Chengde, the city best known for its summer resort palace for the past Qing dynasty emperors. The trip from Chengde to Beijing in the Qing dynasty would take roughly a month, with multiple stops in smaller palaces and hunting exhibitions in between. Today it takes 3 hrs on the Jingcheng expressway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengde

the Jingcheng expressway passes through 2 sections of the greatwall. Simatai Greatwall can be seen in the distance built on impossibly high cliffs.

the 12 totems of the Chinese zodiac

since summers in china is hot and Chengde is located near a body of water, the emperors throne room is completely made out of cedar to prevent bugs like moths and mosquitoes from nearing the emperor.

While we were in Chengde, we met with my grand aunt, who is the sister of my moms father. She is 82 this year, and still takes 3-4 mile walks in the morning in the palace (free for local seniors). Here she made food for us, probably the best home cooked meal i’ve had ever in my life haha

So after a farewell and a promise to come back next year to my grand parents, we left for Changchun airport. Boarded a plane to Beijing and off we went. I also had the worst in air meal ever in this flight. I should start documenting my in air meals. Upon arrival, we were swiftly picked up by my uncle and commenced to battle endless beijing traffic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing

for these who’ve never had a chance to visit, beijing is a old city, with a old city layout. with the forbidden city right in the center, north/south and east/west corridors, and ring shaped roads that circle the city. When i was growing up, the city had 3 major rings outside of its main portion, now they’re up to 6.

today im heading out to Chengde, not to be confused with Chengdu. Chengde is located north east of beijing, its a summer retreat for past emperors and royal families. More on Beijing in coming days.

today i didn’t do too much exciting stuff, besides try out more exotic Asian cuisine, and going to one of the largest man made forests in Asia, but i will save that for a later post. The following is a market downstairs from my grand parents apartment, this pretty standard in this type of city. This used to be on the street, but due to increases in traffic from privately owned cars in recent years, most of the markets have moved inside.

So the last couple of days I’ve been staying at the city of Changchun, mostly known nowadays for being a hub of the Chinese Auto Industry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changchun

if you’ve seen The Last Emperor by Bernardo Bertolucci, this room may look familiar to you as the palace of the last Chinese emperor when he was reinstated to the puppet state of Manchukuo. This is the actual palace, located in Changchun, which was then known as Hsinjing (new capital) during WW2.

The palace was built for the emperor Puyi after he was reinstated as the emperor, but was in way also his prison.

One of cars that the emperor rode in.

We also took a small tour around my dad’s company. Here are people making cellphone parts in a clean room. A lot of the kids are the ones that didn’t make it into college, and instead went through special vocational training. To be able to operate some of the special machinery or be on the assembly line, you need extremely precise hands that wont shake, and can line up parts under a microscope to extremely close tolerances.

Changchun is a big bustling city with a population of more than 8 million. Most of the population rely on the predominant car industry to drive the economy. There are several coal burning power plants around the area, covered everything in a permanent layer of ash. As the city economy ever expands the construction around the city is constantly changing. What was once an industrial zone has now been converted to a commercial zone, and factorys are torn down and moved to the outskirts of the city while new business towers are being built. In a few years, these business buildings will probably be torn down again to make room for housing.

Although not that common anymore, in some of the older/poorer parts of the city, one can still find restaurants that serve dog.

The markets in Changchun are huge. Think of a swap meet style markets that fills up 7-8 Costco sized buildings, packed with people, with the vendors constantly yelling at you to check out their goods.

that’s all today, more coming later

So today we celebrated my grandpas 80th birthday. For these not in the know for chinese culture, it is a pretty damn big deal. Not that its not a big deal if you live to be 80 somewhere else in the world. SOOOOOOO in accordance to the day,  we started drinking at 4pm. Craaaaaaaazy chinese haha

On another note, the food was crazy, if you thought sea cucumbers were wierd, that was the first course, the rest well is way more questionable.

Cui familia

So on Thursday night, i packed up some stuff, and got dropped off at LAX, caught a plane and landed at San Jose around midnight. The next day, my parents and i drove to SFO, hopped onto CA986 to beijing and off we went.

our route took us north of san francisco, over seattle, near the coast line of seattle, and over the bearing sea, and down by parts of russia and into china. The flight lasted for 12 hrs before it reached beijing, en-route i was entertained by a poorly light projector screen that was 5-6 rows on front that played a mix of random chinese and american movies. Shaolin, The Guardians of Ga’Houl, You Again, and Bullets are Flying.

Finally we neared beijing, and eventually landed. The Beijing Airport is HUGE! unfortunately i did not take a photo since we were pressed for time to catch a connecting flight to Chang Chun. I get four more chances during this trip. Finally arrived at Chang Chun after about 16 hrs of traveling, and got picked up by my aunt. To my dads request we stopped by a local restuarant for some porridge, and went to our hotel. The hotel is a pretty grand looking building with a golden front, and pretty lavish lobby for a northern city like Chang Chun. The rooms are comfy except they only have full size beds, which is wierd. Closer inspection reveals dirty stained carpet, and someone has been smoking in this room before.

Soooooo tired, more pix tommorow