sliding cars and bear park

Just over a month ago, I flew to China to visit my youngest brother, Conor, who'd just finished up his January term study abroad program in Beijing. Within twenty-hour hours of landing, we were on our way to the Great Wall at Badaling, on a bus where we were the only white people. (Conor speaks Mandarin, fluently enough to have conversation about American health insurance in a noodle shop, which is to say, more than well enough to get done anything that needed doing while we were there -- so he was my trip interpreter.) Badaling is the most-touristed and easiest-to-reach section of the Great Wall, but it actually wasn't as crowded as I would have expected on a Saturday afternoon, and also, it's beautiful.

  
We were suitably impressed with the Great Wall itself, but also quite impressed with the tourist infrastructure surrounding Badaling. Conor tells me that Chinese tourism is not necessarily up to par with Western tourism the majority of the time, but at Badaling the Chinese were all over it. For instance, running short on time or generally feeling too lazy to walk all the way up the Great Wall? No problem! You can ride the sliding cars.


Yes, the sliding cars are exactly what they look like: a very slow-moving roller coaster. After the fact Conor told me that all along the route there were signs saying "no photography" but since they were only in Mandarin, whoops. If there were anywhere in China where I would have figured on English translations being prevalent, the Great Wall would have been it, but nah.

Even more unexpected than the sliding cars, though: after the bus drop-off point in the snacks and souvenirs section but before the sliding cars, we walked under a sign that Conor examined and scratched his head over. "Um, that says 'bear park,'" he told me. Why yes.


The environment they're kept in is pretty sparse, as you can tell from the pictures, and it's upsetting in the way that basically any zoo is upsetting -- but also, these bears were cool. They may be begging for food from tourists and gnawing on pieces of trash (see below) but they seemed to be genuinely enjoying themselves. Which is maybe even sadder than if they just looked dejected. I don't know. But they are some awesome bears.


For instance, please meet Edna.* Edna was my favorite. Edna was initially into the spirit of tackling the other bears, but then got distracted by gnawing on her own leg.** Then she found and commenced gnawing on a piece of shiny trash, which amused her to no end. (There may have been an end, but it wasn't during the fifteen minutes or so we spent watching her.)

*Edna may have possibly been Ed. Hard to tell!
**Just like our favorite hyena in The Lion King! Hence the name.

In conclusion, woohoo China! You were awesome and sometimes a little awful, but always, always weird.

a month of letters

As seen on the Hairpin a few days ago, Mary Robinette Kowal had the great idea to make February be A Month of Letters -- that is, a month in which you send one letter or postcard for every day that the post office is open.

Now, for those who know me outside of the internet, saying that I like to write letters will inspire peals of laughter because, um, that's a lot like saying I really enjoy oxygen. I'm an enormous dork when it comes to anything of the stationery and postcard persuasion, and already send mail on a regular basis anyway, because it's good fun.

But if you're not someone who already gets mail from me ordinarily and you have some interest in, say, a postcard from Malaysia (I fly to Asia tomorrow (!)), here's your chance! Shoot me an email with your address (thisexactly@gmail.com). I promise not to use your address for anything nefarious, unless you consider snail mail nefarious, in which case . . . our life philosophies are a little different.

If I already have your address, expect awesomeness in your mailbox.

mayrhofen V: après-ski

  

The fact that I didn't go skiing didn't remotely mean that I was going to skip out on the grand tradition of après-ski. We spent parts of a couple different evenings at the Ice Bar, with its dancing polar bears whose masks looked decidedly more like white rats. (And I enjoyed the Ice Bar/Eisbär [polar bear] pun.) As Megan said after we left, "I could very much get into the idea of a yearly non-skiing ski vacation." Agreed! As long as it doesn't get in the way of my tropical/beach vacations, that is.

Eight days till the China/Malaysia adventure!

mayrhofen IV: schneeschuhwandern

It turns out that snowshoeing near Tux, Austria is less like a pleasant stroll through the snowy hills and more like clawing your way up the side of the mountain. When you reach the top, you shiver on the porch of someone's cabin (your Austrian guide, who spent the morning snowshoeing in pants that unzipped to show his thighs and his tiny army green boxer-briefs, assures you that even though he doesn't know whose cabin this is, it's all good). You put on all the extra clothes you've got and chow down on the most delicious belegtes Brötchen of your life, plus tea, cookies, and Schnapps that tastes the way pine trees smell. You look at the mountains, which even in the fog are gorgeous, unreal, and you think about the village your guide told you about earlier, as you were passing a tiny chapel in the snow: a village big enough to have its own movie theater, entirely buried in an avalanche in the '70s. Twenty-odd people died; the chapel is in their honor. And you'll think how crazy it is that a whole village can disappear in an instant, like something out of a myth, like Atlantis, the lost city under the sea. There's very little danger of avalanches at the moment, your guide assures you. There's not enough snow on the mountains right now.

The way down from the cabin is more like what you were expecting out of this experience: for the majority of the return trip, you'll follow the road that winds gently back into the valley, cutting into the woods only once the snow cover gives way to icy slick. By the time you're back at the van, in spite of how you're sweaty and tired and a little bit freezing, longing for a change of clothes and a shower, you'll be thinking about how you understand it better now, the appeal of the mountains in winter, thinking maybe you'd love to do this again.

mayrhofen III: the most wonderful blues

Even if you aren't skiing, you can walk to the end of the main street in Mayrhofen and ride the lift up to the top of Ahorn mountain and spend an afternoon people-watching, drinking Glühwein spiked with a copious amount of rum, and gaping at the towns in the Zillertal below. Highly recommended.

mayrhofen II: new year's horse race

On New Year's Day we shuffled down the street from our hotel to check out the yearly horse races in the snow. The three actual races involved normal-sized horses pulling jockeys on sleds, but in between some of the actual races there were some local ski club members being pulled around the track. And the miniature ponies jockeyed by children were a slow-moving highlight.

mayrhofen I: welcome to winter

  
[full set here]
About a hot minute after getting back from spending Christmas in Virginia, I hopped in the car and drove south to spend New Year's in Mayrhofen, Austria with four of my best friends. I have basically no grounds for complaining in my life. Where did you spend New Year's, Kelly? Oh, you know. Tirol.

Mayrhofen was really lovely, and I say that as a non-skier (I've given skiing and snowboarding a couple of halfhearted tries in the past and am not terribly committed to trying again). We watched plenty of movies and TV (<3 you, Alias), acquired and shot off fireworks (okay, Felix shot them off; the rest of us watched from a safe distance), went to an Erlebnisbad, watched a New Year's Day horse race in the snow, went snowshoeing, and ate all the Käsespätzle, Schnitzel, and fondue we could handle. Tip: go to Wirtshaus zum Griena. It's down a narrow street that is probably perfectly innocuous-looking in daylight and was fairly creepy at night, but inside it's rustic and wonderful. The Schnitzel was great, the spinach ravioli with Alpine cheese was marvelous, and the cheesy-potato-bacon masterpiece I ordered was a heart attack in a skillet, and so worth it. Be sure to reserve in advance! They nearly didn't have a table for us, and that would have been a sadness. I mean, to the extent that being forced to eat something else delicious at one of the other lovely establishments in Mayrhofen really counts as sad.