I'm Michelle Singer, I'm the Adult Programs Coordinator here at the Tele-Covered Library. We're so pleased to have you with us tonight. Welcome to the library. We're very happy to be cosponsoring this series of talks with the Montpilier Senior Activity Center. I'm happy to have Janet Flair from the Montpilier Senior Activity Center from up and introduce our speaker. Hi folks, it's wonderful to see a packed room and thank you for the Tele-Covered Library's cosponsoring the series and also hosting tonight. I'm pleased to announce that three of our other speakers for the next three events are also in the room tonight, which is exciting. The last speaker is not, but the next three are. The next three talks are happening on January 27th. That's going to be cultural observations from a month in Japan with Peter and Therese who are here in the front. On February 10th, we've got on the edge of the Arctic. That's going to be looking at Canada with Barb and Witt Dahl who are here also, back there. And then on February 26th, Bill Dolder is going to be speaking about Incredible India. It's fairly recently back and Bill is right here. But tonight we're going to be traveling to China, Korea, Cambodia and Nepal with Justin Turcotte who traveled in 2019 with his entire family. He and his wife took their kids out of school for a number of months and they had an incredible adventure all over Asia and Oceania. He's going to tell you more about their itinerary. And Justin has had a special relationship with the senior center for, I believe, seven years going on eight now as the contractor for our Feast Nutrition Program. So if you've had lunch at the senior center or someone you care about has, Justin is the master chef behind the Feast Program and we've been really grateful for that partnership. Justin also served for on the Mont player city council and is active as are the rest of his family and many community affairs. And we're so grateful that they're willing to share their photos and their stories with us for this third event in our off the beaten track series. I also just wanted to recognize a couple more people who helped make this series possible. Mariah Lane is the brainchild behind the name and a lot of the planning that went into it. Mariah, where are you? Thank you, Mariah. And Burr Smith also helped in many ways with the logistical planning of the series. I did bring a number of posters that are in the back. If you'd like to grab one before you leave and that summarizes the rest of the events as well as some that have taken place already. I see Barbara Gartney, one of our earlier speakers is here too. Thanks for coming. So without further ado, I'd like to turn it over to Justin who has fabulous stories to share with you. Thanks, Justin. Thank you all for coming out on this cold night and thank you, Jana and Michelle for helping organize this and get it all set up. You'll notice on the back table there's a scrapbook where I've collected a bunch of the tickets and little pieces of paper that I tend to hold on to and then mail back in packets from time to time. And considered also bringing some snow and ice samples from the top of Everest, but I figured you probably had enough here. We're honored to be able to share our experiences and we realize that we're privileged to be from a first world country where pretty much anyone who puts their mind to it has the both freedom and means to travel the world. We don't take this for granted and I acknowledge this because the majority of people on earth still don't have that privilege. Also just a little bit of bits and pieces housekeeping before I get right into it. Any facts or statistics I sourced exclusively from Wikipedia. This is an online crowdsourcing resource online. I did that so that there'd be one place I could go back to. If you have any concerns about these facts, please come to me because you can go back into Wikipedia and request or make edits to correct any inaccuracies. And I would encourage you all to consider visiting or donating to Wikipedia as it's a great online crowdsource piece of information, way to get information. Everything else in the presentation is just first person observation or deduction. Questions. I'm the sort of person that loves to ask questions as the presentation is going on so they don't get lost. So please don't hesitate to throw up a hand if you see something or you're wondering and want to get a little more detail. As best I can, I'll recognize people and answer questions as we're going through the presentation. Additionally, there will be question and answer at the end of the presentation. So if you're more comfortable waiting till the end, I'm happy to spend as much time as we need to try to answer any questions that folks have.  In terms of an overview of the evening, I'm going to first, I'm going to talk a little bit about how we got to where we are today briefly. And then talk about where we went. I have four folders of slides that are set up to run for four countries. Korea, China, Cambodia, and Nepal. After that, I'll be making, as we go through those pictures, I've tried to kind of organize them in terms of, well, being a chef, of course, there's lots of food pictures. Thanks to my daughter, Annika, she was our photographer on the trip. The people, the sites, but you will probably notice that while we took a lot of pictures of cultural icons and World Heritage sites, I didn't spend a lot of slide resources highlighting those. The reason being is that there's plenty of better photographers and videographers who've done extensive documentation of many of these sites, and I would encourage you, if you're really interested in learning more about pandas or the Great Wall of China, to watch some of those videos. What I hope to give you is more of an overview and specifically because, let's see, with the exception of Korea, my wife and I had visited the other three countries about 18 and 15 years ago. And so going back now, what really struck me in the title of this talk, Time Capsule, The Velocity of a Changing World, is just from the conclusion that I hope to share the idea that the world is changing incredibly fast, and please do not use Vermont or the United States as your metric for how quickly the world is changing. That's what I was doing prior to going back to China, Cambodia, and Nepal, and it's not an accurate yardstick to be using on the world today. I hope to shed some light on that, and then, as I said, answer some questions at the end. So this was our family as we prepared to depart the U.S. in introduction to eating three meals a day for the next eight months prepared by someone else. Here's Nicholas eating one on the plane. The airline, of course, was very well-appointed with all the modern conveniences, and we had made some preparations prior to departure in terms of getting the kids' backpacks where they could pack the items that they wanted to bring on the trip. They were going to be responsible for carrying those packs, and Michelle and I did the same as we had on our previous three trips. A question already, that's all you brought? That's correct, because if you have to carry much more than that, it's really a burden. It's hard to get around. It also stops you from going a lot of places you otherwise might be able to. And were those climates all the same? No. Most of the rest of the world, they sell the clothes that you can buy whatever you need when you get there. And the ATM card, if you have an ATM with a Visa logo on it, you can access the local currency pretty much anywhere in the world now. It used to be when we started traveling 2000, 2003, even as late as 2011, you needed to have a backup, or we spent hours and hours in India in 2000 trying to actually get local currency. But nowadays, it's quite simple. The global banking system has made it incredibly easy to just use a U.S. bank account to transfer money where you're going. How old were the children? They are 12 and 14 now, so they were 11 and 13 at the time. This was last year we left in the late summer and then came back in the spring so they could rejoin their class that they had left after spring break. This was my screenshot to help encourage myself to get my weight back under 100 kilos. And so I documented that as soon as I landed to see what would happen. I have to tell you as a chef, fortunately there's a lot of good food out there and I wasn't all that successful. So we landed in Korea and we were on an island off the coast of Incheon. So Korea is basically become a first world country. It has a GDP per capita, which is a benchmark that I use to just kind of get a measure of how much disposable income people have, because it varies quite a bit around the world of about 40,000 per person. And so it's a first world country. They're able to... South Korea. Correct. Yes, thank you for that distinction. It's a great point too because Korea used to be just one country and there are a lot of Koreans who still have loved ones or family members who are on the wrong side of a line, either north or south. And many Koreans really wish for reunification. I knew very little about Korea prior to going, other than that we ended up getting a very affordable airfare there. And so it's because, as many people, I'm sure you know, I didn't because when I was in high school history, we ran out of time before we got to the Korean or Vietnam War. But many people wish that they could be reunified. It's Russia, China, and the U.S. that are in Japan that are kind of making that difficult for them. So in Korea, you have both old culture and new culture together and they've grown quite quickly in the last 70 years. This is a Korean barbecue. So this is a style of eating. Everyone sits on the floor for most of their meals in Korea. And you'll see this shiny pipe is actually a hood vacuum that sucks the smoke from this incredibly hot charcoal fire, where they put small pieces of a variety of different high quality meats to be cooked and then cut up at the table. You'll also see in Korea they have what's called banchan.  They just come like bread and butter would come at most restaurants in America. So and depending on the restaurant, you always will get at least three, but sometimes you might get eight or nine small dishes of just little side dishes. And of course, you can't forget to mention kimchi because this is their national dish. And again, thought of it more as kind of a little too spicy for my taste, having tried it a couple times in America. There's a huge variety of kimchi in Korea. And from regionally, they go from very mild to pungent and spicy. So again, you'll see some more traditional architecture, but also seeing all the high rise buildings as in many of our cities, you'll see an old cathedral with high rises all around it. So sort of an indication of we've kept this small piece, but we're also developing or developed a nation at this point. And the kids had a chance to get involved with some local traditional art.  Korea, of course, is here on between China here and Japan here, and has been kind of a battleground for the last several thousand years as those two powers have made moves to go back and forth. And so they share a good deal of both of those neighboring cultures in their own. This setting is very much like what you'll also see in Japan, and we'll hear more about from Peter and Therese. This is a more traditional section of the city that was preserved. And you can see the old clay roofs and hutongs, but also the high rises that have developed all around the rest of Seoul. And then there's a couple oddities. The people of Korea love seafood, and everywhere you go you'll see live seafood.  But it is considered a delicacy, and people will cut that up and eat it. Oh no, that was a little bit, the squid I'll go for. We were able to try lots of fresh shellfish, regular fish.  If they open that up there's these sort of bizarre, really sharp, circular teeth. It is, it's really kind of, but pretty much everywhere you go you'll see fresh seafood and tanks. So there'll be glass tanks, these are squid. Every kind of fish, shellfish, they love fresh seafood. This is our introduction to how to communicate in countries, because everyone pretty much knows what this means. Or you know, this or this. But in this case we were working on getting, we had to try to find a Kinko's copy to make preparations for our Chinese visas. And so we were trying to explain this to this man in a stamp making shop and we had started using Google Translator. Which for those of you who don't know has a couple really helpful features for international travelers. One is the text to text, so you just select the language that you're talking in and then what you want it to come out. You talk and then it prints it on the screen and then says it both and prints it in their language which is super helpful. The most amazing one for me was when there's another one that is like a reading feature. You turn on your camera, you hold it up to a sign or a menu and you tell it the language that it's starting in and what you want it to come out in. And literally before your eyes you watch the characters just go shh and change into the English words. So that was a new one to me. It was pretty, very helpful especially with menus. Agree, agree. But much, much better than zero which is what I get looking at most Asian characters. We did eventually and we got the visa applications which was just as hard or harder. Virtual reality, so Samsung and many other leading technology companies are located in South Korea. And so we went down to the tech center and took this for a drive. It was my first time ever trying that and it was an incredibly immersive, incredibly powerful tool that I'm amazed hasn't been adapted by more people globally. It's an amazing experience. And of course the primitive toilet has been elevated to a much higher standard. This is your control pad when you go to use the potty with a variety of music and hot air and washing and spraying of different places and cleaning and lasers and all sorts of things. So you just got to try to decode it because if you push the wrong button you may be in for a surprise. South Korea's Imperial Palace certainly rivals China's in terms of its grandeur and there's a quick shot of that. K-pop, another highlight of Korea so they have these usually fairly large boy bands who are all the rage both in Korea, Southeast Asia and worldwide to some degree. And at that point we decided it was time to head across the Yellow Sea. My wife Michelle had before we had left on the trip decided that the best way to get from here to here was to take a karaoke ferry. So we got on the Golden Bridge 5 and made our way across the Yellow Sea. Took about a day and a half. One of the interesting things to me was that there were very few passengers on this enormous ship. Mostly we saw tractor trailer trucks driving into the hull of the ship I would say at least 50 maybe many more. It went on for a couple hours of loading and they didn't unload their cargo they just drove in there and stayed in there. And when they got to China they drove back out again. So there was quite a bit of commerce going across this sea and some of the people we met along the way had done quite a bit of shopping in Korea. Bringing back goods that were unavailable or prestige luxury goods that are either unavailable or much much more expensive in China. Mostly we saw people even like several people all just with bags and bags of cigarettes Korean cigarettes selling them or bringing them to somebody as soon as they got off the boat. First black market trade basically. This is we're in Korea two weeks we went to Japan for about 10 days which I'm not even going to touch because you have another presentation coming. Up on that and back in Korea for another week or two so about three four three weeks three weeks ish. And we arrived in Singdao China. I'm going to just switch folders and bring us hopefully. That's a great question. As I mentioned before my wife and I have taken four international trips of six months or more to with our children. And the way we really like to do it is to just buy a one way ticket. We find that's the best way to get just get the ticket you know you're going to go and then you have to start thinking about well what are we going to do when we get there. What do we want to do. A couple exceptions would be country you know you have to do some visa research because certain countries like China are quite strict on their visa process and so you actually have to present yourself in person to an embassy before you get to China. So that you can do that we debated going down to New York for a couple days to do that in a consulate and elected to do that in Korea. So we applied while we were in Korea came back a couple weeks later. But the application process is really quite a bear. They want to know everywhere we're going to be every single day what you're going to do that day where you're going to be staying. So they really asked for quite a detail. It was a maybe 20 pages per person more quite a quite a process. Well no we didn't. So but you have to have reservations that match what you're saying. So we ended up making a whole bunch of reservations and then canceling them once we got there. But the visa is good for 10 years. So we could go back after that they'll probably be like well you didn't go anywhere you said you were going to go. And and they know exactly where you go. I'll get to that in terms of state surveillance a little later on. So China in you know has been this just rocketing economics from an economic standpoint success story to give you an example. The GDP in 1978 was $153 per person. And that's per capita. And in 2017 is 10,000 over $10,000 per person. So you've seen a meteoric rise in terms of the standard of living. More people have been lifted out of subsistence agriculture and poverty than probably any time in human history over the last 50 60 years in China. So that increased standard of living has resulted in a number of things. And this was a country where we had been 18 years prior. And so we were able to kind of see that. And it was frankly shocking almost undescribable the amount of change that we saw from when we were there in 2003 to what we saw this time. So this is pretty typical cityscape. And you see this is the they have a pretty standard model when they build new cities in China now. 25 story high rises. Most everything conforms to that and they'll just build one after another after another. You can't see the full size of Singdao here partly because of the air quality, even if though it is on the coast. Not all, but many Chinese cities still have significant air quality issues. Is that just a foggy day? It's a little bit foggy, but it would not be uncommon for visibility to be similar or worse than this in major cities. And there are dozens and dozens and dozens of cities of two, four, six million people that you probably never heard of. Larger cities or 10, 20 million people like our major cities. Most of the high rises here residential or business? Well, most of the 25 are residential, but you'll see like a little bit of style here. You know, these are so there are probably some that are businesses as well. This is an old historic port city. So there is quite a bit of old town here with European architecture from Germans and other people who had come to this place to trade and established colonies there back mostly in the 1800s. This picture reminds me when we were getting off the ferry and this was really kind of an introduction to communist function and bureaucracy and you're managing to try to guide a state of 1.3 billion people. It's not an easy job. And so you have a lot of rules and regulations given how quickly things are changing. It's probably quite stressful for people that are living there in this.  So Mike, all right, you know, we're in line and then you can imagine there's a lot of people on this boat. They would load us into the bus. The bus would drive down this road, turn around and pull up right over here. And so you're just thinking like, well, that's kind of weird. And it's the only conclusion I could draw is it's either sort of an introduction to like, no, these are the rules and no matter how silly they may seem, you're going to follow them or you're not going to get in. Or there just been so many problems in the past with people getting off the gangplank here and walking over there. They would jump in the water or they'd try to run away. I don't know what would, people wouldn't mind. I don't know why, but it was just sort of eye-opening to remember that. Now cars in China are a lot smaller. And that is a child's car, but adult cars aren't much bigger. And so that's another part of this change is people are going from walking or riding bicycles, which was pretty much everyone when we were there before. There were no cars on the highways to gas-powered motorbikes and then increasingly electric-powered motorbikes and aspirational to cars including all the best European brands. And you see a lot of those cars on the road there now. I'm not sure if it's gas or electric. There are some electric vehicles. Because Beijing was hosting the Olympics a few years back, there was a big push to clean up their air quality. It was horrible when we were there before. You know, we would hear a lot of sort of anecdotes and stories from other people who were either working, expats in the country or tourists. And what they were saying is, yeah, they got rid of all the two-stroke motorbikes in Beijing. They issued a proclamation and you could bring your old bike down and get a brand new electric bike. And if you didn't, then your social score would start to go down and eventually you'd be arrested and your bike could be taken away. But they don't just send them to the scrap yard. They load them into container boxes and ship them over to Africa where they're doing massive infrastructure and development projects. And as they're building that brand new railroad and road into the mines and the resources of Africa, they're giving away these old motorbikes. So they didn't really take it off the road, even though Beijing's air got a lot better. Another form of transportation, you still see people hauling by bicycle or small electric or motor-powered bikes, large amounts of garbage and recycling. Again, small vehicles, regular vehicles and bicycles all pretty much share the same streetscape. And this would be a pretty typical four-lane, five-lane street with automobile traffic and public transportation as well. Also not at all uncommon to see subway and surface train service in cities. This series of shots focused on transportation. This was the bunks in the trains. We took several overnight trains. Train travel was incredibly affordable in China. Many, many people still use the train system and you would sleep three high on each side and it gives you some sense of the size of the compartment inside. Pretty standard looking trains, unlike Japan, which had a very, very modern rail system. Now reading the sign to figure out which train you're supposed to get on was a little more challenging. Keep in mind they keep cycling too, so just about the time you figure out what those characters mean usually changes. And bicycles are still very much in use, but this starts to give you some sense. This is just a, you know, a typical, you know, popular sort of nighttime spot in a city, but there's, I don't know, a lot of bicycles. You know, there's a lot of people, a lot. And now we're kind of transitioning. So we started right on the coast and we wanted to try to get out towards where the Silk Road was. So we traveled several days to come out towards the deserts of Dunhuang. About two-thirds of the way towards Erme Quai, which is at the far western part of China. And a lot of the people aren't there. And so we would travel, we traveled by train to get there and then lorries once we were there. And of course by camel as well. It's quite vast, similar to probably like Nevada or there are also dunes. There are though large sand dunes. And what you see in the foreground of that reddish color, these are all raisins, or they're grapes that they're just drying in the sun to make raisins. This area also, because it was on the Silk Road for hundreds of years, people were traveling back from between the east and the middle east and the west towards Europe. So these are Buddhist monks' graves and they're all over out there. I wish I had a picture that showed more of them, but you can see there's two more in the background. They're not at all uncommon and they range over several hundred years. Some are very, very simple, others are quite elaborate. And they're all just out there for miles and tens and tens and tens of miles. This was an older, looked like it must have been a house. I think it was built of bricks and mud, but it just looked incredibly old. And so you could tell that people had been out there and traveling through here for a very long time. These are an interesting land form called Yardangs. And they're rock. They're quite large. You can see there's a person for scale. And we took a bus trip to see some of these. It's kind of an interesting geological feature. These are those raisins up close. And we also found a couple genie bottles. So because they are referred to as gin, it's spirits of the desert, and they either help or pester travelers. And so we were quite excited that we'd found those. And a whole bunch of quite interesting rocks and mineral samples. As you may know, China is one of the world leaders in producing rare earths. And it's not surprising as you trek around these deserts, just all sorts of strange stones. We found all these ourselves. Tried to post them back, not permitted. So they're asked to present your passport and they literally open your box and go through everything before they'll put the tape back on that says approved from any post office, state-controlled post office. And they raise their eyebrows about the computer chips that contain photographs like these. Metal, nothing metal. So we had like souvenir coins from Mao's Tomb or something that those weren't allowed. So we kept all this stuff and we're carrying pounds and pounds of rocks and metal down into Nepal and posted it from there. But it never arrived. And the kids, we hiked up into the dunes. And so they got a chance to kind of climb on these massive sand dunes and higher and higher you can see the tracks going all, you can climb these ridges all the way up to the top. So not hot at all actually. We were there, that would have been, what, like October? Was it October when we were there? So it was kind of fall and it was, it's like a desert. It's kind of hotter in the day. It does get hot in the day but we went, I think that was pretty early that we were up there. And again, this is sort of, I put this picture in here because it's sort of a good reminder like this idea that, you know, the party decides for everybody what is going to happen. It's not like, I don't really like grass. I'm sorry. Like I'd prefer not to cherish. No, you are obligated to cherish the grass. And if they didn't have this little fence here, the thousands of people that walk through here would probably have trampled it a long time ago. So I mean, there's a reason but then if it's all, it's just this sort of, it kind of captures that feeling of ultimate state control over a sort of fleeting resource. Again, they're working hard to make sure that everyone understands the importance of public hygiene. They've made great strides although some of the toilets are still pretty bad. This was on, you know, this is in public but people needed to be told apparently. This is pretty typical in terms of queuing and lines. You can see this is the front of the line right here and the line goes out those doors and around the corner for a long way. And there you can see how closely people, they don't have the same sort of lining up and queuing and personal space. Expectations are standards that most first world western countries do. It's very much when this gate opens, there is a rush, like the beginning of a marathon but with more intensity and people are getting knocked down and tripped and everybody's trying to rush to get on the train because once the seats are gone, they're gone. It's not like you have to wait a couple hours, maybe get the next one. It's that same sort of communist, you know, we give it away for free but you don't always get it.  And this is one of the last, another interesting thing we noticed that it changed was when we were there before, you would see sort of a typical amount of homelessness, begging and sort of sideline entrepreneurialism like this in the major cities. You wouldn't pretty much any major city. This time when we went back, I think there was only one person who was begging and so millions of people have been deployed to do something else. They're not allowed to be homeless anymore. They're not there. I don't know where they went but they're gone. It was shocking. And even things like this, like just I need to make a few extra bucks. You want to buy a mouse? Here, bubonic, want a plague? Another typical kind of city, you know, this is very typical. You'll see just lots and lots and lots of high-rise buildings and roads. But you do have some older Hutongs and smaller two, three-story communities as well. Those are increasingly just being relocated. So even if your family had been there for hundreds or thousands of years, if the state says, you'd see posters from time to time in areas that say, you know, you have till 2020 to leave. And after that, we're going to make you leave and bulldoze high-rises. But they'll give you a new high-rise somewhere else as long as, you know, you want it. Yeah, this was nice. I don't know the answer to that. You see, I'm trying to think, you see people definitely working into old age. I don't know if it's by occupation or...  If you're a party member, their whole education system is working you towards this test, these placement tests. Kids are studying so hard. I think it was one of the best things for our kids to go there to see that, oh, kids aren't like, you know, on their phone or don't want to go to school. They're like, it's, you know, eight hours a day. And then you go to four hours of enrichment after school, six days a week, right? And you're not goofing around playing sports. You're studying really hard to get a good score on these exams. This has been the case back to the days of all the emperors. They had this series of tests where if you are smart, you get pulled into the party. So they're kind of skimming off the best and brightest to keep the party strong. And once you're in the party, then you pretty much are, you know, you have responsibilities, but you definitely have distinguished yourself from the other 80% of society. So that was sort of interesting to see the, you know, the party members driving around in really nice cars or having meetings.  You can see that it's a thing. Cranes, a lot of new construction still happening. We saw this when we were there before. I remember being in Beijing prior to the Olympics and I think counting 20 cranes operating 24-7, just building, building, building. It's still continuing, but you can see the last 15 years worth of progress that they've made. Also, riverbank armoring. Well, they do have a green buffer there of trees. That's all completely cemented and paved just because of frequent flooding and just with that many people you have to finish. Here's another shot of kind of just I think people leaving a bus or train station, but those residential buildings are incredibly typical. You would see those almost everywhere you go. There are, of course, still historic structures that have been preserved, generally in the centers of cities and in touristy areas. So, again, just kind of typical cityscape. One question. Did your kids get stopped and want people to take their pictures with them? Yes. Yes. Your westerners are still quite novel and they're very curious about us and they're also very, very interested and insistent about practicing English because they recognize that being fluent in English is a huge advantage in a global market. Although more people speak Chinese than any other language in the world right now. So, food and beverage. Like most of the rest of the world, the Chinese don't have any particular stigma or puritanical history that is very kind of restricting alcohol consumption. So, you'll see in Sing Tao, for instance, there's kegs on the street everywhere. They make tons of beer there and you can fill up plastic bags or containers and just walk around with beer if you want, no one really minds. Peking duck, of course, one of my favorites. We're going into a series of food slides here. Now, dumplings were pretty much the staple food and Nicholas was appointed the dumpling dictator and his job every day was to find dumplings. And you see the Bautse and the Jautse. Two different styles of dumpling. This one being kind of a more puffy rice unit and these are sort of more what you think of as Asian dumplings.  So, a little bit of soy sauce, dipping sauce and they come in a variety of different shapes and colors and sizes. Those are black squid ink dumplings. This was a delicious eggplant dish. Like this sugar kind of a card caramel on the outside of it and it had been cut into baton and deep, quickly deep fried. Just absolutely, it's really nice. A little bit of chili flake too there.  That has completely changed. Now, animal protein is widely available and affordable to most Chinese and plates like this that are 50% more beef are the first things that come. Some restaurants don't even serve rice anymore. Definitely noodles, noodles available too. I've got a shot of some buckwheat noodles but mostly meat, you know, has become they like the taste of it, it's a prestige, it's affordable now and they're consuming huge amounts of animal protein. Yes. This is a fungus dish, black fungus and pork I believe with some green peppers in there. We used to often find just sort of these candied peanuts but with a little bit of fresh red onion or green pepper. Kind of as a side dish but just a nice way to kind of add a little crunch and sweetness to a meal. And of course, more dumplings there in the background but rice is still available. In this case it looks like they've mixed some meat into it. This was a shrimp hot pot.  Also, Chinese very much into sort of the whole, like this wouldn't be at all uncommon to see the whole head shell on the shrimp. That would be pretty typical, say meat on the bone, a lot of these cuts. You're getting little pieces but there's still a bit of bone in there because they really relish that connection to the source of the food. They have really great cuisine there. A noodle dish, some glass noodles here and vegetables again. And then you get into some of the more exotics. So these are scorpions and some sort of larval, large insect creatures. And they're still alive. They're wriggling around up there until they dunk them into the boiling oil and hand it over. Food on a stick is quite popular and you'll see in either night markets or daytime markets where they're specifically set up to sell small bite-sized pieces of things, portions of things like those scorpions or cotton candy desserts. And it would look a pedestrian way. It would probably look something like this. You can see constant presence of both street cleaners and then police in any sort of busy night, you know, social area like this. Here is a more sort of simple soup. This was from out in the desert. I believe it's donkey soup. Again, served with dumplings. Here was kind of a strange one. These were like... Anika, what was... You were the one that ate these. What was the texture of the ball itself? Was it like doughier?  This is fruit, so they'll take a lot of care in terms of presentation to cut off the top and segment I think this is grapefruit or similar citrus. A simple buckwheat noodle dish. Question about noodles, and so noodles are definitely available and common as well. Roasted chestnuts became one of our favorites and are available almost everywhere. So kind of like a sugary mix with these little black beads that help them toast uniformly. So they're really perfectly cooked and of course served warm in a paper bag. And there's all variety of stuff that you're really not sure what it is. It's on a stick. It looks kind of shiny. And sure, give it a try. Here you also see the presence of some other Western tourists. This is the shashwan hot pot and I will tell you this was one of the spiciest things I've ever eaten in my life. And they have... This is the outer moat. Then this is supposed to be like the safe zone. And you get platters of different things. In this case, here's a couple types of mushrooms, but vegetables and noodles or tofu and meat or seafood. And you just kind of drop all this stuff into this. It's heated from below. So it's on your table. It's an installation on every table. And it's kind of bubbling hot. And the more stuff that you're adding, the more flavorful that broth is getting. And you never really know, you see how you're like dipping in here and just sort of fishing around and pulling stuff out. So you're putting in the stuff you like and it's sort of like swirling around and other people, you know, you might get it, you might not. But it all is quite an experience, although it is so spicy. It's unbelievable. They put tons of shashwan peppercorns are different than western pepper in that actually your whole mouth goes numb like you're in the dentist's office. Like I'm not exaggerating. I might when I'm like, I think they drug my food. And of course, lots of shashwan chilies. And here you can see also there were cans, like soda cans of sesame oil. So they put like, I don't know, six or eight on the table. Just when we sat down and I'm like, what do I need this much oil for? Well, it helps with the heat. So you're taking it out of the liquid and then dunking it into like a bowl full of oil so that your palate doesn't get completely anesthetized by the rest of the spice. And it's hot. It's just imported. They generate themselves, they grow themselves. It's a good question. They are very industrious in terms of agriculture. You'll see like two or three rows of garlic planted between just buildings even. Like there's huge fields, but much of it has to be imported now. And so Australia, New Zealand have outlawed political activity for an ownership because Chinese companies were coming in buying up large tracts of irritable land, bringing in tons of Chinese workers, building an airstrip, building a farm, massive, massive farm of garlic or shoots or bok choy or whatever they wanted, putting it all on the plane, flying it all back to China. And Australians only being 19 million people, China could give off 19 million people and not even notice they were gone. They got a little nervous about that. And they've rapidly and radically changed their laws in regards to foreign investment, foreign ownership and politics because they were showing up with briefcases of money and saying, oh, I think this deal should go through and politicians were saying, yeah, that sounds pretty good. Also, that whole region of Southeast Asia, so you've got China here, this whole part, not India, but here is all very in here, really. It was subject to Chinese influence and I'll get a little more into some of that in a minute. What the impact has been on Madagascar, because they were coming in there quite a lot when I was there. I wonder if they went that far. I'm sure in Africa there's major inroads both for mineral resources and ore and coal and irritable land, I'm sure, and also cheap labor, because as Chinese wealth grows, nobody wants to work the third shift in that factory anymore. I want to go skiing. We're going to open a couple hundred skiers this year. So they need to find, they'll move the factory and now that they have the capability to supply the rest of the world, those jobs will go to Africa, which will, of course, raise their standard of living as well. Vegetable dish, bok choy, very, very popular. And they have nice rest. This was quite a touristy restaurant, but they take quite a bit of care. They really like food. Dining is really an experience. Sharing food communally at a table from a lazy Susan is quite traditional. There are always a lot of delicious menus and the people who run the restaurants are by far some of the most hospitable and kind people I've ever met. This was probably almost a basketball-sized piece of citrus, sort of like a pomelo, but larger. So they have some sort of exotics.  And this is, I don't know, a dozen or more dishes and drinks. This was an example of tourist or western food. So we've got spaghetti bolognese and a couple pizzas there. And American beer products are there as well. As are $60 bottle micro brews, if you want one of those. Bubble tea, also a daily popular item. And regular tea. Coffee is also gaining popularity, although it's still seen kind of as a luxury good, but increasingly affordable to a majority of people. More stick food, of course, dumplings. And repeat. There's a golden carp. So, again, they'll often serve fish on the bone, fish with the head. Dried fruit, mangoes. And I put this slide in here, not because it's dried mangoes, particularly exceptional, but just to sort of illuminate the transition from, like, the raisins. We're drying all these grapes on giant burlap cloths in the middle of the desert. Some of them, you know, sandstorm comes, whatever. To now, you know, branding the vintage being marketed for Western prices, too, on a domestic market. Many, many Asians are lactose intolerant, and so milk and dairy products, not popular. Hardly ever see them. Certainly is available. Yeah, they'll put it in a bag or tetrapack, but bag is not uncommon. You're right. These are small sour apples coated in caramel. And they also have a lazing stick speciality as a dessert, kind of sweet and sour. And embryonic poultry is also a delicacy. So they'll let them mature to some degree in the egg and then open it and then cook them or eat them raw with a spoon sometimes. Squid, seafood also popular. And I put a couple packaged foods in here, too, just as examples of how they're becoming much more Western. Snake. And sausages, a variety of different stick foods. Desserts also, and big-grabe strawberries, dragon fruit on the bottom, and then some sort of a soft-serve ice cream on top. Lizard. This was a delicious dish.  This was a fellow who befriended us and brought us into his restaurant and proceeded to serve us a multi-course lunch and give us a tour of the kitchen. And mostly seemed quite keen on getting his daughters to come to the U.S. somehow. Now we're in the Imperial Palace in Tiananmen Square, and I'm afraid these slides might be a little mixed together, but they're pretty much right next to each other. And this gives you some sense of the sort of detail of some of the sculpture work. This is the entrance to Tiananmen Square, and you can see Mao's portrait still prominently displayed there. The access to the square itself had changed a lot in the last 18 years. We don't seem to remember any sort of fencing like this, and there's a lot of fencing now, a lot to kind of help keep and partition, you can't get into the square except through controlled access points, which you're subject to facial recognition and searches, et cetera, to get into this public space. This is a great example of sort of just the growth and the excitement in terms of Chinese productivity. This is a flower display. It's made all of synthetics, metal and fabrics and textiles, and they were putting it up in honor of something that weekend in Tiananmen Square. But literally the size of this thing, I'm like, this is your idea of a flower display, okay? These little tiny, the stems of the flowers are like six-inch steel pipes, okay? It was pretty impressive. There you can see it from a distance in Tiananmen Square. Beijing, again, and some of the, just of course, as I said, I'm not going to show you tons of slides of the Imperial Palace or some of these touristy places, but I picked just a couple just to sort of show like the incredible, you know, attention to detail and craftsmanship that went into some of these sculptures. Lots of gold and carvings. This is inside the Imperial Palace, so traditional imperial architecture. It was a forbidden city, so you weren't allowed in there unless you had some business in there with the emperor or his court, or the court. And heavily, heavily decorated, both outside and inside the buildings, surrounded by a moat all in all four sides, so you would have to swim and then climb that wall to get in there. Lots of gilding and just, again, incredibly intricate decorative work inside many of the buildings in the Imperial Palace. Again, sort of these mythical beasts, sort of half-drag and half-turtle.  For some reason, I was kind of intrigued by the blending of animals and humans or cross-species animals and the sanitar, all these sort of mythical things, but you see this all over the world. It's not just Greek mythology or the unicorn. You see icons of these all over the world and so they're kind of interesting. This would be kind of a typical crowd load for the Imperial Palace, so it stays quite busy. Part of that is every resident of China gets an ID card, which is matched with their biometrics and many of the, to do any traveling or when you go to a site like this, if you're Chinese, you're asked to present that. It's scanned or swiped and then a record that you visited, this cultural monument, serves to enhance your social score. So there's a number that everyone has, like a credit score, but in terms of how well you're behaving. So your score goes up based on a variety of factors and algorithms that are designed to help encourage people to behave and show Han Chinese values.  If you associate with people with a lower score, your score goes down. If your score goes too low, you either can't buy things or you pay more for them. You can't travel. And if your score goes really low, you have to go to a reeducation center and you have to stay there to learn how to be good Han Chinese. Well, there's one in that scrapbook and I wondered the same thing. I'm like, am I holding the idea of a dead person? Like what? Don't you need this? So presumably they can reissue them.  However, the newest third generation ones have a chip that talks wherever you're going. So it has location monitoring both to SkyNet, which is the broad telecommunications network that state controlled. And it also records all those movements in the card itself. What increased your score? What are the things that people have to do? It's a good question. We heard that on kind of the flip side of that, things, you know, like you saw the sign for not peeing and pooping here. So there's like using public restrooms, or like J-walking. We heard stories about Sony Jumbotrons being put up in seven test cities in the center of the city, enormous TV screens that would show people's pictures and would say whatever they did and how many points they lost to kind of help educate the public as to what the expectations are or how they can keep their score from going down. In terms of getting it to go up, I'm assuming it would probably be, again, these are just assumptions, but if you have, let's say, party doctrine or policy decisions, like we want to control the birth rate or which they did for a long time, the one-child policy, or reduce global warming, then we have these expectations for you. If you fulfill them, then presumably your score will go up. Or is it, I'm guessing, or obviously not. A lot of it is the things you don't do. You don't interfere with police business. You don't speak out. You don't break the rules. Question? Yes. Did you see a disproportionate population problem there? Because when I spoke to young Chinese men, they said there aren't any young women. The ones that survived were adopted by other countries and that was a big problem. We wouldn't see it. I don't have the analytical to be able to look at a crowd because there's a 5% disparity here. It's definitely mentioned. It is a real thing. It's been documented a couple different places. Because of the one-child policy, having a son is really important to Chinese family. And you have four grandparents, two children, one child. So they have this problem where there's no one to care for the elders and if you have to choose, a lot of people were choosing a boy, which in some horrific circumstances led to female infancy, which is now reflected in about a 10% difference in terms of the gender balance compared to everywhere else in the world. So about 1 in 20 Chinese men will have to either import a bride or kidnap or trafficking or be singletons for their whole life. So it's 36 million, at least. They're missing straight dunes. The dunes. So this is kind of like, and this was like a cultural thing that I hadn't really appreciated. In Chinese culture, togetherness and being part of a group is much more important than in Western culture where personal identity and personal achievement and singularity is a great example. If you show a Western crowd a picture of a person on a stage making a speech to a crowd, generally the Westerners' comments say, oh, she's thinking about how passionate she is about this subject that she's speaking about, and they'll mostly talk about the speaker. If you show the exact same picture to a Chinese audience, most of them will be talking about, well, this part of the crowd really likes what she's saying, but these ones aren't so sure, but it's a very sort of fundamental difference in terms of cultural norms, and this experience really showed us how different our American camping is from Chinese camping. So we went, we were like, let's try it. Something I don't even remember. It's like at the desk of the hotel or something. Camping, dude in camping. So we went out and it's huge tents, like with stages and speakers, and there's like, I don't know, seven or eight. So it's very scalable. So if they're busy, they only open one. But every time more people come, they just open another one, and another one, and another one, and another one, all right next to each other. And we, you know, did some karaoke and some games, and then it was time for the campfire. So they built this campfire and everybody came out, and those are all their cell phone lights. They're waving their cell phone lights and they're singing Kumbaya, basically the Chinese version, and everybody's like so close together. And we're like, we're in this most incredible, beautiful desert place. Why would you want it? Like look over here, why, why? Like literally just everybody wanted to be right together. And it was just really kind of illustrated that cultural difference. But we were still able to slip away in the morning for the sunrise and a little bit of solitude. But she's the only one up there. Everyone else is like, no, why would we go up there? Togetherness, you'll see this all the time too. So these folks are either playing games or gambling is incredibly popular. And you'll just see groups of people sitting at tables all the time in streets on basically every other corner. People are just congregating. It's not like a restaurant or a club. They're just being social, being together. That was also the case here in a park where there was a guy doing yo-yo if you've seen with the strings. And Nick was kind of watching and was curious. And he's like, yeah, come on over, come on over and spent like half an hour showing him how to do it and great wall. And this is not at all uncommon. You'll see security cameras on pretty much every corner of every street, on every door of any transit center, bus stations, train stations, on every stoplight with a flashing strobe. Every time a car goes under it so they can capture the license plate who's in the car as much as they can on every single car or vehicle that passes through that intersection. That one was on the great wall. But you'll see those pretty much everywhere. So this is the great wall. And as I'm sure many of you know, there was hundreds of years worth of walls built. It was not just one wall. They're all over the place and they range in age over several hundred years with the intent of mostly keeping the Mongols from coming south. The problem is no matter how good any wall is, there's usually a door that you can bribe someone to open which made these walls not very good at keeping Mongols out but really good at moving military soldiers and supplies. You can see and there'll be a couple other slides here but it'd be a lot easier to run a cart over this than this or march troops and you'll see the absence of stairs even at steep inclines because they were rolling things. There were horses and carts and military stuff going through there. And they would often use the ridge lines like this ridge line here you would expect where if they hadn't built it here they often incorporate the natural geography as part of the wall so it's much bigger when you build it and the ridge or you block the valleys. And a popular attraction, again, surveillance outposts where you know garrisons where they could warm up or store food or as they were guarding the wall. These were some friends that took us out and this was back out in the desert and we... these were... one of them was our hotel proprietor and this was one of his friends but they took us all around out into the desert and this was where you saw sort of the mixing of Buddhism and Hinduism in this part of the country much more like out in the center part and we found there would be... like the traders on the Silk Road sometimes they'd just stop and they'd stay and so then you had these monks and they would establish monasteries and then they would bring wayward travelers in and try to get them into religion and find spiritualism. This was like one of the many caves here in these grottoes that were hundreds, thousands of years old that people had carved and inside they had done some relief work nothing particularly sophisticated but I put this slide in because I thought it was interesting that they were showcasing female deities as well instead of just the male Buddhists, the Buddha. Often these retreats were hidden they weren't right on the Silk Road you had to walk a couple days through a valley like this to get into them we drove it, but as you're driving up through this valley then you see this enormous golden Buddha sitting up in this mountain sort of beckoning you and you come in and you go in the door behind it inside it and there's all these beautiful frescoes and reliefs painted inside the Buddha and there's no one there it's like a band and maybe one or two people driving up and down but I just really like each of these characters is rich with symbolism and there's probably a story I'm not and don't know enough about Chinese culture but these paintings are just very very rich in terms of meaning. You could see like some of them are just not being very well maintained like see here on the wall like in damage that's either water but generally no people don't maybe hear not really and as we got further and further up there were a few people that were living up in these old monasteries and they're still probably an ethnic minority but this is much the way life was prior to all the advancements with literally drawing their food which is corn on the ground that's their water supply here again Hindu influences with multiple arms of Vishnu and some of the statues a couple artistic objects again incredibly rich art in China they vary into ceramics and fine artwork incredible craftsmen and women this is a ceramic camel in a museum that we went to most of this the ceramics in this museum were and again it was pretty much lost on me but this they basically had invented glaze and they were this was like the first time anything ever got glazed and even though it's pretty crude by our standards today it was really quite groundbreaking at the time paintings and artwork of course are amazing and these are the karsts so if you've seen the movie Avatar that was sort of the idea was from this and there are these huge spires that come up out of the ground very popular tourist destination for obvious reasons it's just incredibly beautiful and vast and what we discovered here was that there were a lot of people that wanted to see this but I would say 99% of the Chinese wanted to come in and take a tram or a bus or something that didn't involve walking to where they could get on a place to look at it and then leave or go to a couple via some other tram or sky car or something that was going to help them with that and we would we got off of masses of people like that line from the train and they're like so overwhelming the noise of all these people and then they'll come right to where there's all this food and everyone's eating and throwing everything on the ground and they're rushing off to the tram and we're like is it going to be like this the whole time we walked a little bit further past where the tram was and there's hundreds of miles of beautiful trails and there's no one and all of a sudden we go around the corner and it's quiet and we're like this is great there's a lot of westerners and Europeans and occasionally Asians but they are not interested in so much this isn't about the butterfly it's about the railing and they had built all of the this is all cement so it's meant to look like wood there's another slide coming up but all of these trails have hundreds of miles of cement made to look like wood railings but you can hike all around these valleys and the beauty of the karsts and there are wild monkeys there and it's pretty well set up for foreigners as well all the signage has English so that if you read English you can navigate the park quite easily but this is another example of one of these paths but it's all cement and you can see some of the detail they really did take you know they must have can only imagine how many hours it took because they helped it in all the knots and all the imperfections and the grain of the wood they would get everything it was these are the karst fields generally no and again this is a generalization but Chinese will eat anything that walks, swims, crawls, flies and so songbirds all these things have just been eaten there are reserves and preserves but not many so it's hard to realize how small the world really is becoming once you get up in the numbers of billion plus people wanting to eat every day so more natural landforms and some caves that we went down into a cave feature this was a piece of an illustration from the train station that has the genie you know from out by the Silk Road that I just kind got me and same with this one it's this sort of mystical idea of the genie the gin is real to them or at least it's there in that and here we are at the Terracotta Warriors so Michelle and I had been here again on our previous trip but we wanted the kids to see it and it turned out that the most interesting thing here in this rather large pit some of which is still being exhumed you can see these are all just frightened this is what it looks like before they dig it up and then they dig it up and it looks like this and then they put them all back together but it was more and this picture shows the building so this is sort of an aircraft hangar building with a dome roof to keep water from destroying the ruins because there's huge historical significance here and then there's a little walkway that goes all the way around the pits probably room for about six deep is the width of this walkway now we happen to go on one of their national holidays and because of the increased affluence many many many hundreds of millions of Chinese can now afford to travel and of course the Terracotta Warriors is on their list of places to go to but this facility really only accommodates about 60,000 people a day so beginning in the when they first opens at eight in the morning or wherever it is like a mosh pit it's packed just completely packed to the point where we had to literally grab the kids and if they wanted to like stand here and look down into like the kind of prime viewing of the area the burial area we would have to literally like fight and force our way up to the very very very front and the selfie sticks the cell phone sticks are like whacking and everyone's trying to like get closer and closer and closer to the edge and we couldn't believe it we were just I mean you'd look around and occasionally you'd see a western and you kind of it just was like wow like it's just amazing so many people want to go there that they built an entire replica of this so that if you can't get in the real one you can go to another one that looks just like it but if you don't want to do that either they also have dozens and dozens and dozens of selfie stations where you'll have like a warrior and the horse and the archer and then like it says terracotta warriors and you stand there and you take your selfie and then just leave so because so many people want to go and most some of them don't either they don't want to spend the time or battle the crowds and so they'll just do that instead and they're still building you know these are more and now we come to the pandas so this was in Shandu China and they have an amazing panda breeding center they have more live births and better stable pay into populations than anywhere else in the world genetic diversity they've done incredible job with their program there and the city is quite proud of that you can see the right above the Prada store pretty much have all the prime European brands in every major city for sure and here they are they're cute little under her they are some of the most charismatic just goofy funny you can't help but love them they're just amazing again well visited site you would people would kind of as they would come in and out of their shelters you'd there'd be you'd be rushing in these crowds to try to get to where you could see them and again well set up for foreign tourists just really cute just adorable that's a baby that's mother she was kind of like kept nudging the mom and she kind of eventually it's like started to fall and the red panda was one that I never really knew about so this is a cousin and they have a big long tail and they can climb really good the enclosures were really nicely set up with a fair amount of natural habitat and open space where people weren't allowed so that you could kind of get the experience of one not just like on stage but in a forest and then we made a little diversion into a river city so this was a historic city that had served as a trade port and we were staying kind of up in a little place like that or something like that and so the river came right through and just a beautiful you know kind of a it's like a living replica maintained for tourists and well frequented captures the feeling of that village and you can go for boat rides and restaurants costumes are big so either people posing in historic costumes or we saw a lot of people renting costumes and then walking around the sites dressed up like that and they would have other people taking pictures and that was pretty common and this is the bus this is where you would get on all of these bays or for buses that pull up and take people to and from this area and that line goes again but beautiful you know scenery natural once you get away from the crowds you find things like this well maintained paths and just a lot of natural beauty this is the the key for the all of the other non-walking services trams and aircars and might look like this an evening shot of the river city this was hiking up in some of the mountains in China public exercise stations are huge so you'll see them in every city where they'll be like an outdoor gym with maybe 15 or 20 25 pieces of equipment that are all involved motion and coordination and they're well used so people it's totally normal to public singing, public dancing in groups public exercising just a bunch of random strangers sort of like a gym but outside and free absolutely yep, exercising and stretching and like I said singing their parks are really very beautiful so they take a lot of care in the aesthetics of the parks so that if you're as in many cities you know retreating from a very urban environment you would not be so common to see scenes like this with beautiful willow trees and bridges and also featuring minerals and unique rocks like this is pretty typical that you'd have some sort of just really strange natural form they didn't make that it's looked like that and they brought it there to display it for aesthetics this is the sign at the facility just to kind of help orient you to what to do and what not to do and boating you know on anywhere where there's water is much like here people like to you know paddle around a little bit of course the parks are surrounded by miles and miles of that but they really do a nice job with their parks decorative flower displays to our big in parks so they'll spend a lot of time and energy you know creating things like this out of flowers texture seem to be kind of a feature in gardens beautiful floral and botanical gardens a lot of care and pride goes into that this we were I would mention singing Nick and I were in this park and there was just a group of people who were just you know singing together and we were just sitting listening to the music and public walking it's a big thing too so this is like a wall around the city but they've opened up the whole top of it and you can just walk people do it all the time or ride bikes just to go out and exercise very very health conscious Chinese they're very conscientious of like getting too hot or being too cold and what you're eating is really important and your exercise your yin and your yang and qi and traditional medicine is a huge thing and this is us doing laundry on the rooftop pretty typical they're also adopting a lot of western traditions this was a tiramisu cake being made at a pastry shop a birthday cake that we got for Annika and was just like anything you'd find in Europe or here and priced accordingly again the sort of indicative of the not only are oops are people have pets but they're have pet clothing and so you can imagine the industries that come much like our pet industry where to service your animals this is a a fish foot spa so you can pay and put your feet in there and fish nibble the dead skin off your feet I don't think so we did we do I don't think we did that right and public parks where roller coaster rides and all of roller balls you can rent all sorts of things to very much first world this shot I put in again it's the translation software on a highway phone and I put this shot in because it became clear that with the surveillance states reach that people if you raise the wrong topics on these translations they get they just shut the phone off because it's all recorded it's all tracked it's all associated to them and they don't want to have anything to do with any sort of questions about well what's that building over there who what do they do over there nothing like that this is I guess we're kind of getting towards the conclusion here in terms of lifestyle I already mentioned this is a picture of us but animal protein is abundant and consumed and by everyone now as well our global delicacies like sushi is common now in China nature beauty there's still many things there to see a little bit of work to do on some of their infrastructure as the case in much of the world this is some flooding on the banks of the river the Yangtze river these are a couple of those morphed sculptures I was talking about this blending of form and these appear to be human form with animal head and these are I don't know nine or nine hundred or more years old so just this sort of fascination with this you see the find these things all over the world and you sort of wonder like well why did they make well who made that is it just their imagination and that is the end of China so we're at eight o'clock I guess I've gone on a little longer just with China than I would have liked I wasn't sure how long that was going to take we're on our way to Nepal do you do folks want to take a break do we want to keep going do you want to call it I'm not sure how this works should we take five do people want to get up and stretch or go the bathroom or keep going I'm okay I just want to make sure everyone's comfortable and okay yeah please don't you're not going to hurt my feelings at all if you need to go or want to go this has gone on a lot longer than I thought I would so that was in Nepal I think what I'm going to do is I'm do people want me to just go right to Nepal or do you should I do Cambodian Nepal is of interest I'll go there so Nepal this is in the airplane flying from Tibet over the Himalayas into Nepal Nepal has a much lower per capita GDP of just over a thousand dollars so quite a poor country and comparatively in terms of the velocity of change had changed a lot less than some of the other places like China or Cambodia that we went to that said we initially were thinking about Michelle and I had trekked the Annapurna circuit back in 2000 and thought that might be a place where we'd take the kids and subsequently learned that when we got to Kathmandu that it had been paved so the entire 21 day loop was now a four lane road full of buses so it is happening it's happening incredibly quickly we decided then to reconsider that we didn't have much interest in taking a diesel bus to the top of the world so we were talking about it as a family and Annika and Nick were like Everest it's got to be Everest Everest Everest so we're like I had some concerns at the price, the safety how logistically so Nicholas and I spent the next five days on the roof of the hotel with pencil and paper and thinking it out and figuring out how we could make it work and at the end of the day those two kids led us up to Everest Base Camp so this is some photos of that this is their transportation rickshaw is the parts yard but it's either walking this would be their version of a pickup truck that's a functional rickshaw so it's human powered and you sit in it and they pedal you around you can see they have cars and motorcycles as well but it's not uncommon to walking of course is an option this would be more like a tractor trailer truck that's a yak and you'll see all the propane cylinders here that are being carried up to altitude and smaller loads of provisions helicopters can only go to a certain altitude planes also struggle and visibility is terrible in the mountains and the winds it's just not really a safe environment to be traveling by air so unless you have a paved road you know we all kind of groaned about that paved road but the person who lives up there doesn't really want to walk 10 days to get their rice every day or carry the 50 pound bag back 10 days once they get it so you kind of can understand why they might want a road donkey caravans also a big part of how things are moved around can get a little tricky when you're trying to come the other direction jeeps like this these are Indian made jeeps and they break well that was the least I'll tell you some jeep stories generally and fairly barely barely functional vehicles and just constantly breaking down but there's a you know a strong community everybody helps each other and take part off mine or give you a jump or we all stand there and look at it and Kathmandu is their biggest city last time we were there was about a million people now it's about four million big influx in poor Indians coming north to find work as you know instead of earning a dollar a day on the farm they can earn five dollars a day washing dishes or carrying bags which has led to huge urban sprawl you'll notice in Nepal cities three four stories maybe five stories is the highest they're going to go they don't have proper cement quality or engineering to have safe buildings plus earthquakes but there's no skyscrapers there in your almost always in the shadow of a mountain somewhere you can't see it from Kathmandu but as you get higher in altitude this is sort of what towns look like so cobblestone streets and buildings made of stone to accommodate mostly tourists we're on you know probably the most popular trekking route in the world so it's mostly all tourists going up and down that trail and this is sort of what a city might look like and occasionally you'll find a city like this that's mostly empty it's been financed and built by Sherpas in the off season and they're all at work when we're there so it's pretty much or their families have gone down to Kathmandu but they'll build they'll you know they'll build things like this and then it's also as we came up through the lowlands so we didn't fly in we took a jeep and then hiked in and if you get off the Everest trek you're going to see a lot more stuff that looks like this this is Kathmandu again and you can see the big stupa there on the top of the hill they have a lot of plastic waste ramen noodles are very popular and you can imagine maybe one meal a day the four million people eat ramen out of the package throw it on the ground pretty quickly pretty much everywhere there's a foot or two feet of dirty plastic from a variety of basically food packaging mostly which then start to like block the roads and people moving so they scrape it all together and burn it which is why the air quality is the way it is but once you get out of Kathmandu it's obviously incredibly beautiful and cleaner this is a Namche Bazaar and not uncommon to see animals in the streets and along with everybody else Kathmandu again yeah at night and from the rooftop so cisterns pretty much everybody has a water cistern to supply their building with water and this is sort of a typical trail in the lowlands and these go somewhat sequentially so we're going to start down around 5000 feet and end around 5000 feet at base camp and then turn around and come back down down obviously goes a lot faster so you're kind of hiking through forested you know mountains but not like high altitude mountains so you'll still see trees here things are fairly green there's water and there is also the ever present mule and yak trains yaks mostly just used at higher altitude but you can see humans carrying heavy loads as well and just tons of like Sanskrit tablets and symbolism everywhere on this trail like every village you come to will have piles of these tablets which you're if you want to keep your good luck and not fall off the trail or get hurt or you want to get where you're going always walk around them counterclockwise when you come to one so even if you're going that way and you see one you stop and you go around it and then you keep going this is the security at the airfield on our way up into Lukla and the kids so we made a decision in that planning session not to use any guides or porters just to follow the path ourselves we knew it would be pretty easy to follow trail and that the children would carry their own stuff and water we didn't have to bring in our food because all these buildings these are mostly tea houses so they serve simple food the standard fair is what they call dole bat rice lentils a pompadom maybe some pickled vegetables and that's pretty much you don't really want to eat meat because there's no refrigeration and they have to carry it so the further you get from the trail head the worse your odds are so we basically went vegetarian for 26 days straight on the trail no that was another part of the planning every day that you hike uphill prices go up about 50% because somebody had to carry it an extra day so you can eat it and it's just the way it is so you start out paying like 25 cents and by the end you're paying like $20 so we had to sort of figure out how much cash do we need because there's no ATMs and then take it out and max withdrawal, max withdrawal, max withdrawal and Kathmandu and then you're trying to like hide it in your shoe so that we could make it a bridge did we have a little one maybe people had nothing that really stopped us sore throat, no diarrhea dysentery but I credit eating rice and lentils the whole time because they have other stuff on the menu but you don't really want to order it and there's still people flying for tours or getting as close as they can or trying to get further up the trail again we elected to kind of do part of the Tenze Norge section from Lower Altitude so these guys were kind of cruising over pretty regularly this is the type of bridges, suspension bridges that we would cross regularly to get across rivers and thank goodness because going all the way down there and then all the way back up here sure saves a lot of time but it's kind of scary because they're wobbly and then the donkey train starts coming across it's like yeah the rivers are all glacially fed so they've got this beautiful blue that's not a photoshop it has this sort of almost iridescent blue tone to the water and just taking a break trailside to drink water we brought a filter because plastic waste is not only incredibly expensive to buy water but you're generating all this garbage which then someone's got to either burn or carry back down so we just had a like a small swiss water purifier and every day we would pump and fill see if I can see one in this picture yeah maybe just on the side of Nick's bag there they'll show up in a picture but just reuse the same one liter bottle the entire time or pick one up at a lodge someone else had finished with okay you bet okay we're getting um shut down but thank you guys for um thank you thank you folks have questions about stuff they've seen tonight or how many days we started below lucla but about four days downhill from there well down and uphill and it was 26 in total so very limited showers very limited diet every day walking uphill until you get there and then back down again tea houses so they have bunks in there unheated very little oxygen once you get above like 15,000 feet it really becomes pretty serious and we did take diamox the last couple days which is a pharmaceutical that can help you with your blood oxygen levels but it's you take you basically you take three steps ten breaths three steps repeat repeat not very it there's no one there this time of year in the fall almost all the expeditions go up in the spring so there was a couple tens there was maybe 20 tourists that had made that specific track to get there i was surprised at how many people um had like signs and just to get to base camp they had like planned their whole life for this thing we just sort of went up there we didn't i just wore like a pair of leather boat shoes and we got down coats because it does get colder and colder the higher and higher you go um we we rented down sleeping bags in Kathmandu before we left so they're like a high quality down mummy bags and you were never warm until you were asleep and then you woke up and you did not want to get out of that sleeping bag because then you had to get dressed and you only had two pairs of clothes and you can't wash them because they would just freeze and there's no water yes sir um we mostly when we would travel outside of cities which we travel exclusively overland so we didn't do a lot of internal flights in china and i mostly i have memories of like for instance two or three hours of driving past stone sheds stone sheds tile blocks of rock on both sides of the road for two hours straight so the whole world's tile is getting cut and made in that little section so the amount of like factories like there's whole cities that just make zippers and buttons and fasteners for the whole world it's and every time there's a new product and i this is kind of heavy but they'll build a giant coal burning well they'll build a railroad then they'll build a coal power plant there's a giant pit and then you'd see another pit with a half built power plant and then you'd drive a couple hundred miles there's the power plant and here's the cement factory which because it has power now they make the cement to build those 25 story buildings housing for 500 thousand a million million and a half whatever they think they're going to need then they bring the residents in because they have to move them out of the hutong put them in a brand new apartment brand new city really efficient because you don't have to retrofit dig up streets you just do it all at once before anyone even lives there then you decide the factory is that you need in that to produce whatever it is that you want it could be hoverboards or whatever the new thing is that we need a world's worth of for every cut everyone and then they start making that and that's it and then they do it again and again and again it's a very eye opening other questions yeah you bet thank you guys thanks for coming so much