What I blame: my schedule. This last semester was like a multi-car-pileup on my brain. It was like the energizer bunny of semesters: the work just kept going and going and going. The homework was interminable. This is mostly because I had four Academic Writing classes, composed of 104 students all told, who kept giving me things. Every class! They just gave me more things! And then my Listening and Speaking students (72 of them) also gave me things! There was no relief! The flood of things never stopped!
Until the second week of December, when I gave final exams, wrapped up my classes, and waved a warm goodbye in my students' direction. All 176 of them. And then I just graded the things I already had (all 9000 of them) and returned them/turned them in to the department, inputted my grades, and went my merry way on home.
So right now The Ekscursionist is at home. How, then, could she call herself the Ekscursionist? Ah, gentle reader, that's because she intends to write about advnetures she had, as well as about adventures she will have. So: this bloog has been transformed into a sort of retrospective as well as a current-adventure blog. Also, I don't intend to stop having adventures anytime soon, so there's that.
ONWARDS
~:~
My return from China begna precisely three weeks ago. (I know, I know, I left off on a Silk Road post, but I wrote that post a while ago, and right now I want to tell you about my return home.) Anyway, that last week was a pile of stress. On the 18th of December I ran from bank to bank to bank, getting an online version of my account set up. The rest of the day was last-minute packing, then last-minute seeing, then I went. I took the Foreign-Office-sent taxi with two of my chorus friends to the airport, and at the airport we checked my bags in and talked for a while til I get antsy and left. Security with my bag that weighed some ridiculous number of pounds, and then sitting in the waiting room for 20 minutes, and then sitting on the plane, and then sitting on the BCIA shuttle, and then stumbling up the lane to my hostel.
I always stay at Ming Courtyard when I go to Beijing: it's a quiet little place right off Beixinqiao, this little nook of quiet being the gobble and bustle of Ghost Street, Beijing's premier Food Street. Most of the staff I'm on friendly terms with, but a new girl this time - friendl, but as yet unknown; she put me in a new room. I'd opted for a women-only-four-beds place, and, it being off season I was the only one in the room: a nice way to get privacy without going the extra hundred kuai. The other 4women room is a cave, but this one had a long, wide window set in the opposite wall, and so when I slept it wasn't like being in a tomb, but like the world was still going on out there.
Drop bags. Lukewarm shower. Buy a drink at the corner store. Stumble back. Bedtime.
I slept from ~1AM to ~10.45AM.
I woke the next morning rested for the first time in a week. Did some errands, then went and lunched with my Filipina Beijing friend in 日坛, the Temple of the Sun. Every Beijing tourist knows the Temple of Heaven, with its main sacrificial hall ubiquitously printed on bus passes and tour sites alike; what The Mass Public is less familiar with are the Temples of the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun. The Temple of Earth is off in Andingmen, a lovely little hutong (traditional Beijing housing; four-walled courtyards in gridlike, mazey patterns) area; the Temple of the Moon is in Fuchengmen, off west of the second ring road. Ritan, the Temple of the Sun, is a place just outside Jianguomen, a line-change on the subway and a crossroads of highways above. The area's thick with embassies, and consequently with barbed wire and young, nervous, good-looking armed guards who all watch you very closely as you pass.
Pass on by all of them, though, and you're headed into a small but serene little park, closed off from the streets around it. The Temple of the Sun isn't just one single temple - it's a park, which in China means a planned garden with many parts to it. There's a long, wide avenue rowed with aspens and leading up to a carven wall. There's a pair of asymmetric, curved ponds, with bridges and gazebos. There's a tiny few rolling hills with paths crossing them all over, and planted with cherry trees for the Spring and roses for the summer. Toward the back of Ritan Park is a long little restaurant called Xiao Wang's. It gives the impression of having been several unrelated buildings once that had gotten built into each other, but is nice for all that. Large, pleasant, airy rooms, and a traditional atmosphere. My friend was waiting for me upstairs, and we had a good variety of standard Beijing foods: shrimps-with-pineapple, fried tofu in sweet-and-sour sauce, green beans and pork. My favorite was the mutton ribs cooked in cumin and hot pepper. What can I say? I've acclimated to Dongbei more than I realize :)
We wandered a bit and talked a bit, and my friend invited me to a dinner, and, as she still had work, we parted ways. I hopped onto the subway and zoomed over to Nanluoguxiang, another Beijing Favorite of mine - a long street full of traditional shops and eats. No time for window shopping now, though: I was an Ekscursionist on a Mission! It was called Mission: Umbrella, mostly because it involved zooming through NLGX to the traditional umbrella shop down at the far end.
若水堂 (Ruoshuitang) is a traditional Chinese umbrella shop. You'll know it when you smell it - it's a thin, small alcove hidden between larger shops, but the smell of tung oil pervades the neighborhood. Inside, bright lights illumine painted umbrellas from behind. There's the traditional umbrellas, solid brown, blue, red, or purple ones, that can withstand a downpour; there's the pretty-girl brellas, painted with cherry-flowers or peony or lotus or villages and mountains, that act as parasols and little else; there's the childrens' umbrellas, little cloth-covered things sewn with sequins.
I've wanted one of these for years. I went for a mid-size rain-withstanding umbrella of deep purple. It was so thick with tung oil that it thrummed when you flicked it with your finger, and when the saleswoman demonstrated its hydrophobic qualities, she did it by taking a spray bottle and kssshing it right against the paper. The water rolled off like - well, I'll spare you the anatidae, but suffice it to say: I now had an umbrella.
I also had nowhere to pack it.
My bags, filled with the detritusof three years' life, were overstuffed. I took a bus back to Beixinqiao and discovered, to my delight, that the Post office shut at 6!
It was 5.30.
So: a ZOOM down the hutong backstreets, half-lit grey mazey corridors that, did I not know this area, I would've been irretrieveably lost in. Grab up my lighten-the-load bag from my hostel (extra stuff I'd removed that morning), and ZOOM back, veering aroudn cars, trucks, car washes, tricycles, bicycles, cycles, chidlren, dogs, and all manner of household items - and get to the post office with ten minutes to spare.
I posted my umbrella and lighten-the-load bag, and Metro'd on over to Sanlitun. Sanlitun and that nights' concert I should save for a whole nother adventure. In fact, so ought I to do with the next day, my wander through 798 Art District, because that's a whole adventure unto itself. But I'll sum up that I returned and erranded and public-transportation'd my way to the airport on time for my 6.30PM plane back to the US of A on the 20th.
There were so many white faces. So many! It was weird to see and listen to: a whole different type of small talk. I sat myself down in my window seat and enjoyed the journey, particularly after dinner, by which time the lights had gone off and it was dark inside and out. We were, by then, flying over the Kamchatka peninsula - always one of my favorite parts of the US-China flight. This night was particularly excellent, because, aside of being 30k feet overtop the cold land - there was a moon out.
It was a gibbous moon, and there was almost no cloud. I first started watching out when I saw, below us - but not so far as it could've been - mountains like sand dunes. This place hadn't unfrozen since - well, hell, for all I knew it didn't unfreeze even in the summer, by the look of those mountains. They were like drifts of sand, only white, with a bluegrey cast from the night. They were sharp and long and along the edge of them was the edge of the land. We were flying right along the coastline most of the way, and you could see how the mountains' smooth white turned into the ivory, striated white of the plains, and then rolling back up again into cliffs, and all along them, the edge where they ran into the coast. It was scalloped like lightning, crusted with rime. You could see it in blue and white lines of broken and clumped and close-floating ice, all drifted up against the edge of the earth, with some openings of black and flowing sea between them.
The sea showed more often as we flew further north, and further east. Mountains again, on the land-side, and over above them a haze of diamond dust - high-altitude ice crystals falling slow and flat - that reflected the moon hazy below as well as blinding bright above. Then the mountains stopped and there was the dark sea again, this time breaking off the ice into shoals and then large reaches of black water with a little sheen of moon over it. There was one place where I could see, below us, if I concentrated, darker patches -- land? islands? an archipeligo that hadn't been iced? -- but when the moon's reflection rode over them, I saw in their place, giant waves. They must have been monstrously huge, because I saw them moving, tiny and ribboned, even from 30,000 feet - and between then, the normal sea waves were like little lines acrosst the surface of the planet. You couldn't see horizons - everything went to dark mist along the edges - but you could pick out the stars beautifully. I saw Orion rise - first low and large on the horizon, early in the journey, then creeping up and Taurus after it, and the Pleiades, and meanwhile the moon, brighter than you could ever see it from the surface.
Past the huge waves, we continued over land, long and snowy, broken by lakes ice-edged and black. Then plains again, with rivers, whiter than the scruffy white around them, flowing down to the water. Once, on one of these, I saw one yellow light. Only one. Monitoring station? Border? Fishing? How did they have power? How many people - five? Two? One? I watched that one til it fell behind us, and then watched for more. There were few others - one, one ,and then nothing for a long time. I got so excited when I saw two, within - I guess it must've been miles of each other. One was toward the end of one of those twisting, giant rivers of ice. One was somewhere in the haze above the black water, a couple lights instead of one. Once, later, I saw a whole row of lights - five? six? twenty people? fifty? it was out on the black water, and then we returned to white land again, and stay for a long time.
The east came to us after 8 hours in the dark. I'd forgotten that, so far north, even late afternoon is in the dark. We flew into the lightening sky for an hour, and after a time my camera grew confident enough in its abilities to deliver non-fuzzy pictures I could take photos of the blue and white and windblown land. Here there was all snow and no sea, and the lakes were frozen over, and the rivers were so old that they had oxbows on their oxbows and curves overlaying their curves, all those extra tiny, unfinished flows and round little loops looping back in; they looked like if I left my braids in for three days.
The stewardesses made us close the windows, then, because the sun was finally up, and this far north it shone directly in our starboard windows from two fingers above the horizon, brighter than you'd ever conceive of below. But it almost didn't matter anyway - three hours later the sun was setting behind the plane wing, and the darkness we'd just flown out of came back over us from in front. By now, though, there were orange splotches below us, spread out and patched across the land. It faded into cloud, and then there was greydark cloud for a very long time. Only at the end of the flight could we see again - lowering over the capital, flying over the Kennedy Center and the Potomac, and the spread-out suburbs of Reston and McLean, and then finally coming down into Dulles airport.
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