And the 'Cleanest Subway Stations in the World' Award Goes to...Shanghai

Andy Hill

Gandhi once said that you can evaluate the morals of a society by the way it treats its animals, and in a similar vein, I believe that one of the most genuine ways you can gauge the charm of a city is in the care with which its public spaces are attended. It is one thing to have sparkling clean shopping districts, promenades, malls, and arcades; in the places where big money is made and business is done, you would expect there to be some modicum of concern for aesthetics and environment. 

All too often, city councils and governments pay all of their attention to these areas, where the money is and little concern is paid to the places which, although the public shares them all day every day, are not featured in travel magazines or guidebooks.

Nearly every city in the world has this dichotomy between public and private spaces, and although the public spaces are the ones that are the most visited by the most people, tourists included, they are often the most grungy and foul-smelling. 

Although people do not travel to New York City to see the subway stations (wouldn't that be interesting?), nearly all people who travel there will see this seamy underbelly of the Big Apple at some point during their sojourn there. And they would most likely be predictably affronted by the typical ensemble of sites, sounds and smells that metro stations the world over are known for: urine, perhaps vomit, graffiti, and the slumbering inebriate, not to mention people being attacked or at least shouted at and cat-called.

In short, subway stations are usually pretty gross.

However, if you ever travel to Shanghai—not exactly a small town, nor one known historically for its tidiness—I would bet that you would be very pleasantly, perhaps even alarmingly surprised by how remarkably clean the subway stations are.

Each tile is swept and mopped by an army of custodial experts; turnstiles are new; staff are chipper and helpful (okay, not always, but usually); everything is clearly marked; the bathrooms are bizarrely inhabitable. 

In fact, I thought to myself while I was staying there for several weeks, the subway stations in Shanghai just may be the cleanest in the world (that I have seen, at least). 

This is an impressive feat, not only because of the sheer amount of foot traffic these places receive on a daily basis, but for the obvious amount of care that the Chinese government puts into its public places. I was taken aback by the amount of tender loving care that these often repulsive and forgotten subterranean areas obviously received from the good stewards of China's public transit system. 

So hats off, Shanghai: you have been awarded the 'World's Cleanest Subway Stations' medal. 

Keep up the good work. 

Astrological Calligraphy

Andy Hill

When I was teaching in Gaoqing county, two other foreign teachers and I were taken to dinner by several people from the education bureau. It was in a brand new hotel and restaurant, very swanky. We ate sea cucumber, duck tongue, and turtle, among many other delicacies, all washed down with liberal amounts of baiju - China's own favoured white liquor - and cigarettes. Every dinner I've ever been to in China had a week's worth of baiju and smokes packed into it.

After we were stuffed, tipsy and languid, word came around that in a large suite down the hall there was a party of sorts happening, so we wandered over and peeked in. As it turned out, that evening a famous artist from Gaoqing was in town and was a guest of honor at this party. He was a tall, thin bohemian guy with long hair and beads around his neck and wrists. He waved us in and everyone seemed very happy to have three foreigners on hand to witness all of the festivities.

He was famous chiefly as a calligrapher, we gathered. The man had many large sheets of paper, brushes, and ink wells, and he was making them for everyone. He would write a little message and then sign it. I had never really watched someone write calligraphy before. I was transfixed by the graceful, lilting movements of his arm as he applied the black ink to the white paper. 

When it came to be my turn, a woman there who spoke English translated a little for him. A calligrapher asked me when I was born. He said, "Ah! A dog! In the zodiac you are a dog, and so am I." He seemed very pleased with that, as was I. My little poster/greeting said, "From a dog to a dog - don't worry so much!" 

It was out of the blue because I had been dealing with some serious, ulcerating anxiety during that period of my life, especially that week, and it was exactly what I needed to hear. I thanked him profusely and we took a couple of pictures together. He continued making the pieces for each person. We had some more baiju and smoked some more cigarettes, and soon it was time to go.

When I got back home, I hung the piece on my wall, and it has remained with me since then. Whenever I start to freak out about something, I stop and stare at that poster, remember his beaming smile and the movement of his arms when he made it, and I feel my heartbeat return to normal. 

The Mongolian Hot Pot Experience

Andy Hill

For several days, I had been braving the freezing hutongs, reading every historical plaque in Beijing and living on practically nothing with this French guy I’d met at my guesthouse. We were both, to say the least, on a budget and our diet of instant noodles was beginning to sour our attitude and weaken our ability to see and learn as much as we possibly could. 

We were walking around the area just south of Tiananmen Square and went past a cheerily neon-lit Mongolian hot pot restaurant. On the front, there were pixelated images of a cowboy riding carefree across (presumably) the steppe, and the inside looked particularly cheery when compared to the nearly empty, dark streets around us. 

We assured ourselves that we had earned it as we jerked the door open and stepped inside, were ushered to a table and seated with I Ching-sized menus. There was so much to choose from! 

We ordered freshwater shrimp and a couple of vegetable dishes (the other guy was a pescatarian) and, since we’d been so frugal, a couple of large Nanjings. 

A couple of tables over there was something of a party happening, and a long-haired, red-faced guy had a traditional stringed instrument he was trying to delicately pluck and follow with a falsetto melody. The others at the bottle-covered table knew not a word, but nodded and smiled the way drunken people do while listening to someone play a song they don’t know.

Soon, he noticed us and when our food arrived, rose to shepherd us through the complexities of the Mongolian hot pot experience. We ordered some more Nanjings, and he brought over some of the hooch that he and his friends were drinking, and we began throwing shrimp and green onions and chilies into the broth. 

Long Hair, it turned out, was the owner of the restaurant, and knew how to make his guests feel welcomed. He kept ordering stuff from the kitchen, and we kept throwing it into the broth (after explaining several times we were too broke for the additional plates, to which he smiled, laughed, and poured more liquor for us). 

After we had largely sated our appetites, and were just sort of picking sentimentally at what was left, nursing the Nanjings, we were serenaded by the owner on his little instrument. He came over to the table and actually put his foot up on one of the chairs and sang with his eyes closed and his head tilted back. It was nice, even though we were the only ones there at that point in time, except for the kitchen staff who obviously wanted to go home, and Long Hair’s daughter who watched embarrassedly from the counter. 

We paid up for what we ordered (he gave us much more free food than that), killed the rest of the Nanjings, and shook hands with the guy about one hundred times before stepping back onto the sidewalk as he assured us that the cowboy in the pixelated picture on the front of the restaurant was definitely and absolutely him.

Grokking the Yungang Grottoes

Andy Hill

I had spent a week in Beijing, and had soaked up the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, all the palaces and hutongs and markets and museums that I could really handle in that amount of time. Wanting to see more of the wider region, I began casting about for interesting religio-cultural relics to see in the surrounding areas. My searchlight fell upon the Yungang Grottoes, a series of caves containing tens of thousands of carvings of the Buddha and other reliefs depicting symbols and scenes from that wise tradition. 

The Yungang Grottoes are about a dozen kilometers from the city of Datong, in Shanxi Province, so I took a train the following evening from Beijing to that former capital of coal mining. I stumbled out of the station in the early morning smog into the most cripplingly cold air that I had ever experienced. Even central Vermont at Christmas seemed Caribbean by comparison. My bag was very light walking towards the taxis as I had already put on all of the clothes I'd taken with me. 

Trying to figure out the bus schedule made my skull ache, so I approached one of the taxi drivers gathered about the front of the train station, and soon we were off to the grottoes. 

Carved by a series of Buddhist monks during the 5th century, the Yungang Grottoes contain over 50,000 statues, reliefs, and depictions of the Buddha. Most are very small, even bottle cap-sized, but there are also some massive, several meters-tall statues smiling serenely down on the throngs of tourists who come to see this important relic of China's Buddhist past.

Shuffling from one cave to the next, I was struck by the devotion that these artist-monks had shown in abundance and quality of craftsmanship within. The cold air in my nostrils brought out shades of the austerity and asceticism that must have been the rule of their daily lives. 

The carvings sometimes look like near-natural occurrences, covering the face of the stone niches and enclaves as if caves themselves had been tectonically formed with the four noble truths in mind. 

If it had been warmer, I would have stayed longer than an hour perusing the caves, but I was starting to have trouble moving parts of my face, and began to become anxious about the fact that I had yet to buy a ticket out of Datong, and that I may be stuck there for the night. 

Regardless of these circumstances, I came away from the Yungang Grottoes with even more respect and admiration for Chinese history and culture than I'd already accumulated over the week. 

My taxi man was waiting faithfully for me, and grinned and barked in Mandarin as he saw me approaching. Once back at the train station, I was blessed with luck to have been able to return to Beijing that evening, and through the night I swayed and rocked gracefully, millions of tiny Buddhas smiling down upon me. 

My 27th Birthday at the Great Wall

Andy Hill

I had never really treated myself for my birthday. In fact, throughout my teens and twenties I was usually working on this annual time of reflection and celebration of myself, but towards the end of my 27th year in this incarnation, I decided to do something memorable for once.

I had been teaching English in South Korea for a year and had saved up some vacation time, so I bought a ticket to Beijing and planned to hike a section of the Great Wall for the big day.

On that special morning, I awoke freezing and gleeful in a dorm at the Sitting on the City Walls guesthouse. It was not yet light out, and I crept into the lobby to wait for my minivan out to the biggest manmade creation on the planet.

After about three hours, I and several other travellers arrived at Jinshanling and our guide told us he would wait at the end, at a section called Simatai. It was to be a roughly three-hour trek, depending on our durability. 

As soon as we were out of the van and on our way to begin walking along the wall, a panoply of 'guides' came rushing along to 'help' us along our way, carry our bags, explain various engineering and historical feats of the brave souls who built the Wall, and collect some money at the end. 

One middle-aged woman with the dexterity of an Ibex attached herself to me and proved to be cheerful company. 

The sections of the walkable parts of the Wall are perforated by guard stations that in their time were the brains of this ancient telemetric network, using smoke to signal over thousands of kilometres about news happening at one place or another. 

The Great Wall stretches out before you like an endless cobbled snake until you cannot see it anymore, climbing ever further over crags and peaks into the misty horizon, never in a straight line. 

Some areas are nearly impassable and quite scary, and if it weren't for the chipper encouragement of my near-elderly guide, I might have turned back for a Tsingtao in the parking lot. However aerobically exhausting the trek was, I felt an immensity of spirit, leaping from stone to stone and viewing the Wall from each new vestige, coupled with healthy humility and tininess, seeing with my own eyes how vast and long the human experience has been and how hard we have worked to shape the planet in our image. It was both daunting and encouraging. 

I had a beer with one of the army guys at one of the last stations before Simatai, toasting myself, and him, as well as all the countless people who toiled on that massive structure.

At Simatai we sat down to a massive and delectable feast, tired yet enamoured of what we had seen that morning. 

I was proud of myself for having finally done something on my birthday worth telling about. Now, nearly five years later, the Great Wall of China remains the most impressive manmade thing that I have ever seen in my life.

A Cathedral of Carnal Creativity: Symon’s Art Zoo, Bali

Andy Hill

I was literally driving around Bali, on the main road which makes a ring around the island. Near the northern tip, around Campuan, I practically wrecked my motorbike while instinctively pulling over when I saw Symon’s Art Zoo. 

Brightly colored paintings, statues, things dangling from here and there followed my every step as I ascended into the interior open area of this cacophonous carnival of creation. A man, who I would learn was the Symon who had erected this cathedral to his and others’ art, was sitting on a hammock under a veranda inside. I asked him about the place.

“Well, you’ve gotta have a palace. It’s good at the end of the night to be able to say ‘let’s go back to the palace.’ So I built a palace.” 

He gave some instructions to a couple Balinese guys who were moving a two-meter-tall statue of a violet- and crimson-colored penis. They scurried under its weight towards where it was to go.

“You see that up there?” He pointed to the second level whose floor, directly above us, was made from rustic wooden planks. “That’s the boardwalk. You know why I did that? Because now I get to hang out all day under the boardwalk. You know, like the song. Isn’t that nice?”

It is odd to say that there are pieces of art everywhere (although there are) because the whole place really is one big piece of art. A several-meter-long blue Buddha statue reclines on the front lawn next to a pool which, despite its quirks, could be taken from a house in the Hollywood hills. Paintings adorn most every square foot of wall space, or wherever they can be hung. There are statues at every turn, many with erect, but sometimes just tumescent, phalli of all different colors, shapes and sizes, but all with the same recognizable stamp of artistic authorship. 

“I bought this place years ago from the rajah. I wanted to create a haven of art here in Bali, something like the East Village in New York, where I’m from. Have a look around.”

There are many fascinating places to see on the Island of the Gods, countless temples and sacred springs and galleries. Symon’s Art Zoo stands alongside any of them as the most interesting to visit. 

Just having a stroll through the grounds is present enough for the trouble of getting there; but bring some cash and support this remarkable project by buying a painting or statue. Bali will be the better if the Art Zoo is there for years to come. 

A Motorbike Trip Across Java

Andy Hill

I have always loved driving. When I lived in America, I got around to driving across that massive country a half dozen times in total. I am infinitely more interested in the land route than flying and would choose a bus, train, or car over a plane any day. 

So recently I found myself with some time as well as a mission in mind, the logical conclusion of which was Java. From Kuta Lombok I drove to the ferry at Lembar, embarked upon the ferry with my motorbike, and spent several days in Bali before making my way to the western tip of that island to get on the ferry which takes one to Java. 

In the early evening I arrived in the town of Banyuwangi, at Java’s eastern tip, with a powerful thirst for kilometers. 

Although I had enough energy to drive for many hours, it was soon very dark and I was tired of shifting my weight from one bony ass cheek to the other with each passing minute. I made a stop on the side of the road just after Jember for some fried snacks- tempeh, tofu, bananas- as well as a cup of white coffee. After some polite conversation with an older woman, I shared that I was looking for a place to sleep for the night. 

More simply than finding cards at a casino, the kindly old woman called her younger sister over, who conducted me to a house less than a kilometer away, showed me a simple room in the back with a light and bed on the floor, and asked for nothing in spite of my attempts to recompense her for her generosity.

The next morning I woke with the call to prayer at roughly 4:30, had a coffee with the patriarch of the household, and was on my way again. 

Aesthetically, the drive is gorgeous; rice paddies stretch out indefinitely on either side; wild and lush vegetation abut even the most derelict of town roads; and perpetual mountains can be seen on the horizon and through the clouds. That having been said, without some kind of environmental regulation on the emissions of large trucks, the air may be completely un-breathable in not so long a time. 

After that second day of driving, which took me from Jember to Ponorogo in about 12 hours, my face, tee shirt, hands and pants were blackened by exhaust. You have to have an exfoliator for that kind of muck. 

Driving in this country is fluid and courteous- there is no spastic starting-and-stopping; you simply go when and where you can and stop when you have to. The major highway which runs through Java is only a two-laner most of the time, and it runs through every little town along the way, so there is always a place to stop and get a coffee or a bowl of soto ayam.

In Ponorogo I stayed at a place that was 60,000 rupiah per night, or roughly $5 US, and got a fitful if respiratorily-frustrated sleep. I was up at the crack of dawn again the next morning, with Yogyakarta in my sights. I made it to Yogya in mid-afternoon and was able to cruise right into the Java Tea House to meet a friend with whom I would be staying. 

In the next couple of days I will be getting back on the bike to head west towards Cianjur to check out Gunnug Padang, perhaps the oldest megalithic site in the world. I will be armed with plenty of respiratory masks and a camera.