Seasons Greetings---Chinese Style......

Due to the Chinese government blocking all blogs, Tweets and Twitters, I was unable to access my blog site during the two-week trip but am posting one continuous journal of what was a pretty successful job and fairly interesting trip. This post is a summary “after the trip.” Usually I post as the trip progresses, so it reads in reverse but this entry will be front to back.

I made it to China in fairly good shape—long trip but did a personal first in that I’ve now flown over the North Pole. The plane left Chicago headed north and didn’t change course until it reached Beijing. I didn’t even know they did commercial flights on that route but I can say I’ve done it. Of course, it was at 37,000 feet and at night, but I did it.

Fuzhou is about three hour’s flight time from Beijing and is right on the east coast. The weather when I arrived was in the mid-70s very sunny. It would get colder, but never below the 50s and was often overcast which, combined with the terrible pollution over here, made for often gloomy days.

I met my translator and a company official at the airport and they drove me to the hotel. I had slept well on the plane from Chicago to Beijing and surprisingly had little effects of jet lag on this trip. The translator is a young guy who teaches at a local language institute and speaks English well and translates really well. He offered to meet me on Sunday and see a little of the city and I agreed.

We took a taxi over to the The Mazu Temple—which in Chinese translates to "Meizhou Ancestral Temple of Queen of Heaven Temple".

It was actually a beautiful park and the temple was a seven-story building that was filled with over 500 statues of historical importance to the history of this area. Within the walled-compound were several smaller temples for worshiping and I was a little surprised at the number of Chinese who are Buddhists and worshiping that day.

I noticed this at Xian several years ago—there seems to be a general tolerance by the government for most religions so long as the people use them for personal worship—not political activity.

After spending time at the temple we walked around the “White Pagoda”—a beautiful slender building with several stories. Within the compound were various lakes and waterfalls and the largest lake had a very large statue of Buddha. Monks were walking around everywhere and conducting rituals using incense and it was almost like I was back in Thailand—this really is not a China we see on TV.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that here—compared to Beijing—the architecture is distinctly more “Chinese.” In Beijing, except for the Forbidden City and Sun Temple, everything was chrome and glass. That is definitely true in Fuzhou also but they haven’t torn down everything to replace it with modern structures. Here, you still see the old-style buildings with bamboo walls and tiled roofs that are turned up on the corners. Red is definitely the main color here. There is red everywhere along with gold tinting. You also see a lot of orange but red is the predominant color everywhere you look.

We had lunch at a local shop—a typical “noodle shop” and then took a bus over to the Old City—officially called “Three Lanes and Seven Alleys.”

It was kind of interesting but very commercial. They had taken a section of the city and tried to recreate it as it would have looked in the 1800s only now the shops are upscale boutiques. And yes, there was a damned Starbucks coffee shop there.

As you wander through the streets and alleys, though, there are life-sized statues everywhere

and it does give you some idea of what the “old China” must have been like. One of the things I particularly liked was a museum built in the house of one of China’s heroes—Lin Zexu.

He was the person who stood up to the British and other foreigners to stop the opium trade in China. For decades, opium had been used to control the Chinese governments and people and he took a stand against it and succeeded.

Throughout the day I only saw maybe three other “Westerners.” There is really no tourist industry developed here and nobody seems to speak English. Today, the emphasis is on industry—petroleum and heavy construction—but historically this has been a shipbuilding area. It is very old—the temple today dated back to the 900s A.D. and Marco Polo is thought to have traveled through here. Fuzhou is located in a valley with mountains literally surrounding the city. They are not towering mountains like the Rockies but still very beautiful and green.

Also surprising to me was the fact that Christmas is a major holiday over here. Decorations are everywhere—including Santa Claus—and the hotel has been adding more and more lights and decorations every day I’ve been here. It seems to just be a holiday event with no religious connotations—you know, kind of like we celebrate it in the States. But the lighting displays are amazing and beautiful.

The commercial area around the hotel is very upscale which, in any language, means expensive. I am really amazed at the number of “tea shops” here. They all sell teas from specific farms in the mountains and this area is evidently one of the better known parts of China for quality tea. Every shop has a “tea table” where you sit down and the hostess makes various small cups of tea for you to sample. There is no obligation to buy but the purpose is to push their particular teas. We have been eating lunch during class days at a nearby hotel and they have one of these tea tables in the lobby and we tried some of the local teas.

The park adjacent my hotel is very large, well maintained and beautifully landscaped.

It is also full of people at all hours. Personal safety here seems to not even be an issue. People seem very comfortable and unafraid and I have felt no concerns despite the fact I am almost always the tallest person in the crowd and draw a lot of looks. Nobody has been antagonistic however. The window from my hotel room overlooks the park and every morning before sunrise I can see people practicing Tai Chi and I mean hundreds of people doing it. There will be large groups and smaller clusters of people doing it in unison throughout the park. When I’ve gone down there in the mornings to walk, I also see individuals throughout the park in a crouching stance doing the routines. Two of the more unusual were two really elderly women practicing in unison with swords. Not really martial in nature, but it just seemed unusual. Sometimes they do it with fans and that can be really pretty when they do it in unison.

In the evening you can hear music from different areas inside the park and there will be groups of people dancing—the choreographed dancing to the traditional Chinese music.

My first class was a group of three truck drivers from different regions around Fuzhou and they were a good group. The main problem Monday, however, was that whoever prepared the materials for this trip used Japanese PowerPoint disks instead of Chinese. After scrambling around I found a 2007 Chinese disk but it didn’t match up exactly with the new Chinese manuals—and my updating their materials was the main reason I’m here. So, after Skyping and emailing frantically, I arranged for new disks to be shipped immediately. I guess that’s part of the reason my company uses me for troubleshooting jobs.

The materials issue, however, pretty much shot the entire morning so I was a half-day behind before I got started. Then, on the second day, our car broke down in heavy Chinese traffic and we ended up trying to push it to the curb with taxis, motorcycles, cars and trucks whizzing by just inches from us honking.

Damned American-made Buick..... That issue pretty much shot the afternoon of the second day. After that, though, it got better except that I was constantly playing make-up.

For lunch every day we went to a hotel restaurant near the office building for lunch. This is truly “local” Chinese food and nothing like what I’ve eaten at home or even in Beijing.

The table has a large rotating platform and the food is set on it in large bowls and the waitress just keeps adding and taking away the food so there is a constant stream of different plates being rotated around the table. So far I’ve at least tried everything and have eaten quite a bit of other foods I don’t really know what they were. I’ve gone sparingly on the hog intestines soup and did try the donkey meat. The donkey meat was cut into thin strips and I can’t really tell you what it tasted like because most of the foods are heavily seasoned with Chinese spices and glazes. The thought didn’t really “turn my stomach” since I’ve tried camel and zebra in Kenya. The best I can describe it is that it tasted kind of like beef.

Except for when I’m in Africa, I rarely watch TV on these trips. When I was in Croatia last spring I never turned on the TV in my room—I prefer to get out and walk around whenever I can. I didn’t turn on the TV here until Friday night and was surprised to see the CNN coverage of the Nobel Prize award to the Chinese dissident. China has the dissident in jail and has put his wife under house arrest to prevent her from going to Norway and accepting the prize but you can sit over here and watch the ceremony on CNN while all blogs, Tweets and Twitter accounts are blocked. Go figure.

The class wrapped up Saturday and with Sunday off, I planned to walk over to a huge city park with some temples but the weather turned really ugly. Not so cold, but rainy and overcast to the point I could hardly see the park downstairs from my room window. By afternoon it was still overcast but the rain had stopped so I walked over—about a 30 minute walk—and it was worth the efort.

It is actually a huge lake and is the focal point of the city with regards to landmarks. Inside the lake is a large island and several footbridges go onto the island. On the island is a museum, a temple, several botanical gardens and carnival rides including a monorail.

I spent about three hours wandering around and thoroughly enjoyed it but wasn’t feeling really well so I headed back to the hotel and started getting ready for next week’s class.

Overnight, I started getting sick—light touch of food poisoning—and started antibiotics but spent the night restless with night sweats. By morning I felt much better but was really fatigued.

I had met my three new students last Saturday at the final dinner and when we started Monday morning all went much smoother. The Chinese PowerPoint disks had arrived and the vehicle seemed to be working ok.

The hotel has constantly been adding lights and Christmas decorations every day for the last week and is now decked out beautifully. The lobby is ringed with Poinsettias and in the hallways they are playing Christmas music—the good stuff like the old Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra Christmas classics. Even the restaurants are fully decorated with gingerbread houses and tinsel. It’s really neat and I was thinking to myself that I haven’t enjoyed the Christmas season this way in years—totally relaxed and pleasant. I finally figured it out: there is no commercialization; no Christmas sales; no season specials; nothing for sale relating to the holiday. It really is more pleasant.

Strange I should have to go half-way around the world to experience a commercial-free Christmas. Last year I spent Advent and the holiday season in Cameroon—a predominantly Muslim country—and they did the same thing including a huge company Christmas party. This year I’m spending Advent in a country with an atheist government and heavy Buddhist population celebrating the season again.

On Tuesday we drove out to the east part of Fuzhou near the huge shipbuilding complex on the East China Sea. The area is, as you’d expect, heavily industrial but there is also a really beautiful park literally carved into the side of the mountain that features an old pagoda on the mountainside that was really interesting.

The pagoda I’d seen downtown the week before was old—dating to around 900 AD—but this was far older, even by China’s standards. The city itself may be as old as 2,000 years and promotes the fact that Marco Polo passed through here—probably at this site where the shipyards have been historically located. This particular pagoda was reportedly built by the wealthy wife of an ancient Chinese sea captain so she could watch out over the bay and ocean to see his returning ship. The park is full of life-sized sculptures (something I’ve seen in several locations here) and one is a sculpture of her sitting at the base of the pagoda, called the Luoxing Tower.

Banyan trees are common here and I understand they are really seeds that get lodged into cracks and crevices of a host tree then grown out and hang down like airborne roots. They are sacred in virtually all Asian religions and can grow large enough that one tree can cover 2/3 of an acre. There was a big one at the park—not that big—but what was unusual was that it was growing sideways out of the side of the mountain.

This hillside was also the scene of a battle in the 1880s in which the Chinese army fought the French navy—one of the rare occasions when France actually won a battle and destroyed nearly a quarter of the Chinese navy here. There are more sculptures here commemorating that battle from the Chinese point of view and, is often the case in China, these sculptures are actually larger than real life. What was really unusual here was that the park combined stone sculptures with the actual cannons used in the battle creating a really unique and effective exhibit. Sometimes it really amazes me when I realize I get paid to do this.

On Wednesday it started raining almost continuously and the temperature dropped into the 40s. The second week of training so far has continued to progress much more smoothly but Thursday was even colder and wet. On Friday it was still cold but the rain had stopped so we drove south of the city to the company terminal and did some exercises using one of their trucks.

The mountains surrounding the city are really beautiful although they don’t anywhere compare with the height of U.S. mountain chains. The terminal was directly in the center of the huge industrial section—including shipbuilding, petrochemical and heavy construction—and as always the case the area was pretty grimy. What was neat, however, was that right through the middle of it all there was a beautiful four-lane boulevard with a landscaped median and palm trees on both sides. Each side of the road had a walking/bicycle path and small parks were located about every quarter mile. Stone statuary is everywhere. Behind all of this were oil terminals, construction equipment, and cranes but the highway itself was an oasis of beauty in the middle of it all.

They have built tunnels everywhere since the mountains literally ring everything except the seaside. The tunnels are of different sizes—some for large trucks, some for autos and even really small ones for motorcycles and bicycles.

Friday night I was invited to a dinner with the company officials at the International Trade Center and it was really nice. This province of China is especially known for its teas and both of my classes have given me beautiful tea collections and the company also gave me one. I may be coming back to the States with two or three kilos of tea!!!

Saturday was the final training day and I flew out late that evening, caught a taxi to the Beijing airport Hilton where I rested a few hours and then made my connections to Chicago and Houston. My flights all made with no delays and I arrived to snow and freezing temperatures in Chicago but managed to get upgraded to first class for the flight to Houston. All in all, not a bad trip home.

I did five international jobs this past year: Rwanda/Kenya; Croatia; Indonesia; Canada and China. To all those who followed me and emailed occasionally I sincerely appreciate it.

And to all, a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.