My Travel Adventures

V sobotu šla naše rodina na představení Čerta a Káči v Národním divadle. Šlo, jak se zdá, o jakési pravé sváteční představení, neb bylo celé divadlo téměř vyprodáno a mne tudíž hřál pocit, že se tomuto dílu dostává zaslouženého uznání. Z lóže jsem viděl krásně do orchestřiště a mohl jsem se proto soustředit na hudební stavbu díla, v níž jsem si nikdy předtím nevšiml tolik souvislostí s další tvorbou skladatele, než právě v tento den. Třeba pekelné tance z druhého dění by Dvořák býval mohl bez mrknutí oka zařadit mezi Slovanské tance. I půvabná scéna a veselé kostýmy podle návrhů Adolfa Borna ve mne zanechaly dojem, že tohoto představení si může zcela vážit a může jej zcela chápat pouze Čech či člověk, jenž se důkladně až pře-důkladně věnuje studiu české kultury. Na nezasvěceného cizince musela veškerá vizuální výprava působit jako nadpozemský výjev.

Having overstayed my visa in Taiwan, albeit for a paltry total of three days, I am not allowed to return to Taiwan on the terms of Taiwan’s waived visa arrangement with the Schengen. This was not an option for me in the autumn semester, as one’s stay on the basis of this arrangement cannot exceed ninety days, but I thought that I would be able to return without a visa for the winter and spring quarters. Being disallowed from taking advantage of this option threw a bit of a wrench in my plans, as it meant I would have to arrange for a visa not only during Christmas, but also during Easter, which of course is a difficult feat.

On our last day in Vienna, the gang finally acknowledged our disparate interests and split up. My mum and Niky went shopping while my dad, Naty, and I went to see the Gustav Klimt artworks at the Belvedere Palace. We found a lot more than Klimt, however, the major discovery of the day being that perhaps a quarter of the exposition on the second floor is the work of Czech painters. After a terrifying visit to Karlskirche, which included an elevator ride to the ceiling of the dome, we reunited at the  Schönbrunn Palace, once the summer residence of the Habsburg family.  It happens to house the oldest zoo in the world.  Our visit to Vienna ended in utter exhaustion at the palace  café , where we outlasted all other visitors and only left at nightfall.

We started our second day in Vienna with a visit to the Wiener Stadtpark, where we saw the statues of some of Vienna’s greats: Johann Strauss, Franz Schubert, Franz Lehár, and a group of penguins (I am not sure of the history behind this monument). We continued to Karlskirche, after which we ditched my sisters at a café and visited the Secession Building. To our disappointment, the only Klimt there was one single permanent installation and the remaining art was mostly contemporary.

The Wednesday after I arrived in Prague, my family set off again, this time on a somewhat shorter haul. We headed over to the Main Railway Station, where – being the bourgeois airline travellers we are – we got confused by very counterintuitive signage and almost missed our train. Just a minute before its departure, we sprinted on board of the locomotive heading for Vienna.

It is the last week of the semester and I can proudly say, with two hundred TWD in my wallet, that I have survived my credit card expiring. In other news, we were asked this week to submit feedback on the ICLP program. As I have voiced many of my complaints before to all of my teachers, I have no illusions that my responses can truly be considered anonymous, so I feel no compunction in sharing them here (yes, I realise the contradiction of nevertheless Americanising my spelling, which I do as a general rule to keep my responses as anonymous as possible):

Well, exams are finally over now. The great bogeyman with which our teachers scared us for more than two weeks was dispelled in the matter of two hours and fifteen minutes. Yet we have another week to spend at school before returning home for Christmas break. School is dead and we have killed it. What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?

When I went to exchange my last batch of physical foreign money about two months ago, I ran into a bit of a problem. The bank I visited refused to accept my two-hundred-euro banknote – apparently too unusual a denomination to safely rule out its possible falsification. Having relied not to an inconsiderable degree on this two-hundred to carry me through the rest of the semester, I was a little put out. My American credit card had just expired and I had forgotten the pin code to my new Czech card; I could, of course, find out what my pin was at any time, but at that point I felt too invested in this new experiment on whether or not I could make my limited funds last me after all.

We left Taipei in a minibus at around ten thirty in the morning. The weather was cold and the dark clouds portended rain. The organisers of our trip had told us to pack an absurd number of items, but I had dismissed many of these as just part of the Taiwanese impulse to take hiking overly seriously. Why should one pack thermal gear for a hike up a subtropical mountain that does not exceed the height of four thousand metres? And why bother with an expensive suit of weatherproof clothes when an umbrella and some spare dry clothes might work just as well? Nevertheless, the coolness of the morning scared me a little, as I already had to put on a second shirt.

This Monday, I attended a lecture by Professor Leonard Blussé, who wrote many of the materials I have been reading through in my studies of Christianity in Taiwan. Perhaps his most monumental work is the four-volume Formosan Encounter, a selection of Dutch East India Company Documents and other resources, along with translations thereof. Nevertheless, this lecture focussed on the historical study of rivers in Southeast Asia, which Blussé punctuated with a number of anecdotes and insights into his life, research methods, and philosophy.

With the anniversary of NTU’s founding this Friday, ICLP has officially entered its autumn break. Of course, as is customary for any institution of higher learning, our program has made sure that we spend a good portion of that time stressing about schoolwork, repeatedly pointing out the proximity of our final exams and handing out practice materials. Thank goodness I am sufficiently disillusioned with ICLP’s archaic teaching practices that I could not care less.

This Saturday, a teacher at ICLP organized a hike along the Caoling Historic Trail. Reaching the trail, which lies at the border of New Taipei and Yilan in the east, is surprisingly easy. I was surprised to find that I could simply use my metro card to pay for the train there.  

After finishing my Verdi binge, I felt in the mood for a little change of atmosphere. I half-retract my antipathy towards Mussorgsky to say that Boris Godunov is quite interesting. Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar is also very much worth listening to. Most of all, though, I have been more than pleasantly surprised by Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mlada. I came across it by accident, having never heard of the opera before, but what a lucky find it was! The soaring instrumental interludes and forceful choruses are without a doubt some of the best in the genre.

Autumn has finally begun and the weather no longer makes Taipei feel like a polluted sauna. It is still somewhat humid, but the temperatures have become more bearable and some of my teachers have even started wearing several layers of clothing.

This week, I finally finished my marathon of Verdi’s 27 operas. Had it not been for a couple of pleasant surprises, I would almost have been inclined to conclude that the only Verdi worth listening to is the Verdi you have already heard. For my own future reference, I am making a little ranking of my favourites below

This week had been another week to bless us with a long weekend. The National Day of the Republic of China (also called Double Ten Day because it falls on the tenth of October) fell on a Thursday this year, meaning that we also took the Friday off. For the whole extended weekend, there were flags everywhere, which really makes me think that in terms of advertisement and subliminal messaging, the KMT has it much easier than any other party on the island. The holiday celebrates the Wuchang Uprising of 1911 which led to the overthrow of the Qing government and the establishment of the Republic of China.

Amid tense expectations on Sunday night, an email was finally sent out that school was cancelled the following day because of a typhoon. The government had ordered all schools across Taipei to close, and I heard many businesses did not open on that day either (interestingly, a rumour soon spread that the government had only made this decision to score points for the upcoming elections). My suitemate very foresightedly bought us some supplies to, well, weather the weather, and we holed ourselves in waiting for the worst.

My first week studying at the ICLP was very relaxed. My classes begin at 8:10 and end at 12:00, after which I have the whole day to do whatever I want. This week I spent all of my afternoons at the library.

For reasons not entirely clear to me, classes did not begin the week after we sat our placement exams. Instead, some people went on trips with the programme, but by the time I had found out about them in the summer, they were fully booked. Instead, I spent the week familiarising myself with NTU’s library system and its books on 17 th century Taiwan. The 5 th floor of the main library is a wonderfully quiet study place housing special collections on all sorts of topics.

ICLP scheduled another two days for ‘orientation’ after our exam on Tuesday. I don’t know whether this is part of growing up, becoming more Czech, or simply suffering from jetlag, but I have never felt more robbed of my time by a presentation. In the total of five hours, I think I learned two useful things, and even those two things I have already forgotten.

I departed for Taiwan on the Saturday of September 7 th . I arrived on the 8 th in an unremarkable manner, exchanged some money at the airport to see how exchange rates would compare to those in the city, and took a taxi to my hotel. I was tired and very quickly fell asleep.

After I visited Korea, I spent a peaceful two and a half weeks at home in Prague. I met some old friends, though most were out of the country, and saw some of the people I love to see most whenever I come back: the dentist and the hairdresser.

Our last day in Seoul started with a scenic view. We rode up the hill to the Bugak Palgakjeong, an octagonal pavilion to the north of the historical centre of Seoul. The weather was either cloudy or smoggy; either way, we could not see a whole lot that day, and distant Gangnam rose faintly behind thin milky curtains.

On our penultimate day in Seoul, my dad and I made a trip to the De-Militarised Zone. As one may perhaps expect, it is not a journey one person, whether foreign or Korean, can make by themselves. There are only a few companies that are licensed to lead tours to the DMZ, and even fewer that can lead tours to the Joint Security Area (JSA). We, therefore, joined a half-Japanese, half-English-speaking tour bus in the centre of the city, and let ourselves be led around the sights to be seen.

We undertook our return to Seoul by car, planning to get back at around six o’clock. The route inevitably traversed South Korea’s scenic Sobaek mountain range, which is pierced through and through by a vast collection of tunnels.

On our full day in Gyeongju, we visited a number of temples, beginning with Bulguksa. As a note to potential travellers: It is well worth it to wake up early in the morning and see some sights while other tourists are still clambering out of bed. When we visited, Bulguk Temple was practically bereft of visitors.

We arrived in Busan in the morning to be picked up once again by our trusty guide Mr J. Our tour began in the city, which from a distance looks like a collection of lego blocks spilling out of the mountains. Our car climbed its way up the hill through the narrow streets of the erewhile poor quarters, where many tiny houses were built on the tombstones of Japanese settlers. As we learned in a photo exhibition towards the top of the hill, the quarters were settled by refugees. Masses of people migrated South, particularly to Busan, when US, UN and South Korean forces were pushed out of the North by China – many had in fact begged US ships to allow them on board, which they did unwillingly after dumping their arms into the sea to make space. Upon their arrival in Busan, the refugees settled on the outskirts of the city to eke out a living in awful conditions.

We woke up at five in the morning to catch a plane flight to Jeju Island. Off the peninsula’s south coast, Jeju enjoys a subtropical climate beloved by tourists. Indeed, it was quite warm when we arrived, but not the smoggy, humid warmness that welcomed me in Seoul.

Our first day in Seoul was a hectic sprint through the most important sights of the city. Our guide – who went by the name Mr J – first took us to the museum of the Blue House, the residence of the South Korean president. Despite the fact that the grounds have been used for over a millennium, our guide (just like a close-by Chinese guide whom I happened to overhear) started the story at Japanese aggression, setting the tone for pretty much every subsequent stop. What became the president’s residence used to be the residence of the Japanese Governor General during the period of Japanese occupation between 1910-1945.

The reason we travelled everywhere by taxi yesterday was that the air conditioning in the family car stopped working and had to be taken to the mechanic. It eventually turned out this was a symptom of the entire cooling system being broken, but in any case, it was up and running today. Once again, Kelly’s uncle came to my aid, and after I exchanged goodbyes with a good part of Kelly’s family, he drove me to the airport, with Kelly and Yiding riding along to see me off.

On my second full day in Xiamen, Kelly, Yiding, and I visited the South Putuo Temple, originally built during the Tang Dynasty, destroyed during the Ming Dynasty, and rebuilt during the Qing Dynasty. Before plunging into the hordes of tourists, we took a little stroll around the pond in front to look at fish and turtles. To our consternation, we found a monstrous giant turtle in the midst of the pond’s other inhabitants – likely a rather ill-considered release by a rogue animal lover.

When planning my visit, I did not quite realise the extent to which I would be coddled by the entirety of Kelly’s family, not just in the apartment but outside of it. After Kelly’s grandma made us breakfast and Kelly’s dad made us tea and coffee, Kelly’s jiujiu (paternal uncle) drove us to the harbour. Along with Kelly’s cousin Yiding – a hilariously awkward fourteen-year old who made up for his shyness with a range of animated facial expressions – we took the ferry to the island of Gulangyu. Gulangyu is the site of a former international settlement: It housed a number of Western consulates after China lost the First Opium War and Xiamen was designated a Treaty Port by the Treaty of Nanjing. Nowadays, Gulangyu is a hot tourist spot, offering somewhat polluted beaches that are much better for taking pictures than swimming, as well as pedestrian, European-style streets and views of modern Xiamen.

I left Kunming on Sunday morning after Shuting treated Chianna and me to lunch. Several of us had arranged to leave for the airport together, which we did indeed do in two groups a little after twelve. As luck would have it, this was the first time that my ride to (and for that matter from) the airport did not take me down Yi Er Yi road. Instead, we headed up towards the Cuihu area, passing by a church that I had visited on my very first weekend in Kunming. That day, I spotted the church across Cuihu Lake and, feeling all sentimental about the time I had spent singing in churches these past few years, found my way to the entrance and sat in the pews for a good few minutes with misty eyes.

In anticipation of our last free Saturday in Kunming, Fafa and I made a plan to visit the Western Hills (Xishan) overlooking Dianchi Lake. Throughout the week and Saturday morning, our party slowly expanded to a group of six – besides Fafa and me, Shayley (a classmate from Yale, appearing anonymously in the previous posts “Examinations and Excursions,” and “Cheer up, Captain, buy a flower off a poor girl”), Elizabeth (previously seen in “A Note on Guitars”), Bekkah, and Shuting (Fafa herself should be familiar from the post “Cheer up, Captain, buy a flower off a poor girl”). We left at nine in the morning with Fafa at the helm, boarding the bus to the closest metro station and then riding to its final stop at the foot of the Western Hills. Fafa noted the journey took exactly 52 minutes.

Before talking about CET’s closing ceremony, I need to wind back the clock by about two weeks, then by about two months, and then forward again to two weeks ago. So, during my last two weeks at CET Kunming, my class’s topic was Chinese attitudes towards the USA. My class had not discussed politics very explicitly before, but the syllabus plunged us straight into some very turbulent waters. On quite a few occasions, our teacher would begin to talk about recent events in Hong Kong, or our textbook would discuss American “ 霸权主义 ” (hegemonism), or we would hold class debates on media bias across the globe.

This post is nothing but a shameless brag. At the beginning of our program, Elizabeth – one of my friends from the class below mine – discovered and took under her wing an acoustic guitar in the students’ common room. The strings were all getting a little worn, so she took it to a local music store and had all of them changed. Ever since then, the guitar was a popular addition to our daily lives, and I soon formed a habit of practicing a little every single day. Besides a few exercises plucking individual strings in high school, I was never taught how to play the guitar properly, but over the summer I figured out h ow to play a few songs and how to – at least in theory – play most of the important chords.

It was hot on my last day in Sipsongpanna, and yet the weather was remarkably cloudy most of the time. The hotel’s owner very kindly took me to the airport, politely alluding to the reviews for his business on the internet – I was happy to oblige.

The one thing I really wanted to do in Sipsongpanna was to visit the Dai Ethnic Garden. A collection of villages dating back as far as 1400 years ago, the site boasts a number of temples in the Dai style.

A while back, I was eating lunch with a friend, who – familiar with my packed travel itinerary – asked me whether I had been to Sipsongpanna (Xishuangbanna in Mandarin) yet. Before that conversation, I had only heard very vague things about Sipsongpanna, the most popular being the refrain “it’s so hot!” I was intrigued, however, and decided to do some research.

This Friday, Sun Laoshi’s students in Kunming had another dinner with our teacher. She took us to a very good vegetarian buffet. Over plates brimming with tofu, fake meat, and vegetables, we discussed everything Chinese (sorry, this is a rather obscure pun on the name of last semester’s textbook), from the Kunming dialect to the national curriculum. Sun Laoshi told us an interesting legend about why – as I mentioned previously – Lijiang’s old town does not have city walls. Lijiang’s erewhile ruler had the family name Mu ( 木 ), which becomes Kun ( 困 ), if you draw four lines around it – or walls, so to speak. Kun, however, means “hardship” or “to surround,” neither of which would be auspicious for a city.

It was sunny on my last morning in Shangri-La. After writing half of my homework and checking out, I strolled through the old town, stopping again at Turtle Hill and continuing to the south of the city, which I had not yet visited. Though the maps say the old town continues for quite a while southwards, the pedestrian zone ended about twice as fast as it should have, and I wound up outside the old city again. With my itinerary for my trip more or less fulfilled, I decided to carry on south, since I remembered that at the southernmost end of the area was an enormous white stupa. I had seen it both on my trip from the airport and during my walk from Napa Lake.

Rather stupidly, I left the window propped open, which came back to bite me in the middle of the night. The day started out quite cloudy, so after eating breakfast, I headed to the old town to partake in some indoor activities. Instead of just passing by the Museum of the Long March like I did yesterday, I ventured inside, where I was instantly greeted by a huge mural of the Chinese Red Army entering Shangri-La to the enthusiastic reception of local priests. A similar collection of statues stands outside the museum’s main gate. Furthering an account of Communist and Tibetan unity, the museum seems to be part of a former temple complex, with the exhibition looping around the still functional central shrine.

I left the Nationalities Village alone by taxi, as I had a flight to catch. The unexpected excursion had rendered the timing of my previous airport journey unnecessary for this trip, but of course it will come in handy when I leave Kunming for good. The cost of the ride was absurdly high – some 150 Yuan as opposed to the usual 80 to get to Yunnan University – but I suppose there is no use crying over spilt milk.

Last week we filled out an evaluation form about CET’s summer programme. Based on subsequent classes, I gather my pleas to be provided with more English translations were not heard out. Nevertheless, I maintain my pedagogically inexpert opinion that translating a word instead of explaining it in the source language leads to fewer misunderstandings. A plea that was heard out, however, and to the great bewilderment of many, was to have fewer exams. Now I don’t particularly enjoy exams myself, but having to memorise three hundred words for one exam does not strike me as substantially more pleasant than memorising one hundred and fifty for two.

One of my class’s topics for this week were the so-called Flying Tigers, the first American Volunteer Group of the Chinese Air Force. The group, led by stubborn and charismatic Claire Lee Chennault, was recruited with the tacit support of President Roosevelt at a time when the USA had still not entered the Second World War. Its objective was to prevent a Japanese takeover of China. With much of China’s north already invaded, the east coast blockaded, and Indochina controlled by the Japanese, defending the heartlands was an uphill battle. American and Chinese pilots faced the vastly more numerous and better armed Japanese air force. When British Burma fell to the Japanese, the only tenable connection to the Allied world was an air route above the mountains of North Burma leading to India’s far east. And yet, the Flying Tigers and Chinese pilots trained at Chennault’s flight school were able to inflict massive casualties on the Japanese air force, staving off invasion.

The morning after we returned from Dali, I discovered, to my great irritation, that I had once again lost my umbrella. The karmic balance of umbrella loss in this universe had evidently dictated that for saving one umbrella from oblivion, I had to pay with my own.

A hike up Cang mountain was planned for our last day in Dali. It was exhausting. The weather was not ideal, but we did not catch any major rain, so once we got to the top and stopped sweating like a herd of water buffalo, it was actually quite pleasant. The mountain slopes were covered with pine forests, and the trail we set out on took us through a naturally eroded archway towards a rushing cascade. On our way down – which we made by cable car – I once again saw Dali’s three pagodas against the backdrop of the Erhai.  

The second day in Dali was just as rainy as the first, but this did not stop a full program of events. While most people were making traditional Baizu tie-dye cloths, a smaller group of us toured three temples in the town of Xizhou – a Taoist temple, a Buddhist temple, and a Benzhu temple (that is, a temple to the deities worshipped by the Bai people). Seeing statues of the Jade Emperor, the Bodhisattva Guanyin, and gods with various animal paraphernalia brought back many memories of reading the Journey to the West. One of the interesting things I learned about the local religion is that the Bai people regard Kublai Khan as a deity for sparing the local populace of the Mongols’ usual massacres.

I spent very little time in class before it was time to pack up and start travelling again: CET’s midterm trip to Dali, a city about six hours away from Kunming. Sitting on some very lucrative trade routes, Dali was the capital of the Nanzhao kingdom, a state that successfully repealed several Chinese invasions, resisted Tibetan expansion, and waged wars of its own in modern day Vietnam and Myanmar. After its golden age in the eighth and ninth centuries, Nanzhao fell to dynastic squabbles that led to the establishment of the Dali Kingdom, a somewhat less powerful state that fell to Kublai Khan in 1253. The indomitable spirit of the Yunnanese, however, was not extinguished. During the Panthay Rebellion of 1856-1873, Dali was the capital of a sultanate that for a long time held its own against the Manchu government. Like Nanzhao, it too was defeated, but not until a protracted bloody war that cost perhaps a million lives. (Much of this information comes from websites not blocked by the C

On my last day in Lijiang, I decided I would go to Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, whose allure was all the stronger for the fact that it was hidden in the clouds during my whole trip. I read on the internet that I could take a bus from the northern part of Lijiang to the mountain, but try as I might, when I arrived in the general area, I could not find it. I asked a lady working at a tourist information booth where the bus station was, at which she pointed in a vague direction and said “that road.” Arriving at the end of the road, I sought the advice of a policeman, who sent me in a new direction altogether, and when I got to the third place, another tourist information worker relayed me farther yet. When I finally got to the square where both the policeman and the second tourist centre worker agreed I should go, I could find no bus, but I in turn was found by a man offering rides up the mountain in one of those light-blue ride-share vans. Quite exhausted and very willing to let myself be

Lijiangers have the best taste where dogs are concerned. I have seen an unparalleled wealth of giant fluffy dogs who warm my heart almost as much as their thick coats must warm them. But today’s story is not about dogs; it is about taking local wisdoms with a grain of salt.

This Friday was a major day for travel. Having decided I would visit the historical city of Lijiang, I left for the airport as soon as we were done with classes. Well, almost. I first stopped by the dining hall for lunch, and afterwards finished packing in my room. I only packed a backpack (and, of course, took my camera bag along with me), as I figured I would not need much to keep me alive and relatively clean until I returned on Sunday.

I recently found out that Yunnan is the location of Shangri-La, which, as every good tourist brought up on Tintin and Scooby Doo will realise, I am now obligated to visit. Never mind the fact that the city, formerly known as Zhongdian, was renamed to Shangri-La in 2001 to attract tourists. The pictures look nice and I get to say I’ve been to the mythical lost paradise to wow other sock-and-sandal-wearing westerners.

Instead of going to class on Friday morning, all of the students in my program were sent to the hospital for a check-up. Apparently, this is a requirement for people intending to stay in Yunnan for a longer period of time, which, as students at a summer language study session, I suppose we are. Not an inch of anyone’s body was spared. We gave urine samples and blood samples, went through X-rays, dental checks, and ultrasounds, and the female students in the group all had to see a gynaecologist. Should the hospital ever decide to make wax dolls of us all, I trust it will do a very good job of it, for now it knows my body much better than I do.

In retrospect, my first weekend in Kunming was quite relaxed, though it certainly did not seem so at the time. We were given several lectures on navigating CET policies, managing culture shock, etc., and we took part in activities to get to know each other better. The most daunting policy, of course, was CET’s language pledge – a promise not to speak any English, or rather (after one rather nitpicky back-and-forth) not to speak any language besides Mandarin Chinese. I think most students confronted the language pledge with a mixture of dread and determination, though there were a couple students in whose expressions one could only read the first. As for me, I had participated in a Chinese language pledge program as a complete beginner two years ago, so I approached the policy with a sentiment of “it can’t be worse than that time I could not talk to anyone.”

Many aspects of this summer have been unprecedented. For one, I have not had a healthy sleeping schedule since the weekend of graduation until my arrival in Kunming – a total of three exhausting weeks. My under-eight-hours-sleep life began with my parents’ arrival on campus and the imminent horror of having to pack all of my belongings, half of which were to be sent home with my parents, and half of which were to remain in storage. My subsequent travel across three continents did not help my sleep deprivation much.