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!