planned earlier...and got a ticket agent to get the tickets for me. Sweet. So hard-sleeper tickets and 12 hours overnight later, we arrived in Pingyao Ancient City. Mom in the dining car:Our hotel:Scenes of Pingyao Ancient City:Muslim guy making lamian, pulled noodles:Guy shoveling coal in the middle of the street:

We returned to Beijing after a night spent on a traditional Chinese kang (brick bed that can be heating from below during the winter) via 1.5 hour bus ride to Taiyuan, and then a quick dash to a train that was leaving in 20 minutes. This time the train ride was only 8 hours...but we were only able to get hard seat. Ah well, it was during the day so it wasn't so bad, it's not as if we needed to sleep or anything. Mom was shocked by the seatless folk--you don't have to buy a seat either if you don't want to or they're sold out, you're welcome to stand the whole way!

Work Trip to Qingdao

Last Thursday and Friday I got to go to Qingdao for work. Not too bad, eh? Qingdao is known for being clean and having beaches. It is also well known as the home of Qingdao Beer, probably the only Chinese beer anyone outside of China has heard of...it's spelled 'Tsingtao' in the states.

This child looks very perplexed at the man trying to tell her about starfish.It was really, really windy, hence the hand holding the hair back.The Famous Zhao Bridge in Qingdao, the pagada at the end is on every bottle of Tsingtao Beer. The next time you order it, take a look!

Visit with Li Ran!

I got to visit with my friend Li Ran who I met last summer in Suzhou when I was traveling there with my friend Haowen, yay! Here are some super Chinese pictures we took:
It's gongfu skillz time! Kinda like hammer time, only different.Do we look like this guy? We should...Chinese superstars!And finally, Li Ran lives pretty close to Tiananmen Square so before I went home we took a few shots there. It was a lovely evening, fall seems to have hit Beijing suddenly. It's no longer discustingly humid and everyone was out at the square flying kites and staring at the foriegners, nice.

The weekend's adventure!

Fast forward, everyone, to now! I'm going to leave off updating about Europe for an entry and give you an update of what's been going on here in China. The other intern here and I had been planning to take a trip out of Beijing's smog for a while, and since she's leaving to head back to the states soon, this weekend had to be it. So here is the story of How We Didn't Go To Pingyao:

The Brilliant Plan: leave Beijing on an overnight train to Pingyao Ancient City, spend a day there, sleep there, and then hit a few more sites on the way back to Beijing via train Sunday night. Hahahaha, are things ever this easy in China? How naive of me. Problem being that I decided to wait until Friday afternoon to buy train tickets for that night to one of the most popular weekend destinations from Beijing in one of the most populous cities on the planet during one of the last weekends of summer vacation. Oops. This was what the train station looked like when I went to buy tickets:Just a few people, maybe. Just a few.
The Trials of Me Buying (Attempting to Buy) Tickets: Wait in one of about 20 lines of about 50 people each to try to talk to surly ticket-seller lady. Wait for about 45 minutes. Get to front. "There are no tickets to Pingyao tonight. Try the 'tickets for tonight' ticket window.' Change lines, wait another 30 minutes. 'There are no tickets tonight to Taiyuan or Pingyao' 'What about tomorrow?' 'I can't sell any tickets for any other day, try lines 5 through 20.' Change lines. Wait another 20 minutes, during which time 8:00pm rolls around, closing time for many of these ticket windows. It doesn't matter how many people are in line, the ticket ladies just pull down a curtain in front of the window. I pray that mine doesn't close. I change plans as try for tickets to Datong instead. Success! 'Ticket for tomorrow to Datong, please. Two hard sleeper seats.' So we ended up leaving at 3:30pm on Sunday for 100 kuai each (about 12 dollars) for a 5 and a half hour ride to Datong. Looking down from our hard sleeper seats onto cute Chinese kid below:
Arrival in Datong and the Large Foriegners in Small Bus: We knew from the ever-popular and useful Lonley Planet tour book that CITS (the Chinese tour agency that's everywhere, I think it's state-run) organized 100-kuai day tours to the famous sites around town. But where to find said CITS? No problem! 'Hello foreign friends, do you need help?' A friendly face culled we foriegners from the crowds of Chinese leaving the train station right away and pulled us into the CITS office where two Spaniards were already waiting. Friendly man helped us find a room for the night and arranged our tour for the next day. Sure we could've gone cheaper without his pleasant help, but that's what they pay me the big bucks for here at the internship, right? Little did we know that they would fit twenty larger-than-Chinese foriegn folk into sardine cans for our tour:
Seeing the Sites: Large Buddhas in Small Caves and a Precariously Perched Monestary: But in the end, everything was fine and we got to see the famous Yangang Grottoes were there are over 50,000 buddhas carved into sandstone about an hour and a half outside Datong. Sweet.




After that the tour headed to the foothills of Hengshan Mountain to see a monestary that had been built into a cliff about 100 meters off the ground from the 5th century. This was done to protect the valley from flash floods. The monestary has a buddah, a laozi (daoism) and a confucius; gotta hedge your bets, you know?

It was crowded, you had to wait in line to get through the monestary since you could only fit one by one through most of it.

And Home Again: So we had tickets for the 10:30pm train back to Beijing, but we could only get hard seat (which would have meant little sleep for me) that would put us in at like 4am. So after much wandering and asking around about other options (and finally getting an answer at the CITS office), we're told that we can take a bus back, and we can catch said bus across the street from the train station. Fine. We go there, nothing looks too obviously like a bus heading to Beijing so I ask a guy sitting in a car were the bus station is. 'What sort of bus station.' 'I don't know, a normal bus station.' 'Where are you going?' 'Beijing' 'Oh! Oh! WE'RE going to Beijing!' Yeah right. Very convenient. But actually, this van was going to Beijing, it was a sort of shared ride van. The catch? You have to wait until they collect enough people (in the case of this size van, this means 8) to go. 'Just a half hour more, yah, sure.' Riiiight. And then: 'Hello! Hello! You! Change vans, THIS one is leaving now.' More waiting. And then: 'Switch again, this van has a problem, but this other one's leaving, we promise!' FINALLY we leave, only to stop again to pick up more people but whatever, in the end we get to Beijing hours and hours earlier than we would have by taking the bus, leaving me with no excuse to skip work today!