jeff yen

4/2 Hanghzou : AM

This is part of a series of posts that are going to detail my time as part of a week-long, five-star-studded, guided group tour my father arranged for us. Initially I thought it would be a short trip around Shanghai, and agreed to go in the hopes that maybe… just maybe… my dad and I could spend some quality time together.

…Yeah.

In any event, the posts are going to come more or less in reverse order, since the trip is almost over and I’m writing what’s most fresh in my mind at the moment. There’s going to be more exposition in the posts to come, since explaining how these tours actually work at the business level is something I’m going to reserve for when my impressions get drier and I’m bored of writing about the whole thing anyway.

Pictures are also coming, when I get a chance.

This is a perfect illustration of how my mind is going. I feel like I've definitely written this post already, but for the life of me I can't find any trace of it… in my notebook OR on this site. I probably wrote it once, decided it was far too boring, and scrapped it in favor of the PM post. In any case here it is, reborn in the interest of my laughably incompetent brand of continuity.

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The day's morning feature was a boat ride around West Lake (xi hu / 西湖), which was unexpectedly gorgeous. The weather had just started to clear, and the sun would occasionally peek through the cloud cover to bathe the boat in golden warmth, and ricochet blinding flares off the lake.

I firmly believe that much of China's scenery is best complemented by alternating rain and sunshine. There's something about the willows that inevitably gather around lakes and rivers that is just begging to be rained on, and when sunlight – even the peculiarly sepia, withered sunlight of the more populated urban centers – deigns to play off of the jeweled branches the effect is, in a word, perfect. There aren't many things that can make me just stand around and feel happy, but that combination of mist and light is one of them.

Frustratingly, capturing that atmosphere on film (or a digital sensor) is a feat of skill which has simply proven to be beyond me, even with the $1500 in camera equipment I have lassoed to my body whenever I'm traveling.

So today, I was content to just lean over the railing on our ludicrously pagoda-shaped boat, eyes closed, while sparkling wavelets flung novae through my eyelids and the sun soaked into my bones. Meanwhile, I did my best to ignore both our tour guide's blaring loudspeaker, and the grandmother who slowly but persistently forced me further along the railing in order to get a good shot at a particularly compelling bit of nothing. Through metallic bellows about historically significant stretches of lakeside walkway, and the increasingly insistent elbow at my ribs, there wound a constant thread; a gratifying sense of well-being, which I was determined to enjoy while it lasted.

The boat ride cut across a corner of the lake and deposited us near a parking lot, lasting a charming fifteen minutes or so. We then waited for a rather less enchanting half-hour while our bus made its way through rush-hour traffic toward us. Adults leaned on nearby trees, chatting with unfounded optimism about what might await us at lunch, while their children chased each other aimlessly around the parking lot, occasionally straying into traffic.

Once the bus reached us, we piled on board for a short drive to a Longjing ( long jing / 龙井 ) tea plantation. Longjing green tea, as explained to us by a severe-looking woman in an equally severe navy skirt suit while we sat in a stark white room, is known to be one of the finest teas in the world.

She then held forth at length on the health benefits of green tea, occasionally rapping on the table to get our attention if we were insolent enough speak to each other. It seemed less a sales pitch than a stern talking-to, but sales pitch it was, right down to her trick of "proving" green tea's health benefit.

Our schoolmarm took a handful of uncooked white rice and placed it in a cup with some spirit of iodine and water. Allowing us to note the dark – and therefore quite obviously toxic – color, she then poured in some tea, which cleared the iodine almost instantly and started absorbing the color from the rice.

Despite the gasps and fumbling for credit cards that ensued from my fellow tourists, I remained skeptical – knowing that, you know, iodine is important – merely making a note that I should look up the chemistry involved.

(Nerd alert)

As it turns out… this is one of the very things that can make green tea unhealthy if used to excess. Tea – including green tea – has a high fluoride content. This is suspected to increase in the presence of water and air pollution, of which China famously has no shortage.

As fluoride is a chemical antagonist to iodine, it comes as no surprise that green tea would clear iodine from a glass of water. The thing is, despite the icky color, iodine actually helps with proper thyroid function and prevents diseases like fluorosis, which has actually been linked to heavy tea consumption – and has a curiously high incidence in China.

Not to mention green tea's unusually high concentrations of aluminum, which has been linked to Alzheimer's.

It just seems amusing that what was convincing these people to shell out $110 per pound for green tea was the very thing that might: a) help them forget – along with everything else – how they were fleeced, and b) cripple them in such a way as to prevent them from being able to take their revenge.

Snake oil salesmen haven't gone away; they've just diversified.

Then we went to lunch, which was appropriately terrible.