China Trip, May 2010.
An inauspicious start.
It was the end of April and the beginning of May 2010; the rain came and kept pouring without stop for two full days. The soils of Nashville were oversaturated and could no longer absorb additional moisture. The rivers started to crest and overflow, first the Harpeth then the Cumberland and soon some areas of Nashville were distressingly under water. It resulted in the worst flood in the living memories of the citizens here.
We were among the fortunate ones because we had just moved to a new high-rise condominium complex about a month ago and were now situated comfortably on the 4th floor. Were we to still stay in our old house at Merrymount Drive we would have been stranded for days because the roads leading to our subdivision were cut off by flood water. Several of the houses on the edge of our subdivision were in fact badly damaged; one was even completely under water! Fortunately our house was not affected and yet its likelihood of being sold in short order would now be seriously jeopardized.
We were then eagerly anticipating our trip to China on May 4th, scheduling to fly to San Jose one day earlier with an overnight stay in the house of our friends who would accompany us during the trip. Yet, the continuous TV coverage of the disastrous flood scenes had greatly dampened our gay spirit. Even the airport was closed for a while but fortunately it reopened the next day. Thus we managed to escape the devastation of flood in our hometown and sought solace in the exotic land on the other side of the Pacific!
A debacle at the Inchon International Airport.
Initially we were planning on going to Shanghai near the end of June to roughly coincide with the appearance of Melvin and the Bard student quartet at the US pavilion of the World Expo. Since the friends we would be visiting in China resided in Zhengzhou (the husband is the buddy of our friend in California) and only the Korean Airline had a daily (in the morning!) international flight from Seoul, an overnight stay at the airport hotel was thus mandatory to make the needed connection. The airline just happened to have a promotion for cheaper fares and bonus free overnight hotel stays for flights on or before May 22nd, we thus jumped at it and moved ahead our departure date to May 4th. To our infinite consternation, we found out upon arrival in Seoul that no hotel reservations were made for us at the transit hotel in Inchon International Airport. We thus had no choice but to pay for the rooms from our own pockets ($175/rm/12hrs). Fortunately there were several free internet computers at the airport for passengers’ use and I immediately fired an email to our travel agent in SF. Lo and behold I got a response in the morning apologizing for her negligence and promised to reimburse those expenses upon our return!
Arrival in Zhengzhou.
Zhengzhou is the capital of Henan Province and its importance derives from a position astride the meeting of the north-south (Beijing to Guangzhou) and east-west (Shanghai to Xian) rail lines, likely the most important rail junction in China. Our host in Zhengzhou was born and educated in Taiwan but retired from working in the States, and is currently developing a biotechnology park in this important and rapidly developing city.
Our plane finally touched down on the runway of Zhengzhou Airport and I immediately turned on the unlocked T-Mobile cell phone with Shanghai sim card inserted (all purchased via internet in the States before the trip, thanks to Melvin’s suggestion). Understandably I was very anxious to find out if it actually works, so I dialed our friend’s phone number and by George it worked beautifully! This phone proved so useful that our trip would have been miserable without it.
We were greeted at the airport by our hostess and their chauffer who immediately transported us to a fancy restaurant without unloading our luggage. It just happened that this particular day our host was wining and dining some municipal VIPs, so another table was quickly set up next door to welcome our arrival with a feast. It also happened to be his 75th birthday so it all ended with a hearty rendition of ‘happy birthday to you’ and full bellies for us!
We decided to take it easy the next day and relax before embarking on a long journey to Jiuzaigou (suspected location of Shangri la). Upon learning how inexpensive it is to have a haircut in China (about two dollars) and with a hair salon conveniently located around the corner, I opted for the cut as my hairs were beginning to look like those of Beethoven and Einstein (sadly not their brains!). It was a real treat as my head was expertly handled by several pairs of hands with washing, cutting, drying all included, and the best part was that I didn’t even have to pay for it because it was put into our host’s account. We then walked back to his house which is located in a gated community. At the entrance we were met by a uniform guard standing erect and greeting us with a formal military salute. It was kind of awkward but I had never felt so important in my entire life!
Since the renown Shaolin Temple is literally in the backyard of Zhengzhou, we decided to go there the next day. I felt a special kinship to this temple because for years my younger son Irwin had been taking martial art lessons from a Shaolin master in New York who was a genuine monk abandoned by his parents as an infant and grew up inside the Temple. So we were anxiously anticipating this special visit. Unfortunately it is now so commercialized in and around the Temple that I was understandably quite disappointed.
On to Jiuzaigou, one of nature’s wonders in China.
I heard about the natural beauty of Jiuzaigou even before coming to China. Here I copied a short description from a travel website: Jiuzhaigou is a deep valley of stunning natural beauty, approximately 620 sq km in area in north Sichuan. It is a national park and has also been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. The name Jiuzhaigou refers to the nine Tibetan villages which are situated in the valley. The valley has a variety of natural scenery - lakes, waterfalls, snowy mountains and lush green forests. There are also more than one hundred lakes of various sizes and shapes which sparkle with iridescent colors.
Originally we were going to fly all the way there, but our host wanted to showcase and for us to enjoy the fastest bullet train on earth. So we took the bullet train from Zhengzhou to Xian followed by an overnight rest in a hotel there before boarding an airplane to our destination next morning. We had an exciting landing on an airstrip sitting on the plateau of the mountain range. We were then transported to our hotel some distance away. Next day we spent the entire time at Jiuzaigou walking and enjoying its natural beauty. The sceneries could have been even more spectacular were we to come in the autumn when there would be more water to enhance the characters of the lakes and the beautiful landscape could further be accentuated by the colorful fall foliage.
Before our return to Zhengzhou, we were led to a big store selling Tibetan herbal medicines. It was an impressive operation with four resident herbal doctors situated conveniently at the four corners of the store. You could go and let them read your palms and/or fingers and they would tell you what was wrong with your body and prescribe the needed herbal supplements for you to buy and carry home. Some of their diagnoses were in general quite on target. For example, by looking at the fingers of our California friend, one of the doctors immediately diagnosed his Type II diabetes and prescribed $300 worth of herbal remedies. We were thus pretty much sold on that particular doctor. When she looked at my palm and proclaimed that I didn’t have any serious illness and should be able to live past my 90th birthday, I was secretly congratulating myself. Then she prescribed an herbal regimen to be soaked in white wine and with a daily drink of a small cup to last for about10 years. However the price-tag was a bit steep for my taste: $300 for the herbal mix. But were it to work it would be more than worth the money. Even though I had the hunch that we were being had, I was not going to bet my life with that measly $300, so I went along and bought it! Later on we found out that we had paid about ten times what one could have gotten in Zhengzhou or Shanghai. Those kinds of thing had happened time and again during our travel around the globe but we never seem to learn! Well, that’s life!
Next day we retraced our paths back to Zhengzhou and the bullet train, true to its billing, went up to around 350 km/hr as our host was keeping a close tap on it (sorry, do your own conversion if you are curious to know in MPH!). We rather enjoyed the train rides. In fact during the Zhengzhou to Xian ride I struck up a conversation with a rather pleasant girl seating next to me and she turned out to be a tour guide in Luoyang leading a group of young tourists to Xian. She was instrumental in helping us arranging a one day trip from Shanghai to Hangzhou days later.
A two day side-trip to Taishan and three planned one day trips.
After a day’s respite, we were again eager to venture out for a side trip. Taishan is a popular attraction and is also known to have a spectacular sunrise. This majestic mountain is a national park and the holiest and most revered of the sacred mountains in China. In imperial times, many newly established emperors would come to the mountain to worship heaven and perform grand sacrificial ceremonies. Many historical relics as well as stone carvings from various dynasties could be found there. Taishan has also been a site of pilgrimage and worship for Buddhists, Daoists, and Confucianists, thus many temples and shrines dot the slopes of the mountain. In 1987, UNESCO listed Taishan as part of the World Natural and Cultural Heritage.
Unfortunately it needed a five hour drive to get there because it is located in Shangdong Province. To avoid an early morning hike to the mountain top to catch a glimpse of the sunrise, we opted to stay overnight at the more expensive hotel near the summit. Unfortunately the weather was not kind to us and it rained the whole time we were there! So we packed up our things again the next day and got down the mountain via chair-lift and on with another five hour drive back to Zhengzhou much to our chagrin.
On our way back we managed to stop at Qufu to visit Confucius Mansions which were built over 2,000 years ago to house Confucius’s descendents (the Kong family). The luxurious complex has more than 460 rooms, buildings and halls and was noted to be the finest residence in China after the Imperial Palace. The grandeur of the compound is testament to the power and prestige of the Kong family. They ruled the town of Qufu and its environs and had the powers of taxation and execution.
We had three more 1-day trips set up with the local travel agent, these were:
Trip #1: Luoyang with main attractions being the Longmen Grottoes and the White Horse Temple. The Longmen Grottoes, located 7 miles south of Luoyang, the area is a made up of 1,350 caves, bubbling rivers and limestone cliffs. Others believe that the Great Yu, controller of floods, split the mountain to release an imprisoned dragon, hence the name "longmen" or dragon gate. Added to nature’s gifts are more than 750 niches and 40 pagodas containing close to 100,000 statues carved from the sheer limestone. The largest of these statues stands over 17 meters (56ft) tall and the smallest is a mere 2cm (0.8 inches). The White Horse Temple, located 7 miles east of Luoyang, was built in 68AD and was the 1st Buddhist temple founded in China. This historically important temple is often referred to as the "Number One Ancient Temple in China". Legend says that two Indian monks brought Buddhist scriptures to Luoyang on white horses and the founders named the temple after this event. Many of the halls and statues found in this monastery dated back to the Yuan and Ming dynasties (1206-1644AD).
Trip#2: Yuntaishan: Covered with luxuriant original forest, Yuntai Mountain has several deep valleys and ponds, myriad waterfalls and springs, picturesque perilous cliffs and peaks, which compose the unique scenery. Tablet inscriptions of famed poets are exhibited here and they add cultural meaning to the mountain. Yuntai Mountain gains its name from history. Xiandi, Emperor of Han Dynasty, had left the resort terrace and the tomb base here. It had been the secluded place of seven Bamboo Forest Sages of the Wei and the Jin Period. Medicine King, Sun Simiao, once collected Chinese medicine here. Many historical stories are spreading in the area related to some fames once visited here.
Trip#3: Kaifeng. Kaifeng is one of the seven ancient capitals and famous historic cities. It has a history of more than 2,700 years. It was the capitals of Wei Dynasty (Warring States Period), Later Liang, Jin, Han, Zhou (Five Dynasties Period), Northern Song and Jin Dynasties. So Kaifeng is known as "the Capitals of Seven Dynasties". With its long history, splendid traditional culture, numerous cultural relics and historic sites, Kaifeng is famous in the world. Especially during the Northern Song Dynasty, boasting a population of over one million, Kaifeng was most flourishing with the inner and outer city walls magnificently built, and commodities assembled from all over the world. Kaifeng had established friendship relations with foreign countries from that time. It was not only a center of politics economy, culture of the whole country, but also one of the most prosperous capital cities in the world. So the city was known as an international metropolis.
Unfortunately the torturous windy and bumpy mountainous roads had finally caught up with us during the first one day trip. The wife of our California friend had motion sickness and she suffered serious vomiting near the end. So for the second one day trip we were down to three people. Then disaster struck and the poor sanitary condition at the restaurant where we ate our lunch finally did us in. Except for Katherine, both the male members experienced serious vomiting and diarrhea after we got back to Zhengzhou. Further exasperated by his faithful intake of the sugar-lowering medication, our diabetic friend from California was alarmingly weakened to the point that he was all ears and no response during conversations next morning. Luckily a nourishing breakfast and a cup of hot coffee eventually rejuvenated his alertness. We thus decided to forgo the third one day trip to Kaifeng for that day and opted to go directly down to Shanghai, ahead of schedule.
Onward march to Shanghai.
Since the bullet train rails from Zhengzhou to Shanghai are yet to be completed (one of the many lines to be soon added in China), we decided to take the next best train which would take about seven hours. So we bought the first class seats which are bit more spacious and comfortable. We purchased lunch boxes in the train which included a bowl of hot soup. It was fairly tasty but somehow not as delicious as the bento boxes we had on the Taiwan train several years ago. The seven hour train ride was not that bad and we finally arrived in Shanghai and hired a taxi to our hotel in the Pudong side.
I managed to hook up with a distant relative of mine living in Shanghai that evening. I had met her when I first came to China in 1978 to visit my great uncle in Beijing. She was then a teenager and her parents brought her along to meet me at my hotel in Shanghai more than forty years ago. This time she came with her husband and a grown-up son who works for a Japanese company in Shanghai. Since they were also living in the Pudong area, they came to our hotel room to pay me a courtesy visit. She was kind enough to write down for me some of the interesting places we could go bargain hunting and book shopping. Armed with that information, we went out next day to an underground shopping arcade right at the subway stop for the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum. Katherine was visibly elated when she spotted a handbag of her liking and got it with about a thirty percent discount. Soon after, however, a man from Taiwan came round to say hello because he heard our conversations in Taiwanese and he advised us that we should start the bargaining process by slashing the asking price to a third! But that didn’t dampen Katherine’s spirit as she liked her bag with that price just fine! Anyway we did get some good bargains (in our mind!) using that tactic.
Three days at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo and the most amazing coincidence.
Next day we went to the World Expo for the first time. We took the hotel shuttle bus and arrived at one of the entrance gates at 8:45 in the morning. We felt sure we were going to get into the popular China pavilion because its gate opens at 9:30 a.m. But alas, the Expo ground was already jam packed and by the time we got to the China pavilion the tickets for that day had all been handed out! We later learnt that unless you were part of a tour group, one had to come round at 6 a.m. to have a decent chance of getting that day’s ticket for the China pavilion. However, the luck was on our side! It just happened that on the second day of our Expo visit, our Zhengzhou host came down from Beijing with a group (Berkerly-Tsinghua alumni association) and they were being treated with a visit at the World Expo. Our host got creative and proposed that we tagged along the coattail of their group to gain entrance to Taiwan and China pavilions. We were successful at the China pavilion but I was ejected at the Taiwan pavilion (maybe my guilty conscience was clearly written on my forehead, because Katherine and our California friends got in just fine!)
From a casual conversation with a taxi driver, we learned later that the Shanghai municipal government gave out a free ticket to each household and a $30 transportation subsidy for the locals to attend the Expo, thus the huge crowd on the Expo ground. There were visitors from foreign lands but they were overwhelmed by the natives and appeared to be relatively insignificant in comparison. Thus, one tended to cast an extra glance when seeing a foreign face. One day while strolling along one of the Expo avenues, a white face holding a ski-like stick attracted my attention. His face was badly bruised and purple with black eyes. I approached him and said ‘I know you!’, but he registered no recognition. I then said ‘I am from Nashville’ but he said ‘no, I was in St. Louis once’, still not registering. I had no choice but to reveal the fact that we were touring Iran together two years ago! There upon his eyes lighted up and his wife came round and greeted me warmly. He and his wife were both scientists residing in Switzerland but now retired, and he had once done some research at Washington University in St. Louis during that golden age (in the ‘50s) when several of the future Nobel Laureates were doing biomedical research in that distinguished institution, including Katherine’s old boss Stanly Cohen of Vanderbilt University. One time he accompanied his wife to Hong Kong to attend a conference of her specialty, he decided to go take lessons on Chinese cooking to get rid of his boredom! Anyway I asked him about the black eyes and the bruises, he said he fell down the steps in Soochow while visiting an ancient temple-tower the day before. Soochow is renowned for producing Chinese beauties, I was too diplomatic to advance the hypothesis that he was not concentrating on the steps but side-glancing at some beautiful girls passing by! After a short chat I gripped his hand to bid farewell but he cried out ‘not so hard!’ Poor chap, travelling all the way from Switzerland to fall on the steps of ancient China! My heart went out to him.
Because of the huge crowd, one would typically wait for at least 5 hours to gain entrance to a popular pavilion such as that of Saudi Arabia. So we decided to just stroll around and took pictures as the Expo is an architectural wonderland. And thus ended our three day visit to the 2010 Shanghai Expo without seeing much of the exhibitions!
Shanghai sightseeing on our own and a delicious find.
With the helpful tips from some of our friends in Shanghai, we were able to explore the city of Shanghai on our own: A cursory stroll through a gigantic eight-floor book store called ‘Shanghai Book Town’, an afternoon visit to Shanghai Museum, a relaxing walk along the Bund, a sumptuous dinner in the rotating restaurant of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower with a panoramic view of the city of Shanghai from the top, tour and shop at Chenghuang Temple and Xin Tian Di, did some bargain hunting in underground malls, and window shopping along the trendy shops on the West Nanking Road. While in Shanghai we also took two 1-day trips, one to Hangzhou and the other to Nanking. It was too bad that rain accompanied our Hangzhou trip but the Nanking visit was fine.
One day we took the subway to the People’s Square. Without knowing, however, we stumbled into the People’s Park upon exiting the subway stop. There were people chatting, milling around, or doing Taichi exercises. There was also make-shift walls filled with advertisements and I was curious to find out what they were selling or buying. To my surprise and delight, those were mate-seeking ads mostly by old folks. I saw several which were placed by men or women over eighty. I guess this was the Chinese version of match.com for senior citizens! Some were even sitting down next to the fountain with cardboard ads in front while some interested parties were doing real-time live interviews! With a serious air I served Katherine a fair notice: next time we have a domestic hot or cold war, I am going to buy a one-way ticket and fly to Shanghai with my personal cardboard ad!
Except for some issues related to quality of life, the progress in China since my first visit in 1978 has been astonishing. One may well wonder how the inherently inefficient democratic governments of the west with high labor and runaway health care costs could effectively compete in the future with a capitalistic China of 1.3 billion hard-working people under a brutally effective regime. With that somber reflection, our exhausting month-long trip to China came to an end and we arrived home happy, ready to resume the mundane daily tennis routines.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Boston Tea and Tennis Party
Boston Tea and Tennis Party, September 2009
It has almost become a yearly ritual for this tennis nut to make a pilgrimage to New York for the US Open during late August and early September. We usually went earlier to watch the qualifying matches because we could see the players up close and the qualities of tennis were quite high. The best part for watching the qualifying rounds, however, was that they were free of charge! Another attraction for attending the US Open is the authentic Chinese foods which are sorely missed in Nashville but can easily be accessed in Flushing, which is only one subway stop away from the tournament site. Of course we also took advantage of the fact that Melvin would usually be out west participating in the music festival at Angel Fire, New Mexico, thus we could stay in his flat in Manhattan without paying exorbitant amount of hotel fees in the city.
However, we did not go for the qualifying rounds this year because a high school friend of mine, Gary, volunteered to take us to Boston to play tennis with his wife’s uncle, Ken, whom I met in a military boot camp in Taiwan nearly half a century ago. In Taiwan, all male college students must undergo 2-year compulsory military services upon graduation unless you were lucky enough to get a waiver. Fortunately I was awarded an exemption because of my severe myopia; still I was required to go through four-month long military boot camp training before being allowed to study abroad for advanced degrees. At the camp I had the good fortune of acquainting with a stiff-upper lipped gentleman (not of the British kind but of the Japanese Samurai type!). This guy impressed me greatly with his occasional browsing of the Time magazine during his leisure hours. He had been to the States twice and had a Master’s degree in meteorology from the University of Michigan. He was then an instructor at the renowned National Taiwan University. At that time my command of the English language was so pitiful that I would have hard time understanding a sentence of that magazine even with the aid of a dictionary. Thus, I idolized him to no end and he was the only one I still had a vivid impression from that camp!
About two years ago during the US Open season, Gary invited us to have dinner in Manhattan with some of his family members. During the meal he chanced to mention that his wife’s uncle used to teach meteorology at the National Taiwan University. So I queried to see if he could be my idol at the boot camp and voila he was the one and only! In this way we got reconnected, thus Ken and I have been emailing back and forth since and I found out he also plays tennis. One day in July a snarl mail from Gary arrived in our mailbox and in it he suggested that if I would attend the US Open this year he would take us to Boston on September the 4th to see Ken and to play tennis with him there. I jumped at the idea because I would then have an excuse to visit my niece Joyce and her husband BY near Boston and to stay in their luxurious house in Lincoln! And this was how the Boston tea and tennis party came about.
9/2/2009: Arrival in the Big Apple, supper with Milo and Karin.
The flight from Nashville to La Guardia was uneventful and we arrived in New York ahead of schedule, quite an unusual feat these days. We then took a taxi to Melvin’s flat and had a simple lunch nearby before settling down to watch on wide-screen TV some US Open matches which were already well into the second round. We were also anxiously waiting for the arrival of our sweet grandson Milo and his mom from West Point. This would be our only chance to see him because Karin’s school had already started. They came around 6 and we rode the subway together to the restaurant recommended by Karin but when we got there we found it to be no longer in business. We walked back along the street to find another restaurant called ‘Saigon Grille’ which was about ten blocks away. Milo had boundless amount of energy, he would keep running from behind to touch and scare me. By the time we got to the restaurant he was tired, hungry, and ready to eat. We had a decent meal and when I was about to sign the bill with my credit card he said he wanted to do it. I told him he couldn’t because he didn’t have a credit card. To my infinite surprise he responded matter-of-factly that he could use his mother’s! He was only 2 and ½ years old and my advice to his parents would be ‘watch out!’ Afterwards Karin took Milo to stay at her parents’ house in New Jersey, and we went back to the flat to watch more tennis matches.
9/3/09: A day at the Open.
Since this would be the only day we could devote our full measure at the US Open, we woke up early in the morning and were at the subway stop around 9 a.m. Armed with the Metro day passes which allow unlimited subway rides, we took the #1 train to Time Square and then transferred to the #7 train. Instead of getting off at the USTA tennis center, the site of the US Open, we went one stop further to Flushing to have our Chinese-style breakfast. After the bellies were full, we purchased some take-outs for our lunch because the food-stands at the US Open site were unreasonably expensive. At the box office of the Open I had to decide whether I should only purchase the ground pass ($60) or adding Arthur Ashe Stadium which is an extra $15 that day. Cognizant of the fact that the first match at the Stadium was the ever-so-consistent #4-seeded Dementieva against a 17-year old American teenager who got in by a wild card privilege; I made the fatal blunder of not spending the extra $30 for the Stadium seats thinking it would be a washout. Upon entering the site and at the American Express booth we picked up free radios which allow one to clip on one’s ear and listen to matches at several other courts. While strolling around the ground watching matches at various outside courts, my ear was tuned to the play-by-play action in the Stadium. It turned out the match was not only exciting but appeared to be a gigantic upset in the making. Unfortunately all gates to the Stadium were guarded and I had no way of gaining entrance to witness the biggest upset of the tournament. So the take home lesson for me: Do not underestimate anyone and don’t be too stingy or you might miss something huge and come to regret for the rest of your life!
The American teenager subsequently defeated the million-dollar screaming baby Sharapova and Amazon-like Petrova, whom were all seeded players. Along with her first Russian victim in the first round, the American teenager Melanie Oudin had suddenly become the giant killer, downing four Russian ladies in a row! Unfortunately the Cinderella story was eventually ended at the quarter final level by a 19-year old Dane Wozniake who reached the final but was defeated by Clijsters, the mother of an 18-month old baby girl! These and the profanity-laced outburst to a line judge by Serena and the lost of Roger to Del Potro in the men’s final were some of the highlights of this year’s US Open.
In the evening, we were back to Flushing again but this time was to have dinner with my cousin Kathy and her husband. This was to make amends for the invitation mishap to Irwin’s wedding, I phoned and told her about it but somehow Irwin forgot to send out the invitation to her. After the dinner we took the subway back to the apartment and watched the night sessions of the Open on TV before hitting the hays.
9/04/09: On Road to Boston and a get-together dinner.
Gary and his wife Su came to the apartment to pick us up around 10 a.m. and we were on our way to Boston! Su brought along stuffed rice balls and drinks, so we had a lunch picnic at a rest area on one of the highways. We had a very pleasant drive mainly on parkways which were lined with soothing green trees. We reminisced about family stories of Ken, Gary, and some mutual friends, and before you knew it we were in the Boston area! We managed to find Joyce’s house without a GPS, quite an accomplishment indeed! We were welcomed into her impressive house and had some watermelons before Gary and Su headed for Ken’s house in Lexington which was only about a 10-minute drive.
In the evening Joyce and BY drove us to the “Bernard’s Chinese Restaurant” which was located inside an upscale shopping mall in the suburb of Boston. We were later joined by Gary, Su, Ken and his wife to have dinner there. I was the host of this get-together dinner because I wanted to express my appreciation to Ken and his wife for their invitation to come to Boston for a tennis party, to Gary and Su for their red-carpet door-to-door car services, and to Joyce and BY for providing us with free room and board during our tenure in the Boston area. We had a nice dinner with dishes especially selected for us by the manager whom BY knew quite well, as he dined and wined his firm’s clients there quite often. Despite the restaurant’s name the dishes turned out to be quite authentically Chinese! So the Boston Tea Party got to a belly-filling start.
9/5/09: Tennis in an air force base and a Taiwanese dinner feast.
After a nice breakfast prepared by both Joyce and BY, they dropped us off at Ken’s house. We then packed into Ken’s van along with his tennis-playing Taiwanese neighbor Dr. Lee and headed for the tennis courts. The reason we had to get into Ken’s van was because we needed his ID/credential to get into the restricted base where Ken had devoted his lifetime doing weather research for the air force since receiving his doctorate from the University of Michigan. This airfield had been used in landing the presidential jets for various historical occasions in Boston, such as Obama’s attendance at the recent Edward Kennedy’s funeral services. Later we also found out that Dr. Lee’s sister was a classmate of Katherine in college and they are related to the now retired head of the National Academy of Sciences in Taiwan who was known for his considerable prowess in tennis. We played some doubles with Ken’s six other old tennis buddies in a bubble which was actually quite nice since the gates could be rolled up to let in fresh air, blending in both indoor and outdoor advantages. After the tennis, Ken took us to have some sushi in a Japanese restaurant for lunch. We then went back to Joyce’s place to have showers and naps
In the evening we all went to Ken’s house for a Taiwanese feast. We started by each attacking a big Maine lobster as an appetizer. While we were enjoying our lobsters outdoor on the deck, mosquitoes were also busy sucking bloods from the ladies with tender skins and higher body temperatures. So we retreated to inside the house to enjoy the rest of the feast. We sat around a dinner table full of cooked vegetable, meats, shrimps, and crushed peanuts and they were to be placed on thin wrappers with high tensile strength made of a special kind of flour. It’s a Taiwanese delicacy and was quite tasty. We were then treated with some delicious home-made desserts prepared by Ken’s wife, an excellent cook. Would you believe she once demonstrated oriental cooking for Julia Child, the American icon of French cooking?!
9/6/09: Tennis in the park and dinner in a nice Japanese restaurant.
In the morning we along with Ken and BY went to a park to play some tennis. There were ten courts in a very nice setting with generous dose of tree shades. Risking a divorce, Katherine and I teamed up to play against Ken and BY. Katherine stood up quite well to the gentlemen but they soon discovered where the weak link was and exploited it relentlessly. I am ashamed to say I missed most of the balls coming my way and as a consequence lost in a 3-set match, still the morning outing was very enjoyable. After dropping Ken at his house we went back to take showers and rested a bit. Then I recalled a friend of mine during my years in Vancouver, Canada while I was doing post-doctoral research at the University of British Columbia. He was in fact my office mate working with the same professor and he now is residing in the Boston area. I gave him a ring and he was surprised and asked me where I was and ‘Lincoln’ was my reply. He said his office was in Lincoln and he just happened to be on his way to his office to do some work despite its being Sunday. So he came over to BY’s house and we finally met after about 40 years. We had light lunch together at BY’s house and did some more catching up. It turned out he has been working in a research lab inside the air base where we played tennis just the day before. After a couple of hours’ pleasant chats we bade farewell and he went back to the air base to do some work.
Joyce and BY wanted to be the hosts of this evening’s farewell dinner in a nice Japanese restaurant and they invited Gary, Su, Ken and his wife to come to the house earlier around 4 p.m. Upon their arrival I suggested that BY gave the guests a grand tour of his grand house. It turned out BY helped design his own dream house so he was able to explain to us the intricacies of various architectural subtleties of the house. We started with the basement floor which housed the activity rooms including an entertaining center with video projector and a theater-sized screen, a billiard table, a guest bed room, a golf practicing area with a net set, and a professional ballroom studio complete with a wall mirror. Then we moved up to the ground floor which consisted of a grand entrance facing the wedding-style spiral staircases, a large kitchen and eating area, a formal dining room, a TV area with Karaoke facilities, a music room with piano (a baby grand, by the way Joyce is quite an accomplished amateur pianist), and a well-stocked library section which is my favorite. The next floor is the living area which Joyce refused to let the guests walk through (because of tidiness or lack of it?) except for a very nice spacious room above the garage with a big desk, leathered sofa, and some video facilities. The house is quite magnificent in the eyes of this hillbilly from Tennessee, with about 9000 sq. ft. of living space and very elegant decors. Although I was aware of the fact that BY graduated summa cum laude from his university class in electrical engineering, I didn’t realize he is such a multi-faceted talent. He thrives to excel in everything he does, be it academic, business, dancing, singing, golf, or tennis. If there were to be a minor complain from me it would have been his inability to converse in Taiwanese despite his being born and raised in that island. Even this was soon forgiven and forgotten with his wonderful rendition of Taiwanese love songs singing duet with his Taiwanese-speaking partner and outshining her! We had so much fun in the house that two hours had quietly gone by without notice.
At around 6 p.m. we packed into two cars and headed for the Japanese restaurant. The foods were excellent and the waitress friendly, just happened to be another Taiwanese! Ken and Joyce ordered some ice-cold Sake (Japanese rice wine), I thought Sake had to be warm and was also surprised that the mild mannered Joyce could out drink her uncle yours truly! It must be the effect of Sake that Ken started to loosen up and talk more freely, so I follow suit by talking nonsense and kidding him around mercilessly. I imitated his Samurai air while reading Time magazine or playing tennis. I kidded him about his strange courtship of writing love letters to his future wife who was still in Taiwan in English rather than in Chinese or Japanese which they both were well versed. Fortunately Ken was in good spirit and a good sport about it all. So we had a riotous evening together before our return to the Big Apple next morning.
9/7/09: Return trip to the Big Apple and dinner with some high school friends.
At around 8:20 a.m. we got all things packed and ready for Gary and Su to come pick us up at 8:30. Thinking there were still 10 minutes to spare I decided to go to the toilet to do my last bidding: to discharge some of last night’s delicious foods. After a few minutes of struggle I could feel something on the way but before it could see the daylight I heard the chiming of the door bell, so I immediately stopped the process and ran down the stairs to bid farewell to Joyce and BY and headed for NYC.
We took a different route back because Gary wanted us to meet some high school friends living in the New Jersey area for lunch. It took about 4 hours to get to the restaurant and when we arrived we discovered that there were 6 classmates along with their spouses. The foods were too plentiful for a lunch and I volunteered to pay our own shares but they refused. I felt somewhat uneasy because I didn’t know some of the people well enough to feel comfortable having them share the costs of our meal. I felt a certain sense of imposition on them even though I didn’t have such compunction towards my niece Joyce because unlucky for her I am the only A-gu (uncle) she has on her mother’s side! In the evening Irwin and Aya, who was carrying our second grandson due at the month’s end, came all the way from Brooklyn to have dinner with us in a Thai restaurant just across the street from the flat. We were glad to see Aya doing fine and showing no fear of the impending childbirth.
9/8/09: Watching US Open on TV.
We could have gone to the US Open today, but judged from the exponential rise on the ticket price as the final drew closer we decided to stay in the flat to watch the matches in the comfort of sofa and big TV screen. We bought take-outs for lunch as well as supper and spent the whole day in front of the tube. Actually it was quite enjoyable and I was thrilled by some exciting matches. Next day we flew back to Nashville, thus ended the splendid weekend in Boston and resumed my boring daily routines at home! There is, however, one fall-out from this otherwise very nice trip, i.e. the frequent reminder from Katherine about the virtue of a big-screen TV and I have no choice but to practice my selective hearing from time to time!
It has almost become a yearly ritual for this tennis nut to make a pilgrimage to New York for the US Open during late August and early September. We usually went earlier to watch the qualifying matches because we could see the players up close and the qualities of tennis were quite high. The best part for watching the qualifying rounds, however, was that they were free of charge! Another attraction for attending the US Open is the authentic Chinese foods which are sorely missed in Nashville but can easily be accessed in Flushing, which is only one subway stop away from the tournament site. Of course we also took advantage of the fact that Melvin would usually be out west participating in the music festival at Angel Fire, New Mexico, thus we could stay in his flat in Manhattan without paying exorbitant amount of hotel fees in the city.
However, we did not go for the qualifying rounds this year because a high school friend of mine, Gary, volunteered to take us to Boston to play tennis with his wife’s uncle, Ken, whom I met in a military boot camp in Taiwan nearly half a century ago. In Taiwan, all male college students must undergo 2-year compulsory military services upon graduation unless you were lucky enough to get a waiver. Fortunately I was awarded an exemption because of my severe myopia; still I was required to go through four-month long military boot camp training before being allowed to study abroad for advanced degrees. At the camp I had the good fortune of acquainting with a stiff-upper lipped gentleman (not of the British kind but of the Japanese Samurai type!). This guy impressed me greatly with his occasional browsing of the Time magazine during his leisure hours. He had been to the States twice and had a Master’s degree in meteorology from the University of Michigan. He was then an instructor at the renowned National Taiwan University. At that time my command of the English language was so pitiful that I would have hard time understanding a sentence of that magazine even with the aid of a dictionary. Thus, I idolized him to no end and he was the only one I still had a vivid impression from that camp!
About two years ago during the US Open season, Gary invited us to have dinner in Manhattan with some of his family members. During the meal he chanced to mention that his wife’s uncle used to teach meteorology at the National Taiwan University. So I queried to see if he could be my idol at the boot camp and voila he was the one and only! In this way we got reconnected, thus Ken and I have been emailing back and forth since and I found out he also plays tennis. One day in July a snarl mail from Gary arrived in our mailbox and in it he suggested that if I would attend the US Open this year he would take us to Boston on September the 4th to see Ken and to play tennis with him there. I jumped at the idea because I would then have an excuse to visit my niece Joyce and her husband BY near Boston and to stay in their luxurious house in Lincoln! And this was how the Boston tea and tennis party came about.
9/2/2009: Arrival in the Big Apple, supper with Milo and Karin.
The flight from Nashville to La Guardia was uneventful and we arrived in New York ahead of schedule, quite an unusual feat these days. We then took a taxi to Melvin’s flat and had a simple lunch nearby before settling down to watch on wide-screen TV some US Open matches which were already well into the second round. We were also anxiously waiting for the arrival of our sweet grandson Milo and his mom from West Point. This would be our only chance to see him because Karin’s school had already started. They came around 6 and we rode the subway together to the restaurant recommended by Karin but when we got there we found it to be no longer in business. We walked back along the street to find another restaurant called ‘Saigon Grille’ which was about ten blocks away. Milo had boundless amount of energy, he would keep running from behind to touch and scare me. By the time we got to the restaurant he was tired, hungry, and ready to eat. We had a decent meal and when I was about to sign the bill with my credit card he said he wanted to do it. I told him he couldn’t because he didn’t have a credit card. To my infinite surprise he responded matter-of-factly that he could use his mother’s! He was only 2 and ½ years old and my advice to his parents would be ‘watch out!’ Afterwards Karin took Milo to stay at her parents’ house in New Jersey, and we went back to the flat to watch more tennis matches.
9/3/09: A day at the Open.
Since this would be the only day we could devote our full measure at the US Open, we woke up early in the morning and were at the subway stop around 9 a.m. Armed with the Metro day passes which allow unlimited subway rides, we took the #1 train to Time Square and then transferred to the #7 train. Instead of getting off at the USTA tennis center, the site of the US Open, we went one stop further to Flushing to have our Chinese-style breakfast. After the bellies were full, we purchased some take-outs for our lunch because the food-stands at the US Open site were unreasonably expensive. At the box office of the Open I had to decide whether I should only purchase the ground pass ($60) or adding Arthur Ashe Stadium which is an extra $15 that day. Cognizant of the fact that the first match at the Stadium was the ever-so-consistent #4-seeded Dementieva against a 17-year old American teenager who got in by a wild card privilege; I made the fatal blunder of not spending the extra $30 for the Stadium seats thinking it would be a washout. Upon entering the site and at the American Express booth we picked up free radios which allow one to clip on one’s ear and listen to matches at several other courts. While strolling around the ground watching matches at various outside courts, my ear was tuned to the play-by-play action in the Stadium. It turned out the match was not only exciting but appeared to be a gigantic upset in the making. Unfortunately all gates to the Stadium were guarded and I had no way of gaining entrance to witness the biggest upset of the tournament. So the take home lesson for me: Do not underestimate anyone and don’t be too stingy or you might miss something huge and come to regret for the rest of your life!
The American teenager subsequently defeated the million-dollar screaming baby Sharapova and Amazon-like Petrova, whom were all seeded players. Along with her first Russian victim in the first round, the American teenager Melanie Oudin had suddenly become the giant killer, downing four Russian ladies in a row! Unfortunately the Cinderella story was eventually ended at the quarter final level by a 19-year old Dane Wozniake who reached the final but was defeated by Clijsters, the mother of an 18-month old baby girl! These and the profanity-laced outburst to a line judge by Serena and the lost of Roger to Del Potro in the men’s final were some of the highlights of this year’s US Open.
In the evening, we were back to Flushing again but this time was to have dinner with my cousin Kathy and her husband. This was to make amends for the invitation mishap to Irwin’s wedding, I phoned and told her about it but somehow Irwin forgot to send out the invitation to her. After the dinner we took the subway back to the apartment and watched the night sessions of the Open on TV before hitting the hays.
9/04/09: On Road to Boston and a get-together dinner.
Gary and his wife Su came to the apartment to pick us up around 10 a.m. and we were on our way to Boston! Su brought along stuffed rice balls and drinks, so we had a lunch picnic at a rest area on one of the highways. We had a very pleasant drive mainly on parkways which were lined with soothing green trees. We reminisced about family stories of Ken, Gary, and some mutual friends, and before you knew it we were in the Boston area! We managed to find Joyce’s house without a GPS, quite an accomplishment indeed! We were welcomed into her impressive house and had some watermelons before Gary and Su headed for Ken’s house in Lexington which was only about a 10-minute drive.
In the evening Joyce and BY drove us to the “Bernard’s Chinese Restaurant” which was located inside an upscale shopping mall in the suburb of Boston. We were later joined by Gary, Su, Ken and his wife to have dinner there. I was the host of this get-together dinner because I wanted to express my appreciation to Ken and his wife for their invitation to come to Boston for a tennis party, to Gary and Su for their red-carpet door-to-door car services, and to Joyce and BY for providing us with free room and board during our tenure in the Boston area. We had a nice dinner with dishes especially selected for us by the manager whom BY knew quite well, as he dined and wined his firm’s clients there quite often. Despite the restaurant’s name the dishes turned out to be quite authentically Chinese! So the Boston Tea Party got to a belly-filling start.
9/5/09: Tennis in an air force base and a Taiwanese dinner feast.
After a nice breakfast prepared by both Joyce and BY, they dropped us off at Ken’s house. We then packed into Ken’s van along with his tennis-playing Taiwanese neighbor Dr. Lee and headed for the tennis courts. The reason we had to get into Ken’s van was because we needed his ID/credential to get into the restricted base where Ken had devoted his lifetime doing weather research for the air force since receiving his doctorate from the University of Michigan. This airfield had been used in landing the presidential jets for various historical occasions in Boston, such as Obama’s attendance at the recent Edward Kennedy’s funeral services. Later we also found out that Dr. Lee’s sister was a classmate of Katherine in college and they are related to the now retired head of the National Academy of Sciences in Taiwan who was known for his considerable prowess in tennis. We played some doubles with Ken’s six other old tennis buddies in a bubble which was actually quite nice since the gates could be rolled up to let in fresh air, blending in both indoor and outdoor advantages. After the tennis, Ken took us to have some sushi in a Japanese restaurant for lunch. We then went back to Joyce’s place to have showers and naps
In the evening we all went to Ken’s house for a Taiwanese feast. We started by each attacking a big Maine lobster as an appetizer. While we were enjoying our lobsters outdoor on the deck, mosquitoes were also busy sucking bloods from the ladies with tender skins and higher body temperatures. So we retreated to inside the house to enjoy the rest of the feast. We sat around a dinner table full of cooked vegetable, meats, shrimps, and crushed peanuts and they were to be placed on thin wrappers with high tensile strength made of a special kind of flour. It’s a Taiwanese delicacy and was quite tasty. We were then treated with some delicious home-made desserts prepared by Ken’s wife, an excellent cook. Would you believe she once demonstrated oriental cooking for Julia Child, the American icon of French cooking?!
9/6/09: Tennis in the park and dinner in a nice Japanese restaurant.
In the morning we along with Ken and BY went to a park to play some tennis. There were ten courts in a very nice setting with generous dose of tree shades. Risking a divorce, Katherine and I teamed up to play against Ken and BY. Katherine stood up quite well to the gentlemen but they soon discovered where the weak link was and exploited it relentlessly. I am ashamed to say I missed most of the balls coming my way and as a consequence lost in a 3-set match, still the morning outing was very enjoyable. After dropping Ken at his house we went back to take showers and rested a bit. Then I recalled a friend of mine during my years in Vancouver, Canada while I was doing post-doctoral research at the University of British Columbia. He was in fact my office mate working with the same professor and he now is residing in the Boston area. I gave him a ring and he was surprised and asked me where I was and ‘Lincoln’ was my reply. He said his office was in Lincoln and he just happened to be on his way to his office to do some work despite its being Sunday. So he came over to BY’s house and we finally met after about 40 years. We had light lunch together at BY’s house and did some more catching up. It turned out he has been working in a research lab inside the air base where we played tennis just the day before. After a couple of hours’ pleasant chats we bade farewell and he went back to the air base to do some work.
Joyce and BY wanted to be the hosts of this evening’s farewell dinner in a nice Japanese restaurant and they invited Gary, Su, Ken and his wife to come to the house earlier around 4 p.m. Upon their arrival I suggested that BY gave the guests a grand tour of his grand house. It turned out BY helped design his own dream house so he was able to explain to us the intricacies of various architectural subtleties of the house. We started with the basement floor which housed the activity rooms including an entertaining center with video projector and a theater-sized screen, a billiard table, a guest bed room, a golf practicing area with a net set, and a professional ballroom studio complete with a wall mirror. Then we moved up to the ground floor which consisted of a grand entrance facing the wedding-style spiral staircases, a large kitchen and eating area, a formal dining room, a TV area with Karaoke facilities, a music room with piano (a baby grand, by the way Joyce is quite an accomplished amateur pianist), and a well-stocked library section which is my favorite. The next floor is the living area which Joyce refused to let the guests walk through (because of tidiness or lack of it?) except for a very nice spacious room above the garage with a big desk, leathered sofa, and some video facilities. The house is quite magnificent in the eyes of this hillbilly from Tennessee, with about 9000 sq. ft. of living space and very elegant decors. Although I was aware of the fact that BY graduated summa cum laude from his university class in electrical engineering, I didn’t realize he is such a multi-faceted talent. He thrives to excel in everything he does, be it academic, business, dancing, singing, golf, or tennis. If there were to be a minor complain from me it would have been his inability to converse in Taiwanese despite his being born and raised in that island. Even this was soon forgiven and forgotten with his wonderful rendition of Taiwanese love songs singing duet with his Taiwanese-speaking partner and outshining her! We had so much fun in the house that two hours had quietly gone by without notice.
At around 6 p.m. we packed into two cars and headed for the Japanese restaurant. The foods were excellent and the waitress friendly, just happened to be another Taiwanese! Ken and Joyce ordered some ice-cold Sake (Japanese rice wine), I thought Sake had to be warm and was also surprised that the mild mannered Joyce could out drink her uncle yours truly! It must be the effect of Sake that Ken started to loosen up and talk more freely, so I follow suit by talking nonsense and kidding him around mercilessly. I imitated his Samurai air while reading Time magazine or playing tennis. I kidded him about his strange courtship of writing love letters to his future wife who was still in Taiwan in English rather than in Chinese or Japanese which they both were well versed. Fortunately Ken was in good spirit and a good sport about it all. So we had a riotous evening together before our return to the Big Apple next morning.
9/7/09: Return trip to the Big Apple and dinner with some high school friends.
At around 8:20 a.m. we got all things packed and ready for Gary and Su to come pick us up at 8:30. Thinking there were still 10 minutes to spare I decided to go to the toilet to do my last bidding: to discharge some of last night’s delicious foods. After a few minutes of struggle I could feel something on the way but before it could see the daylight I heard the chiming of the door bell, so I immediately stopped the process and ran down the stairs to bid farewell to Joyce and BY and headed for NYC.
We took a different route back because Gary wanted us to meet some high school friends living in the New Jersey area for lunch. It took about 4 hours to get to the restaurant and when we arrived we discovered that there were 6 classmates along with their spouses. The foods were too plentiful for a lunch and I volunteered to pay our own shares but they refused. I felt somewhat uneasy because I didn’t know some of the people well enough to feel comfortable having them share the costs of our meal. I felt a certain sense of imposition on them even though I didn’t have such compunction towards my niece Joyce because unlucky for her I am the only A-gu (uncle) she has on her mother’s side! In the evening Irwin and Aya, who was carrying our second grandson due at the month’s end, came all the way from Brooklyn to have dinner with us in a Thai restaurant just across the street from the flat. We were glad to see Aya doing fine and showing no fear of the impending childbirth.
9/8/09: Watching US Open on TV.
We could have gone to the US Open today, but judged from the exponential rise on the ticket price as the final drew closer we decided to stay in the flat to watch the matches in the comfort of sofa and big TV screen. We bought take-outs for lunch as well as supper and spent the whole day in front of the tube. Actually it was quite enjoyable and I was thrilled by some exciting matches. Next day we flew back to Nashville, thus ended the splendid weekend in Boston and resumed my boring daily routines at home! There is, however, one fall-out from this otherwise very nice trip, i.e. the frequent reminder from Katherine about the virtue of a big-screen TV and I have no choice but to practice my selective hearing from time to time!
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
A Short Trip to India
The Trip to India, June 2009
Why India and why in June?
The short answer is ‘saving’ and the longer one is the fact that the magnificent image of Taj Mahal has been haunting me for ages and I vowed to view it in person within my lifetime. So when I saw the special discount offered by Friendly Planet on a week-long visit to India termed ‘Taj Mahal Express’ ($999 including round trip airfare from JFK) which appeared in the Travelzoo Top 20 newsletter, I jumped right in. The newsletter is put out weekly by Travelzoo.com, highlighting some of the travel discounts offered by various vendors each week. I signed up for the newsletter years ago because I was awarded a free share of the company’s stock for doing so and I was dreaming of getting rich one day! Unfortunately I have no idea where my share is and how much it is worth right now! I picked the departure date of June 8 because the French Open would end on the 7th! It seemed a perfect vacation for this tennis nut before the start of another grand slam (Wimbledon) a week after my return and there would be time enough to nurse the jet-lag upon my return! To my infinite dismay, however, a few days after I paid for the tour in full a more attractive offer with exactly the same price and with better accommodations along with free optional side tours was being offered by another travel outfit called Smar Tours which also appeared in the same newsletter! Well, that’s life and I had no choice but to swallow the bitter pill!
A respite before the long journey.
Since our one and only precious grandson Milo (but Aya is giving us another one in the Fall!) lives in New York, we made every effort and excuse to go see him whenever we could, lest he forgets the grandparents living in the distant Nashville. So we decided to go a couple of days earlier to spend a weekend in NYC. We stayed at Aya’s place and had a couple of meals together with our immediate family. Aside from seeing Milo and having a proper rest before the long journey, we also enjoyed watching the final of the French Open on TV witnessing my favorite player Roger (my alias in the tennis club!) capturing the elusive clay title for the first time with tears of joys in his eyes, nicely culminating the two weeks of tennis which I followed religiously! I also followed the final rounds of the Van Cliburn Piano Competition via its webcast and learned of the awarding of gold medals to a 20-year old blind pianist from Japan and a 19-year old Chinese pianist studying at Curtis. On Monday Melvin picked us up from Aya’s flat and dropped us off at JFK for our long flight to Delhi via Air India.
The non-eventful long plane ride.
The flight from JFK to Delhi was about 14 hours. Thank God it was a direct flight; otherwise it could have taken us the whole 24 hours! Nothing much we could do in the plane except watching movies. Fortunately the movie selections were not bad, with some old classics and recent releases. So the 14-hour stretch was taken care of by watching 4 movies, occasional naps, and meals. As to the Indian food, I was well prepared on that score. Realizing it could be a problem with my body adjusting to foreign foods with strange spices, I had the foresight to train my stomach getting used to them. A month before the trip we went to Bombay Palace, an Indian restaurant in Nashville strongly recommended by an Indian professor of theology at Vanderbilt and my occasional tennis nemesis. The first time I got a terrible diarrhea which kept me awake the whole night rushing to the toilet. Not ready to give up, we went the second time a few days later and it improved considerably except for the occasional pungent farts released. The third time was the charm and not even one single fart, pungent or not, was generated. So the Indian food on the plane didn’t bother me a bit and I passed the test with flying color!
It is hot!
I don’t mean the Indian spices; I am talking about the weather! We arrived in Delhi with great anticipation and were met by the local representatives of the Friendly Planet. The first thing hit you when you walked out of the airport to board the bus was the suffocating heat, it was around 110F! The heat was almost unbearable for the entire trip especially during the outdoor walking tours under the scorching sun and Katherine would rather forgo seeing some interesting sites than suffering the terrible heat! Fortunately the bus was air-conditioned and after the ½ -hour bus ride we checked into the LaLit Hotel which was unexpectedly luxurious with the bargain price we paid for the tour. It turned out June is one of the hottest months and thus we have come to India during the off-season with the bargain price!
Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur
. These are the three cities we visited which constitute the Golden Triangle of the northern India. Agra is best known as the location of the Taj Mahal, the single most important sight a visitor to India can see. This structure was ordered built by Emperor Shah Jahan for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to their 14th child. It took some 20,000 laborers 22 years to build using white marbles decorated with elaborate patterns of semiprecious stones (heavy Persian influence). A reflecting pool adorned with classical gardens lay in front of the magnificent building. We also visited Agra Fort, built under the Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1565, containing numerous palaces and a white marble mosque. Itmad-ud-Daulah’s tomb also known as the ‘baby Taj Mahal’ was another site visited and it was the first Mughal structure totally built from marble.
Jaipur is famous for the unusual rose-colored sandstone architecture that gives the city its nickname, the Pink City. The early 18th-century Jantar Mantar is the largest and best preserved of the five observatories built by astronomer Prince Jai Singh II. The prince had the huge stone structures built to measure time, chart the declination of celestial bodies, and predict eclipses. The other attraction was the City Palace/Museum, which was once a beautiful royal residence. We also made a photo stop at Hawa Mahal, the Palace of the Winds, Jaipur’s signature building and is famous for its beehive-like structure. However, the highlight of the Jaipur visit was the elephant ride up the hill to see the 18-century Amber Palace and Fort for which I have photos to prove it!
Delhi is the capital of India and actually consists of two separate cities. The old city of Delhi, which the Mughuts built and lived in; and New Delhi, built by the British and expanded since independence in 1947. We visited Red Fort, Qutub Minor, and India Gate. The Fort has Diwan-e-am and Dwan-e-Khas where the king granted audiences to the public and to important people, respectively. Qutub Minar is a tall and magnificent structure built by Muslim King Qutub-un-din Aibak in 1199 A.D. India Gate, a 42 meter high structure is a war memorial in honor of soldiers who died during the second World War.
Some memorable personages and coincidences.
There were a total of three buses hired by the Friendly Planet to transport us around and we were with the #1 bus. Since nearly all of us learned about the tour via travelzoo.com, the demographic make-up of the group is very representative of the US population. Unlike the Vantage Tours we had taken before which are mostly geared to older and more affluent populace, we had a younger and more bargain-seeking crowd on this trip. There were about 25 people in our bus and we got to know some of them better during the course of our tour.
We established a bit of kinship with an expatriated Iranian couple from Texas because we were in Iran about a year ago. He was in the Ph.D. program at Texas A & M University with a teaching assistant post in the Industrial Engineering department and nearly completed the degree requirements when the Islamic revolution (about 30 years ago) started in Iran and the American embassy occupied and hostages taken. Shortly after, he received a letter from the University informing him that his service was no longer needed. Out of desperation he started buying some used cars and refurbishing them for resale, even though he knew very little about car engines at that time. Slowly and surely he got a foothold in that college town and eventually ended up owning a big junkyard and a sizable car repair garage. Later on his wife also opened up a child-care facility and operated for a few years. Now they sold their businesses and are wealthy enough to own a house in Esfahan (a beautiful city in Iran) and commuting back and forth from Texas. The couple started traveling because their two daughters are now happily married and residing in the States. We were all anxiously trying to find out the election result in Iran on Sunday; unfortunately our hotel in Jaipur didn’t carry CNN or BBC World News. Thus we had to wait until we got back to Delhi to find out the sham result!
And then there was a young man of oriental face seating a few rows behind us. When our local guide walked past his seat in the bus he started talking to him in Hindu, quite a strange sight indeed! As a matter of fact he carried a big Hindu dictionary with him on this trip. At another occasion I saw and heard him talking to the Iranian couple in Farsi and someone told me he knew 7 or 8 languages. Later on we chanced to talked to him in private and found out that he is a 5th year medical resident at the UCLA hospital and his parents are Chinese from Hong Kong and are now living in New York. The reason he could speak Farsi is because there is a large population of Iranian Jews in California and LA in particular which he had constant contact in the hospital! When we told him we were from Nashville, he said “my god, I went to Vanderbilt Medical School!” He knew of Dr. Stanley Cohen, Katherine’s boss at the medical center and a Nobel Prize winner. What a small world and what a coincidence! So one night when we three were having dinner together in a restaurant, being the white-haired elder I felt obligated to take care of the young and bought him a dinner.
Talking about coincidences, at the farewell dinner (the only free meal provided by the Friendly Planet) in a nice restaurant in Delhi, I was sitting in front of a young black lady from Martinique (the birth place of Napoleon’s Josephine) who is currently teaching French and Spanish in a Virginia high school. I asked her where she went to school in the US and she said ‘State University of New York at Stony Brook’. Then I recalled asking the young Chinese doctor earlier why he decided to go to Vanderbilt Medical School and his reply was because it offered him a full scholarship. Thinking that he might have graduated with summa cum laude from some university, I asked him where he did his undergraduate and he replied ‘SUNY at Stony Brook’. And I also recalled that one of the ladies in the group is an engineer working for Raytheon in Massachusetts making Patriot missiles and I remembered asking her if she graduated from MIT but she replied in the negative and pronounced herself to be a graduate of SUNY at Stony Brook. So I single-handed brought those three to have a mini reunion in a restaurant in the faraway land of India and the city of Delhi, what an impossible probability of having 3 out of a group of 25 to graduate from the same school!
Street vendors and the ugly Americans.
Since we had been to places such as Brazil, Cambodia, and Egypt we were pretty much used to the aggressive street vendors selling gifts to tourists. Yet the ones in India seemed much more tenacious and would not take ‘no’ for an answer. It appeared that the persistency is directly proportional to the extent of poverty in a country. But some in our group got upset at times and yelled out loud ‘NO!’ or ‘get away!’ to their faces. The lack of compassions and rowdy behaviors reminded me of the book published years ago entitled ‘The Ugly Americans’! We were indeed terrible ambassadors for our country! If you were a skillful bargainer like me, you could get some good buys on gifts from this huge and colorful country. I believe I got some good bargains, rescuing Katherine from paying too much on some items.
So here it is, my report on our short and interesting trip to India (actually only 5 days because we lost two days on air flights!).
Why India and why in June?
The short answer is ‘saving’ and the longer one is the fact that the magnificent image of Taj Mahal has been haunting me for ages and I vowed to view it in person within my lifetime. So when I saw the special discount offered by Friendly Planet on a week-long visit to India termed ‘Taj Mahal Express’ ($999 including round trip airfare from JFK) which appeared in the Travelzoo Top 20 newsletter, I jumped right in. The newsletter is put out weekly by Travelzoo.com, highlighting some of the travel discounts offered by various vendors each week. I signed up for the newsletter years ago because I was awarded a free share of the company’s stock for doing so and I was dreaming of getting rich one day! Unfortunately I have no idea where my share is and how much it is worth right now! I picked the departure date of June 8 because the French Open would end on the 7th! It seemed a perfect vacation for this tennis nut before the start of another grand slam (Wimbledon) a week after my return and there would be time enough to nurse the jet-lag upon my return! To my infinite dismay, however, a few days after I paid for the tour in full a more attractive offer with exactly the same price and with better accommodations along with free optional side tours was being offered by another travel outfit called Smar Tours which also appeared in the same newsletter! Well, that’s life and I had no choice but to swallow the bitter pill!
A respite before the long journey.
Since our one and only precious grandson Milo (but Aya is giving us another one in the Fall!) lives in New York, we made every effort and excuse to go see him whenever we could, lest he forgets the grandparents living in the distant Nashville. So we decided to go a couple of days earlier to spend a weekend in NYC. We stayed at Aya’s place and had a couple of meals together with our immediate family. Aside from seeing Milo and having a proper rest before the long journey, we also enjoyed watching the final of the French Open on TV witnessing my favorite player Roger (my alias in the tennis club!) capturing the elusive clay title for the first time with tears of joys in his eyes, nicely culminating the two weeks of tennis which I followed religiously! I also followed the final rounds of the Van Cliburn Piano Competition via its webcast and learned of the awarding of gold medals to a 20-year old blind pianist from Japan and a 19-year old Chinese pianist studying at Curtis. On Monday Melvin picked us up from Aya’s flat and dropped us off at JFK for our long flight to Delhi via Air India.
The non-eventful long plane ride.
The flight from JFK to Delhi was about 14 hours. Thank God it was a direct flight; otherwise it could have taken us the whole 24 hours! Nothing much we could do in the plane except watching movies. Fortunately the movie selections were not bad, with some old classics and recent releases. So the 14-hour stretch was taken care of by watching 4 movies, occasional naps, and meals. As to the Indian food, I was well prepared on that score. Realizing it could be a problem with my body adjusting to foreign foods with strange spices, I had the foresight to train my stomach getting used to them. A month before the trip we went to Bombay Palace, an Indian restaurant in Nashville strongly recommended by an Indian professor of theology at Vanderbilt and my occasional tennis nemesis. The first time I got a terrible diarrhea which kept me awake the whole night rushing to the toilet. Not ready to give up, we went the second time a few days later and it improved considerably except for the occasional pungent farts released. The third time was the charm and not even one single fart, pungent or not, was generated. So the Indian food on the plane didn’t bother me a bit and I passed the test with flying color!
It is hot!
I don’t mean the Indian spices; I am talking about the weather! We arrived in Delhi with great anticipation and were met by the local representatives of the Friendly Planet. The first thing hit you when you walked out of the airport to board the bus was the suffocating heat, it was around 110F! The heat was almost unbearable for the entire trip especially during the outdoor walking tours under the scorching sun and Katherine would rather forgo seeing some interesting sites than suffering the terrible heat! Fortunately the bus was air-conditioned and after the ½ -hour bus ride we checked into the LaLit Hotel which was unexpectedly luxurious with the bargain price we paid for the tour. It turned out June is one of the hottest months and thus we have come to India during the off-season with the bargain price!
Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur
. These are the three cities we visited which constitute the Golden Triangle of the northern India. Agra is best known as the location of the Taj Mahal, the single most important sight a visitor to India can see. This structure was ordered built by Emperor Shah Jahan for his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth to their 14th child. It took some 20,000 laborers 22 years to build using white marbles decorated with elaborate patterns of semiprecious stones (heavy Persian influence). A reflecting pool adorned with classical gardens lay in front of the magnificent building. We also visited Agra Fort, built under the Mughal Emperor Akbar in 1565, containing numerous palaces and a white marble mosque. Itmad-ud-Daulah’s tomb also known as the ‘baby Taj Mahal’ was another site visited and it was the first Mughal structure totally built from marble.
Jaipur is famous for the unusual rose-colored sandstone architecture that gives the city its nickname, the Pink City. The early 18th-century Jantar Mantar is the largest and best preserved of the five observatories built by astronomer Prince Jai Singh II. The prince had the huge stone structures built to measure time, chart the declination of celestial bodies, and predict eclipses. The other attraction was the City Palace/Museum, which was once a beautiful royal residence. We also made a photo stop at Hawa Mahal, the Palace of the Winds, Jaipur’s signature building and is famous for its beehive-like structure. However, the highlight of the Jaipur visit was the elephant ride up the hill to see the 18-century Amber Palace and Fort for which I have photos to prove it!
Delhi is the capital of India and actually consists of two separate cities. The old city of Delhi, which the Mughuts built and lived in; and New Delhi, built by the British and expanded since independence in 1947. We visited Red Fort, Qutub Minor, and India Gate. The Fort has Diwan-e-am and Dwan-e-Khas where the king granted audiences to the public and to important people, respectively. Qutub Minar is a tall and magnificent structure built by Muslim King Qutub-un-din Aibak in 1199 A.D. India Gate, a 42 meter high structure is a war memorial in honor of soldiers who died during the second World War.
Some memorable personages and coincidences.
There were a total of three buses hired by the Friendly Planet to transport us around and we were with the #1 bus. Since nearly all of us learned about the tour via travelzoo.com, the demographic make-up of the group is very representative of the US population. Unlike the Vantage Tours we had taken before which are mostly geared to older and more affluent populace, we had a younger and more bargain-seeking crowd on this trip. There were about 25 people in our bus and we got to know some of them better during the course of our tour.
We established a bit of kinship with an expatriated Iranian couple from Texas because we were in Iran about a year ago. He was in the Ph.D. program at Texas A & M University with a teaching assistant post in the Industrial Engineering department and nearly completed the degree requirements when the Islamic revolution (about 30 years ago) started in Iran and the American embassy occupied and hostages taken. Shortly after, he received a letter from the University informing him that his service was no longer needed. Out of desperation he started buying some used cars and refurbishing them for resale, even though he knew very little about car engines at that time. Slowly and surely he got a foothold in that college town and eventually ended up owning a big junkyard and a sizable car repair garage. Later on his wife also opened up a child-care facility and operated for a few years. Now they sold their businesses and are wealthy enough to own a house in Esfahan (a beautiful city in Iran) and commuting back and forth from Texas. The couple started traveling because their two daughters are now happily married and residing in the States. We were all anxiously trying to find out the election result in Iran on Sunday; unfortunately our hotel in Jaipur didn’t carry CNN or BBC World News. Thus we had to wait until we got back to Delhi to find out the sham result!
And then there was a young man of oriental face seating a few rows behind us. When our local guide walked past his seat in the bus he started talking to him in Hindu, quite a strange sight indeed! As a matter of fact he carried a big Hindu dictionary with him on this trip. At another occasion I saw and heard him talking to the Iranian couple in Farsi and someone told me he knew 7 or 8 languages. Later on we chanced to talked to him in private and found out that he is a 5th year medical resident at the UCLA hospital and his parents are Chinese from Hong Kong and are now living in New York. The reason he could speak Farsi is because there is a large population of Iranian Jews in California and LA in particular which he had constant contact in the hospital! When we told him we were from Nashville, he said “my god, I went to Vanderbilt Medical School!” He knew of Dr. Stanley Cohen, Katherine’s boss at the medical center and a Nobel Prize winner. What a small world and what a coincidence! So one night when we three were having dinner together in a restaurant, being the white-haired elder I felt obligated to take care of the young and bought him a dinner.
Talking about coincidences, at the farewell dinner (the only free meal provided by the Friendly Planet) in a nice restaurant in Delhi, I was sitting in front of a young black lady from Martinique (the birth place of Napoleon’s Josephine) who is currently teaching French and Spanish in a Virginia high school. I asked her where she went to school in the US and she said ‘State University of New York at Stony Brook’. Then I recalled asking the young Chinese doctor earlier why he decided to go to Vanderbilt Medical School and his reply was because it offered him a full scholarship. Thinking that he might have graduated with summa cum laude from some university, I asked him where he did his undergraduate and he replied ‘SUNY at Stony Brook’. And I also recalled that one of the ladies in the group is an engineer working for Raytheon in Massachusetts making Patriot missiles and I remembered asking her if she graduated from MIT but she replied in the negative and pronounced herself to be a graduate of SUNY at Stony Brook. So I single-handed brought those three to have a mini reunion in a restaurant in the faraway land of India and the city of Delhi, what an impossible probability of having 3 out of a group of 25 to graduate from the same school!
Street vendors and the ugly Americans.
Since we had been to places such as Brazil, Cambodia, and Egypt we were pretty much used to the aggressive street vendors selling gifts to tourists. Yet the ones in India seemed much more tenacious and would not take ‘no’ for an answer. It appeared that the persistency is directly proportional to the extent of poverty in a country. But some in our group got upset at times and yelled out loud ‘NO!’ or ‘get away!’ to their faces. The lack of compassions and rowdy behaviors reminded me of the book published years ago entitled ‘The Ugly Americans’! We were indeed terrible ambassadors for our country! If you were a skillful bargainer like me, you could get some good buys on gifts from this huge and colorful country. I believe I got some good bargains, rescuing Katherine from paying too much on some items.
So here it is, my report on our short and interesting trip to India (actually only 5 days because we lost two days on air flights!).
Friday, August 29, 2008
Trip to Iran, May 2008
When I told some of my friends that Katherine and I were embarking on a trip to Iran, the responses invariably ranged from ‘Why?’ to ‘Is it safe?’ I did not have any concern about our safety because as long as the US is bogged down in Iraq it is extremely unlikely that Iran would be bombed and for us to be held hostages. Now we have returned from a very enjoyable journey over there, I can answer the ‘why’ part by saying ‘why not’ and adding that because it is a land of ancient and rich history with magnificent archeological splendors and natural beauty where people are friendly and yearning for outside contacts, especially with the Americans.
Including us two hillbillies from Tennessee, there were 18 members in our group coming from various places and having very diverse backgrounds. California has the largest contingent of five: a couple the wife works in Asia Museum and the husband has a physics Ph.D. in high energy from Stanford but later worked very successfully as a business consultant, three ladies including an artist doing oil paintings, a DJ as well as a newspaper employee, and the third a curator of a gallery; a pair from Florida, the lady was a some-time actress who had appeared in a couple of films and TV commercials while the gentleman was an optometrist turned historian and theater critic; a seasoned lady traveler from Colorado who is associated with the Aspen Santa Fe Ballet Company; a lady from Missouri has a degree in journalism but turned teacher and later became a business lady after the passing of her husband; a couple from New York State the wife used to be a dean in a college and the husband has just retired from the presidency of a college in Vermont; a lady from D.C. who got the B.S. in chemistry from Vanderbilt University in Nashville and received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Duke but later worked with computer and library; a guy from Virginia who used to work as an analyst for the Defense Intelligence but had made all the wrong predictions on the Tiananmen Square events in China (his own jesting confessions!); two retired scientists from Switzerland who had made significant contributions in their own fields of research in life sciences; and an Australian lady who was an experienced Washington watcher monitoring and analyzing US agricultural and trade policies for their effects on her country but is currently enjoying her retired life in Italy. This talented and adventuresome group was further accompanied by a retired professor of archeology from Texas (who had done some archeological diggings in Iran years ago) serving as a trip scholar to enrich us on what we were witnessing, a young Brit served as our trip escort who has recently returned from his tour of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan with one book already published on his experience there and is currently writing another book on travel, and an Iranian national guide who was very animated and made frequent recitations of Persian poems during our long bus rides.
Welcome to Tehran: a rude awakening and recompense.
In the plane from Frankfurt to Tehran I decided to preset my watch to the local time in Tehran so I asked the German stewardess (we were flying Lufthansa) and was told to be a 2 ½ -hour difference. I guess the ½ hour is a way of showing the world that the Iranian government is not bound by the international time-zone convention of using the hour as the unit of time change! As the plane was approaching the Tehran airport (Imam Khomeni Airport, IKA) the female passengers were advised to honor the local custom by wearing head scarves. It was the first time that all the ladies in our group had scarves on their heads and looked a bit strange as well as hard to distinguish one from the other.
The plane landed in Tehran around 1:40 a.m. and we followed the crowds to the immigration area upon deplaning. We initially queued on the lines designated as ‘foreigners’ which were considerably longer than those for the ‘Iranians’. So when the ‘Iranians’ lines were cleared we were instructed to go to these gates. That was our mistake to have made the switch because the officers at those check points seemed to be less experienced in dealing with travelers holding foreign passports. And when they saw our US passports they went to consult with someone else and we were eventually led to a table for finger printing! To most people in our group this was their first time being finger-printed like criminals. Katherine was so incensed and visibly upset, so I had to calm her down by telling her that was how the US government treated Iranians coming to the States and the Iranian government was simply reciprocating. It took about an hour for the custom to clear our group because copies of our finger prints along with the passports had to be hand-carried to the main office to have them Xeroxed. I suspect those photocopies would eventually end up in a trash bin because some people in our group coming through the ‘foreigners’ checkpoints were not finger printed, apparently it was rather arbitrary. Anyway we were bused to our hotel before dawn to catch a few hours of sleep before our first sight-seeing in Tehran.
Our ‘humiliations’ were somewhat recompensed by the sightseeing tours of Tehran after breakfast that began with a visit to the National Museum of Iran which amasses an impressive collection of fine ancient artifacts as well as Persian art. In the afternoon we went to view the spectacular Crown Jewels, housed in the vaults of the Bank Milli of Iran. The crown jewels of Iran could be said to be the largest, one of the most dazzling and valuable jewel collections in the world. Most of the items in the magnificent collection dated back to the Safavid dynasty which ruled Iran from 1502 to1736 AD. The Peacock Throne (among many other spectacular jewelry pieces) is unbelievable in its stunning beauty and craftsmanship.
In the evening we enjoyed a welcome dinner amidst the live Iranian music performed by a musician at the small but elegant Sofreh Khaneh Restaurant in the Laleh Inter-Continental Hotel where we stayed. Whatever transpired at the airport in the early morning seemed to have been forgotten by then!
It’s a small world!
It turned out the couple from the New York State actually reside in Rhinebeck which is only a 10-minute drive from Melvin’s house and they had actually attended concerts at Bard. As a matter of fact we and Karin took Milo to a kid’s playground and had lunch in that charming town only one day prior to our departure for Iran. During the trip the husband told me that when he was still the president of a college in Vermont and when Howard Dean (the current Democratic National Chairman) was the governor of that state he was invited to join the governor on a trade mission to Taiwan. During a banquet two of the Taiwanese officials making speeches mentioned that they were the graduates of the summer language programs of his college. What a small world indeed and what a proud president deserving his sense of accomplishment!
The queen of airport misfortunes!
The lady from Missouri is in the fire equipment business and would invariably inspect the fire safety outfits of every building we visited! She seemed to have the most misfortunes during the domestic flights in Iran. Because of the rigid inequality of sexes in the Islamic world, men and women have to go through separate security checkpoints at airports. So when the ladies in our group were going through the security gates they were on their own, devoid of the benefit of assistance from our male Iranian guide for translation. The lady from Missouri wore a pacemaker which could trigger and shut down the security system if she passes through the electronic detection gate. So she adamantly refused to go through the security door but the female guard not knowing what a pace-maker is insisted on her passing through the gate. After a period of awkward stand-off, shouting, and confusion it was eventually resolved by her asking our Iranian guide to write a note and show it to the security guard. Another time she placed her expensive camera with a big zooming lens attached onto the security conveyer belt but when she went picked up her stuffs at the other end the camera was mutilated because it got trapped to the cleavage at the end of the conveyor! There was nothing she could do but to pick up the pieces and hoping her insurance back home would cover the damage. Fortunately she had another camera which is digital but not as sophisticated as the other one. Despite those misfortunes, she actually quite enjoyed the trip and later wrote a piece on her impression of Iran which was published in The Kansas Dispatch praising the friendliness of the Iranian people without mentioning those incidents. And would you believe that upon returning to JFK she failed to locate her checked luggage and she had to catch a connecting flight at LGA to get home! We later heard that someone in our group had mistakenly carried her luggage off! What a lady and what an adventure!
My own (mis)adventure at an Iranian airport.
I usually made a habit of paying homage to the restroom shortly before boarding a plane in an effort to avoid going to the tiny toilets on the airplane during flights. While waiting to board our first Iranian domestic flight in an airport, I decided to walk around and search for a toilet. Then I saw a ‘gentlemen’ sign prominently displayed so I walked through it but was stopped by a smiling security guard asking for my boarding pass. I was a bit baffled wondering why a boarding pass was needed for peeing but I dutifully returned to my seat and promptly extracted my boarding pass and showed it to the guard whereupon he let me through without any difficulty. But to my infinite consternation there was no toilet in sight and then it suddenly daunted on me that I had just passed through the security checkpoint to go into the boarding area and the ‘gentlemen’ sign was meant as a security gate for the male passengers and not the toilet for men!
Oh, oh, oh my God!
The gallery lady from California actually is quite well-versed in Persian arts and archeology and is in fact planning to write a book about the trip. The book was partially completed with excellent historical background already written and for the traveling parts to be added after the trip. I had the good fortune of borrowing the draft and reading some of it during our long bus rides which enhanced immeasurably my appreciation of what we were seeing on the tour. This lady was very animated and would cry out ‘Oh, oh, oh my God’ upon witnessing a magnificent sight and got us all excited. Her exclamations no doubt were partially responsible for my taking so many pictures, around 1000 (memory cards are cheap these days)!
The Iranian peach ice cream!
One day on our bus trip to a destination we stopped for lunch at a huge rest-stop which houses a variety of shops. After the lunch we moved to a coffee shop for some coffee and ice creams. The gentleman from Florida ordered a peach ice cream and we were all stunned when the server presented him with three big scoops of vanilla ice cream sitting on a beautiful wide-mouthed and narrow necked glass while about a dozen pieces of freshly-sliced peach hung on the rim of the glass. It was so gorgeous and appetizing which inspired us to spontaneously sing out ‘happy birthday to you’ to the lucky gentleman! I believe the Iranian-style ice cream could be a big hit in the States!
Our resident carpet consultant.
The physicist turned business consultant has traveled extensively and is very knowledgeable about carpets so he served as our resident carpet expert by default, as there were several people in the group interested in purchasing Persian carpets as souvenirs. He had all kinds of carpet images stored in his i-phone and would show us those images which-ever-ways via finger-rubbing the screen. His advices were instrumental in the acquisitions of several beautiful carpets by the group members and their headaches at the airport on the means of transporting them. His wife with her colorful outfit was a huge hit with the Iranian high school girls we met during the tour.
The blunt-talking American.
The guy from Virginia who had ‘misjudged’ the situations in China is actually quite intelligent, with a master’s degree in international relations from Georgetown and his straight-talking style is quite refreshing. Whenever we arrived at a new place he would dress very casually and go into town by himself to mingle and feel the pulse of the locals. Here are a couple examples I had the privilege of witnessing. One time I was nearby when our Iranian guide was apologizing to him about something then I heard the reply: “don’t worry; you will still get my tips!” Another morning we were sitting down and having buffet breakfast together, this guy from Virginia being a bit self-conscious about his bulging belly was murmuring that he shouldn’t eat too much and immediately our Iranian tour guide advised him to eat just citric fruits and nothing else every morning. The Virginian was a bit nonplus and said “You begin to annoy me, is there anything you don’t know?” It was hard for me to tell if he was jesting or in earnest!
A Chinese cooking class in Hong Kong.
The two scientists from Switzerland actually spent some times during their younger years at Washington University in St. Louis during its golden years when several future Nobel Prize winners were doing research there including Stanley Cohen (Katherine worked for him at Vanderbilt for years until his retirement). One time his wife was invited to attend a conference of her specialty in Hong Kong and the husband decided to tag along, most of the time it was the other way around. During the scientific sessions he was on his own and got bored, so he decided to sign up for a Chinese cooking class. Apparently it had benefited him greatly and now he can cook delicious Chinese dishes to pamper his ever-smiling and loving wife!
Have ‘Lonely Planet Guidebook’ will travel.
The serious and intellectual nature of our group was reflected by the fact that during the long bus rides and between the Persian poem reciting sessions of our Iranian guide, almost everyone was reading the Lonely Planet Guidebook on Iran. Sadly we two hillbillies seemed to be the only ones without the guidebook and yet we were the most ignorant about the ancient Persia. So to fill our ignorant void we decided to purchase a copy at one of the hotel bookstores near the end of our trip! We were still reading it months after returning home! You can be sure we will have a Lonely Planet Guidebook in our backpack next time we travel abroad!
A ruder awakening in our own country!
Irwin came to JFK to welcome us back to the US soil and took us to Aya’s newly acquired apartment. After resting for two nights in NYC we were anxious to go home and resume our daily tennis playing. We had to go to the Newark International Airport to catch our flight back to Nashville. Being a miser and not willing to spend $100 for the taxi fare, I decided to take the subway to Grand Central Station and then transfer to the New Jersey Transit train which has a stop at the airport. Despite the two pieces of moderate-sized luggage, I managed to negotiate the subway stairs and reached the train heading for the airport at the last minute. As soon as we got onboard the train started to move. Hurriedly we walked along the aisle in search of seats, with Katherine in front and me immediately behind struggling with the two pieces of luggage. Despite my daily tennis playing I dared not risk lifting the heavy trunks up onto the luggage racks overhead lest my 70-year-old bones get fractured. So we were searching for some empty rows for our butts or the luggage to sit on. Although the train was relatively full and mostly occupied by the European tourists returning home after happy shopping sprees in the Big Apple (taking full advantage of the weak dollar!), we managed to find at the very front of the railcar one empty row on each side of the aisle. The one on the right was facing a row occupied by a lady while the one on the left had a folder placed on the window side apparently belonging to the man wearing sun glasses and sitting in front of it. Since the man did not retrieve his folder to offer us the row, we decided to sit on the row in front of the lady and placed the trunks right next to the rows without completely blocking the passage way. Soon a woman conductor appeared to check our tickets and she suggested that I place one luggage onto that empty row with the folder on the side. I complied but in the process the luggage touched the rim of the folder. Immediately the man retrieved his folder and said in a loud voice that I should not have touched his folder. So I said ‘sorry’ but he continued to rant. Then the conductor returned to me and told me to pay no attention to him which made him ranting even more loudly saying that I should be worried because he knew so and so, probably the name of a gang leader! I ignored him but stared intently at the luggage so that I could lunge at it (in case the train made a sudden deceleration) to prevent it from landing on the guy and starting WWIII! Fortunately he disembarked the train one stop ahead of us. I felt bad for being instrumental in showcasing such vulgarity in full view of the returning foreign travelers. It is also ironic that we had been treated better by the people in a country whose government is hostile to the US than by our own fellow countryman! With heavy hearts we returned home and the next day woke up early to go to the tennis courts, and we were happy campers once more!
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
My 70th Birthday
The 70th birthday usually is a huge event in the life of a Chinese. However it is not such a big deal for me since I have been in the West for too long. But I had decided earlier that I wanted to launch my tennis career the year when I turn 70. So I entered the 2008 Southern Indoor Tennis Tournament in early January because it was held locally at the Vanderbilt Indoor Tennis Facility. Unfortunately the results were not very encouraging, yet I took comfort in the fact that I only got one bagel out of four sets of play! With that inauspicious start of my second career and with the approach of my birthday, I decided to buy myself a tennis lesson for a birthday present. So I asked Peter to give me a ‘serve and volley’ lesson on January 31st, my birthday. Unfortunately that day fell on Thursday and he had to go to
I woke up early in the morning on my birthday and went to the computer to check if the weather would be mild enough for out-door tennis. Unfortunately the weather map indicated that it was snowing at that moment. So I went to open the door leading to the newly-rebuild deck to check if it was indeed snowing. Instead of seeing the snow I found a Fed-Ex envelope sitting in the cold, most likely being delivered the day before. It turned out to be a birthday card from Karin and Melvin with photo imprints of arms-raising
With the happy frame of mind, I went to the club to play a scheduled doubles game and came back home around 10 a.m. I then took a quick shower because I had to go to Mr. Edward Nelson’s office and to have lunch with him somewhere. He is a
One Monday I got a call from Ed asking me to have lunch with him on Thursday (Jan. 31st). I went to his office around 11 and he was on the phone when I entered. So I sat on the waiting room sofa admiring the two photos which were prominently displayed on the side table. One showed George W. shaking hands with Ed with the Air Force One parked in the background. The other one showed a younger Ed being flanked by Mohammad Ali and Wilma Rudolph, both were Olympic gold medalists. After his phone call he showed me some of his mementos scattering around his office and also told me about his years as a spy in
On Monday afternoon while opening up the garage door to go fetching the mail, I heard a big thump and it turned out to be a big UPS-delivered package being knocked down by the opening door. Upon unpacking, it revealed a portable tennis ball machine, a surprise birthday gift from Melvin and Irwin. It was something badly needed by us and Katherine had in fact been bugging me to acquire one for some time. Thus it is fitting that my extended birthday celebration started with a free tennis lesson and ended with a free tennis machine to further improve my skill. I thank everyone for making my 70th birthday such an enjoyable event.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Playing tennis with forehands on both sides
In Praise of Double-Forehand Play, the Way of the Future
(or, How Roger can beat Rafa)
Because Roger Federer is my idol, I try to imitate him by playing with one-handed backhand. Thus I was somewhat distressed when Nadal beat him five times in a row on clay, using his relentless cross-court high topspin forehand assaults on Roger’s backhand side. During the 2007 Master Series at Hamberg, Roger managed to stop Nadal’s winning streak by stepping around to deliver his thundering forehand and by being more aggressive. This strategy, however, is somewhat risky because, barring a winner, it leaves a vast open court on his forehand side. Indeed, Nadal exploited this weakness during the French Open a few weeks later by countering with pinpoint down-the-line shots, forcing Federer to stretch out for his subsequent shot, resulting in numerous errors, again denying him the only Grand Slam title he has failed to capture so far.
This led me to ponder if there is an intrinsic limitation to the one-handed backhand stroke. Indeed, most of today’s young pro players are now using the two-handed backhand for power and consistency. However, a two-handed backhand is essentially a forehand of one’s left hand assisted by the right hand. So there is no reason why one cannot go one step further by mastering one’s left-handed forehand. This has the advantages of allowing a greater variety of swings as well as a wider wingspan.
A complete switch from an one-handed backhand to a left-handed forehand may not be as difficult as one thinks, as it is well known that Nadal was born right handed but was trained as a lefty tennis player and the million-dollar grunting Maria Sharapova was originally born as a left-hander but was trained to play tennis with her right hand. One could argue, however, that those switches are only possible because they were made during their childhood. Thus the important question is: can a grown-up right-hander train himself/herself to hit forehand with his/her left hand and gain proficiency in a reasonable amount of time? To prove that it is indeed possible, this 69 year club-player undertook the challenge to supplant his shaky one-handed backhand with a left-handed forehand.
I am happy to report that after several months of patient practice I am now quite comfortable hitting balls with my left-hand. I am confident that within a year my lefty forehand will be nearly as proficient as that of my right hand. With Roger’s athleticism there is no reason why he could not master the stroke with less time if he so desired, not that I delude myself into thinking that he would heed my advice. Furthermore, I firmly believe that playing tennis with double forehands will be the wave of the future as the result of a natural historical progression from one-handed backhands to two-handed backhands to left-handed forehands (for a righty). However, it is reasonable to ask why so few people play with double forehands and why no champion with such strokes has been produced thus far if double-forehand play is indeed superior. This is due to force of habit as few teaching pros are willing to try something new that has no track record. It’s catch-22, because if youngsters aren’t exposed to such a technique there is no way a champion can be produced. So stand up and be counted, the double-forehand tennis players of the world, because the tennis revolution is now upon us.
Here are some of the benefits and advantages which I garnered during this experiment:
- A sounder and more balanced development of one’s body and mind: I consider this to be the greatest benefit of switching to the double-forehand play. One can readily see that a one-handed backhand tennis player has rather unbalanced hand-arm development: the dominant limb is considerably more muscular and stouter than the other one which appears to be rather underdeveloped. This is not aesthetically pleasing, especially for a lady who aspires to have a modeling career during or after her tenure as a professional tennis player. Playing forehands on both sides will guarantee a more balanced development not only on one’s upper limbs but also on one’s brain, as it is well known that right and left parts of the brain control the opposite sides of your body. If this were the only benefit for switching to double-forehand strokes I would have gladly done so without any hesitation.
- Learning good form without the baggage of old bad habits: When a grown-up starts taking tennis lessons the coach usually has a much harder and longer time to accomplish a task compared to youngsters (I am a typical example as can readily be attested by my coach). This is due to the fact that grown-ups usually have acquired bad tennis habits which are much harder to correct than learning it anew. There is an old Chinese saying that it is easier to change dynasties than to change one’s character (habits). Everybody also knows that it is much harder to edit someone’s essay than to write a new one yourself. By learning left-handed forehands one is starting with a blank slate, making it easier to acquire good form on strokes.
- A considerably wider wingspan for easier court coverage: A left-handed forehand can stretch farther than a two-handed backhand because one is not constrained by the right hand. If one extends both hands holding rackets one can see it covers nearly half the width of the single’s court. Thus one can cover the whole court with less running, a considerable bonus for senior citizens who are not as agile as their younger counterparts.
- More freedom on swings to create greater variety of strokes: A forehand stroke with the left hand can attain more freedom on swings than a two-handed backhand stroke. For example, lunging to reach a ball and cross-court shots with extreme angles can be accomplished with much less effort.
- An expanded repertoire to confound your opponent: If one has mastered the left-handed forehand in addition to what one has already acquired previously, one can employ additional weapons to confuse one’s opponent. An adventuresome player can further learn to serve as well as to volley with one’s left hand. Using this expanded arsenal during a match will confound and frustrate the person on the other side of the net.
- An excellent way to retrain one’s footwork: My coach has already given up reminding me about my footwork (shuffling) when I miss a shot. I am notoriously lazy when it comes to footwork, thinking that the dexterity of my right hand can overcompensate and save the day. Unfortunately it invariably turns out not to be the case. Since the dexterity of my left hand cannot be relied upon, I can no longer be complacent if I am to make a decent shot. Thus I have no choice but to move (shuffle) to a position which will provide me with a comfortable stroke.
- Smooth transition from two-handed backhand to one-handed lefty forehand: As stated earlier, a two-handed backhand stroke is simply a left-handed forehand stroke with an assist from the right hand. Thus a left-handed forehand stroke can be mastered easily by gradually letting go of one’s right hand without too much effort.
- Easy hand switch of the racket: One may argue that it is rather cumbersome and confusing to switch the racket back and forth between the two hands. This is simply not the case because the grip of the racket between strokes is identical to that of the two-handed backhander. Thus one only needs to make a necessary body turn and then release one of the hands to prepare for the next stroke.
Disadvantages:
- None comes to mind, but if one really wants to push it, here it is: There may be the possibility of equal-opportunity suffering of tennis elbow or callus formation on both hands instead of just one hand. Yet one may as well argue that it is a plus rather than a minus because it could considerably reduce the likelihood of injuring one’s dominant hand by not placing undue burden on a single hand!
The idea of playing with double forehands was crystallized during the numerous on and off-court conversations with my coach Peter Van Lingen. He is very knowledgeable and was an accomplished tennis player in his own right: member of the South African Davis Cup Team and had competed in all four major Grand Slam events with good results. His comment that “if he were to start his son on tennis right now he would teach him to play with forehands on both sides” had prompted me to undertake the experiment I have described here. So I express my sincere thanks and dedicate this piece to him.
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