After about six weeks of being away from Kunshan I am back, in my office at home, and settling in for the rest of the summer. I had a plan to go to Yunnan province but canceled a few days ago, one part the recent Covid cases along the Myanmar border that could make travel more complicated and one part the desire to get some more writing done before the start of August and the school year. This summer, a summer where I am more or less stuck in China due to the fact that it is very difficult to get back into China if I were to leave, was about figuring out how to make the most of my time here on my own. In June I rented an Airbnb in a hip neighborhood in Shanghai, writing and watching basketball in the mornings, meeting my Chinese teacher in the afternoons. It was great to be in a vibrant city again, to see strangers and eat burritos and sit on air-conditioned trains. While I don't have a huge amount of what I'd consider close friends here in China, I had a relatively busy social calendar, playing basketball, wandering around, or going out for drinks with the folks I knew or who happened to be in town.
City life, reminding me most of when I lived in San Francisco on Valencia, a place where tourists and hipsters would come to shop, eat, and hangout. But I was the tourist in this case, living in Shanghai's French Concession. The second picture is a view of the little alley my Airbnb was in, the third picture some tired guys, and the last a picture from the commuter ferry that crosses the Huangpu river, which I loved to take. The basketball game I played on Sundays was near the terminal and so outside of my neighborhood, I ended up spending a lot of time in the area along the river. Not in the over crowded Bund but on the more mellow Pudong side watching the shipping boats pass, big and small, and wondering what it would be like to live on one.
The desert is the South-Eastern most edge of the Gobi desert that runs south of the Yellow River, just West of Ordos, specifically the Xiang Sha Wan (响沙湾) Desert . Our second day in Ordos we visited the 'Ghost City,' so-called, Kangbashi, a district of Ordos that became somewhat famous, at least in Western Media, for being a large and empty city where nobody lives, another example of something strange the Chinese were doing as measured by the tastes of upper middle-class newspaper editors living on the East Coast. Ten years later Kangbashi is not as empty as the reports would have folks believe though it was pretty empty. We rented scooters and drove around the huge monument malls and parks.
The picture of food is a traditional inner Mongolian stewed dish, lamb, noodles, potatoes and sour cabbage in the winter version, green beans instead of cabbage in the summer version. It was present for a lot of our meals and delicious. Nothing fancy but hearty and comforting. One could eat it everyday and from what I understand that's what people do. The last picture is a one of the grasslands we visited, a slightly unusual grassland on top of Chun Kun Shan (春昆山). We saw sheep and other visitors, took a hike into a valley with large, thick ants and walked around the Aubao three times (pictured last). The first time one is supposed to wish for oneself, the second for your work, the third for your family and friends. And the clouds and skies. And the clouds and skies.
After inner Mongolia I traveled back down South to visit a friend and collaborator in Jinan, staying at a modern hotel in an area cluttered with snack stores and barbeque and bikes on the sidewalk. It was a bit of a shock to thrust back into what felt like an anonymous Chinese city, lights and noise and crowds. But my traveling mind, primed by spending the previous week with more experienced travelers, sought some continuity, seeking out the local food and going for a hike on an incredibly hot day with my friend. We stumbled on some old Buddhist carvings on a mountain in Jinan's south-east, not that we were looking for them. Jinan is famous for fresh water springs, not for swimming but for drinking and making tea. There was a temple in ruins on the mountain built around a few of these springs, ancient economies and intersections with religious belief that remains entirely mysterious and foreign to me.
We watched an elderly man slip behind the barrier to prevent people from going into the cavern enter the darkness to and come out closing the lid on his water bottle. Meanwhile, we chatted about how little we knew about this place and speculated as to what it meant for this temple and these Buddhists to control access to a spring, the temple estimated to be about 1200 years old and rock carvings just around the corner even older.
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Those are just a few moments of the last six weeks but I'm back in Kunshan and rested a bit. Not so much physically as much as mentally, exhausted as I and many people that I know have been from the previous year. Thus I feel a bit refreshed though I am not entirely ready to get back to school. There's more to say and I'll maybe I'll say it in the coming weeks but for now I'm off to meet some friends for lunch. Onward,
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