Day 3

It's day 3, and we're all getting very accustomed to Chinese culture, perhaps too much. Alex Wand, Mississippi bluesman, tried eating a croissant with chopsticks.

After breakfast, we finally had a chance to wander around Shanghai, something we had planned to do yesterday, but had gotten tied up with getting arrested.

There are plenty of exciting stores around Shanghai, my favorite of which was Love Jam Wedding Story. Can you guess what they sold there? I can't either.

People in Shanghai manage to schlep all kinds of things around on their motor scooters and bicycles. It's not too uncommon to see an entire family riding around on one together, or to see a fellow loaded up with what looked like 16 water-cooler bottles filled with water. Here are some kids watching some cages full of little birds that somebody left on the back of his bicycle:

A man and his Fu Dog:

Reaching out for the ever mouth-watering Bakkwa

Viagra going for about $12 bucks a pill:

Ariel holding a giant lollipop:

One of my favorite things we did in Shanghai was we got to see the neighborhood Ping grew up in. She says that all there was was just one room shared by three generations, and Ping got to sleep under the table. They shared a kitchen in another building with some other families, and everything they cooked had to be carried very carefully up the stairs to where they lived. This is what the neighborhood looks like:

In this picture, Ping and Ariel standing right next to the building she used to live in. As we were leaving, a woman and her mother stepped out of a nearby building. She'd grown up with Ping and was still living in the same neighborhood.

After wandering around the city, we didn't have much time before noon, our checkout deadline. Fortunately, we got in around five of, and sprinted up to our rooms... to find that they'd deactivated our key cards early.

After some bickering, during which they tried to charge us extra for getting back to our rooms, because it was NOW after checkout time, we got our stuff and headed off to the train station for our 20-hour train ride to Chengdu.

I'll tell you about that in the next post. I might as well just put the whole train ride in one post. Plus I'm getting super sleepy. Sorry this blog is still a couple days behind. We'll catch up soon!

Love,

-Oliver St. John

Blogger Extraordinaire/Adventurer

Kinship of Rivers

Shanghaied

So then we checked out of our DEET scented hotel and took an unregistered taxi to Shanghai, which was where we started to get into trouble.
Shanghai is a big bustling city where everyone is sure you're trying to rip them off, so just to be on the safe side, they pull a preemptive one over on you.
The initial plan was to split two rooms between the five of us and squeeze an extra cot into one. Well, turns out an extra cot costs the equivalent of $50, half the price of a $100 a night room... which fits two people. Also the guy on the cot doesn't get free breakfast. Which costs $30. This is THE Jinjiang hotel, you know.
So, as this is getting sorted out, Ping, Alex the videography wiz, and myself go over to the Bank of China to exchange some of these fat stacks of cash we've brought over from the U.S. I hand my moneys over to the teller who proceeds to give me a very hairy eyeball before giving a harrier eyeball to my bills. I wish I could have had a picture of the way this guy was looking at the bills, because it certainly wasn't the way most people look at bills to see if they're fake or not. You'd expect that he might, you know, check for watermarks, hold the bill up to the light to see if the little strip thing was in them. Nope. None of that. The way they check bills at the Bank of China is they put them down on the table and get their face right up next to the bill and give it a mean long look. Then they hand it over to another guy who does the exact same thing. Then there's a third guy, too. Once they decide the first bill is OK, they take a look at the second bill, but they compare it to the first bill, giving each bill the hairy eyeball all over again, before passing it off to the next guy, etc. etch. Then the third bill, they'll wanna compare to both of the first two.
This took two hours.
At the end of the two hours, after all that work, they had to have something to show for it all, and what they decide that was going to be was that three of the hundred dollar bills I'd handed them were fake. I was like, what? I got those from the bank! (Well, actually Ping got them from the bank. We'd divided up the cash to exchange so it would take less time comparing.) They can't be fake.
And they were like, see, these bills look a little darker than the other ones. No mention of watermarks, or stringy things. Just that they thought they looked a little darker.
I said, well then give them back to me.
And they said, no it would be illegal for us to give them back to you.
And I said, what? You could just be claiming all my cash was fake and take it all away from me, that's not fair!
Finally, they put the bills in an envelope and gave me a form to fill out, which would require them to send the bills to someone who knew what they were doing and they'd decide if they were really fake after all. We're still waiting on that.
And since I put up so much of a fuss, they called the police and had me arrested!
Well, they finally got me down to the police station, which took a while because I wanted Ping to come with me to speak Chinese, and Ping had to go back and deal with the hotel situation first, so everyone else who had been waiting in the lobby for two hours could go up to their rooms.
And when they got me to the police station, the police chief asked us what happened, and we all gave it to him straight, and he gave us the verdict, which was that the bank manager was wasting everybody's time, and we should all go home.
Then we went home, and had a delightful dinner with Ping's family. I was so tired after all the boating and all the getting arrested, I kept falling asleep at the table in the middle of doing things like chewing, and talking, so I left early.

The next day

Day 2, we woke up bright and early because we were all super jet-lagged, and didn't have much choice waking up early or not. The Chinese have different concepts of privacy than we do in the US. For example, the bathroom was sectioned off from the rest of our hotel room... by glass. Alex and I adapted it so we could modestly take shits:

Right off the bat we started doing all the things the nurse practitioner told us not to do, buying food and drinks from the street vendor and going out without sunscreen. Armed with a big bag of what translated out as "grease sticks" and "grease balls," we boarded a fishing boat we chartered for a couple hundred yuan so we could see the very end of the Yangtze river. Here's the boat in the harbor!

And here's everyone on the boat:

There's loads of industrial stuff going on around Pudong, even right where all the fishing is going on. Most of the industrial stuff seemed to be based around big piles of gravel.

After a long boat ride, during which I got kinda sunburnt, we boarded the island which marks the end of the Yangtze as it flows into the East China Sea. On the way up, I slipped on the dock and scratched up my leg on a bunch of barnacles, and it started bleeding like no tomorrow. Here's where we went:

Well, we got off and started hanging our river flags, and right off the bat some guy came storming down the docks telling us we weren't allowed to be here and we had to get off the island. That was going to be a problem because the fishing boat wasn't going to come back for another hour and had just gotten out of shouting distance. But Ping managed to sweet talk our way out of leaving as soon as possible, and we hung out and made some friends with the folks who didn't want us on the island. They let us use their bathroom, and they even ended up cleaning out and sterilizing my barnacle-scratches. One of the guys spent about five minutes talking very enthusiastically about something that Ariel deduced to be fish. Mississippi Bluesman Alex Wand managed to get out "I don't speak any English," in broken Chinese, at which the fish enthusiast just laughed, and went on for another five minutes. The flags that we did manage to get up were beautiful though:

Here's what they looked like fluttering in the wind:

Well, the next post will be more about day 2. Shanghai deserves it's own post.

Lots of stuff!

Dear River Friends,

Let's bring you up to snuff.

First, we arrived safe and sound in Shanghai, so if you haven't heard from any of us, don't worry!
Here we are at the airport:

After a good long wait for the rickety unairconditioned shuttle, we arrived at our hotel in Pudong, the last town on the Yangtze before it empties out into the East China Sea. We had dinner in a tiny little fish restaurant where we picked out the fish we wanted to eat from styrofoam coolers, and then they cooked them up. In restaurants like these, there aren't any waiters. If you want to order something, or if your order's taking too long, you walk right up to the kitchen and holler right inside at the cooks. Ping did the hollering. 

Here's the outside of the restaurant, which was also a fish market:

Here, wait, lemme introduce you to everyone, so you can tell who everyone all is in all these pictures:

Right here's Mississippi Bluesman Alex Wand, playin the guitar. He plays a custom-made National guitar designed by composer Lou Harrison, with frets designed for a just intonation tuning system, based on the harmonic series. There are only 5 that exist!:

Here we've got wiz-kid videographer Alex Howard. He's only just graduated high school, but shoots video with the best of 'em. He's got right here Canon T3I with a Tokina 16-mm superwide lens on a Glidecam HD 100 stabilizer. There are more than five of them that exist:

Ariel Lerner, holding a large lollipop:

Wang Ping, internationally renowned author, river queen, beloved professor, Chinese medicine doctor, champion oarswoman, skilled musician, award-winning figure skater, professional flamenco dancer, talented photographer, master chef, deadly swordswoman, academic freedom fighter, adventurer:

And here's me! Oliver St. John, Kinship of Rivers blogger extraordinaire, your buddy on the this adventure:

Anyway, that's just the first day. I'll tell you about the next day in the next post!

Love,

-Oliver

Dear river friends,

On Monday around 11:30, Wang Ping, Alex Howard, Ariel Lerner, and myself, Oliver St. John, are taking off for China!

We're all scrambling to make sure we've gotten everything together -- Ping managed to fit all the river flags into a big heavy suitcase, and I've started blogging! (Just about a minute or so ago.)

Want to know how our River Journey's going? Just follow this blog! I'll be posting regularly with stories and pictures and poems as we travel through China.

Scott Gannis made us this interactive map. Here's where we're we'll be going:

 
View Yangtze River Trip in a larger map

 Stay tuned for more updates! I've got my adventure hat on. Tell your friends about this blog!

Love,

-Ollie

Kinship of Rivers Brightens a Dull Day at School

The entrance to St. Paul Academy and Summit School, a handsome brick building in St. Paul, features a two story open foyer with top-to-bottom windows that face Davern Street to the east. That is where we hung several Kinship of Rivers banners during our recent visit. The sky outside the windows was overcast but the flags in multi colors, each with a unique design, brightened the space and made people stop and smile.

Ping had been invited to speak and sign books as a featured author for the annual school book fest (Wednesday, November 9). She spent the morning autographing books and chatting with students, parents and staff about her work. She was interviewed for the school newspaper, The Rubicon.

After a delicious lunch in the cafeteria, Ping and I met with Kathryn Campbell’s poetry class to conduct a Kinship of Rivers workshop. It included a talk by Ping about her life as an author. She told how she received very little formal schooling during the Cultural Revolution and how she taught herself many things by breaking the rules and reading forbidden books. She has continued to teach herself new things by learning the rules first—like with poetry—and then breaking them.

Nothing could have inspired a class of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds more than an invitation to break the rules. We brought out the colored cloth and the paints for the students and they worked steadily until we had a new banner’s worth of beautiful river flags filled with words and images dedicated to the rivers.

River Meets Soap

There’s poetry to be found in the intriguing name--Soap Factory. Kinship of Rivers was recently invited to conduct an event at the Soap Factory art gallery in Minneapolis. The gallery is located in a large historic building, formerly the National Purity Soap Company warehouse. Kinship of Rivers was a featured art event on Saturday, October 8 during an open house. Soap Factory wants to attract attention during its bid for needed funds to continue restoration efforts. All the local historic sites hoping to receive money from the American Express Partners in Preservation Program held open houses this past weekend. The goal is to get folks to vote for their favorite historic site on Facebook.

The Soap Factory, located in the St. Anthony Main neighborhood was perfect for KOR because of its proximity to the Mississippi and because this art space devoted to the confluence of new ideas and new art conjures the spirit of the river. The galleries currently feature the work of artists Guo Gai, Meng Tang and Slinko. 

Kinship of Rivers took over the building’s boardwalk entryway and tall airy foyer off of Second Street. Several hundred colorful river flags hung outside the building flapped in the breeze and welcomed visitors as they approached the entrance. People also encountered Kinship of Rivers musician Carleton Macy playing the flute along with music generated by his sculptural tree of wind chimes.

Inside, more flags festooned the high ceiling of the foyer and several tables were set up for activities. Ruthann had collected leaves and grasses from the area near the river to use in printing on the fabric flags. Lisa assisted as gallery visitors of all ages used paints, crayons and a wonderful new wooden fish stamp to compose river-inspired images and messages on cloth. The room was filled with the delicious aroma of dumplings being boiled as visitors helped prepare them with Ping and Samuel.

The brick and lumber Soap Factory space feels like an old piece of sturdy clothing shining with potential—it is a raw and useful space for art but could do with some mending and refreshing. If you agree, please visit the Facebook page and vote for the Soap Factory through October 12.