Living in a Media World

Over the last several blog posts, I’ve been choosing photos that help tell the story of my trip through China.  But for this final update on my week-long-plus expedition through China, my only goal is to highlight several photos that didn’t fit in with the my previous narratives.

(By the way, the title of this post is taken from the wonderful first-and-only novel by Tim Rumsey, Pictures From a Trip.  It’s long out of print, but readily available used from Amazon using the above link.)

Couples on bicycles

Bicycles are not as all-pervasive in China now as they were in leaner economic times. But you can still see couples riding together with the young man pedaling and the young lady riding sidesaddle on the luggage rack.

Yes, the fish are fresh

You really don’t have to worry much about how fresh the fish (or turtles) are at restaurants in China. Instead of taking your dinner out of a refrigerator, cooks are likely to pull your choice for the fish course out of a collection of live tanks. Ones such as this were everywhere in in the city of Guangzhou.

The Great Staircase

When I visited the Great Wall near Beijing, I was surprised to see that it looked more like The Great Staircase than anything else. The steps headed off toward infinity in the endless mist.

Warning Sign on Great Wall #1

Good advice when you are standing on a tall stone wall. The locals have had centuries to work out this policy….

Warning Sign on Great Wall #2

I’m not completely clear on what I’m being warned about, but I’m taking it seriously. (All kidding aside, I know something about ‘brain disease’ has been lost in translation.) There is no question you have to be in good shape to get through much of this section of the Great Wall.

Tianamen Square Propaganda #1

I have to say, I find the classical Chinese statuary at Tianamen Square more compelling than the giant video wall pictured below.

Tianamen Square Propaganda #2

Along with the buildings, memorials and statuary, Tianamen Square also features a pair of giant permanent video screens currently playing a film promoting Shanghai as a tourist destination.

Scenes from an airport #1

My last view of China was from the Beijing Capital Airport as I prepared to leave for the United States.

Scenes from an airport #2

The contrast between my final air destination of Lincoln, Nebraska and the airports in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Beijing just couldn’t be clearer. I especially liked the high-tech airline label in baggage claim in Lincoln.

There are two things that have become immediately apparent to me during the two days I’ve spent in Beijing:

• The people here have been welcoming and friendly.
• The air quality is at least as bad as everyone said.

Let’s talk about the second one first.

The air in Beijing is a gray miasma that looks right out of a post-apocolyptic movie.

This is what the air has looked like the entire time I’ve been here.  And it’s not just fog, as it might appear, this is the full-on smog I was warned about.  I’ve just been here a couple of days, and I’ve noticed that it burns the eyes and has led to a persistent cough.  And it’s not just me.  (And this leads to my second point…) I had a nice conversation yesterday morning with a local gentleman who was waiting outside the hotel to meet someone for breakfast in the restaurant, and he mentioned how terrible the air was. He did note that it was sometimes better in the fall.

My other observation about Beijing is that the people have been friendly and pleasant to me as a foreigner who has been more than slightly confused and who doesn’t speak a word of Chinese.  The waitresses at Grand Pa Le’s last night (a lovely local restaurant in which we were the only Westerners) all did their absolute best to meet our needs as we tried to order off our picture menus. And the driver for our tour (who spoke no English – that was our guide’s job) pantomimed raising up an umbrella to make sure we all took umbrellas with us to the Great Wall.

(Our guide’s miming of the umbrella is the best charade I’ve seen since my father memorably did toast popping out of a toaster in a game of charades at our house several years ago.)

People’s friendliness extended to the crowds at the Great Wall, where a group of young people asked to have my colleague’s daughter Amanda have her picture taken with them.

Amanda gets her picture taken with Chinese tourists at the Great Wall.

Visiting the Great Wall was a lot like visiting the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.  Lots of crowds, lots of steep, difficult steps, and an incredible sense of history. The steps were endless and irregular, with some being a couple of inches tall and others being more than a foot tall.  As you can see, there was also a huge fog bank over the area we were in.  The Wall is up in the mountains outside Beijing, and everything was covered with damp.  That’s not to say there wasn’t still the air pollution, but there was also real fog.  Visibility was largely limited to 100 yards or less, though that improved somewhat by the end of our visit. I can’t complain about mountain weather being mountain weather (the fog was like what you might get in North Carolina in the Blue Ridge Mountains – minus the pollution), but we were never able to get a real view of the Wall progressing over the mountains.

Oh, one other note on that.  You know those photos of the Wall you’ve seen that show long flat walkways extending for miles?  They weren’t taken in the Beijing area!  There were stairs as far as the eye could see.

One of the coolest features of the wall were the Beacon Towers, which clearly served as models for the beacons for the Rohiran in the Lord of the Rings movies.

The beacon towers along the Great Wall made me feel like I was in one of the Lord of the Rings movies. The fog makes it hard to do them justice.

On our way back to the city from the Wall, we stopped for a brief photo opportunity in front of the Birds Nest Olympic Stadium.  I would have liked to have seen more there.

A quick photo opportunity in front of the Birds Nest Olympic Stadium.

We got back to the Tianamen Square area too late to do more than just see this historic area, but even that was fascinating.

Along with the monuments, buildings, giant video screens and crowds, Tianamen Square also had some beautiful gardens.

After the long day visiting Hong Kong, I decided to pass on the next day’s tour of Macco.  So instead I spent time exploring Gaungzhou with my new friend, Charles Boyer, the dean of agriculture at Fresno State.

In the afternoon, following a great Japanese lunch at a popular local restaurant, we went to a giant college fair at the Guangzhou Expo Center where Fresno State had a recruiting booth.

The Guangzhou Expo Center had four giant halls, all the size of this one.

The Expo Center building we went to was so big that even with the huge college fair there, we still had trouble finding our way there.  But we found a nice man at a desk who spoke no English who wanted to help.  But we just couldn’t get the idea of a college fair across to him. Then it suddenly occurred to me that my conference badge, which I had in my messenger bag, had the word “University” on it, printed in Chinese.  I pulled out the badge, pointed to the word, and the man’s eyes immediately lit up, and he was able to give us directions with hand signals and some written numbers.

When we arrived in the hall, we were immediately greeted by a group of students wearing yellow sashes who wanted to talk with us and have their picture taken with us.

My friend Charles meets with a group of Chinese students who are apparently representing their university at this giant college fair.

After that, we moved on to visit the Fresno State booth and the school’s local recruiter.  To my surprise, directly across from the Fresno State booth was one for Arkansas State University, where I know a number of people in the journalism and broadcasting programs.  In fact, the director of international programs who was manning the ASU booth is knows several of these people as well.  It truly is a small world.

Along with Fresno State, Arkansas State also had a booth at the fair. The man heading up the booth knew several of my friends there.

On Thursday, a group of us from the conference I’m attending in Guangzhou had the opportunity to visit Hong Kong as part of a commercial tour.  Hong Kong was an amazing city, and the tour was a fascinating experience on a host of levels.

The Hong Kong skyline as seen from the Hong Kong film walk of fame.

Our group of academics, both American and Chinese, got on a big tour bus for the two-hour drive to Hong Kong at about 6:30 in the morning, accompanied by box breakfasts from the hotel.  These included a packaged chiffon cake (quite tasty), a red bean paste cake roll (interesting), a cold hot dog on a stick (I didn’t open it) and a carton of milk.  Unfortunately, but predictably, there was no coffee.

The first major stop was at immigration.  Going through immigration from China to Hong Kong is an extended process.  Despite Hong Kong being under Chinese control, it is still treated as a separate country with its own currency and passports.

The process got started with our group going through a huge facility with long walkways covered with severe sounding signs. You eventually enter a giant hall full of stations labeled either “Chinese National” or “Foreigner.”  Once you make it through the long lines, the young man or woman working at passport control processes your passport efficiently. Given that our group has both nationals and foreigners, we’ve been split up, so we have to reassemble on the other side, then walk to a bus station, were we take a crowded yellow stand-up bus for a couple of miles to the Hong Kong immigration station. Once again, we que up, only this time it is “Hong Kong Residents” and “Visitors.” But the process is the same, only instead of a stamp in our passport, we get a little slip of paper stapled to a page.  Again we reassemble, again we get on a yellow bus with standing room only.  And finally we get on a new tour bus – our original one staying behind to wait for us in China.  From start to finish, I think that immigration took about two hours. (Though on our way back in the late evening, it probably only took an hour.)  My sympathies are with those who must make this journey on a regular basis.

Once we arrive in Hong Kong proper, our first stop is the Hong Kong Film Walk of Fame, featuring handprints and stars for the most famous Hong Kong action performers and a statue of martial arts great Bruce Lee.

Bruce Lee will always be the biggest of the Hong Kong action stars.

The walk of fame was pleasant, but the view across the water of the Hong Kong skyline was spectacular.  Then it was off to lunch at a restaurant we entered through a back elevator that led to an entrance through the kitchen, and finally down a marble corridor to the dining room.  Our food was all preordered for us, and quite fancy I suppose.  But as we left, I thought the more ordinary rice and noodle dishes we saw young people enjoying looked even better.

We then had a couple of rapid fire stops – first to the exposition center where reunification ceremonies took place back at turn of the century, when Britain turned over its colony of Hong Kong back to the Chinese government.

This is the sculpture that commemorates the transfer of control of Hong Kong from Britain to China. Despite China’s control of the territory, Hong Kong still has its own currency, and you still need a passport to travel between the two.

Our next stop was a brief photo op at an overlook near the top of a mountain that gave a fantastic view of Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor.

Hong Kong’s magnificent Victoria Harbor

I felt a little bit like Moses having to stay outside the promised land, to gaze into it, but not able to enter.  Hong Kong’s harbor is so full of such rich history, and I would have loved to have at the very least taken a ferry across it.  But alas, this brief look was all I got. Should I ever get back to Hong Kong, that’s what I want to really spend some time seeing.

Our last stop of the day was at the Ocean Park amusement park.  And while I confess that an amusement park was probably not my first choice of places to go in Hong Kong, the park was pleasant enough, and the view from the cable car ride was wonderful.

The view from the cable car ride at Hong Kong’s Ocean Park was gorgeous.

As the day wound down, I was hot and tired, and relieved to get on the bus for the trip back to our hotel.  But before any of us could sleep on the bus, there was the multi-bus, multi-line immigration process to go through.

We got back to Guangzhou at close to 11:30 that night.  And while I was exhausted, I was also thrilled to have gotten at least a glimpse of one of the world’s truly great cities.

Wednesday was our big day and the ultimate purpose for the trip: Graduation Day!

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m here in Guangzhou, China for a conference on 1+2+1 college programs where students from China spend 1 year at a Chinese university, 2 years in the United States, and then 1 final year back in China.  During the conference we discuss how the programs work and what can be done for them in the future, and then we award the diplomas to the students.

And it is diplomas, plural.  Each student earns a dual-degree from both the United States institution and the Chinese one.

Our meetings and ceremonies were held on the campus at Jinan University.

The various delegates to the 1+2+1 conference head in for a morning of meetings before the afternoon graduation.

Following meetings and lunch, it was time to go over to the auditorium for the graduation ceremonies.  For as much as is different between the United States and China, there is much that is the same. Parents still crowd in to take pictures of their graduates!

No matter where you go in the world, parents still want pictures of their graduates!

The ceremony itself was held in a big hall flanked with video screens on the sides and giant screen across the back.

This is the stage before the ceremony with one of my Chinese faculty counterparts who will be handing out degrees shortly. I loved the gorgeous Chinese academic robes.

The ceremony itself was lovely, but long, about 3 hours to grant 270 or degrees.  It wasn’t that the speeches were overly long, it’s that they all had to be given twice.  Why? Because everything except the reading of the names had to be done in both Chinese and English! There was talk that at some point the ceremony might have to go to using simultaneous translation transceivers so that everyone can just hear everything in their own language from translators as it happens, but it was impressive seeing the student speakers giving bilingual speeches so clearly.

As a closing note for today, we were surprised to see that the big statue on campus was of a man with frizzy hair and baggy sweater.  I thought it had to be Albert Einstein, but that didn’t seem to quite fit for a Chinese university. I must be mistaken.  Then I finally paid attention to the inscription running around the center of the sphere underneath.  Yup, that’s Albert!

There is a lovely sculpture of Albert Einstein on the central campus of Jinan University.