Hello, my name is Laowai

I boarded my train from Shanghai to Hong Kong after a quick and painless trip through customs — still required, even though Hong Kong is officially a part of China these days. There are four different classes on trains in China: hard seat, soft seat, hard sleeper, and soft sleeper. I bought a hard sleeper ticket, which Vivien assured me would be fine, despite how awful the name makes it sound. I was pleasantly surprised when I got on to the train: the bed was only a few inches of foam but it was comfortable enough, and more importantly, it was spotlessly clean with a fresh set of sheets and a blanket.

I was in a cabin with six beds stacked three high, and I was the only non-Chinese person in the group. I communicated to the other people through an elaborate series of gestures and grunts, which actually worked pretty well. I showed them my passport, my Chinese visa, and postcards showing both Denver and Colorado which they seemed to find pretty interesting.

At dinnertime, my stomach started growling and I headed for the dining car. I walked in, and all the Chinese people stared at me. I stood there for what must have been five minutes, with the whole dining car watching me like I was the evening news, and then I walked back a car to collect my thoughts about what to do.

Side note: I'm quickly realizing that traveling alone is a whole different beast than traveling with friends. With other people, you can talk through a problem out loud. You say things like, "I wonder if we're supposed to just sit down... or...." and then somebody answers you with their insight and reasoning on the subject. This is not the case when you're alone. You sit there thinking, "okay... everyone is staring at me, and there aren't any open tables in the dining car. Hmmm... I guess... hmm... this is awkward... huh... I don't... umm... crap... oh god this is awkward."

Luckily, in the next car over was the answer: other hungry western people, a group of four friendly guys from Arizona who were traveling through Japan, China, and heading for Thailand. We sat down at the first table that opened up, got a series of dishes and cracked open about twenty lukewarm beers, which supposedly was all that was available. The guys talked about the frustrations of traveling in China compared to Japan. To a certain extent, I definitely agree that China makes for pretty rough traveling sometimes — some Chinese people are constantly spitting, smoking, slurping, burping, cutting in line, pushing, staring at you, and more. That certainly isn't true for most Chinese people, but it's enough of a percentage to get really annoying sometimes. The guys were going through a bit of culture shock after the ultra-courtesy in Japan, and got a chance to blow off some steam.

The next morning, I was awoken at 7:00am by a couple of little kids who kept yelling, "hello! morning! ha ha ha!" while their parents watched with glee as they harassed me. For 45 minutes, they kept trying to wake me up, and anytime I would so much as move they would talk about me. Chinese people, especially those from rural areas, are fascinated by foreigners, which they call Laowai. The whole morning, these little kids watched my every move:

Roll over in bed.
Blah blah blah Laowai blah blah. Ha ha ha!

Check my watch to see what time it is.
Laowai blah blah blah Laowai, blah. Ha ha ha!!

Read a book for a while.
Blah blah blah Laowai, blah blah! Ha ha!

Look over to see if the kids are still staring.
Hello Laowai! Morning! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

After my day as a zoo animal, I finally got to Hong Kong and started walking to meet one of Bill and Vivien's friends Sam, who was nice enough to let me stay with her at her place near Kowloon Bay. (Inside joke for Wayne's World fans: I was born in Kowloon Bay!) Sam is an English teacher at an adult education center in the center of Kowloon, where I met her and dropped off my pack. I spent the day walking around that side of Hong Kong, which is a swarming hive of people, restaurants, beggars, scooters, neon signs, and tourists. Kowloon boasts one of the best views in the world: looking across Victoria Harbour to Hong Kong Island.



I met up with Sam when she finished class at 10:00, and we got on the metro bound for her 47th floor apartment in a gigantic complex in the eastern outskirts of Kowloon. Her place has stunning views of about 30 other similar sized skyscrapers with mountains in the background.

After a hearty American breakfast this morning at a good western-style restaurant, Sam went off to work and I hit the other side of the city, Hong Kong Island. It reminds me a lot of New York City, but much busier and more chaotic. Much of the island is connected through a huge network of above-ground pedestrian bridges which weave through the second or third floor of a lot of the major buildings. You can walk for miles without ever going to street level, it's really odd.



I wandered over to Hollywood Road, an art and antiques district where I saw a lot of seriously impressive contemporary Chinese artwork in a slew of galleries along the street. The road is also home to the Man Mo Temple, the oldest in Hong Kong, as well as the world's longest series of outdoor escalators. In the same area were a bunch of open-air markets selling anything you can think of: mostly vegetables I've never seen before and parts of animals I've never considered eating. A quick video of the action:



The rest of my day was spent wandering through the ultra-luxury IFC shopping mall, which is housed just under the tallest building in Hong Kong, and hanging out along the harbor by the Hong Kong Exhibition Center. Every night, the big attraction along the harbor is this big city-wide light show that someone laboriously choreographed so that buildings light up and spotlights shine in Kowloon as music plays along the harbor on the other side. Here's the Exhibition Center in the foreground and the gorgeous IFC tower in the background:



Thanks to Sam's hospitality, I'll be in Hong Kong for a few more days. Then, I'll make my way north to Guilin and Yangshuo, home to the impossibly shaped mountains along the Li River.

--Ryan!

Photos updated: Hong Kong

East meets West

After a week in Shanghai, the really odd jumble between Eastern and Western culture has interested me the most. Rapidly transformed from a remnant of old-world China to a booming metropolis in less than twenty years, Shanghai is left with fascinating results of the cultural meet-up.

A few days ago, I was sitting with Bill in a KFC enjoying a chicken sandwich, mashed potatoes and a Coke. The walls were filled with pictures of Colonel Sanders, Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping played on the stereo, and there was not a single other westerner in sight. Chinese teens and twenty-somethings all around had dyed-red hair and t-shirts adorned with nonsensical English phrases like much love, model airplane kit as they text-messaged each other on tiny cell phones and listened to their iPods. Starbucks is on almost every corner, and pirated DVDs from the United States are cheap and readily available in retail stores (which means I’ve been watching a ridiculous amount of The West Wing). Even Pizza hut has made it across the Pacific, except in a much more upscale form:



Exports from the west appear to be everywhere, but seem to be mostly embraced by young people. The generation gap that has emerged throughout China doesn’t seem like it is strictly due to influence from the West, however. In the US, there is a gap between those who grew up using computers and those who didn’t. In China, that same generation of young people is also the first to experience open communication with the outside world, and the first to be subjected to China’s one-child policy. It will be really interesting to see how that generation grows up as they become leaders of the world’s next superpower.

A hundred years ago, the British colonists who occupied Shanghai built big buildings along the waterfront in order to present the façade that the Brits had more presence in the city than they actually did. In a lot of ways, the Chinese are doing the same thing in Shanghai today. The city is being built at an absolutely staggering pace, sometimes with the Field of Dreams mentality of If you build it, they will come. After a trip to the government-run Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition, the urban future of Shanghai seemed a little bit backward. To me, the exhibit seemed more concerned with putting on an impressive show than it did with providing ideas and goals behind the plan – nowhere in the museum did they ever mention the impact on the lives of regular people. Much of the new development consists of enormous groups of ten or fifteen identical skyscrapers which rise around a central park for residents, similar to the failed communist blocks and the now-demolished crime-ridden housing projects in cities like Chicago. Instead of discussing why they chose this route, they made some cool 3D flyover animations and a model of the city. To their credit, it was a freaking huge model:



Despite my nerdy concerns about urban planning (which I’m sure you all find engrossing), I have really enjoyed my time in Shanghai. I’ve visited a Confucius museum and temple, a Ming dynasty pagoda, and the multifaceted Shanghai Art Museum. I’ve eaten meals from many different parts of China, including the straightforward Shanghai dishes, the famously fantastic Beijing duck, and the spice of the dishes from the Muslim western province Xinjiang. Tonight we ate in a fancy teahouse in Bill and Vivien’s suburb Jaiding, where we were presented with a few different types of flavorful green teas alongside a series of small food dishes:



On the more Western side of things, I made my first visit to a Prada store at super-swank mall in a really expensive part of the city. I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, which was pretty embarrassing once I was actually inside: imagine walking into a normal store in your underwear. I also visited IKEA again, which was about thirty times more crowded than the one in San Francisco. A scene at the checkout counter:



I’m finally starting to get used to the crazy traffic – looking both ways repeatedly while crossing a street during a walk light takes a little bit to mentally overcome. I shot a video of a fairly typical street scene so you could get the gist for the wackiness. China’s accident fatality rate is through the roof, and it’s no wonder why:



Another of the chaos of Nanjing road, the main tourist pedestrian street:



Tomorrow morning, I’m headed on a 24-hour train to Hong Kong, where I’ll stay for a four or five days before making by way back north into mainland China for a few weeks as I make my way toward Tibet.

Ryan!

--
Photos updated: Shanghai

The worst way to get to Shanghai

The flight from San Francisco to Shanghai normally takes right around 12 hours. For me, it took from Tuesday night to Friday afternoon.

Gretchen and I spent Tuesday, my last day in San Francisco, visiting the de Young museum, which has a really broad collection of artwork from 18th century formal landscape painting to contemporary multimedia pieces, housed in a beautiful building designed by the Swiss firm Herzog and de Meuron. I was surprised to see sculptures by Andy Goldsworthy (the guy from the fantastic documentary Rivers & Tides) as well as Claes Oldenburg, known for his enormous sculptures of objects from everyday life (the one outside the de Young Museum was a huge safety pin).

With a few hours to kill after the museum, I decided to fulfill one of my totally ridiculous dreams of visiting San Francisco: a trip to Dave Eggers' Pirate Supply Store, which is also a children's writing workshop. Let me warn you in advance: asking a rational 70-year-old family member if they want to go to a pirate store is kind of an awkward experience ("umm... it's where they sell, like, eye patches and stuff"). Luckily, Gretchen was along for the ride, so we went. The inside of the store is like a tiny version of the pirate ship in the last part of The Goonies, full of glass eyes, pirate flags, gold coins, jewels, and more. For the adult visitor, each item was accompanied by a hilarious description of its suggested use. A few photos:





Gretchen and I said goodbye to our mateys and got on the Bart to SFO. My heart started beating faster and faster as we approached the airport, not out of nervousness to leave the United States for a year, but because I was afraid they weren't going to let me on the flight. With a one-way ticket to Shanghai, I am techinically required to show an ongoing ticket out of China as proof of plans to leave the country. Without specific plans, I am not legally allowed to get on the plane. According to everything that I have read, it is only a problem if the person who checks you in happens to be an asshole. I got in line at the Air Canada booth and was called forward by a young guy. Holy crap, I thought, I hope this guy isn't a jerk. He silently looked over my trip plans as I nvervously waited to hear my fate. "You're going to Shanghai... through.... Toronto?! That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard! You know that's just north of New York, right!?" He called over his behind-the-counter buddies and they giggled at my stupid route. Luckily, they were distracted enough to print out my boarding passes without checking for my ticket out of China. Phew.

My flight to Toronto left more than three hours late after a big mechanical problem, which caused us to switch planes at about 1:00 am. We made it to Toronto more than an hour after my ongoing flight to Shanghai had already left. Nobody seemed sure what I should do about my missed flight: I was sent to about 20 different booths, counters, windows, rooms, and even a different terminal before I was able to get answers. With only one flight from Toronto to Shanghai per day, it was clear that I was temporarily stuck in Ontario. The apologetic Air Canada people and gave me a flight the next day, a free hotel room at the Best Western (classy!) and $37 worth of meal vouchers, which was fine with me. There's very little I enjoy more than free stuff.

I spent my day at the Best Western (too far from downtown Toronto to spend any time in the city) watching Canadian TV and eating at the hotel restaurant which surprisingly had an outstanding Indian buffet. There are worse ways to kill a day than watching Much Music and eating spicy Indian food, I tell you that much. I finally boarded my flight, 26 hours after I thought I would.

On a 14-hour flight, you hope that you're not sitting next to someone horrible. Much to my dismay, I was sitting next to the most irritating human being on the planet: a squirrely 50-something Chinese man. Everyone knows there's an unspoken rule that the armrest is a neutral zone where you carefully spend your time, making sure you give the other person their fair share of time there as well. This guy spent much of the flight with his arm a full six inches over the armrest, despite my aggressively nudging him out of my space every few minutes. On top of that, he kept spitting into his barf bag, yawning incessantly, and tapping me on the shoulder to ask me ridiculous questions like, "Do you like this kind of plane?" and "Do you like rice?" After a few hours (and a few cocktails), I gave him the benefit of the doubt and decided to just try to forget about it. Just as I was starting to relax, he grabbed my purchased copy of Newsweek out of my seat pocket, read an article, and placed it on his lap like a napkin while we ate our sweet and sour pork for lunch. Oh... my... god.... I pushed the flight attendant button and ordered my fifth gin and tonic.

While he was sleeping, I took a picture of the neutral zone violation. For those keeping score at home, he also has a big spot of drool on his shirt.



I finally made it to Shanghai on Friday night, easily glided through customs and was greeted by my brother Bill, who was waiting for me along with a massive amount of Chinese people. He was easy to spot, because he's two feet taller than everyone else in the country. We boarded the Maglev, the first of its kind in history, and currently the world's fastest train. Unfortunately, since it was raining, the the Maglev was only able to hit 186 miles per hour, instead of its break-neck top speed of 267. Either way, it rocketed us from the far-away Pu Dong Airport to the city in just a few minutes. Here's some video of us flying by cars on the highway:



We met Vivien in People's Square, and ate a great dinner of spicy stir fry before taking the hour-long bus to where Bill and Vivien live, in a northern suburb called Jiading. Calling it a suburb is a little bit misleading, because it is still full of the high-rises and busy streets of Shanghai, just toned-down a bit.

I've spent my first few days in Shanghai wandering around, seeing what Bill and Vivien like to do for fun. We've eaten some great meals so far, including yesterday's lunch at Taco Bell Grande, a bizarre take on the Taco Bell franchise where teenage Chinese employees awkwardly wearing sombreros serve surprisingly delicious Tex-Mex food and try their best to speak a few words in Spanish. It was classic. On the more traditional side of things, Bill and Vivien took me to a style of restaurant called Hot Pot, where you order an array of food (meat, potatoes, vegetables, tofu, etc.) and cook it in one of two sauces in a pot in the center of the table.



We've gone to futuristic ultra-luxury shopping malls, wandered through the historic old town in Jiading, visited the former British colonial center in Shanghai called The Bund, walked down the city's craziest pedestrian street Nanjing Road, and more. One of the most amazing things about China so far is the insane amount of people that are around at all times. I've never seen anyting quite like it. Here is some evidence, shot in Bill and Vivien's local supermarket, which apparently "wasn't very crowded" the day that we visited:



I'm having a great time in China so far. I'm looking forward to exploring Shanghai a bit more with Bill & Vivien, then starting the solo part of my trip in a little more than a week as I make my way south toward Hong Kong. Thanks for reading!

-Ryan!


Photos updated: San Francisco, Shanghai. (Some of these are a little bit grainy because I had my camera on the wrong setting for a few days. I've got the problem figured out now.)

We say San, you say Fran

Saturday morning I made my way from Berkeley on the Bart train headed for the spectacular San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I lucked out, and there were some great temporary exhibits: one about organic architecture, a small exhibit on poster design, and a very large and bizarre show by avant-garde artist/filmmaker Matthew Barney. He had taken an entire floor of the MoMA and covered it with photos, sounds, video exhibits, sculptural pieces and more, all revolving around the theme of Japanese whaling tradition. Some of it was even accompanied by music from Bjork, his girlfriend (wife?). In a different area, he also had a few video pieces of himself making artwork under restraint, in an attempt to combine art with athletics. The rest of the MoMA was great -- I especially enjoyed the Robert Rauchenberg pieces, and a hilarious golden statue of Michael Jackson sprawled out like a reclining Buddha, with Bubbles the chimp on his lap.

That night we celebrated my Aunt Dofie's 92nd birthday party at Kris and Wilbur's house. When asked if she felt different, she said that she felt luckier than ever before. Still being able to go to yoga class, ride on public transit, and live without assistance at 92 years old sounds pretty lucky to me.

After dinner I made my way into the city to go to the Tilly & the Wall, Now it's Overhead, and Jason Anderson show. Jason played super-fun, inspirational rock (like a motivational speaker) which I thought was great. Tilly & The Wall were just as adorable as they were the first time I saw them in Denver, and played a ridiculously fun set full of keyboards, guitar, singing and tap-dancing. Seriously. I talked to a few of them afterward, and they were really nice people too. Here are two short clips I shot of some of the foot-stompin', singalong action:






The next day, after a long late-night bus across the bay, I woke up in the afternoon and didn't accomplish much except to make my way back into the city to visit the San Francisco Museum of Craft & Design which had an exhibit on Raymond Loewy. He's a guy who designed buses, stereos, train engines, cars, interiors, a plethora of famous logos (Lucky Strike, Hoover, Greyhound, etc.) and more. He is most famous for the book Never Leave Well Enough Alone which is a concept that matches his design career perfectly. Seeing all of his work in one place was inspiring to say the least.

Today, Gretchen (my dad's cousin) and I got in the car and drove over to Mt. Tamalpais, which is the highest mountain in the Bay Area at just over a mammoth 2500 feet. That would be a lot more impressive if I wasn't from Colorado. The views were great and the drive was fun as Gretchen tried to keep her cool driving alongside the occasional sheer cliff. We also stopped by the Muir Woods, one of the two big redwood areas of California, which was incredible to say the least. After dinner at Gretchen's favorite macrobiotic restaurant, we went to frugal design nerd mecca: Ikea. Since we don't yet have any Ikea stores in Colorado, I was completely obsessed with the place. I was also somewhat surprised at how massive it is: it was almost the size of two Target stores stacked on top of one another, but full of even cooler stuff. I took pictures, which probably embarassed Gretchen.

I'm leaving San Francisco tomorrow on a long flight to Shanghai with layovers in Toronto and Vancouver (yes, I'm going backward... it was cheaper this way). After I get to China, I won't be back in the states for more than a year. It's a weird feeling having only completed .015% of my trip.

Ryan!

All Aboard the California Zephyr

I left Denver on Wednesday morning at Union Station, where I nervously said goodbye to my parents for a year and hopped aboard a fairly empty train, spending a full minute attempting to stuff my enormous pack into the overhead compartment which served as entertainment for the other passengers. "That's a big pack!" they said, stating the obvious as they watched me struggle.

I was exhausted from my 4th of July exploits the night before, in addition to the all-nighter I pulled trying to prepare for the trip, but I was determined to stay awake until we made it to Winter Park so I could see my city and state from another perspective. I made it all the way to the 20th street bridge — a full three blocks from Union Station — before passing out.

The train was packed with all sorts of odd people. There was an enormous family of Amish, who were — according to someone who talked to them — on their way to Tijuana to get low-cost (and in my opinion, super-sketchy) cancer treatment for one of the members of the family. Another guy on the train seemed to be autistic, and carefully took a photograph of each mile of the trip and scribbled our current mileage on a piece of paper. He also laughed and made "toot! toot!" noises as we passed cars along the road.

Somewhere during my first day of being on the train, I started meeting other people, who quickly became my train-friends. We got into patterns of meeting up at random in the lounge car, which we all but took over from the other passengers by the end of the trip. Here's a rundown of who I hung out with: Patrick lives in Brooklyn and works for the New Yorker organizing a big festival they have each year. Faith is a 20 year old from Florida and is traveling on a solo trip by train in a huge circle around USA and Canada. Lailye is from Massachusetts and is into avant-garde dance and decided to give away most of her stuff and move to North Oakland. Blossom is an expert gardener, and has lived in San Francisco for 13 years. There were other people peppered in there here and there, but that was the main group.

Riding on Amtrak is a weird deal, and doesn't seem to have its you-know-what together quite as much as, say, any other form of transportation. Lailye said it felt like riding on a luxury train in Eastern Europe, which seemed about right. There was something insanely awkward about the whole thing. The on-board announcements were always quirky and strange and didn't have the air of a big corporate entity like you would expect. You'd hear things over the loudspeaker like, "Hey Phil? Katie? It's the dining car. You've both got lunch reservations at 12:45, but it's already 12:50 and you're not here. If you could stop by the dining car and let us know what's going on, that would be great." It was very odd.

Amtrak's scheduling system is pretty hilarious because it has all of these magically precise arrival/departure times like 8:07, 9:42, and 11:54, when in reality the good people at Amtrak have no idea when the hell the train will get anywhere. I found out that Amtrak doesn't own any of the track on which we were traveling, so we were always having to stop and wait for freight trains to pass because we were riding on borrowed track. It was always easy to tell when we were running late because the smokers would start grumbling. We haven't gotten fresh air in a while. Shouldn't we be in Reno by now? Let me see that schedule, honey.

We arrived in Emeryville (between Oakland and Berkeley) exactly five and a half hours behind schedule, making my train ride right around 40 hours long. As we arrived, I said goodbye to my new friends and said hello to my Dad's cousin Kris and her husband Will, who live in Berkeley where I am staying.

This morning, I ventured out into the city to meet Faith and Blossom, two friends from the train, to see areas of the city that might otherwise be overlooked by tourists. We met at the Coit Tower and took the elevator to the top for spectacular city views,then ventured down the fantastic Filbert Steps, which are full of stunning gardens and are home to the famous parrots of telegraph hill. Then the three of us took the bus across to the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge, where we shot some photos before heading down to a very secluded beach that Blossom knew about. The beach was full of naked tan gay men, which was a little bit awkward for me since I was clothed, straight and pale. We hung out for a while, enjoyed the views (of the bridge and the ocean, not the man-ass). We caught a bus away from the bridge and back to the middle of the financial district where I took the Bart to meet Gretchen (my dad's other cousin) and my Great Aunt Dofie.

The two of them had picked up a flier for a Peruvian foundation fundraiser, so we went off to experience a night of Peruvian food, a live band, and dancing afterward. The food was delicious, the band was really enjoyable, and the dancing was brief (for me at least) so it was a great night.

I've got loose plans for tomorrow, so I'll update you soon to let you know what I'm up to. Thanks for reading!

--Ryan!

Photos updated: California Zephyr

The Beginning of a Journey

In 8th grade, the students in my middle school English class were required to write a page-long entry into our journals about what we thought high school would be like. We were to describe our projected first year as vividly as possible: who we pictured as our friends, where we thought we'd hang out, how we'd spend our time. At the end, we turned in our papers with the promise that we'd receive them in the mail after our freshman year of high school. Sure enough, a letter addressed in my handwriting came a few days after school got the following year. Many of my high school predictions were right, some were wrong, and some were totally ridiculous.

These past few weeks have held a lot of the same nervousness and excitement that comes along with packing up and heading to a new school. As I sit here late at night a few hours before I leave, exhausted by the last few days packed with pre-trip errands, my mind keeps wandering to all of the unknowns. Will I make friends? Will I get lonely? Sick? What if my backpack gets stolen before I even leave Denver? Do I really want to wear these same three shirts for a year?

In the end, I have to do the same thing that I did on my first day of high school: try to forget about all of the nervousness and embrace the weird feeling of being completely out of my element. Soon enough, I'll get into the swing of things and being in a new city every few days will feel completely normal. I really hope that you'll join me on my adventure around the world by checking out all of the stories, photos, and video that I'll post on this travelogue. I'll do my best to keep it as lively as I can.

The first leg of my trip takes me to San Francisco by train where I'll visit family and explore the city before heading to Shanghai to visit my brother Bill and sister-in-law Vivien. Wish me luck, and I'll see you all in a year. -- Ryan!