Adventures in Guangzhou!

The best part of the campus, though, was one of their auditoriums--a building up on a hill looking like something from the temple next door. The steps leading down from the main entrance of the auditorium lead to a gorgeous track & field, complete with about three different football fields. As I walked around the track, I was just itching to join in on a pickup game. The skies were blue, the grass was green, the surroundings were beautiful, and there was soccer to be played! Sadly, I was traipsing around in my flip-flops so I guess it just wasn't meant to be.

Heading back into town, we took in the scenery of some really nice beaches across from the west gate of the university. What a great place to go to school--a campus with amazing buildings and fields, clean air, and beaches right outside the gate! I'm somewhat amazed that the University isn't one of the top-ranked schools. Clearly it has the financial backing of some pretty well-off individuals, it has amazing facilities, and the location is ideal.

Back in the city itself, we decided to have a dinner of western food. Where do you find non-Chinese cuisine in a Chinese city? That's right--at the most expensive hotel you can find. We made our way to the Crown Plaza and sat down inside at an Italian restaurant. The sommelier immediately came to our table and offered up the wine list. This being a mini-vacation, we decided to splurge on a nice bottle of wine... that is until we saw the prices. I am consistently appalled at the ridiculous markup of alcohol in restaurants. But anyway, instead of getting one of the "fine wines," we decided to get the cheapest thing on the menu--the house imported wine. I asked the guy what he thought of it and with a look of mild disgust he responded, "Well, it's not my favorite." Gee, you think? Let's be real though, this is probably the guy who made it the house wine in the first place. He could at least pretend, right? Just to spite him I made sure I thoroughly enjoyed every drop from that bottle. Truth be told, it was actually pretty good, too.

After taking the ferry back to Gulangyu, we decided to walk around a little. As I mentioned, one of the Fujian's specialties is tea so tea stores are ubiquitous. Kelly decided to study up on teas a bit over the summer and was excited to sample the offerings there in Xiamen. For people who make it clear that they have the money to buy high end teas (or for anyone with white skin), tea stores will sit you down and brew some of their best stuff, enticing you to buy. Some places even bring out some snacks to help accentuate the flavors or cleanse your palate.

We were beckoned into one of the medium-sized stores and immediately offered a seat in order to taste their best type of wulong tea. Though I couldn't understand everything they were saying, I did follow along enough (thanks to Kelly's translations) to learn a little something. It turns out that traditionally you never serve the first pour of a tea--you let it sit in the cup for a few seconds and then you pour it right out. Each tea apparently has an ideal pour number in which the flavor and aftertaste will be the best, e.g. the 4th or 5th serving into the small cups. They took us through an entire pot, pointing out how the flavor evolves after each pour. Amazingly enough, they were spot on--it really did taste best on the 5th pour! After a small amount of haggling we purchased a small amount and were on our way.

The next morning we set out to do the only major sight left in the entire city--riguangyan, or "Sunlight Rock." This is the highest point on Gulangyu and as the saying goes, you haven't been to Xiamen if you haven't been to the top of the rock. Supposedly on a clear day you can see all the way to Jinmen, a small island off the coast of Xiamen that is apparently a Taiwanese property.

Before we even reached the summit, we came across a very cool little temple literally built into the face of the rock. Though there was no one worshipping there, it seemed to have a very divine and hallowed feeling about it. After a quick picture, we continued up the various stairs to the top. The view was pretty impressive, especially given that it's only about 100 meters up. On the way down we stopped at the Koxinga Memorial Museum, a hall in honor of Zheng Chenggong, the man who helped liberate Taiwan.

The story of this man is fascinating, as related to me by my PiA mentor, Professor White from Princeton: "Koxinga is praised in China as a national hero because of his bringing Taiwan into the national sphere as he expelled the Dutch from Tainan -- and much praised by Taiwanese (even independistas) because of his separation from the central gov't, nominally on behalf of the Ming against the Qing but actually very much in his own interest... This is beautifully ironic. Zheng was a multinational (his mother was Japanese) pirate king, fit for a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta except that he was very serious. He led, very forcefully, a seafaring South Chinese lineage of the kind that ordinarily had as little to do as possible with any Chinese or other central government. His sponsorship of Hokkien (S. Fujian) migration to Taiwan was indeed the factor that made that island part of China, but he had scant help from Beijing (certainly not from proper-thinking Confucians) for any such project."

Naturally this isn't emphasized in the museum at all, especially not at the enormous statue of the man outside the entrance to the hall. This is interesting, especially given that the very first plaque starts off saying that Taiwan has always and will always be completely Chinese. They revere the man even though he probably could not have cared less about Chinese nationalism. After all, when was the last time a pirate did anything for the sake of a government?

Kelly continued my education a bit in a different direction noting that according to Benedict Anderson's theory of "Imagined Communities," governments attempt to mold nationalism by means of three main devices: the map, the census, and the museum. This could not have been more apropos in this exhibit. I think this theory is very interesting not just for China, but for almost every government. I am in the process of helping one of my tutees write an essay about the comparison of Nazi Germany to the classroom in Robert Cormier's "The Chocolate War." We talked about how Hitler created a contagious sense of nationalism and it makes me wonder how what Anderson would say about that. I guess I'll actually have to read the book...

And that was pretty much it. We had some great Japanese curry and then headed off to the train station. If you're interested in pics from the trip, check out the flickr link on the side of the page or click here http://www.flickr.com/photos/awolfe03/sets/72157594351898482/