Zaduszki - All Saints Day- All Souls Day

Last Sunday on the recommendation of our Polish teacher we went to Powaski cemetery in Wasaw to check out the All Saints Day-All Souls Day holiday and see what Warsowians do on this special day. Seeing as Poland is 85% Catholic you can imagine the feeling of the society celebrating this day special to the Christian calendar. In all graveyards in the country, and abroad, there are graves that are adorned with candles and lamps as well as flowers  and other decorations. People visit their family graves and there are almost no graves that do not get some kind of recognition. People carry on superstitions that believe the souls of the dead visit the family home and, perhaps, stop for a moment to eat or warm themselves. In many ways this reminds me of Obon in Japan as families come together, tend graves, and prepare for the dead to return to them.

 

Powaski cemetary, the largest in the city covering 110 acres and is estimated to have buried 1million people in it's grounds. As we approached the graveyard there were throngs of people, people singing, some playing instruments, others asking for donations. As we entered the walls there were paths around the tombstones packed with people. As we got further and further in the crowds thinned, but were still many. It was hard to actually move fast as every couple of paces another interesting grave could be seen. Tombstones in Powaski Cemetery are beautifully made with loving detail around family tombs. Some small, some quite large and some clearly belonging to families with some wealth. It was very interesting to see the different interpretations of honoring death and to see the names and dates of those who laid beneath. Many of them a couple hundred years old.

Aya said a few times that it was creepy to imagine all the skeletons that were resting in one area, a literal necropolis, which I suppose is true, but I was focused more on the art above ground. Can you guess the profession of the fellow with the cap and goggles?

 

We searched the cemetery for some time and I can imagine that in the future we will return again. As we searched we looked for the Jewish section as we thought it would be interesting to see that area given Poland's history with the Nazi invasion and the treatment of Jews. Unfortunately it was walled off, but a Polish friend told us that there are times when a gate to that area is opened, so we will try to go then. Looking at a map I can also see a Protestant section. The different sections of the graveyard remind me of two graves I saw in a picture, a husband and wife of different faiths whose tombstones were built on either side of a wall dividing the two denominational cemeteries had their tombstones built so they would be holding hands. No such thing here, but plenty of unique sculptures and beautiful artwork. 

The view at night is even more spectacular, though we didn't get to see this graveyard lit up we did see a few smaller ones nearer to us. Here, an aerial photo and video from drone shot above the cemetery. 

Unfortunately there are some not so positive aspects of the holiday, trash! I'm not sure why as many of the decorations are plastic and glass, easily re-used or possibly recycled, but there seems to be bins and bins of trash around the graveyards. On my ride to work each day I go by a graveyard and there are three dumpsters available to throw your trash for what is really a small graveyard. Even Poles are wising up to the negative impacts of the trash created, so maybe there will be change in the future. For now life is not sustainable, but perhaps in the future the decorations will be? 

First Impressions of Warsaw

Aya and I have now been in Warsaw for three months. We've moved into our apartment, toured around the city a bit, been taking Polish lessons and generally getting to know our new home. 

One thing that I knew coming in was that I would not completely escape the air pollution we experienced in Beijing. As I was accepting my new position last year some friends of ours living here in Warsaw warned us that the air gets bad in winter and we watched last winter through our apps to see that happen in aqi data. Then, last week we started to experience it ourselves. While not nearly as bad as Beijing, it is still a bit disappointing to have to again consider if I can run outside or if we should have our windows closed and air filters on at home. 

But let's not dwell on the negative for too long. Warsaw is full of positives. Maybe the best thing that we've experienced is the beer and ice cream. Ice cream is everywhere and Aya has literally been eating it almost every day. The craft beer scene is very strong here and so I too have been indulging almost every day. 

and oh, the food, so much of it and so good. There are many national cuisines around the city and Polish food is pretty good in itself. We live outside of the city center, but there are plenty of places in our neighborhood and it is an easy 15-20 minute metro ride to the center of town. 

You would think that we are gaining a lot of weight here, but there are lots of places to walk and hike and my route to work each day is a 20 minute bike ride each way, so lots of time and place to get out and get moving. 

Similar to China, so far, we haven't made too many local friends but I would say that people here do seem to be more keen to hang out together and its just a matter of time before we make more friends. Poles are known for being a bit shy or unfriendly, I am told, but the latter part has not been my experience. We have noticed that people don't really chit chat with strangers, unlike the US ( a good thing) and that in public spaces people tend to be quiet, like in the metro. People don't really smile unless something is truly pleasing to them, so service staff will not seem as friendly if you are coming from Japan or the US were an effort is made to seem friendly. However, once you break that veneer people are very friendly and kind. We've made a couple friends and generally people seem to appreciate our attempts at Polish, though we usually don't get very far before they answer us in English. We've also noticed a lot of good behavior in public, like giving seats to the elderly, orderly queues, quiet voices, and a general respect for others. One thing to be aware of though is to be prepared to hear a long answer when you ask a Pole how they are doing. They take it seriously, so you won't get the usual, "fine, and you?" Often they will tell you exactly how they are feeling and why. One stereotype that seems to be true is that Poles do like to complain, but don't take it too seriously. 

Getting around town has been quite easy and there is a lot to see. We've been to the Old Town a few times, an impressive place as it was totally rebuilt after WWII from old plans and paintings of what the town looked like. There are lots of nice places eat there or just to sit wand watch the crowds. Much of the architecture in the city is squat and dull colored, though I don't find it ugly some people do. One other unusual site in Warsaw is the Palace of Culture, built as a Soviet gift it is sometimes referred to a Stalin's... because it was a large symbol of the Soviet power during the Cold War era. More recently EU money has been pouring into the city and many new high rises and roadways have been built. Though some of the politicians here deride the EU in Warsaw it is clear to see the benefits. 

 

 

The other quite distinct thing about Warsaw and the Poles are the legacies of the past that shape their lives today. "Pamietan/my" can be seen everywhere, "Remember". No matter where you go in the city there are markers, candles, and remembrances to events past. We were lucky enough to be here at the end of July which marked the remembrance of the starting of the Warsaw Uprising, the largest resistance to the Nazis by a civilian population which left over 200.000 civilian Poles dead and 85% of the city destroyed. On this day every year the Poles stand for remembrance in the streets of Warsaw as life in the city literally grinds to a halt. The war time history of Poland and then the invasion by the Soviets gives the living Poles today a sense of sadness but also a sense of pride in the nation. It is a pride that can be easily seen among Poles of all ages, but unfortunately recently has been morphing into a more commonly seen anti-immigrant anti-globalization movement, part of a greater European trend, and gaining more seats in the parliament. 

With all that said, Warsaw is a lovely place to be even if, like everywhere, it is not perfect. It is quite easy to enjoy a day at the local flea markets, walking along the boardwalk of the Vistula river, or enjoying Chopin in the park. The people of Warsaw love their city and their country and make it a point of pride to help foreigner like us feel right at home. 

Final Thoughts on Beijing

In our last few months in Beijing we did a bit of a “tick the bucket list” of travels and things around Beijing and China. To name just a few we travelled to Guangzhou to see a friend we’d been promising to visit for years, we took another hiking trip with Beijing hikers and this time to a rural village, we went back to the forbidden city to tour around it, and of course we went to Tibet as we figured it would be hard to ever do that again. 

After 5 years in Beijing(and 2 in Shanghai) we’d covered a good amount of ground in China (its a big country, if you've not noticed) traveling to far flung places like Harbin, Xian, Wuhan, Guangzhou, and Lhasa. We’ve seen a good bit of the country as well as some of the, “is this China?” Places like Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. We did make some Chinese friends, though I would say not too many. Mostly this is because we were too busy and/or the timing just was hard to coordinate meet-ups. This is partly to do with the busy nature of the work I was doing those 5 years in Beijing, basically putting the gas to the floor to work as much as possible and having little time to do much else. 

There were many things we enjoyed about Beijing and I think the friendly nature of one to one interactions and the attitude of “whatever flies” was something we usually liked. We liked to say, "In China anything is possible", good and bad. In many ways, on the street level, people in Beijing are much more free than people in the west or Japan. No one seemed to care about noise or dirt or proximity or place and in many ways this was freeing. There was a kind of chabudou, or close enough, sort of attitude. Tidiness was not much of an issue, but we did notice through our years that generally businesses, public places, etc. were getting cleaner and some might say less interesting. Noise was turned up no matter the place or situation. If you want to go for a peaceful walk in the park good luck, every rock is a fake rock/speaker belting out a "soothing" tune. I often felt like, to blend in a bit more, I would have to speak really loudly when using my Chinese to make it more authentic. Oddly, we did have one noise complaint against us in our 5 years and we can’t figure out why both because we were watching tv at a low volume level and... everything else in China was so noisy we couldn’t fathom someone actually making a noise complaint. 

The police largely left us alone, though we did have 5-6 officers show up to our apartment door one Friday night as they thought I was my friend who failed to register with the police while visiting but did not fail to put my address as where he was staying when he passed immigration. That worked out fine, but the police were largely a mystery to us. We rarely saw them doing anything and when we did they were sleeping in a car or loitering around seemingly doing nothing. We did go to the police stations a few times for registrations, but each time I was surprised that it was a pretty lax process and I was always struck by the long lunch hour (2 hours!) that I had to try to avoid. Despite that, China seemed safe from violent or confrontational crime. We never heard or experienced any robberies, mugging, thefts, or worse amongst our friends whereas in Malaysia everyone had or knew by one degree of separation someone who had been robbed or harmed. Perhaps that isn’t too surprising though since the state and the police had a presence that was seemingly always there and citizens do not have a lot of rights against their own government should they find themselves in opposition or trouble.

Throughout our time in China we ran into many stories of people being detained without cause(Not people we knew personally), jailed for inciting opposition to the government, or held on house arrest. The government is everything and to oppose them, even peacefully, is not accepted for very long. Human rights lawyers and environmental lawyers were routinely held without cause and charged without strong evidence. If you made trouble for the government, they made sure to make trouble for you. 

In the first couple of years we did try to talk with our Chinese friends about some of the issues that were hot buttons in Chinese society such as unjust incarceration, the role of the government, or environmental pollution, but these never turned out to be productive dialogues. Perhaps it is because of our delivery, but I think it is more about a defensiveness Chinese people have as they identify China and its government with themselves rather than as in the west where many, but not all, people identify the people and the government as separate entities. Most of these conversations turned into a “whataboutism” that did not exactly address the issue but intended to deflect or equivocate. I remember one such conversation my first year in Beijing where I was complaining about the pollution, it was something like 350aqi at the time, hazardous and obviously thick smoky air. A Chinese friend said her in-laws lived in Beijing and that they didn’t think the air was that bad. I said that the numbers don’t lie and it was in fact unhealthy air most of the time. She then whataboutismed me with stating that LA also had polluted air (yes, and?) For reference, dear reader, LA air quality is the worst large city air quality in the US, but it is less than half as bad as beijing air year on year. I encountered this type of argument time to time. Human rights abuses? What about how America treats minorities? Restricting protests? What if it happened in the US, the police would surely shoot. And on and on.  

Most of the time the Chinese government used scapegoats to release the pent up aggressions of Chinese citizens. Protesting against the government is a no-no, but if you want something to protest against how about the Japanese? What about Korea? Once while on a field trip with students a Chinese teacher blurted out, unprompted, that the Japanese were always provoking China and that is why there was constant tension between the two. I couldn’t understand why the teacher had said that (seems to me a good amount of provocation on both sides), but on the train ride back to the city the teacher was reading the Global Times, a party newspaper notorious for having editorials say the things the government wanted to say, but couldn’t directly. I asked her jokingly if she read the paper daily as I assumed she just picked it up on the train with nothing else to read. She said yes, everyday. At certain times while watching news such as on BBC the tv channel would just cut out and we would later hear that there was something about Tibet, or Taiwan, or something else sensitive to the party that was being discussed. It was hard to understand how the party justified this and got away with it, but citizens would often echo sentiments of outside forces meddling in Chinas affairs. To me, it seemed like a bit too much paternalizm. 

In a closed system of media, whether by paper or by internet, there was a certain danger in playing the constant victim. There was always someone else to blame and march against, but only when the government approved. If they did not sanction it, large groups could not gather. That was illegal. At one point, there was even a beer festival I was going to attend that was cancelled as that would mean a large group gathering and the proper permission was withdrawn. If you cancel the beer festival I'm going to, that is a line crossed!

Permission was a bit of an odd thing. Sometimes you had it when you shouldn’t, sometimes you had it then it was taken away, sometimes you couldn’t get it but can’t figure out why. Most people said, just do it and ask for forgiveness later if it is wrong. 

Many times we were told, you are foreign so you wouldn’t understand. Maybe. Maybe that is true. It is hard to tell. If it is true, we might not know it, but either way we would have to rely on someone’s word and that could be difficult when they are seemingly contradicting themselves. As an example, we had one friend, unprompted, tell Aya that she was ok with the internment of Uighers in the western provinces. When asked if she would be ok with it if it were her own family she said yes (was this defensive?). On the same day but previous to this conversation she said to another friend, I just wish westerners would respect China and the Chinese. In a way, this puts me and a lot of westerners in a mental pickle. I do respect the Chinese people and the Chinese nation for the achievements that they’ve earned, but its hard to respect the Chinese government for interning its own citizens and even harder to respect Chinese citizens who say they are fine with that. How can I respect a China/Chinese citizen who doesn’t seem to respect the human rights of other Chinese citizens? Is it because I am a foreigner and wouldn’t understand the Chinese concept of human rights? Most Chinese would probably say, yes. 

These things came up every couple of months. Something would happen or someone would say something to us that would make us think, do we not understand fully what is happening here? I often felt like we did, but maybe we never did. I’m not sure though that people in China really know either. In some of the final weeks we were in Beijing and we went to the rural village of Cuandixia To do some hiking. Here there were many old houses with slogans of the cultural revolution fading away on their sides. Our guide told us about the slogans and talked about how during the war with the Japanese some buildings and temples were destroyed, but never a mention of why the cultural revolution or the Great Leap Forward actually did to the area. We never heard much about these events, or Tianaman square for that matter. Even at the national history museum the terrible events of the 60-70s gets barely a mention among halls and halls of China’s national history. The Chinese often point to Japan and say they should examine their past more closely about such things as the Nanjing massacre and I think they are right, but ask the Chinese to reciprocate and it suddenly becomes taboo to discuss national past wrong doings. Do they know about it? Sure, but how well do they really know it if a full array of opinions and sources are not used to discuss it? (yes, I'm a teacher!) Just because what you hear is true does not mean you are hearing the truth. Truth can be negated by omission. 

 I have come to have an affection for Chinese people and the Chinese nation.  As China continues to play an every larger role on the world stage, I worry. What vision of the world and themselves will the Chinese citizens have? Can they move forward peacefully without a full vision of themselves?  What view will the world have of China and the Chinese as this happens? It is my sincerest wish that the Chinese and the world find a path forward together and that, perhaps, a westerner might finally understand. Who knows, perhaps someday I will return and understand China better. 

Tibet

Traveling to Tibet we took the route by air, choosing to go part of the way back by train. We had heard that the scenery on the train was quite good and it would be pretty cool to ride on THE HIGHEST train line in the world, but the ride itself was more than 24 hours. So, we flew in. 

The first day of course we were thinking about the altitude. At nearly 4000m it was roughly the height of Mt. Fuji, or much of the Rocky mountain’s taller peaks. We could feel it pretty much right away as it was a bit hard to breathe. The first afternoon/evening we had no plan, so we walked around the neighborhood at the speed of a geriatric, breathing heavily and dragging our feet. Over the next few days we felt better, but the few days we were there were not enough to totally adjust and so we constantly had a short of breathe, slight headache feeling which made it hard to do much physically or to sleep well. 

    

The second day we visited two temples and that took up much of our day. We we were accompanied by not only our guide but a couple from Sydney. It was nice to have them along as the husband had a good knowledge of Buddhism and had a lot of good questions to ask as we toured the temple. Of course, as will happen with anything you are unfamiliar with, especially when the names/places are in a different language, just about everything went over our heads and didn’t stick. We were often asking the same things the guide had explained earlier or generalizing information. I feel bad for the guide and it is certainly not a job I would ever want to repeat things over and over! Then again, I'm a teacher so... maybe. 

After lunch we watched as some of the younger monks had a “debate”. It was interesting as they were all speaking at the same time, but of course we had no idea what they were talking about. Our guide told us they were debating buddhist teachings, but they could just be telling each other off, as I suspect some of them were based on their facial and hand expressions. 

Perhaps because of the heat and/or the altitude and/or the time spent walking we were beat by 5pm. We decided that since we were already out we would grab dinner and then head back. As we were on the 3rd floor of the restaurant we could see many of the surrounding rooftops, including the one where there were police literally hanging off the side of the roof watching the street below. This would become a familiar sight over the next few days as we crossed check points and passed armed patrols. 

A big question in itself, Tibet’s autonomy from the Chinese government is basically nil. Since 2008 when there was an uprising across Tibet against government forces, there has been a largely increased presence of Chinese forces in Tibet and a much more restrictive atmosphere. Part of this also has to do with the Dalai Lama as he fled to India in 1959 and lives there still, in opposition to the Chinese government in Tibet. Nowhere did we see pictures or mention of the current Dalai Lama, but people do say his number in the line of succession. 

The following day we were on our own with the guide and we visited Jekhon temple in the center of Lhasa. We had passed by there a couple of times already as it is in the heart of the city and the touristy area. As we arrived in the morning there were many people outside doing their adulation. They would basically do a burpee without the jumping. Our guide told us that they do 100 of these, then take a break for tea or whatever. Inside the temple the crowds were thick, but none thicker than when we were right in front of the statue of Sakyamuni buhhda, which was brought to Lhasa by a Chinese princess. People were wishing to pray to it, I didn’t care, but that is the route. I tried to just walk by as fast as I could, which is to say at standing pace since the people in front of me weren’t moving. To get my attention, as obviously I wasn’t moving fast enough, the crowds behind me kept pushing me. I did, oddly, receive a couple jabs and pushes in this and other temples from pilgrims. I bet they are kind of tired of tourists just hanging out and blocking their way, but I am pretty conscious of keeping out of pathways. I think maybe I was just a target for mild aggression.

After this encounter we had a quick coffee at KFC and then headed to the Potala palace. This beautiful building was home to the Dalai lamas from the 5th all the way to the 13th, the one that escaped to Tibet. It is a huge place, but so are the crowds that wish to see it, so we were given one hour for our guide to whisk us through the place and see this and that room. Apparently there are 999 rooms, but I don’t think we saw all of them, just 998. Kidding aside, it felt that way as we walked hurriedly from place to place.

The following day we were packing off to the train station and taking the highest altitude track from Tibet to Xining. You can take a train all the way to Beijing, but it takes about 48 hours and we thought that 24 hours on the train would be plenty to see the best sites. Many people take the train ride the other way, to acclimatize, but our schedule dictated the other way and probably as a consequence of that we did not encounter many western tourists or tourists in general. The train trip had some quite beautiful parts and here and there we did see some wildlife along the tracks. Again though, I was struck by China’s grip as especially leaving Lhasa and then every couple of miles or so along the track there would be a lone outpost of a police or guard sentry, sometimes saluting as the train went past. Who or what were these people keeping the train safe from?