Worst Kept Secrets

Um, it’s been too long for me to try to catch up, so I’m just going to jump right back in and pretend like I’ve been online since October…

Right now, it’s 7:34 pm, and I haven’t bothered to get dressed today, meaning I’m sitting in my apple commercial living room in my sweatpants and a tee-shirt unable to find the energy to use the toilet, let alone leave the apartment. I’ve only been on break for three days, and I’ve gone all the way downhill in an incredibly short time. It’s been AWESOME.

First of all, I just got a new macbook pro, and after a few weeks with it, I’m unable to imagine how I ever lived without it. The transition from a PC lifestyle to a mac one was completely painless, and everything on this machine works better and more intuitively. Our apartment is such a staging ground for born-again mac people - you should see us with our matching macbooks, peaceably sitting on the couch listening to our separate ipods and occasionally glancing up to comment about some awesome thing that macs will do that pcs won’t. End of story, buy a mac.

Second, I just started using Picasa, and I like it. I really adore flickr, but it’s extremely tempermental in China, and I can’t use it very well due to its (lack of) loading speed. Picasa, though, is working great so far. So until someone posts something questionable and the net nanny comes down on it, I guess I’ll be using it. I really really really recommend it as a photo organizer, though, especially since it does all the little things that make most people think they need photoshop even though they don’t know how to use the really interesting features of it (me). Picasa, A+ in my book.

We had visitors over the holidays - Chris’s whole family made the trip, including seventeen-month-old Jackson, who outdid everyone in his enthusiasm for Chinese food and ability to engage with the locals. The little guy made more friends here than I’ve probably made in my entire life… Honestly, I spent a lot of the time being deeply embarrassed - I got off a plane and spent at least two or three months cringing behind Chris, Leif, and Lily, being largely unable to cross the street alone, let alone get a cab by myself. The Clanton/Clanton-Jones faction, however, hit the ground running, picking up necessary Mandarin, jumping in headfirst to the culinary environment, jetting around all over the city, arranging train tickets, cab rides, tour packages, etc., appearing almost entirely unphased. I also spent a lot of the time being incredibly grateful for what a nice bunch of people they were and for the fact that they were such completely good sports about everything.

As an example of extreme good-sportitude, I’d like to explain what happened when we went to Suzhou. We took a day trip to Suzhou, which seemed like a completely feasible endeavor. Suzhou (based on a few hours there) reminded me a lot of a Chinese version of Eureka Springs, Arkansas combined with overtones of Stratford, England. It’s got a really lovely canal system, traditional architecture, a ton of gardens, etc. It’s about an hour away by bullet train, and so we left around eleven planning to spend an afternoon taking in the sights and getting back to Nanjing in time for dinner.

As far as we know, though, buying train tickets in China is a troubled experience. The best way to do it is to show up at the train station no more than ten days before your departure to buy a one-way ticket with cash. Then you arrive at your destination, where you pray to be able to get a return ticket. We showed up at the Suzhou train station to be told by the ticket clerks that there were no seats available back to Nanjing. Chris and I committed an intense China-sin by leaving without our passports. Without a passport, you absolutely can’t check into a hotel. Not to mention the fact that we were traveling with a very small person with a limited supply of diapers. Chris and I both sort of freaked out in the face of this, while the other Clantons remained completely calm and willing to do whatever we needed to do.

Chris’s solution was to buy tickets for Shanghai, and hope that we’d be able to get Nanjing tickets from there. I was really, really terrified that this was going to end with makeshift beds of cast-off newspapers in a corner of the Shanghai Railway Station, but we had six or seven hours to kill in Suzhou, and so we made the best of it by heading up to Tiger Hill. Which was really, really, really pretty. There were vaguely threatening advertisements for the place all over the train station - “If you do not see Tiger Hill, it would be a pity,” etc. It WOULD have been a pity - we had a really nice afternoon wandering around. I LOVE Chinese parks. I like American parks, too, but it seems like every time I visit a Chinese one, there’s something bizarre and unexpected lurking around every corner.

We didn’t have time to make it to any other gardens, with names like “The Humble Administrator’s Garden,” or “The Lingering Garden.” We tried to make it to some place called West Garden, which turned out to be closed. We had to split up to do this, since there’s a four-person limit in a taxi. I was with Chris’s dad and sister, and spent the cab ride intently focused on the map and being sure I knew exactly where we were. Any of you who ever spent any time watching me try to navigate know exactly where this is going - we wound up lost. Actually, to give myself a little bit of credit, not badly lost, and within five or ten minutes a really nice lady pointed us in the right direction. But I definitely had about five or ten minutes to frantically fantasize about never seeing Chris, his mother, or Jackson again, and the three of us spending the rest of our lives learning to live off the land and heal from our emotional losses. I didn’t get much further than a touching scene in which we were finally fully integrated by the community, and sitting together at a restaurant raising cups of baijiu to toast our long-lost family members in a moving demonstration of remembrance, acceptance, and optimism before the nice lady helped us out, but oh my god it was nerve-wracking.Once again, Mr. Clanton and Carrie were veritable rocks of assurance and calm.

After that, we hung out in a coffee shop, and made our way to the train station. The train station was PACKED. More so than I’m more or less accustomed to Chinese train stations being packed. We made it to our train with no problems, though, and arrived at Shanghai a few minutes before eight. Chris and I were pretty well steeled for the worst (makeshift beds of newspaper in a forgotten corner of the Shanghai Railway Station, for those of you who can’t keep up), and Chris was thoroughly girded for battle. His plan was simple - he would charge out of the train station and make a frantic dash for the soft seat CRH ticket office before it closed at eight, while the rest of us would exit the train station and plant. So the train arrived, and Chris ran like an Olympian, while the rest of us pushed and shoved our way out, stroller and all.

And bless his soul, Chris came back with tickets. They were closing down the ticket counters when he arrived, and I’ve got a very vivid picture of how this went down, involving a lot of frothing at the mouth and for some reason togas (we’ve been rewatching Rome). Chris convinced them to let him inside, and pleaded with them for tickets. They tried to tell him that there were no seats left, but Chris managed to convey that we had a baby and talked them into giving us the emergency reserve tickets. This is the story that Chris told me, although my version also involves gladiators and snake pits. Anyway, Chris returned and met us at the exit of the train station (where I’d been pacing back and forth worried that I’d taken the wrong exit and was fashioning a scenario of my adventures in Shanghai with Chris’s entire family as a group of homeless beggars who stumbled upon some sort of dastardly mob plot and inadvertantly changed the course of Chinese history when…), looking for all the world like the all-but-conquered hero returning victorious but with a heaviness in his heart. The best he’d been able to do was book a slow train for us.

There are two types of trains between Nanjing and Shanghai. One is the bullet train, which is the only train Myself the Princess had ever ridden. It’s clean and comfy, with western toilets and lots of leg room. It’s about a two hour trip. Then there are the other trains, which are older, coal-powered, crowded, and have toilets that pretty much involve squatting over the tracks. It’s about four and half hours on them. Our train got into Nanjing at about 3 am.  It seemed like Chris felt somehow responsible for the whole thing, since he seemed pretty upset about it, but he’d actually arranged for one of the coolest things I’ve done in China so far. Because we had soft sleeper tickets!

The soft sleeper cars are arranged into compartments with four beds in each. Since there were five of us, we were worried that one hapless soul would get stuck with a carload of the baijiu-swigging businessmen we’d seen in the waiting lounge who were clearly looking forward to their journey as an opportunity to par-TAY. However, the gods were with us, and we wound up with a couple of empty compartments. It worked out fantastically, with Jackson (who deserves a freaking medal for so many things, one of which being his behavior during the entire ordeal) and Carrie getting some badly needed sleep in one room, and Chris, his parents, and me hanging out in the party car next next door. I regret to announce that this was the night I finally acquired a taste for baijiu. And it was also the night that I got baijiu-drunk and ridiculous in front of SOMEONE’S PARENTS. Good grief, Anne! Have you no shame?

Have I mentioned how grateful I am to the Clanton family for being so much fun and so welcoming? A big unabashedly public thank you is in order for all of the Clantons and the Clanton-Joneses.

So now we’re hanging out and enjoying a week off before we pack up and head back to the Philippines! YES! We’ve been getting grief for visiting the same place twice, but I don’t even care. I had such an absurd amount of fun last time, and this time we’re going to a very different island, inhabited by the world’s smallest primate and home of the Chocolate Hills. Plus at least three or four days spent lazing about the beach doing nothing but getting sunburned and imbibing fruity cocktails with umbrellas in them. But the other four days are going to be spent staying at an organic Filipino bee farm, and I honestly believe that being able to utter that phrase will provide me with enough environmentally conscious, well-travelled hipster cred to last me the rest of my life. SCORE!