Dad in Egypt

Today would have been my father’s 99th birthday.  “Our new daughter” never knew him, because he died seven years before she was born.  This really was a shame, because he was great with kids, and was quite a character.  Since this blog has more or less devolved into a travel blog, I thought I would tell a travel-related story about him.

This incident took place in 1984, on my parents’ first and only trip to the Middle East.  I had been traveling in Asia for two years when I met them at the airport in Tel Aviv.  After touring Israel together, we flew to Cairo.  

Now, I have to tell you that my father had gone to medical school in Scotland in the late 1930s.  While there, he developed a friendship with an Egyptian classmate by the melodious name of Abdel Maghid Ali El Far.  Shortly after graduation, they fell out of touch (you know, World War II and so on).  Now that Dad was in Egypt, he was determined to find him.

So the first order of business upon checking into our hotel in Cairo was to ask for a Cairo phone book.  Imagine our surprise to find that Cairo didn’t have a telephone directory.  “Wow, what a shame,” I thought, “there’s no way he’ll find him now.”  But Dad wasn’t giving up.  He launched into Plan B, which was simply to ask everyone we met if they knew his friend.  “Daaad,” I said, rolling my eyes, “this is a city of —what?—ten million people?  Do you really think you’re going to find him just by asking random people?”  Undaunted, my father continued to buttonhole every single person we had any contact with (tour guides, money changers, bellhops), and ask them if they knew his friend.

A couple of days later, I took a bus down to Sharm El Sheik to do a little snorkeling.  When I returned the following afternoon, my mother greeted me with, “quick, get dressed—we’re going to a wedding”.  Huh?

Here’s what transpired while I was gone.  My parents went into a gift shop in the hotel, and my dad, as usual, asked the proprietor if he knew anyone by the name of Abdel Maghid Ali El Far.  “El Far?” the guy asked.  “I have a friend from college named El Far.  I wonder if they’re related.”  So he calls his friend, and yes indeedy, Abdel Maghid is his uncle.  It turns out he doesn’t even live in Cairo;  he lives somewhere up in the Delta.  But another one of his nephews is getting married in Cairo the following night.

So that’s how we ended up at this big fat Egyptian wedding, with crossed swords, ululating, and frenetic belly dancing, while Dad and Abdel Maghid Ali El Far got each other caught up on the previous forty years.  I still shake my head in wonderment when I think of it.

Ting bu Dong

One of our reasons for travelling to China this year was for Lillia and me to practice our Chinese.  Both of us have learned a ton since our previous trip.  I made a big push to learn to read, and that really paid off.  I now know a little over a thousand characters, which may sound like a lot, but it’s nowhere near enough to, say, read a magazine article.  It is enough, though, to read a Chinese map, or a menu, or street signs, billboards, and business names.  I also learned a lot of new words, every day.  If you know how to pronounce one character of a two-character word, it makes it easy to look up that word.  I won’t go into the mechanics of this; just take my word for it.

Another thing that paid off was listening to Popup Chinese.  My one-year subscription was the best $99 I ever spent.  We watched a lot of movies on the long-distance buses, and it was amazing how many phrases turned up that I learned from Popup.  Mei shi, mei banfa, wu suo wei, zenme hui shi, all these everyday conversational phrases that elementary textbooks don’t seem to cover.

What I still lack, however, is listening comprehension in conversation.  So often, I would ask a question and then get an unexpected high-speed barrage of words back.  So, I would be left standing there like a deer in the headlights, synapses firing way too slowly as I struggled to decode what had just been said.  Lillia, however, would often get it right away.  “Mom!  She says there aren’t any more tickets for the 9:30 bus!  You have to take the 11:00 one!”  And I would give myself the “doh!” forehead slap, and think, yes, of course that’s what she said;  it just took me too long to process.  After a few situations like this, when I didn’t understand something, I’d ask Lillia, “did you get that?”  And, more often than not, she did.  I have no doubt that however hard I study, Lillia’s Chinese will far outstrip mine in a few short years.

Finally, Some Pretty Pictures

Okay, the trip was not an unremitting parade of misery.  We did see some pretty things.  Here are some of them.

We'll start in Kunming.  These are lotuses in Green Lake:

While in Kunming, we made a day trip to Shilin, the Stone Forest.  This is scenic area of bizarre karst formations.

Here are Tom and Lillia in one of the narrow slot canyons there.

This is a Chinese mosque in a Muslim area south of Dali.

Near the mosque, an old largely abandoned Buddhist complex.  It was full of amazing sculptures and carved and painted doors.

(Look out behind you, Lillia!)

This is a qilin, known as kirin in Japanese.  This is the same critter you see on bottles of Kirin beer.

In the same area, minority women in a market.

A side street in Dali.

A riverside house in Lijiang Old Town.

The Zhongyi Market in Lijiang.  Does anyone know what that long white-tipped pink thing is?  I've never seen it before or since.  If you know, leave a comment.

Mangosteens and other fruit at Zhongyi Market.  Mangosteens are one of my favorite fruits and I hadn't seen fresh ones in thirty years.

More Zhongyi Market.  Lovely mangoes.

A Tibetan temple in Lijiang.

At the same Tibetan temple.  I love the kid sticking his finger in the Buddha's belly button.

Instead of staying in the tourist ghetto of Lijiang, we stayed in the charming nearby town of Shuhe.   There were plenty of tourists there too, but it wasn't overrun like Lijiang.  Here are some riverside cafes in Shuhe.

One of the soggy but cute yaks in the fog and drizzle of Yak Meadow on Snow Mountain.

Wildflowers at Yak Meadow.

Scene from the bus from Lijiang to Shangri-La.

World's largest prayer wheel in Shangri-La.

The Zhu Family Mansion in Jianshui.  Jianshui wasn't on our original itinerary, but we added it to break up the long trip from Kunming to Yuanyang.  It turned out to be our favorite place.

Sewer covers in Jianshui.  And here I thought Japan was the only country with decorative manhole covers.  The amazing thing was that we saw no two alike.

This was our favorite restaurant in Jianshui, and probably our favorite of the whole trip.  These jugs were full of homemade wines.

And finally, the Yuanyang rice terraces.  I couldn't stop taking pictures here.  Most of these were taken from the roof of our guesthouse.

Wow.  If this was the only post you looked at, you'd think we had a great trip.

Conversations with interesting people

One of the nice things about our trip was the long conversations we had with people we met at hotels or on buses.

One of them was Joe, a French-Canadian marketing guy who has been living in China for twelve years.  He had lots of stories about great business ideas he’d had that were outright stolen from him. He bemoaned the fact that he was “addicted to China” (his exact words).  I tried to probe the nature of this addiction, which was inexplicable to me, given his experiences there.  But he was never able to articulate his reasons.  He said when he first came to the Lijiang/Shuhe area, where the air is so clean and the landscape so beautiful, he felt tremendously relaxed and rejuvenated, and immediately moved there.  He’s been there for two years now.

Casey was a young mother from Shanghai who was staying at our hotel in Shuhe.  Lillia had great fun playing with her seven-year-old son.  Casey had recently left her job to help care for her parents-in-law, who are both dying of cancer in neighboring Jiangsu Province.  Her father-in-law has stomach cancer, and her mother-in-law has lung cancer, though she had never smoked in her life.   Casey was pretty convinced that the toxic environment in eastern China was at least partly responsible for their cancers.

Tina was an Austrian woman in her early thirties who has been living in Shanghai for the better part of a year, studying Chinese.  When her boyfriend finishes his Ph.D. in Austria, he’s going to join her there.   She says that on a really good day in Shanghai, the pollution index is more than double the worst pollution ever recorded in her hometown near Vienna.  Even so, she too seemed addicted to China, although she didn’t put it that way.  But she’s wondering what to do when she wants to have kids, which she’ll have to do soon.  Is it right to raise kids in such a toxic environment?  She told us about the joke that was going around Shanghai this spring when all the dead pigs came floating down the river: “Isn’t China a great country?  You can smoke all the time without ever having to buy cigarettes, and now when you turn on the tap, you get free pork soup!”

Elaine was a thirtyish woman from Shenyang in the Northeast, vacationing in Yunnan with her parents.  She had gone to college in Canada and had stayed on for a total of ten years.  Then she returned to China to take a job in Beijing.  She has been there for two years, and now plans to get back to Canada as soon as she possibly can.  She said the pollution in Beijing this year was so much worse than she had ever experienced before.  Also, she was a little tired of the mind-set in China right now.  She said everyone is just focused on making money, to the exclusion of everything else.  Maybe in twenty or thirty years people will start to care about other things, she said hopefully, but right now it’s all about the money.

It was amazing how all these different people came around to the same themes.  There seems to be an awful lot of discontent in the Middle Kingdom these days.

I Have My Reasons

In case my Shangri-La rant has left you with the impression that I’m just a complete crank, let me catalogue some other things about this trip to illustrate where I’m coming from:

Every restaurant we ate at had people smoking in it.  Some were chokingly full of smoke.  If we tried to escape the smoke by eating at an outdoor table, we were usually within smelling distance of an open sewer.

Every long-distance bus we were on had a vomiting passenger (EVERY bus, I’m not kidding).  Our assigned seats on one bus had suspicious brown stains on the seats (we sat elsewhere).  On at least two buses, the driver smoked non-stop, right beneath the “smoking strictly forbidden” sign.

The toilets in Yunnan were horrifying.  The squat toilets I used thirty years ago in India were pristine models of hygiene by comparison.  I won’t even describe them, lest I give you nightmares.  Except to say that at some of the bus rest stops, the toilets were separated only by three-foot-tall knee walls and the fronts of the “stalls” were wide open, so you had the pleasure of shitting in full view of anybody who walked by.

In rural areas, people don’t seem to know what to do with non-biodegradable trash, so it just piles up.  Markets, villages, bus rest stops—they all had piles of smelly trash swarming with flies.

Our last stop was the village of Duoyishu, in the Yuanyang rice terrace area.  We were stunned by the beauty of the landscape.  Well, we saved the best for last, we thought.  Until we went for a walk around the village.  As we walked past one house, a little girl ran across a terrace to spit at us; Tom took a direct hit.  Later that day, other little kids were so hostile to Lillia that she started crying and said she wanted to go home.  Lillia is so friendly and warm, she could make friends with a stone, but not with these feral brats.

Even the food was disappointing.  Usually the food is one of the great pleasures of travelling in China.  And don’t get me wrong—we did have a handful of really great dishes.  But mostly it was rice noodles, with the same ingredients every time.  We love noodles, so at first this was fine.  But after rice noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a few days, we didn’t care if we never saw another rice noodle for the rest of our lives.  When we returned to Kunming from Shangri-La, to our hotel surrounded by rice noodle restaurants,  I needed to take action.  I went to the reception desk and managed to say in Chinese, “Excuse me, is there a good restaurant nearby?  We really like Chinese food, but we don’t want to eat noodles.  We want to eat rice.”  The restaurant he sent us to really was pretty good.  It would have been even nicer if it hadn’t been hot, noisy, and full of smoke.  Also, Tom reported that the men’s bathroom was appalling and there was a guy vomiting in it.  See a theme here?

What with all this plus all the illness, some of which I’ve already chronicled, we were more than happy to be leaving.  When we got back to the airport in Kunming, we felt so happy and relieved.  For about ten minutes.  Until we found out that our flight had been cancelled.  Now, no one at the airport seemed to speak much more English than I speak Chinese.  So we were in a confused state of anxiety for about the next hour and a half.  A woman at the Hainan Airlines desk made multiple phone calls and ran around with our passports to argue with people at other desks, before finally producing boarding passes for us on another flight.  I’m sure when she got home from work that day, she had to lie down and take some Tylenol.  We then had about 20 minutes to get through security and out to the gate, which of course was the very farthest one from the ticketing area.  When we arrived, gasping, at Gate 59, we found that our 9:00 flight had become a 10:00 flight.  Then we sat on the tarmac for two hours.  When we finally took off, the passengers erupted into applause.  We were lucky to make our connection in Beijing.

We are thinking now about next summer.  Canada’s looking really good. 

Lost in Translation

I know that half the time I speak or write Chinese, I sound like a complete idiot.  So I have great sympathy for the people here who write signs in English for tourists.  It’s not at all like translating from, say,  Spanish;  it’s more like translating from Klingon or Mimbari.

Here are some signs we’ve come across on this trip.

 This one has the simple typo-like error.  You can find ones like this all over the world.  Actually, they could have saved themselves the trouble of translating it;  it wasn't the English-reading tourists who were spiffing all over the place.

Here’s an interesting example of choosing the wrong meaning of a word.  I’m sure I do this all the time when I look up a word in the dictionary.  What is a yak angle, you may ask?  That third character, jiao, means corner, angle, or HORN.  (Why Salisbury?  I've got no idea.)

This one was at the Yak Meadow on Snow Mountain.  They were trying to say “stay on the path; don’t trample the meadow”.  If you look up those last two characters, the dictionary does indeed say “lawn”, but a real lawn as we think of it in the west is a pretty foreign concept.  Chinese gardens generally have trees, flowering shrubs, water features, and in between, elaborate stonework rather than grass.  How they came up with “stampede” is anyone’s guess.  It makes me picture a herd of startled tourists galloping across the meadow in a panic.

Here’s a translation that was just too literal.  The Chinese literally says, “caution fall water”, but it came out sounding like a command in English.

Now here’s a real head scratcher:

 It starts out making sense and then just goes careening off the rails.  When I have access to a character dictionary again, I’m going to look up all the words and try to decipher the meaning of this train wreck.

Shangri-La!

If you’ve ever seen the movie “Lost Horizon” (or read the book), you know that in this Himalayan utopia, there is so little stress that no one ever gets sick, and people commonly live well past a hundred.

We arrived in Shangri-la yesterday.  It used to be called Zhongdian until some clever marketing people decided it closely resembled the enchanted valley described in the book.  We arrived in the afternoon after a slow and tedious, albeit scenic , bus ride.  We were a bit the worse for wear; I was recovering from a nasty bout of food poisoning that had emptied out my digestive tract from both ends, and Tom and Lillia had been complaining of vague flu-like symptoms for a couple of days.

So there we were at the bus station.  According to my most recent email exchange with Kevin’s Trekker Inn, we could call them and wait 20 minutes for them to come, or get a taxi.  We had no phone, and a Tibetan fellow was very keen to take us, so when I got him down to 15 kuai, I said fine.  He was right here, right now, and seemed to know where to go.

Well, he stops at the end of a very long pedestrian-only street and waves a hand “down thataway”.  Tom wasn’t born yesterday.  He isn’t going to hand over any money until we are at the door of the inn.  So we all start dragging our luggage (WAY too much luggage) down the cobblestone road.  When we’re nearing the end, our taxi driver is looking around left and right, and gets on his cell phone.  Oh my God, I thought, this is a replay of our Taxi Ride From Hell at the Beijing Airport three years ago.  Except that that time we were actually in the taxi the whole time our driver was lost, not dragging our luggage all over the place.  I show him the phone number in the guide book, and after several misdials he gets it right, but the call doesn’t go through.  So I go into a nearby antique shop and ask the proprietor, showing him the Chinese characters for Kevin’s Trekker Inn (Long Men Ke Zhan).  Ah! Yes!  He knows it!  Up the road this way about 30 meters, on the left.  He points back the way we came.  So we turn around and drag our stuff back to…Dragon Cloud Guest House (begins with the same character, long, meaning dragon).  I know this is the wrong place, but I stick my head in the office and ask in English, ”I’m looking for Kevin’s Trekker Inn?”  The guy answers in perfect English,  “This isn’t it.  It’s down the road that way, about 20 meters”, and points back the way we have just come.

When I come out and tell Tom, he says, “how could we have missed it?”  By now a little knot of locals have gathered around us and are having an animated discussion about our situation, most of which I’m not catching.  Another guy tries the phone number, but doesn’t get through.  He holds the phone up to my ear so I can hear the beeping sound.  By now I’m close to that tipping point between hysterical laughter and abject weeping.  Tom goes back into the Dragon Cloud and asks English Speaker, “Duibuqi, but could you show us where it is?  Because we don’t see it.”  So, he leads us back down the street once more, and then says, “Oh, I made a mistake.  This is N’s Kitchen, not Kevin’s Trekker Inn.  Kevin’s is over on that street,  to the left, around 400 meters.”  I confirm that “that street” is Dawa Lu, the address given in the guidebook.  Finally, we’re on the right track.

So we haul our luggage (did I mention, WAY too much luggage?) back up to the taxi, and a few minutes later we’re there.  We pay our hapless taxi driver the 15 kuai that he worked much harder for than he ever imagined.  We’re shown into a nice clean room, where we all collapse.

So, all’s well that ends well, right?  Not quite.  Almost immediately, Tom starts having shaking chills, and soon has a temperature of 103.  Plus diarrhea.  Lots of it.  I have rarely seen him this sick in the twenty-one years I’ve known him.

That night, Tom continues to run a fever despite alternating doses of Tylenol and ibuprofen ever few hours.  I am battling nausea and intestinal cramps, and my diarrhea returns.  I’ve just nodded off around midnight, when I’m awakened  by Lillia crying.  She doesn’t feel well.  I take her temperature and it’s normal but she has a headache, so I try giving her some Tylenol.  We didn’t bring any children’s, because we thought at eight years old, she would be able to swallow a pill.  A few days ago we discovered our mistake.  So I crush a tablet in a little bit of water, but it doesn’t dissolve.  I advise her to give it a good shake and toss it back in a big gulp.  Instead, she looks at it dubiously and takes a couple of diminutive sips.  I am sick and crazy tired and not in Good Parent mode.  I tell her that if she can’t take the medicine she should just try to go back to sleep.

While lying awake for the next four hours, I was struck with a feeling I’d never had before:  I WANT TO GO HOME.  Mind you, I’ve been sick as a dog in many exotic locales. But whether shitting my brains out in Bangkok or Calcutta, or coughing up a lung in Lhasa or Cuzco, I’ve always thought that this will pass in a few days and I’m still excited to be where I am.  Not this time.  I’m not entirely sure why.  Maybe it’s because this is my sixth trip to China, so it’s not new and exciting any more.  Maybe it’s because all three of us are sick.  Maybe it’s because everything on this trip has been unreasonably inconvenient and uncomfortable, way out of proportion to its meager rewards.  Or maybe I’m just getting cranky in my old age.

In any case, I think this may be my last trip to China.  If we decide to spend a year living in a Chinese-speaking country, I think it will have to be Taiwan, even though the accent there almost makes me break out in hives.  After all, it’s way cleaner, the food is safe, the people have more of a developed-country mindset (e.g., they care about the environment), AND you can buy onigiri at the convenience stores.