The fun never stops

The CIEE semester ends in 10 days, so everyone else is going home soon, so of course we have to have lots of activities together before we part! Monday night I went with Kim to a free Darlene Schzech and Hillsong concert at the theater where the other branch of our church is located. It was super fun and awesome and energizing even though we had to wait in line for like an hour to make sure we got tickets before they ran out. Afterwards we went for Indian food and it was delicious and a good end to a highly satisfying day.

Tuesday night Zub (a nearby club frequented by foreign students) was closing down, so we went to pay our respects by dancing and dancing and dancing some more! My legs are still sore, but it was super fun and I saw tons of people I knew there and it was a happy foreign student time.

Yesterday was chill...I met with my tutor in the evening (I love her! she's so cute! I'll be so sad to leave her and my other Chinese friends) and then met up with my classmates from Hanyu at Pepper, this really chill Korean place, and we just hung out and talked in Chinese a whole bunch and I ate the most bizarrely round and symmetrical onion rings of all time, which were surprisingly delicious. Hooray!

Today my weekend started when I got out of class at noon, so I'm thinking tonight will be another night of dancing and just hanging out with my CIEE friends because the semester is winding down...tomorrow I have to get up early to get out to the Indian embassy (it takes about an hour to get there) so I can apply for my visa since they only accept visa applications 9-11:30 M-F. I really hope the whole thing works out smoothly. After that I need to go shopping for a bigger suitcase, because I have too much stuff to bring home! Even if I threw out everything I brought with me and just filled my suitcase with the things I've bought in China, I still don't know if I'd have enough room. Well, it would be tight, at least. I buy so much stuff but it's all so cheap! How can I resist.

I didn't renew my internet for the month of June because I'm only on campus for 10 more days, so I dunno how often I'll be able to post in the next little while, but I'm sure I'll figure something out, maybe involving internet cafes and whatnot. Hen hao.

Painting With All the Colors of the Wind

I had such a productive, fulfilling Saturday! In the morning I went for breakfast (somehow it feels like I'm achieving more when I actually go somewhere and get a Chinese breakfast than when I spread peanut butter on bananas in my room) and picked up my clean laundry and rode my bicycle and it was sunny and I felt like I had some good inertia for the day.

I was in a hurry, so I caught a cab to Wudaokou, where I was meeting the other people who were going to volunteer at the school for migrant children. We took the subway up to northern Beijing, then took a bus off into the middle of somewhere, I still don't really know where, then walked through the town to the school. It was in the mid-to-high 90s, so walking there was a super sweaty time, and even during volunteering I found that my clothes were soaked several times. Ewwww.

But whatever about the weather, because teaching at the school was sooo much fun. We have 2 sessions, one teaching English to teachers in the community, and one teaching random stuff to kids. Teaching English to the teachers is a great exercise for the linguistics part of my brain. Not only does it exercise my Chinese skills, but I realize new things about English as I'm trying to explain it. I was talking about the verb "come" and how sometimes you put a "to" after it, but there are 2 exceptions: if the destination is "here" or "there." My student said oh, okay, so can I say "come to home?" Ahaha, I said, actually there are 3 exceptions, "here," "there," and "home." I couldn't think of any other places that didn't require the "to," so I left it at that, but it made me wonder at the peculiarity of English. I'm so glad it's my native language, because English is mightily hard to learn. It's probably the most irregular language ever, due to its mixed roots in Germanic and Romance languages, and yet coincidentally it's becoming the global lingua franca for business. Who's idea was that? It would be so much more convenient if we all spoke Esperanto...

But as much as I enjoy the linguistic aspects, the part I really like about the teaching is my students. The teacher who I teach English to is so cute! Her name is Rose, although she has a tendency to forget what her English name is. She brings her little son with her to class, and is always looking to him for backup, since he takes English in school. Rose is rather shy about speaking English, but I explain things to her in Chinese and she diligently writes things down so she will be able to remember it when she's doing her homework. I just love working with her, and her son is adorable too. Yesterday we learned about the past tense. It was super.

After we work with the teachers for one session, we have a session with the kids. For yesterday's program we split the kids into two groups: one group did sponge painting, and one group divided up and had a contest to see who could build the highest tower using only a certain amount of paper, straws, and tape. The point of both activities was really just to encourage creativity, which isn't emphasized in Chinese elementary education the way it is in America. The kids had a lot of fun and got pretty ingenious building the towers, including the fabulous idea of taping the top of the tower to the ceiling and then building it down from there, which might be cheating, but you can't deny that it's creative! I think I had just as much fun as they did, and I confess that when we were painting pictures I was so engrossed in painting my own picture that I didn't give any kind of guidance or anything, but seriously, it doesn't require that much supervision to paint a picture. One of the little girls painted a huge, red sun, which all of the volunteers agreed was super Communist. Oh my.

After we were all done, the kids hung around by the chalkboard trying to show off their English knowledge for us by writing words and phrases on the board. They were very curious about us, and wanted to know how old I was (they guessed 25 at first, the only time anyone's ever overestimated my age in quite a while) and whether they should call me laoshi (teacher), ayi (auntie), or jiejie (older sister). I told them that I had a little brother who wasn't too much older than them, so I supposed I was young enough to be called jiejie. One little girl gave me the picture she had painted, and I was feeling pretty super.

After we cleaned up we had a little strategizing meeting, after which I went for delicious delicious pizza with one of the other volunteers. Today after church we also went to an Italian buffet, which marked the 3rd day in a row that I had gone to eat somewhere where they gave me a fork instead of chopsticks (the first one being Korean food on Friday). I feel a little guilty about that, but I don't eat Western food that often, so whatever. I have to admit, however, that I am really looking forward to getting some of that good old American food when I get home: hamburgers grilled in the backyard and tomatoes from our garden that aren't blatantly artificially colored and Christmas mint brownies and my mom's chocolate chip cookies...ahhhh. Of course I'm also excited for 6 weeks from now when I'll be getting home-cooked Indian food 3 times a day!

I finally got all my placement information about going to India, and I've got plane tickets (I have a stopover in Finland!) and this week I'll be going to get my visa and I just feel like everything's coming together, which is cool. I'll be working in an orphanage for boys in Delhi, teaching English and just generally helping out for 5 hours a day, and I'll be living with an Indian family and hopefully learning how to cook Indian food! I'm really excited...now all I need to do is find out how I can maybe learn a little Hindi before I go. There's a little language and culture orientation, but I want to prepare myself as well so I can kind of know what's going on. Lots to do, and I still have to find housing for the rest of my stay in China after my program ends...whatevs, everything is hen hao. :)

Incredibly Busy Thursday

So I had 2 tests on Thursday, and they're the last tests before the CIEE semester ends and they cut off my grades, so from here on out it should be relatively smooth sailing. Yesterday was the super-busiest day ever, though. I had stayed up until 4 studying, then woke up at 6 to study more, then went to 2 exams, chilled a little bit, then embarked upon a journey to the Indian Embassy to see how I could go about getting a visa to go to India this summer.

One of the things I like about living in a big city is public transportation. At home, public transportation is pretty much limited to the Link bus that picks up old people so they can go grocery shopping, and while Rochester has a bus system, it's not a very convenient one. Using Beijing public transportation can be time-consuming, but the very existence of a subway system makes me happy. The Indian embassy is all the way on the other side of town from my university, but I can take a bus from campus to the nearest subway station and then subway it all the way to the embassy district quite easily. I was quite pleased at my navigational success; I didn't make a single mistake in getting there. The dudes at the embassy were pretty cool, too. One guy was asking me all these questions about where I was going and what I was going to do, and I thought he was grilling me to make sure that I wasn't actually going for some unapproved purpose, but really it turned out that he just wanted to recommend good places for me to visit! I was probably just paranoid because my actual intention is to teach English, but I have to pretend it's just tourism so I can get the visa. The visa form had all these spots where you were supposed to give a reference from India and stuff like that, and I was worried because the only reference I might have in India is the office of the program I'm volunteering with, and that might be suspicious, but the man was like "oh if you don't have references in India, don't worry, just leave it blank." Then I was worried about where to get passport-sized photos, because I had no idea, but they pointed me to a place that was just down the street and I got them taken then and there for cheap. The photos even turned out well, unlike most ID photos - everything was just really convenient. The only annoying part is that the embassy only accepts visa applications Monday-Friday, 9-11:30 am, which is when I tend to have class. Silly embassy.

After I got my visa stuff figured out and my photos taken, I grabbed some mediocre baozi at 7-11 and headed back to campus. I got back in time to nap for about an hour, after which I headed to English Corner and then directly from English Corner to Ren Bai Ge's place where my Hanyu class was having a party. We hung out some and then went to Propaganda and danced and danced and some random Chinese man kept dancing with me and trying to talk to me but the music was so loud I had no idea what he was saying. Whatevs. Also some Germans saw me and thought I was German and tried to talk to me in German, at which point I reflexively responded in Chinese, without even thinking about it. It turned out that they didn't speak Chinese any more than I speak German, but I was pleased/amused that it's become somewhat of an instinct for me to speak Chinese. Although I was only running on about 3 hours of sleep total, I somehow managed to stay out until 2 am. Needless to say, today is a resting day.

This morning my roommate informed me that she heard me speaking fluent Chinese in my sleep, having what seemed to be a conversation with my teacher, although naturally she could only hear my half of the conversation. I thought that was pretty fabulous. Hen hao!

Racism, Sexism, and the Concept of "Face"

It's not like my trip to Xinjiang was the only time I've encountered racism and sexism in China, but it's much easier to find outside of my campus bubble. After all, Beida is the best university in China, so the people there tend to be better educated and less prejudiced, although even at Beida there are still people with very unfortunate mindsets.

Let me start by saying that the Han Chinese are incredibly racist. Yes, they have a long tradition of Chinese culture and they are proud of their noble country and whatnot, but that's no excuse. The main issue in Xinjiang is ethnic tension. Xinjiang is Uyghur country (its official name is still Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region), and it has been annexed by China and broken away from China and been re-annexed quite a few times. In order to prevent this sort of thing in the future, more and more Han Chinese have been moving to Xinjiang to dilute the ethnic Uyghur population. The Uyghurs and the Han don't like each other at all, and Han Chinese consider Xinjiang to be a dangerous place because of certain acts of terrorism committed by members of the independence movement. It's a bit of an exaggeration, though...I never felt particularly threatened during our trip, but maybe it's convenient that the Chinese are intimidated by Xinjiang: fewer tourists to get in our way. Hen hao!

At any rate, we observed some interesting ethnic relations during our trip. When we were going out to the border of Pakistan and discovered out in the middle of the desert that our lunch hadn't come along with us, our Han daoyou (who had gotten a call early in the trip about some bags of food left in the hotel, and had brushed it off) completely flipped out on our Uyghur driver, as if it was completely his fault that he didn't put the food in the trunk. The daoyou was also generally disrespectful to the driver, yelling at him for not understanding the place names that she was telling him, even though the Mandarin "phonetic translations" of Uyghur place-names are generally a complete butchery of the actual name. We felt bad for the driver, who was a pretty laid-back and good-natured guy, and we gave him a tip at the end. I also learned from our daoyou that Han and Uyghur children go to separate schools, ostensibly to help preserve their separate cultures. I could maybe accept that excuse, if it weren't for the fact that the Chinese government cut off secondary school funding for Uyghurs. That's not preserving culture, it's just giving the Uyghurs the short end of the stick. Interestingly, there's a sort of affirmative action program to help Uyghurs get into college, although if they can't go to high school how are they even going to make it that far?

As angry as we were at our daoyou for her disrespectful treatment of the driver, I also felt a little bit bad for her because, as a woman, she also had a hard time getting respect sometimes. When we were near the border of Pakistan, we had to pass through some sort of booth where we all showed our passports and such, but on the way back the men manning the booth had some sort of problem (I don't know what; everything was in order as far as I could tell) and started yelling at the daoyou. She hustled us along to the van and stayed to deal with the men herself, but she had a hard time of it, and she came back rather angry and frazzled, saying that it's hard to make your voice heard to men when you are a young woman (she was only 23!).

We were a little concerned before going to Xinjiang that the Uyghurs wouldn't like it if we spoke Mandarin, but I feel that they didn't hold it against me, at least, because I am obviously not Han nor any other kind of Chinese. So I got along fabulously with Uyghurs using Chinese, and I understood where the knife-selling man was coming from when he told me that I should buy his Xinjiang-made knives and not the low-quality knife that was "made in China."

In Urumqi the ethnic situation is also interesting because it's 80% Han, unlike Kashgar which is 80% Uyghur. In downtown Urumqi, we basically didn't see any Uyghurs, because they all live out in the slums. The Han Chinese seem to enjoy pretending to observe Uyghur *culture,* though, because our travel agency kept taking us to places run by Uyghurs where they'd demonstrate traditional Uyghur dance for us and then try to sell us things. You wouldn't believe the way the Chinese people eat that stuff up, but under the facade of their performance, I'm sure those Uyghurs dislike Chinese tourists as much as I did. Imagine what it would be like to make your entire living by exploiting your traditional culture to earn money from the people your culture traditionally hates and who treat you like second-class citizens. This idea occurred immediately to me, Richard, and Casey, but didn't seem to even cross the mind of anyone else in our Chinese tour group. As we left the second Uyghur vineyard that we went to that one day, our tour guide remarked to the bus that all the Uyghurs ever do is sing and dance and eat grapes - don't they have a comfortable life? Yeah right. Sing and dance and pander to patronizing bozo tourists. Sounds fabulous. Kind of like the "people zoo" in Beijing where they have people from all the minority groups and tourists come to look at them and see their *traditional lifestyle* and *culture.* I wish I were making that up...although now that I think about it, it kind of sounds like that one part of Disney World with all the different countries. Hmm. Anyway...

Han Chinese racism isn't just directed towards Chinese ethnic minorities. Some of the most ridiculous stories of racism I've heard are about Chinese prejudice towards black people. For instance, Alex, another student in my program, is black, and he's had times when women saw him walking down the street and quickly ran into a store to hide. Apparently the Chinese have the idea (they get it from the Western media, I believe) that black men are dangerous thugs. Alex's Chinese tutor is also incredibly racist, and tells Alex all kinds of crazy stuff. He came to a tutoring session once and told Alex that he had figured out why Africa was so poor: it's because Africans spend all their money buying Coke, and drinking Coke keeps their skin black (or Coke-colored, presumably). Another one of my American friends told me that in his apartment, the landlord had asked them not to have black guests anymore because it made the neighbors nervous. In addition, this kind of racism is built right into the Chinese language. Now, Chinese names for countries are generally phonetically transcribed into Mandarin syllables, and although there can be many meanings to a single syllable, whoever coins the Mandarin name for another country picks which characters (and therefore which meanings) represent each syllable. "America" in Chinese is Meiguo, which means "beautiful country." "Africa" is phonetically(ish) translated as Feizhou, but instead of using a nice fei like the one that means "to fly," they picked a fei with a strongly negative meaning (it's in words like "illegal," "rude," "blame," and "inhuman"). This discovery both offended and interested me, so much that I'm thinking about doing my linguistics honors thesis on the prejudices built into the Chinese language.

Race is also always an interesting issue for me personally, as a curly-blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white-skinned person in China. Occasionally people (generally service workers) don't acknowledge my presence because they assume that since I'm a foreigner, I can't speak Chinese, so they don't want to deal with me. Sometimes I get patronized a lot, like by the tour guide who would translate things into English for me (although she only knew enough English to translate the very simple things that I already understood in Chinese) or the guy at Mogao Caves who told me in broken English that I shouldn't be walking around without a guide, as if I were a child. The foreigner thing also means that people will try to charge me higher prices. On the other end, in some areas I get more respect because of the color of my skin. This was particularly apparent when traveling with Richard and Casey, who both have Chinese faces (although they are Americans). People more willingly offered me assistance with things like carrying my suitcase, and Chinese people frequently assumed that Richard and Casey were my guides, and sometimes wouldn't believe them when they said they were Americans. On the train to Dunhuang, a drunk man wandering around the train came over and rambled at Richard a bit about how we're all Chinese (even after Richard said he was American) and how we Chinese had to stick together and not lose face in front of the foreigner.

"Face" is an incredibly important concept in China. "Losing face" has approximately the same meaning as it does in English (losing one's dignity, being humiliated), but people are a lot more touchy about their "face." If you're bargaining for something in public where there are lots of people around to witness the transaction, it's harder to get a good deal because the vendor would feel that they lost face in front of everybody by letting you get the better of them, pricewise. On the train, a woman asked if her friend could switch beds with Richard because her friend was pregnant and had a hard time climbing up to her high bunk. There was a 4 kuai price difference between the two tickets, and our immediate reaction as Americans was "oh don't worry about it, it's only 4 kuai," but we quickly realized that if Richard didn't accept that 4 kuai, he would be causing the woman to lose face. The Chinese system of guanxi dictates that you owe someone for every favor they do for you, and for a grown woman to be indebted to some young kid is humiliating, a loss of face no matter the amount. We felt this to be rather silly and inconvenient, but it's such a large part of Chinese culture that it can't be ignored.

However, the most glaring example of Chinese prejudice was one we encountered while shopping in Urumqi. Richard and I were out buying fruit on the street while Casey looked for iPod chargers in a department store, and we noticed a man and a woman having a fight. The husband had taken away his wife's cell phone, and she was screaming at him to give it back. He refused, and in the course of arguing hit her several times (unfortunely, not the first time I've seen a man publicly hit a woman repeatedly in China). He dragged her down the street, trying to get out of the public eye, and Richard and I followed, afraid to intervene but not wanting to just let it go. A crowd gathered around them as the woman screamed and struggled, but as is typical, nobody actually did anything; everyone just stood and stared. Eventually a guard from a nearby hotel came over and separated the two, and tried to sort out the fight and get the woman to behave while she protested that she just wanted her phone back and she didn't want to go home with the man. While this was happening, a random older man from the crowd stepped up and started berating the woman for fighting with her husband in public and making him lose face in front of everybody. The poor wife was crouched on the ground, with an expression of such fear and anger as I've never seen on a human face. She looked like nothing more than a hunted animal, and in fact that man was treating her as if she were a dog. Richard and I were mad enough to spit fire, but we knew that, sadly, the entire male-dominated cultural and legal system was on the husband's side, and if we tried to physically intervene we'd probably get arrested or something equally inconvenient. Neither of us knew how to express what we wanted to say in Chinese, so for a while we yelled at the man in English. The crowd dispersed a little, and the couple moved around the corner of the building, and it looked like everything was going to calm down. We didn't want to just walk away, so I went to the girl and put my arm around her shoulders, wishing that my Chinese wasn't so inadequate to express all the things I wanted to say. Then we delivered our few coherent sentences of criticism to the husband and left; there was nothing else that could be done. In retrospect, even this small action was probably harmful in the end, because being confronted and criticized in public was another loss of face for the husband, and losing face in front of a foreigner is especially humiliating. I'm sure that the loss of face caused by our little bit of righteous indignation got taken out on the girl that night at home. It's kind of a good thing Casey wasn't there at the time, because she wouldn't have thought twice before slugging that man, and who knows what would have happened then. There was no way to win; we felt so frustrated and helpless. If that had happened in America, any woman on the street would have gone and slapped that man (I definitely would have), and even men would have had to take the woman's side. But this isn't America. Richard's words really hit home when he bitterly stated, "This is a time when I feel ashamed to be Chinese."

In the social bubble of the American Northeast, I'd never felt that racism and sexism were particularly big problems. I like to think that nobody I know would judge another person to be inferior merely because of their race or gender. Openly expressing a disdain for black people or beating one's wife in public is completely unthinkable and not at all socially acceptable. But I have to remember that my acquaintances at home are part of what on the global scale is a very small, well-educated elite. On the other hand, in China, the government doesn't provide schooling for the children of migrant workers, doesn't fund secondary schools for the Uyghurs, and only 2% of Chinese children make it to college. Unfortunately, without a decent educational system there doesn't seem to be much hope that China will be able to change its attitudes any time soon. Zhen bu hao.

The Toilets of Xinjiang

Sounds gross, but you can't deny that you're curious. I thought I had seen a pretty wide variety of bathrooms while living in Beijing, but traveling in Xinjiang took my experience to a whole new level. My little notebook where I wrote down our notable memories of the trip contains something in basically every day's entry about some bathroom or another. The Chinese word is cesuo, which literally means "toilet." There are lots of other nicer words, equivalent to the English "restroom" and such, but I feel that cesuo is the most accurate for what we encountered. No American bathroom I've ever seen can measure up to the sketchiness of the Xinjiang cesuos. Our first day in Urumqi, we were at Carrefour, a French-owned, fairly upscale grocery chain, and I was advised that I didn't really even need to ask directions to the bathroom, I could just follow my nose. It was unfortunately true. It was such a disgusting cesuo that even Chinese people were holding their noses. Hen hao.

When we were driving our little van out in the desert coming back from the Pakistani border, our daoyou kept asking us if we wanted to "sing some songs." This confused me at the time, although I later learned that it's a Chinese euphemism for going to the bathroom. Useful knowledge. We stopped for a bathroom break, and the daoyou pointed at some walls, the ruins of a house, and said that the cesuo was there. We wandered around the walls, expecting to find some hole somewhere, but there really was none, in fact there was nothing more than a very loosely defined trench-ish area behind the walls. Good times. It was a character-building experience.

Our hotel bathrooms throughout the trip, while not as sketchy public bathrooms by any means (they were among the only bathrooms we encountered that featured toilet paper), all had the interesting feature of a lack of a distinct shower. Apparently it is common in Asia for the shower to just be a showerhead somewhere in the bathroom, so the whole bathroom is basically the shower. This wasn't totally bad, and it was convenient to be able to put shampoo bottles on the back of the toilet while showering, but it's still kind of weird. Our hotel bathroom in Urumqi also had translucent walls and a door with no lock. I could see the TV from the shower, although I couldn't tell what program was on, but it was still rather unnerving.

Other bathrooms of varying quality encountered on our trip:
Random buying-stuff place in Kashgar, where I think they sold carpets - one of the nicest public bathrooms I saw. We were really excited about it. It even had soap. We were all advising each other to go to the bathroom because we were so impressed. Take a look:


















So maybe standards are a little bit different in China, all right? Besides, a picture can't capture lack of disgusting bathroom smell.
Wind farm bathroom - I mean, who really needs pesky things like stall doors, or stall walls that are more than 2 feet high? So inconvenient to build, and it gets in the way of those nice bonding experiences you can have with the person in the stall next to you.
Place we stopped at on the way back to Urumqi from the vineyards - hole in the ground with no stalls, just planks set across the hole to put one's feet on and a wall around it. 2-person capacity. Looking down: not recommended. Another interesting feature: Chinese lady who thought it would be more fun to wait inside the bathroom and stare at that foreigner going to the bathroom than wait outside.
Shopping mall in Urumqi - stalls had walls and some even had doors, but it was all still over one big trench. The whole trench flushes automatically at random intervals, so the waste from the person in the stall next to you might be flushing past you as you go to the bathroom. Lovely.
Urumqi in general - All of Urumqi is a cesuo, we decided. This entire city smelled like a giant public toilet. The median strips on the roads looked and smelled so sketchy that we jumped across rather than step on them.
Train - Train bathrooms are notoriously sketchy, but our train bathrooms were actually cleaner than almost all of the other bathrooms on the trip.
Hotel in Dunhuang, the one where we ate lunch, not the one we stayed at - I feel that hotels should have higher standards than normal public bathrooms, but this place was incredibly rank, and had both a non-functioning lock on the door and no lights inside. Hen hao.
Mogao Caves - we figured that since it's a UNESCO site, the bathrooms might be held to some kind of standard, like the rest of the place. We figured wrong. I walked in, took one glance, and decided I didn't need to go that bad after all.
Restaurant in Jiayuguan - looked fabulously sketchy from the outside, although honestly it was pretty normal inside:














Lanzhou University dorm - one randomly-self-flushing trench for an entire floor of women. Un-bathroom-related: also there are 8 students to one room. Makes you appreciate your living situation, doesn't it?
Top of the mountain in Lanzhou - No lights, sketchy puddle in one corner. Yuck.
Airplane - Who cares if it's like 2 square feet in size? There's soap! And paper towels! This is the fanciest bathroom EVER.

Getting back to my Western-style bathroom with a normal toilet and a normal shower that I only share with my roommate was such a relief. (Although Western toilets elsewhere in China tend to actually be less clean to use than squatty potties, probably because Chinese people don't use them correctly so they get...sprayed a little. Ew) The moral of the story is that if you have access to a vaguely clean, non-smelly bathroom that has things like toilet paper and soap and hot water and towels and privacy, count yourself lucky. There's no question; American bathrooms are a luxury.

Day 8: Lanzhou

Our train came into Lanzhou at 4 am. Fabulous. We trudged out of the train station, only to discover that there wasn't any daoyou waiting to pick us up. Again. It was cold and dark outside, but fortunately there was a little restaurant next to the train station that opened at 4:30 for just these situations, where we sat for a couple hours with our two other foreign friends without ordering anything.

Our daoyou finally arrived around 6ish, and informed us that the travel agency didn't have anything scheduled for us until 11. Whatttttt. She told us we could get a hotel room and go sleep for a couple hours, but it was 80 kuai and we didn't want to pay, so instead we got some breakfast (the traditional noodles of Lanzhou!) and set off on a slightly undirected adventure in Lanzhou. Our daoyou was actually a college student, and she was super cute and nice and let us leave our luggage in her dorm room since we didn't have a hotel. She gave us a little tour of Lanzhou University, which wasn't very interesting but it gave us something to do. At one point we saw a man pacing in circles and reading out loud to himself, and after some careful listening I determined that he was reading the Bible, which I found interesting. I hear it's a good way to sharpen one's English.

One of the major features of Lanzhou is that it's on the Yellow River (which is really a sort of rusty red color), and it boasts the first bridge over the Yellow River. Exciting, right? Our daoyou took us to see these huge water wheels powered by the river, which was kind of neat. There were a bunch of dudes with rafts that had some strange blobby pontoon-things on the bottom, which we learned were sheepskins. The raft man inflated one by blowing into its leg. We kind of wanted to take a sheep-raft ride, but it was still like 8 am and kind of cold out.

Spiffy water wheel:














There was a big old statue around this area that we decided to take a picture with, and I even climbed up on the statue for the picture. You wouldn't believe the way random Chinese people came out of the woodwork to take pictures of us. It was pretty silly.

On the other side of the river from the city of Lanzhou is a really nice, pretty little mountain with some semi-famous pagoda on top. We took cable cars up the side of the mountain (soooo much better than walking) and climbed up to the top where the pagoda was. It turned out to be a small and wimpy pagoda, but we were having such a nice, laid-back tour with just the five of us and our daoyou that we didn't really care. I don't think our daoyou was used to having tour groups like us, but we had a good time enjoying travel in a more college-studently way. We checked out some of the traditional gourds of Lanzhou that they put designs on by carving them or burning them or painting them or something (I forget), which was cool, and then we opted to take a zipline back down to the bottom of the mountain. Our daoyou got to go for free (tour guides get all tickets free at tourist attractions), although she was really scared to go, but the daoyou has to stay with her tourists, so she had to do it. It was super fun.

Overlooking the Yellow River and the city of Lanzhou, as photographed from a cable car on the side of the mountain:














After we had gotten back down the mountain, we tried to plan our afternoon. There weren't any activities left on our schedule, so we decided that maybe now we could consider that hotel room for a nice nap and a shower. It seemed that we could only go to one hotel (I don't know if the travel agency had a deal with them or if all the other ones were all booked up or what), but when the daoyou called to make a reservation they said that there wasn't any hot water for showering. Whoops. We decided that we could deal with that, we supposed, and in a flash of brilliance I suggested that she ask the hotel to give us a discount because there was no hot water. It totally worked. In the end, it was 30 kuai per person, about $4 American. Hen hao!

We had an incredibly delicious lunch in Lanzhou, although there was a wedding reception at the restaurant so they kept forgetting to bring us our food, but when the food came it was so amazingly good. All of the other Chinese food I've had in China just can't measure up. To add to the fabulousness of this day, after we picked up our luggage from our daoyou's dorm room, we got to the hotel to find that they did, in fact, have hot water, although Casey didn't realize it so she showered with the cold water anyway. Whoops. So we got hot showers (well, Richard and I did) and we still got our discount and we had a couple hours to nap. It was so excellent that our unhappy travel experiences of the previous days were just a hazy memory.

For dinner we went out for some traditional kind of Lanzhou noodle (different from the traditional Lanzhou noodles we had for breakfast). The restaurant we went to was run by Hui people, members of a Muslim Chinese ethnic group. Our daoyou informed us that if you get the noodles at a Han-owned restaurant instead of a Hui restaurant, they won't be very good. It was like our nang escapades all over again. The Han Chinese just can't make that minority food, apparently.

After dinner we caught a shuttle to the airport and it was back to Beijing...we got back to campus at about 2 am, although I was randomly compelled to clean my room/have a dance party for a couple hours while my roomie was still conveniently away on her May Break trip to Shanghai. It was a good time.

Annnnnnd that's the end of my May Break, except for the parts I left out because I felt that certain issues deserves separate posts, namely, racism, sexism, and sketchy bathrooms, all of which we encountered in abundance on our trip. Keep your eyes peeled.

Day 7: Jiayuguan

After eating a quick breakfast, we were off to the train station to hop a train to Jiayuguan, where the western end of the Great Wall is. On the train, we were sitting across from a family, and the little girl made friends with us and taught us how to count on our fingers in Chinese (there’s special symbols for 6-10) and helped us read a comic book and played Chinese and American hand-clapping games with us. She was awesome. Her dad, upon finding out that Richard’s parents were Taiwanese, prodded Richard about Chinese politics and the issue of Taiwanese independence for a while. It was one of the more pleasant interactions that we had with Chinese people on our trip.

It turned out that the family we hung out with on the train was also going to the Great Wall, so we hung out with the little girl while we were there, which was fun, especially when our tour guide let us hold the tour flag! I felt so important. The Great Wall itself was a little disappointing, however. When they said that we were going to where the Great Wall ends in the desert, I pictured a crumbling Wall sort of trailing off into nothing in some hot, dusty, middle-of-nowhere place. However, the Wall at Jiayuguan actually ended in a fort, and it wasn’t crumbling in any way; in fact, it had been reconstructed and was staffed by dudes who dressed up as guards and rode around on horses doing pretend military rituals. It wasn’t too desert-y either; the fort was actually surrounded by some nice gardens and a lake. Too bad.

Try some Wall, it's delicious!














That night, we were supposed to take a sleeper train to Lanzhou with our Japanese and Korean friends. However, when the daoyou gave us our tickets, they were hard seat tickets instead of sleepers, and they didn’t even have seat numbers on them, which means that you don’t actually have a designated seat and you just have to fend for yourself and hope that there’s some spot for you to sit. We were a little worried about this, but the daoyou pointed to a man who was hanging around nearby and told us just to follow him and we’d be okay. We weren’t sure exactly how that was supposed to work, but we followed him into the station anyway and waited for our train.

In the train station, there was an adorable little Chinese boy, dressed in the usual fashion for small Chinese children: 8 zillion layers of clothing and split pants as an alternative to diapers. We watched him run around and play, but at one point he stopped strangely. After a second of confusion we figured out what was going on: the little boy was peeing on the floor. His mother, spotting this, came over and scooped him up, but not before he left a decent sized puddle on the floor. To solve this, she went over into the corner, got one of those twig brooms that Chinese people are always ineffectually sweeping at things with, and swept the puddle until it was smeared over a larger area. Satisfied with her work, she went back to sit down. We were both amused and disgusted, and vowed never to touch the bottoms of our shoes ever, ever again. China is dirty beyond imagination.

The culprit:


















But back to our strange man and our train tickets. We didn’t really know anything about this man, except that he was carrying a bag of bananas and a bag of what appeared to be some kind of strange noodle, maybe? We all walked through the ticket check, but the employees didn’t even ask the man to present his ticket. He then gave the two bags to some railroad employee, although we didn’t catch any conversation exchanged between them. Sketchayyyyy. He waited with us on the platform, but when we tried to ask him what was going on all he would tell us was bie haipa (“don’t be scared!”). He took our tickets, and told us just to get on the train and wait. When the train came, we all got onto a sleeper car with our luggage, and the man disappeared. We waited and waited, and they even pulled up the stairs and were preparing the train to leave, and our man hadn’t come back yet. As the train was just about to leave, the man came running back and gave me a handful of tickets through the train door. Magically, he had procured hard sleepers for me, Richard, and Casey, and soft sleepers for our two friends.

What was up with our sketchy man? Why was he even there? Although it was confusing at the time, it’s become clearer to me in hindsight: So, the man has some kind of guanxi with the people at the train station. To review: guanxi literally means “relations,” but in this case it more accurately means that he’s got connections at the train station who owe him a favor. The travel agency has a deal with the guanxi man. They charge us as if they’re getting us sleeper tickets, but then only buy us hard seat tickets, the cheapest kind. The guanxi man uses his guanxi (and bananas) to get our tickets upgraded, and in exchange the travel agency gives him a cut of the profit they’re making off of us. The guanxi man wins, the travel agency wins, and the confused tourists probably never exactly know what happened. Interesting times, but you have to expect such things. After all, this is China.

The train that we took that night was due to arrive in Lanzhou around 4 am, so we went to sleep as soon as possible, although before I fell completely asleep I got an unsuspected phone call from my mommy, who wanted to know where exactly I was in western China (I hadn’t exactly provided any specifics, and it’s kind of a big place). Unfortunately my phone ran out of minutes before too long, but it wasn’t so bad because I needed to sleep anyway, and there was only one more day of our trip, so it wasn’t too hard to deal without my phone. Hen hao!

Day 6: Dunhuang

We're officially out of Xinjiang at this point - our train arrived in Liuyuan, Gansu Province at some obscenely early hour and we were immediately shoved onto a bus to Dunhuang. The travel agency was scheduled to provide us breakfast, but they never did. Richard and I, banking on the fact that we would be stopped in Liuyuan for at least long enough to get breakfast, decided to wait until we got off the train to go to the bathroom. This was a bad decision, because there was no (discernible) bathroom in the train station, no stop for breakfast, and a 2 hour ride in the jouncy backseat of a bus full of Chinese tourists before we got to somewhere with a bathroom. We distracted ourselves by telling riddles, which was admittedly a pretty fun time.

We stopped at a hotel to go to the bathroom, although since we weren't staying there we didn't really have a place or opportunity to do things like change our clothes or brush our teeth. Traveling in China seems to involve a mandatory lowering of personal hygienic standards. I learned to appreciate my toothbrush so much more. We thought they were going to give us breakfast at the hotel, but they didn't. Nice.

From Dunhuang we took a bus out to the Mogao Caves, a group of caves carved into the mountain with big Buddhas and cool paintings inside them. There was a small fiasco over tickets because, on the way there, we had asked the tour guide if there were student discount tickets and she totally ignored us, but when we got there, saw that there was an 80 kuai student discount (that's a lot of money!), and asked her to get us student tickets, she said that it was too late and she had already bought the tickets. I was really annoyed because the travel agency we went through was a student travel agency and should have known that we could get student discount tickets, and then it wouldn't have been so expensive. Grrrr. I wanted to go back to the ticket counter and argue for a refund, but Casey really didn't want to bother, so we took the alternate route of being grumpy.

Mogao Caves are actually a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so the people who worked there spoke some English, and all of the exhibits in the little attached museum had English on them, which was nice for a change. I even got scolded in English by an employee for looking at a cave on my own, without a tour guide. There didn't seem to be any good reason why this wasn't allowed...Communism, maybe?

But yeah, Mogao has the second biggest Buddha in China (the first is somewhere in Sichuan Province), and it's carved out of the mountain inside a big cave, and it was pretty awesome. Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take pictures at the caves, so you'll have to take my word for it: it was cool. It's a really good thing that UNESCO protects that site, because they took a lot more precautions to preserve original relics than most Chinese tourist sites. The Chinese are notorious for exploiting historical and cultural places for tourism, even if places get kind of destroyed in the process. Whoops.

We went back to the hotel for lunch, where we had okay food and undrinkably awful tea while watching Home Alone 2: Lost in New York dubbed hilariously in Chinese. It was fabulous.

This day was completely redeemed in the afternoon, however, because we went off into the desert and rode CAMELS! We had to wear big orange booties to keep the sand out of our shoes, and there were humongous and very picturesque sand dunes to ascend via camel and then to climb up some more and sled down in the sand and then get back on the camel and return to the bottom. I loved the camels! They were really laid-back animals, and they just kind of grooved along up the edge of the huge dune while the sun beat down. It was an incredibly sunny day, and the sky was blue, and I got a little bit sunburnt, but it wasn't actually hot because there was all kinds of breeze blowing over the dunes. The only downside to breeze is that it blows sand at you. By the end of the day I had sand in my EVERYWHERE, from my socks to my hair to my underwear. It was impressive, and not entirely comfortable.

Me and my camel. I named him Luobo (Chinese for carrot) because it sounds a lot like the Chinese word for camel, and they kept getting mixed up in my brain:


















Don't I look intrepid or something?

And oh, those stylish neon orange sand booties:


















We had dinner at the same hotel we'd been returning to all day, and it was actually quite nice because the other tourists had gone somewhere else and it was just the three of us. In the evening we went out strolling around Dunhuang, which is actually a fabulous little town. There were strings of lights hanging all over the streets, and it seemed like every resident of little ol' Dunhuang was out strolling too. It was a really nice atmosphere. We went to the town's night market, which was fun, but the stuff wasn't anywhere near as awesome as in the Kashgar Uyghur market. What can ya do.

Day 5: Sucky

This day was almost certainly the nadir of our trip. For one, we got lumped together with a big group of Chinese tourists again. Whee. We were scheduled to go to Tianshan Tianchi (Heaven Mountain and Heaven Lake), which sounds like a nice place, right? And the weather ought to be nice compared to the day before when we went to the hottest place in China. So that morning when we were getting dressed, we just kind of extrapolated that the weather ought to be hot and sunny, like every other day in Xinjiang, which is, after all, a huge ol' desert. Except that when we got there it was, in fact, cold and wet. Not just a little bit chilly or a little bit drizzly, but freezing and pouring. Nice. Our daoyou, however, was incredibly perky in the face of the circumstances. She confessed that it was her first day as a real daoyou all by herself (I imagine the demand for tour guides increases exponentially during May Break, being as the entire country has the same week off, due to the brilliance of Communism), and so she was excited, plus it was the first rain they had had there all year! We probably didn't appreciate this fact as much as we could have.

They gave us lunch pretty soon after we got off the bus at Tianshan, and what do you know, it was zhuafan. It seemed like they fed us zhuafan every single day, except every time we had it was worse than the last. Hen hao. At least they gave us hot tea with our meal, which we were desperately looking forward to in our extreme chilliness. Great, right? Except the tea wasn't actually hot. Quite tepid, really. Also it tasted like (I kid you not) lamb fat. Even the Chinese people wouldn't drink it. The meal as a whole was so unsatisfying that we ended up buying lamb chuanr and nang from some vendors, even though the prices were exorbitant. We were so excited to get our nang, because nang is delicious, except as soon as we ate some we discovered that nang is apparently only delicious when made by Uyghurs, and the stuff purveyed by our Han Chinese nang vendor was almost inedible. The only good we got out of it was the fun I had exploiting Richard's Asian guilt to make him eat it despite his protestations ("don't waste food, Richard! there are starving children in China!"), and even after that we had to throw away a huge bag of nang.

In addition to getting ripped off food-wise, we ended up buying 20 kuai raincoats, which I guess is insanely cheap from an American expensive, but here it was a ripoff. They were kind of silly raincoats in that they were so poorly designed that they had buttons but no buttonholes. In a moment of ingenuity, I used the sharp metal skewers from our chuanr to poke myself some buttonholes. This small success was one of the few highlights of the day. Hen hao!

We paid 80 kuai for tickets to take a cable car up and down the mountain, but for reasons that were unclear to me, we were informed that we were supposed to take a bus up. Then on the way down, the cable cars were shut down because of the weather. We never got any money back. That's Chinese tourism for you.

Our tour included a boat ride on the lake, which would have been lovely had it not been pouring buckets at the time. In spite of our raincoats, we were soaked and freezing, so when our tour guide told us it was time to get out of the boat to take pictures at some scenic spot or another, we flat-out refused. They made several attempts to cajole us into getting off the boat, but we were not to be moved. It turned out later that the scenic picture-taking spot cost money, so we actually got a refund from the travel agency for not getting off of the boat. Score!

When the boat ride was over, we immediately embarked on a quest for hot beverages. We found a little shop with typically high prices, and decided to order hot fruit drinks, which were cheaper than coffee or tea because they are essentially hot Kool-Aid. Delicious. The shop had no hot water (or something like that, I'm not really sure), so the lady had to go somewhere else to get water to make our drinks from the bizarrely colored powder, and when we finally got them they smelled pretty okay but tasted like nothing. The lady offered us sugar at first, but eventually caught on and gave us more Kool-Aid powder. We spent the rest of our time at Tianshan savoring our still-flavorless-but-hot drinks and lamenting that we hadn't had the foresight to bring along a bottle of baijiu (the ubiquitous Chinese rice liquor, over 100 proof and dirt cheap), which probably would have been more effective at warding off the cold and improving our mood. Oh well.

My general feeling about Tianshan Tianchi was that if heaven is anything like "Heaven Mountain Heaven Lake," I'd be awfully depressed about my mortality, because frankly spending eternity in the rain with Chinese tourists would be pure torture. I took a single picture at Tianshan, as we were driving away, just because I kind of felt like I should have:














Nice, huh?

They took us to another buying-stuff place after we left Tianshan, where our lack of Chinese language skills got us out of having to sit through some long droning presentation on why we should buy the store's Chinese medicine. We were supposed to have dinner at the impressively awful hotel restaurant again, but after a lot of argument the daoyou just gave us our dinner money and set us loose. Unfortunately, they still hadn't told us what time we needed to be at the train station (the daoyou didn't know herself), so we just ate the fastest dinner we could find, which happened to be KFC. I had never eaten KFC before, not even in America, and frankly I don't think I'll ever feel compelled to do so again. It turned out afterwards that we actually had a lot of time before our train left. Whoops. In the meantime we went shopping, where Casey got an iPod charger and Richard and I got fruit and saw a man beating his wife on the street. More on that later. This was not a vacation where we developed much love for the Han Chinese.

Our train ride that evening was the first time I had traveled by train in China independently, instead of with my program. Taking a sleeper train with a bunch of American college students is just like a big slumber party (albeit with sketchier bathrooms than your typical slumber party), whereas taking a sleeper train with a bunch of Chinese people is, to put it plainly, awful. As I was trying to fall asleep, the man across from me was eating sunflower seeds, crunching the shells between his teeth and then noisily eating the seed. Crunch...smack, smack, smack. Crunch...smack, smack, smack. After a few minutes of this I was ready to strangle that man and shove that entire bag of sunflower seeds down his annoying throat. The only thing better than the sunflower-seed-crunching man was the woman in the bunk below me. I awoke at maybe 5 or 5:30 am to the beautiful sound of this woman hocking up loogies and spitting them into a bag. She did it regularly, almost with a kind of rhythm (about every 3 seconds, I would say), and incredibly noisily. I don't characterize myself as an angry person or even a crabby person - in fact, the people I live with would probably tell you that I'm very laid-back - but for a few days in Xinjiang I developed feelings of deep rage towards Chinese people. I'm no longer rage-ful about this, but it was pretty ugly for a couple days there. Hen hao.

Get ready for Day 6...I won't give too much away, but I will say that it was generally better than Day 5, and there might even be some camels involved!

Great Moments in Bargaining

At the beginning of the semester, I was petrified of bargaining, especially bargaining in Chinese, but now I love it. Somehow buying clothing is far more satisfying when you have the thrill of the chase. It's like a sport, you vs. the salesperson, each of you trying to come up with better excuses as to why your price makes sense. One popular strategy for salespeople is shameless flattery, where they tell you how good you look in the clothing, how nicely it sets off your beautiful white skin (if you're me), etc., so you don't feel so reluctant to pay the high price they're offering. Whether they really mean it is variable, I guess, although that one time in Xinjiang I really wanted to buy the green scarf and the salesladies practically FORCED me to get the red one because it went better with my white skin, so I feel like those salesladies really did think it looked pretty good. Anyway, today I had a super fun bargaining experience buying a black halter top with white polka dots. I was dubious about the fit, because I have a generally un-Chinese shape so I always have to be skeptical, but when I tried it on it was super cute! The saleslady and I were having a fun bantering time, and the salespeople in neighboring stalls were even getting in on it and yelling things to me(no fair, ganging up on the foreigner!), and I was feeling generally good-humored and silly about the whole thing, so when she started telling me that it was worth the price because it looked really good on me, I countered by saying that in fact, she should give me a discount because I looked so good (you can get discounts for all sorts of random stuff in China, so I figured it was worth a shot), and it totally worked! Well, eventually, although I had to walk away and get called back three times before I got the exact price I wanted, and even then I had to do a fair amount of weaseling out of the last two kuai over my asking price that they were still demanding, but I felt that the salespeople as well as myself were having a pile of fun. My general bargaining strategy is to be kind of over the top and amuse the salesperson so they like me. It's not the most cutthroat strategy ever, but I have more fun! Annnnnd I've gotta go to sleep now so I can wake up at 6:30 to go to the Dirt Market(maybe if you're lucky I'll buy you some dirt; I hear it's really nice). Wooo!

p.s. - just kidding there, the Dirt Market actually sells antiques and random whosiwhatsits, I think. Hen hao!

Day 4: Developing a Hatred for Chinese Tourism

Previously, Richard, Casey, and I had either been by ourselves with just the daoyou or in a little group of maybe a dozen people. The unfortunate part of traveling with only 3 people, however, is that it's too few people for the travel agency to always be willing to give us our own guide and our own tour, so they started lumping us (along with the Japanese girl and the Korean girl who we were with the first few days) onto other large groups of Chinese tourists. This was terrible. I've met plenty of lovely people in China, but (and the circumstances of our meeting figured into this, I'm sure) I did not like the Chinese tourists at all. The group we were with this day were all friends and relatives, so they all knew each other, and were constantly being loud and annoying and touristy.

At one point the guy in front of me was videotaping the view out the window, which was: dirt. He did this for a really long time. At one point, embittered, I made a comment to Richard and Casey about how annoying this was and I wished he would sit somewhere else. Actually my words may have been more along the lines of "I hate that man and his stupid video camera." I know that's kind of out of character for me to say, but that's a testament to what Chinese tourism will do to you. Besides, it was all Chinese people on the bus, so they wouldn't understand our English comments anyway, right? Except later that day the man answered his phone and started speaking English...whoops. Bu hao yisi, as we like to say: how embarrassing.

We hadn't gotten much sleep the night before, so we were sleeping in the back of the tour bus on the way out to Turpan. At one point, we stopped at what is apparently a tourist attraction, although I never would have chosen to go there if it was up to me: the largest wind farm in China. That's right, a lot of windmills. You looked at them from a sort of observation deck, and let me tell you, it was so fascinating that it just made me want to get right back on the bus and sleep instead of looking at stupid windmills. Yet the Chinese tourists took pictures of it, and then took pictures of themselves posed in front of it, etc. This was to be an indicator of our Chinese tourism experience to come.

On the way to Turpan we drove past the Fire Mountains, which are big and red and pretty neat. Apparently they are one of the obstacles for the Monkey King in Journey to the West, which I had only vaguely heard of before but now I feel that I should maybe read it because the tour guides kept making references to it. Hen hao!

Turpan, our destination for the day, is famous for being a Buddhist outpost in what is now a predominantly Muslim region. It was built back in the day when the Uyghurs were Buddhist and hadn't yet been converted to Islam by traders coming through Xinjiang on the Silk Road. It is also, nicely enough, the hottest place in China. When we went, it was 41 degrees, which is about 105 degrees. Lovely. Also, the architecture of the place we went to reminded me a bit of the city of Flibber-O-Loo, a la VeggieTales:














All the buildings were made of mud and straw. It was a pretty okay place. They gave us lunch there, however, and it was zhuafan again, same as we had on our first day in Xinjiang, except not delicious. Whoops. Then we got ice cream, which was more delicious. Yay!

In the afternoon we went to a vineyard, where we saw some (really old!) grape vines. It was riveting. After we toured the vineyard, there was, for no particular reason, a dance performance put on by the Uyghur teenagers, culminating in a dance where they tried to get the whole audience to dance with them. Then we went to some other place where there was more dancing, and they actually even taught us some moves to this traditional Uyghur courting dance, each of which has a specific meaning. The guys' moves meant "I have a big house! I have lots of grapes! Whaddaya say?" There was even one move where you do something with your fingers to demonstrate specifically how many acres of grapes you have, or whatever unit they use in that crazy metric system. Hectares, maybe. Anyway, the girls had corresponding dance moves that meant "My father doesn't agree! My father doesn't agree! I don't agree either!" We all danced around in a circle with the Uyghurs, and it was actually a pretty fun time. Then they tried to sell us insanely expensive raisins, because in the end, most everywhere they took us was just a place to buy expensive tourist stuff.

Random Uyghur dance show at the vineyard:














We also went to a less fun buying-stuff place, where they gave us a presentation and made us try some kind of locally made wine that was positively disgusting. Good times. Then we visited an aquifer, which was pretty cool because we got to go in tunnels underground. They explained to us that the aquifer is super awesome because it's the only reason that part of the desert can even sustain life. Our happiness was dampened a bit by the Chinese tourists, who upon being told that they shouldn't touch the water, immediately started scooping it up into their water bottles. I was so annoyed at them, I just wanted it to be like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where Augustus Gloop is so greedy for the chocolate river that he ends up getting sucked up a pipe and learning his lesson. Unfortunately Willy Wonka wasn't there to teach the Chinese tourists a lesson, so I'm sure they will continue to be rude and selfish without consequence. Hen hao.

After the aquifer, they took us to some sort of garden, which I'm pretty certain was just a time-waster, because it wasn't on our itinerary. The three of us were so annoyed that we just waited outside. Ironically, on our way back the bus drove past the Dead Sea of China, which was one of the destinations on our itinerary. Maybe by "see the China Dead Sea" the travel agency meant "catch a glimpse of a sign saying 'China Dead Sea' out the window of your bus but not actually stop." That night we didn't do anything else besides have dinner at our hotel. The food was terrible, not that we weren't already in a bad mood. Also the travel agency forgot to book Richard's room for a second night, so he couldn't get in to his room. Everything got straightened out eventually, but it wasn't the best day ever. Grrrr.

Day 3: Uyghurlicious Times

We started out day 3 strolling down a lane of shops run by Uighurs. There were lots of shops with scarves and knives and little mirrors and local instruments, which would turn out to be the ubiquitous souvenir goods in Xinjiang. It was also a great place for street food. They tell you not to eat street food in China because it could be dirty, but if you never eat any street food, you're totally missing out, because it is an experience. We got these roasted lamb baozi that they cook in a special oven (clay or something, I really don't know) by sticking the baozi to the walls of the oven, where they just cling like barnacles because the oven is so hot. Nang, the traditional bread of Uighur cuisine, is also made like this. It's super cool. This street was also the place where, to my great surprise, we encountered bagels. I didn't think there were any bagels in China, but if you think about it, bagels came from the Middle East, and Uyghurs are of Turkish descent...I've never been to the Middle East, but Xinjiang is approximately how I imagine it to be. Anyway, Uyghur food was awesome. Beijing food really can't compare.

Also in that alley of shops we spotted a lot of things that we didn't know what they were exactly. The first were things that looked like pipes, but the daoyou said no, they definitely weren't for smoking; in fact, they were intended for babies to go to the bathroom in. Lovely. Later, we saw baby cradles with holes cut in them, and now wiser, immediately guessed that they were pee holes, which, of course, they were. Oh China.

Later that morning we went to Idkah Mosque. It was pretty, and there were trees and gardens and a tower where they ring the bell to call everybody to prayers, and most interestingly, a clock set to *Xinjiang time,* 2 hours before Beijing time, and technically illegal. Rock. Also, and I forget what time of day this happened, but we went to a Buddhist something-or-other with the tomb of the Fragrant Concubine, apparently a famous person in Chinese history who worked her way up in the ranks of the emperor's concubines by having an exceptional personal scent. That's a pretty super claim to fame, if you ask me. Besides the story, though, it was a generally boring place to visit. It doesn't help that the tour guides are always speaking in Chinese and I usually have no idea what they're talking about when they ramble about various cultural sites.

At lunch we tried more local food, including pigeon chuanr (kebabs, if I've never mentioned this vocab word before), which were okay if rather lacking in actual meat, and super-sour yogurt, without even a touch of sugar. I mustered up all of my stoicism and ate it plain. Yeahhhh.

The coolest place we went all day (and maybe the coolest place we went on our whole trip), however, was the Uyghur market. This wasn't some artificial bazaar constructed to tap into tourists' desire for local, cultural-looking souvenirs, it was the real thing, the place where the real Uyghurs go to buy stuff and not just to shake tourists down for their money. We were almost disappointed at first because so much of the stuff was just normal, everyday goods, and we wanted that unique cultural souvenir-type stuff. The cool cultural stuff was still there, though...we found some really good shops after a while. The interesting thing was that, since it was a market by Uyghurs for Uyghurs, the salespeople didn't necessarily speak very good Chinese, or in some cases, any Chinese at all. This made things interesting, because as you might guess, I don't speak any Uyghur. I bought some dried melons from a man who knew no Chinese, and we bargained on a calculator and using his 2 English phrases, "one kilo" and "one-half kilo." He was asking for 13 kuai and I was holding out for 12, so I just gave him 12. When he gestured that I was still missing 1 kuai, I just shrugged and acted like "so what?" and the man was so amused that he didn't even bother hassling me any further for that last kuai. It was super fun.

We had some really excellent times talking with the Uyghur salespeople in the market...I like talking to Uyghurs in Chinese because their Chinese isn't usually a whole lot better than mine, so they almost never used words I didn't understand. Richard and Casey amused themselves by practicing their haofu/huaifu act on the vendors. Haofu/huaifu is a phrase we invented to describe what is essentially the Chinese bargaining version of good cop/bad cop (ours literally means good husband/bad wife). In Casey and Richard's case, Casey was the sympathetic figure, the good wife who just wanted to buy some pretty mirrors, while Richard was the mean husband who got so into the act that he started actually yelling at Casey in front of the vendor about how she was always wasting their money, and the vendor started sympathizing with Casey about how her husband didn't really appreciate how nice the mirrors were, and they ended up getting a pretty respectable price for them. Super fun.

While Richard and Casey were buying mirrors, I was off getting knives. Little knives (and big ones, for that matter, but I wasn't about to buy any big scary knives) were all over in Kashgar, so I felt like I should get some, even though I hadn't originally intended to. I went to a couple shops, but ended up buying knives from the most fun little knife man ever. His knives were really good (he demonstrated slicing things for me, and they were some sharp little knives), but when I protested the price he wanted for them, he pulled a typical vendor move and brought out a cheaper, lower quality product, saying "if you want it cheaper, you can just get this cheaper product," knowing that of course nobody wants the cheap, low-quality one. It's one of the oldest ones in the book. Anyway, he showed me a poorly made little knife to contrast with his, and said "if you want a cheaper knife, you can get this kind, but it's not as good. My knives I make myself, here in Xinjiang, very high quality. That other knife? You don't want that knife. It's made in China." This was basically the highlight of my bargaining experience. You don't want that knife; it's made in China. That comment really sealed the deal...after that, how could I not buy his knives? I was so happy and so ready to get my bargain on buying other Uyghurlicious stuff, but then Casey called to say that everyone was waiting for me at the entrance because we had to leave. Whoops. I got lost on my way back, and when I arrived the daoyou totally guilt-tripped me about making everyone else wait. Nice.

After the market we went to the Old City where the Uyghurs live. Sadly, the Chinese are busy tearing down the old city and building some kind of new subdivision to house the displaced Uyghurs. All in the name of progress. Anyway, our little tour group stopped in a few houses in the old city, where I'm sure our daoyou had some kind of deal with the owners to get a cut of the profits from any touristy things they could manage to sell us. Sometimes it was bizarre, as in the case of the house where a girl fed us (strangely enough) madeleines that by their taste and texture were apparently made of foam rubber while trying to convince us to buy beaded tissue-box covers. Silliness! We also met some really adorable kids, though, and Richard and I bought fezzes. We were always trying, on the course of our trip, to seek out the actual local culture more than the touristy stuff they fed our tour groups, and in the case of our fezzes, I felt that we were very successful. All of the fezzes they sold in tourist places were completely over-the-top, with sequins galore, but I never saw many actual Uyghurs wear them. However, almost as soon as we had bought our fezzes, we were out in the street, and I saw two men in a row wearing the exact same fez Richard and I had just bought. It was a fabulous moment for me, a moment of triumph over the inescapable touristy-ness we encountered all over.

After that we had dinner, featuring the best food I had on the whole trip, nang bao rou. It's a big ol' nang topped with a pile of tender lamb, plus carrots and other good stuff, in the most amazing sauce ever, and it was beautiful, to boot. If I ever get Casey's pictures, you can see nang bao rou in all its glory.

Post-dinner we hopped on a plane back to Urumqi, where our original daoyou met us at the airport and took us to our hotel. It was a really shiny modern hotel, but the shower was still just a showerhead in the tiny tub-less bathroom, so when you showered the toilet was in the shower. I thought this was weird, but it turned out that all our hotels on the trip were that way, so whatever, I guess it's just an Asian thing. Hen hao!

Not About Xinjiang

So Sarah and the Lehigh choir were in Beijing this past weekend, which was super awesome! I took them to get street food and we went to karaoke (which is fabulous with choir people) and it was really good practice for my Chinese as well as being all kinds of fun. Their concert was on Sunday night and it was pretty excellent...there were quite a few times when me and Quynh and Jacqui felt that we might be the only people in the audience getting the musical jokes (the Chinese didn't respond much to the Addams Family theme song or even Hava Nagila in the big medley thinger), but I feel that we appreciated it enough for the entire audience. There was, however, a downside to having Sarah and Lehigh peeps around, which was that I didn't sleep nearly as much as usual and I did basically no academic work all weekend, so the past 2 days I've been working really hard to catch up and I'm kind of tired.

Last night we went out for Peking duck (my first time eating it, can you believe it?), and I think I ate a little too much food because later that night I felt a little yucky. I couldn't concentrate on my homework and studying, so I set my alarm to wake up a little early and figured I'd finish it in the morning. Well, this morning I successfully got up early, and figured I'd take a quick shower and then get to work. Unfortunately, when I finished my shower, I was horrified to find that the bathroom was flooded, and not just the bathroom, but most of the rest of our room as well. It seems that we had some problems with our drain, but my roomie and I were kind of busy cleaning up and finding someone to help us fix it that I never had time to do my studying. Whoops. But I arrived late to my first class, so I missed the quiz anyway. I'm not sure if that's good or bad, but I think the teacher can forgive me, as I was busy dealing with a flooded room. It's all fine and dry now, and Quynh and I joked that it was all just an ingenious strategy to get the maids to actually clean our floor. Hen hao.

I almost forgot that I'm supposed to give a speech on something tomorrow in Hanyu class and I haven't prepared at all. I think I'll talk about my spring break, so I can probably mostly just wing it, but maybe I should look up some of the words I'll want to use or something. Good times.

Day 2: The Desert Outside Kashgar

On the first full day in Kashgar we weren't actually in Kashgar; we were in a little mianbaoche (literally "bread car," alluding to the fact that it's a largeish van shaped like a loaf of bread) driving through the desert. Xinjiang has a lot of desert. Some of it is pretty cool desert, but some of it frankly sucks a little bit. The desert we were in this day wasn't the spiffiest-looking desert ever in terms of awesome huge sand dunes (that desert happened later), but it had really sweet mountains. More specifically, K2. You know, the second tallest mountain in the world, or whatever. Our guide referred to it as "the second highest peak in China," the first being Mt. Everest (Qomolangma Feng), which I guess is in China (Tibet, really, which in my mind is its own entity) although I never thought about it before. It seems funny to refer to it as the second tallest mountain in China when it's also the second tallest mountain in the world, which is cooler, but whatever. Don't question the daoyou.

So yeah, we met in the hotel in the morning, and it was a bit disorganized, and there was a bag on the table that nobody would claim, but we got off fine and went off on our 4-hour drive into the desert all the way to the border of Pakistan. That is about as far western China as it gets. Our car was cute, but it had a couple of funny little fold-out seats in the aisles so you could cram in the maximum number of people, and it was my luck that I should happen to have to sit in one of these seats for the whole way out there, and it was approximately the most uncomfortable seat ever, awkwardly tilted quite a ways backwards but with a really short back so it wasn't just like having your chair recline. Not fun. We stopped the van a couple times to take pictures, because there are some pretty nice vistas:














At one of the places we stopped, to my great amusement, there were some dudes with blankets trying to sell us stuff. This was funny because we were completely in the middle of nowhere in the desert, and no other cars passed by while we were stopped, but still they were there waiting for our little van. Nobody bought anything.


















This was also the first time we encountered pretty young kids trying to sell us stuff. There was something amazing about the kid in the suit coat - he was probably about Jake's age, but he was already working next to the adults attempting to fleece the foreigners. Hen hao.

We drove some more, stopping again at a little place where I encountered the first of many sketchy public bathrooms that would become a theme on this trip. I think there will be a separate post devoted to this later. Anyway, at this place they gave us some tea in thin plastic cups that I was amazed didn't melt from the heat of the tea. This is also surprisingly common in China. The tea was supposed to help you deal with high altitudes. At the time I thought maybe the tour just took us there to prepare us for high altitudes on the day's trip, but we didn't actually go anywhere high up, and in retrospect I'm quite sure it was just another place where we were supposed to buy stuff.

I am not sure about other countries, but here is how travel agencies work in China: they are sponsored by local stores, and in turn they agree to take their tours into those stores, usually for a predetermined amount of time. Most of these places sell some kind of local goods that they think tourists would want to buy, like local jewelry or tea or Chinese medicine or carpets. If in the future I refer to a "buy-stuff place," this is the kind of establishment I mean. In addition to these places, tour guides will sometimes have personal deals with local merchants where they guide their tourists to a certain vendor's stall in exchange for a cut of the profits. This seems sneaky by American standards, but in China it's a normal way for tour guides to supplement their income, which I don't think is particularly impressive.

So anyway, there we were, out in the desert, and it came to be lunchtime. Lunchtime is lateish (around 2) in Xinjiang because it's actually 2 hours earlier than Beijing there but they have to use Beijing time because of Communism. It's super silly. Anyway, our daoyou was telling Richard to reach behind the back seat and get out our lunch, and Richard was saying that he didn't see it and the daoyou was getting a little annoyed and insisting that it was right there and why couldn't he find it. After a short while it dawned on her that the lunch was not, in fact, there, and had actually been left behind in the hotel. That bag on the table...that was our lunch. Good times. The (Han) daoyou yelled at our (Uyghur) driver about this, although I'm not sure exactly why our lunch was his responsibility, but we'll talk about this later too, in a separate post about racism/sexism, which, like sketchy bathrooms, is enough of a continuing theme to warrant separate attention. It wasn't that big a deal in the end that our lunch was left behind, though, because we weren't that hungry, and some of the ladies had brought snacks which they generously shared, and it was all okay.

I think it sounds really impressive to say that we went to the border of Pakistan, but honestly I was never entirely sure when we were at the border. I thought it would be more obvious. We did at one point go through a little booth where we all had to show our passports and on the way back through the booth they counted to make sure we had the same number of people and there was some argument between our daoyou and the passport-checking dudes, but it's not like we went over the border into Pakistan. I don't think. I saw some mountains that might have been in Pakistan. It looked okay.

One time we got out and there were more people selling us things and a man trying to get us to pay to ride a camel. We were planning to ride camels another time, so I just took a picture of the camel, which was free. Then I went and slept in the backseat of the van while everybody else took 8 zillion pictures, because I couldn't sleep in my uncomfortable seat on the way out and I still had a massive sleep deficit from the 1-hour-of-sleep night before we left Beijing. It was a good choice. Here is the camel:














The events in this day are all mixed up in my head, but at some other point I also saw this really tall mountain:














I can't tell from my pictures which mountain is K2, but whatever. This picture has me in it, which is the important part.

Besides mountains, the desert also had small, dirty children, specifically at a place where we stopped to go to the bathroom on the way back. They came over and talked to us in Uyghur and they were so cute and we had no idea what they were saying but we kind of made friends anyway. I think we also made that pit stop so our driver could take a nap, because he was losing it a little, which on skinny little mountain roads is not a good idea. Remember that China has no labor laws so sometimes drivers, who are not the most well-paid of people, have to drive really long amounts of time without allowing much time to sleep. I'm told that the reason Chinese drivers honk their horns so much isn't because they really need to alert other cars to get out of the way but in order to make sure the other drivers on the road stay awake. Isn't that nice.

After a nice 4-hour drive back, we got some dinner, to which the daoyou added the chicken we were supposed to have at lunch. They don't believe in refrigeration in China, and the chicken had been out since breakfast, but we ate it and were fine. In the evening we hung out in the Square in Kashgar, which is where everyone kind of goes to mill around. We practiced our Asian Squat, which is the special Chinese alternative to sitting on the ground, which as we will learn later has all sorts of incredibly nasty things on it and is far dirtier than regular American ground. Also we bought ice cream and chatted with the man selling the ice cream. We told him that we were all Americans, but he didn't believe us, insisting that Richard and Casey were Chinese. Chinese people frequently don't accept the "I was born in America hence I am an American" line of reasoning. I've heard stories from other white people, even, about how they meet Chinese who don't believe they are American because they don't have blonde hair and blue eyes. I didn't realize this was the stereotype, but apparently I have pretty much the quintessential *American* look to the Chinese. Sometimes when Chinese people are staring at me I hear the whispered word "Meiguoren" and I wonder how it is that they assume automatically that I'm American and not British or German or Swedish or anything else that I could theoretically be.

We didn't do anything interesting after that except go back to our hotel and sleep. Which is what I'm going to do now. Hen hao!

Semi-interesting note: there was a Playboy store in Kashgar, which we thought was hilarious, but actually in China Playboy is a pretty normal brand of clothes and shoes and whatnot, and has none of the word's American connotations, although they use the same bunny logo. Don't ask me why; it's China.

Day 1: Beijing/Urumqi/Kashgar

There's a lot to tell so I'll just take it one day at a time.

The first day of our trip was Friday, April something-or-other. I'm not very good at dates. I had been up packing and getting ready, bringing my bicycle into my room so it wouldn't get stolen over break, etc. until the wee hours of the morning, so I got maybe 1 or 2 hours of sleep before waking up at 5 to leave for the airport. It's about an hour's taxi ride, and our plane was at 7:45. Gross. We were lucky to find a taxi on campus, although we felt bad to wake up the driver, who was asleep in the backseat. It wasn't too bad that it was so early because we all just slept through the entire plane ride to Urumqi. We were only going to Urumqi to transfer because there aren't direct flights from Beijing to Kashgar, but it ended up that we had an 8-hour layover in Urumqi. Fun times, right? Well, it was actually kind of nice, because the travel agency we booked through gave us a tour guide (henceforth I shall use the Chinese word for tour guide, daoyou, because that's what I call them in my head) and we went out and did some stuff in Urumqi. This was a bit of a false first impression of our trip, because later the travel agency pulled some shenanigans on us, and various other unfortunate things happened, but I'll explain that as it comes. I went with my 2 American friends, Richard and Casey, and the first day it was just the 3 of us with our daoyou, who was the most adorable ever. He was young and really nice and his English name was Zero. He took us to lunch, where he ordered us a traditional Xinjiang dish called zhuafan, which is rice and vegetables stir-fried in lamb fat with a nice hunk of lamb on top. They are all about the lamb (yangrou) in Xinjiang, especially because the Uyghurs are Muslims and therefore don't eat China's usual ubiquitous meat, pork. It was really good, and totally got us psyched up for Xinjiang food.
Besides lunch, our daoyou also took us to this bazaar, where Casey and I bought pretty pashminas and Richard bought overpriced raisins (30 kuai for only 1 jin! I know you have no concept of that but it's a lot, even though they were excellent raisins) and we made fun of him. Our daoyou, nice as he was, was kind of no help. He kept being like "well this is pretty good stuff so I guess it should be a little expensive," which when you're trying to bargain is not exactly useful. I went off on my own and got stared at like mad and made friends with some scarf-selling ladies. I was looking for a scarf to cover my hair, and I tried on a couple and was leaning towards the green one, but the ladies were like no no no and seriously MADE me get the red one instead because it "looked better with my white skin." This is kind of a common theme in my clothes-shopping experiences here.
It's not really related to anything, but that afternoon we were waiting at the bazaar with all our luggage for our car to come, and I was sitting on my suitcase and I was so tired that I fell asleep sitting up on my suitcase in the Uyghur bazaar and everybody stared at me. Casey has a picture of this, which I'll post whenever I get pictures from her.
In the evening we went back to the good ol' airport to fly to Kashgar. Our flight was pretty late, and we didn't actually arrive in Kashgar until almost midnight. Here's where the fun starts.
So our deal with the travel agency was that any time they had to pick us up, there would be a daoyou waiting at the plane/train station with a sign with Casey's name on it. This worked fine mostly, except when we got to Kashgar there was only one person waiting for a sign, and it wasn't the LEE CASEYMARIA that we got so used to looking for. Heheh. This is a little more representative of the bulk of our trip experience. We went outside the airport, which was the teeniest little airport ever (it had one luggage conveyor belt and like two rooms, and that was it), and waited for a daoyou, but no daoyou came. A lot of slightly sketchy taxi drivers came up and asked us if we needed rides, but we declined and told them our daoyou was coming. In the end, we had to call our Urumqi daoyou and ask him to help us get in touch with the Kashgar daoyou because we didn't have any contact info. I'm pretty sure the Kashgar daoyou had just forgotten about us, but she apologized profusely and said she'd be there quickly. Ha. At this point, the airport had closed, all the airport employees had left, and they turned out the lights. The sketchy cab drivers, however, were still there. After a while most of them finally accepted that we didn't want a cab and left, but there was still one cabbie waiting at the bottom of the steps, watching us in the dark. Nice. Around maybe 1 am or so, our daoyou finally arrived, delivering some convoluted excuse and then whisking us off to our hotel, where we finally got to rest for real. And that was the first day.

Day 2: long van rides in the desert, amazing mountains, and an unfortunate miscommunication. Prepare yourself.