Tacoma to PDX: it shouldn't be so hard, right?

[I spent a couple days in Tacoma last weekend as a judge at the Northwest Regional Barista championships. I’m still working on an article about that experience, but I wanted to first share my misadventures trying to get back to Portland.]

Under most circumstances, I’m a big fan of mass transit, mostly because it means I don’t have to drive and can focus on doing other things. However, when you rely on someone else to get you places, you are at the mercy of forces beyond your control. Most of the time you get where you want to go when you want to get there, but not always.

Riding up to Tacoma (I came with Brandon Arends), I figured I would be able to find someone who was headed back to Portland from the NWRBC on Friday afternoon. The barista competition runs Friday, Saturday and Sunday, but I needed to leave early to get back to Portland. If my efforts failed, I knew I had some friends leaving Tacoma for Portland on Saturday morning, so I had a backup plan.

Unfortunately, my original plan was faulty. It was a parade of bad luck and even worse timing. It seemed like the universe had conspired against me to slow my travel down.

Swing….and a miss!

When Friday’s competition ended, I asked around to see if anyone was headed back to Portland. I was told that ‘someone named Jeff’ was going back, but that he had already left. Rats. Another person suggested I take the train. That sounded like a good idea. Amtrak is a nice way to travel between Tacoma and Portland. I pulled out my laptop and checked the schedule. The next train to Portland was leaving about 3:10pm, which would  put me in Portland by 5:30. Perfect—except that it was already 3:00 and there was no way to make it to the station, buy a ticket and get on the train in time for its departure. The 6pm train was sold out, so Amtrak wasn’t an option. Double rats.

That was two near misses, and I wasn’t even out of the convention center yet.

Brandon, who was staying until the next day, and I went back to the hotel about 3:20pm. The first thing I did was check the Greyhound bus schedule to see when the buses left. There was one leaving at 5:10pm that still had seats available. I almost bought a ticket, but then I remembered that sometimes you can find people on Craigslist (CL) looking to share rides. What the hell, I thought, I’m up for an adventure, so I went to CL to try to find a ride.

If you’ve never used CL to purchase or anything, the site is a free online classified ad site that has a very unique etiquette model. Whenever you try to sell or buy something, you have to accept that people won’t necessarily give you a response. If they don’t call you, you have your answer—no. Therefore, when you are trying to get something on CL, you have to send out multiple feelers. Some bite, most don’t. It’s not that people are being rude—rather, that’s just how the game is played. You just have to accept it.

On the Seattle rideshare section, I found a few different possibilities. One person named Josh was leaving Tacoma at 3:30pm with room for three people. He left a phone number to call.  He didn’t answer, so I left a message and a contact number. Another ad said that two students planned to leave around 2pm. Two o’clock was already long past, but people’s intentions don’t always work out, so I sent them an email in case they were behind schedule.

A third ad said that she was leaving Seattle for Portland that evening (see picture).

I sent an email, trying my best to convince her I wasn’t dangerous, creepy or looking for more than conversation, but I must have failed, because I got no response.

Finally, I found an ad saying that someone was leaving Tacoma for PDX about 3:45pm, asking $20 for help with gas. That was better than the $35 that Greyhound wanted. I sent the person a text, saying that I was in Tacoma at the La Quinta hotel, right off the freeway. No response. About 10 minutes later, I wrote and was more direct: “I have $20 and I’m right by the freeway exit,” I clarified.

I waited another 20 minutes, figuring that if no one responded I still had time to buy the bus ticket. About 4:15, I decided to go ahead and buy the ticket. Reluctantly (should I wait?), I pressed the ‘Confirm Purchase’ button. I received a confirmation email that told me to be at the station an hour before departure to pick up the ticket, which made no sense because it was already less than an hour before departure. I love computers. They give such great customer service.

Doh!

As I closed the screen of my laptop, I heard the familiar bzzz-bzzz of my phone, indicating an incoming text message. The person I had texted earlier said that he would be there in a few minutes and asked for the address of the hotel. Aaaggghhh! I knew I should have waited (I had bought the cheaper, nonrefundable ticket, of course). I texted back that I had just bought my bus ticket and that I didn’t need him to pick me up. Damn. That was about 4:20. Had I ridden with him, I would have gotten back to PDX about 6:45pm. As it was, my bus was scheduled to pull into Portland at 8pm.

Since I was supposed to be at the station an hour before departure, I left the hotel at 4:30 and walked toward the station with my bag. It was a beautiful day in Tacoma, the sky was blue and the crisp air was invigorating as I walked briskly toward the bus stop. It felt good to be traveling on my own again, even if it was only from Tacoma to Portland. There was an extra bounce in my step as I made may way down the hill to the Greyhound station.

When I got to the station, it was dark, and locked. A man waiting outside told me that the station doesn’t open until 5:00. But doesn’t the bus leave at 5:10? Didn’t Greyhound’s email tell me to be at the station an hour early? Who’s in charge of the  computer system?

It wasn’t much fun standing there on the street, waiting with nowhere to go. In the back of my mind, I was marginally worried that the station might open late and there not be enough time to get the tickets printed out before the bus left. I was prepared to try to talk my way onto the bus using nothing more than the confirmation email on my phone. The message clearly stated that a paper ticket was needed for boarding, but if you couldn’t get the company to print it out on time, that wasn’t my fault, was it?

It turns out my worries were unfounded. The customer service rep was on time, and he printed out my ticket by 5:05pm, though it would not have mattered if I had shown up late. The attendant soon informed us that the bus was running “20 minutes late.” Of course it was.

At fifteen minutes to six (35 minutes late), the bus pulled in. We boarded the bus and were on the road ten minutes later, 45 minutes after the bus was scheduled to leave. At that time of day, the traffic is pretty bad in the region and the driver had to fight stop and go traffic until almost Olympia, where the bus stopped to drop a couple people off. Our expected PDX arrival kept getting later and later. I spent time writing about the NWRBC experience until my laptop battery quit, then I shut off the light and sat in my seat staring into the dark night.  

In all the excitement, I had forgotten to eat, so I sat there staring out the window trying to ignore my growling stomach. One of the rules of the road is that you should always have some backup eats for situations like this. I had violated the rule. One more thing.

We finally pulled into Portland at 9:00pm. I checked the Tri-met bus arrivals at the nearest station for my route home. The next #19 bus was coming in three minutes, which meant that by the time the bus finally parked, the opportunity was gone. Yep, that’s just how the whole trip was – one more missed connection. The next #19 was not coming for another half hour. I could do nothing but throw my hands up and laugh (and swear, if I’m being honest). To kill time, I decided to walk from the Greyhound station up to PSU. The exercise felt good after sitting around for so long.

As I was waiting at the PSU stop, my phone buzzed as it received another text from the mystery driver who nearly gave me the ride. He offered to take me back to Tacoma on Sunday. In my reply, I thanked him for the offer and said I lived in Portland, taking the time to lament that I still wasn’t home. I could picture him laughing as he responded with the news that he was headed out to a bar. That was the end of an anonymous conversation with an unknown fellow traveler. Craigslist has a funny way of bringing people together.

Thankfully, the #19 arrived on time – ahhh, the last leg of the trip. At 10pm, I finally walked in my front door, tired and hungry. Instead of taking two and a half hours, the trip took just over five and a half hours from door to door.

An iffy day

The day could have been much better, if only:

If I had found “Jeff” before he left, I would have probably made it back to Portland by 5:15pm. No dice.

If I had checked the Amtrak schedule 15 minutes earlier, I would gotten on the train and made it back by 5:30. Nope.

If I had waited one more minute to buy the bus ticket, I would have ridden back with the mystery texter and made it back to Portland by 6:45. Negative.

If the bus had arrived at the Tacoma station on time, we would have made it back to Portland at 8pm, and someone would have been available to pick me up at the Portland station when I got back.  Afraid not.

If the traffic between Tacoma and Olympia had been lighter and we arrived a few minutes earlier, I would have caught an earlier Tri-met bus home. Instead, I missed the bus, which cost me an extra half hour. Go figure.

Like I said before, I like mass transit. I enjoy seeing and meeting new people, I like the fact that people share resources and I really like letting someone else do the driving. But after a day like Friday, I remember why people drive. Mass transit can be a real pain in the ass. But it does make for some interesting stories....

San Francisco Scenes

A couple pics from our recent jaunt to San Francisco:

The Golden Gate Bridge, a must-see for first-time vistors
Still looks great after 78 years
That's a big cable

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Searching for Sightglass Coffee, or ‘the “honkey” incident'

Another story from San Francisco:

Anthony Salas, a barista at Paper Tiger Coffee in Vancouver, suggested that we try out Sightglass Coffee while we were in San Francisco. Always up for trying new places, we followed his recommendation. It turned out that finding the café was as memorable as the café itself.

Sightglass Coffee is located on Seventh Street, close the heart of downtown San Francisco. After lunch at the wharf, we hopped onto the cable car and rode it over the hill to Hallidie Plaza (For the record, the cable car is overrated—not much more than tourist transportation. I would estimate that 95% of the people on the car were tourists, and the other 5% were the driver and the ticket-taker. Call me a cynic, but it was not the “San Francisco treat” that you have seen on television). From the plaza, we walked down Market Street and turned onto Sixth Street. We could have walked one more block to Seventh ,  but I wanted to get off of Market because it was loud from all the traffic. Our chosen route made for a more interesting story, though at the time it was a little unsettling.

To give you a little background, when traveling, I do my best to not look like a tourist. Granted, this is not always possible, but I try to not saunter around gaping at tourist attractions, snapping lots of photos and being more conspicuous than necessary. I try to act like I know where I am going, and I do my best to avoid using maps in public. Tourists can be targets for mischievous or malevolent people, so it’s best to not look like one.

We probably should have done a little research about this part of the city before we went, because it would have been good to know its reputation. On Sixth Street, it was pretty much impossible to not look like a tourist. Theoretically, it could have been the safest part of San Francisco, but the neighborhood looked like it was going through a rough time. There were lots of shops that looked run down, with paint peeling off the walls, as well as many empty storefronts covered with old posters and graffiti. The shops that were open included several pawn shops and convenience stores. Groups of young black men stood around, crowding the sidewalk and watching us as we went by. It reminded me of walking around Datong, China, where the local people stared at the unfamiliar faces (us) passing by them. Even worse, I had a camera around my neck, flashing “TOURIST!” in big bold letters to everyone on the street.

I felt out of place, and asked myself if I was nervous because we appeared to be the only white people there, or if the area just gave off the impression that it was unfriendly. It was probably some of both. It can be unsettling when you visit a place where you stand out so much.

That said, I don’t think my uneasiness was much different than what people from outside Portland feel when they visit downtown and have to pass through the groups of homeless people crowding the sidewalk. Walking around downtown Portland doesn’t bother me anymore, but I have spent a lot of time there. Sixth Street in San Francisco was completely new to me.

To add to my unease, one of the things we saw as we were walking was likely a drug handoff. I could be mistaken, but seeing two men approach each other on the sidewalk and discretely pass a small paper bag between them without saying anything seemed a little suspicious. I commented to my wife that it didn’t look like they were sharing doughnuts. She agreed. We kept walking, pretending not to notice, or at least to not care.

The most memorable incident of our side trip took place a couple blocks later. As we came to the corner, a tall black man dressed in a red hat and a blue and white sweat suit looked at us in disapproval. He was talking to a group of men, and as we approached, he stepped out directly in front of us.

“. . .and someone like this honkey,” he said, glowering at me.

 “Oh, sh--,” I thought.

My heart jumped when he said that, though I tried to not show any fear. We stepped around him to the left, hoping that he wouldn’t try to stop us. If he had, I’m not sure how I would have reacted. I wasn’t looking for a fight, just a coffee shop. Fortunately, the man made no other moves to block us—he had already made it clear enough that we weren’t welcome in his neighborhood. We kept walking, glad to soon reach our destination.

Looking back on our misadventure, I doubt we were ever in any real danger. We were uncomfortable, but no harm came of it. After all, the man made no physical contact with us. All he did was call me a honkey, which is actually kind of funny. I haven’t been called that since the days when I used to play a lot of basketball. There was always lots of creative things said in the heat of the games.

All in all, our quick trip to Sightglass was a memorable one. We found some pretty good coffee and we came away with a story to tell.

Caffe Trieste (SFO) - not just a café

What is it that makes a café a “local place,” or even what I would call a “neighborhood institution?” In my previous post about Xpression Coffeehouse, I wrote about how the owners want to make their café a place where the neighborhood gets together. But how does a café reach that goal? There may not be a single answer to that question, but I do know that some places are successful while others are not.

Last week, I visited the original Caffe Trieste in San Francisco, and it is a place that definitely has “it.” The café is the proverbial place “where everybody knows your name.” Although no one knew my name when I was in there, I was confident that after a few visits, many of them would.

Having great coffee is not the only way to become a neighborhood café. The first day I went to Trieste, in fact, I thought my espresso was barely drinkable. If I were going to base my experience solely on the coffee, I would not have gone back the second time. However, my pastry was excellent (it tasted a lot like a chocolate chip cookie) and the environment was fun, interesting, and full of character and quirk. I wanted to go back.

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Book Review-A Sense of the World

It has been a while since I last wrote about traveling. That is mainly because I have not done any traveling lately, something that I hope to change soon. After all, traveling is one of the most valuable and invigorating experiences a person can have in life, in my opinion. If you don’t travel, you lose the opportunity to enjoy and appreciate the wider world.

In an effort to take to the road without actually taking to the road, I recently read A Sense of the World-How a Blind Man became History’s Greatest Traveler, written by Jason Roberts. The book is a biography of James Holman, a fearless traveling Englishman, who, in spite of his blindness, was able to travel all over the world. What makes the story even more compelling is that he did his traveling in the first half of the 19^th century.

Holman was not blind from birth. He was born in 1787, one of six brothers and the son of a pharmacist. In those days, class structures were very rigid in England, and Holman’s father had high ambitions for his son, whom he wanted to become a gentleman. One way for a commoner to do this was to reach officer status in the military, which is what James Holman did.

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Tired of paper transit tickets? (updated)

Today, I want to step away from coffee for just a moment. One of my favorite things to talk about is entrepreneurship, and I have something I would like to share with you.

When I’m out traveling around the city, I prefer to walk or take public transportation. Walking around, you really get the feel of a place, and on the bus or the train, you don’t have to stress about traffic.

Since I take the bus and the train pretty regularly, I can say with confidence that it would be nice to be able to pay for tickets using an app on my phone, especially when riding the bus. Even better, the phone would serve as a ticket itself.

Tri-Met (Portland’s public transit agency) doesn’t have a system like that yet. However, a couple of my classmates from Portland State’s MIM program are trying change that. Nat Parker and Michael Gray have started a company called GlobeSherpa to develop mobile phone apps, and their most promising app at this time is called TransitSherpa, an app that acts as an electronic ticket management system for Tri-Met. I’ll let Nat explain:

Their company is currently in negotiations with Tri-Met to make the system a reality, but they need some funding to speed things up. Tomorrow evening, at 5:30pm, Nat and Michael will be at the Backspace café/pub competing in the second-to-last round of the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network’s Seed Oregon competition, a competition that helps start-up companies with funding and guidance. The winner is determined by popular vote of the audience, so the more supporters TransitSherpa has, the better chance it has to win. The winning company gets to present at the Angel Oregon conference in March, where it could acquire the funding it is looking for.

If you think that a Tri-Met ticket app is something that you would rather have sooner than later, come by Backspace tomorrow evening at 5:30 and support TransitSherpa. It costs $25, which I know is kind of steep, but it’s supposed to include some kind of food and drink spread. In addition, Nat has promised me that he’s going to be especially entertaining during his presentation.

You might wonder if I get anything out of this advertisement for them. Nope. I’m just spreading the word for them and trying to speed up the process of creating a Tri-Met ticket app. It’s 2011, and the time for e-tickets is here. Let’s help TransitSherpa make it happen.

No más

Update: GlobeSherpa won by two votes! Congratulations and good luck at the next round.

Airport Coffee Hacking Tip

When you travel, one thing you may get tired of is airport coffee. It’s true that most airports these days have Starbucks or Peet’s (or some other large coffee chains) in them, but even if you do like their coffee, you probably don’t like the high prices they charge. Airport cafés have limited competition and they know it, so they charge way more than they would on the street.

There is a way to beat the airport coffee cartels and still have great coffee.

Zachary Gray, owner of Paper Tiger Coffee, gave me some great advice for getting great coffee when you’re traveling, without being treated like an ATM.

Here are the steps:

Step 1-Right before you leave for your trip, grind some coffee beans and put the grounds into a Ziploc bag. It is very important that the beans are ground extra-coarsely—more coarsely than for a French press. Grind out enough coffee so that you have at least two tablespoons of grounds for each six ounces of coffee you are going to want to drink. Put them in the bag and remove as much air as possible. Seal the bag and throw it in something you are going to carry onto the plane.

Step 2-When you get to the airport, look for a Starbucks—not to buy coffee, but to get a cup of hot water. Starbucks has great water. They triple-filter it so there is nothing in it to add or detract from the taste of the coffee. Order the size you want, making sure to match the quantity of water with the quantity of coffee you have.

Step 3-Dump your ground coffee into the cup of hot water. Gently stir the grounds to make sure that they all come into contact with the hot water. Let sit for 3-4 minutes, then pour just  a little cold water over the grounds to help them sink to the bottom. The coffee should be ready to drink.

As you drink the coffee, you have to be gentle with the cup so that the grounds stay at the bottom. If you do this, the grounds are less likely to release some of the bitter compounds they contain (i.e., they won’t over-extract) and you won’t get a mouth full of sediment when you drink it. As long as you’re careful, you will not taste much more sediment than you would with a French press.

It’s not rocket science—high-quality fresh coffee + good water has always been the recipe for great coffee, even if the method is somewhat primitive. In Gray’s experience, this ‘farmer coffee’ (a.k.a. ‘cowboy coffee’) is better than nearly all the coffees you can get at the airport. The fact that you don’t have to spend so much money also makes it taste better. Enjoy!

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(Feel free to pass this on to your fellow travelers/coffee lovers)

Dog River Coffee Company

If you happen to be driving to Portland from Eastern Washington and you just cannot drive another hour without stopping (if you’ve got kids, you might know what I mean), Hood River is a good place to get out and stretch your legs. When we drove back to Portland after Thanksgiving, I was hoping to drive all the way to Portland without stopping. However, I was outvoted 3-1, so we pulled off the freeway and drove up to Oak Street, the main street in the touristy part of town. We parked and hopped out, looking for a café. Just up the street, beyond the absinthe bar, we spotted the Dog River Coffee company.  It looked like the type of place where we could get a little boost for the last leg of the trip (the café, not the bar).

Dog River Coffee 

For those of you who don’t know, Hood River is a small town about an hour’s drive east from Portland on I-84. It is located on the southern bank of the Columbia River and is a well-known destination for wind surfers who come to take advantage of the Columbia Gorge’s ever-present winds. It is also a popular place for people who are in transit to/from Mount Hood for camping, hiking or skiing. The downtown is geared for tourists and is full of small shops, restaurants and cafés. If you venture up the hill very far, the town offers some spectacular views of Mount Adams across the river to the north.

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Show Your Patriotism—Drink Coffee!

Today I want to bring you a little coffee history. I was reading Starbucked by Taylor Clark and one of the stories he tells about the history of coffee in America caught my eye. I thought I’d share it with you. But first, a little background (I promise there is a point to this story—it just takes a little while to get there).

I don’t know how many of you grew up drinking coffee before Starbucks became popular. It may be that for most of you, you never cared about coffee before the big green apron came along. I didn’t drink much coffee myself until fairly recently. To be honest, I don’t know if I ever went into a Starbucks before 2002. Growing up, I had an occasional cup after church (a Methodist tradition) maybe once a year, but I was never really what you would consider a coffee drinker. During high school, I remember some older friends telling me that there was no way anyone could make it through college without drinking coffee. They were wrong about at least one person.

My own personal connection with coffee really began in 2001 on a trip to Italy. While staying at a hostel (Casa Olmata) in Rome, we were given a ticket for a complimentary breakfast—a cappuccino and a croissant—at a nearby bar (café) that was across the street from Santa Maria Maggiore. We found the bar about 8am and walked in, a little unsure of ourselves. It was my first trip to the country and I couldn’t speak much Italian. We handed the tickets to the barista and he immediately set to work on the drinks. I stood there waiting, looking around and taking in everything around me.

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The Columbia Gorge on Ice

If you’re around the Pacific Northwest for very long, one thing you ought to do is take a drive through the Columbia River Gorge. It is a very scenic trip that rivals any other that America has to offer. My family and I drove up the Gorge for Thanksgiving this week, on the heels of this year’s first major winter storm. I was reminded how beautiful the Gorge can be. I was also reminded how temperamental it can be (at least the weather).

The Columbia River Gorge is one of America’s largest river channels. It was formed during the last ice age when the ice dam that formed Lake Missoula broke, causing one of the biggest, most intense floods the world has ever seen. Water rushed out of the lake and across Eastern Washington, digging a network of deep channels in the earth. According to the Montana Natural History Center, the flow of water was 60 times greater than the Amazon River, the largest river in the world. Sixty times! The wall of water rushed through the region and left behind a trove of geological features. It created wonders such as Palouse Falls, Dry Falls (which were 3.5 times as wide and twice as high as Niagara Falls), the Channeled Scablands and Wallula Gap The waters spread out like a giant hand across Eastern Washington, coming together at Wallula and raging their way to the Pacific Ocean. It would have been quite a scene to see, assuming you were standing on ground above the flood plain.

Quite the view

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The Undertown Café (Port Townsend, WA)

One of the joys of being a traveler is exploring new places. Of course, one of the frustrating things about traveling is that sometimes you can’t find what you’re looking for. When I go somewhere new, one of the things I always want to find is good espresso. Unfortunately, I have been to towns where you just cannot find good espresso, no matter how hard you look.

I recently traveled Port Townsend, Washington, located on the Olympic Peninsula at the mouth of Puget Sound. It was my first trip to the area, and when I got there I was really in the mood for some coffee. Seeking the wisdom of “the cloud”, I sent out a tweet asking if anyone knew of a good café in Port Townsend. Someone responded and told me that I should go to the Undertown Café. He did not elaborate much, but I still decided to take his recommendation and check it out.

The Undertown is underground

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Everything I Ever Wanted to Know about Jail

You never know who you're going to meet when you're traveling. A couple days ago, I mentioned that I was getting ready to take the bus back to Portland, hoping to find a good story. Here’s what happened.

The first leg of the trip, from Walla Walla to Pasco, was uneventful. We stopped in a couple small towns along the way—sometimes picking people up, sometimes not. That’s the biggest drawback to riding the bus—it can be pretty inefficient because you stop so often.

At Pasco, I had a layover of about 45 minutes. I wanted to get something to eat, but unfortunately, the Pasco station is not close to any restaurants.  With a backpack, a guitar and a heavy duffle bag, walking the mile back to the taco stands we had passed on the way to the station did not sound like fun, so I opted to just sit down on a bench to wait for my next bus to leave.

About five minutes later, a young guy came and sat down on the opposite end of the bench. He was in his early twenties and wore a black t-shirt, baggy jeans and a pair of well-worn black Air Jordan basketball shoes. He was about average height and had a medium build. It looked like at some point in his life he had lifted weights, but had not done so for quite a while. He wore his hair cropped very short and had not shaved in three or four days. He had someone’s name tattooed on his right wrist, and on the inside of his left forearm, a large raptor spread its wings. When he sat down, I got the sense that he wanted to talk. I made eye contact with him, which was all the encouragement he needed.

“Where you going?” he asked me.

“Portland. How about you?”

“I’m going to Spokane,” he replied. “I just got out of jail, and I’m getting the hell out of here!”

I knew right then that I had found my story.

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On the Road Again

We finished harvest yesterday (we were lucky to get done--it rained hard today), so tomorrow I will be returning to Portland after nine days in Dayton. To come back, I'm going to take the bus from Walla Walla to Portland. I had planned to catch the train in Pasco, but two things made me change my mind. The first is that the train leaves Pasco at 5:35am, which means that I would have to leave Dayton by 4am to make it on time. No thanks! The bus, on the other hand, departs from Walla Walla at 11:45, which means I don't have to leave Dayton until 10:45. Much, much better. I can use the extra sleep.

The second reason I decided to take the bus is that I think the bus will be more interesting than the train. As my friend Dave Schreck said today, when you ride the bus you get to see an "interesting slice of Americana." I agree. The people that ride the bus are a different crowd than the people who take the train, and I hope to run into someone with a fascinating story that I can share with you. Until then, happy Friday.

Coming back from China

When I passed through security and walked into Terminal 3 at the Beijing International Airport, it struck me that my adventure was coming to an end. The terminal was cool, clean and quiet, three adjectives that have little to do with the China I experienced. I sighed deeply, preparing for the journey ahead. I was excited to return home, but not necessarily looking forward to the next 24 hours on the move.

The trip had started out well. After a couple more difficult farewells, I hopped into a taxi to the airport.. There were no traffic jams and not even a line at the check-in desk (for a full flight on a 747!). The only thing that almost went wrong was when I got to the airport, I didn’t know what flight I was supposed to be on, and I couldn’t find any  flights to San Francisco on the monitors. For a minute, I thought maybe I was supposed to fly out at 4am instead of 4pm and had arrived 10 hours late. My fears were premature, however. The flights to SFO did show up on the monitor a few minutes later. Whew! Crisis avoided.

I had arrived at the airport two hours early, so I wandered around a little, checking out some of the luxury good for sale in the duty-free shops and eating an overpriced dish of fried rice that wasn’t half as good as what you could get in the shops in the city center. I knew I would miss good Chinese food, but I was also excited to get some good home cooking. Living without a kitchen was hard and with all the walking I did, I probably lost 10lbs on the trip.

My last meal in China...could have done better

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The Petra of China

On the second leg of our trip to Inner Mongolia, we went to Datong, in Shanxi province. Datong is a very important city in China because it is the center of a very large coal-producing region. The abundance of coal has allowed the city to prosper, and it was obvious while we were there that the small town of three million (small by China’s standards, at least) was changing fast. According to our guide, the Chinese government is worried that the coal in the region, which they have been mining for thousands of years (that’s what he said), is going to run out soon, so the city is trying to transition from a resource-based economy to a tourism-based economy. The city is razing huge swaths of the town in order to construct a massive stone wall that surrounds the city, in hopes that the spectacle will bring tourists in. We watched a set of excavators tearing apart a large, aging apartment complex and I expect that a set of new apartment buildings will replace it. All over the city, new high-rises were being built, and I could easily see why some economists are worried about a property bubble in China. Who is going to live in all of these massive, expensive new lodgings?

When we pulled up next to the hotel at Datong, I don’t know if I have ever seen a happier group of travelers. After sleeping poorly in a bunch of cold yurts, facing the stomach-wrenching odors of the filthy bathrooms, riding horses for two hours on the wind-blown prairie and spending four hours on a bus, seeing that we were going to stay at four-star hotel was the sweetest sight any of us could have asked for. All we wanted to do was grab a shower and take a rest before heading out for a group dinner of traditional hot pot. The shower was splendid and the bed was comfortable. Our bathroom even had a western toilet, still the only one I’ve seen since I arrived in China. It’s the small things in life that make it tolerable. . .

Happy travelers waiting for the bus in Datong

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Inner Mongolia

Our trip to Inner Mongolia was an interesting adventure. I had thought we were going by train, but somehow I missed the memo that we were taking the bus instead. It was okay though. When you take the bus you still get to see the country (though you are much more susceptible to traffic jams).

We pulled out the south gate of the university on Friday at 12:50pm, only twenty minutes behind schedule—not bad for a group of about 45 people from all over the world. I sat in the middle seat of the back row so that I could take advantage of the leg room in the aisle (Travel tip: while this is a good strategy for short trips, on a long trip it is better to sit by the window. You have a better view for taking pictures, and it is easier to sleep).

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Shortcut, my a--!

I had planned to tell you today about our trip to Inner Mongolia, starting at the beginning of the trip. However, the trip home was so interesting that I wanted to tell it first.

On our trip up to Inner Mongolia, we had seen hundreds of trucks stopped on the freeway that leads to Beijing. Coming back to BLCU, our dear leader, hoping to avoid the traffic, instructed the driver to take a different route, one that cut through the mountains and would drop us  right into Beijing. We would be able to avoid the traffic jam on the main road and save ourselves a couple hours road time. If only it were that simple.

Shortly after we left Datong, we pulled off at a small rest stop to use the bathroom. The guide told us it would be six hours before we stopped again, because along this back road there were not going any good places to stop (he was wrong, there were plenty of bushes along the road). This sounded a little ominous, but I didn’t worry too much about it. Driving tractor growing up had seasoned me for long periods of sitting. However, once we got back on the road, I quickly realized that we were in for a long day.

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Yes, it's still great. . .

BLCU arranged a trip for us to go to the Great Wall. The wall is something that everyone who comes to China should see, but having seen it previously, I was not sure I wanted to go back. However, I did want to meet my new classmates, since we hadn’t had the opportunity to talk much yet. I’m glad I ended up going because it turned out to be a fun trip.

On the way up, I sat by Lee. Lee is a 53 year-old Korean man who is taking a month off from his business to come study Chinese. Twenty years ago, he founded a wall covering import business that was doing well until about 2 years ago. His company does business in seven countries. Interestingly enough, the company imports some of its wallpaper from New Hampshire. Apparently America does still export some manufactured goods.

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The Dungeon

Like I mentioned before, I am trying to improve my writing skills and I want to be able to create pictures with words. The room where I stayed the first night in Beijing is a good opportunity for me to do this. I’ll include pictures at the end so that you can compare the image in your head with what I describe. (I'm having trouble so I'm going to put the pictures in later.)

The hostel where I stayed had rooms both above and below ground. Mine was underground. As I descended down the three flights of stairs, I remembered all of the sketchy places I had stayed in the past. This one was surely going to be memorable, whether or not it made my top ten list of weird cheap lodging.

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Airport to Hotel

The arrival at Beijing International Airport was uneventful. There were some slow moving lines at the immigration checkpoint, but the Chinese officials soon changed some of the foreigner lines over to general entry lines, and I quickly made it through. It continues to be a mystery to me why some lines would move so much faster than others.

I would have liked to have been Zachary Auerbach today. There was a hostess at the airport who kept walking around baggage claim with a white piece of paper with his name typed on it. The third time she walked by, I looked a little closer at it. Apparently, she worked for the Ritz-Carlton and was going to take him there. That would have been nice. My Chinese language skills were not good enough to convince her that I was Zachary, so after picking up my bag, I walked over to where the express train from the airport to downtown leaves from. As I walked out of the airport and into the train station, I realized I was not in Portland any more. The blanket of heat nearly knocked me over.

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