Having Fun All The Time

We got up early the next day and got on a bus to Tiger Leaping Gorge. We spent three hours on the bus riding through the Yunnan countryside, and along the way got acquainted with the other foreigners who were with us. They turned out to be a great bunch: a young English couple who were in the middle of a six-month trip through Asia, and a couple who had come from Spain to travel—one American guy who had been living in Spain for four years and was fluent in Spanish, and his wife, a very warm Spanish lady whose face lit up with an amazing smile whenever anybody spoke with her.

Along the way I asked the English couple a question that had been nagging on my mind ever since the first time I met someone who was doing a World Tour or equivalent, like they were doing—a trip that lasted months on end with no stops at home to rest and recuperate and let your feet settle back on the ground: How do you keep from getting completely exhausted?

Despite the fact that Jane's Hostel was a rathole, they had some really cute puppies.

This question has particular significance for me because traveling, while one of the most stimulating things I’ve found on this earth to do, completely takes it out of me. It’s not only physically tiring, but deeply emotionally draining. This, for me, is just because of the constant movement and change: picking yourself up every few days, or week, or few weeks, and getting on a bus or train or plane to a new part of the world—I love it, but after a couple of weeks I tend to get weirdly moody and excitable, and to have a tendency to break down. I find that this is usually a delayed reaction: when I have to deal with something stressful while traveling, I usually have little emotional reaction while the thing is going on, but a day or two later when I have a minute to myself, I feel totally adrift. This happens especially when I meet someone and travel with them for a day or two or longer, and then split off and go back on my own. The transition can be abrupt and very unsettling.

And when I asked my question I could tell that I wasn’t alone in this feeling, because the English folks knew exactly what I was talking about and the girlfriend, Anne, answered without blinking: “We take days off,” she said. “Every so often along the way, when we find some particularly nice hotel or beach or something, we’ll just stay in that place for a few days and not do anything, not go anywhere except maybe to eat. We’ll just read our books or write in our journals or whatever….sometimes you feel guilty that you’re not out there seeing stuff, like if you miss some waterfall or something, but then you just tell yourself, ‘Well, I saw 20 waterfalls yesterday, so it’s not a big deal…’”

Day one at Tiger Leaping Gorge definitely gets my vote for the best day of the trip.

This idea might have been perfectly obvious to anyone else, but I had never really thought about taking “days off” while actually vacationing around China. But I liked the idea, and after Tiger Leaping Gorge when we got back to Lijiang for the second time, we put it to good use.

But we were still approaching Tiger Leaping Gorge—this would not be a “day off”, although it would be the nicest day of our whole month-long adventure. When we arrived at Jane’s Hostel at the trailhead I realized that I hadn’t actually checked the guidebook at all, so I asked the others where to go from here, because they looked like they knew what they were doing. They explained that we could leave our bags at the hostel, start the trek, and then when we arrived at the other end a bus would bring us back by road to this very hostel to pick up our stuff.

It's the perfect place for a hike: two days, lodging on the way, few people, and beautiful.

Since Jess and I had left our bags back in Lijiang and were carrying small daypacks, we didn’t have to deal with this, but we grabbed a bite to eat at Jane’s (gross food, lots of flies, also other reviews online say the rooms are nasty) and then started the hike.

We walked for about 45 minutes up a hill that afforded pretty views down into the valley below us, corn and other vegetables planted in various spots along the mountainside, and at the bottom a lazy brown river which we would be following for the next two days.

After an hour we rested at a little store along the trail, and started talking to a Swiss guy who had been traveling solo for six months all over the world. I asked him how long he was going to carry on, and he shrugged.

“I dunno; it depends on when I run out of money,” he said, as if the detail couldn’t matter less to him.

Tiger Leaping Gorge.

He explained that when his money was gone he was going to go to Australia to work for a while—I learned on this trip that Australia has a program that Americans can also participate in which allows you to work there for a year at any job you can find, kind of a work-travel thing—and then he would head home. After a few minutes, we all got up and started the hike again, and the Swiss guy charged ahead. That was when we saw the mountains along the gorge for the first time.

The straight stone faces of the mountains were dramatic in all this peaceful greenery, and as soon as I set eyes on them I felt all the stress of the last year in China melt away. This was going to be a good hike. After a couple more hours Jess and I set nicely into the rhythm of walking, and eventually we neared the “28 bends”, a steepish switchbacked part of the trail.

It was here that I saw, for the first time, real marijuana in China.

Before the steep 28 bends started there was a little stand on the trailside, with a few young Chinese guys milling about and an old lady standing behind the counter. I was hot and sweaty so didn’t take the time to look around; I homed in on the cooler.

Perhaps you can tell from the look on my face how completely relaxed the place made me feel. Maybe Chinese describes it better than English: xìngfú -- blessed, lucky happiness.

“How much is the water?” I asked.

“Eight for a big one, five for a small one,” the old lady answered in Chinese.

“Are you gonna have water?” I asked Jess, and she replied in the affirmative.

“I’ll have a big one,” I told the old lady in Chinese. “Are they cold?” I asked.

“Yes, yes, they’re cold,” she said, and reached down into the cooler.

She pulled up the water and handed it to me.

“Eight yuan, right?”

“Yes, eight yuan,” she said.

Then, as I was pulling a five and three ones from my wallet, the old lady said a word that I had never heard before.

Tiger Leaping Gorge.

There was a silence after she said it. It had sounded a little like meiyou ah na. My brain, which had become accustomed to working extra hard to decipher meaning from southwestern Chinese peoples’ strange tones and accents, began scanning it for some meaning in Chinese. The first part definitely seemed like the word méiyǒu, which meant “don’t have” or “no”; but the second half made no sense. A na? It could be a word. Those two syllables appear in Chinese, but they didn’t make sense together.

I decided to ignore it, since whatever she said couldn’t have been that important (I had already got the water, which was what I wanted), when my cousin, standing just behind me, said this:

“Ganja, something for you to smoke to get relaxed in the hills.”

“What?” I asked, and turned.

Our room in the Tea Horse Hostel.

“They’re selling marijuana here,” she said. “Look at this little sign.”

“It’s fake,” I said. This was my knee-jerk reaction to this news: I had encountered “pot” in China before, but it was all just dried herbs. I never expected to see real marijuana in China.

Then another voice piped up.

“No, it’s not fake,” a man’s voice, German accented, said. “It’s total shit, but it’s real.”

I looked around and saw the Swiss guy who we’d been sharing the trail with all day.

Sunrise behind the mountains on the second day. We left before it breached them.

“How do you know?” I asked

“Because I smoke it,” he said.

“You mean you’ve smoked this weed or you smoke back in your home?”

“Back in my home, but I know.”

This seemed impossible to me: here of all places, why would they have pot? It made sense in the huge cities like Guangzhou, Shanghai and Shenzhen, but up in these mountains?

An old man herding goats in the hills on the second day. For rillz.

But it was real. I picked up a bag and sniffed it, and it was definitely pot. It was extremely heavy with seeds and dried and shredded poorly, and there was little visible evidence of the putrid and sticky crystals that represent heavy THC content in pot in the U.S. But it was pot. I was awestruck, knowing that China has very strict penalties for dealing drugs, to find it so obviously for sale even in the mountains. Only two years ago an Englishman was put to death in China for carrying 4 kilograms of heroin into an airport in northwest China. Chinese people are executed with fair regularity for drug dealing. But here it was, in Yunnan, out in the open.

The Swiss guy said that in some of the small towns around Lijiang—Dali and Shaxi—it was everywhere, usually offered by little old ladies like this one, who had been taught two English words: “ganja” and “marijuana”. This seemed to lead him to believe that pot is common in China, but that’s a false notion.

Virtually every Chinese I had ever met had only a very vague notion of what pot was, and had certainly never seen it except in Western movies.

The English says "Safe Path" on the left, but what does that imply about the "Ladder" on the right? (Chinese says "Makeshift Road" on left and "Sky Ladder" on the right.)

Based on the fact that these ladies knew English slang terms for pot, it was clear that they were part of an operation that produced and sold weed throughout this area, and they were just at the retail end of things. Somebody higher up had clearly studied English, maybe been abroad. And the fact that they had a market made sense: I couldn’t imagine Chinese tourists buying this stuff, but there were a lot of foreigners touring through this area, and foreigners are easy to spot anywhere in China.

Leaving the weed behind but taking the water, Jess and I continued up the trail and a few hours later, after a relatively tough hike through the “28 bends”, we arrived at the Tea Horse Hostel, a courtyard-style building set just off the trail perched at the top of the gorge, a thin dirt road leading up to it from the river far below us, which was presumably how they got food and other goods up to the hostel.

At the bottom of the gorge near the end of the trail.

The Tea Horse was very simple—you could even say rustic—but that was fine for us after spending five or six hours on the trail. Behind the hostel was a cement patio with an uninhibited view of the mountains, and there we found our American-Spanish friends enjoying beers in the late-afternoon sunshine. There was another hostel an hour or so down the trail, but the sight of cold beer incapacitated me. It was decided. We would stay here for the night.

The beds were cheap—25 yuan, just north of three dollars for a night—and the food was decent. The company was better. The group we had shared the van with coming out here, the English folks, the Spanish-American folks, and us, shared a table and started telling stories and drinking beers. Jess seemed to be having a good time and seemed to take to the wonderful Spanish woman and the American guy who had mastered the language she had struggled with in high school. A couple of guys joined us—a Briton who had been living in Paris for several years, and his darkly handsome Moldovan boyfriend, who was also in Paris. Between us we had more than half a dozen languages: The American guy spoke English and Spanish; his wife of course spoke both as well; the English guy spoke French, his boyfriend spoke English, French, Russian and Moldovan; and I spoke Chinese; and with the Swiss guy, who joined us briefly, we had at least German and maybe another language or two as well.

Point being that it was an interesting group and we had a lot of stories. So we drank and talked until 1 a.m. Somewhere around that time I got a laugh with my best China drinking story: the one about getting so drunk that my decision-making skills were sufficiently impaired that I actually stepped into the doorway of a “red-light parlor” with a Chinese friend of mine, but then got a hold of myself and then put the kibosh on that idea, went back to my friend’s house with him (the buses had stopped running so I couldn’t get back home) and proceeded to throw up on everything. This was shortly after I arrived in China, before I learned how to keep control in the new drinking culture. Always good for a laugh.

Climbing back up.

At some point I got up to grab another beer and walked by a table of people conversing with one of the hostel girls, and this is what I overheard:

One of the foreigners said: “Are you sure it’s legal in China?”

And the hostel girl said: “Yes.”

“I mean, legal, you know what legal means?”

“I think so…” she said.

And, knowing what they were talking about, and since I had had two beers and was now willing to interrupt anyone’s conversation, I interjected as I walked past: “No, it’s definitely not legal,” and then, for good measure, I added: “Kěndìng shì bùhéfǎ de.”

“That’s what I thought,” the foreigner said. “How do you say marijuana in Chinese?”

“Dàmá,” I said.

And from the hostel girl: “Ohhh…” A sound of sudden recognition.

I went and got my beer.

Needless to say, we left the "safe path" for the chickens...on the way back up, anyway.

Back at the patio, the English and Moldovan guy told a story from that day: Somewhere along the trail at Tiger Leaping Gorge they had come across a “sightseeing” spot, a little spur trail, with a sign in front saying you had to pay something like 8 yuan to go down it, and an old Chinese lady collecting money. Since we were in the middle of the woods and it seemed like you shouldn’t have to pay some random old lady to go down a public trail, and on top of that since we had paid about 50 yuan to get into this scenic area in the first place, the English and Moldovan guy had ignored her and just walked on past. So she had done the following: hissed, spit in their faces, threw rocks in their direction (without hitting them) and brandished a knife at them (without stabbing). They were clearly traumatized by the encounter, and I was mystified. Apparently anything is possible in Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Some time, late at night, we all went to bed. And we all seemed to sleep well. And early in the morning Jess and I got up and started our walk. The sky was clearer than it almost ever is in China and the air was cool, perfect for a walk. We spent the day on the trail and hardly saw anyone. The English couple were a half hour ahead of us but we only saw them occasionally in the distance. It was the rarest thing in China: peace, serenity, silence. And for that reason it was perfect. Jess seemed to love it too, but perhaps it was especially wonderful for me, having such little chance in China to experience such blissful quiet and emptiness. China is large, and living and working in the east, you rarely find yourself so literally alone (although it’s not hard to feel alone). I loved it.

Finishing the climb up the 30- to 40-foot ladder.

Around mid-afternoon we arrived at the “end” of the hike (although we could and should have continued on to Walnut Grove on a cliff-trail by the riverside, had we only known…) at a place called Tina’s Guesthouse. There we bought our bus tickets back to Lijiang and rested, pretty exhausted after the day’s hike. It had begun to rain near the end of our hike and on the road back to Lijiang Jess and I sat mostly in silence, listening to part of an episode of This American Life on my iPod. After arriving back in Lijiang, we were both tired from the hike.

So we took a day off. That evening we just lounged around, and the next day we just lounged around, too. Our trains were leaving at 9:30 that night, and we spent the whole day inside the hostel. Jess spent her time on the computer and I spent mine reading and chatting with other people in the hostel. And it was nice. And we were leaving at 9:30 p.m.. And we ate a wonderful family-style dinner that evening at the hostel with the employees. And we had a nice chat with them. And they explained that Dali and Shaxi are better than Lijiang; even one of the girls from Lijiang said so. And then I hung out some underwear to dry in the laundry room. And I chatted with a French girl named Emilie for a while in the hostel; she had been studying medicine in Yunnan. And she was nice. And she was very smart and interesting. And she seemed really nice. And she was quite good looking. And I asked if she wanted to watch a movie and she said yes. And she picked a movie and I turned on the TV and she started curling up on a blanket in front of the TV that could not possibly be big enough for us to sit on together without being very close. And it was obvious that she was expecting me to sit on the blanket. And it was 6:45, and we had almost three hours until our train would leave, and it was so nice, until I checked our tickets again and realized that I had read our tickets wrong that morning and that we were leaving at 7:30, not 9:30.

So we grabbed our stuff, and I said goodbye to Emilie (my face probably completely shattered) and we ran out of the hostel and caught the first overpriced cab we could (no time to haggle) and went straight to the train station and got on our train.

It’s a good thing the trains from Lijiang to Kunming are really nice and comfy. I promptly forgot about the nice French girl in the hostel (as my tiny squirrel brain has a tendency to do) and chatted with two middle-aged guys from northeast China for about an hour, until the train people turned out the lights and everybody went to sleep.

Our arrival back in Lijiang was blessed with a rainbow. How's that for service?

Of course, things took a turn for the worse the next day. The magic of Lijiang and the Tiger Leaping Gorge was shattered when they turned on the interior lights on the train at 5 in the morning for no FUCKING reason, even though we were arriving in Kunming three hours later. And started playing really loud music, again for no reason. And then announced that we would “very soon be arriving in Kunming” an hour before we got there. It was a nightmare. Everybody was tired, still trying to sleep, almost everybody on the train, for those three hours, but the train stewards made it impossible to sleep for no reason.

I will say only briefly: this, and a thousand other reasons, is probably why China was rated second-to-worst-place in terms of service by The New York Times Magazine.

And one other reason: Jess forgot her bag on the train, and it was taken, I am nearly certain, by a train steward. Like, not taken and sent to lost and found, but just taken. I say this because after we got back to the hostel and Jess realized that she had lost her bag, I did the following: I went to the train station and begged them to help me; I spoke to about ten different officials of different rank and order until I found the correct place to ask for help getting the bag. Those guys then took a half hour to find out that the train had already been sent to the Cheku—the parking garage—and that I would have to go there myself to look for the bag. So I got a cab and he didn’t know how to get to the cheku. So I switched cabs and a nice middle aged lady drove me there. And I gave my passport to the guys at the gate. And I walked a half mile to the train. And got on board and walked the whole length of the thing to the very car that we had ridden in and checked it myself. And there was no bag. And I asked the cleaning ladies about it and they seemed certain that I would never see that bag again.

And every step along the way, people asked me what was in the bag. As if they knew that the level of importance of what was in the bag would determine whether or not it was “found”. In retrospect I probably should have lied and said that my passport was in the bag, and it might have turned up, but as it was it just contained Jess’s driver’s license, wallet, credit card, and some clothes. And after all that, the bag never surfaced.

I called Jess and broke the news, and then went back to the hostel. I realized around that time that I had also forgotten something over the last day (not just Emilie): the underwear I had hung up in the hostel in Lijiang was still there, waiting for some brave soul other than me to take it down.

Jess called her mom and told her about the bag, and I waited for the tears. Knowing my family as I do, I had a feeling they would come. And come they did. I’m not sure if every family is like this, but nobody in my family has ever liked it when things got lost. The reaction is always bad. It was bad when I was 1 to 18 years of age, and watching Jess’s face as she dealt with battling her own conscience about losing the bag, and then dealt with her family’s frustration that she had lost her license and credit card, was like looking at a mirror that could show me myself 10 or 15 years ago. It was strange and rather freeing, in a way: I realized that whatever horrible things I feel now whenever I screw something up are not just things I feel but things everybody feels. And they come from the hard process of growing up, and dealing with screw ups and lost bags and little failures like that, and learning the hard way how not to do that anymore. Which is the only way to learn it—the hard way. In a way, it sucks to feel awful and cry and get yelled at by your parents, but I guess…if there’s a good thing in it…it’s probably that you learn.

Anyway, we got over the missing bag and didn’t talk about it anymore, and relaxed for a day in Kunming. And soon it was time to go again to get on a plane to Shanghai, which was our final stop on the adventure. And which would be the place I would finally say goodbye to my cuz, and continue the China adventure on my own—this time, with a couple days’ rest in me, slightly better able to get by.

Next: Shanghai, meeting up with one of my uni students and saying goodbye to Jess.

Our next destination was Yúnnán in Southwestern China, bordering Vietnam and Tibet. Far away from anything I had seen in China yet and south of Sìchuān, Yúnnán was hot and beautiful, and from what I saw as we traveled through the province, the women were definitely better looking than in Sìchuān, too.

Our real destination in Yúnnán was Lìjiāng, a small historic town in northern Yúnnán that is listed as a Unesco World Heritage site. We arrived on the comfy double-decker sleeper train early; the sun had recently come up and the air was a little chilly. Traffic was heavy as we left the train station but soon thinned out as we passed through sparse suburbs until we arrived at the Lìjiāng old town.

The town of Lijiang. Beautiful, but too touristy.

The old town is all cobblestone street and old wooden houses, some partially or completely restored, some authentically old but with restored roofs and interiors, but some genuinely crumbling, looking old and dilapidated and lovely.

Lìjiāng is famed for this sort of thing, and was genuinely nice, but we found out very soon that we should have planned to stay in this place only one night and then have moved on, either to the real countryside or to nearby Dàlǐ or Shāxī, which everyone we met said was worlds better than Lìjiāng. Lìjiāng was just another tourist destination, and I learned again, as I had learned at nearly every stop on this trip, what was impossible to decipher in the guidebooks—you’ve got to head away from the tourist spot at all costs in this country, or be damned.

Jess hanging out in the nice hostel we stayed in, the Panba Hostel.

The driver pulled up to a quiet side street and we walked to our hostel, and I tried for a couple of hours to get in touch with my friend Shūlěi, who was also traveling in Lìjiāng at this time, with no luck. Who knows where she was or why she wasn’t contacting us. She had messaged me the night before saying that I should get in touch when we arrived, and we had spoken and agreed that we would meet today.

After a while Jess started talking about wanting to rent a motorcycle. I didn’t know where to get one but the hostel manager, a guy named Jiāng Yángzi (English name River), told me that we might be able to go to a village called Shùhé to rent bikes, so we hopped on the broken down hostel bikes and took off, rode for about an hour, about 7 or 8 miles, me asking directions every ten minutes, until we arrived in the village.

It was overwhelmed with horses and stalls selling souvenirs, a nightmare and worse than Lìjiāng itself, which the foreigners we had met along the way all derided as just another tourist trap.

We crawled through the little town for an hour but found no motorcycles, so I called the hostel and they told us to try another place. So we biked for an hour to find it, only to find that my Google maps was wrong. And in the end we simply returned to the hostel after biking in the hot sun for four hours, basically convinced that there were no motorcycles for rent anywhere in Lìjiāng (this turned out to be true; I confirmed later).

We stayed in the hostel waiting for Shūlěi to call, and I tried to work out the details of what we could do over the next couple of days. I texted Shūlěi and eventually she got back to me, calling, and said that she could see us the next morning and that they were staying outside of town.

So we relaxed. We were both exhausted from the bike ride and badly sunburned, and Jess collapsed into bed and stayed there the whole afternoon. I looked in the guide and went off to try to find a restaurant that claimed to offer calligraphy lessons, and walked for two hours aimlessly, unable to find the place in the winding roads of the old town, asking for directions multiple times and still not getting anywhere.

It got dark and I gave up. The streets were getting thicker with people, the noise growing steadily, until I wanted to escape temporarily. I went back to the hostel and found Jess still in the room, dozing. I asked her if she wanted to eat and she said, as usual, no, so I told her I was going to take a shower and we could go after that.

I went downstairs to relax a bit more after my shower and met an American guy who had been traveling with a woman who looked Chinese. She was tall and beautiful, with shoulder length hair that she repeatedly pushed back with her hand, a nervous tick that conveniently looked good.

The woman had heard me speaking Chinese and complimented me on it through the guy, in a way, and then he asked me my method for studying. I told him about how I’ve used Chinesepod for two years and then asked a few questions, and the girl spoke to me in Chinese. She was wearing leggings, dressed like an American, and as always it took me ten minutes to realize that she spoke perfect American English. By this time there was a weird tension between us, the American Chinese girl who speaks perfect English and perfect Chinese, confronted by the American white male studying Chinese who speaks decent Chinese and English, both vaguely threatened by each other in some inexpressible way, both on not opposite but opposing ends of a cultural spectrum, looking at it from different angles, somehow epistemologically indifferent to each other.

Shulei and Pingping arrive in Lijiang.

Finally I showered and Jess and I wandered around the town, which in the evening had become furiously choked with Chinese tourists, shouting, loud, pushing, crowding around street attractions, moving slowly and bumping into each other, everybody either trying to pass someone or walking too slowly. We got sidetracked and went over a bridge I didn’t recognize. We saw children placing paper flowers with candles on them in the small river and the candles getting caught in a whirlpool and piling up beside the bridge, only a meter away from the kids, refusing to budge and shattering the magic of what they were doing. We walked past an old well in the town that had once been used for drinking water, now surrounded by a crush of Chinese snapping their cameras and shouting, and we caught a glimpse of a man standing down in the well, holding a bowl of clear looking water over his head, preparing to drink.

We got back on track and arrived at the restaurant, which was nearly empty, and the waiters curtly directed us to our seats, where we looked at 50 yuan burgers, 30 yuan Tibetan dumplings, 20 yuan sodas, everything overpriced but at least with a relaxing environment. The bathroom was in a store next door and a sign inside instructed customers in English, “only pee, no poo!” and in Chinese, “forbidden to large convenience” (this is the Chinese way of saying “poo”).

We ordered our food and jess found that her burger had egg mixed in the meat, as well as carrots and some other unidentifiable vegetables.

The dumplings were OK but I felt that we had wasted our time and money coming here. And on the way out we wanted to pay money for a book from the book swap, which they initially agreed to but then reneged. By now I felt sick from the extremely spicy and delicious noodles I had had for lunch, and we started to rush back to the hostel, but Jess saw a dress she wanted on the way. She bought it quickly while I writhed in stomach pain standing up in an alley outside, trying to avoid the tourists who crowded and streamed around me.

We went back to the hostel and soon went to sleep, feeling stressed and frustrated, both, I think, slightly disappointed with the day, but expecting, rightly, better things to come.

Monday I got up early, unable to sleep, and Shūlěi called me in the morning and said that we could meet in about an hour. I set out to meet her and her friend Píngpíng and found them eventually near the water wheel in the middle of Lìjiāng old town, and we walked back to the hostel together. Shūlěi’s friend was very friendly and a little shy at first, and it took about 15 minutes for me to realize that she could speak English and that she had lived in England for four years. Shūlěi thought that I had been traveling with three others and was surprised to learn that I was only with my cousin; they met Jess back at the hostel, and we sat around drinking tea for a while until it was time to go get food.

The delicious meal we had together.

We walked up to the main street above the old town to find a restaurant, where Jess became horrified by the chickens and fish being slaughtered and cleaned in the doorways of the restaurants. “We’re not eating here, are we?” she asked with a raised eyebrow when we stopped in front of one of the places. They were classic Chinese—loud, grimy, doing brisk business with a mix of different style of dishes.

“They feel this kind of thing is pretty disgusting,” Píngpíng said to Shūlěi in Chinese.

“It’s OK,” I said, “she does think it’s kind of gross, but I don’t mind.”

“Well let’s go somewhere else,” Shūlěi said.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, my stomach grumbling. “She’s not going to eat anything no matter where we go. She picks bones out of a chicken egg,” I added, using a Chinese idiom to describe someone who’s overly picky.

“How can you treat your cousin like that?” Shūlěi demanded, laughing a little at how uncouth I was, and she and Píngpíng led us on to a place where they weren’t slaughtering chickens but only cleaning fish in front.

Shulei with Pigsy, the monstrous dog at the hostel in Lashihai.

We ordered fish flavored fried pork with no spice for jess, and fried Chinese greens, and a boiling vat of spicy fish for the rest of us and ate well, Jess occasionally chatting with Píngpíng and Shūlěi listening intently, trying to parse their English, and interjecting in Chinese when she understood something they said. There were times when Shūlěi couldn’t understand what we were saying, but mostly she could follow along.

I wanted Jess to be able to participate in all our conversations so I tried to translate whenever we spoke Chinese, but also I felt that this was part of the experience of truly experiencing a language — being very aware that you don’t understand, listening to the sounds, occasionally being caught with someone who can’t speak at all. Seeing Jess in that state reminded me of the few times, in the very beginning, when I was left on my own–when I rode in a car with someone who spoke no English and I spoke no Chinese, when a friend who spoke English got up to use the bathroom–those moments when you are left with someone who speaks a different language, who perhaps wants to ask you things, say things to you, but who has no choice but to sit in silence while you sit in silence, neither of you wanting to frighten the other by launching into a speech in an unfamiliar language.

Lashihai was exactly what we needed after a day in Lijiang.

This had been the reason I had studied Chinese to begin with. I had wanted to see what it was like to be the one who was able to pierce that wall of silence, where the combinations of sounds—seemingly arbitrary, endlessly complex, irreproducible without years of effort—became beautiful aural symbols that released us from our cages of silence, sometimes made us aware of how simple and helpless we were without it, how defenseless and isolated a person is without words.

After lunch Shūlěi and Píngpíng left to go meet some people who they might be sharing a van to Tibet with. Their plan was to hire a van and a driver to take them the rest of the way across the west to Tibet in a long drive, four people altogether, crammed into one van, and since two of Shūlěi’s friends were going home they would have to share the van with two strangers.

Lashihai.

Jess and I relaxed at noon, still feeling not fully adjusted to the elevation change and the rough couple of train rides that had brought us to Lìjiāng, and then around 4 we went to meet Shūlěi near the water wheel again.

The four of us took a cab ride out to where the girls had been staying, Lāshìhǎi lake, about 20 minutes away from town.

The cab ride took about 25 minutes. First we zipped through the streets of Lìjiāng and quickly escaped onto a narrow country road, and began climbing up a hill. Soon we were at the lake—a long stretch of still water surrounded by motionless fields of grass and gently sloping mountains. Everything was a bit gray and muted, the clouds steely, suggesting rain, the air cool and lightly windy. The place was beautiful and quiet enough to hear the wind blowing in the leaves; there was only one road visible, the one we came in on, and no other cars in sight.

Lashihai.

Shūlěi and Píngpíng explained that they had found the place after they had arrived in Lìjiāng. They had been staying in the old town and hadn’t liked it, so they had taken a cab ride to check out the area outside town. They had gone to Lāshìhǎi and walked for a while, and paid an entrance fee. Then they walked ahead further and met some men who asked them for money to go for a boat ride, but they were a little startled by the six men, who were large and somewhat forbidding looking. So they declined the boat ride and walked by themselves a long way, walking around the river until they were hungry and thirsty, until they finally found a house that looked somewhat like a hotel, and they knocked on the door, and someone answered.

It turned out it was an incomplete and run-down hostel on the side of the lake, inhabited by a young Chinese guy from eastern China who had moved to this area to relax and work with the locals. Shūlěi and Píngpíng both explained that he helped the locals, but they didn’t clarify exactly how, except that he helped them buy things that they needed and teach them some things. He had a Harley Davidson motorcycle in the hostel, and lots of western liquor, but the grass in the courtyard was severely overgrown and it appeared that they hadn’t cleaned the place in some time. It looked almost abandoned, but was still running. In the entryway there was a comfortable and relaxing couch with a table in the center, a hanging chair, but it appeared that no one had used any of it in weeks.

Píngpíng stayed behind to prepare to leave for Tibet, and Shūlěi took us for a walk out toward the lake through the soggy grass in the wetland, our flip flops gathering thick, heavy muck. Horses grazed on the side of the road and throughout the wetlands. Apple trees and pears grew in the orchards ringing the lake, the apples individually wrapped in small paper bags, to protect them from bugs or the sun, I couldn’t be sure which.

“Why is it like this?” I asked Shūlěi. “It seems the hostel is set up for foreigners, but there’s no one there.”

The hostel in Lashihai, with Prince, the dog.

“Actually he’s not the owner,” she said. “The owner is cycling to Nepal and he’s been gone for two months, and when he comes back they’re hoping to finish it and start up a hang-gliding operation here, but they still haven’t figured it out. And when he comes back this guy might leave.”

“Wow, he’s got a pretty comfortable life,” I said, but Shūlěi didn’t respond to that at all.

Shūlěi had been a good friend of mine for several months in Sanming. She was very different from all the other Chinese women I had met: she was confident, for one—she moved and spoke in a self-assured way that you rarely saw in young Chinese women; she was very friendly and outgoing, and wasn’t shy about saying what she thought, and often expressed more thoughtful opinions than many of the young women I met; she also never asked me silly questions that directly related to my foreignness, and seemed to sense that I would rather just be treated like an ordinary person. She didn’t try to pamper me or treat me like I was special; if we ate something or had tea together, I could pay or she could pay or we could split the bill; she didn’t worry about it. And perhaps most of all she expressed dissatisfaction with the traditional life she was expected to lead—she had a steady job at the university that her parents wanted her to keep, but sometimes she talked about ditching her “stable” lifestyle for something more adventurous. On top of that, she was an independent traveler. She was the only Chinese friend of mine who had been all the way to Tibet, and she was already planning to go again.

When I knew them both back in Sanming, Ruirui (the friend Jess and I met in Xi’an) called her the only “Chinese foreigner” in Sanming.

The front of the Lashihai hostel.

But now that I had met Shūlěi here in Lìjiāng, she seemed even more independent. Perhaps traveling does that to all of us, but the difference was striking. She seemed preoccupied with getting to Tibet, and a little bit stressed out by the preparations. She had told me earlier that they were planning on spending more than 3000 yuan each for the trip, which I knew was probably almost two months’ salary for an average employee at the university (somewhere north of $450).

We walked further our into the marsh and eventually I took off my flip flops, because they had become completely laden in mud, and Shūlěi continually urged me to put them back on until she took hers off herself and realized how much easier it was to walk without them, and we walked, our feet covered in thick layers of mud, until we reached the end of the muddy path and the lake began.

Some Chinese boys rowed close to us on a long blue boat made of blue aluminum, 15 feet long and heavy, with a deep puddle of water in the bottom.

The boys in the boat at Lashihai.

“You guys wanna go for a ride?” Shūlěi asked.

“No, let’s not bother,” I said.

The four boys rowed closer. We could see that they were dressed in colorful athletic shirts, one in a bright yellow Kappa jersey, and wore dirty but not cheap pants and shoes. They were deeply tan and laughing and joking in the boat, apparently out fishing, and as they got closer they began calling “hello” at us. They got closer and Shūlěi called out to them in greeting.

“One person 30 yuan!” was their reply.

It was strange to hear. We were miles away from Lìjiāng, which itself was miles away from anything except mountains. But we hadn’t come far enough to escape the money-making impulse at the sight of visitors.

“You guys really know how to do business!” Shūlěi shouted back, laughing.

They rowed past us.

“Can you get in here?” She called, as the water seemed too shallow to get to solid land.

Yeah, they shouted back, as if it were completely obvious and she must be a little dim for asking.

“How do you get to land?” She asked.

“We just go in here,” they said, giving that peculiar Chinese answer to her question — the one that answers nothing, that gives no information, but simply makes the questioner seem ignorant.

The muck on our feet made it impossible to walk in flip-flops.

We walked back and then went to the hostel, and washed our feet. We sat around for a while and Shūlěi told me about the animals in the hostel. There was a dog called Bājiè, Pigsy, from Xīyóujì, the classic Chinese tale about a monk who travels to India to retrieve the sacred Buddhist scriptures. The dog was huge and black and did not look like a pig but like a monster to me, after the episode in Sìchuān. Then there was another dog, a chocolate lab named Prince, and then a small tabby orange cat named Iron Bullet, Tiědàn, because she had been the only of her litter to survive

“Pigsy watched prince grow up,” Shūlěi explained, “so when Prince was a puppy Pigsy was really protective, even bite people. Actually he doesn’t bite people unless he’s protecting Prince, but one time he used too much force and hurt someone,” she said.

Suddenly I became very aware of how close Jess was to the big dog. “Maybe we should get going,” I said.

We headed back to town by car, getting a ride from a wealthy couple who had a television in their black four door sedan, installed in the dashboard. They dropped us off on the side of the road and we transferred to the van of Shūlěi and Píngpíng’s friend, Límíng, meaning “dawn”–and then he took us to Shùhé village, where we watched people dancing around a large fire in the small village square. The Chinese people had a conga line going in a huge circle around the 10 meter bonfire, tourists all, except for a group of five very pretty Chinese girls dressed in ethnic attire and looking uncomfortably and unsmilingly at the squirming masses of tourists around them. A few police officers stood inside the ring making sure nobody got too close to the fire.

The bonfire in Shuhe Old Village to celebrate the Torch Festival.

Jess and I watched for a while as Shūlěi and Píngpíng danced. It seemed fun, but I didn’t trust Chinese tourists around a huge fire, no matter how many policemen were there, and anyway dancing has never been my strong suit.

After the fire, we walked back to the van with Shūlěi and Píngpíng and Límíng, and on the way we bought several of the hand-made tie died tablecloths from a vendor in the town, Shūlěi and Píngpíng bargaining doggedly on our behalf while Límíng waited outside. Then we walked back to the van and Shūlěi realized that Límíng wanted to go back to his place the opposite way from the way we had come in, so taking us back wasn’t convenient.

So we said goodbye in the parking lot, some weird distance in the air between us, maybe because none of us knew if we would see each other again, and because we had only had a chance to meet for this one day, while all of us were planning to go elsewhere.

They would start their journey to Tibet the next day, and I couldn’t go with them. This was because of the ban on foreigners in effect this summer (potential political unrest in Tibet) and because you couldn’t get in anyway even if you were allowed, because foreigners had to go with a tour group.

Jess and I walked back through Shùhé to get a taxi back to our hostel. I was tired again and a bit sorry to say goodbye to Shūlěi and Píngpíng so soon. But the next day we were heading out for Tiger Leaping Gorge, which promised to be one of the best parts of our trip. And turned out to be by far the best place I’ve been in China so far.

And I’ll write about that in the next installation of this travel log. It might take a few days for me to get to it, though, as I’m in the middle of a transition to Xiamen at the moment and time is limited. Saying goodbye to another place even as I write this travel log—and finding that it takes as long to record these adventures as it does to live them.

Next: Tiger Leaping Gorge (Hǔtiàoxiá), the one place we visited on our whole trip that I can't complain about even a little.

After we left Xi’an we headed south to Sichuan, where things got a little crazy. Sichuan is deeper into western China than I had ever been before. It is known for its very spicy food, for its relatively underdeveloped economy, for its gnarly and nearly impossible-to-understand version of Chinese, and, as I’ve been told time and again by Chinese friends, for its beautiful women.

It is also known for the horrific earthquake that struck there in 2008, killing more than 60,000 people.

As we approached Sichuan on an overnight train from Xi’an, I had all of these things in mind, particularly the spicy food and pretty women. I was also thinking of Jiuzhaigou Valley, which is known for its incredibly blue water and beautiful mountains. My friend Jack had been to Jiuzhaigou the year before, and he said it must be the most beautiful place in the world. I figured it must be an exaggeration—this was coming from a man who had never left mainland China.

Unfortunately, we had a huge obstacle before we could get to Jiuzhaigou: a 12-hour daytime bus ride from Chengdu.

The twelve-hour bus ride from Chengdu to Jiuzhaigou Valley is rough. But there's no other way to do it unless you're willing to shell out the $300 for the 40-minute flight.

Before I continue with the story I should insert a caveat: Anyone who reads this who is thinking of traveling to Jiuzhaigou should know that you can travel directly there from Xi’an by bus. You don’t need to go to Chengdu first. But we did because I didn’t know this fact before we left.

Anyway, after a day in Chengdu (unremarkable place, no pretty women), we set out in the early morning by bus for Jiuzhaigou (“zhai” rhymes with fly and gou sounds just like “go”), and crammed into our seats. The bus had a few other foreigners on it but was mostly Chinese. This made sense. The plane tickets to Jiuzhaigou were 2000 yuan round trip (over $300) while the bus tickets were $45 round trip.

The scenery was some of the best I've seen anywhere, which makes the question--is it worth it??--hard to answer.

The problem with these bus rides, besides the fact that you have to sit on a miserable bus all day, is that they always stop at these sham places for lunch that serve terrible food for too much money. The passengers tend to accept this meekly, with no complaints.

But after going to Jiuzhaigou (which was beautiful—I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves), a passenger decided to make a stand.

We pulled over for lunch around 1 p.m. in a decent little cafeteria. Jess and I glanced at the food, but it all looked really spicy and neither of us were very hungry, so we decided not to eat and I just got us a soda. We sat in the back of the dining hall quietly and rested; we would all have to get on the bus soon.

But then a heavy-set Chinese man in a lime green shirt started arguing loudly with the woman at the cashier. At first I had trouble understanding what they were shouting about, but after a minute I picked up the problem: The man had taken one tray of food for he and his daughter to eat, thinking that it would only count as one meal when he paid the check. But he had no such luck.

The most remarkable part of the valley is the water--astonishingly blue, which is caused by some kind of agent that remains in the water from when this valley was carved out by glaciers.

Unfortunately this is just how these places work. You get food as soon as you walk in the door—they practically shove it on you—but you don’t pay until after you’ve eaten. Invariably the price is 50 percent more than what it should be, which usually only amounts to an American dollar so I tend not to complain, but it annoys even me.

This guy was furious. He had paid for two overpriced meals when he felt that he had only taken one. And he was not backing down. At all. After a flurry of initial stern disagreeing with the stocky middle aged woman behind the counter, he let go and started shouting at her. He told her he wasn’t going to pay. He argued that they were cheating him and everyone else in the place. He shouted. She shouted back. A skinny looking young guy started looking at him sternly, but let the woman do most of the shouting.

The man’s daughter was still sitting quietly in the back of the cafeteria while all this was going on, no longer touching her food. And soon the man came back to her and stood by her while he continued the shouting match. At this point other passengers from the bus started peeking into the door of the cafeteria to see what all the commotion was. Some people who were already inside smiled sheepishly at the man’s antics. Some people simply stared ahead quietly.

I expected the man to scream a lot and then pay, which is what usually happens. But it went on for about five minutes with no clear end in sight, the woman holding firm, the man nearly choking on his anger. The argument waxed and waned as these kinds of public Chinese arguments do, punctuated by occasional awkward silences where each party gauged the steadfastness of the other. There was a brief lull and then a sudden burst of shouting from the man. By this time I had pretty much started to ignore the both of them and just tried to enjoy not being on the bus.

Then I heard a loud crash, and a shout from the man, and from the corner of my eye I saw a burst of color as the man’s tray of food flew threw the air towards Jess and me. The guy had decided he didn’t want to eat after all, and had slashed the food off the table, apparently in the direction he thought no people were in. Except that there were two foreigners there, sitting in the dark corner of the cafeteria.

There are also some really nice Tibetan villages within the park, which you can stay in if you ask around surreptitiously after you arrive in the town outside the park. There are ways to do it--I saw it done by a foreigner while we were there--but it's not legal and it's a bit sketchy. But still, it would be very cool if you had the time. Amazing, really.

Luckily, Jess served as a pretty good food-shield, so I didn’t get any on me. But she got a bit of a splattering of rice and little bits of carrot or pumpkin. The guy got up and continued his shouting, shoving his eight-year-old girl daughter out the door while he kept on arguing loudly.

Now there really was a crowd, everybody staring in that disturbing and silent Chinese way at the activity, faces impassive or smiling slightly.

Finally the young male proprietor just told the man to get out. He walked up to him and looked him in the eye and said, calmly, get out. Just get out, and after a few minutes of this the man indeed got out.

Jess and I went outside, her bemused, too, and she got on the bus. I lingered outside the bus for a moment and a Taiwanese guy, maybe about 45, whom I had noticed handling a passport on the bus that said “Republic of China” on the cover, chatted with me for a moment.

“Do you know what they were fighting about?” he asked in English.

“I think they were arguing because he was asked to pay for two meals when he only had one,” I replied in Chinese.

“Yeah, I think that’s about what it was,” he answered in Chinese. “But it’s a bit hard to understand why someone would go through so much over just a small bit of money.”

“Maybe he was doing it on behalf of all of us,” I said.

The Taiwanese guy smiled and asked me if I knew a certain Chinese idiom: gé mìng xiān liè. I had never heard it, so he explained it to me. The term means “martyr to the revolution”. This had been exactly how I had seen the guy in the green shirt, and even though his gesture had been ridiculous—splattering his food on the floor like a child—I understood how he felt. Traveling in China was always like this. Literally everywhere you turned, there were unscrupulous people trying to screw you out of money and ruining your travel. It was always obvious that the bus drivers got a take of these stops, but nobody complained. At least they never complained to anyone but themselves. Only the occasional person complained bitterly and endlessly. This was maddening to me.

Again, the lakes were amazing.

The Taiwanese guy’s English was pretty good, but he was busy most of the trip chatting with another Chinese passenger. We all got back on the bus, as if nothing had happened, and I commented how happy I was that at lest we didn’t get pelted with food.

“That’s because I was a shield to you,” Jess reminded me.

Throughout this ride, I hadn’t really thought of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake much. I knew it happened in Wenchuan, but I wasn’t sure where in Sichuan that was. I had noticed some cracked and oddly bent roads along the way, but I wasn’t sure if that was caused by earthquake or by construction.

Then, a few hours after lunch, suddenly nearly everyone on the bus sat up at the same time and bent their necks to look out the right windows, and my eyes followed theirs. Down in the bottom of a gorge that ran beside the road, maybe 100 meters deep, sat a row of buildings almost completely submerged in water. Suddenly the earthquake pops into my head, and I realize that we are in Wenchuan. There is a huge black sign with white lettering in the bottom of the gorge, and I recognize five characters before it zips by: Wènchuān Dà Dìzhèn. The Great Wenchuan Earthquake.

Jiuzhaigou Valley.

Suddenly signs of the earthquake are everywhere: We pass by a highway, originally on concrete 15-meter legs, that has completely collapsed into the river below us and is still lying there, running straight into the murky brown water where it disappears; a series of attractive luxury apartments, interrupted midway by a cluster of older buildings in the center, cracked at the foundation and resting at an awe-inspiring angle, as if the five-story buildings were water jugs that had the tablecloth pulled out from under them; a wrecked suspension bridge; tunnels that look too dark; roads that have been ripped in two like paper.

The scenery is fascinating in the terrible way that images of disaster are, and it is strange to think that this all happened three whole years ago. In some places it looks like it happened yesterday. But there has clearly been a lot of new construction here; there are new, shiny government buildings, new highways, new apartment complexes. One thing is still lacking: the reason it takes 12 hours to get to Jiuzhaigou is because the highway that was destroyed in the earthquake that led to Jiuzhaigou from Sichuan’s capital has yet to be rebuilt.

One weird thing you see when traveling to beautiful places in China: the tourists like to dress up in "local people" traditional clothing.

The scenery moves on, and we get closer to Chengdu, and the wreckage seems less. Then we stop for a rest at a grungy little gas station two hours outside the capital.

That was where karma reminded me that I was not invincible by throwing something completely unexpected at me, again, literally.

Everybody got off the bus and fanned outward, stretching their legs, smoking, chatting. I walked in the opposite direction as everybody else, curious to look down into the gorge below us. I noticed, about ten feet away from me, a very big, black, filthy dog laying in a big patch of dirt. This truck stop was the definition of the word shithole. The air was thick with smog, the place was too close to the road, and on top of that they had mangy looking dogs leaning against rusty sheds. But I didn’t pay the dog any mind. I just rested my eyes and stretched my legs, and then after a minute turned back to the bus to find Jess and chat with her.

From behind me, I heard a loud growling and a bark and the rustling of gravel, and without looking I knew to run. Or maybe leap desperately would be the right word, because that is what I did, and after about two steps I felt the dogs teeth grab onto the small bag I was holding, and hold onto it. Glancing over my shoulder I saw his bared teeth flashing at me, but something had held him back. I stumbled backward a few steps, yanking my bag out of his grip, and saw that he had been barely held back by a ten-foot chain. My bag was fine. But it was clear that if that had been my arm, I would not have been fine.

Jiuzhaigou Valley also has a lot of waterfalls.

Two Chinese men looked at me concerned and I explained I was OK and then marched to the place where the owners were selling overpriced water and soda and ice cream.

“Boss, your dog just tried to bite me,” I said. She looked a little surprised and looked me up and down. “He didn’t bite me, but got my bag.”

She smiled, and a few passengers around me laughed.

“It’s not funny,” I said angrily.

“I know,” she said. “Why were you near him?”

“I didn’t even see him,” I lied. I had seen him, but I hadn’t expected him to leap at me. He weighed about 90 pounds and had white and black fur and clearly hadn’t left his spot for a long time. “He tried to bite me,” I said again in frustration

An old woman in a classic breadbox-shaped dark blue cheap coat interrupted: “What were you doing over there?”

“I was just walking around relaxing,” I said. “It’s not funny!” I insisted again, angrily, and then I walked away, the driver and the others breaking into harder laughter. “Yeah, real funny!” I yelled over my shoulder, “really funny!”

Then I did what I’ve always done to calm down—went to my crutch and smoked a cigarette—and when Jess found me and asked me what flavor ice cream she should buy I said simply that a dog had tried to bite me and I didn’t know. She said sorry sympathetically, which was nice of her, and went to get her ice cream. I relaxed for a minute and went back to the shop.

We also paid the pandas a visit while we were in Chengdu; well worth it, just organized it through the hostel, which was easy and fine.

“That’s not safe. You should put the dog somewhere where it can’t bite people,” I said.

The old woman said: “That dog doesn’t bite people.”

“It just tried to bite me!” I said incredulously.

“He’s never seen a foreigner before,” the owner woman, about 40 in a white and black striped shirt, said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, “it’s not safe.”

“It is safe,” the old woman said.

“It’s not safe!”

The owner lady gave me a few palliating words—yes, we’ll move him somewhere else, fine—and I said OK, and walked away, still shaking. The Taiwanese guy laughed with me for a moment; finally it did seem funny, if only because I hadn’t been hurt.

But I knew that if the dog had got me it could have been much worse. I had gotten away by a hair.

Back on the bus, Jess commented how the dog had actually been cute, and I asked her, as politely as possible, to stop talking. We tried to decide if it was a bad omen, and Jess decided that it was just karma balancing itself out; after all, she had been my shield for the food, and now I had been attacked by a huge dog. I felt OK with that explanation. We struggled to get comfy in our cramped seats and rode out the next two or so hours of the trip mostly in silence, thinking only of our hostel beds.

We had enjoyed Jiuzhaigou, but in the end I felt as though we could have gone somewhere else that would have required less work. Jess said she thought the bus ride was worth it, but it wasn’t for me. Jiuzhaigou was truly beautiful, like nothing else I’ve seen, but it is not the most beautiful place on earth, and it, like most of China in the summer, was a hotbed of Chinese tourists. After seeing it once I decided something I’ve decided in so many other places in China—nice, but I don’t need to ever go back.

Luckily that would finally change with out next destination—the most beautiful place I’ve seen in China and an area I would happily return to anytime; and also the second-to-last stop on the second epic journey through China: Yunnan!

Yunnan: If you like natural beauty, probably the next best place in China after Tibet.

Our plane landed in Xi’an in the late morning and we took a bus to the center of town, where we were able to walk to our hostel. About an hour later we met Ruirui, a young Chinese woman who I met at Sanming University and whose hometown was near Xi’an.

From left, Zhangrong, Ruirui, and Jess, outside the Terra Cotta Warriors.

Ruirui (pronounced, roughly, like two “Ray”s, “Ray Ray”) is about five three, with long dark hair (like almost all Chinese girls) that she generally keeps in a simple ponytail, and a round face that is virtually always smiling. She’s one of those people whose facial expressions are pretty much a perfect representation of whatever’s going on in her head. Her eyes are big and expressive and her personality can easily swing from loud and unrestrained to quiet and nearly shy.

I met Ruirui in one of the dining halls at the university when she was sitting with one of my friends, another teacher at the college, and they waved me over to sit down with them.

I immediately noticed a few things about Ruirui:

• Her Chinese was very standard (meaning that she came from the North, which meant that maybe she could teach me oral Chinese)
• She didn’t seem too freaked out by speaking to a foreigner, and it certainly didn’t make her shy
• She talked pretty much nonstop

These are all qualities I look for in a Chinese friend (and maybe even a friend in general). Trait one is important because it can be hard to learn new words from Fujianese, who are often unclear of the correct pronunciation themselves; traits two and three are important basically because I tend to be a kind of shy person, and am not always good at initiating conversation, so people who like talking tend to get along well with me. (Strangely, I think maybe the opposite is true with me and romantic relationships; maybe I avoid being the center of attention in friendships, and like to be the center of attention in relationships? I don’t know; I’ll have to leave one to sort out another day…)

Amazing street food! Made of potatoes (I think), tasted like turkey stuffing with a bit more bite. Even Jess liked it.

So a couple of weeks after meeting her I sent Ruirui a message asking if she could teach me Chinese. She agreed, I think with no intention of ever actually teaching me, but happy to hang out and chat with me, which is close enough to teaching, especially at that time, almost a year ago when I was just starting to be competent in long-form conversations.

And from there we became good friends. We hung out at least once a week in Sanming, usually just grabbing a bite to eat, sometimes going for a walk somewhere or checking out some part of Sanming. (I was often a guide to her on those outings, having been in Sanming a year longer and more familiar with the area, which she always found funny – the laowai showing her around.) Perhaps the fact that Ruirui was new to southern China made her a better friend, too. She often talked about differences between the South and the North that made it clear that she missed home.

A cast of some armored horses that were found in Shaanxi. Xi'an is all about old stuff. Throughout the entire stretch of Chinese history, Xi'an has served as the capital of China for more years than Beijing. It's a cornucopia of old.

Rèqíng was a word I had heard used before to describe people from the north, and Ruirui used it often to describe people from her home province, Henan. Hénánrén gèng rèqíng (rèqíng is pronounced something like RUH-ching), she would say. Henanese are more reqing. It’s a bit difficult to understand, this word—the dictionary says: enthusiasm, zeal, warmth. But this is a fairly Chinese idea, this word. It’s just two characters—hot, and sentiment—put together to form a word. It evokes a feeling of very proactive friendliness and insistence in my mind. There can be connotations of politeness in the word, as in, Northerners are more friendly and polite than southerners. If you come to visit me in the North and I take you out to eat and insist that you get totally pissed on rice liquor, that is reqing. If I fight over the check for ten minutes with a friend, that is reqing. If I am a street food vendor, and treat all of my customers fairly and generally smile and act nice, I am reqing. You can be reqing to your friends by being very hospitable and (in the Chinese way) very pushy in your politeness—refuse to let them pay the bill, literally grab their hand and thrust their wallet or whatever back into their pocket, follow table manners precisely and toast them in the correct order, always insist that when eating they have the seat of honor, when taking pictures they are in the center. This is treating your friend very reqing.

This is the place where the tomb containing the thousands of terra cotta warriors was discovered in the 1970s by some farmers digging in the earth.

Reqing, in other words, is a kind of Chinese ideal. And whenever I became close to someone from the north, they eventually told me that northerners were more reqing than southerners. Not having spoken to anyone from the south living in the north about this, I don’t know if people in the opposite situation would say the same. But it was clear, within moments of meeting up with my friend Ruirui, that she was going to aim the giant cannon of Chinese manners at my cousin and I and unleash a barrage of politeness that would leave us battered and confused and feeling waited-on to the point of total embarrassment.

Ruirui had enlisted a friend, Zhangrong, to accompany us with her boyfriend to go sightseeing in Xi’an, and they quickly met up with us as well. Then the five of us all went to the Muslim district of Xi’an to get some street food.

This is one of the famous things to do in Xi’an – go get some of the various street foods made by the Hui people. They’re also known as “Chinese Muslims”, one of the largest groups of “ethnic minority peoples” in China. They make some mean food. Naturally, Ruirui, Zhangrong and Zhangrong’s boyfriend wouldn’t let us pay for anything. This can be exhausting, especially when you know the person buying you food doesn’t have a whole lot of money herself. At one point, Jess wanted to buy a soda, so she hung back secretly while the rest of us went ahead. I actually tried to distract the group from her so she could buy the soda herself. But Zhangrong’s boyfriend saw our scheme from a mile away, and snuck into the shop where Jess was buying the soda, and paid for it, all without her noticing that he was even there.

We walked around for the afternoon and in the evening had dinner, and then the next day went to the Terra Cotta Warriors exhibit, a massive, crowded historical relic, the tomb of one of China’s earliest emperor’s, QinShiHuang. As usual with these kinds of things, I wasn’t that interested in the Terra Cotta Warriors, and it was at this place that I started to wonder why, if I don’t care at all about major tourist attractions, I even bothered. And then I decided that I didn’t know. And then I decided, just like that, that I wouldn’t do this anymore—go to major, famous historical relics like this. Because it was basically a waste of my time.

The Terra Cotta Warriors in Xi'an. The place is massive.

Don’t mistake my meaning: I did not decide not to travel. I decided not to travel to places like this. I love travel. I love learning new cultures, the new food and sights and sensations, the constant motion, the exhilarating rush of landing in a new place and figuring it all out. I love the sense of change. I love the new perspective you get, instantly, when you see something new, and I love the fresh view of your life back home that it gives you. I love the way it sharpens my vision and my mind, and brings the world down to a manageable size and speed. I love the encounters you make, the unpredictability of life on the road.

But coming to places like this—The Terra Cotta Warriors, The Forbidden City, places that you had to spend days to get to, competing all the while with tens of thousands of other tourists all crawling through a blazing summer day to see the same bloody old relic—was not about all those things I mentioned above. It wasn’t about anything at all, as far as I could tell, except seeing something with your eyes that is no more impressive (to me) than a picture in a book. And you don’t learn anything. The thing about these historical relics, that actually makes them look smaller to me, in real life, is that they are emblems of so much history and meaning, but that you don’t get any of that just by visiting them. You can learn way more about the Great Wall by reading a book than you could by visiting it. That’s not to say it’s not worth seeing, but sometimes that transcendent experience that you want is impossible, at least in China, because there are so many people. If The Forbidden City had 100,000 less people in it on a day, it would be amazing to see. Were it possible to see an empty room there and stand there, in the quiet, and imagine what it was like 300 years ago, I would go again. But going there and literally having to struggle to avoid being pushed to the ground because the crowds are so bad, standing in lines in the hot sun for hours just to get in, dealing with the loudness and the rudeness (line-cutting is rampant) of the Chinese tourists. It’s not worth it. My time is worth more than that.

Biking on the Xi'an city wall was definitely one of the highlights of the Xi'an experience.

Such with the Terra Cotta Warriors. There was a white guy with a little red-and-blue action figure, who was reaching beyond the fence and placing the action figure inside the bounds of the 2000-year-old relic, on the old ashy-looking soil where the emporer’s tomb had rested untouched and lost for centuries, till it was unearthed by a group of farmers in 1974. It was a stupid little action figure, and the guy was obviously doing some kind of take-a-picture-of-my-action-figure-all-over-the-world thing. It looked like a mini Captain America, a little guy holding a silver-colored plastic gun, about two inches tall.

I chuckled at first when I saw what he was doing, and then a late-middle-aged Chinese woman walked by him, while he was snapping pictures, and scowled angrily and spat: “That’s inappropriate! He shouldn’t be putting an American figure there!” And then she walked away.

My first reaction to this was shock, but it only took a second for me to realize that she was right: this was an ancient Chinese relic; it was inappropriate to put anything on the soil, obviously, especially a little plastic American figurine. I imagined somebody going to the Lincoln Memorial, running up to it (even though that would be impossible), and putting a Mao Zedong plush doll on his foot, or something. The thought was kind of funny, but it would definitely piss a lot of Americans off to see something like that.

The amazing Zhangrong, biking with us on the wall.

I also noticed that Ruirui’s face was clearly a little uncomfortable, so I said I would say something to him about it, and she was clearly relieved.

So I delivered the news with a bit of the bluntness of the Chiense woman’s tone of voice: “I don’t know if you can understand Chinese, but you’re pissing people off doing that,” I said. “Some lady just walked by and said it’s not appropriate.”

“Oh,” he said, looking startled suddenly, “thanks for telling me, I had no idea. I’ve been doing this all over the world.”

“Yeah, I know what you’re doing, but it seems like other people might not understand,” I said.

He just thanked me and then put the little action figure away, and this made me feel kind of guilty. I had expected an unfriendly encounter with the guy, or had expected him to make some kind of insensitive comment about the woman’s response to what he was doing, but he turned out to just be gentle and slightly embarrassed.

Proudly displaying our tickets to the Shaanxi ancient history museum.

Yet another reason to avoid big relics like this altogether—it’s just another place for Chinese and foreigners to collide: the Chinese generally self-conscious about the fact that foreigners who live in China have the time and money to see more of these things than they do; the foreigners generally walking around sometimes actually appalled by the culture around them, more often simply understanding little.

Hanging out with Ruirui and Zhangrong, however, made the stay in Xi’an more than worthwhile. Neither of them spoke more than the most basic English, so my time with them was a constant flow of new words and Chinese phrases, and my expanding ability to talk with them felt good. There were times when my cousin had to remind me that she was there so that I would translate for her what was going on, and I feel guilty that she couldn’t take part more in the conversations, but I think, with me translating and with Ruirui taking the occasional bold opportunity to practice her English, she was able to get a general idea for who these people are.

We only stayed in Xi’an for about three days, and with the rest of our time we hung out and ate a lot with Ruirui and Zhangrong, went to the “largest musical fountain in Asia” and played in the water, rented bikes and rode for about an hour and a half around the amazing and enormous old city wall that surrounds Xi’an, and went to the Shaanxi ancient history museum, which Zhangrong made memorable by walking with me through the whole museum and pummeling my brain to pudding by giving explanations, in rapid-fire Chinese, of nearly every relic in the place.

On our last day in Xi’an we went to see Ruirui at her university, the Shaanxi Science and Technology University, a massive university with about 20,000 students that was, because of summer vacation, a huge ghost town about an hour outside of Xi’an.

Ruirui's dormitory, which she shared with three other graduate students.

We took the bus out to the university. When we arrived it was early afternoon and deathly hot. We stood on the side of the road, the cicadas whining like overtaxed lawnmowers, and I called Ruirui. She met us outside and together we went to get some food in a small, grungy restaurant on the campus. After lunch we walked across campus to see the new library. Ruirui told me that the school had borrowed tens of millions of yuan in order to build the new facility, but that there were hardly any books in it yet, because they spent too much on the building.

“So now they have to raise tuition for all the undergraduates,” she said, laughing, “because they built too nice of a library.”

We walked through the suffocating heat and took a couple of pictures in front of the library, my cousin and I looking limp in the sun, and then walked back to Ruirui’s dormitory, where she had lived with three other women while she worked on her master’s degree in animation.

She didn’t live there much anymore, because she had been at Sanming University teaching, but it was clear that four women had lived there as graduate students, four loft beds made out of steel with desk units under them, clothes hangers hanging from the edges, only a small closet in the corner, cheaply painted walls, and a small sunny balcony area with a sink and a squatter toilet with a shower head in it.

The hallway on this level was perhaps 80 meters long, with maybe 50 apartments just like this one on the third floor of the building, the units for graduate students at the university slightly cushier than the dorms for undergrads, where they lived six or eight to a room.

Ruirui pulled out a book of her sketches and sat with Jess for a moment, showing her the drawings while I sat next to them translating back and forth.

And Ruirui herself, with the obligatory peace sign (which in China everybody says is a V for "Victory").

“These are from really early on,” Ruirui said modestly as Jess turned the pages. “They’re not so good looking.”

“No, they look really nice,” Jess said.

“I can’t draw very well,” Ruirui went on. “But I have another notebook of drawings that are better than these.”

“Can I see it?” Jess asked.

“It’s at home,” Ruirui said. Jess continued flipping through the pages. The sketches were mostly human figures and faces, drawn with competence but not necessarily mastery, the early work of a dedicated art student. “I can’t draw well,” Ruirui said again.

Channeling Ruirui’s modesty was strange for me: translating someone’s words when I understood that they were just cross-cultural noise. In China folks generally don’t say they’re good at anything. This is part of Chinese “politeness”. If someone compliments you on anything, even if you are great at it, you just say you’re terrible at it, and they generally accept that response.

After sitting in front of the fan in Ruirui’s room for 20 minutes, we headed back out into the sun and then went back to town, flagging down a cab. Ruirui was leaving Xi’an before us to go back to her hometown in Henan, and we went to the train station together.

Ruirui had meant to leave after us, but I had mistaken the time of our departure, so we said goodbye to her in the center of the train station, surrounded by the cacophony of thousands of people filling every corner of the place, hundreds sitting on the floor on newspapers that they had spread out, many snacking on sunflower seeds, many napping, all somehow impervious to the overwhelming noise and chaos of the place.

On the bus with our friends.

Ruirui turned to Jess and said, in carefully thought-out and pronounced English, “I am very happy to meet you,” and then they hugged and Jess thanked her.

I hugged Ruirui too, suddenly aware that we were finished with Xi’an and still had several places to see and two or three weeks left of our trip. But it felt like we had been in Xi’an a long time and going to Chengdu, our next destination, seemed a bit of a lonesome prospect after being at the blunt end of Ruirui’s very reqing personality for four days.

I thanked Ruirui and she hurried off to her train, and Jess waited with our bags while I went off to find food for our 15-hour train ride. A little bit of the stress came back—you’re going to Sichuan; what are you going to do there, buddy? was the dialogue in my brain—but before long we were jogging along the train platform, struggling with bags that just got heavier with presents as the journey rolled along, and when we got on the train again and started rolling, the stress was gone again. In Sichuan we would see Jiuzhaigou, which a Chinese friend had once described to me as the most beautiful place he had ever seen.

After I left Xi’an Zhangrong kept in touch with me by text message, and at one point I mentioned that I would miss Jess when she went back home. Zhangrong sent me back this message:

“We have a saying in Chinese: Now you’re ‘someone who has left his home behind’. There will definitely be times when you’ll feel lonely. The life here isn’t the same; your friends aren’t the same. When Jess goes home of course you’ll be sorry to see her go. If you like, we can be your family in China. And if you don’t go home for the New Year holiday, you’re welcome to come back to Xi’an or to my hometown and spend it there. We would really welcome you!”

Zhangrong, in fact, is from the South, Hunan Province. So I felt, after reading this message, that I had proof that indeed, southerners could be reqing, too. There was little chance that I would be able to go to Xi’an again, but Zhangrong, like Ruirui, was just very friendly and maybe curious, and just happy to spend time with us. There was no other reason for her to play host to us for three days. This was the kind of thing, for me, more than things like The Forbidden City or the Great Wall, or even the amazing food, that always made China worthwhile. A good place to be. Americans, of course, can be reqing too, but it was particularly meaningful to receive this kind of a welcome from someone so different from us, and from so far away.

That night, our first night on a train, we both slept a little fitfully, but the best of our trip was yet to come. Sichuan and Yunnan, we were about to learn, had the north beat hands-down in terms of travel.

But I’ll get to that tomorrow, when we go to…Chengdu, the spiciest city in China.

Next stop: Sichuan! Tibetan towns, and some real natural beauty.

I picked up my cousin the next morning in the Beijing airport, and she was hungry, so we made the obvious choice for her first meal in China: Burger King.

My cuz took a direct flight from San Francisco, but for some reason they had a parking lot walk-thru deplaning experience. This led her to believe, until we flew from Yunnan to Shanghai, that in China they didn't have those gates that connect directly to the plane.

This was my first chance to have the BK in China, and it was exactly the same as back in the U.S. Definitely flame grilled. Definitely too much mayonnaise. Definitely at least 7,000 calories per burger.

Here’s the funny thing about Western food in China: Chinese people, in general, don’t eat it. (Some Chinese people love McDonald’s and eat there every day, I know, but for the most part, no.) And the funny thing is that they generally have the same reaction to Western food that Westerners have to Chinese food.

Like this: You go to China, and somebody orders lunch and they order chicken claws. Or duck’s blood. Or fish air bladder. And put it on the table. Think of three things: what would be the expression on your face? What would you be thinking? What would you feel about eating these things?

We ate our fair share of fast food, like any good goddamn American.

I’m pretty sure most Westerner’s internal reaction would be a quickened heart-rate and the thought, blaring through their mind: Oh my god I can’t eat that what am I supposed to eat!?

OK, my point: This is the reaction many Chinese have when they see these things: Cheese, chips, pasta. They look at it like it’s dog food, and you are an asshole for even considering eating it.

So when my cousin started describing her eating habits back home, and her passion for Burger King, and particularly when she mentioned that her boyfriend goes to Burger King so often the servers have memorized his order, I knew that this trip was not going to be about exploring the many wonderful dimensions of Chinese food.

Which is, honestly, 50 percent of the reason for coming to China. For battling the crowds. For dealing with rudeness in the street and an incomprehensible language. For dealing with pollution and tourist destinations that take days to get to. The reason, so many days, is just food. You can get some of the most amazing food on earth here for dirt cheap. Some of the weirdest snails, fish, food that’s spicy or mild, barbecue that will strip your stomach lining, noodle soup that will put the color back in your face. If you’re interested in food, and you’re willing to take risks, the palette of flavors here will blow your mind. And the joy of discovering new and weird foods after being here for years and trying everything will never cease. It’s awesome. I’m not even a “foodie” – whatever the hell that term means – and I love it.

On the high-speed rail from the airport to the big city.

But if your idea of a good meal is a Burger King #3 with sweet and sour sauce (and I have nothing against that diet choice; everybody has the right to choose his or her own food), you are not going to enjoy it. You are probably not going to eat anything weird by Chinese standards.

Anyway, we ate Burger King. And then we got on the high speed train back to the city. And then we got on the subway and began to slog through the unbelievable crowds. Jess and I spent about five days in Beijing, and by the end of it both of us were literally afraid of the subway. It was so packed that we both had immediate feelings of fear and despair whenever we saw a subway entrance. I didn’t realize this was happening until the end of the trip, otherwise we would have taken more cabs, but such is life.

That first day we didn’t do much; we got communications set up with home so that Jess could let everyone know she had arrived safe, and chilled out. I was feeling sick from some super spicy noodles I had eaten the day before anyway, so I didn’t mind.

Jess’s first night in China was somewhat like everyone’s: she got to sleep OK but woke up several times in the night, and woke up very early in the morning. I was still passed out so she passed the time quietly, and eventually I woke up and we tried to find breakfast.

Our beautiful hostel, the Beijing Templeside Guest House.

That day after we got up and about we decided to go check out the 798 arts district in Beijing, which was a long street full of galleries displaying art that ranged from OK to Good. There was nothing spectacular, but it was interesting to see what modern Chinese art consists of nowadays. The street included a gallery that showed posters of North Korean propaganda, most of it old. Posters displayed North Korean soldiers aiming guns at Americans and Japanese. My favorite featured a Korean peasant woman standing with her arms outstretched, between her arms a pile of food—bread, canned goods, beverages, and what looks like canned meat—with the caption: “Corn is the raw material for many products” (in Korean).

The Temple of Heaven has got to be one of the most peaceful places in Beijing. That is, if you slip away from this part, the touristy section, and walk through the huge park that surrounds it and see all the old folks sitting alone practicing erhu and other instruments, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups.

This gallery was small and weird, and taking photos of the posters weren’t allowed. There was a private room just off the small gallery where a Chinese man was standing, evidently sorting through papers. The room was full of piles of propaganda materials and relics that had come from Korea.

I said hello and let myself into his office.

“These are all from North Korea?” I asked in Chinese.

“Yes,” he said.

“Are they old or new?”

“They’re all old,” he said.

“How did you get them here?” I asked.

“I went to North Korea,” he said.

He was a middle aged man, handsome and tall for a Chinese, maybe five feet eight. Obviously he was pretty terse when it came to talking about his business.

“You went there yourself?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Is that difficult to do?” I asked, a little incredulous.

“Yes,” he said.

“How did you do it?” I asked.

I cannot overemphasize how great the Templeside was...pity it's going to close.

“Yeah, it was a big pain. It was really hard. But it’s business,” he said. “Just business.” As if that explained everything.

I nodded and left his office. After two years in China I guess I’ve become used to this level of response from folks, even about topics that are super interesting: One or two words, something vague and meaningless. Most American collectors of old things like this would be happy to smother you with information about the object of their obsession, but this Chinese guy could only spare five or six words. Oh well, there was nothing I could do about it. I bought an overpriced postcard showing a reproduction of one of the photos and we headed back to the hostel.

Gotta love propaganda. One thing I like about America: despite the fact that most of us are idiots, at least we don't fall for this crap.

That night we had dinner with Natasha and Nick, Beijing style hotpot, which was great (although Jess, naturally, couldn’t eat it). We went back to the hostel to get ready for the Forbidden City, which turned out to be a small disaster.

We slept in the next day and got to the Forbidden City late, and it was a teeming mass of screaming people, basically. The Forbidden City is enormous and expensive and hot, and it turns out that if you go there in the summer, you should get there at opening time in the morning or literally do not bother to go at all. It’s horrible. Please take this as a warning: go early in the morning or do not go. Again, it was horrible.

But I won’t write much more than that here, because this is just the number 1 tourist attraction in China, or maybe number 2 after the Great Wall. So there’s no need to write anything. Some people love it, some hate it. I fall on the hate side. It’s loud and crowded and miserable, and the tour guides spout meaningless drivel about the place. (This all wasn’t quite clear to me last year, but now I am certain of the diagnosis.)

The Forbidden City: not forbidden anymore, but maybe it should be, because it is tourist hell.

We went back to the hostel after an endless day of crawling through the Forbidden City, and relaxed. Beijing, and China in general in the summer, is full of cicadas, which form a huge roaring sound in the hot noontime sun. We realized that Emma, the girl in the hostel in Beijing, had bought a pet cicada and was keeping it in a small cage hanging from one of the small trees in the courtyard of our hostel. I chatted with Bobby, one of the owners and she told me that the hostel would be renovated. She told me that the hostel, prior to their occupancy, had been a home for several families. The center of the courtyard had been full of small brick structures that people also lived in. But soon it would all be torn down.

I asked Emma what she thought of this, curious at how the people who worked here would feel about this courtyard house (which was originally hundreds of years old but which had been renovated over the years anyway) being rebuilt. “I think it’s good,” she said. “When they’re done it will be better.”

The cicada in the tiny cage that the hostel kept...just for kicks. Emma said they fed him cucumber, and his name was "Guoguo", and it seemed like she spent a lot of time shushing him. Cicadas are loud.

So we soldiered on. The next day we tried to go to the Great Wall, but couldn’t make it because we got started too late, so we tried to go to the military museum, but it was closed on Mondays, so we went to the Temple of Heaven, which was nice. That night I went to a club with Natasha and Nick called “Chocolate”, a Russian club in Beijing that offers live music (in Russian) every night. The place was only half-full but it was awesome. The music was really good and we got a hookah for pretty cheap, the drinks were OK and they actually got me to dance, which happens once every time an angel in heaven gets killed by the devil, who punishes those on earth in celebration (by making them see me dance; usually three or four angels have to die to make me sing in public).

The next day we went to the Great Wall. We went to Mutianyu Great Wall, which is the one I would recommend. It’s not so complicated to get to. You take a public bus to a small city outside Beijing called Huairou, and then when you get to Huairou you hop off the bus anywhere and get into one of the cabbies offering rides to Mutianyu. It’s 20 yuan per person, or something like that. The ride is nice, and I remembered it from the year before. One thing we did that was new was go up the side of the wall that had a SLIDE you could ride down. This is, I have little doubt, the best slide in the world. Do not go to Beijing without doing it.

The Great Wall -- beautiful and worthwhile, as always.

And that was Beijing. We had dinner with Nataha and Nick again our last night there, and we left them at the subway. Natasha waved to us as our train pulled away, and she kept waving for a really long time. The last thing she said was, “It was nice being China buddies with you.”

For some reason when I travel, I get “emotions”, which meant that I was really sad to see them go. Natasha in particular had been one of my favorite people in China, but now she was leaving. And we were leaving Beijing. And soon I would be moving away from Sanming. Traveling boils your life down to two basic experiences: movement and change. And those can be two of the toughest experiences to deal with, as well as two of the best. So after 5 days in Beijing I felt, weirdly, like I didn’t really want to leave.

But there were things ahead in Xi’an, namely these: friends, food, and things to see. So we went to bed (it seemed like Jess was acclimating to the time change) and got ready the next day for our flight to Xi’an, several hundred miles west of Beijing, the old capital of China.

Tomorrow: Xi'an!

I didn’t post much this summer, so here’s a little photo overview of my summer.

I lived in this building for most of the summer in downtown Sanming.

This is the street market where I often bought breakfast...it closed around 8:30 so I often missed breakfast and was hungry in the morning.

I bought a mountain bike and spent a lot of time biking in the mountains around the city. One day I met a high school kid and he led me on an extra long tour around the area

I taught English to a bunch of primary school kids throughout the summer. They turned out to be ingrates and dropped my class as soon as the soon year started. Teaching primary school students turned out to be basically a failed experiment

I went to visit my friend Natasha in Guangzhou, China, about 12 hours away by bus. She's funny funny and great, also teaching English. This is her with a Chinese man in the Catonese Opera restaurant she took me to. The Chinese guy sang some opera song (hence the makeup) and then an old woman said a bunch of stuff to us in some dialect and then gave us 100 RMB and a piece of paper with what turned out to be her name and phone number written on it. Weird.

Guangzhou was a huge, modern city where the cops hassled me for no reason. It had lots of Western stuff including real hot dogs, though, which was nice.

Guangzhou also had a military school that I checked out and that was really boring and hot, and the kids in fatigues creeped me out, until they noticed the only foreigner on the whole island and I waved at them and remembered that they were just kids.

Guangzhou also had some pretty neat back alleyways.

The city is so huge, Natasha and I wandered into one of those alleyways and it was a city unto itself; it seemed to go on forever

Some mailboxes in the alleyway near the opera house.

Near the middle of the summer I developed a big burn-like thing on my arm that I thought was a spider bite. It turned out it was an acid burn from some kind of bug that contains acid in its body...if you kill it on your skin, it slowly burns you. It hurt like a bastard

Toward the end of the summer, some friends and I went on a daytrip to have a barbecue cookout in the mountains nearby

This was a supplement to the steady, perhaps excessive, diet of Chinese barbecue and beer throughout the summer. I don't know why the colors are so washed out in these photos...

Of course, MahJong (or in Chinese...majiang)...is a standard social outlet at all similar outings...but I can never participate because I haven't put in the time to learn yet and I am always a little too drunk to follow the rules by the time people start playing this at picnics and such...oy

The summer ended with a trip to the Fujian coast with a bunch of other foreign teachers working in Fujian. I made some new friends, and we visited a university in the area and met some students who cheered when we came in the room but were, of course, too shy to really actually talk to us

And we took a tour of a nearby river...most of the tour was spent on the bus, though, which sucked

The summer ended with yet another (!!!!) performance of TongNian (childhood), the song I have become slightly famous for knowing how to sing. I got a bit tired of being "informed" that I would sing the song at various events (rather than being asked) and a bit rudely told them that this time would definitely be my last time and asked them to confirm that. But I was fed up and a little rudeness was in order to get my point across

A picture with some of the students from the final performance

My mother took this picture, and I think it is the best one from the whole trip. The "BJ" stands for Beijing, of course. I have no idea why these people look so serious.

Beijing: An unwelcome welcome, the storied wall and a big goodbye

Immediately upon arriving in Beijing, we got in a car accident. It was around eight in the morning and we had rented two cabs at the train station to take us to our hotel; I called the hotel and asked them if it was all right if we came and checked in early, and they said yes. I had booked us in a small hotel called the “Templeside Guest House”; which actually turned out to be a tiny hostel in one of Beijing’s thousands of tiny residential alleyways known as Hutongs.

The hutong where our hostel was located. A bit misleading, but the inside was nice.

The Hutongs in Beijing are a relatively famous attraction of the city; many of them are hundreds of years old and are packed with tiny apartments and convenience stores; really like little towns to themselves tucked away from the chaos of Beijing traffic. Really, I have seen these kinds of alleyway systems in Xiamen, too; they seem to exist in any city that is reasonably old and interesting. But Beijing has a lot of them, and I was interested in the Templeside hotel because it was located in a 600-year-old Beijing hutong (supposedly 600 years old).

Regardless of the age, it turned out that the hotel was definitely located in an obscure hutong, and so true in fact that when we arrived at the hutong, it really looked from the outside like nothing more than an alleyway, and it was hard to believe that we were supposed to go in there to find our hotel. On top of that, our cabs had stopped on the opposite side of the street and expected me and my family to unload our luggage and walk across four lanes of Beijing rush hour traffic to get there. So I told them we couldn’t stop there and to take us to the other side of the street. Which they dutifully did, and which went fine, until I heard a loud crash and the cab in front of mine – the one that held my mom, uncle and cousin – was hit in the passenger-side door by a bus.

We were trying to keep track of what day it was by counting on our fingers when we took photos. But after day 10 it didn't make sense anymore.

It was a low-speed collision and luckily everyone was fine (except for the cab’s door and front right fender, and probably the driver’s day, which were all ruined), but it was the first car accident I had been even incidentally involved in in China (aside from my drunken shouting at the road rage incident in Shanghai); and right after the accident a girl from the Templeside hostel came running out of the hutong shouting “Oh my god!” in unison with me, except I was adding more English expletives. Everything was OK, though; we grabbed our things from the cabs, my mom actually paid the driver who was now engaged in a heated argument with the bus driver, and we followed Emma, the young Chinese girl from the hostel, into the hutong to go to our new Beijing home.

I’ll spare words on the Templeside hostel except to say that it was awesome. I think it shocked my family at first to see that I had booked them in a hostel (even though it was an honest mistake on my part), but we all had our own rooms and bathrooms and the place had a great courtyard with a garden in the center, and we met more interesting people just lounging around in the courtyard than we did during all the rest of our trip in China. Which is how it always works with hostels. On top of that, the service was excellent and everything was a fraction the cost of what it would have been at more mainstream, more plush and probably physically more comfortable hotel. We got essentially free tour guide service from the four girls who ran the hostel, we got travel tips from other people at the hostel, and after three and half days of stay and a lot of meals eaten at the hostel our bill for three rooms was only around $500 USD (including two dozen beers, three breakfasts for the group of five, one dinner and a lot of coffees).

This is the base of the Mutianyu area where we took the tram to the top of the wall. The base was completely flooded with bloodthirsty vendors, but once we got to the wall it was mercifully quiet and surprisingly pretty empty of other people.

Beijing was hot from day one. After settling in the hostel that morning we went out and checked out the Forbidden City, which was beautiful but incredibly hot and crowded and in some sense just a dizzyingly large and rather beautiful place with a more-or-less boring history, at least as far as the history the tour guides know goes. It’s a lot of hooh hah about how many concubines the emperors of China had and where the concubines lived and where the emperor lived and you get little substantial stuff about the political significance of the place and the way the country was governed. Not that I know much about those things in relation to the Forbidden City anyway, but it would have been nice to learn more. Instead I learned stuff I already knew: the City is old, it’s big, the emperor lived there, he had sex with lots of women, the place was inhabited by eunuchs, it was forbidden to any guests for hundreds of years, etc. That’s about all there was to the story. We got a guide for 150 RMB because I was too hot to seriously barter, but I think it should have been 100 or less. Then, late in the afternoon, when we had all pretty much reached our limits of sweatiness and crankiness, my uncle and cousin disappeared into the crowd somehow, and I stood with my parents for 10 minutes scanning faces in the crowd before we decided to just give up and go back to the hotel, which we did.

The two things the Forbidden City has going for it are that it is huge, and that it is symmetrical. There's a lot of history, but on the scorching hot day when we went, I just felt like getting out of there. I had had all the scorching hot hugeness and symmetry that I could take.

When we got to the hotel we immediately started drinking, and this didn’t stop until about 6 hours later after we had finished an enormous Brazillian steakhouse meal in Beijing and returned to the hotel, and I realized that I was completely exhausted, drunk, and had pretty much been completely sapped of optimism and energy. We had really not stopped moving for over 40 hours, since the night previous we had slept on the train, and everybody seemed to be on everybody else’s nerves in the group after a difficult day. Eventually I slept, but it wasn’t restful, and I realized I was beginning to get worn out from the constant motion – it had been over a month since I had really had any time to relax and do nothing, which is a long time of constant activity for me.

A quick group shot on basically the final destination of our epic tour, the idiosyncratic, at time successful and at times useless Great Wall of China.

The next day was better, because we went to the Great Wall. As I learned from Peter Hessler’s book, Country Driving, the Great Wall is actually not one wall but many, many different walls that sort of amble along northern China, from Beijing to Mongolia. But anyway the wall we went to was definitely the Great Wall – the one you see in pictures that is big and stone and stretches on to both horizons. We went to Mutianyu Great Wall by way of a rented taxi van driver whose number my uncle had got from the woman who cuts his hair in San Francisco.

The mighty explorers

It took us about two hours to get there, the taxi for the whole day was 600 RMB (the driver, Mr. Li, couldn’t really speak English, or just barely, so it was pretty much all Chinese with him), and Mutianyu was ridiculously beautiful and the tourists were beautifully few. We walked along the wall for a couple of hours, looking at the rocky peaks in the distance and the endless rope-like coil along the ridge’s edge, and fell into the spell. It was a lot like seeing the Grand Canyon – description doesn’t really prepare you for it, photos can’t really ruin it for you; you just have to go there, and when you see it you’ll definitely feel something.

Mutianyu Great Wall. Note the lovely relative lack of people

After the Great Wall we went to the Summer Palace, which was another loud hot crowded tourist attraction and beautiful, but I think we were all too hot and had lost the patience for it. We walked around a bit and then went home.

The Summer Palace. A ton of buildings and gates. Very pretty, but beyond that I didn't get it. We did see an old lady take an astonishing nose-dive into the side of a hawker's stand, though (sorry, no picture of that)

In the evening we ordered in and ate dinner at the tables in the hostel garden and watched World Cup soccer, and for me that was my favorite night of the whole trip – relaxing with other hostel people and chatting and eating in the garden, like an actual relaxing vacation and not a maddened race across China. We didn’t have enough nights like that over the trip but that was because there was so much to fit in – and that’s just how the trip had to be. There are so many things to see and do in China, it’s such a huge place. It’s got as much to see and do and experience as the U.S., maybe – it’s not like a smaller European country where you can get a feel for it in a week or so. It is a big, big, mother of a beast of a country that takes serious travel and serious patience and a serious willingness to push your boundaries. And I began to realize that the trip was almost over and we had done all those things and we had actually managed to see a huge swath of the country, and that we had made it to Beijing, pretty much to the end.

That day was my father’s birthday, July 5, and I borrowed one of the hostel’s bikes and went out in search of a place to get him a cake. I cruised up the road outside our hutong for about 10 minutes and found a bakery and ordered a cake for 75 yuan, and a half hour later I picked it up. I hadn’t had time to do more than that for his birthday, but I was happy that he was in China. It was definitely one of those things that you could never predict in life – a year ago, I would have never imagined that I would celebrate my dad’s birthday on the Great Wall of China. But that’s how it happened.

Tiananmen Sqare. I didn't even notice the cluster of umbrellas -- gotta credit my mom with a good eye for a good photo

The next day was our last day. Together, we went to Tiananmen Square and stood in the middle of it, and I had to ask a Chinese person if we were in Tiananmen Square to confirm that we were actually there. It basically looks like a giant, giant parking lot where no cars are allowed. It’s a bit more impressive than that, but that’s the gist of it. Then I went shopping with my mom, in the evening we went to a totally amazing acrobat show (which was also slightly disturbing to me because the performers appeared to have been performing the stunts since the age of 3, and I have seen street acrobat performers, children, performing in China and they can be a pretty depressing sight – often extremely poor, performing stunts that have twisted their bodies in unnatural ways, 5 year old children working all day doing stunts to try to feed their families, etc.), we ate Beijing roast duck for dinner, and then we all went to bed. I would get up in the morning at 3:45 to accompany my parents to the airport.

I got up in the morning and we found a cab right away outside the hutong even though it was 4 a.m. and pitch dark. The ride to the airport was 100 RMB and took about a half hour, and we made it on time. I was extremely anxious, really unaccountably so, and just figured I was feeling that way because I still had to bring my uncle and cousin to the airport and then later I would also be flying back to Fujian late in the evening. I also hadn’t yet found a hotel for when I landed in Fuzhou. But really it was because I was saying goodbye. I had gotten used to having my family with me, and what I had known would happen was happening – I had become happy and comfortable to be with them and then we were all shoving off again and going our separate ways, and it felt a little bit like falling back into a vacuum. Due to so many factors – language barriers, cultural differences, my newness to the place, economic differences, personality differences – there is still really no one in my city who I feel close to, who I really deep down trust and feel trusted by. Which is also how I felt a lot of the time in Oregon after college. So saying goodbye to people who I hold dear initially wasn’t easy, and I knew it would take a while again to adjust back to my normal life.

This is just a photo of a poster of the acrobat performance, because we couldn't take photos in the show, but they did this trick at the end of the show. 14 girls together mounted a moving bicycle. It was crazy and the girl driving the bike was wearing a weight-lifting belt

But later that evening, around 10 p.m., I too was taking off from Beijing and headed south again. When I finally arrived in Fuzhou I encountered some very nice people who, at 3 in the morning, helped me find a hotel near the bus station for the night (as I expected might happen – Chinese people in strange cities, I find, are always totally willing to help a strange foreigner in need, maybe partly to practice their English but really just because of basic kindness); and in the evening on the eighth my bus arrived back in Sanming, the old familiar and yet unfamiliar place that I still call home. I was tired and had developed my second cold since the trip started, but I was back. I saw a familiar face soon after arriving, which helped soothe me, and then I went home and slept, and the journey was really, definitely over.

In the airport, waiting for my flight back South. I made the mistake of spending most of the last day in Beijing in the airport, waiting for my flight and writing this epic summary of our epic tour, after which point I pretty much passed out of exhaustion in the airport for the afternoon. Thus the genesis of this 10,000 word summary. Thanks for reading

The British Pavilion at the World Expo. The pavilions for almost every country (except the crappy U.S.A. pavilion, which looked like a Honda dealership) were interesting and kind of amazing -- even though the lines were so long we couldn't get inside any of them

(This is part 4 of a 5-part series.)

Shanghai: Mexican food, a rainy World Expo and a ride on the bullet train straight north

We took a van from Sanming to the Fuzhou airport, and paid 1,500 RMB for the privilege, which is about 1,000 RMB (or $140) more than we should have paid, but we were running late and I was exhausted and not in a position to argue, since I had not planned the van in advance and had to rely on a friend to book it for me.

The sun was finally out full and it was hot, but we stayed cool in the van and arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare. We arrived in Shanghai in the late afternoon and checked into our hotel, which was the luxurious and very western Aston Hotel, or, in Chinese, the Pu3 Jiang1 Fan4 Dian4. The Aston claims to be the first westerner-run hotel in Shanghai, and it seems to fit the part. The building is old European-style architecture and looks like something from England or France (sorry, my architectural knowledge and therefore language is pretty tepid here). It’s European-y. And comfortable. And has a good western breakfast. The only problem is that most of the people who stay there are not Chinese, so it’s kind of like a foreigner’s hiding spot in Shanghai. If you visited China and you only stayed at the Aston, you wouldn’t really have visited China.

The ritzy restaurant in the lobby of the Aston Hotel. The hotel was great and comfy -- but the waters in the lobby were 25 RMB (you can walk out the front door of the lobby, go a block to the left, and buy the same water for 1 RMB)

As a consequence, we ate western food for dinner both nights in Shanghai. Which was actually great. The first night in Shanghai we went out for Mexican, after I had complained our whole trip that there was no real Mexican food in China. It turns out, I was wrong. There is one real Mexican food restaurant in China, and it is called the Cantina Agave, and it’s located somewhere in Shanghai not far from the French Concession. We ate nachos and burritos and tacos and taco salad, and everybody’s meal was good, and my uncle and I had a couple of shots of tequila. As always is the case when eating western food in China, the bill was a king’s ransom compared to what it would have been for a Chinese meal, and probably almost as big as the bill for the unbelievable meal we had in Sanming. But it was good Mexican, and I think the whole group was craving something other than Chinese food for the evening.

Cantina Agave! Delicious Mexican food in China (perhaps the only delicious Mexican food in China)

We only stayed in Shanghai for 48 hours, which was not long enough to see a whole lot of the city. It was just long enough to see that the pollution is pretty bad (about a half-mile visibility on the day we arrived) the tradmark Oriental Pearl Tower building is really just a dirty cement monstrosity, the cab drivers are maniacs, and the foreigner/food scene is awesome. We also saw a road rage incident in which a Chinese guy driving a car rammed an unmanned motor scooter and proceeded to plow the scooter with the bumper of his car all the way to the sidewalk. (The driver of the scooter cut him off, and when the car honked at the scooter, the scooter parked in front of the car, got out, and walked to the driver’s window to confront him, so really he had it coming – but still this was after I had had two shots of tequila and a couple beers, so I responded by snapping a lot of pictures and shouting mocking obscenities at the driver of the car.)

I think the thing that set me off about this driver (of the car) was his reckless disregard for all the people standing around in the street. No one got hurt, but someone could have...even if it is hilarious that he put that jerk motor-scooter driver in his place in the most direct possible way

Our last day in Shanghai we went to the World Expo. But we didn’t get there until late in the afternoon because most of our group was by now suffering from diarrhea, including me. And by the time we arrived, the place was packed and the lines for all the interesting countries’ pavilions were all over three hours long. So we walked around, saw the interesting buildings and the huge, huge Expo campus, my mom bought a T-shirt, I bought a cap, it rained on us, and then we left. It’s hard to say that the Expo was a letdown, because I knew the lines would be long and I knew we didn’t have enough time to really do anything, but still – it’s a long way to go and a lot of expense to see a bunch of fancy buildings that are just going to be destroyed in a few months’ time. Even if we could have gone inside, I have a feeling I would have felt the same way. But maybe not. A follow-up trip to Shanghai might be in order to confirm.

A snapshot at the Shanghai World Expo!

The highlight for me in Shanghai, however, was the fabric market (mian4 liao4 shi4 chang3). On our first full day in Shanghai my mom and pops and I went there to look for gifts and cheap tailor-made clothes, and it did not disappoint. I had heard on ChinesePod.com that you can get custom-tailored men’s shirts there for 80 RMB, or about $12, and I wanted to check it out because it’s hard for me to find shirts that fit my fairly thin, tall frame.

It was awesome. The fabric market is just a huge marketplace where individual tailors stand and shout at people passing by and try to get them to stop and order a suit or jacket or shirt. You basically just go in and find a tailor and negotiate a price (you want to do that first – they will try to draw you into making decisions about your clothes before you name a price, because that gives them a huge advantage in the negotiations, i.e. you’ve already made all your decisions with them and you don’t want to go to someone else and do it all over again), they take your measurements and the following day you can pick up your custom-made piece.

I got a lot. I got a beautiful brown wool overcoat that fits me perfectly for 350 RMB, a little over $50. I got a 3-piece blue suit with thin lapels that looks pretty modern and cool and fits me perfectly for 650 RMB, or almost $100. I got two dress shirts, one black, one blue-and-white-striped, for 80 RMB each (about $12 each) and a casual blazer for 300 RMB (around $40). And an extra suitcase to carry it all for 200 RMB (around $30). The only adjustment that needed to be made when I picked up the clothes was the sleeves of the suit, and it took about 20 minutes. Everything else was nearly perfect. The pants of the suit, especially, fit me better than any pants I’ve ever owned. In total I spent around $250 for the clothes, which is a laughably small amount considering what I’ve been willing to pay for awkwardly fitting, relatively ugly clothes back home when I couldn’t find anything better. So, in summary, the Shanghai fabric market has officially replaced all other clothing stores in the world in my mind. (The address is: 399 Lujiabang Rd; see the link above  for more info.)

The Shanghai skyline. That big pointy building is the Oriental Pearl Tower. And yes, it's not that far away, but it looks like it is, because of the smog, and the smog seemed to be at least that thick for the duration of the trip

We picked up the clothes on our way to the Shanghai northern train station, to board our bullet train which would take us to Beijing overnight. The bullet train goes 124 mph (200 km/h) and travels the 800 miles (1300 km) from Shanghai to Beijing in about 10 hours. It wasn’t cheap – the tickets ran about $130 USD to buy in advance, about the same as what plane tickets would have cost – but it was interesting and I slept incredibly well. There’s something about sleeping on trains that I love, and the bullet train was the best. It’s the white noise, partly, and also the rocking motion that the train makes – it all combined to create excellent sleeping conditions. So after boarding I immediately fell asleep and woke the next day with the train almost in Beijing and my pillow covered in drool. (Note: when you board the bullet train, you take all your bags on you, as with normal trains in China; you don’t check them, you just stow them under the sleeping car berths.)

The bullet train (D train) rocketing north toward Beijing

Surprise! They have Walmart in China, too. Although I've only seen this one, in Xiamen, which is one of the wealthier cities in the country. (It looks pretty much like a Walmart inside, too.)

(This is part 3 of a 5-part series.)

Sanming: A journey back home, this time with people from home-home in tow

It had been raining in southern China for about a month, and as we headed towards the Guilin airport it started to rain again. Our flight was delayed again, as had the flight from Shenzhen to Guilin, but took off after only an hour or so delay, and we landed in Xiamen, where I had planned for us to go directly to the train station and catch a sleeper train to Sanming, which would put us in my town around 6 a.m. the next morning (I had first done this with my friend, Natasha, when she visited me from Guangzhou in the spring).

But those plans were ruined when we got to the station and the ticketseller informed me that due to flooding, the train was closed and would not open again for at least a week.

This left me standing in the middle of a train station in China, with four of my family members, and no other English speakers in sight or really friends to speak of in the city, wondering how the hell we were going to get to Sanming with the trains out and wondering where we were going to sleep, exactly.

The issue was not totally easy to resolve, but after about 30 minutes we were at a hotel, we had rooms, and we were planning to go to the bus station in the morning to take a bus to Sanming. There was a bit of a mixup in the middle there – the only hotel address I had in Xiamen turned out to be an unregistered hotel and the cab driver refused to take us there, so I asked him to take us to a different hotel – but it went fairly smoothly and the only bad thing about it was that now we would only have at most several hours in Sanming and we had to sleep on rock-hard beds in Xiamen for a night.

The sun-drenched city of Xiamen from the hotel window (I don't remember the rain stopping during this part of the trip, but it must have temporarily.)

The next morning, the earliest bus we could get was 12:30 p.m., so my uncle and cousin and I cut out of the bus station for an hour or so in search of coffee, food, Internet access, and a bank to exchange money. Along the way we stopped at the famous peanut soup shop on Zhongshan Rd in Xiamen that every Chinese person I have been with in Xiamen has taken me to. The place is interesting – it kind of dirty and is always super crowded and loud and exhausting; it’s not really the kind of place that appeals to me at first. But after you’ve been there a couple of times you notice that it appears to be one of those magical food establishments – a sort of nexus between different classes and breeds of human beings that attracts all types regardless of their status or background. Among the churning masses that shove and squirm to get the sugary-sweet and piping hot peanut soup you find cops, old ladies, young punky Chinese kids, families, women in high heels, fat middle aged guys, everybody. And the place has a kind of ruthless soup-Nazi feel to it; you take a coupon at the register for whatever you want and then give the soup/snack counter your coupon and they give you your volcanically hot food. And then you struggle to find a bench to sit down on among the teeming masses. The place is a headache and a nightmare in a way, but it’s definitely an experience and the people watching is better than maybe anywhere else I’ve seen in Fujian.

Eventually we returned to the bus station and hopped on the bus back to Sanming. When we all first got on the bus it was like an oven inside – literally, it was probably 130 degrees Fahrenheit or more. It had been sitting with the engine off in the scorching southern China sunshine for hours and they had allowed us to board without starting the air conditioning. So immediately everybody dumped off the bus and let it cool off inside, and then we reboarded again.

The Fujian landscape as viewed from the bus on the way to Sanming

Chinese buses are actually fairly comfortable and I think my whole group was pleasantly surprised at first. The long distance buses, as far as I have encountered, are not the hard-backed bench seating arrangements you’re likely to see in a movie about China. They’re basically Greyhounds, except maybe a tad dirtier and smellier and with A/C that may not function as well. So the 4.5 hour trip from Xiamen to Sanming was uneventful and, around 5:30, we pulled into our hotel in Sanming.

The hotel itself was unfortunately quite bad (a friend helped me book it and I made the mistake of trusting him completely without checking out the hotel for myself – I have seen way nicer hotels in Sanming), but the dean of my department at the college had booked a dining room for us in the hotel, and prepared the most elaborate, expensive and delicious Chinese meal I have ever seen or eaten. Pretty much all the teachers from our department attended, which meant that there were about 15 of us including my family at table. The meal was fish, expensive snails that I had never seen before, jellyfish, several pork and beef dishes, several vegetable dishes, a few soups, crab, prawns, and several other traditional Chinese dishes that I have since forgotten. It was amazing, and I have no idea how much it cost, but it must have been at least 1200 RMB (somewhere around $200). Which is like spending over $1,000 on a meal in the U.S. – it’s a serious all-out eating fest. And, of course, there was lots of drinking, and for some reason the dean especially took a liking to my uncle, who explained a bit about California and San Francisco and some other things about the U.S.

After dinner it was time for the event that later my uncle said was the most meaningful part of the trip for him, to which everyone seemed to agree – that was meeting my students. It was after 9 p.m. when we finally made it to my teaching building, and I knew that the students had been waiting for around an hour at least, and I and my family members were still a little intoxicated from the drinking at dinner. But when we arrived in the classroom we got the usual explosive, more-or-less screams-of-delight greeting from the group of 50 students and then my dad and mom and uncle and cousin mingled with the students for about an hour. At the beginning I just introduced my family members to the class and explained that I hoped the students practiced their English; and they could say anything they wanted except “My English is very poor”. So they mingled and talked and I think my family was just as amazed, if not more so, by the experience.

The thing is, and really I’m just parroting my uncle here, that the students come across as so enthusiastic here in this part of the country (especially in a place as rural as this, where the students perhaps didn’t even expect to get to go to college, much less have experiences learning from/with foreigners) that it is impossible not to compare them in your mind to the cynical, bored, uninterested students in wealthy cities in the U.S. – or even relatively wealthy cities in China, for that matter. My friend Natasha had the same reaction when she came to Sanming from Guangzhou – her students were all spoiled city kids and she spent most of her time trying to keep them from misbehaving, whereas with my students I don’t even have a shadow of a problem like that. The students are so well behaved and so hard working it is a little scary. And they are so enthusiastic about everything I bring to the classroom that it is hard for me not to become completely spoiled by them.

The exhausted family arrives in Sanming -- but barely gets to see it in the daylight

So my family met the students, and after about an hour I finally decided that it was time to head back to the hotel when I noticed that my father, soaked in sweat, had begun distributing hugs to very happy students. I’m sure the students were happy to get hugs, but we were all tired and extremely hot, white family and Chinese students alike – the students were just as soaked in sweat as the rest of us – and it was time to go.

As we left I realized that I had left the keys to my apartment back at the hotel, which was a 40 minute cab ride away, and that I still had to get our World Expo tickets and some fresh clothes out of my apartment. So we went back to town, I left my family in the hotel and then headed back out to return to the school. I made the cab ride back and opened my apartment door and again it looked a bit unfamiliar after just six days away – that feeling of having left this somewhat shabby world and gone into a much cleaner, brighter one temporarily – and then I grabbed my things and left.

A typical Chinese town as viewed from the van on the way to Fuzhou.