To XiAn, roundabout, and back

Yesterday, we returned to Sharon’s parents’ house after a 10 day trip. As traffic is crazy here, there isn’t an abundance of car rental agencies, and roads/freeways are often not well marked, driving is almost out of the question. This means travel is either by train, bus, or plane. This post will mostly just be about our experiences actually travelling. Another post will be dedicated to the things we did and saw, such as seeing family and the Terracotta Warriors.

To give an idea of where we went, in red is a crude one-way sketch of our travel path.

Here I will break down how many hours we actually spent traveling, mostly for my own education. Numbers in parenthesis are approximate prices, USD, per ticket.

LaiZhou (the city by Sharon's home town) to WeiFang -- 1.5 hour bus ride (4.5)

WeiFang to XiAn -- 19.5 hour train ride (73.4)

XiAn to HanZhong (where Sharon's brother is stationed) -- 3.5 hour bus ride (15.3)

HanZhong to XiAn -- 3.5 hour bus ride (13.8)

XiAn to JiNan (to see Sharon's Aunt) -- 18 hour train ride (65.3)

JiNan to NingJin (still to see Sharon's Aunt) -- 2.5 hour bus ride (5.9)

NingJin to JiNan -- 2.5 hour bus ride (5.9)

JiNan to LaiZhou -- 4 hour bus ride (12.1)

Total, this means that over the last 10 days we spent 51 hours in long distance buses or trains and a combined (not including Sharon's mom, who came with us for most of the trip) $392.4 on travel. All of this does not include taxes or public buses. I suppose this is relatively cheap for that much traveling, but somehow you expect things to be almost free in China.

If we were going to do it again, we would probably fly instead of take super long train rides. The train has many different options which vary significantly in price: hard seats, soft seats, hard beds (which are actually padded), or soft beds. Since we had a baby to deal with, we opted for the soft beds since they are enclosed 4 to a room. Flying would have cost about $25 more per person than the soft beds, which would probably have been worth it. However, it's a fun experience to sleep on a train and see the Chinese countryside as you go by, and at the same time I'm glad we got to do it.

Sometimes, you can actually get killer deals on flight tickets. Later this month, we are flying to Shanghai for less than $50 a person, cheaper than it would have been to go by train.

The soft bed cabin

 Enoch did as well as we could ask for amidst all this travel. Being a superstar in China has turned him into a much more outgoing little toddler. By the end of the train ride, he had walked into everyone's cabin and made friends with almost everyone in the car. He also learned how to read.

If you look closely, you will notice Enoch inherited my talent of sleeping with the eyes open. Enoch was able to get naps during the day on the train and slept about 8 hours a night. On the way back, we were unlucky enough to have a lion-snorer in our cabin, which depreciated the amount of sleep we got.

We went by mile after mile of these netted farm plots.

I didn't expect to see so many power plants. Sometimes I would see 5 of these in a couple mile stretch.

I like this picture because the houses have a very "China" feel to them.

Lots of industrial parks.

You can see lots of terracing in this picture.

In between XiAn and HanZhong are whats called the QinLing Mountains, one of the 7 or so great mountain ranges in China. The bus took us on a separated highway that bore right through the middle of the mountain range in tunnel after tunnel. I lost count, but there were probably about 50 tunnels, and some were over 2 miles long. That must have been one expensive highway.

We didn't spend any time here, but it looked beautiful. There are supposed to be lots of pandas here, and I'm sure there is some great hiking.

Qin Ling Shan -- Would love to see all the pandas that are supposed to be hanging out there!

OK, that's it for now. Updates on what we actually did later.

Zhu You

It’s probably hard for anyone to imagine what modern, rural China is really like. While people might have peeks into China via Chinatown or movies that depict ancient palaces and temples, these don’t exactly explain Sharon’s hometown.

This is Sharon’s parents’ house. Like many homes in rural China, the family business is located at home. Sharon’s parents have a refrigerated storage facility that is mostly used as a store for fish feed. The entire courtyard is private, and the left part of the picture is their home and the right part are the freezers. Out of the picture and farther to the left are more freezers and some offices.

As you have probably guessed by now, not far from Sharon’s parents are many fish farms. They live in the edge of town, and if you head towards the ocean you run into plant and fish farms.

 

Surprisingly, the main product of these farms is sea cucumbers. They are supposed to be really healthy to eat, so they fetch a nice price.

 

 

I'm pretty plant stupid and had to ask what this plant was. It's wheat, and it turns out China is the world's largest producer of it. Corn is also a huge product up here. Lots of rice, too, but that's more in the south.

In the opposite direction of Sharon's parents house is the main town.

It had just stopped raining that day, so there were hardly any people out. Usually it’s a lot more crowded.

It may or may not be surprising to you that there is a lot of trash. The pole that Sharon is standing next to is sort of like a sanctioned trash pole. It’s like the community trash can and when the trash truck comes they shovel it up into the truck. However, there ends up being lots of trash in other places too, such as the hillside in the picture below. When we were driving back from the airport, Enoch had a poopy diaper, and one of the family friends who helped Sharon’s mom make the drive insisted on throwing the diaper out the window. This sort of attitude is pretty normal here, and the idea of keeping trash confined to trash cans hasn’t caught on yet.

Hope you enjoyed the tour of this little town called Zhu You. Tomorrow, we are heading off to XiAn! It's an 18 hour train ride, hopefully we make it through all right. Enoch has gotten used to the milk here, so that's one less thing to worry about. Updates to follow later.

To China with a baby

We have been a bit nervous how making the trip to China would be with a 14-month old. Last time we made the trip I didn't sleep much over the 30 hours of travel time, taking a toll of bloodshot eyes and a slightly raised body temperature. As that was during the swine flu epidemic, it led to Chinese authorities in hazmat suites quarantining me to a hospital. We could only guess at how much more strenuous things would be with a baby that doesn't like to sit still.

A few things made the experience less-than-miserable. First, Sharon wanted to get a small umbrella stroller for the trip, and it was a great idea. Not only was it really handy in the airports to help calm Enoch down and soothe him to sleep, but we've already used it a ton here in China. They are very cheap. I think that after a coupon Sharon got ours for $16.

Next, if you're going to fly across the Pacific Ocean, you can't go wrong with Korean Airlines, with or without a baby. Every seat has a personal entertainment station with things like games, movies, and TV. The leg room is decent. They feed you well. They give you things like slippers and a toothbrush. If you care about this kind of thing, all of the flight attendants are beautiful Korean women who take hospitality seriously. If you have a baby, you can request ahead of time a seat equipped to have a bassinet installed in front of you at no extra charge. Enoch sorta tops out the 30 inch/22 pound limit for the bassinet, but he still got a few hours of sleep in it. I think if he was younger he would have slept even better. As you can imagine, that was great for us, but when he wasn't sleeping the bassinet gave us an extra table to put all the baby-(un)associated stuff on. That comes in handy when you're trying to handle food trays with a baby on your lap. The following picture was taken from my seat while I was watching the new Tron movie.

At this point, I'm still not sure if Benadryl makes Enoch tired or hyper. We tested it out the night before the trip, and Enoch was a bit goofy/happy and then quickly fell asleep. On the airplane, however, we weren't sure if it made him hyper, cranky, or had no effect. He could have simply been in too much of a fatigue-caused crazed/hyper state for it to make a difference, because during our lengthy layover in LA he was walking up to every stranger he could find and making friends. He has been super clingy lately, so this was most unusual.

It's been fun to see Sharon's parents with Enoch. They are completely enamored with him. Actually, the whole town is completely enamored with the product of a local girl and the only foreigner that many of them have probably ever seen. Enoch is such hot stuff around here that even his ear-piercing screams that we can't get him to stop doing seem enoyable to Sharon's parents. At least they laugh when he does it, which encourages him. In one of the biggest victories for Sharon's mom, Enoch recently allowed his grandma to hold him for a minute before he started crying.

Jetlag hasn't been too much of a problem. Enoch and both of us took a four hour nap during the day when we got there and then we all slept 10 hours at night, and the next day we all seemed to feel good as new. Actually, Sharon is finding the wooden platforms used as beds here not as comfortable as before now that she's pregnant. She has thus had a lot of trouble sleeping and is often tired. During the day, she sometimes tries unsuccsefully to take naps. Instead, she ends up delirious on the sofa for a couple of hours, moaning about being tired when I approach her. Hopefully we fix that problem. Enoch also has trouble sleeping because he is so thirsty.

Yes, Enoch is thirsty, and the poor kid doesn't want any of the milk here. Or rather, I should say that he will often fight to the death to not drink the milk here. In smaller cities/towns like this, the only milk they have is the unrefrigerated stuff. Enoch simply refuses to drink it unless he is desparately thirsty. It's hard to know whether it's better to 1: let him get so thirsty he has no other choice but to either die or eventually drink the new milk or 2: to give him some water and juice to soothe his thirst instead. We've tried both, but as expected letting him thirstify seems to have better long-term results. It does mean, however, that we get to put up with a cranky baby at times.

Anyway, our time here has basically been spent visiting people and going to markets. The weather has been nice, about 80 degrees with cool breezes. Next week we will make a trip to visit Sharon's brother who is stationed as some sort of prison guard in a city 800 miles west, near the Terracota Warriors. We are good, and I'm glad I have been able to figure out a way to access forbidden sites like blogger in the first place (but that's another story).

I'll end with a video of Enoch with his tongue sticking out that I took yesterday. For some reason I can't find the embed html so you'll have to visit the youtube page:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkG9JEgesqU

Good Things To Talk About

Some recent good things to talk about:

1. The smoothness of our move yesterday, due mostly to using Mom and Dad's cars and help from Mom and friends.
2. I had my cell phone with me when the wind locked me into my own storage locker, avoiding hours of cramped discomfort and possibly death.
3. Enoch forgave me pretty fast when I kneed him in the head in the process of loading the trucks. I think he might have said some baby swears, though.
4. My parents are letting us stay with them this summer, including full use of the house's amenities and the possibility of getting a free upgrade to the master suite by summer's end.
5. I'm trying to make up for attending most of my classes in college by ditching the last week to go to Mexico with Mom and Dad.
6. Enoch is a running/walking machine and makes a cute mess with cookies