Friday, November 24
I awoke naturally at 6:30 am , which is unheard of for a night person like me. Usually Art is up and about for a couple of hours before I drag myself out of bed on non-work days. When in China, I was up as early as he was.
I had slept soundly again. The beds were very firm, much firmer than at home. One thing I really liked about them was that instead of a top sheet and blanket there was a wonderful white cotton quilt. It seemed to know how much warmth I needed and provided exactly the right amount. As I recalled the bedding hanging out to air throughout the city, I remembered that it was all quilts. What a nice way to sleep!
David, our tour guide, had given us a detailed verbal itinerary for today. I’d noted on the previous days that he would tell us in advance what would be coming up , and he would repeat it at intervals throughout the day, so everyone on the bus knew what would happen, including people like me who don’t always hear things the first time, or people like Art who don’t always hear them accurately, or people like most of the seniors in our tour who hear them and then forget.
David told us to have our luggage outside the room by 9 am so it could be taken to the lobby. Bus number two would be leaving at 10:30 am sharp, would make one stop at a “jade factory” before going out to the old Hongqiao airport so the group could catch a plane to the city of Wuhan, where we would be getting on the boat for our Yangtze River cruise. David told us that he would be making all the arrangements at the airport. All we’d have to do was stand there and wait until he handed us our boarding passes, then go to the gate. For this part of the day I could tell he was to be the shepherd and we the sheep.
I had forgotten to bring lipstick from home, so after breakfast Art and I ventured out to the street to find somewhere to buy it. A couple of blocks from the hotel, I spotted a pharmacy across the street – in Shanghai most of the shop names were written in both Chinese and English. We found a corner to cross the street, as we figured we’d be less likely to be hit by a car or a bicycle if we waited for a light.
I left Art outside the pharmacy and walked in. There were four ladies in white coats. They all stared at me, smiling. I ran my fingertip around my mouth and raised my eyebrows. Recognition dawned on the face of the woman behind the counter. She foraged in a glass case and pulled out…lip balm! I smiled and shook my head. I looked at the other women. One of them was wearing lipstick. I pointed to her mouth and nodded, then pointed to my own and shook my head. One of the women smiled and said, “Ah. Colour!” A French rather than a Chinese word. I smiled and nodded vigorously.
As this exchange was going on, another woman came up to me. She said, in English, “Chinese medicine.” She opened a bottle and then, with a piece of cotton, put a little of the contents on the back of my neck, saying “hot”. Immediately I cooled off – and I hadn’t even realized I was warm! That happens sometimes to us middle-aged women. I decided against buying the Chinese medicine, but I did buy the lip balm to be polite.
One of the women took me outside the pharmacy and pointed down the street. I patted her shoulder and waved goodbye to the rest.
As I approached Art, who was waiting outside for me, his attention was focused on a noisy group of men in the street nearby. They were gathered around the front end of a car that had come from a parking lot and was part way into the street. Nearly everyone was talking, pointing and gesturing. Apparently there had been some kind of accident, but I couldn’t tell whether there was a person on the ground, or a bicycle, or a motorcycle. A woman emerged from the back of the car and approached the group of men, but their voices got higher and louder and their gesturing more vigorous, and she got back into the car and closed the door. After a few minutes, the police arrived. The men all turned to the policeman and began talking and gesturing to him. It was a much noisier happening than minor accident scenes at home. No one seemed angry or even terribly upset – just noisy. We never did find out what the car had hit.
We walked in the direction the pharmacist had indicated for about three blocks, then turned left. After a hundred feet or so, we realized we were out of the area where we were likely to find lipstick. Most of the places here were street vendors selling food – chickens hanging from racks, dumplings steaming in pots, fruit stacked in boxes. Lots of interesting smells and a good deal of interest on the part of the vendors in having us stop and look. I shook my head at the last one and we turned around. Back on the original street, I found a store that looked like a good possibility for lipstick. I went in and said to the storekeeper, “Colour?” She nodded. From a glass case she took out the selections of lipstick the store carried – three colors. I selected one, paid her – my first purchase with Chinese money, but easy, since their written numbers are the same as ours – and left.
This little adventure, away from the tour group, was a real kick. Here we were, speaking no Chinese, but we were able to do our simple business successfully. I found the people I encountered to be very friendly and eager to understand me and to be understood. When the pharmacist realized what I wanted, her face lit up – and so did mine when I knew that she knew. It was very cool. In the whole week we spent in China, I didn’t use my phrase book a single time to express myself.
As David had promised, bus number two left the Shanghai Hotel at 10:30 am sharp. The “jade factory” was a workshop where the jade was cut and polished. Next to it was a Friendship Store where we were given another 45 minutes to wander. We bought a jade pig (we have a pet potbellied pig named Bud, so this purchase was in his honor) and a necklace for me.
The bus headed for the old Shanghai Hongqiao airport. Along the way David told us that the population of China is 1.2 billion counting the city people and the country people. David said that he was born in Shanghai, so he had a Shanghai birth certificate. That meant that he could go to college and get a job in the city. The country people – 80 percent of the population of China – are not free to move around. They stay in the country to grow the food. David was informative about life in the city, but he seemed disinterested in talking much about the country or the people who lived there. David warned us, “You have been in the city, in Shanghai. Today you are going to the countryside. It will be different there.”
When bus number two had almost arrived at the airport, David sang to us to say goodbye. It was a song he liked, John Denver’s “Country Road”. It was tough to understand the words, but we all recognized the melody and sang along with him.
David was a little distracted on the way to the airport. His cell phone rang several times. Each time he picked it up and said, “Hway?” That’s what it sounded like to us, anyway. Every now and then, now that we’re back home, I call Art on his cell phone and he picks it up and says “Hway?”, and we both laugh.
When we entered the airport terminal I knew why David was our shepherd. There were no English words to be found anywhere – not on the names of the airlines at check in, not on the arriving or departing flights. Just Chinese characters. This airport was more crowded – and we were the only non-Asian faces. We stood in an obedient flock for perhaps twenty minutes. During this time a stooped old woman moved from group to group, begging for money - the only beggar who approached me on the entire trip. Shari commented, after the woman had left us, that she had awfully good teeth for a beggar.
When David came over he handed out our boarding passes. There was no airline indicated. The flight time, gate number and seat number were recognizable, but that was it. We went through security check and headed for the gate to wait again for our flight to be called.
While we waited, I struck up a conversation with another couple from our tour. Tony and Francis were from Connecticut. What I noticed about them at first was that Francis, the woman, was about five inches taller than her husband. He was a compact fellow with sharp brown eyes, and she was comfortable looking and gregarious. We had a spirited conversation. I learned a few days later that Tony was a retired cartoonist who had done the “Joe Palooka” and “Dr. Rex Morgan” comic strips for many years. His stories about the syndicates who own the rights to the comic strips were informative and interesting. I told him he was an invisible celebrity. He said he was glad he wasn’t recognized in public.
We heard a voice on the public address system. When we turned to look, our flight number was displayed on the board. We went through the gate, out a door and boarded a bus, which took out us to the tarmac.
The plane was a Boeing 737. It said “Wuhan Airlines”. I have never heard of Wuhan Airlines. Before this trip I had never heard of Wuhan. I was trusting my life to a strange airline in a foreign country. I have trouble trusting any airline in any country, but this was something else again.
The pre-flight announcements were performed by Chinese flight attendants. In Chinese. Then, from the public address system on the airplane, a person reading phonetic English repeated the announcements. I barely recognized the words as English. Fortunately, I’ve flown enough that I had a general idea of the probable topics – seat belts, flotation devices, oxygen masks dropping from the compartment above.
As I strapped myself in, I repeated my favorite phrase again to myself – “If it’s my time, it’s my time.” We took off. We ascended quickly to 10,000 feet and stayed there for about 20 minutes, then ascended, again quickly, to 31,000 feet.
On my last day of work, one of my colleagues had made a joking remark about “those Chinese air traffic controllers”. It appeared that he was right. It seemed to me that the pilot had the option to choose his altitude and direction – and he did. We ascended and descended for no apparent reason. Every so often the plane would make a swooping turn, suddenly and seemingly at random. I checked for an airsickness bag in the seat pocket in front of me.
The flight attendants came around with a snack consisting of a coconut drink and a large packet of about 50 shortbread cookies. The label on the coconut drink said “the approved State snack drink”.
Outside the plane, we could see low brown hills. The air was hazy – with fog, we thought – but as we descended we could see it was just plain pollution.
We landed at a military airstrip. The touch down was not as bad as I had anticipated. As we walked across the tarmac to buses I could see a long row of military planes, each with a guard. Over the fence were multi-story apartment buildings, probably built in the 50s. They were utilitarian and crumbling. We had disembarked from the only civilian plane at the airport.
A new tour guide boarded our bus. He instructed us to get our luggage from the baggage area, stow them in the hold of the bus, and reboard. We obeyed him. We found our luggage in an outdoor fenced area. I decided against taking any pictures of the airport. It felt like I was in a third world communist country at last.
Our departure from the airport was delayed slightly by a discussion between our tour guide and three members of our tour group. Pat was a middle-aged woman traveling with her daughter Natalie and a family friend, Tamara. The three women had traveled together all over the world, and this was their first trip with a tour. “The price was right,” Tamara had told me, smiling. They were accustomed to a degree of independence that our tour simply did not provide. When we were leaving the Shanghai Hotel, they had been elsewhere and had not gotten on the bus. So they’d taken a taxi to the airport. Apparently they had an adventure with a taxi driver who didn’t speak English and who wasn’t going fast enough for them on the highway. Now the women told the tour guide that they wanted to take a taxi to the boat from the Wuhan airport. The tour guide disagreed with them, and they eventually got on the bus, frustrated and annoyed.
The plan was for our group to make a stop at a stone museum and then have dinner before boarding our boat, the Victoria 5. It was late afternoon by now. The air in Wuhan was thick with industrial pollution – Wuhan is a steel-manufacturing city - and the sky was overcast. As we drove towards our destination, Art commented that this city reminded him of his time in Vietnam in the 60s, except that the rickshaws and handcarts were now motorized rather than hand propelled. There were not as many taxis or cars as we had seen in Shanghai, but many buses and even more bicycles. The streets were crowded with people.
Our new tour guide, Francis, had a solemn voice and spoke decent English. He told us he learned his English on the Internet! I thought he was kidding at first, but he told us several jokes that I’d seen recently on the Internet, including one about a man and his dog named Sex that probably shouldn’t have been told on a bus full of seniors. I imagine it’s harder to pick up culturally acceptable guidelines on the Internet than it is grammar and punctuation, but it reinforced for me the power that the Internet has to bring all the people of the world into closer contact.
I’d never heard of a stone museum, but it turned out to be a geological exhibit of minerals found in the caves and mountains of China. It was actually fairly interesting, even to me, though I would never set foot in such a place unless I had no choice.
Our dinner was another banquet. This was in the Szechwan style, so many of the selections were spicy compared to the banquet in Shanghai the night before. The California woman who didn’t like Chinese food was at another table, but we could hear her complaining from where we were sitting. Shari went over to their table when we were finished with our courses and brought back a couple of theirs. Apparently that was the picky eaters’ table, but Shari thought their food shouldn’t go to waste. It didn’t.
We drove from the restaurant to the harbor. By now it was dark. The steps from the street were steep and unlit, descending to a floating barge between the riverbank and the boat. It’s low season now on the Yangtze, so by the time we had negotiated the 80 or 90 feet of stairs we were about 40 feet below street level. I had seen several tour group members using canes to negotiate rough terrain and wondered how they were managing this descent.
On the barge a troupe of drummers in full Chinese costume were playing us aboard. It turned out that this was the boat crew. Each time we returned from a shore excursion over the next four days, the crew lined up along the barge, and as we passed, said, “Welcome back”. It was kind of corny, but a good feeling anyway each time it happened.
We were ushered into the dining room. The staff collected our passports and trip vouchers and disappeared. One by one, crew members returned with passports and room keys, and tour group members went off to claim their luggage and head for their assigned rooms. After half an hour, Bob and Shari and Art and I were still sitting there, waiting. Bob went to inquire into the delay and returned to tell us that our names were not on the passenger list. Oh, fine, I thought. This had been a long day and I was very tired.
We made our way to the lobby of the main deck. I was surprised to learn that there were 20 other people in the same predicament. Apparently the travel agency had not told the boat company that there were 62 of us, and the crew was already on the phone, because the boat did not have enough room for all of us.
Shari and Bob and we stood, quietly discussing our options if we were shipped back to Shanghai. We decided that a full refund, triple miles and an upgrade on the trip home would be acceptable. Our dreams were thwarted, though, by the appearance of a crew member with our passports and room keys. Art and I actually got an upgrade, from a standard room (pretty small) to a junior suite on the third deck (not so small and with a bathtub).
I went back downstairs a couple of times, where angry tour members were threatening the crew. One of the tour group, an attorney, said, “You had better find me a room, or I’ll make sure you never get another passenger from United Airlines. That would be a big account to lose.” The crew performed heroically; everyone eventually got accommodations of some kind, except for one couple and the attorney, who left the shop. Art and I unpacked into miscellaneous cupboards. The beds were narrow and hard but very comfortable for sleeping – and each of them had a cotton quilt to keep us just-right warm.