3 of the 5 dying cities are in Ohio: Could tourism help?

by Jamie Rhein on

Canton, Youngstown and Dayton are on the list of the five fastest dying cities. Dying sounds terribly grim. How about shrinking? I can’t imagine that no one will ever live in these places one day. They are all on highways for one thing. Still, as industries have become smaller and have all but disappeared in these cities, the economy is not holding people in large numbers or attracting more.

Each place does have decent offerings and worth a shout out. I’ve been to Canton and Dayton and driven through Youngstown. I went to Canton specifically for the Pro-Football Hall of Fame. A Japanese teacher who stayed with us a few years ago wanted to go there so we obliged. It’s a lovely drive through Ohio’s rural countryside. Our teacher friend was quite the football fan so this was a thrill for him. I enjoyed myself as well, and I am most certainly not into football. I don’t dislike it. I’m just not a fan.

I went to Dayton twice. Once to take in Wright brothers and Katharine Wright historic sites for an article I was writing, and the other time to do a restaurant review of Jay’s Seafood in the historic Oregon District. I found it to be a lovely small city and can’t imagine that entrepreneurial types won’t find solutions to the shrinkage problem. I have plans to head to Dorthy Lane Market in the near future.

Youngstown has been on the radar as a struggling city for awhile. The town has been doing some work to revitalize itself. Before BloggingOhio ended there were several Youngstown related posts, mostly by Chris Barzak, a writer, and now professor who lives in Youngstown that highlighted these efforts, as well as the interesting things to do there.

As people are looking for places to go closer to home for a quick get-a-way, maybe tourism could help–at least a tad.

“No Reservations” season 4, episode 12: Colombia

by Jeremy Kressmann on

Location: This week Anthony is in Colombia, a country that finds itself the setting of one of South America’s most remarkable transformations. In the 25 years since the death of Pablo Escobar, one of the world’s most notorious drug lords, this once war-torn country has emerged like a phoenix from the scars of the past. Colombia offers Tony a tantalizing mix of cultures, delicious food and beautiful mountain scenery.

Episode Rating: Four bloody meat cleavers (out of five) in keeping with last week’s rating system.

Summary: Cocaine. Violence. Political instability. These are the unfortunate but typical words that are associated with Colombia, South America’s northern-most state. For many years the country suffered under the weight of rival drug cartels, fueled by an insatiable demand for their chief “pulse-raising” product in the United States and beyond. It is these very depictions that Tony comes armed to confront upon arriving in Colombia. Within the episode’s first five minutes Bourdain has already pronounced his visit to Colombia as an unexpected delight. Colombia is literally a country-transformed and with killer food to boot.
Tony wastes little time diving into the country’s cuisine. He meets up with restaurant owner Jorge in Cartagena, a city on the country’s Caribbean coast. After sampling some delicious ceviche at Jorge’s restaurant, the pair take a trip to Cartagena’s central market to shop for some fish. Mr. Bourdain looks like a kid in a candy store as he conducts taste tests on all manner of exotic produce – five types of mangoes, strange orange-lime hybrids, pretty much anything fruity and delicious is available and there for the tasting.

To top it off, Tony enjoys a hearty local dish consisting of seafood rice, chicken, fish and turtle eggs, the local delicacy. Ashamed that you’re eating an endangered species Tony? Although our host gives the ethics of turtle egg-eating momentary pause, the egg is already well on its way down his digestive tract before the issue comes up. All of you just promise you won’t try any turtle eggs if you decide to visit Colombia, cool?

Soon we are transported to Bocagrande, one of Cartagena’s flashiest neighborhoods, where Tony boards a small water taxi for a trip to a small fishing island just across the bay. The rustic island stands in stark contrast to the flashy mainland high rises, and Bourdain takes the opportunity to enjoy a laid-back lunch with a local free-diver, who catches him a Caribbean lobster for lunch. Throw the words fresh, lobster and rustic island together and you don’t need to add much else – the story basically tells itself. It was almost tortuous to watch him eat it all and not get a taste.

The next and final stop on Tony’s Colombian odyssey is Medellín, the second-largest city in Colombia and one of its most notorious. The crew visits Queareparaenamorarte (try pronouncing that one), a restaurant that serves traditional Colombian cooking from across the country. Tony gorges himself on a mouth-watering array of foods – a plate of chorizo, rice soup with meat, avocado and plantains, flank steak and tamales de tilapia prepared with coconut, plantains and passion fruit sauce. All the while he’s downing shots of aguardiente, the local Colombian rum, with his hosts. C’mon did you really think we could have an episode of No Reservations without Tony getting drunk?

And we’re just getting started. In a show renowned for its gluttony, Tony’s Medellín visit turns into one of the most gluttonous we’ve probably ever witnessed. Bourdain has breakfast at the “How Yummy” restaurant at the Plaza Minorista market in Medellín. After an appetizer of empanadas, he dines on Calentao, a typical breakfast plate of leftover rice, beans, fried eggs, fried plantains, an arepa covered in cheese AND meat. In what has to be the line of the episode, Tony decides that Calentao “makes the Grand Slam at Denny’s look like a carrot stick.” Heart attack anyone?

Clearly not yet full from his gigantic breakfast, Tony has an even bigger lunch, consisting of a plate with beans, salad, rice, fried eggs, pulled pork, an arepa, chorizo and chicharron. Good god man, please make it stop. It’s almost painful to watch a human being eat this much food. But then again, it is a cooking and eating show – who am I to judge?

Tony wraps up the episode with a visit to the some of Medellín’s rougher barrios for a traditional Sancocho lunch and a little local culture. His hosts are the neighborhood’s residents – people who have experienced a dramatic rise in their standard of living in recent years. What was once the training ground for the Colombian drug cartels and their armies of mercenaries is now home to young adults who have started their own hip-hop crew, a filmmaker and a talented young chef. Thankfully Tony spares us the “kumbaya” moment at the campfire and gets back to what he does best – eating some tasty food and hanging out with his guests.

Bourdain’s examination of Colombia offers the country high marks and an optimistic road to the nation’s future success. It’s the type of country that only Anthony Bourdain does best – a place cluttered with misconceptions waiting to be corrected. And although a “human interest” angle was definitely woven into the episode, No Reservations: Colombia was really all about the food. Tony’s focus on the country’s diverse and delicious cuisine definitely made this a surprising and very enjoyable episode to watch. But more than that, I found myself wanting to go visit Colombia – for any travel show, this is the pinnacle of a successful episode.

Dispatch from China: The time I befriended a fossil smuggler

by Jerry Guo on

The Imperial-styled strip mall may look like a relic of the past, with its clay tiles, ornate sidings and those Chinese New Year red lanterns, but like much in China, it’s spanking new. Yet relics of the past are good business here. In one of the mall’s countless stores, apron-clad Zhang Lijie is chipping away the rock around a 120 million-year-old fish fossil that she plans to sell for $3. Zhang, 38, went from selling vegetables a decade ago to hawking fossils on a street corners. Now, she owns her own store, The Treasure Mansion, which stocks the fossilized remains of ancient fish, trees, plants and insects – but no dinosaurs, which are officially illegal.

“Business is OK,” she says with a blush of modesty, after reluctantly admitting she earns 10 times what she did as a farmer, and now lives comfortably in an airy loft above the shop.
Here in Chaoyang, an impoverished northeastern Chinese city surrounded by cornfields where farmers still use horse-drawn plows, prehistoric bones have jump-started the economy in a way no free-trade zone or joint venture could have done. The region shot to fame in the mid-1990s when paleontologists began discovering feathered dinosaurs and other well-preserved fossils. They eventually logged at least 500 new species in the area. Good news for scientists, but even better news for an entire generation of farmers, dealers, shop owners, and even local officials who profit from a flourishing underground trade in priceless fossils.

Most fossils find their way to Ancient Street, the pedestrian boulevard that, despite its name, opened only last year, boasting over 60 stores that make it by far the biggest commercial fossil market in the world. There’s a noticeable hierarchy here, with the newly minted dealers competing with each other, as well as peddlers of gaudy flowers and pirated books, out on the street. More established dealers set up booths in a crowded three-story building. Only the shrewdest, like Zhang, can afford the stand-alone storefronts.

Trade can be slow, and a gaggle of bored shopkeepers sit around a table sipping tea as a couple of college-aged students browse for gifts for their professors. Most customers buy fossils for others, as gifts or bribes. After an initial rush, shopkeepers say, demand has leveled out, although their stores remain open. “It’s normal to go a month or two without a sale, because there are so many other shops,” says one dealer. But she didn’t seem worried, explaining that selling just the occasional $300 petrified tree stump or $600 marine lizard will keep her business afloat.

Ancient Street is for the casual fossil buyer, of course; Chinese moguls and Western collectors head instead for dealers like Wang Facai (literally meaning “fortune”), whose store called Rare Stones, carries no precious jewels, just some dusty Ming vases (likely fakes) and cheap fish fossils scattered on the shelves. The bulky Wang, in a muscle T-shirt, glances around before beckoning me into one of two back rooms. From a secret closet behind a mirror, he pulls out a slab of rock which contains the profile of a half bird, half dinosaur, Confuciusornis sanctus, whose discovery in 1994 helped scientists develop the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs.

“Everyone wants this bird,” he says, trying to convince me the $8,500 sticker price is a steal. Wang also shows me pictures of a $1,500 dog-sized dino (uncanny resemblance to the pet dino in The Flintsones) and a $25,000 unidentified feathered dinosaur.

Although sales of dinosaurs are strictly illegal, local officials tend to look the other way. “The middlemen and authorities are in bed together,” says a retired reporter for the Chaoyang Daily, who has investigated the local fossil trade for the past decade. “The officials receive money, and even fossils, so they ignore the situation.”

As fossil collecting becomes the next big thing for China’s nouveaux riches and even Hollywood leading men – Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicolas Cage reportedly recently got into a bidding war over the remains of a $276,000 Asian T-rex – the paleontological paradise of Chaoyang is under threat. Farmers and dealers are hard at work disturbing potentially valuable sites in the race to find specimens to sell. In a cornfield outside of town, farmers have sliced open an entire hill. Layers of earth, each covering deposits millions of years old, protrude naked, leaving only broken slabs of rock. Along the road back into town, farmers ride bicycles with shovels lashed to their backs, returning home after a hard day’s treasure-hunting.

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That Market in Thailand That the Train Moves Through

by Jamie Rhein on

The market in Justin’s post that the train moves through, literally–you really need to see it to understand the intricacies of the situation–could be in Bangkok. Or it could be near Bangkok. Bangkok is a city after all that sprawls and sprawls and sprawls.

I’ve taken a train to Bangkok twice, both times from Chiang Mai. Once it was the night train where we passed into Bangkok early in the morning. Along the tracks, even before the sun was barely up, life was bustling. There is a section that looks like the one in the video, although, I don’t think it’s the same track. The second train I took was the day train and a chance to see how the countryside gradually becomes dense with buildings and people.

Richard Barrow on his Web site, Richard Barrow: Promoting Thai Culture and Life to the World, details a train trip that sounds like it passes through the very market in the video. It sure looks like it to me. Plus, his description in the post “Market on the Railway Tracks” sounds identical. Here’s the description. Go to the post for more.

“I knew that during the last 100 metres or so the train would pass through a market. Literally. I know it sounds strange but this was my planned highlight of the trip. I wanted to get pictures of the market stallholders pulling back their produce as we passed through the market. “

Plus, look at the picture. Look at the first shot of the video. See? According to him, this market is along the Maeklong Railway at the outskirts of Maeklong. His post also explains how you can take this train trip to see the market for yourself and provides other photos. If you want info about Thailand, his blog is a wonderful mix of details.

A Canadian in Beijing: My Last Day in China

by Ember Swift on

What did I do on my last day in China?

I bought chopsticks.

What can you do in the face of reality? The reality was that I was leaving and the response was to soothe the pain of that reality with retail therapy. And, sad as it sounds, it worked. What’s more, I took home gifts for my loved ones and that felt good. It felt like a bridge between Beijing and Canada somehow.

I guess you could say that I relented and loosened my grip on my desire to be “a local” and promised that desire that I’d revisit it in the future.

Many different markets had been tested in advance of their arrival. I went to The Pearl Markets, the Silk Markets (each offering much more than pearls and silk), the YaXiu Markets and, of course, to the Wudaokou Markets (several times) in search of the cheapest options and best environment for them. . .
My friend Rui suggested the Wholesale Clothing Markets by the Zoo. I had never been there and so we all decided that a new experience for everyone was due. They are geared to Chinese shoppers as opposed to tourists and we were the only foreign faces that I noticed there. With our translating skills, my family was alright, but without any Chinese knowledge these markets would be extremely difficult for a foreign traveller. While they proved to be super cheap, the sizes were also limited, especially for my sister’s fiancé, Steve, who wears size 12 shoe and is over six-feet tall. They also closed early (and I found out that they open at six a.m.!) and so we piled into a cab and headed for more shopping options.

I suggested against the Silk Markets, which I had found to be far too pricey. Even the sign that showed a happy white family turned me off. I mean, how better to tell the tourists that they’re about to get ripped off than to show them smiling pictures of white people pretending they don’t know any better!

The presence of credit card stickers above stalls also proved that these prices were out of control; if they’re willing to accept international credit cards within the stalls themselves, then they had definitely inflated their prices. In fact, I found a shirt there that I had bought at the Wudaokou Market for 30 kuai that was listed at 280 kuai. Just ridiculous. The exact same shirt!

These kinds of “foreigner price inflations” are insulting. In fact, I think “indignant” would be the word I’d use to describe my response. I just couldn’t imagine bringing them there and luckily they were fine with that.

We headed then to Wudaokou first where they found a few things but weren’t quite satisfied. There was still the issue of an impossible task in finding shoes to fit Steve’s feet. Many vendors actually laughed when we told them we were looking for a size 49 or 50 (in Chinese sizes.)

So, we hit the Pearl Markets, this proving to be the most successful location for my sister and Steve. Not only were they able to get the souvenirs they wanted, but also several people could speak to them in English and they were able to operate without me as their sidekick the whole time. They found clothes that fit and had already become quite skilled at bargaining by this point. They came away smiling and laden with clothes and gifts and shoes and knickknacks. It was a successful mission.

The Pearl Markets were probably the best choice for lots of reasons. Not only were the prices better and less insulting, but the environment just outside of the markets was very western with a café (that looked suspiciously like a Starbucks knockoff) equipped with outdoor seating and tables with sun umbrellas. It’s the kind of décor that I rarely see in China and see everywhere in North America.

My sister and Steve wanted to hang out here for awhile and I can see why: it’s familiar. So, for the first time in three months I had an afternoon beer in the hot sun while shaded by the patio umbrellas. I could easily have been in Toronto in that activity. The rest of the seats were all sat in by non-Chinese shoppers. Whoever had thought of this café here was thinking about the tourists, that’s for sure.

Besides, it was good to rest now that the list had been (mostly) crossed off. Everyone was smiling.

I have to admit, though, that I was also peaking about leaving. Smiling on the outside and crying on the inside. Sound dramatic? Yeah, that’s me. Hidden drama at the best of times.

We headed back to the hotel then to get ready for dinner. I put them up (and also stayed) at the Beijing Friendship Hotel. This hotel is one of the oldest in Beijing and used to be the only place where foreigners were allowed to stay in Beijing. Since then, this has changed, but this hotel still holds its grandeur and scope. It is a huge site with several different buildings.

Staying in a hotel at the end of my trip really did solidify the feeling of being a tourist once again. I know that China is not my home, but it had begun to feel that way before I moved into the hotel for four nights. I really hope to regain that feeling in the future – that feeling of China being home – but it wasn’t meant to last this time around.

When we headed for the airport the next day, the drop in my gut seemed like an endless black hole. I kept gulping back tears and nausea and just tried to keep breathing the reality of my leaving in, as though it was a necessary medicine and that I would recover. Recover from the pain of separating from this amazing country, yes, and also recover from the intensity of this tourist marathon.

I’m still working on both recoveries.

I know that I will return to China. I will go back sooner than later, I believe. I just can’t stay away. My language skills were just starting to feel smooth, just starting to whisper the potential of future fluency.

I will definitely return.

Wo ken ding zai lai 我肯定再来。

China, I miss you already.