Beijing Duck

We had a large group, 47 people, and all our meals were pre-planned, and pre-paid. After a long day in Beijing, we went to a downtown restaurant for dinner of Peking Duck.

The restaurant, as were nearly all of those attended, fairly large and shiny. I expect that restaurants and menu details were chosen specifically to cater to Americans. My aunt and uncle visited China in the early 80's, and they reported being served dog at one point. We were never served dog.

The place setting was pretty much the same at every meal. A small plate, a small bowl with a soup spoon in it, chopsticks, usually the plastic kind, and a glass tumbler. We were quite confused about the bowl. Was it a rice bowl, or a soup bowl? We were always served a soup course, but in some cases it came with its own bowl, as it did that night in Beijing. Food was served family-style on a large lazy susan in the middle of the table. Just like all my favorite Chinese restaurants in the US.

The food in Beijing had the heaviest sauces of anywhere we ate. The duck was very good, mouth-melty and smoky in flavor. We wrapped it in a thin rice pancake. It was very fatty, so I didn't have much, on account of my body's propensity to turn fat into arterial blockage. A very marked propensity, that.

Nearly every lunch and dinner began with a few cold dishes already on the table. These were things like sliced cucumbers and precooked meat. The meat bits weren't smoked, really, they were more like bologna or something. Or maybe pickled roast pork or something. Not very spicy though, with little or no vinegar, either. So maybe pickled isn't a good word. I came to appreciate these more and more, at least the vegetables. Because there was very little oil in them, and the were a nice fresh taste, it was quite refreshing to snack on them while waiting to be served the hot dishes. Though I wish they'd throw in one or two with a bit more spice or vinegar.

This particular meal was unique in that at each table (we took up 5 tables) a few Chinese students were seated at each table and shared the meal with us. The students at our table mostly ignored them. They were tired and shy, and the room was quite noisy, making conversations difficult. The two Chinese students at our table were also somewhat younger, 13ish, than our students, who were 16ish, which didn't help things. They sat together, which didn't help in conversation starting, though I'm sure they felt shy, too.

Most meals came with one glass of beverage prepaid. This could be either beer or soda. The choices of soda were Coke or Sprite. The beer was quite good; occaisionally we were served wine, though it wasn't up to the standard of the beer. Lots of the land we saw would be excellent for growing grapes, though that isn't going to happen until the farmers stop subsistence farming on it.

We were warned to not drink the tap water, and to stay away from ice, which was made from the tap water. Rainbow, our tour director, said, "You aren't ready for it."

Chinese never drink cold water. They brew tea with it, which does two things. First, it boils the water, purifying it. Second, the tea infusion also acts as a preservative, and mild anti-biotic in and of itself. So tea was what we drank at meals, and at other times, we relied on bottled water. I didn't see much in the way of diet soft drinks.


But the strangest part of this meal came somewhere in the middle. The room was decorated with many pieces of Chinese-style art, in the form of the tall paintings affixed to scrolls hanging on the wall. A man who seemed to be in charge of the operation came over to our table and mentioned to one of the students that all the wall hangings in the room were for sale. As I've described before, the prices were very attractive, and so commenced about 20 minutes worth of a buying frenzy, wherein our group proceeded to buy about half of the art hung on the wall in the restaurant where we were eating a meal.

I didn't participate. It was just too touristy for me. Besides, I didn't think I had room to carry the scrolls in my luggage, either. The moment struck me as bizzare and surreal. I felt a little embarassed, honestly. That's just my stuff, I guess.

The volume of food we were served was far more than we could eat, this was an gesture of hospitality primarily, though I think there was another subtext as well: We have plenty of food now.

It wasn't always that way. As recently as 30 years ago, there wasn't enough food for everyone in China, and people starved. The food ingredients that we were served were all very familiar: corn, zucchini, tomatos, string beans. Not a lot of peas, but a few. We saw potatoes being grown on terraced hillsides where I would have imagined rice being grown. Potatoes seem a much better choice, though.

We weren't served much tofu, though this is probably because we were American. We had rice at every lunch and dinner, except in Xi'an, which has always been a wheat culture rather than a rice culture. There we got noodles and dumplings.

The bean paste in the baked items did not taste the same as what I've had here in the US. It lacked a certain edge of something; a something that I never quite liked about it. I don't know if that was to cater to us either, or merely the result of using fresher ingredients. Anyway, much better.

Finally, the soup course came. In Beijing and Xi'an the soup course came dead last, while in Chungqing and Shanghai it was about two thirds of the way through. At this meal, it was a corn soup. The broth was thickened with cornstarch, there were kernels of corn in the soup, and very little spice or even salt in it. I didn't find it as appealing as some of the other soups we were served.

The situation with the Chinese students improved near the end of the meal, as people got up and circulated among the tables. The Chinese students thought that one of our students (who is Chinese-American, and speaks Mandarin as her native language) reminded them of Cho Chang, a character in the latest Harry Potter movie. That seemed to loosen things up a bit. They all wanted a picture taken with her.

We got back on the bus, finally, and headed back to the hotel, falling asleep almost immediately. It had been a hard day.

All the Pearls in China

After visiting the Forbidden City, we had lunch and visited a cloisonne factory. This was a government-run facility. If you're like me, you had no idea what cloisonne was or how it was made. But you've seen it before, ranging from the completely gaudy to the insanely beautiful.

When we entered, we could see workers engaged in every step of cloisonne fabrication. So now I know how it's made. The typical cloisonne piece is a vase. First, a vase is made from copper sheeting, soldered together and beat by hand into the correct shape. Then the pattern is applied. Thousands of thin strips of copper are applied to the vase to form a series of shallow pools on the surface of the vase. I don't know exactly how they are affixed, but it didn't seem to be via a soldering or welding process, but rather by the use of some sort of adhesive, which is quite surprising, really. The people doing this have a pattern to which they refer, and that pattern seems to be copied onto the vase directly, perhaps via carbon paper.

The next step is enamel. This looks like a powdery dye immersed in water. It is more or less spooned into the pools and left to dry. Apparently, there is no set color scheme for a given pattern, this is left to the taste and judgement of the worker. I saw the same pattern with several different color schemes, in fact. And I didn't see any patterns or references at their worktables.

When the enameling is completed, the pot is fired in a kiln. I presume this is done to cure the enamel, which has already dried somewhat, or else it would run out when you turned the pot over to work on the other side. After firing, a worker with a lathe uses a cloth and some sort of liquid abrasive to polish it and remove an outer layer of scorching from the kiln. It probably smoothes off the topmost layer as well, where the copper dividers would have a tendency to extend past the enamel.

We were told that a pot like this might take 400 hours to complete. In the factory showroom you could buy such a pot for the equivalent of $50 in US currency. That's 10 cents an hour for what is really highly skilled labor.

In the showroom, there are salespeople everywhere. prices are marked, but negotiable. If your gaze lingers on a piece for more than a second or two, someone will come up to you and tell you about it, and tell you how much. Their English was good enough to carry out the process of selling, that's for sure.

The showroom was very large, perhaps as much as four full-size basketball courts, and stuffed with items of all size and shape. It was entirely clear to me that the operation out front could not produce all the material being sold in the showroom, even if some of it moved slowly.

Which raised the question, where, and how, was it being produced? I didn't want to ask these questions, as I thought it might embarrass our hosts, and I didn't really have a need to know.

For example, our tour leader, my daughter's high school art teacher asked them what they did with pieces that ended up with defects. This question seemed to puzzle them, and they said that never happened. This isn't credible to our ears. People drop stuff, glue doesn't hold. Sometimes, the polishing lathes aren't hooked up correctly, or stuff gets caught in them. (The workplace was full of reminders that there's no such thing as OSHA in China.) But they said that defects don't happen.

One of the other oddities is that there are very few cash registers evident. Not just in this place, or the other "factories" we visited. And most hotels as well. When I wanted to buy something, I would negotiate a price with a salesperson, who would write the agreed price on a printed ( and carbon papered) slip of paper which I would take to the cashier. The cashier would take my money, make change for me, and put the cash in, variously, an envelope, a drawer, or a shoebox. The slip of paper would be stamped as paid, and the duplicate filed in another box. This procedure was followed even at the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco when I got my visa.


I'm not entirely certain that capitalism is the same thing as commerce, but it is entirely clear that the Chinese understand commerce. In fact their embrace of commerce and selling is, er, bracingly vigorous from the perspective of us Americans.

Every time we stepped of the tour bus, there were street vendors there. They had many products to sell. Most common were postcards of where ever we were at, followed by watches. The would call "hello" to get you to look. They would touch your sleeve, or stand in your way. If your eye lingered on their merchandise for more than a moment, they would follow you for blocks. In short, they went for the jugular as aggressively as the worst telephone solicitor in this country.

In all, we visited several of these government factories. Besides cloisonne, there were factories for cultured fresh-water pearls, silk, jade, and a gallery for calligraphy and ink painting. In each case, the process was the same; a short demonstration and lecture on the process, followed by a stop in the showroom to buy. Some places were fixed price, with a discount announced by the person greeting and giving the lecture, while others allowed negotiation.

Retail is theater, they say, and these stores reflected that. The point of these places was not to make the stuff, but to sell it to us. I'm sure that they were meant to sell to Americans, and Europeans. I'm not sure why, though. To concentrate the English speakers? Are the prices subsidised to generate goodwill? Or to accomodate the needs of the Western tourist, who isn't used to negotiating and has very little time to do so.

Our tour director alluded to this. "We Chinese like to take our time shopping for something nice, and try and get the best price, but you don't have time for that," she said. Fixed price saves time. Of course, the need to save time is connected with the price of labor, which is very cheap in China, even ignoring the effect of currency peg.

Unlike the Western nations, which allow the relative prices of their currencies to be determined on an open market, the Chinese government fixes the price of the Yuan relative to the dollar. It is set low, to make it easier for them to sell stuff to Americans.

However, internally in China, there is plenty of evidence that labor costs are low. From the scads of salespeople in any particular store, to the ridiculously low cost of handmade items, to the lack of cash registers. Labor is used where we might use capital goods to save labor costs, because there's no point. Jackhammers and backhoes are not used to dig holes in the streets, men with picks and shovels are.

This struck me as a straightforward economic decision. Why invest in labor-saving devices when labor is the cheapest thing there is. And because of the currency peg, anything they can't make in country, such as backhoes, perhaps, is going to be very expensive, artificially expensive.


The final observation I took away from all this is about intellectual property. The artists we saw were simply duplicating a pattern someone else had made, whether that was in cloisonne, jewelery, silk or painting.

At the gallery I looked at a stack of hand painted, roughly 8x10 pictures of bamboo. They sold for maybe $5US. Each one was different, though they all looked the same. To my eyes, at least, it would be very hard to see the artist in that painting. These artists undergo rigorous training in line and drawing, and the result is a high degree of uniformity.

We saw some oil paintings also, and they were a bit more uniform. But it seems the culture places very little reward on discovery and creation, and certainly very little on self-expression. Which will make it difficult for it to accomodate the West's demands for greater respect of IP, even though the Chinese know that this is necessary.

Lost in the Forbidden City

The usual view of the Forbidden City is the one from Tiananmen Square. Which isn't really part of the Forbidden City at all but merely an outer entryway. After walking through an archway beneath Mao's portrait, you stroll down a large, stone-paved avenue, to the true main gate. The main walkway is paved with smooth marble paving stones but once we got to the outer courtyard of the main gate (surrounded by walls on three sides) we saw that off to the side the paving stones were uneven, with edges sticking up.

At first I assumed that this was due to frost and settling in the 400 years since those stones were first laid. But then another member of our group pointed out that the there was a pattern to the irregularity. The upraised edges seemed to be mostly on the edge that was furthest away from the gate. We have no idea why this might be so, though it might make it more difficult to run toward the gate.

As you pass through the Forbidden City, you encounter a series of three great halls, where the emperor would conduct business and recieve guests. The architecture is concerned with, first and foremost, overawing any visitor. You might walk through a human-sized arch moving from one courtyard to the next, only to see a giant sunken courtyard spread out in front of you, with a great hall on a raised platform in the middle of it.

It would be easy to think that men are fools to be so easily led, that the size of one's palace translates into the supremacy of one's ideas. But I felt the awe as I walked through these spaces, even after 400 years and without all the people of the court adding to the ambience of the place. Certainly this would make me more malleable.

And of course, the notion that it is forbidden adds to the effect, or at least prevents it from becoming familiar, and thus less awe-inspiring. But of course, it is the political/emotional content of such places that leads others to tear them down, or burn them.

After the three great halls comes the living quarters. To the East lay the quarters of the Emperor's number 1 wife, who was chosen for him by his mother. We didn't visit that part. To the West lay his number 2 wife, chosen by himself, and the quarters for concubines. Many of these quarters were restored and could be viewed through glass windows. They featured integrated furnishings, such as a wood-paneled beds that seemed built into the wal. And small tea tables by the window, with a raised platform for sitting or kneeling. No chairs were in evidence.

We were told a story of one beauty from a small town along the Yangtze River named Peach Blossom. She was sent to the Emperor to be his concubine. However, she failed to bribe the imperial portrait painter enough, and so the picture he painted of her was unflattering, and so the Emperor, choosing his companions from their portraits, never visited her.

But Peach Blossom was apparently resourceful and managed to win the favor of a provincial governor, who petitioned the Emperor to have her for his wife. The Emperor assented, and then saw Peach Blossom in person for the first time as they took their leave of him. He had given his word in writing, and could not go back on it, but he was very angry and had the painter executed.

And one cannot stroll the quarters without hearing of the Dowager Empress Xi Ci, who started as a concubine in the Forbidden City. My guess is that she is the most powerful women to ever have lived, top 5 certainly, and she was, as my mother would have said, a real stinker.

Further behind these quarters was a garden. This garden was maze-like, narrow and intimate, just as the great forecourts were open and awe-inspiring. It was here that my daughter and I got lost, somehow moving past the tour guide who had called a halt. We had made it out the back gate before we realized that the rest of the group wasn't with us and that the blue flag which was used to keep us together was nowhere to be seen.

It was a Saturday, and naturally, there were people everywhere. There were many foriegn tour groups, such as ourselves, but the majority were from China it seemed. And every single one of them was going out the back gate, which we needed to go back in. Was I sure about that? Not really. But we did our impersonation of spawning salmon anyway and were rejoined with our group after only about 10 minutes of panic.

At which point, of course, we went back out through the rear gate and got back onto the tour bus.

Tiananmen Morning

After visiting the Temple of Heaven, we went to Tiananmen Square. Our tour guide said gave us a few statistics, namely the largest public square in the world, and noted a few notable things that had happened there.

He mentioned Mao Zedong's proclamation of the People's Republic of China in 1949. He mentioned mourning for Mao at his death, and for other leaders. And then, to my surprise, he mentioned "the student demonstrations in the spring of 1989, which you might have seen on CNN." I was surprised that he mentioned it at all. I wasn't planning on bringing it up.

As it turns out, many of the students on our trip were born in 1989, so didn't have a clear idea of what happened. From April 15 to June 4 there were large demonstrations, and eventually a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square. The demands of the protesters were varied. The protests began with public mourning for Hu Yaobang, who had been Secretary General, and a reformist leader, but had been denounced by the party. But the protests widened to economic protests, fueled by crippling inflation.


In the end, the tanks were sent in. Estimates of the number of people killed range from 400 to 2600. This was the same year, by the way, that the Berlin Wall was torn down.

From the vantage point of the tour bus driving in, it was easier to see how it was situated. Mao's mausoleum was at the opposite end of it from the Forbidden City entrance, where a very large portrait of Mao still hangs. On one side is the Chinese National Museum of Art and History, and on the other the Great Hall of the People where some sort of representative government body meets. For one month out of the year.

I feel a pang of jealousy at that statement.

More in the middle is the Monument to the People's Heros. It is meant to commemorate war dead. There were very long lines at both Mao's mausoleum and the Great Hall of the People. The steps of the Great Hall of the People looked like a good place to take a photo, but unfortunately they were all closed off except for a narrow corridor to allow a large queue of visitors.

As we parked and disembarked, we were met by beggars in addition to the usual street vendors. There was a boy on a sort of roller board that appeared to have something wrong with his legs. Another man walked into our group as we were standing and bared his shoulder and chest, showing what looked to me like burns and scarring.

In order to get to the Square from our dropoff point we had to cross the broad streets that make up three of four sides of the square. This was done via a very large pedestrian underpass. The underpass allowed you to cross either to TS or to the Forbidden City side, and unfortunately some of our group took the wrong turning.

Our tour leader had a little blue flag on an extending pointer to help us keep together. However, once we got to the square, it was awash with people and tour groups, many of them sporting blue flags which were not quite identical to ours.

It was a Saturday, which I'm sure didn't help. And the location is a must-see for internal Chinese tourists as well as foriegners.

Also on the square is a roped off section which contains a flagpole flying the flag of the PRC. It is considered the national flag of China. It is guarded by two soldiers. I expected them to carry rifles, but they didn't. In fact, I couldn't see any weapons on them at all.

The soldiers seemed terribly young to me. They also seemed a bit undisciplined. We saw another company of them off the square as we got off the tour bus and they were marching in formation, but gawking at the same time.

The flag is close to the north end, across from the Forbidden City and the large portrait of Mao. While we were there a company of perhaps 20 soldiers marched up and saluted the portrait of Mao. And then changed the guards on the flag. None of them had weapons either. Could this be some oblique reference to 1989? Is it now considered inappropriate to carry weapons here?

Whoever finds beauty in weapons
Delights in the slaughter of men;
And who delights in slaughter
Cannot content himself with peace.
-Tao de Ching

After about 30 minutes of free time, we went back under the street and visited the Forbidden City.

Temple of Heaven

Eventually my daughter will upload the pictures we took and I can link to them. At which point I will be able to show you a picture of a man with a very large brush doing writing on the pavement in water with a giant brush. I don't know the text that he was writing, though.

This took place in the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, and was our first destination on the morning after we arrived. The temple grounds are a large public park, with some old structures on it of historical interest. There were people in the park also doing Tai Chi, (they say it as taiji), sword dance, ballroom dancing and something resembling hackysack. A little bit of badminton also. I've been doing taiji for 10 years myself, so I watched this with great interest.

Our tour guide said that the calligraphy practice was considered healthful and useful in preventing stroke in older citizens. In China the official retirement age is now 50 for males and 45 for females. I think they are trying to get the younger folks employed.

Which reminds me, in China, because of the One Child Policy, there are 6 adults to care for every child, two parents and four grandparents. This makes the child known as The Little Emperor or Empress. Of course there is a social welfare problem, since that one child is ultimately going to be responsible for caring for all 6 of those adults. Which was mentioned to us by multiple tour guides.

All the groups I saw doing Taiji were doing it to music. I've never seen Taiji done to music in the US, and I've seen it done by Chinese expats a lot. There's no instruction either, that I could see. The leader just starts doing it and everyone else joins in and follows along as best they can.

Anyway, the Temple of Heaven was built as the place for the Emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties to appeal to the gods for good harvests and blessings. The parts that we visited consisted of a great mound, paved in marble and some other stone, and a temple. In the center of the mound was a round marble stone, raised slightly above the central platform. This is where the Emperor stood to make his appeals to the Gods.

The Ming dynasty was founded in 1388, and the third Ming Emperor moved their capital to Beijing from Nanjing. The Manchu's of the Qing dynasty took over in 1644 and ruled until abdication of the last emperor in 1911. These guys weren't exactly ancients, but they felt the need to build this temple and come out to it every year to pray for the harvest.

In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond notes that most rulers feel the pressure to protect their underlings from natural disaster. The conditions for agriculture in China are pretty reliable, otherwise there wouldn't be so many people there, but there's some variation. So this is method of self-aggrandizement, really.

The temple is the first place we ran into a characteristic feature of historical Chinese architecture -- high, wooden thresholds. These are to keep out the evil spirits, evil earth spirits to be exact. However, our guide pointed out that in a traditional farmhouse, such a threshold would also keep out the rain and dirt.

And as these things go, the higher the threshold, the more status the place.

Interestingly, we were assailed by street vendors during the 1 block walk to the gate of the park but not once we entered the park. I don't know how they manage to keep them out of the park and let all the other people in.

Tour Guide Guru

We'd just got to the cruise ship late the night before after a 3-hour bus ride in the rain over roads that were, well, let's just say they were less than super highways. The morning's excursion was to Feng Du, the Ghost City.

Feng Du is on the Yangtze River in the Three Gorges area. We were supposed to have boarded the cruise ship in Chungqing (you might have heard of it as Chungking), largest city in Sichuan (aka Szechuan) province. But the river wasn't high enough to allow that, hence the bus ride.

Ironically, at Feng Du, the river is flooded because of the construction of the Three Gorges Dam downstream, and is due to be flooded more later this year. This flooding means that many of the residents of Feng Du have had to be relocated from their homes on the south bank to highrises on higher ground on the north bank.

You would think that's a good reason for Feng Du to be called the Ghost City. But it's not the reason our tour guide gives.


She boards the bus with us and speaks to us in reasonably good english. She's dressed in a ski jacket, a blouse and blue jeans. The blue jeans are highly decorated with sequins and a figure of a cloaked woman on one leg. She's maybe as much as 25 years old, and carries not the slightest hint of urban sophistication. She seems as if she could be a girl from my rural, small town home, except for the eyes and the accent.

She tells us that we are to visit the site of an old Daoist shrine, though we might have heard of it as Taoist. It was named after two government officials who became disgusted at the corruption, quit their jobs, and went to live on the mountain here. It is said that they became immortals and flew up into heaven. The name Feng Du is taken from the combination of their names.

A Buddhist temple was built here during the Tang Dynasty, perhaps 800 years ago. Of course most of the temple was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, she tells us. But it has been rebuilt, in part by a land developer who, unfortunately, died before the project was complete. But the parts on the mountain that we are to visit, the rebuilt Buddhist temple and the Taoist temple at the top, are complete enough.

In short, the whole thing sounds to me like a tourist trap. The gift shop next to the Buddhist Temple doesn't help matters.

Feng Du, it is explained, is the place that you go to be judged when you die. If you are deemed unworthy, you are carried below the mountain for 500 years of torture at the hands of the devils there.



Soon we come to three bridges. The center brige is the bridge of judgement. If you are pure enough, you can cross it in 3 steps, and proceed onward. Otherwise, you will be pulled below the mountain by the devils beneath the bridge. The right bridge is the bridge of wealth, and the left bridge is the bridge of health. The center bridge is also the bridge of love, and crossing it with a lover will ensure the constancy of that love.

After crossing that bridge we find (next to a gift shop) a curious cone-shaped stone sunken into the ground with a large stone shaped like half a basketball next to it. Our tour guide explains to us that this is a test. Only a man who is faithful to his wife can balance the stone on the rounded top of the cone. It weighs 200 kilograms, she says.

I gave it a try, since my legs are quite strong, and I'm not quite sure that the 200 kilo figure is credible. But it is. A direct lift is not going to cut it. I figure that I must slide it somehow up, but fear of dropping it and crushing fingers and toes is definitely a factor. Eventually I give up. And then the tour guide announces that well, of course I'm faithful to my wife because I wasn't afraid to try. I'm a very sincere guy, she says.

And then she introduces a fellow that will show us how it's done. He's shorter than me, and considerably less bulky. After rolling it around, mostly for the sake of showmanship, it seems, he points the curved side toward the curved cone and tilts the flat side away from the cone, past vertical. He is on the far side of cone and he half rocks, half drags the stone up the cone. He pulls it to it's balance point in one move, curved side down. He holds it a moment to make sure, then spins it slowly as a flourish.

It is explained to us that he has a family and it's our appreciation that supports them. I show my appreciation with 40 yuan, having no idea whether that's enough. But what the heck, I've been both beaten and complimented.

To reach the Buddhist temple we must climb a flight of 33 steps. It is another test, we are told. If we can climb the steps in one breath, we will be lucky.

In front of the Buddha statue there are people praying. Incense and candles are available for a donation. Our tour was arranged via my daughters high school, and one of the students is scolded by our tour guide for not donating enough. I wander into the gift shop and think about the story where Jesus scoured the temple. Is there no such story to Buddhism or Daoism?

At last we reach the top of the mountain and the City of the Dead. This is Daoist. There are many demons and spiritual beings depicted here. The main temple houses the King of the Dead, a twenty foot high statue. Outside the temple a small stone sticks up out of the paving stones, and if you can balance on this stone on one foot, while looking into the temple where the King is, you have passed the final judgement.

Also within the temple is the King's wife. She was a mortal, like Persephone, though nobody says anything about her being rescued from the underworld or pomegranates. Women who spend time in front of her shrine are said to appear younger and more beautiful. Men linger there at their risk, since the King might become jealous.

And there is a depiction of the punishments in Hell. They seem metaphorical, in the sense that gossips have their tongues pulled out. But that's a natural consequence; since once you are known to pass lies about someone you will not be believed.

We go back down the mountain and I ponder the experience. It seems a good metaphor for personal growth. You could call it spiritual, emotional, or moral, I'm no longer sure I know the distinction. We continue growing until death. Sometimes what matters is not whether we passed or failed the test, but whether we tried. And the final test is whether we can face death without losing our balance. Maybe this isn't commercial so much as it is a different approach?

I don't want to leave you with the idea that I didn't like the experience. It was thought-provoking and engaging, even though a very different set of cultural assumptions were at work here. And I was very touched by our guide, who seemed as though she would fit right in giving tours of the local Mystery Spot or the Worlds Largest Tree.