My parents are here, this deserves its own post later in the week. They’ve been here for two days and already complained about the lack of western food. Spend eighth months without eating a real sandwich, THEN I MIGHT be sympathetic.
Anyway, I had a wonderful time in China this past weekend. I especially enjoyed the fountains in front of the building. The fountains were really nice.
The room service at the hotel was fine.
On Saturday morning I met the direct descendant of General Tso. For those of you who haven’t been to an authentic Chinese restaurant, General Tso has been feeding Jews on Christmas since before anyone can remember, even before PBS aired that really fun special on China Sesame Street did when I was a kid.
Great-great-great-great-great-great grandson Tso looks like this:
He currently works as a hydrolics engineer but he takes time off on the weekends to vend fresh steamed buns and I got him to sign the back of this fortune slip I had kept from dinner the previous night.
Speaking of which, for westerns wondering how prevalent fortune cookies are in China, the answer is, yes, you can find them, but they look very different. Here’s a picture:
Mr. Tso helped me sneak into see where and how they make the fortunes. These ladies sit in a room and punch out fortunes using a combination of tea leaves and facebook stalking, but the lack of accuracy is probably due to censorship issues.
I ate at the original Panda Express. I saw a panda at the zoo, and later I saw one ordering a latte at a Starbucks. Wild!
I’ve spent the last twenty minutes trying to think of a joke involving “pandas” and “bamboozled” but nothing’s coming.
Unfortunately, I did not get to see where they house political prisoners whose organs are harvested after their execution. Not only that, but I didn’t even get to take back any organs home with me! That is, unless you count the duck liver I ate on Sunday night. But if that duck was a political dissenter, it doesn’t really matter because his fate is probably the same as all the loyal communist ducks.
In Beijing everything is yellow from the smog which is actually really cool because if you put on the right pair of sunglasses everything suddenly turns green.
On Sunday morning I saw the factories were they make everything in the world. At the end of the tour they were selling yellow dust in the gift shop which I thought was a total ripoff because I’m from Jeju where the dust lands naturally for free.
I was really jazzed to see the Great Wall. That Wall is the original giant wasteful expenditure that completely failed to keep out the invading Huns. Although as “Mulan” showed, it might have slowed them down long enough for a plucky heroine to start an avalanche and later foil an assassination attempt.
At least the Wall is still a ‘wall.’ Hadrian’s wall is barely a fence, and the fence that separates Canada from the USA was the only casualty of the Aroostook War (look it up, I sort of did).
As with most things, the pictures that you see in travel magazines and coffee table books don’t accurately represent the landmark in reality. My camera was running out of batteries but here is a photo I snapped before it died:
Also, I didn’t get a good photo of Beijing’s skyline because of the smog:
So here’s a picture of Beijing’s sister city Addis Ababa:
If anyone has a free weekend coming up, I would highly recommend heading west for a few days. Going to China, even for that short time, was an experience I’ll never forget.
And if I do, I’ll just read this blog post as a memory jogger.
I was a spineless pale pathetic lot. And I didn’t have a clue. But somehow China made a man out of me. Now I’m as swift as a coursing river, with all the force of a great typhoon, with all the strength of a raging fire, mysterious as the dark side of the moon.
Culture Time 