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I took the train to Datong in Shanxi province. It was so crowded, just like the train on the National Day holiday. I suspect because it is still close to that holiday. I had a seat for the 6 hours at least. The journey was fairly nice, going northwest from Beijing through a mountain range. Then inside Shanxi province the sky was so clear, I could see very far. I noticed old signaling towers on the peaks of many mountains. This was used in old times to pass messages or signals rapidly across the border between China and Mongolia. This is also near the great wall, but I didn’t actually see it from my train.

I arrived in the city of Datong and the travel office in the station asked if I needed a room and directed me to a cheap dormitory. And about $5 for a bed, but no heat, just a dirty shared bathroom on another floor, and a Chinese man in the room who didn’t speak any English. But it was good enough.

I caught up on a lot of business. I had to get a new SIM card for my phone since my old one expired if you don’t use it for a few months. Seems like phone companies all over the world aren’t very fair, that’s why I avoid them as much as possible.

I also took the time here to apply for a visa to Myanmar, which I want to visit later in my trip. However, I didn’t have any passport sized photos. For about $3, I was able to get some taken and printed at a shop. They do it with a small digital camera, pirated version of Photoshop, and a small printer.

I got to try the new Line 10 subway that opened a few months ago. Almost every year there is some new project like this that opens here. I got to visit the family I stayed with and had dinner there. I remember before there was a lot of construction around the subway station there, but now it is all finished and a new skyscraper is in business.

I visited the Capital Museum which had a special exhibition on 5000 years of Chinese history. Since it was the last day of this exhibition, it was probably the most crowded museum I’ve been to in my life. The museum is probably one of the biggest I’ve seen in Asia. There was a line to get into the exhibition, but I didn’t want to waste them there and instead looked at the rest of the museum. Near closing time, they let everyone into the exhibition, so I walked in too and it was very hard to walk through there and I couldn’t see much. Overall it was an impressive museum though.

We tried a "western style food" restaurant today. Most of the food tasted wrong though. For example, the garlic bread didn’t taste like garlic at all, pasta and tomato sauce had a lot of oil in it. It is the same if you go to an Asian restaurant in America, the food may be ok, but very different compared to here.

The bus from Chengde to Beijing was supposed to take the new expressway, but after an hour or so, there was a roadblock and the bus was forced to detour for half the way back. The bus also had trouble with the transmission, would not always get in gear, and problems with the breaks. The breaks seemed like all or nothing, throwing everyone forward in the bus at the slightest slow down. My friend said maybe it was a good idea we got insurance for our tickets. They will usually make you pay 1 yuan insurance for bus tickets.

Back in Beijing, I had time to see a new Chinese movie: Painted Skin.

I woke up early to catch the first bus down the road to the city of Chengde. This is the kind of bus that picks up and drops off people anywhere along the road. And the bus that keeps squeezing in people no matter how full it gets. Since it was the holiday week, it sure was full. I’ve never seen it happen before, but at one point the driver waved off someone, saying the bus was actually full.

Once arriving, we found all the trains for today to Beijing were full and tomorrow has standing room only. However, the buses seem ok. First I visited Puning Temple, which had an amazing 22m tall, wooden, 42 armed, statue of Guanyin. All these buildings here had no electric lights. They don’t want to take any chances of fire. Puyou Temple, next door, did burn down during the Japanese occupation of this area and mostly only foundations remain. The other big place was Putuozongcheng Temple, a unique place modeled after the Potala Palace in Tibet. The outside is Tibetan style and then you are surprised by a carved out inside and a Chinese style building in the middle.

Today I learned it is better to be a foreigner in these Chinese temples over a Chinese. Everyone here, such as guides, try to exploit the Chinese need for good luck and superstition. This includes doing cheap tricks, fortune telling, telling them to pray a certain way after buying certain materials.

My friend met up with her friends in this city. They are husband and wife and we saw their expensive wedding photos. It is hard to tell they are the same people in the photos, since the studio makes everyone looks like movie stars with lots of makeup and costumes. They fill their home with huge versions of these photos on the walls.

All of us went to a restaurant and had some huge dishes of food. I eat a lot, but still could only finish only half the food. They were very generous and nice.

For breakfast every morning, my friend’s father will start the day off with some Chinese 38% alcohol. They say it keeps you warm. This village if full of interesting characters. An uncle down the street who cannot talk, another uncle who paints coffins, and a grandfather who is very hard of hearing (I thought mine was!). Also an interesting story about my friend who was the second daughter in this family. Due to the one child policy in China, her mother had to go hide somewhere in the mountains while she was pregnant. If the government found out, they would abort the baby, even if it was a week or two before birth. Her father lost his job and much money because they broke the rules of having more than one child.

I learned of some interesting things around the village. During WWII, there was a tunnel dug through a mountain next to the village to serve as a bomb shelter. It is kind of dangerous, so not sure if I can visit. There is also a walled area with old buildings in it. This used to be a Buddhist Temple until shutdown in the Cultural Revolution. There used to be four statues insides, but were destroyed. Currently it is used as a chicken farm. There is supposed to be a ghost of a baby inside.

Today I got to walk in fields and mountains around the village. The family planted some trees in an area of their land since the government gives special credits for doing so. A walk up the mountain behind the village reveals a good view. There are clear skies and fresh are in this part of the country.

This village is so small it doesn’t even appear on a map with a name. I learned the house I’m staying in was constructed in 1994. All the homes here are south-facing with large windows on the south side. This house is split into three sections for different people in the family. Although the house isn’t very old, it is very old fashioned.

The biggest difference between this home and ones in a city is the lack of indoor pumping and running water. All of their water is from a hand pump. And this is an improvement since before there used to be a well used with buckets. The toilet is is a concrete outhouse with no door, only a sheet covering half the doorway. There is no shower here. To bathe, one must use a bucket of water outside or visit a town nearby to use a shower.

The kitchen is very basic here. To cook food, it is not by electricity, not gas, but by burning mostly corn stalks. These burn very quick and hot, and the reason why stir-fry type cooking is done in China.  The top of the stove has a built-in curved wok. Next to the stove is a bedroom and inside the bedroom is a kang, a type of bed on top of 1m of packed dirt and clay. The idea is the fire in the kitchen will warm the kang and it will keep you warm all night. I imagine in the winter the whole family will sleep here to keep warm. In addition, they will run a stove pipe from the kitchen through the entire bedroom in the winter time for more heat.

The house is surrounded by a brick wall and two gates. Outside there are a number of chickens in a pen and one pig. There is also a garden where vegetables are grown. Most of the vegetables I’m eating here are grown in this village. Also if I eat chicken meat, it is from their own chickens. And once per year they will usually kill a big pig.

Around the village is mostly corn fields, the main income for the people here. Corn isn’t a very popular food for cooking here in China, but more so for animals or ground up and sold for other uses. I was surprised all the corn is harvested by hand here. Right now it is harvest time and people are cutting down individual stalks, peel the corn, put it in a bag, use a wheelbarrow to bring it home, and then dry it in the sun.

My friend’s father is a security guard at the village’s step-down power station. I got a tour from the 35kV source, to the transformers, some big capacitors, and the monitoring equipment. The station is only about one year old. Even though this is not a big city, I am impressed by the road and electrical infrastructure around here.

Today is October 1st, the National Day for the People’s Republic of China. It is one of the two biggest holiday weeks in China (the other is Chinese New Year). This week, most Chinese people take the trains to their hometowns to visit their families, so it is one of the worst times to travel in China. I was getting on the train.

My plan is to go visit the hometown of a friend. And this hometown is actually a small village about an hour north of the city of Chengde, in Heibei Province. The four-hour train left at 6:30AM. My friend bought tickets a week earlier, so we had seat numbers. Many other people did not. We squeezed on the train and kicked the people out of our seats. The train was so crowded it was a struggle to get to the seats, there were people filling all the walkways. The luggage racks were filled with all sorts of bags, many looked like potato sacks, others looked to be made out of old blue jeans. There was also luggage on the floor, making zero foot room, but at least I didn’t have to stand for 4 hours like some people.

A Chinese army man was sitting across from me. Some people were having a conversation about the Tiananmian square incident in 1989. The man said me was there and explained how he only saw the army shooting guns into the air, not at students. I was surprised to see people talk about this openly.

First, I arrived at Chengde, then took a local bus past the Summer Resort of the Chinese emperors, and to the end of the line. I noticed a lot of people staring at me here. I thought I must be getting closer to this village where a foreigner has never visited.

The final leg of my trip was a car ride from one of the relatives in the family. We continued north through a valley of corn fields on a well built road. My friend said her cousin died as a child crossing this road since the cars drive so fast. Down a short side road was the village including the family’s home. I had some lunch, looked around the village, and  at about 4PM had a nap, dinner, and then went to bed at 7PM.

After preparing for my trip, I was dropped off at the newly opened North Terminal at the Detroit Metro Airport. Today was September 29, 2008 and the terminal opened on September 20. There was nothing too impressive about the place compared to the world’s largest airport terminal which opened in Beijing this year.

My first flight was from Detroit to Chicago. The American Airline’s airplane looked like an antique as I boarded. The flight was nearly full and it was a struggle to find space for my bag. It was the same situation on my second flight from Chicago to Seattle. American Airlines has a policy of charging a fee for any checked-in luggage. Of course everyone will now try to carry on their luggage. On the second flight, the pilot was getting annoyed because he couldn’t take off on time since there were people still standing up trying to find a place for their luggage.

My third and final flight from Seattle to Beijing was delayed 90 minutes. I was getting concerned because I arranged for a friend to pick me up from the airport in Beijing. I walked from one end of the airport to the other trying to find an open Wi-fi signal at every coffee shop. There was one that advertised it but required a purchase. I don’t drink coffee however, and I want to try to sleep on airplanes besides. I noticed one pilot inside using his computer. I ended up asking him and he gave me the password. Although I nearly have a computer setup for cracking the security on these networks, it is always easier for the social approach and just ask.

The fight on Hainan Airlines from Seattle to Beijing was enjoyable. Finally I felt like I was in the 21st Century with a new Airbus 330A airplane (just temporary too, they will upgrade to Boeing Dreamliner soon). This plane had the best entertainment system I’ve seen yet. Each person had access to about 20 or 30 on-demand movies. So you can choose what you want to watch, you can fast forward and pause. We were fed two meals, the flight attendants were younger than the ones on American airlines, and the fight wasn’t as crowded.

Finally, after roughly 17 hours in the air today, I descended through the hazy Beijing skies. I didn’t get to go through the enormous new Terminal 3 building, but instead exited at Terminal 2. I did get to take the new Airport Express Train to the city and also got to try the new machines used to recharge the subway card. Since the Olympic games there is also required x-ray of your bags going onto the subway. I didn’t have too much time to rest because early tomorrow I’d have a lot farther to travel.

I have rarely left my house in almost four months here at home in Michigan. No luck at jobs around here, not even an interview. I’ve decided I’m going to get out of the house for a while and take another trip while I’m still young. This will give me another chance to see many of the places I’ve missed before.

Since Oasis Hong Kong Airlines went out of business last year, I thought I was out of luck on cheap flights to Asia. Fortunately, I found the next best thing: Hainan Airlines. The 4th largest Chinese airline started flying from Seattle to Beijing in June of 2008. Next year they will start service from Chicago, but for now I have to make a few connections. I found a good deal that packaged all the connections together (thanks to kayak.com) for $503 one-way.

I’ve been preparing. This summer I received new visas to India (5-year) and China (1-year). I bought two travel guides, checked out another five travel guides from the library and took photos of many pages. I’ve upgraded my laptop from 1.5GB to 2.5GB RAM and the hard drive from 160GB to 320GB; dual booting my laptop with Windows Vista and Mac OS X 10.5; bought a new wireless card for the laptop that is supposed to be compatible with both operating systems. I’ve also upgraded my main PC with a Seagate 750GB hard drive, but it crashed about two months after I installed. I got a replacement and that is up and running again.

Chronological summery of my trip from September 2007 – June 2008:

1. Japan = 21 days
2. Korea = 10 days
3. China = 60 days
4. Thailand = 30 days
5. Cambodia = 20 days
6. Vietnam = 11 days
7. Thailand = 5 days
8. Malaysia = 6 days
9. Thailand = 3 days
10. China = 51 days
11. Singapore = 3 days
12. Indonesia = 15 days
13. Thailand = 4 days
14. Taiwan = 15 days

I took a flight on Northwest Airlines after midnight Eastern time and it arrived at 5:30AM in Detroit. On the first flight from Taiwan I think I slept an hour, but I didn’t sleep at all on this flight. My body still thinks it is daytime.

After waiting around for a while, I asked where the bus stop was. It was down on the lowest level, hidden away it seemed. I got on the 7:18AM bus which cost $1.75. I was the only white person on the bus and that felt a little strange after where I’ve been. I also noticed a lot of fat people on the bus.

It was a nice Sunday morning for driving through Detroit. I noticed the differences between here and the other places I’ve been. There are liquor stores everywhere, lots of pizza shops, many parking lots, and a lot of grass. In Detroit I got to see the urban scenery including abandoned buildings, a burnt down school, and a wastewater treatment plant.

I had to change buses in downtown Detroit, so I walked around a little bit. For the second bus I had to insert my ticket into the machine in the correct spot for the free transfer. The bus driver was late and in a hurry. She threw my ticket onto the floor since I didn’t take back the ticket right away. I don’t know how this confusing bus system worked. I had to pick up my ticket from under the bus driver’s feet.

In Royal Oak I had to transfer to my 3rd bus. I got off on the wrong stop and and to walk quickly to make it to the station and I saw the bus arriving as I was getting close. If I missed that one, I would have had to wait another hour. After 3 hours on the bus, I made it.