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.