Xian

Day 14

We were supposed to see the terra cotta warriors today but last night our flight was delayed until 1:20AM, didn't board until after that, then we had the flight itself and a long ride from the airport to the hotel, so by the time we checked in it was 4:30 in the morning. Nobody was feeling ready for a two hour trip in each direction. Instead we slept in.

Ray and Donna had seen the Warriors the day before and showed us pictures. I was disappointed but Andrea had wanted to cut the warriors from the itinerary anyway. In fact, it was the only item on the trip that I had insisting on. Andrea joked that as long as we'd seen the pictures we could pretend that we've seen it.

Andrea and I woke up to people being noisy in the hallway outside our hotel room at 9:00AM, giving me a luxurious four and a half hours of sleep. The Chinese often see people behaving boisterously and say "they are free." I heard it about the rowdy audience at the Guangzhou Opera House and several times about my own children as they sang, danced, and kibitzed. I have resisted any temptation to discuss the difference between the ability to be loud and real freedom.

We dressed, tried to wake the kids, managed to get Zachary, and met Donna and Ray in the lobby. We ate next door: black rice porridge, a scallion crepe filed with undercooked shredded potato and another crepe with leek and egg. Zachary got scallion pancakes but took two third of it to his brothers.

After breakfast we toured the Wild Goose Pagoda compound, which had a working Buddhist monastery, and a variety of Buddhist and Taoist shrines, including one that depicted Budas life carved in jade on three walls and buildings with large golden statues of Buda, his disciples, and the Taoist god of money. It was an odd juxtaposition, Buda calling greed one of the three evils in a story carved in jade and a God of money and fortune to worship just across the courtyard.

The legend behind the Pagoda was that there are two groups of Buddhists, one that ate meat and another that was vegetarian. The meat eaters saw a flock of geese overhead, thought about how they had no meat, asked God for meat, and one of the geese immediately fell out of the sky with a broken wing. This made the group that age meat decide to become vegetarians too.

After the temple we ate lobby in a food court. I ordered nothing, just having the kids leftover green beans, dumplings, and red bean smoothie.

We went back to the hotel where Andrea and Donna exercised while the kids played video games at the mall. Li Feng, Evan, and I hung in the room and I caught posting to this blog up to yesterday.

After the kids returned we checked out, jammed ourselves and our suitcases into a van, and headed for the train station. We bought dinner from street vendors. Joshua was very happy with his fried vegetable sandwich, which he declared the best sandwich he had eaten in his entire life.

We're taking the sleeper train to Chengdu. Each car has three levels of thin bunks. There was much discussion amongst members of my family about the frequency with which the bedding was laundered and the provenance of various stains. Lights out is 10pm.

Everything we asked of the kids was an argument this evening. Joshua was apoplectic when Andrea said no to a second sandwich, Ari would not take no for an answer when told not to go into the station without us or when told not to climb on the luggage racks in the train. Joshua would not defer plugging his phone in to charge until after helping get the luggage up. They wouldn't calm down and stop being giddy which made the evening very hard.

Lights out was at 10 pm and with earplugs I fell asleep almost instantly, once Joshua stopped fussing with his cell charger. I woke at 4am, nose stuffed, and lay in bed for a while thinking about photoshoots before finishing this entry and reading a bit more of The Goldfinch. I went back to sleep around 5 until the noises of people waking up woke me again at 6:20AM.

Fenghuang

Day 13

We arrived in Fenghuang last night. After a few attempts to find our hotel, which included the driver going through a night market and then backing out of the dead end we hit, we finally arrived at a parking lot, got out of the van, and began dragging our luggage through a maze of market stalls, narrow alleys, and stone paths to get the rest of the way. The town uses a sewage system that I'm sure would not be allowed in any western country and you can really smell it in places.

The hotel's small front garden and lobby merge into each other almost seamlessly. It is beautiful, with ponds and a small waterfall, hanging basket chairs, and a friendly large golden furred dog, that was not too bright. He and Evan were scared of each other and so he tried to hide under a chair, didnt quite fit and got stuck for a minute.

Andrea and the kids were put off by the horrible stench in the stairwell and the insects buzzing around the hallway light. I calmed the kids and got them settled into their room, which was perfectly nice inside when Andrea joined me and declared, "I can't sleep here. I'm going to get bedbug bites." I calmed her too and then struggled to figure it how to turn off the TV. Since I couldn't turn it off with the remote I ended up finding the power switch on the actual TV. By the time we turned in for the night I was so keyed up that it took me a while to fall asleep but I slept well, only waking when Andrea got up around eight.

We packed up and went walking. We ate breakfast from a cross between a street food vendor and a restaurant. I had some rice noodles, fried tofu, little balls stuffed with black sesame, and I even tried some of Li Feng's stinky tofu. It was not as bad as it sounds; tasted like a charcoal briquette.

The city is quaint, lots of old buildings around a river with pretty bridges and boats that you can hire. The place is a tourist trap, with a million opportunities to get your photo taken in native costume or buy a souvenir. I noticed small brass Eifel towers for sale and asked about them. They "are for the people who can not go all the way to Paris."

Parts of the wall that once surrounded the city to defend the indigenous Miao against the Han still stand, though most of it was dismantled during WWII when they determined that walled cities are too hard to evacuate, were too easy to bomb, and were to hard to retake once occupied by the enemy. We passed one establishment that had half a dozen signs saying that Japanese people would not be allowed, in English, Chinese, and Japanese.

We ate lunch at a Chinese restaurant: two kinds of greens, spicy cucumber, and a fish hot pot. The fish was pretty full of bones and hard to eat so I tried to stuff myself with vegetables, failed, and supplemented with frozen yogurt, which was fine until my blood sugar plummeted, so now I am starving. I'm sure I'll end up eating far too many of the walnut cakes that we bought. They were made on a small machine. A person puts a few small pieces of walnut in a mold which then moves along, has a squirt of batter sprayed in each half, has a bit of filling squirted in, is flipped closed, cooks for a bit, is moved up a row and heads in the opposite direction, is flipped over to finish cooking, and is finally unloaded by hand by the person who puts in more nuts and the process repeats.

I've tried to limit my pauses for picture taking because Andrea is impatient and complains or more often just forges ahead without me and I'm tired of running to catch up. Now, however, she's complaining that I'm taking pictures of all the same things that she is. She just started a blog to try to be more like me and I'm sure that I'll blog a lot of the same topics that she does. You can check her blog out at bozokiblog.blogspot.com

Li Feng decided that we should take the train back, because last night's van ride was so uncomfortable. Perhaps it is my aching back, the sore throat that is back now that my Naproxin has worn off, or my general tiredness from trying to get Andrea to be less upset about her inability to communicate and to get the boys to stop complaining about everything but comfortable is one of the last words I'd use to describe these seats or this train in general.

We were met at the station by another van because the one with our luggage wasnt there yet. We went to dinner at a Korean BBQ. After dinner we went to the airport where I'm writing this now. Flights are being delayed and canceled because of heavy rain. Our flight is supposed to leave at 1:20AM now but Andrea is betting that it will be canceled. I am trying to ignore my hunger and the sore throat that has morphed into a stuffed nose, sneezes, and burning eyes. Strike that; I gave in and binged on pistachios, walnut cakes, and caramel corn.

Tianmen Mountain

Day 12

 

We got out of the hotel a bit later than we intended to because Andrea had some stomach pain. We headed to a cable car ride that took us to the top. Each gondola seated eight and the ride was really long. Andrea read somewhere that the ride was 4 miles but it didn't seem that far. The line to get on the cable car was undoubtedly that long, however. I've seen lines for popular Disney attractions that were shorter.

The scenery was impressive, we walked along paths that wound along the sides of the steepest cliffs I've ever seen. We took a chair lift from one peak to another, watching the forest pass below. We ate at the top of the second peak. We got boiled corn this time and it was slightly less like a pencil eraser in texture than the roast corn was but it had the same taste. I honestly have no idea how they can do that to corn. Andrea thinks they grow it that way.

 

The entire day I have had a low grade store throat and headache but I refuse to let it affect me.

We came down by a combination of escalators and busses, but Ari and I climbed down 800 steps in the middle. The bus was cool, winding through a copious number of switchbacks on the side of the mountain. I dozed a bit, not much because of my back pain, and Andrea slept on my shoulder.

We got back in the van to head to the next city. It's a four hour drive and is already 6:30 so Andrea and Li Feng went to a grocery store and bought a variety of fruit, bread, marinated eggs, cucumber, milk, beef jerky, peanut butter, rice pudding, sausage, desserts, and a bag of chopsticks. We ate while traveling.

Andrea was horrified to learn that the long drive was only about 100 miles but we had to take local roads, full of goats, dogs, pedestrians, three wheeled vehicles, and other obstacles including a couple of places where the road was dug up and we had to go over dirt as rutted as anything I've seen in Guatemala, which had the worst roads I've seen so far.

After dinner Evan had a huge tantrum and Joshua freaked out over it. Between Joshua always being upset with Evan and Andrea frustrated with the lack of translation and difficulty communicating I am constantly worried that we're going to insult Li Feng who has meticulously planned this part of the trip, bends over backwards to make sure that we are comfortable and carries Evan up and down mountains or through hot cities for hours every day. For all their complaints, Evan is a trooper, napping in little bits and pieces while in a car or being carried and we can't be a picnic with our picky eating and the kids constant complaints.

I began to read The Goldfinch as we drove through rural China, my throat burning, and Andrea on her laptop working.

Zhangjiajie

Day 11

I had trouble falling asleep after all the excitement last night and woke up again at 6:40 to pouring rain. We ate breakfast at the hotel buffet. There were some sort of sunflower seed cookies that I loved. Tomorrow I'm bringing bottled water with me.

 

The kids slept until we woke them at 8:00 but remained in bed until 8:30 when I read them the riot act and even then they took their time getting ready.

 

Li Feng made some calls and found somebody who was willing to pick up the laundry, do it, and return it to the hotel for $50. Andrea was pretty upset at the expense but I pointed out that some things have been less expensive than we thought they would be, especially food, so it will all even out in the end.

I'm not sure what time we finally left the hotel but it was far later than usual. As soon as we set foot outdoors we were accosted by vendors selling cheap rain ponchos and umbrellas. I bought 6 of the ponchos for under $5 and Andrea bought Zachary a new umbrella.

 

The ponchos were so thin that they began falling apart immediately. Zach's had a hole in minutes. Only 4 of the 6 lasted the day. So much here is disposable and wasteful. The Chinese go through an incredible amount of plastic; they buy bottled water because they don't trust the trap water, for example. And, there is so much litter it's horrific. It covers the streets and is washed into the rivers. I saw hundreds of discarded items today alone, much of it discarded cheap rainwear, including plastic ponchos just like ours and shoe covers made of the same material which we declined to buy even though they were offered.

We headed or to the park, which had an entrance within walking distance. We entered via a gondola on a lift, just like a ski lift although nobody could ski these vertical slopes even if there was snow. We ascended through the rain and cloud catching fuzzy glimpses of the spectacular landscape. Sandstone columns rose hundreds of meters straight up. We spent the day going from overlook to overlook, traveling by a set of free busses in the park, hiking at each stop. There were places where the land looked through a cloud and it was hard to believe that you weren't looking at an island floating in a pool. The weather was less than ideal. The kids whined.

We ate street food at stalls along the road at lunch time because Andrea was hungry and wanted to try things. We got four ears of roasted corn that were a marvel. They not only managed to get it to the texture of pencil eraser they got the flavor too. I gamely ate mine as Andrea tried to convince Zachary to keep eating his, telling him that the texture was intentional and that they got the flavor by caramelizing the corn, even making a couple of supportive comments about how much I love roasted corn, though I didn't mention this one's peculiarities. We also got some sort of steamed mochi ball wrapped in a leaf filed with a peanut sesame mixture. Andrea took one bite and let me have the rest. Zachary and I got red bean buns. They were died out, hard on the bottom and crusty on the top. I gamely ate as Zachary extolled it's virtues while Andrea tried barbecued fish on a stick (they put anything on a stick, including whole fish) and declared it so salty as to be inedible. Far and away the worst meal that I have had in China.

We kept trekking. I tried to get some photos through the fog. I miss doing serious photography something fierce. Every time I take a shot I fall behind and Andrea is always ahead anyway. I've had to yell for her several times when she got ahead of not just me but the guide and gone the wrong way.

Just as it was starting to clear a bit Andrea declared that she was done. I went to take a few shots from one last overlook and as soon as I was within 20 feet she took off, kids in tow to get in line. I just couldn't face running after her one more time and of course the consequence was that a Chinese couple got between me and the group. Zachary desperately wanted me to join the group but I refused to push my way through once again to catch up to my wife.

We rode a glass elevator down the side of a 326 meter vertical mountain. They let people in in groups of about 20 but only about half get to stand right next to the window so people ran and pushed. Some guy behind me tried to push me aside and I was having none of it. I body blocked him and then got squarely in front of him, incensed at his rudeness. When I got in the guide, who had saved a window spot on the side, switched with me. Half way down Andrea said "that guy just pushed his way right in," and I noticed that Mr. pushy had forced himself in between two of my kids.

Li Feng, the guide and I, took a monorail ride around the valley and then followed Andrea and the kids home.

After a little downtime, we headed out for dinner. The kids really wanted American food so we found a place called Cat cafe. Li Feng, Evan, and our guide split off to eat Chinese. We had pizza (no sauce; not our choice, fruit on the side; that was our choice) and pumpkin chicken rice. It was my second last favorite meal in China. On our way home we passed a place that did foot rubs and back massage. I would have loved a back rub since the time I spend hunched over a screen leaves me with a near constant pain in my back but Andrea was dead set on using the first place we had seen that morning which only did feet (for reasons not entirely clear to me) so I went home and when she and Zachary finished we sorted the clean laundry and packed. I slept really soundly but woke up at 6:40 and was just awake for the day despite my best efforts to go back to sleep.

Milk Fragrant Purple potato mud

Day  10 


I woke at 5 because a couple of cars decided to have a honking competition outside the hotel, went back to sleep, woke at 5:30 because Andrea decided it was too bright and got up to close the curtains, went back to sleep, woke at 6:30 because the tour was leaving at 7:30 to try to avoid G20 traffic so they put in a wake up call for the whole group even though we are leaving the tour today. I had trouble getting back to sleep.

At 7:00 Andrea woke up and we decided to go down to breakfast. The buffet was the biggest yet. There was something that they called pumpkin pie that was never served at any Thanksgiving table; glutinous orange squares. We both liked the "milk fragrant purple potato mud," purple mashed potato with a touch of vegetables and a thin cheese topping. The mung bean buns were particularly good.

We sat with a woman who we befriended on the tour, an endocrinologist from Redwood city and her nine year old daughter. Zach spent a lot of the bus ride playing with her and she was disappointed not to be able to say goodbye to him because we were letting him sleep as long as we could. 
After breakfast we checked out and boarded a van that Li Feng hired for the morning. We drove through horrible traffic, with pedestrians, cyclists, and small three wheeled vehicles in the road, several coming right at us in the wrong direction on our side of the road. Drivers play chicken all of the time, forcing themselves into adjacent lanes and honking often. We arrived at the morning's destination, a large market area that had hundreds of stores selling silk. Some of the silk was clearly fake, fabric in a bag that said 100% silk in big letters that had a small tag sewn to the cloth inside that read 100% rayon. Others are the real deal. Li Feng coached Andrea in the art of negotiation, explaining that we should pay about half of the sticker price. Andrea had no trouble knocking more than half off the price of everything she bought.

I thought that this activity was designed primarily for somebody other than me and the boys but Zachary found a replacement for the blankie that he was given at birth by Sparrow Hospital and loved until it was lost on a trip years ago and Joshua bought a fan. I thought that I could do some cool things with a model and some of the fabrics and started to say so to Andrea but only got a far as "You know some of these..." before she cut me off with "yeah, there was one back there that was really cool.  It had a whole tree pattern on it..." I let it go.

Laden with silks and other pretty baubles we hopped back into the van and headed to the airport in traffic that was surprisingly light. The airport security was efficient and caught every water bottle we had missed in our backpacks and the can of insect repellant we had goofed and not packed in a checked bag.

The plane was delayed, as was our last flight; apparently most domestic flights in China are. We ate shrimp dumplings, cucumbers, and plums while we waited. 
This plane flight reminds me that on our last flight Andrea showed me an email that she got saying that she had been promoted to professor. I didn't want to steal her thunder but she isn't one to toot her own horn, so I'll do it for her because I am immensely proud of her.

We landed in Zhangjiajie, were met at the airport by a guide, and had our usual exciting ride to the hotel. This is where Avatar was filmed and even from the van the scenery was amazing, lush green mountains, trees clinging to their steep slopes, disappearing into the clouds. In a way it reminds me of Sedona, a landscape so beautiful that it is surreal. Since we've been going to Sedona for years it is full of happy memories for me.

We checked in and headed to dinner. We had beef in a wok, kept warm on the table by a small fire, peanuts, cucumber, green beans, eggplant, and some pickled vegetables (radishes and a local bean). Unfortunately, the beef dish had chunks of beef fat that we picked out as we ate. After dinner we strolled along the street, stopping in shops to buy fruit, a razor, and nail clippers.  We approached what looked like a pet shop with rabbits, birds, and a huge rodent that I didn't recognize in cages and frogs, snakes, turtles, and fish in plastic tubs. It turned out to be a restaurant and the "pets" were the food. I wanted to look at the rodent but Andrea and Joshua were really upset so we hustled past. WeÕve since seen lots of restaurants using the same technique of displaying their ingredients including snails, clams, crayfish, crabs, and vegetables.
We were getting desperate for laundry but Li Feng and the guide both told us that there was no such thing as a laundromat in China. The hotels charge by the piece of clothing and 10 days of laundry for five people at hotel prices would be over $100 US so we bought some detergent, deciding that we'd just do it in the sink and let it air dry.

Andrea went first and carefully instructed the kids on what to do. While I started my laundry she went to the next room to help Zachary with his because he was having difficulties.  I got a sink full washed and decided to rinse and wring in a few batches. After rinsing the first batch, I set about trying to wring them out. I took one shirt wrung it but wanted to get more water out. I pressed it up against the sink and applied pressure. I was completely shocked when the entire porcelain sink fell out of the counter and smashed on the floor with a loud crash, scattering pieces everywhere. I was mortified, beyond upset, so I went and got Andrea who went and got Li Feng, who went and got the guide, who went and got somebody from hotel reception, who went and got the hotel manager, who went and got a maintenance man and two maids and then moved us one room over. I don't think I've been so embarrassed since Joshua poked an obese guy in the belly, looked up at him, and shouted "Dad, you lied to me. You told me that men couldn't get pregnant." at the age of five.
I finished doing that sink full of laundry in the new room. I Google mapped "laundry near me" on my cell, which is currently getting data and found half a dozen places. Li Feng is going to call them in the morning. 

West Lake, New friends, amusement park

Day 9

We woke up and went to a hotel breakfast that was traditional Chinese. We tried a rice cake bun shaped like a star that was great. I've also been able to try a lot of new fruit, there was one that looked like a fuzzy dark red golf ball that we bought from a street vendor that was fantastic it tasted sort of like a cross between cherry and raspberry. This morning I tried longanberries (not to my taste) and some grape shaped dried red fruit that I liked.

After breakfast Li Feng, Evan, and I went for a walk along the canal. It was a lot less crowded and the weather was less unpleasant. The last couple of days have been in the mid 90s and humid but at 8AM it took me at least 5 minutes to start pouring sweat.

We got back on our bus and headed to a tea plantation where they demonstrated tea making and packaging and fed us an enormous lunch. A few of the dishes are things I am beginning to think of as typical: eggs with tomato, mushrooms, pork. There were also half a dozen new dishes to try, including new dishes with chicken and fish.

After the tea Plantation lunch we went to a Chinese amusement park that had various recreations of rich men's houses and themed attractions that fell sort of flat. The haunted houses were walked, single file, but so poorly lit that we had trouble seeing our way and eventually the Chinese people around us used their phones as a flashlights which improved it greatly. It claimed to be the most popular such park in China with 7 million visitors a year. The heat was intense, about 100 degrees. I bought a mung bean and green tea popsicle.

Fortunately we were befriended by six Chinese people about Joshua's age who explained things, like the red ribbons hung on bridges that symbolized wishes of couples. Hanging out with them turned what would have been an awful hot day into a great one. I had a great time inappropriately teasing the young women who asked to take pictures with us until Andrea made me quit. We did take some nice pictures and they promised to email them to me and to friend me on Facebook.

After the amusement park we went to West Lake (there are 800 West Lakes in China but this is the most famous). We rode around the lake in a boat, seeing the town on one side and the mountains on the others, thethree lucky stones featured on the back of a one Yuan bill, and the three famous causeways built about a thousand years ago. We were then given an opportunity to walk along one of the causeways but even though the temperature had dropped to 99 (feels like 124, according to Google) Andrea, Zachary and I sat on a bench and watched the world go by.

We picked a particularly hot year to visit according to or if our new Chinese acquaintances. I am trying not to take it personally that Andrea said things in the heart of the day like "I can't stand to touch you."

On the way back to the bus Ari adjudication for a huge mango and ice cream concoction. I bought two. Neither got finished but they are delicious and helped us cool off.

We checked into the hotel in Hangzhou and went to look for dinner. We ran into four of our new friends in the elevator and they joined us. We ate at the closest reasonably priced restaurant that we could find. Our friends helped us order and when we finished the waitress declared that we had not ordered enough for nine people. We said that they should choose dishes and after some debate they ordered a couple.

We've noticed a few things about Chinese restaurants. First, there is always good leftover, a lot of food, enough to feed another 4 or 5 people. Second, no matter what you order, they always fail to bring something. Today it was a vegetable dish that I asked for, yesterday it was bottled water that we asked for three times, the day before that it was a fruit salad. Third, they often wrap each place seeing in shrink wrap. Fourth, they serve a lot of boiled water and a lot of tea at every meal and the Chinese people drink very little of either.

After dinner, Joshua headed off with our new friends and Andrea and I went back to the hotel.

Lingering Garden and Wuzhen

Day 8

When Andrea finally woke up (or actually was women by the phone) we got ready for the day. The hotel had a razor that I used to shave for the first time since we got here. We ate breakfast at the hotel restaurant which had a huge assortment of cuisine, Japanese, Chinese, and traditional western breakfasts. Andrea and I tried something called sago lamp that was like sold tapioca disks with red bean filling which Andrea loved.

We then boarded the bus and headed to the Lingering garden which was a private garden of a rich family and their living quarters. The gardens are beautiful with lid of rocks from a lake 60kms away. The taller, thinner, and more filed with holes the more prestigious it was considered. The garden also had bamboo, the oldest ginkgo tree in China (600 years) and a bonsai garden tended by 18 gardeners. It was beautiful.

The original owner of the house had 5 wives and 11 children. If any were half as good as mine then he was a very lucky man.

We tagged along with an English speaking guides for group and the kids actually learned a bit. Andrea and I had a rare moment of disagreement about enforcing good behavior. It is a good thing that child rearing differences don't count as arguments of we'd be up to six.

After the gardens we went to lunch. I particularly liked the greens, bamboo shots, mushrooms, and eggs with tomato. There was a delicious fish in sweet and sour sauce but it was deep fried so I ate little of it. The fish was sliced so that pieces protruded, battered, and fried whole so that you could pull off pieces with your chopsticks.

Street lunch most of the group went boating but we stayed behind and had coffee, bubble tea, and browsed the small shops.

The entire day the weather ranged from pouring rain to drizzle. I didn't take a single photo but Joshua took a lot of video.

OK, I need to amend the last paragraph because I wrote that on the very long bus ride to Wuzhen and I ended up taking lots of pictures. Wuzhen was a huge place, full of cobblestone streets alongside canals. There were restaurants, shops, and artisans that demonstrated how things were made hundreds of years ago. They made silk and dyed fabric. Singers sung traditional songs as we ate dinner. We walked and browse the shops, taking in the sights, masking or way through the crowd to the far end of the village where we boarded a traditional Chinese boat and were propelled by a man in the back, pushing a huge rudder like thing back and forth, to our hotel. We all agreed that it was one of the most beautiful places Wed ever visited.

Our hotel is worth some comment. Each room is laid out with an ante chamber and a long hallway off of which the kids a bathroom and two bedrooms. They have is two key cards each of which opened the main for and one of the two bedrooms, allowing them to rent the room as a double or two singles. The accommodations are nice, but the A/C didn't work in our first room forcing us to move to a new room. The little toiletries were cute and included a wooden comb and a sewing of in a small decorative wooden case, which was a nice touch.

I went to sleep at 11am slept very soundly all night.

I can no longer get my VPN to work at all which leaves me with access to Facebook and blogger only from my cell, on which restrictions are relaxed because I have a foreign sim card. However, the cell only had 2G, which along with slow Chinese Internet is so painful to use that it's hardly worth it. We could upgrade to 3G for $25 a week per line or to 4G for $50 but we've decided that is just too expensive.