Life in and out of the Hotels 

The Chinese hotels we stayed at in Quanzhou and Fuzhou, 3 star hotels, are
much as advertised in the guidebooks. The rooms are very similar to
American hotel rooms. But you don't drink the tap water. They provide you
with a thermos of very hot water and tea bags to make tea. The hot water
thermos is exchanged several times a day, or you can ask for more hot
water at any time. Otherwise the biggest difference between the rooms in
China and the US is that the Chinese provide a toothbrush and comb in
addition to the soap and shampoo. Each room we had had a refrigerator.
Sometimes this was stocked with a variety of beverages we had never seen
before and sometimes we stocked it ourselves with mineral water. Southeast
China is warm to us, even in the winter, so having something cold to drink
was very refreshing. In some hotels the electricity to the outlets and
lights is controlled by a little switch by the door which is off unless
you have your hotel card in the slot. Why doesn't anything work? Because
you forgot to put your card in the slot.

The hotel will usually have an explanation of their services in English,
but that will be pretty out of date. You hardly need it. Most stuff is
obvious. The staff are eager to please and will try to accommodate your
needs if they can figure out what those are. They have good laundry
service, but a few times stains on my shirts came back. I'd be tempted to
have some stain remover or good detergent with me next time and prewash
the hard bits before turning them in to be washed. But the laundry and dry
cleaning is fast and cheap.

Often the hotel will advertise that they have a "western" dinning room. We
never tried those, so I can't speak to their quality. Most hotels have
several dining rooms and serve a buffet breakfast and complete lunch and
dinner at pretty much the normal times. Breakfast starts about 7:30 and
goes to 9 or so. The breakfast buffet includes fruit juice, fried eggs,
rice gruel (congee), rice, soups of various kinds, steamed buns of every
description, ditto dumplings, rice noodles, fruit (watermelon and apples),
sometimes onion rings and french fried potatoes, cakes, an assortment of
other sweet things, and an assortment of pickled things. I imagine that if
you were not that good at chopsticks, they would provide you with western
eating implements, but one little concession you can make to your hosts is
to know a few words in Chinese and to know how to use chopsticks. Practice
picking up peanuts from two feet in front of you. To oversimplify, the
Chinese eat larger things by picking them up with the chopsticks, holding
them to their mouths and biting pieces off. You have to be able to hold
those large pieces while you eat on them. Fried eggs, for an example.
Sometimes they tear them into smaller pieces, but usually they grab the
whole fried egg and eat at it. As a rule, the food served to you, family
style always, is in small enough pieces so you can grab it, but not
necessarily single bite size. You can use your fingers, and I never quite
got the idea of when that was ok and not, but usually you do so as an
exception, like when you are tearing the carapace and legs off a crab. And
you don't take things out of your mouth with your fingers, usually. You
either take things out with chopsticks - another good test - or you spit
things out into your "waste" plate, or the table. (Sorry Mom.) Your place
setting is a waste plate about 5 inches across, a tea cup on top of it, a
small bowl and spoon, a glass, a "boat" to hold your damp washcloth, and
your chopsticks resting on a little dragon. Sometimes you will have a
napkin and the waitress will put one corner of the napkin under your waste
plate to hold it on the table and drape the rest of it over the table in
front of you and onto your lap. You usually take food off the serving
plate and put it into your small bowl to eat it. Or you can just eat off
the serving plate, what the heck. Any bones, paper, or other bits you
don't eat, go onto your waste plate. The waitress will take the waste
plate and the small bowl away every so often and give you new ones. She or
he will also give you a new washcloth every so often. The washcloth is
pretty much used the way we use the napkin, and then some. People wipe
their foreheads, neck, and arms, in addition to their hands as needed.
Your initial cup of tea is for "washing your mouth out" and then you
choose whatever beverage you want to have poured into the small glass, or
you can have tea in your glass. I never tired of the tea and essentially
drank it all day long, preferring the good oolong of the Fujian area to
jasmine or "black" tea. (Black tea is really red.) I never tired, either,
of having tea made for me. It's a procedure that I found wonderfully
fascinating.

There are many teas in China, and we've got to try them all before
morning. The Fujian area has very good Oolong tea and one of the best
oolong teas is Iron Quanyin. This is grown on the hillsides of Fujian. And
Fujian is mostly hillsides. It's a mountainous area with just 10% of the
land flat and arable. Walking down the streets of the city there are many
tea shops selling tea and tea making sets. The set includes a shallow
rectangular pan with an insert that has holes in it to let water and tea
through. The tea pot and cups rest on the insert. The tea pot and cups are
small, not to say tiny. The steps in making tea are: crane taking a bath,
dragon goes to the palace, spring wind in your face, the general Guangong
inspects the cities, general HanXin selects the soldiers, and ... then you
drink. (I think !) The crane taking a bath is washing the cups. Putting
tea into the pot is the dragon going into the palace. You fill the pot up
with loose tea. The spring wind at your face is the first pouring of water
into the tea pot. This is washing the tea. Let it sit for 2 minutes, and
then you scrape off the bubbles that form on the top, then pour this into
the cups. Pouring this into the cups is the general inspecting the cities
for troops. This is discarded into the pan beneath. Then you refill the
tea pot with hot water and let that steep for a few more minutes (4?).
This you drink, or smell, rather. Sometimes there is a special even
smaller but longer cup that is inverted into the main cup to catch the
scent of the tea. After the tea is poured into the cup, take this out and
use it to smell the tea. Or sometimes there is a little cap on the pot
that is used to capture the smells. You let the tea sit in your mouth to
savor the taste and drink slowly. The host will pour more water into the
pot and refill your cup. The same pot of leaves is used about 5 or 6
times, each time steeping for a few more minutes. They have several
different sizes of pots. The smallest for one or two people, and slightly
larger for the groups of 5 or 6 we usually were. Our pot might have been 4
inches across. Sometimes the pot is more like a cup with a cap. And often
the tea after steeping is poured off into another pot for pouring into the
cups. This process was repeated for us with slight variations at
libraries, tourist spots, and in tea shops, always wonderfully. The hotel
has a tea house also, but we didn't get there.

At lunch and dinner, the hotel staff would bring us a special menu that
had translated entries. It was pretty obvious by looking at what the other
people were eating that our menu didn't have some good stuff on it. We
must have looked slightly confused, because the helpful hotel staff began
to provide us with additional menu options written out in English that
weren't on the other menu. Those were never repeated and had excellent
choices on them.  As usual, they were very considerate hosts.
Unfortunately, not very considerate guests, we only learned a few words
for different foods, so we could not do a very good job of just ordering
what we might have thought of. Having more control over food vocabulary
would be a good idea. We could have gone out to other restaurants for the
meals, and we did eat at many restaurants while out touring, but the hotel
restaurant cooking was just fine.

The first course at the Chinese meal is the cold course. These are like
appetizers. They are small plates of peanuts, sugared cashews, pickled
cucumbers, fried hot green peppers, pickled seaweed, little string beans,
whole fried little fish, pickled cabbage, sea insects in aspic, and other
unknown things. The second set of courses is hot food. If there are enough
people this might be several soups, lots of dumplings, steamed buns, tofu
fixed in various ways, spinach or sweet potato greens, any kind of seafood
including sea insects, fresh water fish and crab, "wild beast that looks
like a deer", ducks tongue, etc. At the end of the meal is the fruit and
sometimes a sweet soup. The fruit we have had most is watermelon, grapes,
and apples. The country abounds in banana trees, but for some reason,
bananas don't show up at dinner with the other fruit. The fruit is eaten
with toothpicks, usually. For two of us the cost of lunch or dinner was
about 50 Yuan, $6 or $7.

Contrary to what the guidebooks tell you, the hotels off the tourist track
don't often take traveler's' checks. To exchange traveler's' checks you
have to go to a Bank of China. The hotel will exchange dollars in cash,
however, so I was glad I brought some. And ATM's do seem to be in short
supply outside of the large cities.

TV in the room was cable. They carry the standard channels of CCTV 1
through 8, more or less. Channel 4 has a news program in English at 7 PM
and another English program about China after that, usually. These are
good sources of additional information about China. Channel 1 seems to
broadcast many cultural programs with dancing and music. I caught some
Chinese language lessons from time to time. Some hotels also have channels
from Australia, France, and Indonesia. And there always seemed to be some
sports on, often rugby or soccer. There is one music video channel, with
really "tame" music videos. Otherwise, everything is in Chinese,
naturally. Still could be interesting to watch sometimes, especially the
soap operas set in traditional China.

The hotel has a business center that I used more than anything else to
mail letters and postcards and send faxes. The last letter I sent was
$.50. There is no glue on the stamps or the envelopes so you use a bottle
of glue they give you and glue everything together. Not all my faxes got
through, but all the ones that were sent to me did, so I think faxing is a
pretty viable way to communicate with folks at home if email is not
available for some reason, just test it first. In my case, I did have
email available in the two libraries I was a guest of. I had asked the
Fujian Provincial Library to set up an email account on their server,
which they did for me. Then I used web mail, which is an NT application
that lets you use a browser to read mail talking to the server with imap
or pop. I kept that email account and could access it from anywhere I
could get to the web. At first I tried to telnet back to our email server
in Portland to read mail, but the internet is amazingly slow for that kind
of communication, for some reason I never figured out. The web mail
account on the Fujian Library server meant that I could read and send mail
fairly locally without having to deal with that poor bandwidth out to the
US, or whatever it was. Not the best solution, but it basically worked. I
sent most of the pictures, 300 to 400 k, back with ftp and I got a
whopping 3 or 4 kbs transfer rate. Put a severe bottleneck on the amount
of work like that I could get done. It was almost worth compressing files.
I visited an "Internet Café" in both Fuzhou and Quanzhou, so I am assuming
these are pretty common and fairly popular. In both cases I was just
looking around and tested the services out by showing off the library web
site.  The response time for casual web work was not that bad, but not up
to our standards of "good" bandwidth, like 256kb or a full T1, either. I
think that kind of bandwidth is just coming online in China. And things
are changing rapidly. My guess is that in a year or so, we will see
bandwidth to educational institutions and libraries in the T1 range, as we
have now commonly in the US, and maybe higher. I'm not sure exactly what
it would take to set up access to the web in the hotel room. The phones
look like they could be made to work for dialup. Calling a US or even Hong
Kong net number would be pretty expensive. I suppose, like any Chinese
person, you could get an internet account in whatever city you are in if
you are going to be there long enough to make it worth while. Internet
access for the individual is metered, as far as I can tell, charging about
6 yuan/hr for internet access, .2 yuan/min for the phone line, and some
amount per 1000 packets. Just call it a dollar and hour, not bad compared
to US prices.

Drinking deeply ,

Brian