Portrait of an LBX

Jour 43 (04/11/09)

Suzhou(苏州)-Shanghaï(上海)

-91km-

Ce matin, on se lève pas trop tôt, car nous n’avons que 91km à faire. Ça devrait être du gâteau! Nous retournons à la bibliothèque pour nous connecter sur la toile, et prenons un petit déjeuner dit ‘à l’occidentale’, avec toast, salade, ainsi que des petits morceaux de tomates et de bananes recouverts d’un filet de mayonnaise!

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For some reason (but do they ever need a reason for the things they do?) China blocks Picasa, which went unnoticed by us when we first signed up for the account and started uploading pictures because we were on our VPN. Then we just couldn’t think of another good, free option, so we kept uploading things to Picasa. This has made it a pain for people in China to see our photos, and since a large portion of our audience is in China, we finally manned up and paid for a Flickr account with unlimited space. So from now on, all our multimedia stuff will be going to that here.

However, it would simply be a huge pain and take more time than we have to move everything from Picasa to Flickr, so unfortunately, our Photos/Videos page is going to look a little sloppy and be a bit tough to navigate. All the photos up to half of Shanghai can be found on our Picasa account here, which will continue to exist. Videos from the trip up to Shanghai will still be located on Andy’s Flickr page here. Videos after Shanghai can be found in the Videos set of our Flickr account, or you can link directly to them here.

We had found that Picasa was compressing the photos too much for our taste anyway, so Flickr is a welcome change for us. If you do view the Flickr photos in a fullscreen slideshow, we’d recommend clicking “Options” and unchecking the box that says “Embiggen small things to fill screen” because we upload only relatively small versions of our pictures to save on bandwidth, and they are guaranteed to look poor in fullscreen.

Apologies for the confusion, but hopefully now everyone will be able to view our photos and videos from the rest of the trip…at least until China’s whimsical web censors decide to block Flickr as well.

Jour 40 (01/11/09)

Nankin(南京)-Liyang(溧阳)

Province du Jiangsu(江苏省)

-114km-

Nous nous levons sans trop nous presser ce matin: 9h. Nous avons tous les trois super bien dormis. Evan et Andy se sont même couchés plut tôt que moi, car la fameuse soirée halloween s’est avérée être un échec: ils n’ont parlé à presque personne.

Nous retournons à la boulangerie d’hier pour prendre un petit déjeuner spécial: sandwich-café. Lorsque nous en sortons, nous croisons un Ricain mormon avec son gosse sur les épaules, qui nous pose des questions sur notre voyage et essaie de nous traîner jusqu’à son église. D’après Evan, les mormons sont super balaises dans les langues étrangères, mais un peu fous et emmerdants dans leurs conversations, surtout lorsqu’ils ne cesse de répéter que la réincarnation de Jésus habite actuellement aux États-Unis. C’est dingue de voir comme des gens intelligents peuvent avoir des absences, des trous noirs, des moments de connerie intense, au point de pouvoir gober ça. D’un côté, ça m’énerve de voir des gens se pourrir la vie à cause de ça; mais de l’autre, je suis vraiment très admiratif envers ces magiciens de l’arnaque qui arrivent à convaincre leur assistance des conneries les plus ridicules. Là encore, Chirac a raison: « Plus c’est gros, et mieux ça passe! ».

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By Andy

We awake at 7 a.m. with a collective groan – two weeks of going to sleep well after midnight and waking anywhere between 10 a.m. has taken its toll. I check the weather on the iPhone: still 40 percent chance of rain until noon and 60 percent after that. A quick glance out the bathroom window, which looks out on a narrow alleyway between two buildings, confirms that it’s not raining, and we pack up and head downstairs. I’m the first one out the door.

“It’s snowing,” I say. I missed it looking out the window. I don’t really know how to feel about it. It seems better than rain.

“November rain,” Alexis jokes. His English is getting better, and it’s making for some unbearable puns.

China sits closer to the equator than the United States, which means insufferably hot summers just about anywhere in the country for a northeasterner like me. If my memory is correct, Zhejiang province and Hangzhou, the nearest large city to us, are on the same longitude as northern Florida and southern Louisiana. The snow is downright strange and makes me worry about what we’re going to face for the rest of the winter.

After a breakfast of subpar vegetable-filled buns, fried dough and soymilk, we set out. The first part of our ride is gray and industrial. The smell of coal in the icy air hits my nostrils. Throughout the ride, my fingers fare better than the day before, but the cold still cuts straight through the vents in my shoes, freezing my feet despite the two pairs of socks I’m wearing. We have to figure out a way to avoid cold feet, or we’re done for the winter, I think. (more…)

By Andy

I have a sense of relief about being back on the road, as if during a drunken slumber in Shanghai the road itself seeped into my blood and my bike somehow became another limb. Already, our two weeks of relative luxury in Shanghai’s French Concession area seem like a distant memory, though today we have ventured only a relatively short 76km from where we awoke and said goodbye to our hosts.

The road feels familiar, like climbing back into bed with a lover after a prolonged period apart. As a result of yesterday’s cleaning and maintenance, my bike glides across the pavement, each push on a pedal propelling me away from the big city and toward the hinterland where we belong.  The memory of our final push into Shanghai, gears and chains grinding, clogged with the dust and grit of the North China Plain, makes me cringe.

I have never biked out of an American city before, but the experience of biking out of a Chinese city is nearly always the same. Tall, somewhat closely packed skyscrapers give way to endless expanses of high-rise apartments that become shabbier and more insalubrious as we move way from “civilization.” Eventually, the apartment complexes are replaced by ramshackle luxury villas, constructed, exactly like their high-rise counterparts, of substandard concrete and steel, but located basically in the middle of nowhere with no convenient public transportation options to speak of. Porsche SUVs sit in identical driveways, looking shiny and new next to identical houses with grimy, peeling paint. Then the middle of nowhere itself arrives. The occasional, half-complete high-rise complex still protrudes from the dark soil, likely the result of a land grab and sale by unscrupulous local officials looking to supplement scarce tax revenue out in the boonies. Farmers, whose houses may once have sat where the apartments are now rising, tend to patches of vegetables still planted in the shadow of the new high-rises. Occasionally, a patch of putrid air from a factory no longer permitted to operate within the city limits hits me full on. I turn my head, suck in a deep breath, and hold it until the factory is gone.

Finally, we are out. (more…)

By Evan

Sorry for the massive delay in posting to all. We’ve been enjoying life / waiting out the rain in Shanghai for well past our anticipated rest time, but now we should be getting back on track. Back to the story, as of the last post, we had left the Nanjing Hopkins Center and the Halloween party for Liyang (溧阳) in the middle of Southern Jiangsu, where we found yet another cafe with wireless to update pictures and posts. At lunch on the day we got to Liyang, several of our friends sent us emails with pictures of the huge snowstorm in Beijing triggered by government weather rockets. That would never affect Southern China, right? When we woke up the following morning, the cold weather had indeed found its way south of the Yangtze, giving us a near-freezing ride through biting wind for the 40+ km to Yixing (宜兴). When we finally arrived in the city a little after noon, we stopped to ask directions in the first business that appealed to our sensibilities: a fireworks stand. The kindly patrons informed us that the clay pots for which the city is famous do not actually come from urban Yixing itself but from a little village 10+ km to the south called Dingshan (丁山). After buying 20 yuan of fireworks off of them (all work and no play makes PLBX a dull blog), we rolled south through the city and toward our destination. Yixing is actually geographically extremely well endowed, ringed by small mountains and with a smattering of little rivers cutting through the city. The architecture was refreshing compared to what we passed through in the North China Plain, especially the remains of older buildings. Of course, everything is relative, and it’s still a herculean stone’s throw from beautiful, but as Andy put it, at least we can imagine how it could evolve into something worthwhile. (more…)

By Andy

Quiet streets near our temporary home in Shanghai's former French Concession area

After three years in Beijing, I feel like I have never seen so much rain in my life.  It has come in drizzles, spurts and torrential downpours. We are certainly no longer in the desert that is northern China, but it seems strange to consider ourselves in the south as well. Maybe that’s just the temperature speaking – if it doesn’t pop above ten degrees Celsius tomorrow, they’re going to declare that winter has begun, which will make for the earliest winter in the past decade for Shanghai. The forecast for tomorrow calls for snow. I’ve broken down and bought a hat, gloves (waterproof) and a warm fleece pullover.

We had originally intended to spend a week here resting and recuperating, but the rain has stretched this to nearly two already, and according to the forecast it shows no sign of letting up until Sunday. So we’ve been holed up in what are at least very comfortable surroundings in a two-bedroom apartment in the former French Concession, of which I have become quite enamored. Instead of the wide (sometimes as wide as ten lanes!) boulevards of Beijing, bulging at the seams with traffic and constantly undulating with an almost unfathomable mass of humanity, we have found ourselves walking unencumbered down narrow, tree-lined alleys. The area is quiet – almost serene in comparison to the horn-blowing, hawking, yelling messes we navigate anytime we pass through anyplace remotely urban elsewhere. Most importantly, the place is livable – we have a number of friends living in the area, and nearly everything is walkable if one has a little time to put into it. In short, it is a place to which I would gladly return were I to spend additional time in China after this trip – which is not necessarily guaranteed.

Relatively empty sidewalks with Chinese characteristics

Shanghai is the financial capital of Mainland China, and like most places with such an epithet, the place is expensive. We’ve been blowing through money like we’re fighting simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – except we can’t borrow from the People’s Bank of China or ask Geithner to just keep the printing presses running. Our original projection for the trip called for us to average about $14 per day, which is starting to look laughable, despite our free lodging provided by an extremely generous friend and former coworker of Evan’s. In addition to a healthy dose of rest, we’ve had our fill of catching up with old friends and enjoying the luxuries that only a metropolis can offer in China: microbrews, coffee and free wifi.

Nevertheless, the idleness is beginning to wear on us to the extent that we are reaching a breaking point. A communication failure early on and a mix of varying assumptions have left us all at varying levels of waterproof-ness. We will try to correct as much of that is possible tomorrow morning with a trip to a sporting goods store, and unless the weather is truly unbearable, we are going to attempt to hack it in the rain. For anyone following our trip for the cycling aspect, we will undoubtedly have some valuable information on the subject of waterproofing soon.

Stay tuned.

Jour 38 (30/10/09)

Lai’an(来安)

Province de l’Anhui(安徽省)

Bien que nous nous soyons couchés tôt la veille, nous aurions bien fait la grasse matinée. Malheureusement, quand l’hôte est chinois, l’invité n’a pas une minute à lui. Dès 8h, Bu et Shi nous attendent déjà dans le hall d’entrée. Bu, déjà chaud comme la braise, ne peut pas s’empêcher de nous dire, en présentant une des réceptionnistes: “你们看看我们你的中国美女！来，让她跟你们合个影吧！” (« Regardez nos belles Chinoises! Venez, je vais vous prendre ensemble en photo! »).

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Jour 36 (28/10/09)

Bengbu(蚌埠)-Huangnipu(黄泥铺)

Province de l’Anhui(安徽省)

-48km-

Aujourd’hui, étant donné l’état de santé d’Andy, nous nous levons assez tard. Nous verrons après le petit déjeuner s’il est prêt à prendre la route.

Sur la plaque d'immatriculation: "Interdiction aux Japonais et aux chiens d'approcher"

Alors que nous marchons dans la rue à la recherche d’un resto, nous apercevons stationnée sur le trottoir une moto à la plaque d’immatriculation assez particulière: 日本人和狗不得靠近 (‘Interdiction aux Japonais et aux chiens de s’approcher’), avec une traduction maladroite en japonais et en anglais. Je fais remarquer à Evan et Andy que ce genre d’écriteau ou de remarque est interdit et serait sanctionné en France. Ils me disent qu’aux Etats-Unis, n’importe qui a le droit de dire et d’écrire ce qu’il veut, même les pires remarques racistes, xénophobes ou homophobes. D’abord un peu surpris, je me dis que c’est en effet assez proche de l’idée que je me fais de la liberté. Après tout, être pour la liberté, c’est d’abord accepter ce qu’on désapprouve (même si c’est très très con!), et pas seulement ce qu’on approuve. Il est interdit d’interdire! (oui, c’est un journal, alors il m’arrive de dire ce que je pense parfois…)

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