Journal of a Sabbatical

China Trip 2000

our sweet hometown

Today's Reading: The Story of the Stone (a.k.a. Dream of the Red Chamber) by Cao Xuequin

Back in Beijing after 9 days in Tibet. The haze over Beijing has not let up. If anything, the visibility is worse and the humidity is higher. Quite a change from the dry air and clear skies of Tibet. After having seen the Himalayas, Incense Burner Peak here looks like a little dirt mound - not worthy of being called a mountain. That is if I could even see Incense Burner Peak. The haze has gotten worse in the last couple of hours. I think it might rain.

The itinerary for the Tibet trip listed for the final day of the tour "Return to your sweet hometown." The neighborhood around Xiangshan has finally become familiar and being back here does feel a little like being home. The one-eyed woman who sells bottled water on the street near the guesthouse gate smiled and waved at me this morning, glad to see me back. The women who work in the restaurant were happy to see me too and remembered that I like to drink Sprite in the afternoon. Just wait 'til Zsolt finds out Sprite is way more expensive than beer.

It's nice to be back in our sweet hometown and it sure is easier to breathe here than way the hell up at 19,000+ feet. It's also nice to be able to get email again and post a few observations to the web for the folks back home. There was Internet access available in Lhasa, but I was mainly way out in the countryside where there was nothing but yaks and sheep. The nomads do have trucks - which look weird parked next to their tents - but they did not seem to have access to the net. Come to think of it, I don't think they had cell phones either, although around here it seems that all Chinese citizens are issued cellphones at birth. Maybe they just haven't distributed them to the nomads yet. Internet and cellphones are pretty pervasive but there are still places where you can be out of touch with the wired world.

I have laundry hung up to dry in the pomegranate yard of the herbarium so maybe I better take it down before I walk home to my little hovel. Actually, I'm in a slightly better hovel as I have moved in with Carol in her hovel because the toilet in mine blew a gasket when the water came back on. It seemed easier to just share with her since I'm only going to be here a couple more days. The yard where my laundry hangs is next to the storeroom where the specimens from the last China expedition are stored, and where Carol and Rosalie have been working. My work area looks out over the same yard, which is planted with pomegranate trees although I'd have to lean out the window quite a ways to see them.

The garden wall is topped with barbed wire so it gives the view of a distant pagoda a definite Cold War feel. On an overcast day, it's surreal. The other side of the garden is bordered by a windowed corridor connecting the main building to the building with the laundry facilities in it. Through the windows in the corridor you can see into the rose garden on the other side. The rose garden is completely surrounded by buildings, kind of a little gleaming inner courtyard.

When I finish checking email and writing up the day's events here I'll walk back downstairs and through the lobby to the windowed corridor. There's a door there that opens into the pomegranate yard where my laundry is.

I took about 40 photos in the permanent herbarium collection today, down from my high of 110 in one day before vacation. Mostly I spent this morning trying to communicate to the guardians who keep riffraff out of the collection that I needed an extension cord. I do not know the Chinese word for extension cord so mimed plugging something in and reaching far but somehow they thought that meant I wanted a pot of glue. I drew a perfect picture of exactly the kind of extension cord they use here and showed it to the guardian. She still didn't get it. One of the scientists came by and she showed her the picture. Light dawned. The scientist told her what I wanted and she went and found me one. Remind me next time to get a phrase book that includes "extension cord".

Even the Guy in the Blue Shirt couldn't help me with the extension cord, but he was enormously helpful when I first got back to work and found another botanist using "my" space convenient to the outlets, with my boxes of stuff stowed underneath. When Guy in the Blue Shirt saw me, his face lit up and he said "Good morning" apparently the only English he knows besides "Hello", then he walked over to the guy who was in my spot and said something long and complicated in Chinese and pointed to me and then my stuff under the desk. The other guy moved to another desk! The Guy in the Blue Shirt knew I had gone to Tibet because he overheard me talking about it with Zsolt and Sa-Ren, so he asked me "Tibet?" in a tone that indicated he wanted to know how it was. I showed him on the map where I'd been and tried to indicate using my less than adequate Chinese that I had liked it very much. I've been working next to this guy for weeks and he always greets me cheerily in the morning. I really wish I could talk to him. He looks to be in his 70's or so, old enough to have been on the Long March with Chairman Mao. I don't even know his name. I saw him reading a Russian scientific journal one day so with high hopes I had Rosalie ask him if he spoke Russian so she could translate. Alas, he can read Russian but not speak it.

So after work and fetching the laundry, I walk back through the garden to Moon Gate Village. We call the guest house Moon Gate Village because each little courtyard of rooms is entered via a Moon Gate. I have yet to figure out what the name of the place really is. It's probably something prosaic like IBCAS Guest House. For that matter the restaurant is probably called IBCAS Restaurant. The restaurant is right next to the guest house. The back of the restaurant is inside the gate/wall of the guest house's courtyard and the botanical garden. I tried to draw a diagram of the neighborhood in my notebook, but I'll have to do it with words here because I really don't draw well. If you're standing where the one-eyed woman sells soda and bottled water in front of the gates to Moon Gate Village:

To the left is the usual restaurant, an office/shop having something to do with IBCAS, entrance to the botanical garden (the scientific one), motorcycle repair shop, side street leading to piles of trash.

To the right is a strip mall kind of thing with three restaurants, the third of which is the "alternative restaurant" as we call it. Then there's the main street, across which is the entrance to the Botanical Garden (the touristic one) where the camel guy plies his trade.

The other side of the street, starting opposite the motorcycle shop:

Crazy lady restaurant (so called because the woman who runs the place tried to lure us in when we walked by at night, then insisted on escorting us back to Moon Gate Village)

School

Convenience store where I bought the feminine supplies and batteries that lasted about 3 minutes

Side street/alley leading to Xiangshan Park

The other convenience store

The other motorcycle shop

Bakery with crullers

more restaurants (? - don't quite remember)

the main street

I'm sure I've forgotten some of the details. I remember wondering how such a tiny neighborhood supported so many restaurants, not to mention two motorcycle repair shops. The motorcycle repair guys would work into the night and be out on the sidewalk welding something underneath a motorcycle in the dark so their faces glowed red in the light of the welding torch. I remember the restaurant dog turned out to be as big as his bark when I finally got a glimpse of him. And there was a cat that hung out in the courtyard between the guest house and the restaurant. It would not come near people and was only active at night. It looked white and ghostly and meowed vociferously late into the night. Any time a car or taxi parked in the courtyard the ghost cat appeared from nowhere and scampered under the car but if it heard or saw people coming it sprinted from under the car and disappeared.

And I still don't know where that guy keeps his camel at night.