Scavenger hunt!

So as some of you know, I’m using this blog as a sort of correspondence with students from my old high school back in Reno.  So this particular blog is dedicated to you all.  Lemme know if there is anything else that you all think I would be able to find or take pictures of that I wouldn’t think to do myself!  All right.  Here we go.

First - Mrs. Wakefield’s request.  Pictures of what they call a supermarket here definitely isn’t what we would call a supermarket at home.  When we think supermarket, we think: eggs, milk, bread, meat, produce, various canned and boxed good, etc.  No.  Here in China, that is not a supermarket.  What they would call a supermarket, I would more accurately call a convenience store.  At least to our American standards.  

Ramen and rice.  What more can you need?

Tea!!

Hygienic products and odd ends.

You really find stands and small stores, local outdoor markets, bakeries, and butcher shops for all those needs.  All in your neighborhood, all relatively fresh (although I’m not really trusting the meat that hangs off of hooks - I don’t even think about where restaurants get their meat) and really convenient.  How’s that for buying local for you?  I took a picture of a common fruit store on the street just as an example.  I’m one of those people that feel uncomfortable taking pictures up close of random people, so I took the picture from a distance.  I’m sure a lot of you have already seen this method of selling goods before, so no need to go close anyway. =)

However, while we were on our holiday, we managed to encounter not one, but TWO Wal-marts in a city smaller than Chengdu in one day.  Crazy!  I have only heard of one Wal-mart in Chengdu, and that is out in the periphery of the city to discourage most people from buying items there (speculation).  But the Wal-marts here are like nothing you will ever imagine Wal-mart to be back in the States.  I took a few pictures before my camera ran out of battery. 

I couldn't help but take a picture of this in the toy section.

Entrance inside one Wal-mart.  High end goods sold by ladies in Wal-mart aprons before you enter the rest of the store!

Slabs of meat...just sitting there. 

Whoever said Chinese people don't like Wal-mart are liars.

Wal-mart brand here.  With a Chinese product.  Mind boggling.

Every day low prices.  Look at the mass of dried fruit!

But these types of stores, like Wal-mart or Carrefour (mentioned earlier), aren’t very common and hardly accessible to most people.  Therefore, I am a fan of local, neighborhood businesses with shady looking stores but good prices and products.  No arguments here.  In my limited knowledge, seems like most of the world runs on neighborhood markets, not the supermarkets of America.  But that might just be me.  What do you think?

And for my high school readers – here are some products that we have in China that we are very familiar with in the United States.  

Coca Cola

7-Up (Pepsi on the side)

Lay's Stax

Oreos!

Familiar brand, Nestle - not necessarily a familiar product.

And it’s not just food but products we use every day.

Weird, huh?  And kind of makes sense at the same time.  China is one of the fastest growing countries in the world, so it doesn’t make it too hard to believe we can find a lot of familiar things (in different packaging) here.  Globalization.  It works.

Of course, you can’t find everything you want here (Ailene thinking back to her first desperate days in Chengdu looking for lined loose leaf paper and index cards), but you can get pretty darned close.  And sometimes, you just have to improvise.  Which means you can get by with a little ingenuity and an open mind.  Not a bad thing at all.  Think of the poor college student days ahead of you, and you’ll know what I mean.  So I’ll just leave this post at that.   

Next post will be Yunnan!

Some field trips and exploration! Part 4

I’m am getting a last post in before the week long National Holiday (celebrating the PRC and its independence from the ROC) and my travels take me to a province to the south of Sichuan, called Yunnan.  The scenery there is supposed to be spectacular.  Definitely some amazing pictures coming your way next week when I come back.

As for now, I have to admit, I’ve been super busy.  This last week, we’ve been bombarded with exams and tests before the national holiday.  And then I’ve been extremely neurotic and looking up routes to and from Chengdu so we get back in time for classes.  And I love to over-prepare for travel.  I know I promised some pictures of China to a few of you (Sorry Mrs. Wakefield and class!), but it doesn’t look like I will be able to get to it this post.  There’s actually so much to talk about in the topics that you’ve proposed to me (seeing the inside of a supermarket and products that we are familiar with in the US found here in China) that I want to do it right and make it pretty substantial so you see what I see!  And now we know I'm just making excuses because we all know I can't manage my time and should have been able to do it.  Thus - I fail.  But hopefully I can regain some life points when I come back with that extra special scavenger hunt post and my Yunnan trip post!

So, I shall leave you all with some pictures of our field trip to Yellow Dragon Town (黄龙溪镇).  This town is about 2 hours outside of Chengdu and is an Ancient Town dating all the way back to the Three Kingdoms.  A lot of the buildings and structures from later periods have been preserved, so walking around you get a small taste of what China was before the fall of the last dynasty in 1911.  Interesting fact, because Yellow Dragon Town has preserved so much of its ancient architecture, it has been used to shoot hundreds of period films in China.  Neat, right?!  I really enjoyed it.

Here we go.

A structure built to overlook the stream that flows through the town.

The main street of the town, restaurants and shops all the way.

One of my friends here in the USAC program, having fun on the stepping stones!

!!! This place was really great.

A building we found in the back alley.  More authentic for it.

Some field trips and exploration! Part 3

I’m just going to skip ahead and tell you about my latest journey (this past weekend), since it is definitely still fresh in my mind.  This time, instead of Daoist, it is Buddhist, and we went to Big Buddha at Leshan.  Everything there was huge!  I’ll show you my pictures, but I gotta say (just like in my last post) you can’t really know until you go to these places yourself. (Ailene blatantly promoting China)

We started out at 7:30 am, when all we all wanted to do was sleep in on a Saturday morning.  =/  But it had to be done.  We wanted to go to Leshan before the weather turns too cold for us to go many places.  (We've heard many times that winter here is unlike winters anywhere else.)  So we head to the bus station in a taxi (using my rudimentary Mandarin) and are soon on our way to see Big Buddha (乐山大佛).  Two hours later we arrive in Leshan, but definitely not near the mountain where Big Buddha is located.  I don’t think that we would have known where to start.  However, there was another bus waiting to transport a bunch of tourists like us to the mountain for a small fee (1 CNY = US$0.15).  Generally, I would always say, “I don’t think so,” but I am learning in China that beggars cannot necessarily be choosers.  We’ve lucked out and haven’t been too swindled thus far.   I guess they only want their money and know that there are some desperate people out there.  =)  And they never lead us to shady places, which is nice.

Inside the park we definitely got to see some amazing carvings and sculptures.  It’s extraordinary that so much has survived over the years.  There’s something to be said for some things that are enduring.  Here are some of the favorite things I saw in the park.

After exploring the park, we finally got to Big Buddha.  Oh my goodness!  The crowd here was so large!  That was definitely where all the Chinese tourists were at.  We didn't want to be crushed, and we had no idea how to get a boat so we could take pictures from a safe distance.  But alas, we wanted to see him so we followed the crowd to go down the cliff.  Lol  40 minutes in line.  20 minutes to get down the cliff.  Kind of like lines at Disneyland.  But it was worth it.  If you Wikipedia Leshan Big Buddha and look at the picture provided, we were in the line of people on the right.  It was a press of bodies I’m getting more and more used to since there are so many people everywhere!  Here are a progression of photos as we go down the cliff.  It was really neat!

We didn’t expect to spend the entire day in this one area, but it was a really nice surprise that we were able to.  Here’s to hoping for many more pleasant surprises.

Some field trips and exploration! Part 2

So true to my nature of procrastination and dread of doing even the simplest things, I haven’t been blitzing you with posts like I have promised.  But this week will more than make up for it.  Especially since October 1 marks the week long holiday the entire country gets!  I may not be able to make any posts that week, as I might be traveling, so I gotta make this week count.

The great thing about my study abroad program is that it sets up field trips for us to go on.  From what I’ve heard, it doesn’t sound like a lot of programs do that, so I lucked out with having such an excellent program right on campus.  And as amazing as those field trips are, I am actually going to use this post to talk about a day trip that my new friends and I have taken outside of the program.  And these are the experiences that you can’t really get unless you are a little bit adventurous.

I’ve found that on our field trips, while we get to see new things, sometimes we just aren’t given enough time to revel in the culture and the surroundings.  That is what the day trips we have taken are for.  Like my earlier experience in Beihai Park, these are things that I want to see personally or know that I will not get the chance to see if I don’t take the initiative and go.  And every time it has been rewarding.  There hasn’t been a moment that I have regretted.

The first day trip that we took was on our first weekend in Chengdu.  We went to Qingchengshan, an ancient Daoist mountain about an hour outside of Chengdu.  This is the moment that I was waiting to say, “This is the type of scenery in China that you only see in magazines and television.”  Soaring mountains hidden in the mists (let’s pretend it was all mist), temples interspersed on the mountain for Daoist worship, distant farms showing the agricultural activity that is never far from the city.  Like a lot of other sites, it was full of tourists.  But unlike other sites, there were practicing monks on this mountain.  People live this life - of worship and devout belief in the Dao. 

Heading up the mountain

View from the lift that brought us to the top of the mountain.  Gotta love modernism.

Can you see the city?

And they had a temple dog – a little in need of a bath, but still treated well from the looks of it.  =D  

Being at this mountain, you realize this isn’t just something that you read about, but something that is real and vibrant and something that has meaning beyond what we experience in our everyday lives.  But I suppose you could say that about any religion you find in the world.  Myself?  I’m not necessarily religious.  But I do believe that religion – any religion, done the right way, really is something worth believing in.  And there are moments here in China, where I enter a place so sacred, that I can feel that there is something more out there.  A reverence, a certain resonance in the air that holds the beliefs and hopes of thousands of others before me.  That is something that I can’t deny.       

Being here in China, it is easy to forget that some of the amazing and beautiful things here started out as a way to connect to something greater.  That’s why you won’t see a lot of pictures from me that show places where people actually pray.  I’m not saying that it’s wrong, but it just seems more respectful to not take pictures at places where people are sending up prayers.  And this way, just maybe it might encourage you to see some of these places yourself.  =)

In front of the entrance to one of the temples with my friends.