Travel Log of Kathleen Meadows Part 2
- a week in China.

I seemed to have taken on some biological stowaways that are setting up housekeeping in my nose, throat and upper chest.

Yesterday, I felt their initial presence and ignored it except for taking some extra vitamins. This morning they seem to have created a new dynasty, so I have just swallowed a handful of pills including garlic, echinacia, golden seal and zinc. Orange juice from a cardboard carton with a straw is bathing my throat in vitamin C. I am well, but playing hostess to some unwanted guests. And so it is this rainy morning in Shanghai.

The rain is the rare kind that makes the world look like it is all part of a Boris Karloff movie. Gray-white mist is flowing between the buildings, and clouds of steel are rushing in from the East China Sea. We Americans constantly make directional errors relative to China, calling it the Far East, when in fact it is more west of us then east. This is residual of our European ancestors, for whom China was far east. We make other errors too, like thinking we are the best and greatest nation on the planet. It is all a matter of perception and what we choose to see.

A lady I met the other day named Judy (a British woman who's lived in Hong Kong for the past 22 years), pointed out to me at the Ming Tombs, that Chinese were using chopsticks when we were still in Europe, tearing hunks of meat with our hands. The ancient buildings of this civilization still exist today because of the extraordinary craftsmanship and materials chosen by Chinese builders. America had a vast resource of extraordinary material. Trees wide as houses, pristine water and air. In two hundred years believing the idea that we (males anyway) are chosen of God and have holy dominion, we have done unholy things. Nearly totally destroying the native cultures, wiping out ancient forests (frequently felling trees just because there were so many of them!) and causing the extinction of thousands of beasts. Maybe it is all a Boris Karloff movie, and mankind is the vampire. "I want to drink your life's blood, beautiful maiden Earth!"

Enough, I am off my soap box now. Took a splinter in my heel on the way down too. I have the difficult job in this life of saying it like I see it, and in the words of an old friend, "Kathleen, sometimes you see too much." Might not make me a very popular writer in the short run, but maybe in the final balance. Who knows, and so I go on.

We spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday, busing around to some of the wonders of Beijing province. Beijing is drier and dustier then Shanghai, located several kilometers in from the sea. People do not hang their clothes out to dry there like they do in Shanghai, they keep them inside. By the way, the Chinese do not used tumble dryers, they hang their clothes, outside if possible, in a drying box if not. It takes more then three hours in a drying box to dry heavy clothes. It is literally a box like a small refrigerator, with circulated warm air that has a hanging bar, that accommodates exactly one washer load of clothes. They say that tumble dryers ruin clothes. But you are left with a lint and wrinkle problem...Lots of ironing here.

Back to Beijing. We stayed at a five star hotel known as the Tiananmen Dynasty. About $70.00 per night for a room with a stocked bar and big tub. We did not use any of the bar stuff. Bottled water was 30 RMB (about $3.50 American). Water was 15 RMB downstairs at a very expensive in hotel store. Anyway, the beds were great except for a reaction I had to the sheets on the second night (they changed the sheets every day). I nearly went through the ceiling itching. By the smell it was evident that it hadn't been rinsed well, so I slept on the mattress pad just fine.

There's no way to adequately describe the sense of being in a place built by man more than a thousand years ago. A tour guide named Charlie, the original Peking man and "very handsome," (by his own admission, though he is the fattest Chinese person I have seen so far. "Too much beer" he says) showed us around the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Beijing Museum, and the Summer Palace. I get out of breath just typing it all! Along the way I picked up pebbles to have pieces of the places. Everything from eye level and above was carved, painted or inlaid. Stories were everywhere, though Charlie did not know them well. I am going to pick up a book while I am here to understand their symbolism. So much has been lost in the revolution, but so much has been gained too. People are not forbidden to go to to the Forbidden City or just about anything I can see. We were shuffled into a store at the museum to buy stuff, but followed Margaret's admonition to wait until we were at the Friendship store, where prices are half to 1/10 the cost. It is where the vendors buy their merchandise and is run by the Government.

When coming out from every place, we were mobbed by vendors saying "Buy buy!", "One dollar, One dollar!" Charlie told us to keep on moving, not to talk to them or even look at them. By the end of the day we were at Tiananmen Square and I was tired of being rude, so I when a vendor came up to me I said,
"I am Kathleen, Whats your name?" and shook his hand. He backed away saying "What your name?" obviously not knowing what I had asked him. Two women near by who knew some English, burst into laughter.

I was approached by an old woman selling flying plastic birds, the wind up kind. Dennis and I used to sell these years ago at the Federal Way Public Market. I introduced myself to her the same way I had before and told her I used to sell those myself. A man came to teach me how to say, "I have some, and do not need any" but I was more interested in meeting the four people that had gathered around this crazy American woman. My brother was having a great time, laughing as hard as the little crowd, but then Charlie called. He had gathered up the rest of the group and was leaving. I felt good about leaving those vendors behind. There is much that happened the next day, but my stowaways are now using my head for a punching bag. I am going to close for now.