Pat's Blog

Sporadic and sparingly-edited dispatches from China, Southeast Asia, and wherever else.

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  • July 2025 – Xi’an

    July 2025 – Xi’an

    A humid summer weekend in ancient Chang’an

    Back in late July, a few of my coworkers and I made an impromptu visit to the city of Xi’an in northwest China’s Shaanxi province, the former ancient capital of China, and at various points the largest city in the world.

    From Chengdu to Xi’an is a bit under 400 miles, or roughly the distance between Indianapolis and Green Bay, Wisconsin. On the train, it takes about 4 hours. We left right after work on Friday and returned Sunday evening.

    Xi’an North Railway station.

    Along with its historical importance, Xi’an also has the distinct pleasure of being one of the hottest, if not the hottest, cities in all of China. In an inverse of Yunnan’s perpetual springtime weather I mentioned in the May 2025 installment, various topographical factors conspire to make this area an absolute furnace in the peak of summer, despite being far north of Chengdu in terms of latitude. While we were there, temperatures peaked one day at 43C, around 109 degrees Fahrenheit.

    First stop: noodles, barbecue, local orange soda, and some beers. Xi’an is famous for noodles, and they were delicious.

    The little street our hotel was on.

    Xi’an is one of the oldest and most significant cities in all of China’s 5,000-year civilization. It has gone by many names and served as the capital of many imperial dynasties. It first came to cultural and political prominence during the ancient Western Zhou dynasty (circa ~1046 BC, over 3,000 years ago) and became one of the key endpoints of the Silk Road. Chinese commodities would come to ancient Xi’an before being carried across the vast deserts of Western China and Central Asia, and ultimately reaching the Middle East and Europe to be sold.

    However, outside China, Xi’an is probably best known for being the location of the army of terra-cotta warriors.

    Forgive the history lecture, but I think it’s important to understand the context and relevance to Chinese culture, and I’ve gotten some feedback from people that they enjoy the explanations of topics that aren’t as widely known or remembered in the West. Don’t worry, I’m just giving you the broad strokes.

    I mentioned the Zhou dynasty earlier, which ruled for almost 800 years, from 1046 BC – 256 BC. Despite being the dominant regional power during this period, the Zhou was centered in the North and didn’t actually control all of what we now consider to be China. In the final centuries of its existence, the Zhou dynasty entered a sustained decline characterized by internal conflict and the transfer of political power from the central Zhou kings to regional warlords.

    By the end, these warlords started to rebel and style themselves as independent kings (王, wang pronounced ‘wong’, meaning ‘king’, is the most common surname in China). Thus, the final centuries of the Zhou dynasty came to be known as the “Warring States period”.

    The Warring States was a chaotic era of civil war in China. One of the 4 “classics” of Chinese literature, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, is a fictionalized version of the real events of this time.

    I’ll spare you the military details: when it was all said and done, the kingdom of Qin from the rugged northwest edge of Chinese civilization emerged victorious. One by one, the Qin conquered each of the other contending kingdoms using new and unconventional strategies, logistics, and military technology.

    For the very first time, China was entirely unified under the control of a single dynasty. In 221 BC, the king of Qin (Qin, pronounced ‘chin’, is the origin of the name ‘China’) abandoned the title of ‘king’ (王) and assumed a new title: Emperor (皇帝, huang di). Qin Shi Huang, as he is commonly called, was the first emperor of China and he is responsible for the standardization of currency, weights and measures, road dimensions, and even the Chinese writing system itself. He had an immeasurable impact on Chinese civilization that endures to this day, which is why, in spite of his notorious brutality (we’ll get to that later), he is still admired, or at least respected.

    All of that is to say, the world-famous terra-cotta army (that was only discovered in the 1970s by peasant farmers that were trying to dig a well) was originally built to “guard” the secret burial site of this very same Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor. Today, the warriors are located about a 40-minute drive outside of the city center of Xi’an.

    One of my friends on the trip has a much better camera lens than me so I’ll be stealing some of his photos.

    Who says America doesn’t have culture?

    The biggest collection of warriors is in this building that looks like an airplane hangar. It’s really breathtaking how many of them there are, and how well preserved after 22 centuries.

    We got there at ~10AM on a Saturday which is probably about the worst time you could go in regard to crowds.

    Up close, the figures are incredibly detailed. From facial features, hair, clothes, weapons, and accessories, no two figures (out of 8,000) are exactly alike. The terra-cotta army includes infantry soldiers, cavalry (including horses), chariots and charioteers, archers, women, officers, generals, dancers, and even animals like swans and cranes. Originally they were all painted bright colors, but after exposure to the dry air, the paint fades and flakes off in a matter of minutes.

    The realism and lack of repetition in the statues has led some scholars to theorize that the warriors were each modeled off of actual soldiers in Qin Shi Huang’s army.

    My friend Jia-Le also came along. He’s lived in Sichuan all his life but never had the opportunity to go see the warriors for himself. I’ve found that Chinese people have a genuine and living connection to their history, and care deeply about what is often referred to as intangible cultural heritage. It was a very happy moment for him.

    The army is actually a few kilometers away from the mausoleum of the first Emperor. The emperor’s pyramid-shaped tomb is massive: the outer walls measure about 0.6 miles by 1.2 miles, and the complex was built 400 feet high before being covered with grass and trees to make it appear like a natural hill. It is believed to contain many chambers and an inner gate, with more statues, artifacts, booby traps, replica buildings, and underground streams. The mausoleum is almost entirely un-excavated, for a few reasons.

    The first, more intuitive reason is that the archaeologists are concerned that with current technology, excavation (i.e. potential exposure to air, light, moisture) could permanently damage or destroy the priceless artifacts within.

    The second reason is pretty remarkable. Qin Shi Huang is notorious in Chinese history for, during and after his successful military campaigns and conquest, obsessively attempting to prolong his own life and ultimately achieve immortality. I guess once you hit 40 and you’ve taken over the entirety of what you consider to be “the world”, (天下, tianxia, literally “everything under Heaven”) there’s not much to aspire to short of living forever.

    So the first Emperor ingested many fraudulent elixirs, sought out wise sages and alchemists, and even sent a ship captain to sail into the East China Sea towards Japan with hundreds of young men and women to find a mythical 1,000-year old magician that was said to possess the secret to eternal life (they never returned) (also, Chinese tradition holds that after being deceived by a couple of alchemists in this immortality quest, the emperor summoned 460 scholars to the capital and had them all buried alive).

    All of that is to say: Qin Shi Huang unexpectedly died at age 49. The exact cause is unknown, but it is commonly believed that he died of mercury poisoning, as he was consuming lots of liquid mercury in his final years as one of his immortality elixirs. Accordingly, it was arranged that his mausoleum would also be chock-full of mercury. The traditional accounts of the tomb’s construction include huge “rivers” and “oceans”, mimicking real bodies of water in ancient China, entirely composed of liquid mercury. This may seem outlandish, but scientists have actually observed high mercury contents in the soil near the burial site, which makes the prospect of excavation even more complicated, given that the tomb could be filled with poisonous fumes.

    If you’ve made it through all of that heavily-simplified (I am not qualified for any higher level) Chinese history lesson, I extend my congratulations and give you an A+ for this semester.

    I’ll wrap up the terra-cotta warriors with this: it’s very difficult to definitively confirm or tabulate exact numbers, but historical accounts and archaeological remains leave open-ended the plausibility of the following, chilling traditional story about the completion of the tomb. It is believed that when the emperor died, the workers that completed the final sections of the complex and their entire families, the emperor’s former concubines, courtiers, servants, and anyone who knew the mausoleum’s location, potentially tens of thousands of people, were all sealed inside with the emperor’s body and buried alive.

    Back in the modern Xi’an, or rather, in the old part of the new city. Xi’an has a really cool city wall dating from the Ming dynasty (~1300s AD) that you can walk on top of, all the way around in a big square.

    You can also rent bikes on top of the wall and ride them around.

    I’ve mentioned before that people in China love to rent traditional costumes and do photo shoots. This location is tough to beat.

    The popular Muslim Quarter of the old city, near our hotel. Men of the Chinese Muslim “Hui” ethnic group traditionally wear hats like the one you see worn by the man in white in the foreground.

    Yangrou paomo (lamb broth with unleavened bread) from a Hui restaurant. The perfect food to eat if you have a cold.

    Shaanxi province’s famous Biang Biang noodles. Very wide, with beef, chili oil, carrots, garlic, and various other spices.

    One of Xi’an’s many monuments to ancient Chinese poets. I believe this poet is from the Tang dynasty (618-907). The Tang imperial capital was at Xi’an (then called Chang’an) and so all of the famous poets lived in the city at one time or another. The Tang dynasty is seen as a golden age in China, particularly for art and poetry. Tang poems are still taught in every kindergarten and primary school in China (including mine) to help children learn Chinese. The Tang dynasty deserves more coverage than I’m able to provide here.

    That’s all I got. I hope it makes sense, and I’m sorry for any mistakes or bad writing.

    Best,

    Patrick

  • January 2025 – Chengdu

    January 2025 – Chengdu

    Editor’s note (11/2025): As I’m transferring this over to the website, I’m reading things I wrote almost a year ago and thinking that now, with more experiences under my belt and more familiarity with the language and culture, that I could phrase some things slightly better or explain ideas more correctly. However, I think overall what I wrote is OK and also that I might go mad going back and rewriting everything, so I will leave it mostly untouched as a snapshot of a moment in time in my life.

    Hi everyone,

    Sorry about the long delay in getting this one out. December and January at work has been pretty busy for me, but now that Chinese New Year has arrived and school is out, I have lots more time to catch up.

    This edition will be on a few things that I think are interesting and/or I have a lot of pictures that I can share. Hope you like it.

    Food

    I’ve been meaning to write more about the food here in Chengdu for a while, and now that I have at least an entry-level familiarity with the local cuisine it seems like an appropriate time.

    First of all, it’s important to note that saying “Chinese food” can be a bit confusing when you’re talking about eating in China. There are 8 distinct officially recognized “great cuisines” within Chinese food (see map below), and really there are hundreds of smaller culinary traditions across every region of the country. Even tiny rural towns are often regionally known for a particular dish or agricultural product. And so, if you’re in China and a Chinese person asks you what you want to eat for dinner and you say, “Chinese food”, they’ll most likely have a good laugh at your expense (don’t ask how I know this).

    A better response would, of course, be “Sichuan food!”. Sichuan cuisine is one of the most, if not the most, famous kinds of Chinese food globally. It’s characterized by its bold, spicy flavors created using local chili peppers, garlic, and Sichuan pepper. In Chengdu, it being the capital of Sichuan province, obviously most of the restaurants serve “Sichuan-style” food, but there are also many restaurants with food from every corner of China and from abroad.

    Here are some photos I’ve taken, some Sichuan dishes some not. I’ve added some other people’s photos to supplement ones I’m missing.

    First, two classic Sichuan dishes that I really like but I don’t have any photos of:

    Kung Pao Chicken, grilled chicken with peanuts, onions, and chili sauce.

    Mapo tofu. Tofu with spicy sauce, onions, and other vegetables. It’s so good, it doesn’t even really taste like tofu.

    Far and away the most popular kind of dining in Chengdu is hot pot. There are hot pot restaurants all over the place, you’re never more than a few minutes’ walk away from one. I wrote a little bit about hot pot in the October letter. It’s pretty self-explanatory: family style dining where you cook different meats and vegetables in semi-boiling chili oil. Everyone in Chengdu eats it regularly; if someone asks you to go to dinner in a group setting, odds are good that it’ll be hot pot. Really tasty, especially when it gets cold outside.

    If hot pot is the top dog, barbecue (in Chinese: 烧烤 “shao kao”) is probably #2. There are a few different ways they do it. There are a lot where you order the kinds of meat and vegetables you want; they bring them uncooked to you and you cook them yourself on a stove at the center of the table.

    There are others where an employee will do the cooking and flipping over, and still others where you order what you want, and the waiter will bring everything out on skewers already cooked for you. At all the above, you get a divided plate where you can go pick your own seasonings and sauces à la carte that you can dip your barbecue in.

    Skewer BBQ featuring some of my coworkers’ kids ^

    ^ Awesome barbecue restaurant in a small mountain town in rural Sichuan. The boss lady used a lettuce leaf to clean the stove and then cooked a bunch of meats and veggies on a huge open flame right in front of your face and you kinda just had to be quick grabbing your stuff before the flames went up again. Also the walls were all painted to look like Western “streetwear” brands like Supreme, Off-White, Bathing Ape, etc.

    ^Tian Shui Mian, sweet water noodles. Soft and chewy noodles seasoned with spicy chili sauce but also with sugar and another sweet seasoning. Gives it a really good flavor, I went back for a second bowl.

    Every day at work, the chef makes lunch for all the teachers. It’s always different from what the students eat, and you can actually send him a request for a meal you want him to make for lunch and he’ll do it if it’s in his wheelhouse. They send a schedule at the start of the week, but I never bother to translate it so every day I get a surprise. I make a point to eat everything they serve and almost always I really like it. A lot of the meals are Sichuan-style, some are not. Almost always it will be some kind of meat and vegetables in a sauce that you can put over a bowl of white rice.

    Here are some of them:

    ^ This is a classic Sichuan dish that in English is called “shredded fish-flavored pork” with a side of sweet potatoes. I don’t really think it tastes “fish-flavored” but it’s delicious.

    ^ These are wontons filled with pork and veggies and seasoned to your liking with chili oil, soy sauce, green onions, garlic, etc. In the local dialect they call them “chao shou”; this is one of my favorite dishes I’ve had in Chengdu.

    ^ Wide noodles in chili oil. The sauce might be Sichuan style but the type of noodles is from Yunnan province (south of Sichuan, borders Vietnam and other SE Asian countries).

    ^ Rabbit with peppers and duck eggs. I’m not sure where its’ from. Pretty tasty but too many little bones.

    I’m realizing I didn’t take as many photos of school lunches as I thought, so I’ll send more in the future.

    ^ This is from a restaurant that serves Hui and Uyghur food from Xinjiang (Western China). This was their signature chicken dish with potatoes and super wide noodles, which I really liked.

    ^ This is from a different Hui restaurant, this dish was grilled chicken, nuts, and Xinjiang peppers. Really good. The Hui ethnic group are ethnically Chinese Sunni Muslims that have been in China for over a thousand years. As such, this restaurant is completely halal.

    This was a big plate of fish + toppings (the fish is buried under everything else). I kind of doubt that this is a traditional dish because its covered in French fries, but anyway I thought it was really great.

    That’s all I’ve got for now on food, but I’ll just keep sending more as I try more.

    Chinese Names

    When I started writing these, one of the things I wanted to cover was the Chinese language/writing system, as it is quite different from what we’re used to and isn’t really very well understood in the US. Obviously, the topic is far too large to ever cover in a few paragraphs, but it might be of interest to sprinkle in small details here and there.

    I think a good place to start is Chinese names. A few weeks ago, I finally got around to picking mine: 龙浩然     In the Latin alphabet/pinyin: Long Haoran or Lóng Hàorán. (Editor’s note: after becoming more acquainted with Chinese, I actually picked a different name for myself, but I’ll leave this in here because I think it’s still a helpful example)

    In Chinese, family names go first and are almost always just one single character. So in my name, the family name is 龙 or Long. That means that one’s personal name comes second and is almost always either 1 or 2 characters. In very rare cases, a personal name could be more than two characters, usually it’s because the person is an ethnic minority that is transliterating their name from their native language into Chinese. In my name, the personal name is 浩然 or Haoran. (When talking about this, I’ve started using the terms “family name” and “personal name” because saying “first/last name” just makes it more confusing.)

    Chinese family names (AKA surnames AKA first names) are passed down through the father. Take for example, the president of China, Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping’s father was named Xi Zhongxun, and Xi Jinping’s daughter is named Xi Mingze. In China, wives do not take their husband’s family name, so a mother will usually have a different family name than her children.

    Chinese personal names are chosen in many different ways. One way is by choosing characters that invoke personal qualities that parents want their child to embody. Names that mean wise, successful, honorable, studious, strong, patriotic, amiable, noble, beautiful, bold, etc. are common. In Chinese culture, names can be an important augur of a person’s future, for better or worse. For this reason, I stopped trying to make my personal name sound like “Patrick” because the character 怕 “Pa” that I would likely need to use means “to be afraid” or “to dread”. Not exactly the omen I want for myself…

    Another way people choose names for their children is through family tradition. Unlike in Western cultures, sons and daughters are never named the same thing as one of their parents i.e. John Smith Jr. Instead, a family often will have a traditional Chinese poem that determines children’s personal names. It’s a bit complicated, but basically generations in the past, a family chose poem that will determine one character that each child in each generation will share, and each will have a unique second character. For example, Mao Zedong had two brothers: Mao Zemin and Mao Zetan. “Ze” is the shared generation name, and Dong, Min, and Tan are taken from elsewhere in the poem. In the next generation, the family would move to the next character in the poem for the shared name and so on (so maybe a second gen would be Mao Linyue, Mao Linwei, etc.) Not every family follows this, but it isn’t uncommon. Some families have records of relatives going back hundreds of years following these naming conventions, using 1,400-year-old poems from the Tang Dynasty, which is just fascinating to me.

    I chose Haoran because it’s close to “Horan”, but it’s also an actual Chinese personal name that real Chinese people have, loosely translated to “vast wilderness” (I asked every Chinese friend or colleague that I could about the name to make sure I hadn’t stumbled into some kind secret embarrassing meaning, but they all liked it so I took that as a green light.)  I chose 龙 Long because it means dragon and the dragon is my Chinese zodiac, as well as that the character seemed way easier to write and pronounce than some of the other options.

    ^ The learning process. These were the not-great first drafts. Now I’m able to write the three characters of my name pretty well plus maybe 20 or so other characters. Slow and steady.

    Miscellaneous

    The professional basketball team for Sichuan actually plays only one metro stop away from my apartment. Funnily enough, I made a local friend playing soccer that works at the stadium and he was able to get me and Jia-Le, the P.E. teacher at my school, into this regular season game for free.

    It was a good time, there were a few thousand people there but I think there would’ve been more had the two teams not been near the bottom of the league standings. The best player on Sichuan is an American named Edmund Sumner, who actually used to play for the Pacers and is leading the Chinese league in scoring.

    Went on a field trip with students and parents into the mountains. Had a Christmas Party when they went to bed.

    New Year’s Eve.

    It’s hard to tell from the photo, but this is the largest building in the world by surface area. It’s something like 18 million sq ft and apparently it was a passion project bankrolled by a Chinese billionaire at an incredible loss.

    Part of the mall inside the biggest building in the world. I kinda just wanted to go inside so that if in the future someone says “Wow, that’s a big building”, I can go “Nah, not really.”

    I’m not sure what these art installation things are called, but they’re in like every social media video about Chengdu.

    Saw a stranger had this in public and had to ask her for a photo. Luigi’s very popular over here, at least among women.

    Every month we go to the horse stables and half of the trip is explicitly devoted to feeding the horses.

    It’s pretty normal here to see people wearing clothes that have letters in English or in the Latin alphabet but are sort of either gibberish or real words that together don’t mean anything, but this one was so egregious I had to get a picture.

    No comment.

    In early February, I’m taking advantage of the time off to do some traveling. I’ll be flying to Bangkok, going to the beach for a few days, and then flying to Hong Kong and making my way back to Chengdu via high-speed train, stopping in a few Chinese cities on the way (see the loose itinerary map below.)

    The next installment covering that trip should be out in March. I hope you are all doing well, and I wish you good fortune in the new year. Thanks for reading.

    新年快乐！Xin Nian Kuai Le!

    Patrick

  • March 2025 – HK & Guangdong

    March 2025 – HK & Guangdong

    When I left off, I was leaving Thailand for Hong Kong.

    The map below is a good illustration of China’s “Greater Bay Area”. I went to Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, three of the four most well-known cities in this cluster, the other being Macau. Macau (formerly a Portuguese colony) and Hong Kong (formerly a British colony) are part of China, but are governed as Special Administrative Regions, giving them a degree of autonomy from the mainland under the principle of “One Country, Two Systems”. For example, in Hong Kong there is no “Great Firewall” that requires you to use a VPN to access sites like Google and Meta. The remaining cities are all part of Guangdong Province. This relatively small area has a population of ~86 million, and as the region continues to develop it has been called a “megalopolis” or a collection of large cities that combine to form a single massive continuous urban area.

    Unfortunately for me, I think I ate something bad in the tiny Krabi airport on my way out, and was hit with a bout of food poisoning that dampened my mood for my few days in HK and Shenzhen. I still was able to get some pictures, but in general I wasn’t able to do as much as I wanted and I barely felt like eating anything beyond rice or bread, so I don’t have much in the way of food pictures or commentary. Next time!

    By some stroke of luck, or because Hong Kong is so compact, my hotel actually ended being right across the street from Chungking Mansions, the inspiration for the great 1994 HK film of the same name:

    Though my personal favorite HK movie is Fallen Angels, also by director Wong Kar-wai.

     
    ^ View across Victoria Bay. I couldn’t get good pictures of the skyline at night.

    On my way out I wanted to try some pastries, but when I followed the GPS to the pastry shop this was the line. Oh well.

    ^ West Kowloon Railway Station. Very beautiful design and right in the heart of Hong Kong.

    I thought Hong Kong was a very cool city; the mixture of British influence with traditional Cantonese culture was interesting, the city itself is compact and dense, and in some ways it is both futuristic and aging. Like I said, I wasn’t there for very long and illness limited my experience, but I did like it and I think it’s worth a visit if you’re nearby.

    From West Kowloon I hopped on a high speed train to Shenzhen. Travel time was only about 15 minutes, but because of One Country, Two Systems, you have to go through customs when entering the mainland as if you’re coming from another country.

    When you think about Shenzhen, the first thing you need to grapple with is how new it is. In the late 1970s, what is now Shenzhen was basically a fishing village home to a few thousand people. Today, it’s a megacity of nearly 15 million people and the heart of the Chinese tech world (sometimes people call it “China’s Silicon Valley”).

    The development of Shenzhen was the deliberate strategy of Deng Xiaoping (pictured above), the leader of China during the late 70s and 80s following the death of Mao Zedong. It was part of the larger Chinese “Reform and Opening” period (that still continues to this day) that aimed to lift China out of poverty by selectively opening parts of the economy to domestic and foreign capital. Modern Shenzhen is often cited in support of Deng’s strategy.

    ^ This isn’t a great picture but there are so many of these technology malls where every floor has a different genre of new consumer tech products that you can walk around and try for yourself. I’m kicking myself that I didn’t get any better photos.

    ^ View from the top of the Ping’An Financial Center, the 5th tallest building in the world.

    ^ View of the previous building from the ground. Pictures don’t really do it justice, it looks absolutely massive in person.

    ^ Shanghai has a bull that’s an exact replica of the one on Wall Street, it’s only fitting Shenzhen has this huge automaton one.

    My final stop on this trip was Guangzhou.

    Guangzhou, also known as Canton, is the capital and largest city of Guangdong province. Guangdong is the part of China where people the Cantonese dialect that people in the US may have heard of (most Chinese immigrants to the US pre-1990 were from Guangdong). Today it is a city of nearly 20 million people, and has been an important trading port for silk and other commodities since the time of the Roman Empire.

    ^ Shamian Island neighborhood. Similar to Shanghai, in the 19th century Guangzhou had parts of it carved out for European powers to headquarter their trading operations in the city. This small island (literally “sandy field”) in the Pearl River was where the French and British colonial administrators resided. Now it is a quiet neighborhood with noticeably European architecture. The building style combined with the native plants reminded me of parts of Charleston, South Carolina.

    ^ Catholic church in Shamian.

    ^ Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. Sun is seen as a founding father of modern China, and is officially honored both on the mainland and in Taiwan. He was the leading figure in the 1911 revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty, the last imperial dynasty in Chinese history, and established the Republic of China. He was from Guangdong province.

    ^ The two decades after Sun Yat-sen helped create the Republic of China were full of chaos and instability. The new government was weak, and soon China was effectively divided into  regional regimes controlled by competing military commanders (known as the Warlord Era). This is a memorial to the martyrs of a failed uprising against the warlord of Guangdong in 1927.

    ^ I really like the amount of trees Guangzhou has everywhere.

    ^ Walked up nearby Baiyun Mountain where you can get a glimpse of the city. It was clear and blue sky in the morning when I started, but the clouds and fog had rolled in by the time I got to the top.

    ^ The Pearl River

    ^ Canton Tower

    ^ They love a pedestrian bridge in China

    In the city center’s hi-tech area.

    All in all, I had a really great time.

    That’s all I’ve got for now, hope you enjoyed it and stay tuned for more content.

    Patrick

  • March 2025 – Thailand

    Hi everybody,

    I’m now back in Chengdu, a couple days before    two weeks into    three weeks into the new term.

    I’ve been way taking too long to finish so I’m breaking it into two parts. Second part of this trip covering HK/Guangdong will be out very soon (I promise). Hope you enjoy.

    The flight to Bangkok from Chengdu was about 3 hours. My hotel was in the Chinatown district, which is one of the popular neighborhoods for tourists. There were lots of people out and about, both tourist and local. It was hot. Bangkok has a monsoon climate: hot year-round with wet and dry seasons, February being part of dry season. Everyone wears sandals.

    I tried to learn some survival Thai language in the two days before I arrived and was only able to retain “Hello”, “Thank You”, “Don’t Want”, and “Sorry”, which to be fair is probably good enough, though it didn’t really matter in the end. Everyone I needed to speak to would lead off with English upon seeing me before I could even get a word out.

    ^ In Chinatown, you’ll often see a combination of Thai script and Chinese characters.

    ^ The street my hotel was on.

    ^ Tuk-tuks go into the early morning.

    ^ This is Wat Arun, one of the most famous and beautiful temples in Thailand, right in the center of Bangkok. You can pay for a ferry back and forth across the river for ~25 cents.

    ^ This building and the next few are all part of the Supreme Grand Palace of Thailand, the former court of the Thai monarchy and offices of the royal government. Now that stuff is elsewhere, but it is still a site of national pride and has a few temples to boot.

    ^ One of the important temples. You had to take your shoes off to go near it, and you couldn’t take photos inside so you’ll have to take my word for it that it looked cool in there.

    ^ I’m an idiot and forgot you can’t wear shorts to Buddhist temples (in my defense it was like 90 degrees), so I had to buy and wear a $30 pair of baggy elephant pants. When I decided I’d had enough of going to temples I handed them off to a shorts-wearing Aussie I saw walking in that direction.

    Stir-fried crispy pad Thai.

    Noodles, chicken, veggies, spicy chili sauce, Chang, simple as.

    ^ Potentially my favorite thing I ate in Thailand, Thai satay. It’s very simple, just skewered marinated chicken served with different sauces. Had to get it a second time.

    ^ I used the Bangkok MRT a few times and I was really surprised at how clean and convenient and just generally nice it was.

    On my last night, I went and saw a Muay Thai event at the stadium that was originally the first Muay Thai venue in the world. I don’t have much to say about it, but it was definitely entertaining and worth a visit if you’re ever in Bangkok. It’s traditional for every fighter, Thai or otherwise, to complete this sort of shadowboxing/dancing/praying ritual that honors your trainer and the sport in general, sometimes for minutes at a time and with traditional Thai music playing.

    I spent 3 days in Bangkok in total and really enjoyed it. There is great variety in the styles of the different neighborhoods; some are full of sleek modern skyscrapers with fancy hotels and rooftop bars, others are seemingly more traditional working-class neighborhoods with midrise apartments and cramped alleys full of greengrocers and street food vendors.

    There is Chinese-influenced architecture and Chinese diaspora-run restaurants and shops, as well as enough massive Buddhist temple complexes to take me weeks to visit them all. Compared with Chinese cities, it was definitely dirtier and a bit less developed to be sure, but not enough to hurt my experience and I never felt unsafe even alone late at night. It’s one of the world’s great cities that I only had a small taste of; I would definitely visit again if I had the chance.

    From Bangkok, I took a 75-minute flight to Krabi. It’s one of the popular destinations for tourists that want to lay on the beach or go island-hopping. I did some research online and found a place called Tonsai Beach that was relatively accessible to an airport but less crowded than some of the others.

    I rented a hotel room that comprised 1/2 of one of these little yellow houses. The room was $75 per night for three nights, and mostly I sat on the beach, swam, kayaked, and relaxed.

    ^ There are many rock formations near Tonsai that are decent for climbing. I ran into a lot of climbers when I was staying there.

    ^ This is one of the “long-tail” boats that run from the early morning until the evening shuttling people between the nearby beaches.

    It’s basically a big canoe with a weed whacker attached to the back of it. Riding in one of these is the only way to get from the busy  town of Ao Nang to the more secluded beach my hotel was on. It only took about 10-15 minutes but you had to wade into knee deep water to get into the boat (and carry your luggage over your head).

    So that’s all I’ve got for the Thailand portion of the trip. Sorry again about the delay. I’m already close to done with the second part so you should be seeing that soon.

    Best,

    Patrick

  • October 2025 – Dali

    Three Hoosiers in the Far East

    Last week, two of my friends from college came to visit during the National Week/Mid-Autumn festival holidays. I had October 1st – 8th off of work, so we decided a few months ago that this would be the best time for them to come visit, despite being the busiest domestic travel week of the year. Currently, American passport holders and people from many other countries can come visit China visa-free for 10 days, and the timer only starts on your first full day in China so if you arrive in the morning, it’s actually more like 11 days.

    They flew into Beijing and spent two days there while I was still working, and then on October 1st I met them at the airport in Chengdu, where I live. We spent three days in Chengdu, and then ventured south into Yunnan province, the cities of Dali and Kunming, for 5 more days. In this entry, I’ll share some photos I took and some background on Dali/Yunnan.

    I mentioned this in the Chongqing blog, but the first week of October is a massive travel week in China, and at many places like train stations, airports, the metro, ticketed tourist attractions, the crowds can be pretty huge:

    (Chengdu East railway station on 10/1)

    We were prepared for this but to be honest we didn’t have a terrible time with regard to crowds, outside of a few traffic jams and a long line to ride a cable car in the mountains in Dali.

    I’ve already included a lot of Chengdu stuff in previous blog posts, so I’ll just quickly skim some highlights.

    The view from our Airbnb in Chengdu city center.

    Obligatory trip to People’s Park to drink tea and watch traditional Sichuan opera in a small outdoor theater.

    Wenshu Buddhist Monastery in downtown Chengdu.

    Asian squat + cigarette. Zeke had truly gone native by this point.

    Traditional Sichuan dinner. Kung Pao chicken, Mapo tofu, Twice-cooked pork, veggies. Ate ourselves to death at this place.

    …and she’s buying a stairway, to heaven

    We’re off to Dali!

    A little background on Yunnan province:

    Yunnan is in the very southwest of China, bordering Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam. It’s physically about the size of Germany and has about 50 million people (~same as Spain/South Korea). In China, ～90% of the 1.4B population are Han Chinese and the remaining 140 million are made up of 55 distinct minority ethnic groups, and Yunnan is known for having 25 of these groups. The villages of Dali are the ancestral homeland of the Bai (白, literally: “white”) ethnic group (pictured below)

    Yunnan is thought to be the birthplace of tea and was an important stop on the ancient “Tea-Horse road” that linked trade between Yunnan, Tibet, India, and Nepal.

    Most importantly to me, however, is the fact that Yunnan is thought to have the most pleasant climate in all of China. Due to some geographical/topological quirks that are beyond my understanding, Yunnan has mild winters and mild, if not a bit rainy, summers. In general, it stays between 50-80 degrees Fahrenheit all year round, unless you go into the high mountains. I must admit that during some of the steamy July days in Chengdu more than once I found myself thinking “Surely, they must need some English teachers in Yunnan…”

    The inner courtyard of our hotel. The place only had 6 rooms, we took up three of them, and two were unoccupied. It was run by a family that lived in an adjacent apartment.

    We could go on the roof from our rooms.

    Walking around Dali Old Town.

    Treating ourselves to some traditional Yunnan food, I don’t remember some of the dishes but there was definitely fish, mushrooms, and homemade plum wine.

    Tilapia, pork ribs, fried rice, potatoes and veggies.

    Rented bikes from this nice auntie for about $10 a day.

    Biking to the lake through farm fields. Saw farmers picking green onions by hand.

    Dali is located around a large lake called Erhai. On the south shore is the “new”, modern looking city, and along the west shore are many older looking villages that are more aesthetic and popular for tourists such as ourselves.

    The weather was beautiful the whole time we were there, 75 and partly cloudy every day. We did all forget that Dali is at about 6,500 feet elevation (1,000 higher than Denver) and thus the sun is much stronger, so after this bike ride we were all a bit pink.

    Finished our cycling at the Three Pagodas, a UNESCO world heritage site that was built in the 9th century over 1,000 years ago.

    Nighttime from our roof.

    Dali is famous for it’s nightlife and music scene, and it was especially lively during the holiday when people from all over the country visit here on vacation. I forgot to take a photo, but just by chance we found ourselves watching a different band that did Rolling Stones and Bill Withers covers in between Chinese songs.

     
    Uncle that runs the hotel would make us noodles every morning for breakfast.

    Got up early to take some pictures of the town before everybody woke up. It seems like in Dali, everyone stays up late and sleeps in late.

    This mountain that rises to the West over Dali is called Cangshan. Near the highest summit of Cangshan is a mountain pond where, legend has it, the Mongol warlord Kublai Khan and his army washed their horses before conquering Dali and absorbing it into the Yuan imperial dynasty.

    This cable car takes you about 60% of the way up Cangshan mountain, where we could then hike for a few hours (on a relatively flat path) to a chair lift that took us the rest of the way to the bottom.

    View from Cangshan of part of “new” Dali City.

    That’s pretty much all I got. I really enjoyed my time in Dali. It’s absolutely gorgeous, great weather, great food, lots of stuff to do, and just generally a good vibe. I wouldn’t be surprised if I come back here again.

    After we tallied up all the expenses at the end of the trip, we each spent about $50 a night on hotels, and about $60 a day on all other expenses combined. I always tell people, once you figure out the flight, the rest isn’t so bad. Hope you enjoyed this one, I’m sorry for the 7-month summer hiatus that I took, and keep an eye out for another installment coming soon. I have a serious backlog of stuff I need to get to.

    Best,

    Patrick

    Some bonus content:

    “We believe in nothing, Lebowski… nothing.”

    Yum.

    Not really sure what this is intended to mean but I think this is fruit juice in a bag.

    iShowSpeed, or as Chinese people call him, 甲亢哥 (hyperthyroidism bro)