Kidney stones are foul things.  My first happened in December, 1986 and I thought I was going to die.  Had I the choice of death and the hours of discomfort I ended up with, I’d have chosen the former.  My last is with me now, and I think I’d make the same deal.  I’ve already had one of the more interesting and colorful lives one can have, so checking out and skipping the world of hurt and paralysis that comes with these things seems like a bargain.

Kidney stones result from diet (all the things I like), not drinking enough water (I really only do drink when I’m thirsty and then prefer black tea), or from heredity.  The only thing I know about heredity is that my youngest son gets them too.

For some reason the blood cleansing process that occurs in kidneys sometimes produces a by product other than urine which coagulates into a mineral mass that takes up residence until it works its way through various ducts and passages and gets flushed.  They can be small or big, they can hurt or pass without notice.  I flushed one once the only sign of which was the clanging noise it made as it bounced off the porcelain of a urinal.

Folks say kidney stone pain is only surpassed by the pain of a difficult childbirth without drugs and that may be true.  I have no interest in finding out and can’t anyway except by hearsay.

My first was on the eve of getting married in England.  My second marriage and first kidney stone.  The stone episode was sudden, but didn’t last more than one night.  The marriage lasted eleven years and was almost all of it pleasant and worthwhile.  This particular kidney episode has lurked for weeks now and peaked a few days ago cancelling classes and anything else I had to walk to or stand up for which is pretty inclusive.   In the UK, the horse pill the doctor gave me had no effect and only after he doubled the dose and we were arrived at the  door of a hospital in Winchester, did it disappear as quickly as it’s onset.

I’ve had two really bad episodes in China – once about two years ago and the one now.  Both times I’ve been fortunate to have a young and attractive Chinese com padre who got me to the hospital.  They weren’t the same girl and their being young and attractive is irrelevant, but made me feel better.

Chinese medical help is accessible and cheap.  I went to two different places – the first a neighborhood clinic and the second to a hospital nearby my apartment.  I could barely walk to the clinic the first time and yesterday I needed a taxi to go two blocks.  The annoying thing with kidney stones is that the symptoms (excruciating, paralyzing, attention-getting  pain), isn’t limited to the back or a kidney.  It radiates to the groin and in my case right down my leg on the side with the stone that makes standing or walking damned near impossible without high doses of narcotics.

The first time at the local clinic, an ultrasound, urinalysis, a shot of something and some painkiller cost me thirty-five dollars (dollar equivalent) with almost no waiting.  Yesterday, the same, plus the services two physicians in the urology department, two shots this time and three different medications including codeine laced  pain pills cost about the same thirty-five dollars.  The only thing I had to wait for was the urinalysis – most of which involved my waiting for nature’s call.

I’ve got two photos of two stones resting in the same kidney now and it (they) still hurt like hell. That’s about the same outcome as the last time.  One is 6.2 mm, the other 4 mm.  The girl who helped out this time doesn’t have quite as good English as the girl I was with the first time, but we figured it out.  One of the urologists knew a little French so between smatterings of three languages we got along fine.

I wanted the damn things gone, but the docs said just to wait it out as there was no blockage and the tests were ok.  They said the stones weren’t big enough to use high frequency sound waves to zap them and said the after effects of that procedure was worse than what I was already dealing with.

I have no idea.

It’s winter, so like the rest of Shanghai, the hospital was cold and most doors and windows were wide open.  There were a few exceptions, one where a gang of people sat with IVs dangling over their heads being one.  (Chinese use IVs a lot.  It’s not unusual to see people on the street walking along with an IV bag held aloft.)  And, as usual, a lot of heaters were fired up, but losing their effects to the outside.    I could barely walk  -  I mean really – but not once saw or had access to any wheel chair or other conveyance.  The only people I saw who did were poor souls being wheeled in from ambulances.  In a U.S. hospital, they always run  a self-serving scam that nobody walks until they dump you on the curb outside their legal liability.  So I shuffled along – five or ten steps and then sit a bit.  Pathetic.

Upon arrival, you check in at a desk, give your name and get a plastic credit card which becomes your ticket around the place.   I probably got a little slack because I’m a foreigner represented by my Chinese friends, but there wasn’t any paperwork – and I didn’t see anyone else sitting with clipboards full of things to fill out either.  I paid the equivalent of $1.85 at that point.  I then made my way – what a sight that was – to the urology department in a nearby building that seemed really far away under the circumstances.  Two docs there looked me over, got the story and suggested an ultrasound and urinalysis.  I wasn’t in a position to argue.

People pay in advance for hospital services, so my friend arranged to pay another $14.50 for that and finally, after seeing the docs to talk about the results paid another $14 or so for two shots in the butt, two boxes of pain killer and a box of stuff to mix with hot water and drink.  That’s it.  Getting the shots was the same as the first experience (Chinese tend to do things in a uniform way), where you stand on a small platform, turn around and rest your butt on a small shelf  behind which sits a nurse in preparation.  Drop your drawers a smidgen and she pops you.  There’s a pull-across curtain that everybody seems to ignore and the whole process opens into a busy hallway.  It’s refreshingly practical and not at all private  – typically Chinese.

The Chinese have figured out medical record keeping so there is no concern with finding or passing medical records around.  You take your records with you, all of them, including the photos of the ultrasound, urinalysis and doctor’s notes.  The ultrasound includes two photos of the stones-in-place and the urinalysis is a computer generated sheet in English and Chinese. I have no idea what the doctor’s notes say.

Now I wait.  They’ll will go away eventually.  If they don’t kill me first.

When I was in the States this past summer, I bought one of those new Titanium jackets from Columbia in anticipation of the cold.  Its pretty good, but I still need to layer up.  One of my students noticed it (Chinese are particularly fond of Columbia stuff because its expensive), and told me that their ads in China show guys wearing only their underwear and one of those jackets in the winter.   No fu*kin’ way.  Not in Shanghai.

So things are bad enough, but the Chinese love to leave doors and windows open – even when they have their heaters running – which drives me nuts.   Sometimes, China is like a Monty Python skit where everything appears quite normal except for one important detail that gets changed to make the whole situation ridiculous.

I’ve asked several Chinese about the contradiction of being energy and environmentally conscious (and they are – every light bulb in the country is florescent or led), while running heaters with doors and windows wide open.  Some of these individuals include physics and chemistry teachers with PhDs and other smart people.

Almost all of them tell me they need the clean, fresh air from outside to help their health.  They seem oblivious to the undisputed fact that the air in China, particularly in the cities is the unhealthiest on the planet and would probably be improved by being run multiple time through the filters on every heater and air conditioner they use.  If there is any whiff of anything in the air in a room, undetectable to me entirely – all the windows get popped open with the heaters running still.  Even for cooking aromas.   It’s nuts.

I’ve stepped a couple of people through the logic of their ways and some possible conflicts in the reasoning behind open air heating and cooling (same practice duplicates in the summertime), and they look at me like I’ve got three heads.  Fact-based logic, presented step-by-step loses every time to the rote learning-without-thinking that influences so much of the country.

The Chinese government finally agreed to changing their air-monitoring methods to measure pollution particles 2.5 microns or smaller which had been causing a huge disparity between clean air reports issued by Chinese municipalities and those issued by foreign Embassies who had instrumentation on their rooftops – including the U.S.   The Chinese were blithely reporting a beautiful day to be outside while the more sensitive equipment was measuring air quality that could kill.  Things take time here.

There are quite a few street vendors around that cut-to-fit sell leather belts.  They’re not hand-tooled or particularly special like you’d find at craft shows; just leather belts in black and a few shades of brown.   I’m not sure if its the population growth or what that keeps these places in business, but I am sure it’s not coming from any growth in girth.

The reason I know that is because Chinese guys, not big-waist-ed to begin with, wear belts that wrap almost a third of the way around their waist after the buckle – like they either lost half their weight or are expecting to gain half again and want to be prepared.  I’ve not counted carefully out of respect, but my guess is that most belts people wear here have six to eight extra holes in them and the coinciding length.  Why?

China is a place that wastes very, very little (except for copious amounts of heat and the energy to generate it), and they recycle everything to the degree that an empty cardboard box is a scarce sight.  An empty beverage bottle is scooped up by a recycling entrepreneur before it can hit the ground. I have no idea why leather isn’t conserved a little more, there are shoe guys that fix shoes you and I would toss – even sneakers.   Maybe it’s the pigs.  Chinese consume a lot of pork.

She’s a young, smart, feisty, stubborn, beautiful and very traditional girl from Changting,  a small-for-China town in the mountains in the western part of Fujian Province.  I won’t repeat the Lily stories here, just that she was with me in Shanghai for a while, helped me enormously and finally could no longer resist the pull of culture, tradition and family so returned to her hometown at the end of 2010.

In China, there isn’t a lot of safety net for people when they get old, so there’s a lot of pressure to establish a family and other connections to secure a future.  And in China, girls getting toward their mid-twenties think they’re old and if they don’t get married soon, they won’t at all and that will be the end of them.

There’s a forty-year age difference so don’t even go there, although I sure thought about it a lot and I’m going to miss this girl as long as I am breathing.  If you’ve lived in China for four or five years as a white guy, then be judgmental – otherwise, you can’t possibly relate. Anyway, she went home which was inevitable at some point, but the particular timing came from the mother of a friend of hers who finagled a much sought after and highly valued government job.  The rest, as we say, is history

Lily as I knew her, ((I won’t use her Chinese name now) was good to me and agreed to see me a few times after going home – including a sweet visit to her hometown, but the writing was on the wall and apart from a few exchanges about translation and business things, she pulled away as she had to.

It wasn’t pleasant, but I knew it wasn’t going to be a hoot of laughs at the end, even at the beginning – I wasn’t kidding myself; I’m stupid, but not THAT stupid.   I learned about her marriage by accident.

Someone who read these narratives for some reason, an English speaking ethnic Chinese who lives in Malaysia wrote and asked about visiting Changting, Lily’s hometown, because it’s one of the ever-fewer places left that is not touristy and its off the beaten path.   I put her in touch with Lily who, of course, was generous with her help, time and advice.  When the visit happened a week or so ago, Lily also invited these folks to her home for dinner, showed them around town and did all the kind things she just kind of does that were so helpful to me and others who crossed her path.  They took to her immediately as everybody I’ve seen her meet does – she’s got an awfully infectious personality.

She didn’t want me to know about her marriage, out of compassion and sensitivity for my feelings, but due to a few e-mails read out-of-sequence, my friend from Malaysia spilled the beans.   From what I understand, Lily’s married a fellow who also works for the government and has enough respect around town to be the recipient of gifts from the citizenry which is typical of well-placed government officials and workers.  An awful lot of Chinese I know end up with partners deemed “suitable” which usually means found or accepted by a committee of family.  The Chinese are the most pragmatic people I’ve ever met and suppress every other emotion in deference to practicality.   I know nothing about Lily’s courtship so I won’t say more.   I just hope she’s happy.

So the end of the story is that the young girl who meant (means) so much to me will be OK, safely back in her culture and traditions with as secure a future as anyone can have given that the partners both have government jobs.  She was really frantic about that and in the last weeks in Shanghai as she made her decision to leave, she’d have nightmares all the time.   As she eventually explained it, she felt like she was in a cage not of her making and that the communal society that makes up China can pull back even the strongest independent minds to conform.  I’ve seen that with western-educated Chinese who’ve lived in the US or Canada for years who get sucked back in after they return to the mainland.  It’s a shame.

Logically and in fact,  it’s a nice ending and a load off my mind too since I knew she was pretty poor there for a while and unhappy, but she wouldn’t take money without working for it.  And I also knew that in a smallish, traditional, country town like Changting, there might have been social penalties for carousing with an old white foreigner.

I’ll never be able to thank the girl enough for the experience and for the kindness she showed me – or for all the help with my business and the hilarious adventures we had all over China.   There’s nothing like seeing China with a native, a person of some talent and insight, a great sense of humor who isn’t a tour-guide.

This thing is killing me of course, and her getting married just before Christmas which is about the same time she left for home last year makes for a difficult holiday, but hey, what can I do?  I know this — I got really, really lucky – it was her initiative from the get-go, a real surprise to me and that kind of thing is unlikely to happen again.  I’m a old guy for  God’s sake!

Good luck, Lily – have a happy life.  And thanks.

Lily

I’ve had the good fortune to visit Christmas Markets in Cologne, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Berlin and a beautiful little town tucked into a steep valley in north western Germany called Monschau.

German Christmas ornaments are unique – usually delicate and of wood, glass, or my particular favorites, hand painted pewter.  I found my first “German” hand-painted pewter Christmas ornament at a small shop in Zurich a long time ago and have picked up others when I’ve seen them since.  At a Christmas market in Nuremberg, while looking at these and small wooden ornaments, I was told there was a whole town in Germany that made these things as their main industry. I forgot the name at the time, but years later, while indulging in the ridiculous extravagance of a European delivery of a 2002 BMW 5 Series car (it’s a long story and I was swimming in cash at the time), I had time, was in Germany and managed to learn the place was Seiffen.

Seiffen is in the southeast corner of Germany, almost to the Czech border and an hour or so from Dresden.  It’s not very big, but almost every shop in the town looks like a storybook and there they do indeed make and sell wooden Christmas ornaments in all shapes and sizes including the “smokers” that use little incense pyramids and send incense smoke out the mouths of various characters made of wood and colorfully painted.  I bought a bunch and use the ones I kept at Christmastime, never forgetting Seiffen.

When I first came to China in 2007, I knew I’d be here for Christmas, so I brought along one of my German pewter Santa figures to add a little color to an otherwise bland holiday.  I met some people in the metal business and asked them if these things could be made in China – which of course they could – and got some estimates and an analysis of the metal composition of the pewter.  These things were expensive from Germany – forty bucks or more even for something little – and China made everything at much lower costs.

Anyway, I didn’t want to commit to enough volume for pay for a mold, it would have taken four or five hundred of the same shape, so I tabled the idea.  I always felt kind of bad about making something that the German people of Seiffen had used for their livelihood for seven hundred years so it didn’t bother me much to abandon the idea.  And I ordered a few more items directly from Germany – including a foot-high pewter Christmas tree, all painted up on both sides which cost me a fortune, but serves the purpose.

This past Friday, I went to one of the three Paulaner German restaurants in Shanghai with a colleague, a British guy whose English I can hardly understand because of his heavy London accent.  God knows how the Chinese kids manage with this guy.  This weekend, December 9-11, Paulaner had their Christmas Market, The combination of German food and a Christmas market proved irresistible.

This particular Paulaner is surrounded by a park-like area in the French Concession part of Shanghai and they had plenty of room to set up the temporary huts and booths very much like those in Germany, including several selling sausages, hot chocolate and of course, the warming Gluhwein.  It was cold Friday night.

I was disappointed that only one of the booths was selling traditional wooden German Christmas ornaments , incense smokers and the colorfully painted wooden Nutcracker figures.   I was looking things over, thinking about maybe buying one as a gift, but they didn’t carry the small incense cones which are hard to come by in Christmas scents and I wanted to protect my small stash.  I asked the prices anyway and was stunned.   Five bucks for a small sized smoker and about six or seven bucks for the larger size.

What’s this? I wondered.  And you are right.  These guys were all made in China, looked exactly like the ones made in Seiffen and other small German cities as they have been for hundreds of years, but were selling at a fifth of the price or less.  The people at the booth told me their largest customers are in Germany.   Go figure.

In retrospect, I felt kind of stupid thinking about my abortive pewter figure gambit.  I actually felt bad thinking that some poor German whose family had worked for generations molding an painting thousands of these little ornaments, authentically, would be displaced by some low-wage Chinese who had no idea of the traditions or heritage with which they were absconding.   I’m out-of-touch.  Some German beat me to it with no qualms whatsoever.

There is no end to the things you can get here at low prices – without sacrificing quality – oil paintings, silk comforters, clothes, jewelry, pearls – all of which I’ve dabbled with; and now German Christmas ornaments.   My problem in making a killing hasn’t been in sourcing – it’s finding effective channels at the other end.

Where there is heat it comes from dual purpose heater/air conditioners which the Chinese refer to as air conditioners even if they only heat.  They’re wall mounted near the ceiling where they exist and operate with a hand-held remote.  If you don’t read Chinese characters, which I certainly don’t, it takes some experimentation before you figure out how to get heat instead of cold. Most Chinese operate them with windows and doors still wide open.  No amount of logic sways them.  It’s a fresh air thing that trumps any sort of comfort or energy efficiency.  There are any number of traits of the Chinese that boggle the mind and defy a westerner’s concept of logic.

People start wearing jackets, sweaters and coats indoors now – never changing when they come indoors since the temperatures stay about the same inside and out.  A crowded classroom will generate a little heat, but in the middle of winter in Shanghai it’s never enough to cause shedding of outerwear which includes hats, gloves and scarves.  I never get used to it.

The Chinese just shrug and tell you it’s winter now and you are supposed to be cold – and properly dressed.

Shanghai is humid all year round with a few nice, dry days here and there.  The humidity amplifies the cold – it goes right through you and given the lack of heat in most indoor settings, it’s tough to shake a chill once it hits.  Bathrooms are cold water affairs so washing your hands brings no hot water and there is rarely a dryer and more rarely any paper products so wet hands in cold air as you shake and dry that way doesn’t help.  I don’t live in the foreigner “bubbles” or frequent western style hotels too often so I live mostly like a local and can attest to an incredible tolerance of discomfort.  Fortunately, my apartment has the heater/air conditioning units which if you run them full tilt most of the time in winter can take off the chill, but not the layers since they rarely generate enough heat.  People in China literally layer up – everybody wears long-johns as at least one layer – and people get perceptively bigger as they insulate themselves.

This will be my third year coming up in Shanghai and there are only two good periods of decent weather – late September to early November and again from maybe April to the end of May.  The rest of it sucks.  I promised myself last winter that I’d never winter here again, but hey — who keeps resolutions anyway.  I had all kinds of good plans that went to hell.

Tomorrow I’ll fly three hours to Chengdu in Sichuan Province, due west of Shanghai.  I’ve got a friend there who has been bugging me to come visit and I figured what the hell.  It’s a girl I met in Xiamen when I first arrived who worked in the local supermarket (as opposed to the other one that caused me so much angst and still does in a lingering sort of way).  Anyway, at the time, she was my first foray into Chinese culture and customs.  She spoke no English and me no Chinese which in retrospect generated some ridiculous attempts at conversation.  She has since picked up a smattering of English (a path I started her on almost three years ago) and I’ve picked up less Chinese.  So it should prove to be an adventure and adventure R Us. I have no idea what she sees in me, but for some reason she stayed in touch – as much as one can with a huge language barrier.  From what I gather – and I’ve asked the question directly more than once – it’s the exotic foreigner thing combined with the impossibility for Chinese to either decipher or care much about a westerner’s age or looks.  Lucky for me.

Thank God for Google Translate and cut-and-paste.

I visited Chengdu in the summer of 2008 just before returning to the States and in the midst of my upending encounter that brought me back to China in 2009.  The big panda preserve is there and it’s a nice city.  At the time I was there, the effects of the May 12, 2008 earthquake were all over the area and many pandas had been evacuated to safer places.  A student of mine was there so I visited him.  He’s since gone back home to Fujian Province but the other Fujian girl relocated to Chengdu for reasons I have yet to discover.  Whatever happens, I’ll get back to the Panda Preserve and see spots there I missed last time.

See you.

Xinjiang (pronounced “sin-gee-yong”), is one of twenty-three provinces in China.  It’s way in the west; the capital, Urumqi (said as oo-rum-chee) is five hours by air from Shanghai.  Kashgar (or Kashi in Chinese Mandarin) is another ninety minutes by air from Urumqi, in the extreme west of Xinjiang, less than 200 miles from Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and one or two other “Stans,” pretty much in the middle of nowhere.  That part of China is supposedly the one spot on the planet  furthest from any saltwater shoreline – more than 1,600 miles in any direction.

If you look at a map of China, the part that sticks out furthest in the west is Xinjiang, the province or Uighur Autonomous Region above Tibet and extending further west.  And at the tip of that place, all the way to the west is Kashi (as the Chinese say it), or Kashgar in English and in the local language, Uighur.

It’s one of those places in China where Chinese-looking people (Han Chinese) are in the minority.   The majority of the province’s 21 million people are “Turkic,” look like Europeans or Middle Eastern people and most have been known as Uighurs (We-Grrrrrs) since the 1930s.  They’re a distinct group with many middle eastern customs including being Muslim, building mosques, forgoing pork in favor of lamp, sheep and goats and have a written language that looks a lot like Arabic.   There are quite a few Han Chinese Muslims in Shanghai and a few Uighurs.  The Chinese Muslim men in Shanghai all wear little round white caps and the women cover their heads with scarves. They usually can be found operating small restaurants that feature home made noodles that are prepared to order while you wait which is an even in itself.  Uighur people are most often found selling raisins, nuts or dried apricots and other fruits from pushcarts on the street.  I first learned of Xinjiang from big murals pasted to the walls of almost all the small Muslim restaurants around town.  I like the cooking in these places so often found myself staring at the pictures. The photos looked beautiful and I put Xinjiang on my list of places to go.

Early in October, coincident with China’s “Golden Week” National Day holiday, I went.

I arranged the trip with a local tour guide service, one of the Uighur (or Uyghur) people…there are a variety of spellings.   My cost was about US$1,200 for five nights and six days, plus a few hundred for airfares from Shanghai and between two cities in Xinjiang.  Watching the money flow between the guides, hotels, restaurants and tourist-site entrance cashiers, the actual cost was probably just over half what I paid.  But I had a guide, driver and a car and wouldn’t have had a clue as to what was where had I tried this on my own.

Xinjiang is big – about the size of western Europe.  Virtually every Chinese to whom I mentioned this trip in advance told me it was dangerous and to be careful.  In 2009, there were riots in the province, largely in the capital Urumqi, after some Uighur migrant laborers in Guangdong province were roughed up by majority Chinese workers and bosses.   Two Uighur migrants were killed and the resulting protests and riots in Urumqi killed nearly two hundred people when the Uighur locals and Han Chinese mixed it up.  Some people reported that many of the young Ughur migrant workers were impressed by threats to their families in Xinjiang and that’s why they went in such large numbers to fill factory jobs so far away.

I had no idea what to expect, but my experience was that a lot of things in life are overblown and since I was going to travel in the company of locals, I went.  In the event, the place was calm and peaceful with a smaller police presence than in Shanghai.  The Han ethnic Chinese stay in the cities pretty much and the countryside and smaller villages are all Uighur.  The only military presence I saw were two transport planes parked on a ramp in Kashgar.   I saw guns in the hands of police in two places – at the Urumqi airport and at a natural chokepoint in a mountain pass not far from the Chinese border where police checked passports and ID for people traveling along the single highway.  There were a couple of other manned and unmanned police checkpoints along the road some of which had a small wall of sandbags around them – that was pretty much it as to the unrest or danger.

Alternate  stories came from my Uighur guides who told me that Han Chinese dominated the government, the police and the Army and were expanding the ethnic Chinese population in the province by design.  In Kashgar, a town of 500,000, Beijing has a plan to double the size to more than a million and only more ethnic Han Chinese can add those kinds of numbers given the birthrate and native population of the Uighurs.   There’s a lot of construction and some of the old parts of cities are being razed – under the premise that they are unsafe – to make way for new apartment blocks.

Schools are bi-lingual with an emphasis on Mandarin and like in Quebec Province in Canada, all the roadsigns and stores have bi-lingual writing in Mandarin and the Uighur language, but I noticed that the Mandarin Chinese characters all seem to be of a larger size than the local language.  The farther one gets from Urumqi or Kashgar into the countryside, the less Han Chinese/Mandarin influence.

China is supposed to be on one time-zone even being as wide as the USA.  Since Beijing is so far to the east, that makes early morning, Beijing time, pretty dark in Urumqi.  So Xinjiang people keep “local time” which is two hours behind the time in Beijing.  Big ticket items like airlines, fly on Beijing time, but local busses, shops, hotels, restaurants and tourist sites all use local time.  It’s kind of a don’t ask, don’t tell policy that subtly defies Beijing’s insistence on controlling everything.

I visited Kashgar in the west, Urumqi in the center of Xinjiang and Turpan, the grape growing region about two hours from Urumqi.  On the way to Turpan,  I saw more wind turbine electric generators I knew existed and more were being erected all over the place.  There is a constant wind (and sandstorms) in that region and the Chinese are taking advantage of every gust.  The turbines and their mounts are just huge.  A friend of mine told me that a lot of Inner Mongolia is seeing the same phenomenon.

Most of Xinjiang is desert surrounded by mountains.  They’ve adopted a Central Asian practice of tunneling irrigation ditches to carry water from the mountains to the flatlands creating oases where fruits (grapes mostly, but some others I didn’t recognize) and all kinds of nuts are farmed.  The tunnels can be thirty kilometers long and deep underground which stops most evaporation.  There’s a museum to this hundreds of years old engineering feat in Turpan.

It gets very hot and very cold – plus 40 degrees C or more to minus 40 degrees C which is more than 104 F to -40F.  They grow grapes for raisins and ship tons of them.  Before winter, the vines are buried in the dirt to protect them and dug up again in early spring.  There are grapes all over of all kinds, but few wineries because of the Muslim dominance.   the few wineries there are are operated by Han Chinese – non-Muslim people.

People live in Yurts or Gers, which are felt or canvas covered round single story buildings; or in stone or mud and straw made houses.  They make and use the “oriental rugs” that are sold everywhere.  Hand-made ones can take a couple people two or three months for ones of small room-size and cost $1,500 or so depending on the material and patterns.  These are put on slightly elevated platforms in dirt-floored houses and that’s where people hang out.

Uighurs and Han Chinese seem to get along, but don’t mingle.  The Muslim Uighur are reverent to their faith and rarely intermarry with Han Chinese.  One can sense in conversation, however, the feelings of an oppressed people.  There is an ornate tomb in Urumqi dedicated to the “Fragrant Concubine” who, as the story goes from the Han Chinese side, had a natural scent that was captivating to the then Emperor of China in some dynasty.  She supposedly fell in love, became the number one concubine and played a major and heroic role in Beijing until her natural death when she was returned to her homeland.  It’s a well-known romantic story among Han Chinese, subject of a film not too long ago.  The Uighur story is a little different and say the girl, while still fragrant, was kidnapped and dragged off to Beijing, where she secreted knives in the sleeves of her garments intending to kill the Emperor.  Details are few from that point.  In any event, nobody except tourists believe the girl’s remains made it back to Urumqi, but her family’s tomb is revered under the premise that they did.

Most of the countryside is dry, dusty and tan.   Where there is greenery, it’s from a small river or more often from irrigation using water from snow covered mountains.  The scenery is striking and the two lakes I visited were stunning – the first, Black Lake 200 Km west of Kashgar on the way to Pakistan is crystal clear and cold in the middle of desert and snow-capped peaks.  The lake is at more than 12,000 ft. elevation which it doesn’t take long to feel.  The other lake, Heavenly Lake is near Urumqi and sits in a bowl high up in mountains above the desert.  The elevation and water changes to landscape to resemble the Northwest of the US a little or Germany.

Five days in a place the size of western Europe is a little too short to see much so I hope to get back there again.  But I recently heard from a student I had who is now attending college in the UK.  Turns out she is from Inner Mongolia which I didn’t know when I was teaching accounting to her cohort.  She’s invited me to Inner Mongolia and promised to show me around next summer.  That’s a hard invitation to ignore.

Like most city living, it’s convenient. The subway, one of eleven subway lines weaving around Shanghai, is five minutes away; a fresh food and vegetable market is ten minutes on foot. Five or six dry cleaner/laundries are within two blocks in each direction. There are more than a dozen restaurants within the same two blocks including a Pizza Hut (considered “high-end” in China), and a KFC. At night there are street vendors selling all kinds of stuff including movies for eighty-five cents per DVD; fruit and vegetables and some who set up small cafes with portable tables and stoves or woks all transported on three-wheeled bicycles or carts.

Right near the subway entrance and the Pizza Hut, across the street (Kongjiang Lu) from the KFC is a large department and food store like a smaller version of but not Walmart which has about anything not available at smaller local shops or from street vendors. Three bakeries are close by one of which makes croissants as good as any in Paris. Each one costs about forty cents.

The entrance to my building and the adjacent buildings open on an inner courtyard and drive – an underground garage accommodates most of the cars here. There are two apartments per floor and one elevator which goes at a little less than one second per floor. The backside of the my building and the adjacent building fronts on the street and the first floor on the street side have a variety of shops and services. Mine has two foot massage places, a small whorehouse, a “medical” service where old people sit for hours with alligator clips on fingers and nostrils and various wraps on their arms legs and heads with wires leading to little electronic boxes that do nothing. Apparently the psychological effects are profound as these places are all over. Young workers offer free blood pressure taking and then persuade the gullible to go inside and get wired up to one of these things.

The adjacent building has another foot massage place, a shop that sells high-end housewares and decorations. an auto-shop where people are always cleaning and washing cars on the sidewalk spraying water all over and a “massage” place where men can get attention, but no overt sex from a bevy of almost-over-the-hill girls who sit around all day waiting to perform your-clothes-stay-on rubbing and touching under the guise of a massage that seems to take the edge off a lot of Chinese men with no or inadequate female attention. I’ve never seen one of these places for women. Guys pay about six bucks an hour or so.

My own foot massage place where I go at least once a week is two blocks away too, flanked by a bicycle shop, a bank and other foot massage places. I get the ninety minute foot massage treatment from the same woman and with a healthy tip, I pay about twelve dollars. I bought a ten-speed bike at the shop next door a few weeks ago, a Chinese brand called Phoenix, with Shimano gears and brakes, for seventy bucks. I’ve got a good bike in the States, but it would cost me considerably more than that to ship it.

My bank at which I can use the ATM to move money to anybody who gives me their account number and name is five minutes away. That includes my rent, which in China is paid in three-month chunks, in advance. When you first rent a place in China you fork over four months rent when you sign the lease which includes the security deposit. If you are not expecting it. there’s some serious sticker shock when arranging accommodations. I can pay my utility bills at almost any Seven-Eleven-type store with cash. My barber (a real one) is just down the street and most times there is no waiting and the haircut costs about $2.00, which is twice as much as my late Uncle Mike Spisso charged in Poughkeepsie when I was a kid. Within two blocks there are four fresh fruit markets which carry a lot of things I know like bananas, peaches, grapes and pears (the so-called “Asian pears” that are huge and delicious), plus a lot of fruits I never heard of or saw before. They come from all over the world including a lot of Kiwi fruit which for some reason are very popular.

My apartment opens to the Southwest with two big windows and an enclosed balcony. The balcony is where laundry gets hung to dry, rather than in most Chinese apartments where it hangs out the windows and balconies and anything else able to hold wet laundry. I look out on the rooftops of many apartment buildings, across to my school and to Yangpu Bridge one of several crossings and tunnels that connect the Puxi side of Shanghai with the Pudong side which are dissected by the Huangpu River. From my apartment I can also see the big tower with the balls on it, the Oriental Pearl Tower all lit up at night and the Shanghai World Finance Center, the bigger skyscraper that is blue and looks like a building with a large handle on top of it.

Directly below my balcony, eleven stories below, is the entrance to the “red-light” establishment which while it doesn’t have a red light, does have a few past-their-prime women and occasionally a startling young beauty whose virtue is available for about $15. Before noon, this place and others like it (there must be nearly a dozen within three blocks), are shuttered with heavy curtains. After noon, until God knows when, they are open with assorted practitioners sitting around, some of whom are attired in uniforms while others are in lingerie or street clothes depending on the predilections of the owners/operators. They watch TV, work on elaborate cross stitch projects, play games on their mobile phones or sleep. So many people wander around the streets in pajamas, its hard to tell sometimes if they are working girls going on an errand or just a neighbor following local tradition.

There are buses all over, most of which operate via overhead electrical lines like trolleys. The others run on natural gas so you rarely see a belching bus spewing black diesel fumes. Taxis are all over too, almost all of them are VW Santanas. The meter starts now at RMB14, up from 12, just over $2. Yesterday, I traveled seventeen kilometers, a little over ten miles and my taxi fare was RMB 63 which is just under $10. Taxis are expensive when compared to the subway or bus, but a lot cheaper than any place in the States. They’re easy to get, but flagging down a taxi in China is a little different than in the States. In New York for example, people stand roadside with their hand raised, waving at taxis. In China people stand roadside, but their hand is down, slightly away from their body, still waving a little, but more like an underhand toss than an overhand throw.

Shanghai has two airports and three train stations. They’re all huge. All are connected by direct subway lines which is more than you can say for any city in America. One line, the No.2 Line, connects Pudong Airport with Hongqiao – kind of like Kennedy and Laguardia respectively, except each is on steroids. Hangqiao (hang -chow) also serves as a high-speed rail terminal. I took the high-speed train from Beijing to Shanghai in August. I left Beijing’s South Station at 11:30 AM and arrived in Shanghai just before 3 PM. the distance between Shanghai and Beijing is 1070 kilometers or about 660 miles. My train traveled just over 300 KM per hour for most of the trip, made two stops in between and my ticket cost about $85.

I teach at two schools, both within easy walking distance and the shortest path is via a bog public park (Yangpu Park). The park is always crowded. In the mornings its filled with older people doing slow motion Chinese exercises, sometimes costumed, sometimes with fans or even swords, often accompanied by music played on portable players. During the day, kite flyers take over the meadows, fishermen line the ponds and in-between singers match their skills with portable karaoke players that include TV screens and speakers most powered by car batteries on carts. Other parts of the park (and many parking lots and street corners at night) are filled with ball-room dancing couples, again accompanied by portable music machines, all dancing in stylized, formal (not to say “rigid”), postures – men with women, women with women, and people just twirling around by themselves. The paved areas near the KFC and subway entrance in my neighborhood are particularly popular nocturnal locations for the local version of dancing UNDER the stars.

But that’s China and that’s my neighborhood.

In just over two hours it will be September 11th here, twelve hours before that day arrives in New York and Boston. It’s hard to realize that ten years have gone by so quickly, but time seems to quicken with age and it’s just whipping by these days. Ten years ago, I was about on my way to Boston’s Logan Airport to catch a United Flight to Washington, Dulles which at the time was a weekly commute to a consulting job at American Online. Both AOL and the country were in a lot better shape then. The plane was to be a 767 and the gate was the same as that used by one of the two flights that terminated prematurely in the upper floors of the World Trade Center that morning.

I caught the event while packing a suitcase and watching the Today show on NBC in an upper floor apartment at Charles River Park in Boston, not far from Bunker Hill, the North Church, the Esplanade and Fanuel Hall. Living in that city for a while was a great experience. My apartment overlooked Boston Harbor and Logan. By happenstance, I was looking that way when a few years later, the Shoe Bomber’s flight landed at Logan accompanied by two F15′s that peeled off as the commercial flight from London touched down.

There was no way to get to Washington that day – a Tuesday. Tuesdays are a little weird. D-Day, the invasion of France in World War II was a Tuesday and the Wall Street Journal always published the bulk of their job postings on Tuesdays. October 29, 1929 was a Tuesday, the day of the Great Stock Market Crash that many think was the start of the Great Depression.

Tuesday, September 11, 2001 was a gorgeous day all over the East Coast. If it wasn’t so tragic we could always refer to a perfect sky as 911 Blue. I finally tore myself away from TV at about 1 pm and took a walk. The strangest thing was the quiet. Boston was always overflown by airplanes – jets and jetprops from Logan to everywhere. But this afternoon, after smart air traffic controllers started what became a country-wide shut-down of air traffic, there was silence. It was broken only once by a single Air Force fighter over the city which was the most stunning examples of closing the barn door too late, save several days later, when I was on one of the first flights out of Logan when the airport and air traffic reopened.

On that morning, I again was headed to Washington and flew in a 767 right over Ground Zero that was still smoking and a devastating sight. At Logan, every imaginable law-enforcement agency was represented, plus the military – armed to the teeth, accompanied by dogs and outnumbering prospective passengers by about two-to-one. People and governments are terrific at plugging holes after the damage is done and then celebrating their efficiency and cooperation. The terminal was deathly quiet – there were plenty of people moving around. It was just that nobody said anything.

United has an audio channel that lets passengers hear cockpit conversations with air traffic control and on that first flight and several thereafter, the tone and caution exercised by everybody on those airwaves was clearly different than the friendly banter I’d often listen to before things got dicey. If you listen to the tapes just released by Rutgers, the professionalism of the people working with airplanes is pretty impressive. Too bad Washington can’t work as well.

I talked with a guy I knew who drove the bus from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to AOL Headquarters in the Time Warner Building near Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. AOL/Time Warner ran a convenient private air-shuttle from Dulles to New York twice daily. He and a bus load of commuters saw the whole thing from the Jersey side as they sat on an elevated roadway in traffic. It was hard to hear the story.

Months later, near Christmas, I was in New York and the mid-town firehouses were still covered with cards, posters and signs from well-wishers all over the world. Some of the houses had photos of the guys they lost and it was just a sad, sad sight. At ground zero, there were hundreds of messages, signs and pictures still hanging on fences; small tributes to the missing and dead. I caught one in particular that mentioned a name I knew, a UK guy who joined the U.S. Army, fought at the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam and was head of security at one of the banks at the World Trade Center. Rick Riscorla was his name and another Vietnam vet left a note about having his life saved by Riscorla who lost his own shepherding people from the Towers. there’s a biography about Riscorla, I forget the name, but it’s his photo on the book and Mel Gibson movie cover about the Ia Drang both named “We Were Soldiers Once.”

I was pretty familiar with the World Trade Center and had visited a number of people in their offices on the upper floors, had lunch in the plazas between the buildings and used the subways and shops in the basements below. I can tell you these two structures were too massive to ever collapse – I would swear to that – but they did. The most startling thing I realized when I walked downtown nearing Ground Zero was that sunlight was all over the place. That had been blocked mostly by the towers and the adjoining buildings.

Today I read a news story about the Government Accountability Office that released an assessment of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security – an Orwellian name if there ever was one. Some years back, they changed the name of the Government Accounting Office to Government Accountability Office for some reason. The GAO reports on government efficiency and inefficiency, but can hold nobody accountable so it’s just more Washington Linguistic Nonsense. Anyway, the GAO reported that DHS, a conglomeration of a number of pre-existing agencies like The Coast Guard and FBI, hadn’t yet reached it’s potential. This ten years after 911 and eight years after the bureaucratic madness that led to among other things the denuding of FEMA and the mess after Katrina. We deserve better.

When the big spender was tapped out, maxed credit cards; a credit rating in the toilet, his friends advised getting a second job to increase his income. They were, after all beneficiaries of his gravy train and couldn’t see how stopping their friend’s wild spending habits or cutting back could possibly benefit them. “You’ve got an income problem, not a spending problem.” they said, “You’re still a Triple A kind of guy. Not borrowing more to keep picking up our tab is stupid ‘tea party’ stuff.”

What’s worse is that government, which under Keynesian economics intervenes as a last resort to help economies recover, took it’s best, if poorly aimed shot, and had no effect. Trillions disappeared and the meaning of “shovel-ready’ changed forever.

My friend Eloisa Brown recommended the book “2030″ to me and I read it shortly before seeing the film “Transformer’s 3″ here in Shanghai. Both have sad commentaries of the decline of the U.S. – “2030″ explicitly and “Transformers 3″ which features the U.S. Space Shuttle, now retired forever with more than half the program’s useful life remaining. Movies seen the traditional way in China are expensive, but still packed with “Transformers 3″ sold out most of the time. My ticket in a stadium-seating theater on the 8th floor or a nine floor super shopping mall, cost 120 RMB which is almost $18. My friend’s ticket at a student rate was half that. Popcorn in China is sweetened, not salted and tastes something like stale Cracker Jacks. It’s a terrible movie and in “3D” so I got the funny glasses and watched things fly toward me – sort of. My first 3D experience was in the 1950s with the movie “Feather River” where the effect was emphasized by having white people playing Indians shoot their arrows toward the camera. The most obvious aspect of the 3D this time was that the Chinese subtitles (the film was in English and not dubbed), seemed to be floating in front of the screen. I had a hell of a time keeping track of good transformers versus the bad transformers – the only one I could keep straight was the one that was yellow most of the time. I did notice that Lenovo, the big Chinese PC maker that acquired IBM’s PC business some years ago, won the product placement battle with their branded PCs rather than Apple which usually dominates Hollywood. Maybe that’s because Apple thinks PCs are obsolete and is holding out for an iPad movie. Chevy had a lot of branding too — that’s my tax money they spent and I’m not sure it will lead to better or more cars sold, but then GM hasn’t been a particularly clever company for fifty years.

The focus of getting back to the States in July was a seven day pack trip into the wilderness of Montana which seemed to be another of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences that takes priority on my calendar these days. In a nutshell, it was riding horseback accompanied by a mule train for two days and 35 miles into the Bob Marshall Wilderness area in northwestern Montana, just southeast of Glacier National Park, following the course of the South Branch of the Flathead River and then taking five days and two rafts to navigate our way out by river. The outfitter business is bad these days and Kalispell, Montana, a nice town, has too many empty storefronts and the surrounding area has too many properties for sale.

After two days of horseback and walking a little funny, we (three of us – my youngset son, the fly fishing guide, his girlfriend and me), and a professional packer and guide were left to our own devices alongside the river where we inflated the two rubber rafts that would carry us and our pack mule loads back to civilization in the next five days. Our horses and mules and the two wranglers who came in with us left early in the morning for the return trip. “The Bob” as the place is known, is remote and where we were largely burned out from a forest fire that occurred six years ago or so, long enough for regrowth to be all over the place and giving enough light and space for wildflowers and wild animal browsing.

Nothing mechanical is permitted in the designated Wilderness area so everything and anything is packed in (and out), by mules and things, including clearing trails, is done with hand tools. Outfitters make one exception and carry a satellite phone in case of medical emergency – and bear spray (which is a persistent pepper spray concoction) and a gun. Once you get over the temporary distraction of not showering for seven days and having to start a fire to eat, the isolation and beauty of the place is pretty astounding. And after sleeping on Chinese beds for a few years (which cause some westerners to swear that the Chinese never buy mattresses and sleep on box springs), a hard cot and the ground are actually quite comfortable.

We carried two (heavy) coolers of frozen meat, vegetables – even shrimp and ate well. We carried way to much stuff to be considered “roughing it,” but that’s how outfitters make their money – the illusion of living in a primitive way for a week. We took one large tent and a “fly” or big canvas top mounted on poles like an over-sized outdoor craft-show tent where we kept our stuff, cooked when we used the propane fired stove we carried and got out of the rain for the one afternoon and evening when it poured. We were on the river as the storm approached and managed to stop and get things pretty much set up just before the deluge. We drank from the river, sometimes from a plastic bag with a charcoal filter that dripped water into a big plastic bottle.

This past winter, Al Gore notwithstanding, Montana had an unusual amount of snow and a very wet spring. As a result, the run-off has been enormous and the rivers are the highest they have ever been in memory. The water temperature is literally ice water and standing in it for more than a few minutes results in total and painful numbness for any immersed body part. We hit two log jams where we had to push our rafts back up-stream (no easy task in high, cold, fast-running water) to find small back channels we could squeeze our way through.

Normally, fishing in the Flathead and its tributaries is fantastic – about the best in North America with brown, rainbow, cutthroat and bull trout that can get as large as 24′ and more. This summer, rather than low water and high temperatures that are the usual complaints, we had high, murky water that was so cold as to keep the fish lethargic so the fishing was disappointing. We caught fish, but not like we usually catch fish in Montana.

I was in the states for just over three weeks and drove about 2,000 miles from Las Vegas to Montana and back, by way of Cedar City, Utah. I experienced no appreciable jet-lag going East to the States, but had a tough time returning the other way, back to China. Not much happens in Shanghai at 3 in the morning – I’m sure.

United Airlines really sucks. I flew an old 747, paid for the extra legroom which is like coach used to be and had a faulty headset receptacle that cut in and out during the four not memorable movies on the ten hour flight from Shanghai to San Francisco.

Compared to China, where I fly a lot, the TSA set up at San Francisco airport looked like the worst you’d expect from Commies. Foreboding, intimidating, body scanning, shoe removing blue shirted, emblemed emblazoned uniformed fat white or partly Asian men for the most part with a few fat white women here and there. I read that the bad guys are thinking of implanting bombs into bodies now like drug traffickers have done with coke filled condoms their couriers swallow for later delivery. If racial/national origin profiling ever had a a place, it’s got to be when suicide bomber types accept surgical implantation of explosives. God help the truly pregnant, breast enhanced or recent legitimate surgical patients when the blue shirts get their marching orders for those terrorist innovations.

I read a book called “Ordinary Men” about Nazi death squads comprised of regular people with families like anyone else, going to church, celebrating birthdays, totally detached from their day jobs. People become immune to the reality of what they do one small step at a time. After being out of the country for a while, it’s still a great country, but I think it’s not quite what the Founding Fathers had in mind anymore. ‎I hope what Frenchman Alexis-de Tocqueville observed about America in the 1840s is still true: “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.”

I don’t claim to be particularly trim – too many pounds from a slowing metabolism, too-slowly slowing eating habits and sedentary living — but holy shit, people in the States are huge. I mean jigglingly, flowing overly, waddlingly huge. Maybe the casino set (I made landfall at Sam’s Town Hotel and Casino, far off the strip, but homey in Las Vegas), is different, but what I saw at the San Francisco and Las Vegas Airports seemed to confirm the expanded population as well. China claims an obesity problem these days, mostly from rich kids stuffing themselves on western fast food, but most Chinese are rail thin, fit in their clothes nicely and can wear mid-rift revealing attire without spilling over the edges. To be fair, they say love is blind, but the engineering required to get physical love into the relationships of some of the dramatically misshapen couples wandering the Casino floor is beyond me. Love has been blurred a little, but never that blind for me – something I’m not particularly proud of, but something I’ve come to terms with.

I read that a momma grizzly ate a guy in Yellowstone National Park and it wasn’t Sarah Palin getting frisky. In a few days I will be deep into National Forest near Glacier National Park in Montana to fish for a week – a predator I will be. Turnabout is fair, but I still hope the outfitters will have taken the appropriate precautions. We’re supposed to travel by horseback and river boat so maybe that will be enough.

We’ll see.