Introduction
It’s been nearly two weeks since I flew to Asia, and time has (similarly) flown past. I visited Taipei and Shanghai with my father before beginning my internship in Beijing this week. We attended an English-speaking Presbyterian church service on Sunday, and it was wonderful to see a different type of worship style in the same church denomination I belong to. The day I toured the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial in Taipei was also the moment their new president was inaugurated, and from our vantage point we were lucky enough to see two celebratory fly-overs and hear music blasting from the streets. A tour guide spoke to us about the tensions between China and Taiwan as well as the different political stances on China taken by the two parties in Taiwan, the KMT and the DPP. We visited several beautiful Taoist temples and attended a night market, where I tried some new foods like sweet potato donuts, spicy stinky tofu (I disliked this one), blackened squid, and blended papaya milk. We also saw a man walking his pet pig and another walking his pet turtle, which seemed to thrill the locals as much as us. The next day, my father and I drank buckwheat tea (quite delicious) and visited the National Palace Museum, where we saw incredible art including calligraphy, paintings, and pottery. What struck me the most was a carved ivory puzzle ball, an unbroken piece of ivory that has up to 14 carved hollow spheres within the original orb. A smaller cultural museum informed us of the native inhabitants of Taiwan and its wildlife—all very interesting. After eating a meal that introduced me to bird’s nest soup (the bird saliva is supposed to give women smoother skin) and sea cucumber, we flew over to Shanghai, where our adventures continued. We were grateful that our flight out was the day China began performing military exercises around Taiwan.
In Shanghai, my father and I took the maglev, a train that is levitated from the rails through magnetic force. The hour-long drive from the airport only took us 8 minutes on the train, and it was unusual to experience going 180 mph in something other than an airplane. Our walking tour took us through the previous French Concession, a beautiful park where you could see grandparents with their grandchildren as well as exercising and dancing together, and the building where 15 men met in secret in the 1920s, forming the Communist Party (including Sun Yat Sen and Mao). We learned how to serve tea to guests, only steeping the tea for about 15 seconds at a time and pouring it into very small cups, never adding sugar, milk, or mixing any flavor of tea with another. We visited the Oriental Pearl Tower, walking through its wax-figure and dollhouse-versions of old Shanghai, and rising to the top of the tower to witness the enormity and vast reach of the city. The next day, a tour guide led us through a famous area consisting of the oldest teahouse and the Yu Garden, built over 500 years ago with beautiful ponds, stunning architecture, arched bridges, stony walkways, and even some furniture molded by coaxing the roots of strong trees to grow into the desired shape. I also went balboa and collegiate shag dancing one night, and Lindy hopping another (all types of swing dance). It is always a wonderful experience to dance in a new country, because there is an immediately strong connection without words and a shared thrill in creating something together. The level of the dancers here is very high, and I hope to learn from them while I remain in China.
Finally, after bidding my father a safe 24-hour journey home, I boarded a bullet train that sped from Shanghai to Beijing in 4 ½ hours. Due to a misunderstanding on my part, I was moved from one seat to another the entire trip and listened to a man who had, unfortunately for anyone within 40 feet of him, a nearly unbelievably reverberant snore—so this was not my favorite part of the trip. The next day, having at last reached my shared apartment with Sarah, my co-worker and fellow 1L from W&M Law, we attempted visiting Tiananmen Square, but were turned away due to a lack of tickets. Our passports were checked four times within twenty minutes (including for turning around on the sidewalk), which was a shock coming from the USA, where our passports generally remain tucked away in special little places and nearly forgotten. Since our attempt to buy metro cards were also foiled and we had only boarded thanks to the pity (or annoyance) of a kind metro worker, we instead walked to a nearby commercial street, where our passports were checked once more. We meandered for a long time through the hutongs, peering in at beautiful clothes, eating aromatic foods, buying candies and scented hand creams. When we returned to the apartment, we spent about four hours scrubbing the entire place down—the previous renter had left it a terrible mess—and got to bed pretty early in anticipation of our first day of work.