tbaroundtheworld

We had another dinner at the Face Bar, this time Indian and among considerably more patrons to top off the day. Getting there was a challenge for the second time as the taxi driver insisted on dropping us off at the end of the wrong dark alley. My Chinese got us through. Sunday was spent at Factory 798, an art colony out on the way to the airport. It’s a district of former munitions factories converted to lofts, galleries and ateliers. Modern art in China reminds me a lot of the publicity around Russia when it opened up back in the 1980’s. Lots of work that was both bizarre and political within limits. In most cases I’m sure the artist thought they were being crafty. But their message is often so blatant in its simplicity that it ends up coming across as snarky; in the way a teenager often thinks they’re being wry. For the most part, the government looks the other way as long as the message is not too pointed. And I didn’t see much of that on this day. The most interesting thing might ...

My visits to Beijing have always been under restrictive circumstances. The first time I had a couple of hours to kill on my way to Barcelona and so I did little more than ride the subway a couple of stops, take a few photos of Tiananmen Square, wander through the free portion of the Forbidden City and then head off to the airport. The second trip wasn’t planned in the least – I missed my connection and so had only an afternoon to kill. That time I did try to maximize the benefit of my time by going to the Temple of Heaven. Of course it would have been more effectively used had I not gotten lost and taken 2 hours to travel 30 minutes worth of distance. This time, everything was planned and I was prepared right down to the sheet I’d typed up that told me what subway line to take, where to get off and where to walk once back above ground. In addition to that, I’d checked the maps and plotted the routes. I was ready to go. Before leaving I downloaded a wonderful application for my iPhone c...

I have to admit that I am certainly spoiled by the quality of hotels I stay in these days. Here, the equivalent of a $125 Marriott Courtyard in Chandler, Arizona is a Renaissance with a room on the 22nd floor featuring a super-modern bathroom enclosed in a glass cube, a king-sized bed the size of a football pitch, a fruit plate, a desk, a couch and an in-room safe. If that’s not enough to make you happy, you can spend your entire stay in the penthouse lounge drinking Irish whisky and watching action flicks on Cinemax. I’m not sure how I’ll ever go back to a regular hotel when I’m done with this life. Dinner plans for our first night in the big city evolved into a trip to Face Bar, my favorite Asian hang-out. After many nights sitting on the patio at the Shanghai version, watching the sky slowly dim from pink to black as the bats hovered over the plane trees, I decided that there would be no more worthy dinner than one taken at the Beijing version, a new one on me. So we left the hotel,...

Dalian is a tough city to warm up to. I suppose it starts with the fact that the winter has two modes – opaque petrochemical ice fog or sunny blue Manchurian skies caused by hurricane winds and sub-zero temperatures. It presents a tough compromise – die of weather induced depression or simply freeze outright. Either of those extremes makes psychologically surviving the workweek a challenge even for the most grizzled professionals such as yours truly. I can only imagine how the less emotionally resolute survive. What keeps me going (in addition to constant emergency interventions by My Lovely Wife) is the prospect of getting out of town and wandering around some other city even if that city has the same aggressively unpleasant weather as this one. Last week, with escape in mind I made a plan to get out of Dodge for a couple of days. Plane tickets in China are pretty much price fixed by zone. The major airports – Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Guangzhou – are like giant hubs in the center...

It’s been really, really cold here in Manchuria for the last couple of weeks, so cold that I haven’t been able to convince myself to drag a bicycle outside for a ride. The thought of putting on all those clothes and freezing for the first hour if not the entire ride is simply too daunting. I stand at the window, it’s a clear day and the flags down on the street are blowing straight across in the howling Siberian winds. So instead I’ve limited myself heading out for a walk when an errand beckons. Saturday morning rolled around and after staring across the city for 20 minutes and becoming convinced that I would die if I didn’t have the proper clothing I bundled up and headed out of my apartment on the pretense of buying some vital things like butter, a dust pan and some wheat bread. One of the great things or perhaps terrible things depending on your perspective is that they don’t bother wasting heat on the elevator lobbies - they’re just about as cold as it is outside, maybe even more s...

I went out to dinner the other night with some friends. The place was a pretty fancy Japanese restaurant off Renmin Lu in downtown Dalian just across the street and up the block from my old digs at the Shangri La Hotel. This section of town has recently been recast as the luxury shopping district with two new steel and glass-clad modern malls featuring all the big names – Prada, Versace, Armani, etc. I’ve been to them once and the most noticeable thing at that time was their lack of shoppers. While the Chinese have an insatiable hunger for top tier brands, most of the salaries have not yet enabled that kind of consumption. And tonight was no different - it was cold in only the way a damp Manchurian seaport can be in January and the few people on the street were far more interested in when their bus was arriving than in looking at the fancy things in the windows. The restaurant continued the neighborhood motif – lots of glass panels, marble stairs, low lighting and elegant wall covering...

One of the interesting things about international travel is your naïve expectation that all the spheres of the universe will magically align themselves into complete harmony, because that’s pretty much what it takes to get you where you want to go. It’s not enough to get to the airport in plenty of time to make it through security, because that part is one of the few you have complete control over. Rather it’s your ability to walk through the thermal imaging device after working up a sweat by hauling your tail down five miles of corridors that will make the real difference in whether your day leaves a smile on your face or finds you sleeping on a faux leather seat in some far-flung airport, or worse, a room with grimy green walls on Quarantine Island. And for every little thing you control, there are a hundred waiting to trip you up. The most successful multi-city international trips are often those in which your layovers are so excruciatingly long that nothing is left to chance. All t...

What do you think about when you’re driving to the airport at 4:20AM? It’s almost always the same poser for me – will the gas pumps at a closed station work with a credit card? Or is there a big switch inside that powers them down until the workers return in the morning. Just when I think I have this one figured out, I see a car at a pump and I wonder, are they getting after-hours gas? It’s been a month since I set down on these shores and now I’m heading back to the other side. I can’t say I’m thrilled at the prospect – like Christmas leftovers, it’s time for this portion of my life to move on. But my enlistment has a few more months to run and so I’m diving in once again. Each departure gets that much tougher and each morning sitting in the lounge waiting for a plane gets that much less interesting. My time in Mexico was well spent between counting birds, photographing Santa in downtown Guaymas and getting to the bottom of the cruise ship mystery. Two years ago we went down to the do...