We arrived into the Kathmandu airport and encountered the most shocking thing we had seen in weeks; A SMILE. Everyone was smiling. The man working border patrol, the woman pushing a luggage cart even the soldiers with M16s flung around their shoulders were smiling. Smiles! We love smiles! We felt genuinely welcomed into Nepal within minutes of stepping off the plane.

What a huge difference that makes. When traveling and being on the receiving end of customer service everyday for months you really begin to appreciate the small things that companies and individuals do that make your day a hell of a lot better. But I don’t believe it was the airport’s customer service trainings that gave us this experience. People genuinely seemed happy in Nepal, publicly, you can see it on their faces. What wonderful thing.

Ofer had set up a tour guide for us during our stay in Kathmandu and we were delighted to see our names being held at eye level as we left the baggage claim area. Two sweet young men took our bags and led us to the car. As we drove they asked us where we were from and were eager to practice their English skills with us. It was late at night but it seemed SO dark and peaceful, abnormally so. Then I realized there were NO STREET LIGHTS. Needless to say it was very hard to see our surroundings. Within twenty minutes we were checked in and relaxing in a beautifully spacious room just outside of the center of Kathmandu.

The next day we met with our tour guide early in the morning for our first introduction to Nepal. Driving out of the lodge property and into the streets of Kathmandu was like driving into a Hollywood set. All of the characters were there: a women in a brightly colored sari selling freshly slaughtered chicken, a man spinning a stone wheel to sharpen a knife, cows and chickens lying in the middle of the street, naked children sitting on the ground occupying themselves with the dirt between their toes. I looked back beyond the car to the lodge and watched the 21st century fade in the distance.

Ofer and I spent the drive tapping each other with our mouths gaped wide and pointing to things we had never seen before: a family of four on a motorcycle, an elderly woman carrying what looked to be 20 pounds of potatoes on her head, garbage piled up so high in the street that we could smell it through the closed window, the monk dressed in traditional robes talking on his cell phone, babies sprawled out sleeping on the concrete.

This was the first time in my life that I truly wished I was a photographer. Everywhere we looked was like a picture out of National Geographic. We felt like we had stepped into what we only imagined the world must have been like hundreds of years ago (of course minus the coke advertisements and cell phones). It was hard to believe people lived like this in the year 2010.

Much of our time in Kathmandu was spent looking at temples, shrines, ancient architecture and religious figures. Our guide provided us with a constant stream of information from religious stories to current political events. We were in total sensory overload. It was difficult to take in what our guide was telling us because we were still in total culture shock. I completely missed stories about Lord Vishnu and the date that they reconstructed a certain shrine because I was too focused on the MONKEY that was standing right next to me as if he was waiting for a bus or the woman who looked to be in her 100‘s squatting smoking a cigarette and showing off the last tooth in her mouth.


This was also the first time that I saw children begging. They would come try to stand in our pictures and then ask for money, or walk with us saying some memorized phrase over and over again with their hands out, one even came over and tried to hold my hand in order to in order to entice a sympathetic dollar out of me. Ofer and I had talked about this and the way we saw it was if we give money to these children we just feed the problem. Some of these kids are put out on the street because their families know they have a better chance of making money than the adults in the house. Therefore the children are kept out of school and put on the streets to beg with their older siblings. It was difficult to see but in our opinion if we were going to give anything it was going to be food, not money.

We couldn’t have been more awestruck. There was so much to see, so much to learn. By the end of our first day of sightseeing as we were being driven back to our lodge we convinced our driver to drop us off downtown so we could walk around on our own. We just couldn’t get enough. The neon bright saris against the crumbling walls of the temples, the packs of motorcycles with toddlers standing helmetless on the back, the smell of raw fish and chai tea. Despite the handful of tourists we saw throughout the day and the street aimed for tourists in the center of town the people of Kathmandu seemed relatively untouched by the western world. People seemed to spend much of their time attending to their religious practice, selling or buying in the markets, sitting on the floor eating and playing cards and games in abandoned temples. There was a level of peace among the people despite the chaos. People appeared to generally be happy with their lives.

From what we understood a life in Nepal is a very pious life. In fact Nepal has the largest majority of Hindus than any other country (Although Nepal is also considered the birthplace of Siddhartha (Buddha) on which the Buddhist religion is based). Most people dedicate hours of their day to worshipping their gods, visiting their temples and doing traditional blessings for themselves and their family members. Ofer and I have various feelings and thoughts about this which I’m sure we will address in another blog.

**This section may not be appropriate for those of you who are reading to young children**

One of the sites that our guide took us to see was the Bagmati River. As we followed our guide through the streets dodging sleeping dogs, swamis and sacred cows I started to piece together from his broken yet modern English that we were heading to the place where they cremate their dead. He in no way prepared us for the sight, it was just another part of life to him, nothing worthy of alarm, just one more stop on the tour. Ofer and I held hands and wondered how we would emotionally and physically react to the sites we were about to see.

We were lead to a path high above a river with a ledge and seats overlooking the scene. Across the river from us we could see slabs of concrete jetting into the river with awnings overhead. On each slab was stacked wood and and straw and on top of the piles were bodies wrapped in white sheets. We learned that as a family member is nearing the end of their life they are brought to this area for their last moments of life. The dead is first dipped three times into the Bagmati River, then eldest son, with shaved head, lights the funeral pyre. When the cremation is completed the ashes are then swept into the river rushing below. The eldest son, and sometimes the family members then enter into the river to sprinkle the holy water on themselves. Now the water in this river is not what we Americans think of river water; blue currents with splashes of white curls as the river turns. No, this river was mud brown. Brown from the earth, brown from the garbage that was floating in it, brown from the ash and sut from the cremations.

We stood there and watched. As Americans we assumed there must be so much pain and suffering watching your loved one die and be cremated in front of you. Our tiny perspective didn’t begin to give us an understanding of what this place means to the family and the community. I fought my American urge to choke on the sut and smoke rising from the river mingled with the constant reminder that this was not just wood they were burning.

The mourning families were not the only only ones who used this water. Floating right past the corpses were children from 5 to 10 years old swimming in the water. They would climb on the bank of the river, nude with smiles on their faces. They would flip and fling themselves into the water trying to outdo their friend or brother before them. Then they would let the river do as it pleased and charge them down dips and turns. We were told that as a family is cremating their loved one a coin in placed on their chest. After the burning the coin will have been melted but will be swept into the river. These boys dive and sift the river looking for the remains of these coins. I could hardly wrap my head around the concept of a 5 year old drifting in a river of ash looking for what could be the only money his family makes that day.

Such an amazing sight to see. Death is such a fascinating concept. I would have been so interested and I hope someday to learn more about how the Nepalese view life, suffering and death. It was a grounding experience to see first hand how one act can be seen so differently depending on upbringing, culture and religion.

Nepal was one of the places on this first leg of our trip that I was excited to see but also quite apprehensive to go to. Where would we sleep, would it be clean? Would we feel safe? But from the first moment of driving out of the gates of our lodge all of my anxieties fell away. We were in complete awe. In Nepal we discovered our curiosity, we were humbled and our eyes were opened in a way that they had never been before. Kathmandu is a place we would highly suggest and we hope to visit again someday.

For those of you who have not been to the Great Wall of China, we have news for you: it is huge. I know you have heard this all before, that it is the longest wall in the world, you can see it from space blah blah blah, but let us tell you: it is massive. And it isn't just that it is long. There is no way to take a 'stroll' on the Great Wall of China, not even hike it, nope in fact you stair-master, full-speed treadmill up it and ski down. Some areas you can take a break and just walk at a small incline but other areas are made of up intermixed small and huge steps that require controlled breathing and angry 80's music in your head to get you through (at least in my case). The steps were so steep that I held onto Ofer with one hand and the side of the wall with the other.

Not to mention that the steps were incredibly slippery from millions of feet and years of rough weather wearing them away. And this is not just on the way up, the Wall is just as steep and slippery coming down. I almost fell multiple times and saw a few people take some pretty big spills just when they thought they had mastered the terrain. I swear, if this Wall were in the USA there would be some governmental release of liability form to sign before you can access it. And just when you think you've done the toughest set of stairs you pass the guard post on the top just to see the next guard post in the distance on another even more treacherous hill. I spent a good amount of time explaining to Ofer how it would have been much smarter to bore tunnels through the mountains instead. Ofer would proceed to tell me that this would completely negate the purpose of the Wall. Details. The views were absolutely incredible and it was overwhelming to imagine how much work and how many years it took to build this World Wonder.

During our stay in Beijing Ofer and I lived in a Hutong. A Hutong is a neighborhood made up of narrow streets and many courtyard houses. Our hotel was a beautiful courtyard house renovated with plenty of space to sit outside and relax away from the bustle of the city. Beijing is made up of concentric circles surrounding the Forbidden City. Some Hutongs were for distinguished people in the society and as you got further away from the Forbidden City the status of the inhabitants lowered to 'commoners'. You can tell which kind of Hutong you are in based on the size of the houses, streets and the decorations on the doors and entrances to the homes.

At one point Ofer and I took a tour of a different Hutong than our own and learned about how to distinguish between the houses of different ranking individuals, it was fascinating. One of our favorite things we learned was that all entrances to the houses have a small plank of wood blocking the doorway, in order to walk into the residence you needed to step over it. We learned that the reason for this was it was thought that bad spirits had no knees, so the boards were put at the front of the house because the spirits wouldn't be able to step over them.

One of the most well known sites in Beijing is the Forbidden City and we were very eager to visit this historical place. The Forbidden City which is called the Palace Museum by locals is at the center of Beijing and was built during the Ming Dynasty. We had the impression that it would consist of one very large courtyard and maybe a few palaces but we learned that it was made up of 980 buildings, housed 24 emperors and spans over 7,800,000 square feet. Every building was incredibly ornate and some of the rooms inside had been reconstructed so we could get a concept of how the royalty lived.

Of course on a trip to Beijing we needed to see Tiananmen Square which is the largest city square in the world and the location of many historical events in China. Over 30 years after the death of Mao it was incredible to see what a huge hold he still has on much of the country. It was hard to believe that we were standing in the spot of so much ancient and current trials. We opted out of going to the mausoleum to see Mao's embalmed body.

One of our favorite things we did in Beijing was join a group in the park to do Tai Chi. They first did a performance for us and then took the time to teach us the beginning part of their practice. After just the 15 minutes of doing it Ofer and I both wanted to seek out places to do Tai Chi, it was incredibly relaxing and it felt good to take time to move slowly and be in tune with our bodies.

Our time in was Beijing jam packed with temples, tea ceremonies, Peking Ducks and strolls by the water at night. Sometimes we had to pinch ourselves to realize that we were't just in the biggest Chinatown we had ever seen, we were actually in China. Now when we see pictures or hear stories of The Great Wall, Tiananmen Square and traditional Chinese performance we will be able to draw back on our memories and recall the times we saw them with our own eyes. These are gifts that we will be able to share with each other for the rest of our lives. We couldn't be luckier.

Ofer and I have been spoiled by Japan and Hong Kong. Clean streets, kind people, good smelling hotel rooms. I was starting to feel confident that this whole traveling thing wasn’t going to be as hard as I had initially anticipated.

Then we stepped out of the airport in China. We got into the line and we were led to our car. With suitcases and backpacks in the trunk and our driver informed of our destination we climbed into the back seat. Once the doors were shut and the cab started on its way Ofer and I looked at each other. Something was wrong. There were no seat belts! As Americans we have been trained not to ride in a car unless there are working seat belts, something Ofer and I both feel very strongly about. We started digging in between the seats, maybe they had been sandwiched there by overweight American tourists who weren’t concerned about seat belt safety. But our hands came back empty.

Hold the phone...something else is wrong. Our cab driver is a suicidal maniac. Once out of the terminal we were being thrown around in the back seat of his car like kernels of pop corn in an old fashioned popcorn popper. He sped and weaved between busses and cars with a grimace on his face, this obviously was not a happy man. “We’re really not in a hurry” I told him coyly when what I really wanted to say “Check your blind spots, you lunatic, do you drive get-away-cars on your days off??!” No response from the front seat. As we swerved and jerked back and forth Ofer and I decided that we would check his blind spots for him, as if this would help at all. Once we tried to so, we noticed something else was wrong. Everything was a blind spot! There was newspaper covering every window in the car but the front window. We were the car version of a horse with blinders on, only the one leading the horse was an angry Chinaman who lacked a fear of death.

My big powerful future husband started getting red. “This is ridiculous he said, where did this guy learn to drive!!” Then the car sped up and we dodged trucks and motorcycles with more speed. “Stop it, he may understand English” I said to Ofer in my bastardized version of Hebrew. Instead I did what any woman in this situation would do; I become my mother. I pulled out a pen and paper and proceeded to write down every name and number I saw posted in his car. The city of Shanghai will benefit from us getting this guy’s license taken away.

As we held hands and watched out the front window we noticed that the streets were becoming less and less busy. In fact we were in an area with what seemed to be houses with no doors and sometimes no roof, people squatting out on the streets relieving themselves, people clearing the phlegm in their throats so loud we could hear it in our moving car and smells that would make you not eat for days. “Holy Crap, he understood what we were saying and he is taking us to an area to kill us”, this is honestly what went through my head and judging by the look on Ofer’s face his thoughts were not too far off. We then took a sharp right turn and saw a large hotel a hundred feet away from the street.

You know movies where they show you some beautiful home with a freshly painted facade, a gentle breeze plays with the flowers that line the perimeter...you can almost smell the fresh baked bread wafting from the open window. Then the light changes and you watch as the years go by, the paint cracks, the porch swing crookedly falls off it’s perch, the flowers become a distant memory and the glow of the home where you could picture a family growing inside is replaced by creaks and bad dreams and the smell of wood and plants rotting. Yep this was what it was like. We had both seen the picture of the hotel online but it must have been taken at least 30 years ago. It looked like a deserted haunted house although it was clearly populated considering how many cars were in the parking lot.

Welcome to China.

That was the first of a string of things to go wrong with the hotel. Once inside we were told to only take cabs out of the hotel because it isn’t safe to walk the streets. The first room they put us in had not been cleaned and still had tissues and bedsheets strewn on the floor. They second room they put us in had no internet, they had to send their IT guy in to run a cable into our room. Then the next day they forgot to send us the wake up call we had ordered. Smelly sheets, a bathroom that smelled like don’t even ask what, dirt and grime on the carpets. Not to mention the fact that they claimed to have a workout room and a olympic size pool of which there were neither...details. We were home.

Ofer and I both know a lot of people who have visited China and loved it. There is so much that colors your experience of a country; who you meet, who you’re with, the places you end up sleeping and eating. Not to mention how comfortable you are in general about traveling to a foreign place. Maybe for us it was the contrast from coming from Hong Kong and Japan. But China was our first real culture shock on this trip.

When we first walked to a busy area looking to grab a bite to eat we waited for the street light to change (Japan had trained us well). Once our ‘walk’ symbol was displayed, hand and hand we began to cross the intersection. Not more than 2 feet ahead of us a motorcycle plowed across our path, then another. I looked to the right and saw that no one even slowed down at the red light. Once we got the hang of the fact that streetlights mean absolutely nothing, we were fine. But the shock of stepping off the sidewalk thinking we had the right of way to cross and nearly getting killed by a motorcycle definitely showed us how incredibly differently cities operate.

There were many more things that we were not accustomed to that at first came as a pretty big shock, especially since we had just come from Japan and Hong Kong. One thing is, there is a lot of spitting that goes on in China. I know you don’t want to hear about it but trust me hearing about it is a lot better than being the indirect recipient of the splash. And it isn’t just, “Oh, ew a bug just flew in my mouth, let me get it out!” nope it is a full-fledged, Leonardo De Caprio in Titanic, from the pit of your stomach spit. And both men and women do it. They don’t hide it. They do it everywhere and at anytime. It’s lovely.

I also need to dedicate at least one paragraph to toilets. It took us less than a day to recognize that we were no longer in the land of heated toilets with flowery sprays and courtesy flush sounds. I remember the first time I saw a real China toilet. We were on our day trip and it was suggested to us to use the bathroom. I waited in a line (I use the word ‘line’ loosely because in China people had no intention of waiting their turn in a line, if they saw an opportunity to get in front of someone else, they took it) behind 10 Chinese woman and children. Once it was my turn I walked toward the open stall. I quickly glanced to my right and saw a stall without a door and a young lady about 18 years old squatting above a hole in the floor. I looked at her and she looked at me, no embarrassment, nothing. Obviously I was the odd-man out.

I reached my stall and walked in. I shut the door behind me. You can imagine the smell, I’m not even going to go into that. All there was, was a porcelain hole in the ground. I stared at the hole...the hole gaped right back at me. Who was going to win, me or the hole. I looked around for toilet paper. Nope. Just as I was convincing myself that this was an ‘experience’ I felt a gush of water splash over my foot from the stall next to me. The hole won...I left. Hole: 1 Shayna: 0.

So apparently how it works, is no toilet paper is used, once you are done you wash anything remaining on yourself or the ground down with a bucket of water you bring in with you. After your delusions of yourself as a ‘lady’ are shattered you then walk out to the sink. There are three things that I now very much appreciate in a bathroom sink: water, soap and paper towel/dryer. If you have one, there is a very good chance that you don’t have another. Paper towel I can do without, I am getting used to that. But no soap? That’s another story. In China Ofer and I learned our lesson, we started bringing tissues and hand sanitizer everywhere we went.

OK, so China is very different from what we have seen before on this trip. That’s fine. Now it is time for us to mold ourselves to be comfortable here. This is how it was going to be for the next few weeks.

We had a one-day tour set up in Shanghai. We saw so much in that one day. There are some positives and negatives about tour guides. The positives: We don’t have to plan where we are going, how to get there, how much to pay the driver, when/ where we are going to eat etc. Everything is laid out for us and we don’t have to think at all, something Ofer and I enjoy and try to do as much as possible. Negatives: They take you mostly to the tourist traps (although some are things we do really want to see), there is a good chance that we won’t understand their English through their accent and more often than not they bus us to places and encourage us to buy (they get a cut of whatever it is that we purchase).

Our guide took us through to the ancient city wall, the Grand Canal, the ancient town of Suzhou, Zhouzhang Water Village and to a silk factory where you can watch the process from silk worms eating mulberry leaves to the finished product of a silk tapestry. A lot of the silk factories are now mostly machine operated but we were lucky to visit a factory where every step was done by hand. It was amazing to watch, really made us appreciate the work that goes into creating even just one silk pillowcase.

Ofer had been talking for MONTHS about going to the World Expo. In fact that might have been his major reason for wanting to visit Shanghai. He was really excited to see the Switzerland Exhibit because they apparently had a roller-coaster. We had been getting reports that it takes hours of standing in line to enter one of the countries expositions but we needed to check it our on our own.

I have to start by saying China is HOT in August. Very very hot. Most people carried umbrellas with them to protect themselves from burning and over heating. And all around the Expo there were areas where you can stand and be sprayed by water in order to try to cut the heat. We asked around and found out that the only Expo that doesn’t have a line is Africa. No line sounded good to us so we headed in that direction. The Africa Exhibit was in a huge space (as was everything, really) and had stands inside from different countries. It was fun to walk around and to visit the stands of the countries that we are planning to visit on this trip.

We decided to be brave and head out in the heat toward the Switzerland Exhibit. Once we got there we were told that the roller-coaster was temporarily closed. Of course. So instead we walked around and found the Spain Exhibit, which looked really cool from the outside. We waited in line for about 2 hours and snaked around the outside of the building. Every ten minutes or so we were lucky to be under a spicket that would spray us with cool water. This trip is starting to make me understand why people in other parts of the world feel the need to shower 2 or 3 times a day. The Exhibit was pretty amazing. It was mostly made up of multimedia displays showing different videos and pictures from Spain. In front of the first screen was a woman dancing to dramatic Spanish music. Next we saw a huge replica of a baby. A huge freaky non-human looking baby. Why this was part of the Exhibit, I can’t tell you. I think people were intrigued by it because, like us, they were pretty disturbed by it. The entire Exhibit lasted about 5 minutes. As admittedly cool as the exhibits were the heat was really brutal. And the more we saw the more we were excited to see most of these places in person.

That’s the thing about China. It is very difficult for people from China to travel outside of their country. In fact whether we were on the street or on the Great Wall people seemed to be in awe of us. Internet (granted restricted internet), TV and people traveling to their country are their only access to the outside world. In fact, many times we were stopped by locals and asked to be in their pictures. So we could see why the Expo was so popular. This was their opportunity to see the world because there was a very good chance that most of the people standing in those lines for hours upon hours and going for multiple days have never and will never leave China.

When living in New York I was introduced to Shanghai Soup Dumplings. If you don’t know what this is I highly suggest googling it and trying them. They are absolutely delicious. My favorite restaurant is Joe’s Shanghai, however since Ofer and I now found ourselves in Shanghai I was determined to try the original. I think I made Ofer try them in at least 6 different restaurants, no joke. We must have eaten at least 50 Shanghai Soup Dumplings in Shanghai along with countless other Dim Sum treats. I don’t know if it is just brand loyalty but I have to admit we liked Joe’s Shanghai the best! Ofer and I kept ourselves busy in Shanghai, we went to the highest observation deck in the world in the Shanghai World Trade Center. We attended an amazing acrobatic show, we ate local cuisine, we got sick from local cuisine and we went to our first night club in Asia.

By the time we loaded into our final cab to head for the airport we laughed at how much had changed. Our first driver in Shanghai wasn’t crazy, he was just doing what everyone else did in China. A driver who stayed within the lines and didn’t sit on his horn was the exception to the Chinese rule not the outlier. By the end of our week in Shanghai we had gotten used to being thrown around in the car, needing to just keep our eyes closed during the journey and not even look for seat belts. It had taken a pretty good initial shake but China had officially broken us in.