OCT 2 Our first race day began very early. Since the schedule for the first 500 meter heats had not yet been drawn up, or else no one would tell us what it was, we had to get to the race site by about 7 a.m., which meant waking up around 5:30. Of course, when we arrived we learned that we wouldn't race until later in the morning. This gave us a good amount of time to warm up, play hackey sack, and get sick on imitation Red Bull. Our racing career in China was short and mediocre, but not terrible. We ended up borrowing a drummer from California, and two paddlers and a steerer from the Tianjin medical school. The Chinese guys were all strong and experienced, which was good because we couldn't communicate with them very well, and all the Harvard folks really buckled down (as far as I could tell from the third row). The result was that we did not come in last in either of our time trial heats, but we did not perform well enough to advance beyond that. The team that eventually won the mixed division was the Italians, to the surprise of all. Slightly after lunchtime, we were all dragged away to attend the opening ceremonies. There was a flag parade, where we were lucky to have borrowed the Californians' extra flag, and a swearing-in at which April pledged for all the foreign teams: "We will not get conceited in victory, or dejected in defeat." Following that was an unexciting speech from the festival president, which he ended by suddenly firing a flare gun into the air. The crowd turned to follow its trajectory, and there behind us was the final race of the mixed division, just reaching top speed as they left the starting line. Two minutes later it was all over, with the Italians squeezing out a narrow but decisive lead over the Russians and one of the Chinese teams. The festival still had several hours to go, however, as the men's and women's divisions wrapped up, so several of us explored the area for a while. Just across a very busy street with no crosswalks, there was a big upscale pedestrian shopping area that we poked around. We discovered a giant octopus scaling a building, a Chinese record store that carried mostly foreign bootlegs, and innumerable clothing and electronics shops. The weather was nice, so there were also many booths and stages set up along the walkways, with everything from karaoke to portrait drawing to a demonstration of personal massage technology. We returned to the waterfront just in time for the "friendship race". For this race, each boat contained half of a Chinese team and half of a visiting team, but sadly we weren't invited to participate. The award ceremony just after dusk was quite a spectacle: fountains sprayed seawater in elaborate patterns that wove between between fireballs and beams of colored light as orchestral music played, while those who'd gotten stuck in the back of the crowd by the water tried to avoid getting drenched. Our team was given an award, a plate declaring we'd gotten third to last place in the "annual Tanggu gup". That was pretty much it for the day. We returned to the hotel after all the awards were awarded and had another dinner at the hotel retaurant, and mostly collapsed from fatigue. With no real cause for celebration yet and another race day to come, I for one just flopped into bed for an early night. --------- I mentioned that the air was polluted in China's cities. Air pollution is a problem of big cities worldwide, but it's especially bad in China because of all the coal that's burned. Over half of the electrical power comes from coal burning plants, and in old cities like Beijing there are still a lot of coal burning stoves used for heating. Cars clog the city streets, though there are also crowds of bicycles everywhere you look (but surely not for environmental reasons). Water quality is also generally not good. As in so many developing countries, the unwary traveler risks a host of intestinal problems by drinking the tap water. Judging from the amount of bottled water available, it may be that locals don't trust the water either. I got somewhat conflicting advice about this: brushing your teeth with tap water was deemed safe, but not eating fresh produce (which may have been washed in tap water), and drinks with ice cubes were right out. I don't know what the Tanggu harbor water was like, and I am comfortable in that ignorance. These observations seem to reflect something about the state of China right now. The country is industrializing as fast as possible right now, especially as the 2008 Olympics draw near, and seems not to be worrying too much about the side effects. Labor is still one of the cheapest economic inputs, and as far as I know the standard of health has never been especially high. --------- OCT 3 Our last race day began early again, but everyone was used to it by now. The order of the day was the 5000 meter race, which we were both looking forward to, and intimidated by. The huge majority of dragon boat races in North America are 500 meter races like the previous day's, with only a handful of longer ones. The longest one I've heard about is a 2000 meter in Toronto. We had practiced the 5000 meter race several times in the previous month, but no one quite knew what the real thing would be like, or even what an average time was. Even once we got underway, we had only the vaguest idea of how we were doing. The race takes around half an hour, so in the interest of time many boats are on the water at once. In the interest of avoiding collisions, however, the starts are staggered by about a minute each, with the faster teams going first and the slower teams going later. This means there is very little overtaking and you can't compare your position easily to anyone else. To complicate things further, the race course was a loop that each boat went around 4 1/2 times, slowing down for the turns and speeding up for the straight segments. In our heat of nine teams, we launched sixth and were overtaken about 10 minutes in by one boat. It was quite the adventure: the boat behind us caught up as we were going around a turn and naturally tried to cut the corner as close as possible, so we naturally tried to cut closer yet so they would have to work harder. We clanked paddles with the other team for a good minute and actually struck the turn marker buoy, but our expert steerer kept us in bounds by, oh, a good six inches. (Going out of bounds results in disqualification.) That was the only head-to-head moment for us. The rest of the race was just a long, hard slog through just over 30 minutes of paddling. Our time ended up being on the low side of average, but definitely not the worst at the festival. We were awarded another commemerative plate. Immediately after the last races, a flurry of jersey trading began and lasted pretty much all the way into the evening. Dragon boat racers love to swap jerseys with everyone else they can find, and many had come prepared with a huge amount of their team's gear. The younger Russians, from the Vladivostok Institute of Water Sports, drove probably a harder bargain than anyone. Harvard jerseys were very popular, and I am sure I could have gotten more for mine if I had held out a little longer, but I traded right away with the captain of the one Chinese team we beat in the 5000m. So I now have a sleeveless jersey for the Tianjin Institute of Architecture (I think), and I sat out the rest of the trading session. It may have been best to trade for a shirt I actually saw people racing in. I heard from a veteran of previous years that some Harvard team members were conned into trading for a shirt that said "I'm a thief". Following another awards ceremony that featured more fountains and lights, we all went to the festival finale banquet. There was a huge, huge amount of food of all sorts, but a lot of teams more or less ignored it and just ran around trying to do more jersey trading. There were also speeches by and in honor of festival officials, a number of toasts, photos, drunkenness, and general carousing. Morgan got really really drunk, along with a few other teammates. During our group photo, a lot of people fell down suddenly. These events may or may not have been connected. Once the banquet was finally over, we still didn't feel like calling it a night, so we went down the block to a nearby disco, called "Cool Heat". The huge majority of people dancing there that night were visiting dragon boat teams, with a few bemused locals, and one really intoxicated middle-aged management type. It was a lot of fun, and I was pleased to see that, on average, paddling a boat well has little if any correlation to dancing ability. Even the our friends from California, that pearl of American culture, looked pretty much just as awkward as your average east coast college kid. (Later on, Sasha praised my "Michael Jackson"-like dance moves.) Thoroughly tired out, our official business done, we trickled back to the hotel for a well-earned rest. From that point on, we would call our own shots, and that was a welcome prospect after four days of constant, often poorly organized business. Of course, we now had a group of 18 opinionated people, who had to somehow organize themselves in a foreign country for five days, on the basis of next to no information. It turns out, this is not as easy as it sounds. ---------------- You know what they have in China' big cities that we don't have in the US? Colored public lights. On lampposts, bridges, sidewalks, and elsewhere. Wherever you would normally have a plain streetlight or floodlight here, you are likely to find the same thing in China with a green, red, yellow or purple filter, or often all of the above, one right next to another. It makes the night cityscape much more cheery. ---------------- OCT 4 We left Tianjin in the morning, after one last dose of hot Gatorade, taking bus back to central Beijing with Romeo and the California team. Out of the many guidebooks people had brought (I no longer felt negligent for having forgotten to get one), we identified some things to do. One of them was a very highly recommended restaurant in Beijing, not too far from our hotel, whose name has escaped into the mists of time, if indeed we ever knew it. But it was promised to be "popular with the locals", and it certainly was. The management had the good sense to pack our party (almost everyone plus Romeo) up to a private room where we wouldn't embarrass ourselves in front of the other patrons. Romeo helped us order a huge meal of 7 courses or so, featuring a turtle/chicken stew. It got pretty silly, and a little disgusting. As an apertif, the waitstaff offered us the blood of the turtles we'd eaten. According to tradition, a mixture of turtle blood with baiju, a potent distilled liquor, is supposed to promote health. So of course we ordered it; how could you say no to something like that? Well, one way is to have neglected to get any immunizations before coming on the trip -- which I did because I only had a week to get things together -- and the prospect of drinking something disgusting and then getting hepatitis A for my trouble, strangely enough, did not appeal. The turtle itself was pretty good though. It tastes like fishy chicken. The bill for this indulgence came to about 60 yuan per person, or $7.50 each. For all its weirdness and inconvenience, China also has its perks. With stomachs full, we bid goodbye to Romeo. He set off for the bus station, to go back to visit his family for the rest of his midterm break. The next few hours were consumed by debating our plans for the next few days, exploring the neighborhood, and buying some groceries. In the early evening, as I was walking around with a few people, Lydia's cell phone started ringing. To our surprise, Romeo was asking if we would mind for him to return to Beijing and stay with us while we were there. Our guide, now a friend, had come back to us. And none too soon: our next goal was to tackle the Great Wall of China. ---------- OCT 5 The master plan for the Great Wall was to begin at a somewhat remote location called Jiangshinglu, then hike about 10 km to a reservoir called Semitai. We hired a minibus to take us to the start in the morning and pick us up at the end, aided by the invaluable Romeo. But unfortunately, there was a miscommunication, and the driver picked us up in the morning thinking we wanted a much closer destination (probably the popular and overcrowded Badaling). When we told him where we really wanted to go, he demanded a huge price hike. I suspect he would have done this no matter what we had told him, but in any case we met him in the middle. The drive to the wall went fine, taking something over two hours. Many of us napped on the way there -- we had left at 8 a.m. -- but no one so conspicuously as Morgan, who had stayed out drinking literally all night, not staggering back to the hotel until just after 7:00. The hiking also went well. Our group was a bit large (all 19 of us went), and naturally split off into a number of smaller groups of people all going at a similar pace. I was in one of the slow groups, poking along enjoying the scenery and the fine weather, and stopping pretty often for photos. Poor Bill was still sick, so he couldn't have kept a fast pace in any case. He ultimately had to use one of the abandoned towers for, shall we say, other than its intended purpose. On the way, we saw a few other hiking parties, and locals followed us along trying to sell us stuff. One woman ran home to fetch a beer after Rob asked about it. We also met enterprising photographers, ticket-takers, and bridge maintainers, all of whom extracted their few yuan from each of us. At the very end was a zip line down across the Semitai reservoir, which took us down to the parking lot where our trusty van was waiting. The ride back was not so smooth. We were about one hour out of Beijing when we hit a massive 2 hour traffic jam. Of course, no one knew it would be a 2 hour traffic jam when first hitting it, so a number of drivers tried to pass around it. The first wave went around on the right shoulder, but they got backed up and stopped by whatever had stopped the two main lanes. Then people actually crossed the median and tried to pass the jam going the wrong way on the highway, but that didn't work either, and both lanes of the other side of the highway ground to a halt. Before long there were five lanes of stopped traffic on a four lane highway, with a trickle of cars leaving Beijing by creeping past on the shoulder. With literally no way to move the bus forward, we just sat for two hours. The heat and gas fumes rapidly got oppressive, as almost no one thought to turn off their cars, and Rob and Morgan got out (to the bus driver's dismay) to find out what the problem was. About 45 minutes later they came back to report an overturned truck that had been carrying rocks, now piled all over the road. They had even helped move a couple. The rest of us passed the time teaching Romeo vulgar American slang. (Other Mark tried to move things in a more constructive direction by suggesting idioms like "bite the bullet", but it turned out Romeo almost knew more about those than we did.) By the time we finally got back to the hotel, it was 11:15 and everyone was exhausted. Any plans for the evening had been dashed in a uniquely Chinese way. But with three full days remaining in Beijing, it was hard to be too irritated. The Great Wall was the last thing before the flight home that had involved the entire group, and our trip was a bit different from this point out. -------------- (I never got around to finishing this properly. As a substitute, here is a transcript of the journal I wrote in on the plane back.) 10-9-2005 I'm on the plane now in Beijing, ready to take off, so it is time to write about the rest of the trip. I left off with the day we went to the Forbidden City. We had a nice breakfast at the hotel (mix of Chinese and western breakfast foods) and then cabbed it out to Tiananmen Square. We had gotten a late start and another group had already gone, so I went with 6 others. We stayed together through Tiananmen, the world's largest square, and through the gate into the palace, but got split up quickly afterwards. Seeing all the palace buildings was interesting, but we weren't allowed in any of them. We ate lunch at the palace and we tried to find something interesting in the many side streets, to no avail. Then we looked outside for a really interesting sounding museum called the Courtyard Gallery. We eventually found where it should have been, but no gallery. We did find a neat tea shop, our first hutongs (back alley neighborhoods), and a DVD shop where several people loaded up. I didn't find anything good that Jon didn't already have and that would work in USA. We returned to the hotel, and I bumped into the Lauras, other Mark, April and Heather as they were heading toward a Chinese acrobatics performance, so I joined them and enjoyed the performance. There was some fun Chinese yoyo work and lots of balancing people in caveman suits, but sadly the sound tech'ing was terrible. We got dinner at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that was quite good. The remainder of the evening was slated to be karaoke, and we went (at about 11:30, after staying at the Den for way too long) to a very posh place called Party World. I was cranky and didn't know the songs, and left after about 15 minutes. Everyone else had a great time and went to a club afterwards, but I was glad to sleep. The next day was Friday. Sarah left us around noon. We went to the silk market in the morning, which probably had no real silk anywhere. It was a curious affair, a 4 floor mall-like building filled with stalls -- no big stores -- and it was my first real experience with Chinese bargaining. I only did okay. At this market most sellers ask an initial price of 6-10 times what they will eventually take. Max says if you are not laughed at initially and leave them angry, you probably got screwed. I bought a few odds and ends, but nothing like what Sasha got. In the afternoon I went with Sasha and Max to ride bicycles around the hutongs in the lake district. This was one of the top experiences of the trip. The light and weather were perfect, the area was beautiful and interesting. We talked to some of the residents in one hutong and complimented a grandmother on her vegetable garden. We watched people practice taichi, play the lute, and exercise on the outdoor public gym equipment. We lounged on couches next to Houhai with its boaters and fishermen. We finished the evening with a sunset over the lakes, a drink in one of the fancy bars on Lotus Lane, and that was more or less it. On Saturday I went to the antiques market at dawn with several other adventurous souls. It was an outdoor market, already bustling at 6 a.m., and there were millions of knickknacks to be had. I never got a reasonable price out of anyone. We did try steamed buns and fried peanuts along with the other bargain hunters. We returned to the hotel, ate breakfast and napped, and headed out to the Forbidden City again to bike some more. We found some interesting hutongs, but it wasn't as good as the day before. Max and I eventually split off to visit the garden at the island on Beihai Lake. The white pagoda at the top was closed for renovation, but it was pleasant nonetheless. We witnessed a novel sight: a young Chinese hostess guiding patrons into her restaurant, in a beautiful red dress and with a red lantern with a candle. We met with most of everyone at the Den to go out for dinner. We settled on a restaurant on Houhai, but gave the cab bad directions and had to walk about 30 minutes, asking passerby about the restaurant periodically. Dinner was good, with the highlights being spicy fish, beef with chilis, and some kind of taro root. We lost our equilibrium a bit when some people didn't want to pay for a full share because they hadn't eaten parts of the meal, but getting things settled and walking outside in the night air put us in a good mood again. We drank Tsingtao on the lakeside couches and were silly. It was great. The evening sputtered and died a slow death after that. I won't go into the boring details. Suffice to say there was a failed club outing and a bizarre late night massage, both of which I skipped. Sunday morning saw our last breakfast, one last trip to the silk market for kites and other gifts, and a ride on the Den's rugby club bus to the airport. After a sad goodbye to Romeo, who'd stayed with us this whole way, we went to the check-in area and Romeo went back to Tianjin to begin classes at his university. I spent my last yuan at duty-free on tea and Chinese wine, almost missed the plane boarding call, and now here I am. Next stop: Newark by way of North Pole. Last stop: Boston, where I will be totally wrecked for a day or two, then back to the lab. Casimir force, here I come! ----------------- Postscript: the return trip was not terribly eventful. I had a nice conversation with Sasah, watched a movie that left no impression whatever, and tried to doze. I ate a meal or two of airplane food. We arrived in Boston late, and I was home by about 9 p.m. It wasn't until about 10:30 p.m. that I realized something was seriously wrong in my digestive tract. Suffice to say that I must have eaten something unwise in my last 24 hours in China (or possibly on the plane: I suspected the ice cubes). For those of you planning on getting food poisoning, I really don't recommend pairing it with jet lag from a 12 time zone shift. I was knocked out for a solid week. But everything until that point was a great experience. Zai jian!