There Will Be Stud...ying

The past few days have been pretty uninteresting; I’ve spent most of my time doing homework and catching up on stuff. I did finally get off campus yesterday and visit a neighborhood southwest of Tiananmen Square where, I was told by my guidebook,* there was a large and vibrant Muslim community and excellent shopping.
Other than an abundance of grilled meat restaurants (of which I am still a little leery after my Dai BBQ adventure), there unfortunately wasn’t much that set the Muslim neighborhood apart from its surrounding environs. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting – something more like San Francisco’s Chinatown, perhaps – but the whole place seemed pretty standard, with the same China Unicom storefronts and Han people wandering around that could be found anywhere else in the city. The high point was the Niujie Mosque, built in the 900s (seriously, it blows my mind how old this is) and still the largest mosque in Beijing. Since my guidebook recommended checking it out, and the admission fee was just $1.50, I went in for a look.
The mosque was remarkably quiet inside. I expected it to be a bit more bustling on a Saturday afternoon, but there were just a few older people walking around, and nothing was really going on. A very sweet older man took my ticket, and we had a brief conversation about where I was from. (I pointed out Seattle on a map because I know its Chinese name. The man was excited to learn that I was American and said “My brother lives in New York! Do you know him?” Me: “Probably not.”)
The mosque made for a nice, peaceful twenty-minute stroll. It was completely walled off from the rest of the neighborhood, so there was a definite sense of separation from the Beijing traffic and hustle and bustle. The architecture was a very interesting mix of Chinese and Islamic styles; if it weren’t for the Islamic writing everywhere, it would be easy to mistake the place for a standard-issue Chinese temple. Besides functioning as a hall of worship, the mosque also served as a community hub, and many of the buildings were devoted to teaching, welcoming guests, and other general multi-purpose uses. The biggest building was the prayer hall. I couldn’t go in because I am not Muslim, but I stole a peek through a window on the side, and it was beautiful – huge and very ornately decorated.
I left the neighborhood and headed up to Liulichang and Dazhalan streets, recommended as shopping hubs. Liulichang, well known for its antiques, was a huge disappointment. The whole street was just block after block of the same shops, all with signs promising in broken English to carve your name on a chop in only five minutes, advertising genuine antique ceramics,** and offering free tea tastings (I tried the tea at a couple places and it was very bad). From there, I spent about fifteen minutes wandering through a warrenlike maze of hutongs trying to make my way up to Dazhalan, as well as an extra three or four helping this guy fit a mattress into his car. Once I got on the right street, it was pretty much a straight shot northeast, and I stopped only once.
I’ve heard the rumors about Chinese people eating dog. A couple people asked me about it before I left. I largely wrote these concerns off as xenophobic and ill-informed, and figured that in a city where so many people keep dogs as beloved pets, dog meat wouldn’t be something I’d run into. I even asked one of the Chinese teachers about it, and she totally blew me off. “Only Koreans eat dog,” she told me.
So imagine my surprise when, in this random little hutong, I found myself face-to-face with a restaurant that read “Dog Meat” across the window in big characters. The neon sign above it had a fairly normal name on it, but right next to the restaurant’s name was a giant picture of a Golden Retriever. I was too busy being perturbed to take a picture and walked away slowly after picking my jaw up off the ground. The weird part is, I kind of want to go there, but first I want to make sure they don’t actually serve Golden Retriever.
Dazhalan was a little better in terms of shopping. The touristy stalls that sold Mao t-shirts and posters were still there, but so were more traditional shops filled with actual Chinese people. My favorite store was one that sold beautiful handmade cloth shoes, but there were several that caught my eye, including a pharmacy that had been in existence for 200 years and proudly displayed Chinese remedies in huge glass jars next to boxes of Maalox, and the many silk stores lining the street. At the end of the street was a giant pedestrian-only shopping plaza that had obviously been completed just in time for the Olympics. The buildings were gorgeous and Western-quality, but 95% of them were empty. Nonetheless, this seemed like a hotspot for young Beijingers with money to burn to congregate.
I’d finally decided to go for the knockoff Coach bags at the Silk Market, so I went there next to try my luck again. I decided on one of the most convincing fakes I’ve ever seen, made with real leather and everything. It even had a real Coach price tag on it, although the area where the actual price would have been was left blank, which I thought was kind of funny. This time, the bargaining was even more fun: I knew what to expect, the vendor spoke better English, and I’d memorized several bargaining phrases, which I used to great effect. The vendor insisted that she was giving me a discount because I was a student and not a tourist, and repeatedly showed me the price she’d ostensibly make tourists pay for the bag. Whenever I suggested a price, she would get this hilariously appalled look on her face, say something like “Oh, you’re killing me, honey!” and insist that she couldn’t do business that way. I actually feel like I got a little overcharged anyway, but I really like my bag, and I had fun speaking Chinese with the vendor, who seemed legitimately impressed that I knew so much.
After that I went home, got dinner, went to a bar with Pei Rei and Cody, came home relatively early, and went to bed. Today was spent watching my pirated There Will Be Blood DVD and finishing up work, although I did take a food break to eat possibly the most delicious dessert I’ve had, a blueberry mousse topped with peaches and dragonfruit slices. I’m probably going to go back and get another one within the next hour. I have no idea how the Chinese girls have such thin bodies. I’ve definitely put on a few pounds since arriving here, and with the abundance of good, cheap food, I’m sure there will be more coming.
This entry is not as meaty as my usual ones, so for your viewing pleasure, here’s a list.
UNSUCCESSFUL SELLING TACTICS WITNESSED AT THE SILK MARKET
1. I was walking through the leather-goods area (bags, belts, shoes, etc.) and a vendor stepped in front of me holding a watch exactly like the one I was wearing (Fossil, simple silver face with black leather strap) and asked “Lady, want another watch?” Um, no. I clearly already have one, what do I need another one for?
2. On the first floor, which has the bulk of the clothes for both men and women, a vendor jumped out at me and asked “You need something for your boyfriend?” I don’t know why this struck me as such a weird thing to ask, but I told her “mei you” (“I don’t have one”) with more surprise and force than was probably really necessary and scuttled off quickly into the thickets of fake Ralph Lauren shirts.
3. This wasn’t used on me, thankfully, but I saw a more heavyset Western woman looking at some sweaters as the vendor helpfully told her “This will not make you look fat anymore!” They are not subtle in the Silk Market.
4. Weirdest for last: while I was in the bathroom washing my hands, a vendor approached me (you can tell who they are because they all wear the same red vests) and told me that I was very pretty and if I waited for her to finish in the bathroom, she’d take me to her stall, which had name-brand jeans. I wanted to go into my usual Chinese spiel about how their jeans were too short and too small in the butt for me, but I felt like the situation was just way too strange for that, so I gave her an incredulous “zhende ma?” (“Seriously?”), finished washing my hands, and left.

*Lonely Planet’s Encounters: Beijing. I have never before, and probably never will again, run across such a useful little book. The thing is completely indispensable, and if it only had a subway map it would be literally perfect.

**This is borderline impossible, as it’s illegal to take most things that would qualify as “antique” out of the country.

Yunnan Picture Post

From top: Bai women, the view from my awful bike ride, my friend Amy making cheese, old town Dali, park in Kunming, sign summing up my whole trip, fake ethnic minority welcome wagon, THOR, our immaturity at the cigarette factory, me peeking over my bunk on the sleeper train, Buddhist temple, our "football" game, me and the Aini shopkeeper, traditional headdresses, the Aini village.

Yunnan Days 11-14

Day 11: T is for Too Much Tea
We had our final meal at the Aini village, breakfast, at about 7:30 this morning. Nobody had gone into Jinghong for more supplies, so there was about ¼ of a jar of jam and some bread left for breakfast. The people who arrived at breakfast on time, myself included, demolished the jam pretty quickly, and the over-sleepers and hangover-afflicted students who came in late were left with nothing but white bread. This was the cause of much griping among everyone, but none more so than Complainer, who snapped “Shut up!” at some poor, well-intentioned student who suggested that she put ketchup on it to make it a little less bland (for some reason, there were like three unopened bottles of ketchup laying around). I have no idea how someone so inflexible can derive any enjoyment out of travel; I swear I have never seen the girl crack a smile at anything this entire trip, and it seems odd to me that one would willingly come to China and then get all bothered by the constant presence of Chinese food. As I told Jackie, “She could have studied abroad in Omaha instead, you know.”
We left the village with similar fanfare as we’d arrived to. Everyone who could get within touching distance shook our hands, hugged us, and invited us to come back and see them again. Unlike a couple of the places I’ve visited, the invitation seemed genuine. I would be more than happy to come back and see them, but I would have no idea how to get back to their village. The village head told us that aside from maybe twenty people, we were the first foreigners the villagers had seen (I also had the first sunburn the villagers had seen, and was constantly being asked if I was hurt and/or contagious).
We drove back to Jinghong for a lunch at the same delicious place we’d visited a couple days ago, checked into our hotel room for a quick shower, and then set off for a walk in another tea plantation. The Barbies groaned when they heard this, but this time they had a point: we’d visited at least one tea-related attraction every other day, and we were all getting pretty sick of it. However, our teacher chaperone, who we had by this point nicknamed Buzzkill Laoshi, told us all sternly that it would be a nice walk and that there was a 1700-year-old tea tree we could look at, according to Bai Mei.
The tea plantation was a relatively nice, shady walk, but there wasn’t much to see – lots of nondescript tea bushes, but no people. After about an hour, we reached the endpoint of the walk, which had nothing more than a tea bush the size of my family’s camellia plants at home. Buzzkill Laoshi briefly conferenced with Bai Mei, then surfaced and said something like “I’m sorry, she has misunderstood. The 1700-year-old tree died, but this one is still very old. It is 300 years old.” Then, because the group wasn’t quite mutinous enough, Bai Mei got us lost on the way back. Ugh.
We were on our own for dinner, so a big group of us went out for pizza, which we’d been craving since the tea plantation walk. We ended up at a multilingual place called the Mei Mei Café, which could have been torn right out of old-town Dali: barely passable “Chinese” food, menu in four languages, breakfast, internet access, and Western food. To my surprise, the pizza was actually very good. They didn’t skimp on the sauce or the cheese, two common problems plaguing the Chinese pizzas I’ve had thus far.

Day 12: Charlie’s in the Trees
Today we went on another hike, but this one had more of a point – we were traveling along a jungle creek to a waterfall. The trail got pretty ridiculous at some points, and the two guides we went with frequently used their machetes to clear paths out of the overgrown foliage. In multiple places, we had to step on the guides’ hands to clamber up sheer, slick walls of wet dirt, and occasionally the trail would give out when people stepped on it. Nonetheless, we made it to the waterfall in one piece in about an hour and a half, cracking “back in ‘Nam” jokes most of the way there.
The waterfall was indeed worth the hike. The water was cool and clear, and most of the group promptly removed all unnecessary clothes and shoes and jumped into the knee-deep small pool underneath. We all took turns shoving, throwing, and table-topping people under the waterfall, which was very cold, and then some of the guys started playing football with an imaginary ball, which degenerated into more table-topping after multiple arguments over who had the “ball”.
We ate lunch at a local home (delicious, but disappointing because Steve had told me we’d be served pigs’ blood, which seemed like an appropriately Thor-esque thing to eat) and went back to the hotel for free time. Dinner was on our own once again, and a group of about six of us decided to follow Steve’s recommendation and try out Dai* barbeque. There were four or five similar-looking places in a row not far from the hotel, so we picked the busiest one and headed inside.
Dai barbeque is a simple affair – the restaurant had a huge variety of meats, veggies, and other edibles outside. You pick all the stuff you want, put it in a basket, and then they cook it for you and bring it to your table. We tried to get a good cross-section of what the restaurant had to offer: we got some pork, chicken, and beef skewers, a whole game hen, fish, some duck heads, various veggies, pork fat, and tofu stuffed with herbs and chilies. Some of the more questionable things we did not eat included whole sheep brains, grubs (which I had later, and were completely tasteless but delectably crunchy), and a nest of giant, wriggling wasp pupae. We all pointed at this one, especially Becca, who was horrified by one of the pupae hatching. The waitress noticed her distress and nonchalantly plucked out the wasp, which was the size of my thumb, and set it aside, with its new wings twitching peevishly.
Dinner was delicious, and we wandered around town afterward full and happy. The boys went off to get massages (which were apparently not at all sketchy, quite good, and $4.50 for an hour) and Jackie, Becca and I strolled along the main shopping street, stopping in at one of Jinghong’s myriad Burmese-owned jewelry stores so I could get a jade necklace (multiple people have determined that it is real, and it set me back just over $10) while the others chatted in Chinese with the owners about their home in Burma. My new necklace is a nice shade of milky green, tied on a red thread for good luck, and shaped like an eggplant, my favorite Chinese veggie.

Day 13: The War of the Mekong
I woke at about 4 this morning with an awful stomachache. So far on the trip, I had managed to avoid the dreaded laduzi, the Chinese word for an upset stomach, intestinal distress, etc. Most of the group had already had it for a couple days, and it was the “etc” that was the real killer, as many of the places we visited had irregular access to toilets. Morale, and Immodium, was running low. (Fortunately, I’d brought my own.)
I went to the bathroom, threw up, felt miserable, went back to bed, woke up, went to the bathroom, felt miserable…it was a vicious cycle that lasted roughly until our morning wake-up call. As it turned out, Becca was afflicted too, and so I gave Steve a ring:
“Hello, Steve. It’s Thor. I’m calling on behalf of myself and my roommate, as we are both inches from death.”
Steve trotted upstairs, gave us some antiviral/antibacterial cocktail, and told us to take the morning off. However, I decided to double up my dose of Immodium, suck it up, and go to the morning’s activity anyway. We were going to visit Xishuangbanna’s new, huge Buddhist temple, and as a religion major I’d been looking forward to my visit and felt I’d be amiss if I didn’t go. Becca stayed in the room, planning to meet us after lunch.
It was a quick drive to the temple, and we wandered around for about an hour before meeting three monks for a Q&A session about Theravada Buddhism, the type most commonly practiced in Southeast Asia. Since I’d studied this particular variety of Buddhism, most of the information in the talk wasn’t new to me, but I enjoyed it all the same; Buddhist monks everywhere seem to have a calm happiness to them, and I always like hanging out with them and feel a little more serene afterward.
When the talk concluded, Buzzkill Laoshi translated our guide’s brief introduction to the temple, which had apparently been constructed with financial help from the Chinese government. I asked why the government had chosen to help, given that the Communist Party was officially atheist, and was fed in response the least true thing I’ve ever heard: “The Chinese government supports freedom of religion.” There were so many questions I wanted to ask: then why don’t they let religious people become Party members? Why do they keep arresting people who operate unlicensed houses of worship? Why the constant, ostensibly political crackdowns on Tibetan Buddhists? I didn’t press the subject farther, but it was frustrating to know that I’d never have gotten a straight answer.
After a stop at a tea store (the best tea-related place we saw thus far, but by this point even I was burned out on tea) we went back to the same restaurant for lunch, which gave us a stunning array of foods for the third straight time. By this time, my laduzi was more or less in remission, so I ate away happily. We picked up the people who had stayed behind for the morning (apparently Becca and I weren’t the only ones who didn’t mesh well with the local food) and left for our river raft trip down the Mekong river.
The Mekong, which flows through the center of Jinghong, conjured in my imagination visions of jungles, colorful flora and fauna, clear water, and mighty rapids. The jungle part was pretty spot-on, but the rest of it, as I found out, was bunk. The section we were on was pretty slow, and the entire river was opaque brown (because of mud, not pollution, although there was undoubtedly some of that in the mix too). A little dismayed by the lack of whitewater and white water, I disembarked from the minibus and walked to the dock.
The group was divided into three boatfuls, each of which had about eight people plus a driver (the rubber rafts were motorized, so we got to sit back and relax). The first was named the No Fun Boat, and was populated by the people who couldn’t swim and didn’t want to get wet, including, unsurprisingly, Complainer and Buzzkill Laoshi. This was where we put all of our stuff. The other two boats segregated themselves into Kobe Boat (over the course of the trip, Andrew and T had elevated Kobe Bryant to Chuck Norris-like status), captained by Andrew, and Thor Boat, captained by me. Thor Boat had myself, Becca, Steve, Cody, and some other exemplary people. Kobe Boat got the Barbies, Andrew, T, and, mysteriously, Pei Rei, who by all accounts should have been on Thor Boat. Each boat had on it five or six small plastic bowls, officially for bailing out water, but actually used for throwing water at the people on the other boat. This started quite soon after we left, and everyone was thoroughly soaked within minutes. To make matters worse, Andrew had been carrying a pack of water balloons around for literally ten days in anticipation of the raft trip, and during lunch had filled 25 of them with water and lovingly stashed them in a backpack. However, the balloons rarely broke, so they went back and forth between the various boats with great frequency but little success. The raft drivers were totally in on the fun, and frequently bumped into the other boat on purpose so we could dump river water on each other with reckless abandon. Early on, Steve and Cody also boarded the Kobe Boat in true Viking fashion. The raft drivers took issue with this, so they promptly came back and a no-boarding rule was established.
We also ran into another raft full of Chinese tourists. Both boats had agreed that there would be no civilian casualties, but the Chinese boat drove over to us and started flinging water with great zeal. At this point, they ceased to be civilians, and in celebration of their new Enemy Combatant status, the two IES boats started fighting back. Everyone was having a ridiculously good time and getting super wet, except this one woman in the back of the Chinese boat who was around my mom’s age and kept trying to shield herself with her umbrella. As we pulled away, we resolved that we would get Umbrella Lady, and we would get her good.
After a quick stop ashore for the drivers to have a smoke (during which Becca stole about half of Kobe Boat’s bowls) we continued on, getting very damp and trying to deflect attacks from both Kobe Boat and the Chinese boat. As we pulled toward the endpoint of the raft trip, the Chinese boat came in for one more attack. We all tried to dump on Umbrella Lady, but she shielded herself with her parasol until Cody, in a fit of genius, grabbed one of the Kobe Boat’s water balloons and smashed it over her umbrella at point-blank range.
The umbrella, which was meant to protect the carrier from sun or perhaps light drizzle, folded immediately. Defenseless, Umbrella Lady looked on in increasingly soggy horror as seven twentysomething, vengeful Americans came at her from all sides with bowls full of river water. As we pulled up and put the bowls away, several of us heard her mutter (in Chinese) “I don’t like foreigners”. The rest of the boat shook our hands and congratulated us on a good fight. I considered the entire trip a victory for Thor Boat, as we defeated Umbrella lady, had the only boarding of the day, and stole about half of Kobe Boat’s munitions.
There was little time to gloat, because our next stop was at the local tech school for a soccer match against a Jinghong club team. We’d heard the horror stories about the previous year’s match from Steve and fully expected to be steamrollered by the club team. They beat us 6-3, but we definitely held our own thanks to Cody and Andrew, both experienced and talented soccer players, and the Jinghong goalkeeper, who was about as useful as the Swiss navy.

Day 14: Oh, Thank God
This was the day we returned home. It would be a long one, though: our flight was not scheduled to arrive in Beijing until half past midnight.
We started the day off in Jinghong with a visit to a park (not interesting) and the local fruit market, where I sampled delicious, fresh tropical things that I’d never seen before, may never see again, and don’t know the names of because the likes of them have never been seen in the Western hemisphere. I ended up buying several things to take back to Max and a passion fruit** for myself, but my peers got exotic melons, pineapples, everything. I don’t think I tried anything I disliked.
We had our final lunch (excellent, as always) before the short flight from Jinghong to Kunming, where we went to the city’s famous flower market for a few hours. The flowers were gorgeous, and came in every variety you could imagine, but I didn’t get any, as I’m not into things that are decorative rather than useful. We wandered around there for a while and got dinner (the most mediocre dumplings I’ve ever had – not enough meat, not enough sauce) and then went back to the bus for our final journey to the Kunming airport.
Our flight back to Beijing was an hour and a half late due to lightning, so we were all tired and grumpy when we boarded, and most of us slept the whole way through the flight as well as the bus ride back to Bei Wai, where we divided up our fruit and flowers and went back to our own beds.
Overall, I have mixed feelings about the trip. There were some things I really liked (the Aini village, the chat with the monks) that I wouldn’t have done as an independent traveler, and I had huge amounts of fun at times (the river trip). However, those are ultimately outweighed by the tight schedule and the lack of time to explore on our own and interact with the locals. I feel like my Chinese is worse than it was when I left; since we did everything with the group, there was really no time or reason to speak Chinese, and I’m out of practice. Parts of the trip were also really poorly organized – there were several things on the itinerary that we never got to do due to poor planning. I would have preferred a one-week trip with the group and a week later in the semester for us to travel on our own.
I am thrilled, however, to be back in Beijing. Touching down at the airport felt as much like a homecoming as any I’ve ever experienced, on par with my first trip home from college for Thanksgiving or my return to Northwestern at the start of sophomore year. The Paralympics are over now, but I haven’t noticed any significant difference in traffic or air quality (in fact, both today and yesterday were lovely and clear). The only post-Olympics changes I’ve noticed are positive. There are more street food vendors out and about now, people who were previously driven away by Beijing’s special Olympic public health standards, which is always a good thing because Beijing’s best food is street food. The other group now out in full force are the pirated DVD vendors, who are back to selling their wares out in the open. I got off the bus today and almost immediately had copies of Hellboy 2, The Dark Knight, and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 shoved into my hands, all movies that aren’t out on actual video yet. The Beijing police are supposedly trying to crack down on this, but I see no signs of that happening. They’re just mad because I got a copy of There Will Be Blood for about eighty cents and they don’t have one. It works, too.
Oh, Beijing. You’re beautiful. You’re amazing. I love you. Don’t ever leave me again.

Dumpling Tally: 47

*The Dai are a Thai minority group living in Xishuangbanna. In Jinghong, and possibly all of Xishuangbanna, they’re actually the most numerous ethnicity, outnumbering Han Chinese.

**Passion fruits are the best fruits. If you disagree with me, you are wrong.

Yunnan Days 9-10

Day 9: Village People
We left Pu-Erh in the morning for a drive to a region of Yunnan called Xishuangbanna, where we’d be spending the rest of our trip. This drive took us through a protected nature reserve called Elephant Valley, where, our guide told us, 300 Asian elephants roamed wild and free. Despite her repeated insistences that if we were lucky, we might see an elephant, the creatures were nowhere to be seen, although we were all temporarily fooled by a statue near the visitor center.
After we made it out the other side, it was a short hop to the regional capital of Jinghong, where we dropped our big luggage off (once again, we were instructed to pack only what we needed for two nights) and ate the most delicious lunch yet. Xishuangbanna is known for its tropical fruits, and it became clear why: we were served delicious grilled skewers of pineapple, slices of watermelon, tiny bananas called bajiao, and juicy papayas to start the lunch off. Since the area is so close to Laos, the food is quite influenced by that country’s cuisine, and we had maybe ten or twelve delicious, tropical courses served to us, the best being a delicious Thai-ish cucumber salad.
We finished lunch and then went to one of Xishuangbanna’s two protected cultural sites, an 800-year-old Buddhist temple. (The other was about a two-hour drive away, near the Myanmar border, so we didn’t get to see it.) The temple itself was a pleasant, overgrown diversion, but the tropical heat was stifling and nobody was happy about climbing up the roughly 23409587342 steps to the top. Xishuangbanna was the first outright tropical place we’d been: the heat and humidity were oppressive, and greenery erupted from every available patch of dirt. Everywhere we went, even the streets of Jinghong, was green, lined with banana trees with six-foot leaves, tropical flowers, ferns, the works. The Chinese government is making a huge effort to develop Xishuangbanna as a tourist destination comparable to those in Thailand, and although the region definitely still needs work (people were still living in shanties on the outskirts of Jinghong, and outside the main highways the roads are very poorly developed) it’s coming along quite nicely. I’d be interested to see what the place is like in ten years.
Our final resting point for the day was a traditional village populated by the Aini minority group, where we’d be living for two nights with an Aini family. We were told ahead of time that showers, electricity and running water were not guaranteed (the Barbies and Complainer complained, predictably), so we knew this would not be a touristy place, but everyone in the tiny minibus I took to the village was still impressed by its remoteness. Although it was quite close to Jinghong distance-wise, about half of the drive was on a one-lane, red dirt road rivaling some of the gnarliest I’d seen on my bike ride. As we wound our way through deeper and deeper jungles, you could all but see the thought bubbles popping up over everyone’s heads: “Where are we?”
After roughly an hour and a half, our vans finally pulled up to a wooden gate where we were greeted by about thirty or so Aini villagers in traditional dress. This was actual traditional dress, too, not the fake stuff we’d been assaulted with over the past week. I later learned that the Aini women wove, dyed, and embroidered the clothes themselves, albeit with supplies they’d purchased from the next town over. The cloth was all black, but the embroidery on it was in every color imaginable, patterned with squares, simple shapes, and flowers.
The villagers sang to us and welcomed us into one of the village’s larger homes, where we were served piping hot cups of local tea and offered one of the weirder Yunnan traditions: a cigarette bong.* After being greeted and tea’d for about forty-five minutes, we met the families we’d be living with for the next two nights. I was staying in a group with Becca, Jackie, and Complainer, and to my great joy, our house not only had a TV (with a DVD player), but a fully functioning, clean hot shower. The toilet was basically a ceramic hole in the ground, but it had running water under it to wash everything away. All in all, the house was much better than I’d been led to expect, although ours was one of the nicer ones in the village (a few people did indeed get houses without plumbing, although the villagers were really chill about sharing their toilets and showers). Like all the Aini houses, ours had two stories. The first was open-air and was where the residents kept their stuff – motorbikes, cars (a couple families had them), work equipment, and livestock – and had their toilets. The second floor was where the family actually lived, and contained the bedroom, living room (where we slept on mattresses pushed together), kitchen, and shower. We put our things down and left for dinner in the communal house. The food was more simply spiced than what we’d been eating, but it was also deliciously hearty, and I ate and ate (including another chicken head and something that I found out after the fact was pig skin, but it was really good). Afterward, the Aini women tried performed a drinking song for us, and we responded in kind with a couple American classics: “Don’t Stop Believing” and the theme song from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

Day 10: Aini, Wo Ai Ni
We were rudely awakened much earlier than necessary by the crowing of chickens and the honking of geese. (I couldn’t help hoping that one particularly loud rooster would end up on my dinner plate.) After a breakfast imported from Jinghong (toast and jam) we left for the Aini tea fields, a ten-minute walk outside the center of the village, to learn how to pick tea. This wasn’t very hard, and most of the bushes had been pretty well picked over, so after about fifteen minutes the entire affair degenerated into people wandering off and eating tropical fruit. And oh, the fruit. I ate things I don’t even know the names of: a giant grapefruit-esque thing the size of a basketball, miniature sour red berries, and a tiny variety of guava that had the unmistakable hint of cilantro underneath the sweet, juicy guava taste. It was all so good, and we munched our way back to the village, plucking fruit off every tree we passed.
We ate a delicious lunch similar to the previous night’s dinner (although I noticed with dismay that the offending rooster was still alive and honking). During lunch, a change of plans was announced. We were supposed to learn to tap the rubber trees near the village, an important source of income for these people, but the villagers were concerned that our delicate Caucasian constitutions wouldn’t be able to handle the heat, and insisted that we have free time until dinner. This went over quite well with most of the group, and about half of them went back to sleep the heat off.
The rest of us went off with various groups of villagers to learn about Aini stuff: there were toys and games, including a top that none of us could work successfully and a game similar to lawn bowling, and traditional weaving and something similar to (but much harder than) crocheting, both of which I tried and summarily failed at. Afterward, I spent time with Steve and Jackie in front of the village’s only store (which, blessedly, sold popsicles), talking to some of the villagers, including the village head, a man around forty who spoke very good Mandarin.** We learned that the village had 600 people, all Aini (although there were no restrictions on who could live there, the Aini are pretty low on the ethnic minority totem pole so most people don’t want to be involved with them) and that the average income had doubled in the last five years, from about US$100 to $220. However, each family had just received 200 rubber trees, which upon reaching maturity in 7 years could be tapped every day. Each would produce 2 kuai worth of rubber a day, so when the trees mature fully each family will make more in a reasonable week’s work than they used to in an entire year. And while their income doesn’t sound like much, where they live it’s enough to live quite comfortably. The majority of homes had satellite TV, everyone had electricity, and because they raise their own plants and animals, there is always enough to eat. Frankly, I was quite surprised that their standard of living was so high – their clothes may be grubby, and the toilet facilities were sketchy in a couple places, but they definitely have everything they need. In fact, my family’s house was built just last year, and many other villagers are planning upgrades as well.
In the middle of the conversation, a girl with a nice haircut and dye job, about my age, rode by on a motorbike with her boyfriend. “Does she live here?” Steve asked, impressed, as we all were, by her trendy clothes and haircut. “Yes,” said the village head. “They go to Jinghong for college, and they come back dressed so differently.” I couldn’t help but think of my own newly found affinity for $100+ jeans when he said that. In this area, the generation gap is especially large: most residents over 40 have never been to Jinghong.
After our chat, we moseyed over to the village’s newly poured concrete basketball court for an impromptu match between five IES guys and some Aini students. We beat them, but it was a close game – the village guys were quick on their feet, even those playing barefoot, and the competition got intense, with Americans and Ainis screaming happily at each other by the end. (We also taught the villagers some showboating victory dance techniques.) When the game was finished, we ate another dinner (and I ate another chicken head, because by this point it was just expected) and went back to the basketball court for a “dance party”.
Things started off simply enough: the village women dressed in their traditional clothes again and performed some Aini dances for us. The whole village had turned out to see us, and eventually they clamored for some American songs, which Andrew and T fulfilled by doing an a cappella version of “99 Problems”. Then the private party began: most of the villagers left, and we were all seated around low tables and given barbeque and pineapple. The women came around and gave all the guys extensive massages, which was awkward because about half of them were people’s host moms. The men got out their cigarette bongs and gave each table a homemade bottle of baijiu, the infamous Chinese moonshine. The teacher accompanying us promptly took them away and scolded both us and the givers, which I thought was pretty rude (and many other students took issue with this, though not for the same reason). Music was pumped over the tinny stereo, and as the villagers and many of the students got progressively more inebriated, dancing began. Oddly enough, the town’s police chief was among the drunkest, and he asked me to dance no less than three times, each less coordinated than the last. Around midnight, the village head broke the party off, and we headed back home for a good night’s sleep with these kind, giving people.
I’ll finish writing about the trip (and post pictures) tomorrow – I have a fair amount of work to make up tomorrow, and, more importantly, today is a criminally nice day and I want to go exploring outside.

*This is exactly like it sounds. You put water in the bong, take the filter out of the cigarette, put it in the small tube outside, and inhale massive amounts of smoke. The villagers were very good at it. The few students who tried were not.

**Most of the people under forty in the village spoke Mandarin, albeit with a weird accent that made them kind of hard to understand. The older people spoke an Aini language that nobody could understand a word of.

Yunnan Days 7-8

Day 7: I Finally Lose It
This was really an immensely uninteresting day. We spent the vast majority of it on the bus on a long-haul ride to the town of Pu-Erh. Formerly named Simao, the town rechristened itself in an attempt to become a center of tea tourism. The weird part is that Pu-Erh tea, the delicious stuff for which this municipality is named, is not actually grown here; although they've tried to capitalize on it with new tea fields, the best Pu-Erh is from the southernmost part of Yunnan, which we'd be visiting next. Nonetheless, we had a couple things lined up in Pu-Erh, which was much more relaxed than Mojiang.
Early this day, before I left Mojiang, I attempted to get online in an internet cafe to update the blog (I was on the "Days 4-6" post). I had written my way most of the way through the bike ride when a local policeman came inside and informed us we'd have to leave immediately. Apparently, since we were foreign, it was "complicated" for us to be here. Having heard plenty of horror stories about people getting on the wrong side of Chinese law enforcement, I left promptly, but it was still really weird to get kicked out of somewhere for being white.
We made it to Pu-Erh in the late afternoon and had a couple of hours before dinner to hang out, which I spent at the hotel pool. Dinner was on our own tonight, so I left with a small group and was immediately subjected to even more stares and giggling "hello!"s from the locals. By the time dinner was over, I was incredibly tired of being ogled, and a couple blocks from the hotel it proved to be too much. One man, maybe in his thirties, kept staring at us without speaking. After ten seconds or so, I finally lost any semblance of cool and yelled at him (in Chinese), "Don't stare at us! This isn't a zoo!" The look on his face was priceless; I'm not sure whether he was more perturbed at being called out, or being called out gramatically correct Chinese by an American. Regardless, the entire night left me feeling massively uncomfortable and homesick for the Beezh. Some of the group went out to a bar later, but I was too emotionally tired out to want to deal with the stares again, so I took a shower and called it an early night.

Day 8: Pimp My Ethnic Minority, Part 2
This day went much better, thankfully. We started early in the morning going to a Nescafe growing and processing station run by a very energetic Walloon (I love it when I get to use that word) named Wouter, who talked with us for about an hour about how the coffee growing and buying works in their area. It sounds like a great operation: Nescafe (I just wrote that as "Nesface"...huh) buys directly from the farmers, who can choose when they want to sell based on market prices. They also do pretty rigorous quality control, apparently, which strikes me as odd because to my knowledge Nescafe is powdery, crappy, overly processed instant mix. I guess the stuff from Yunnan is really high-quality overly processed instant mix, though.
We ate lunch and then went to what was described as "a tea plantation". I was excited, but given that this was IES* I probably should have known better. It could more accurately be described as a "tea/ethnic people theme park". We were welcomed by a song and dance from people wearing about 10 minorities' "traditional" costumes (and knockoff Converse), given some tea, sang and danced at some more, and then led through their small tea fields before being served more tea by more ethnic minorities of dubious veracity. The tea was good, but the selling of culture was no less obnoxious the second time around.
We got back and went to dinner in a big group with Steve, the RA. This was better, because Steve speaks Chinese really well, and there's more safety and comfort in numbers. We ordered a ton of dishes (we probably had about 15 mouths to feed) and shared them all sitting outside and breathing in the smoke from the barbeque. My willingness to eat the head of our whole barbequed chicken caused some of the guys (and Steve) to proclaim that I was actually a man named Thor who should replace the entire electoral college, and most of the group spent the walk back to the hotel discussing whether a Norse hammer was manlier than lightning bolts. All in all, a good night.

*I should probably stop giving IES quite so much grief about this. As I found out later, they contract with tour companies and tell them where they want to go, and then the tour company picks out places for them. These places are often pretty touristy, which makes me wonder if the tour companies don't get some sort of kickback from taking people there. Given the emptiness of many of the sites and restaurants we've visited, this seems pretty likely.

Yunnan Days 4-6

Day 4 - Hell: An Introspective Journey
We started the day off in the small town of Dali. Chinese people have a penchant for naming their towns "The ________ of the East" (for example, Shanghai is the Paris of the East, Macau is the Las Vegas of the East, etc.), and I would like to propose that Dali be added to the list as "the Sebastopol of the East". As far as I know, its only purpose is to sell Western food, souvenirs of questionable authenticity, and travel permits to Tibet to Western backpackers. The entire town is filled with Bai-style batiks and the like, and roving Bai ladies will try and sell you silver jewelery and, if that doesn't strike your fancy, pot. The walled-in old town is nice enough, but after passing blocks and blocks of the same stores, it started to get old pretty fast.
Good thing, too, because on this day (Sunday) we were due to head out on a monster, ostensibly 200-km bike ride around nearby Erhai Lake, spaced out over two days. We had barely gotten out of town when our tour guide told us we'd be making a stop at a small temple to celebrate an annual festival honoring a local god. I was skeptical about the authenticity of this, given the previous day's Real Live Bai Village, but went in with an open mind.
The entire thing was amazing - completely made up for the fake Bai junk from the day before. The temple complex was packed with locals, the majority of whom were older people, but families with small kids and younger adults were also there in droves. Impossibly wizened women in headscarves played traditional instruments, and people brought food offerings to the god in pots.* Firecrackers punctuated the din every ten minutes or so, scaring everyone but the old people. Some of us had our fortunes told and then ritually burned to send a prayer to the god; I opted to spend this money on a candy apple.
After a lakeside lunch of Kentucky Fried Chicken, we continued on. I felt good about the ride so far, since we were already at the south tip of the lake, almost halfway to our destination. Oh, was I ever wrong.
We were given instructions to follow the main road alongside the lake at all costs until we reached the town of Wase, where we'd be spending the night and our tour guide would be waiting for us. I set off on my own, riding along the shoulder of the road with my iPod in (there are separate bike lanes and little traffic on this road, so it wasn't dangerous or anything, Mom). The group quickly dispersed, and soon we were all riding alone at our own pace. This was fine until I reached the quarry.
The quarry, I gather, was not there before. This was of no comfort to me, however, because now it IS there, accompanied by exhaust-belching giant dump trucks and a dusty, gravelly, pothole-pitted road that went on for roughly ten miles. I had no choice but to continue, so I did, slowly, grit getting in my eyes, my teeth, everywhere, and the overwhelming dry heat of the southern sun burning me to a crisp all the while. By the time I had finished, my black leather sandals had turned light gray from the dust, and sweat and minerals from the quarry had calcified in little lines along my shirt.
I went on along a thankfully slightly-more-paved road, passing the occasional truck or electric tricycle taxi, up hills and down them through acres of farmland and small villages with roads worse than the quarry. This was the first place I'd been in China where foreigners were a true rarity, and as I went by I was incessantly greeted with "Hello!" from people of all ages. This got really old after a few times, but I always responded in kind (except the guy who grabbed his crotch as he said it, who got a confused look and a "guten tag").
It was a hard ride. The road was paved in places, but in other spots dusty, one-lane, and filled with holes, which often contained giant puddles of water, refuse, and manure from the local farm animals. There were beautiful stretches - one mile-long downhill stretch through a field of tall, leafy, flowery tobacco plants comes to mind - but the rest of the ride was so, so punishing. There was a van following behind us in case we couldn't make it or our bikes broke, but oddly enough, the knowledge that I could take it if I wanted to made me want to continue all the more. I wanted to keep going to prove to myself that I could finish. (Also, I kept repeating "you're going to have such great thighs when this is over" to myself.)
Other than knowing I have a well of previously undiscovered tenacity in me, the only profound revelations I had on the trip regarded the contents of my iPod** and the fact that my butt is not as soft as I'd thought. I feel like giant solitary bike rides, as well as marathons and solo backpacking, are supposed to inspire you and change your life, but when I finally got to the hotel I felt only filthy and exhausted. Adding to the annoyance was the fact that I was missing the Mid-Autumn festival, the second biggest party in China, because I was in the middle of Podunk, Nowhere. (This is akin to leaving New Orleans for Mardi Gras, New York for New Year's, or Boston for St. Patrick's Day.) Also, Max sent me a text telling me that he was at Propaganda playing pool with the president of Nigeria's son, which did not alleviate my sour mood. The cherry on top of the cake was the knowledge that I had to do it all again tomorrow...


Day 5: Ow, My Most of Me
When I got back on the bike in the morning my legs felt like rubber and it hurt to sit down. This actually got easier as I pushed through the initial pain and stiffness, and fairly soon I got into a rhythm again, albeit a slower one than the day before. This day was pretty much more of the same: fields of corn, rice, and tobacco, picked by stooped old women. The group did have a chance to practice harvesting the rice by beating it against the six-foot baskets the women carried on their backs - hard work, to say the least, and since then I've thought about those sweet old women when I've eaten rice (that is to say, constantly). The ride was lovely, but we all felt our sore, overworked legs giving out the farther we went. Every part of my body hurt: my calves from tensing on the pedals, my thighs from pushing down, my hips from climbing the hills, my back from carrying my bag, which contained all my necessary goods (clothes, shower stuff, etc.), my shoulders from bending over the bike and the previous day's sunburn, my hands from chafing against the handlebars, my butt from the hard seat (much harder than the ones in the States), and my head probably just because everything else hurt and it didn't want to be late for the party. To make matters worse, the big set of gears on my 21-speed bike (the 1-2-3, not the 1 through 7) had started refusing to shift down, making hills torturous. I managed for a while by switching to 3-1 and walking my bike fairly frequently, but it slowed me down a lot.
After a more excruciating journey than I'd previously thought possible, we stopped at a restaurant for lunch, where I ate more than I've ever eaten before in one sitting, cringing every time I shifted in my seat.
During lunch we were given the option to ride a bus back if we didn't feel up to finishing. Several people gladly accepted, but I really wanted to finish. However, I wanted to finish with a functioning bike, so I went up to the bike repairman and told him what was going on. At first, he insisted it didn't matter, but after some very loud complaining from me (the phrase "absolutely not acceptable" came up a lot) he agreed to look at it. By the time he'd determined it was beyond repair, though, everyone else had left, and there were no substitute bikes left, so I ended up taking the bus back for the last fifteen miles or so. I was annoyed that I didn't get to finish the ride, but pleased about the bus ride back, as bumpy as it was.
After a long-deserved shower and a mediocre "Western" dinner (hot and sour spaghetti, anyone?) we piled into another sleeper train back to Kunming, where the next day we'd depart for the lush, tropical southern area of Yunnan.

Day 6: Nick Naylor Would Be Proud
We moved from the train to the bus, got breakfast, and started what would be a long day of driving with an hour-long hop to the small city of Yuxi. With the change in locale came another tour guide, who we were informed would be with us for the rest of the trip. The first time we saw her, though, she didn't speak a word to us or the trip leaders (two teachers and the RA, Steve). This, combined with her skintight jeans and heels, led me and the kids who hang out in the back row of the bus to believe that she was a hooker that IES was keeping on retainer for some reason. Eventually she informed us that her name was Bai Mei and that she was a native of this area, and she'd be showing us around. However, each place we've been to this day has furnished us with a separate, interactive tour guide, so I am still not convinced that my first impression was entirely wrong.
Our reason for stopping in Yuxi was to visit the Hongta Red Pagoda Cigarette Factory. Yunnan is still largely agricultural, and tobacco is one of the main cash crops, so I was interested to learn a little more about the role the factory played in the local economy. However, this would elude me; we were first shown down a hallway decorated with posters of various Communist statesmen smoking, and then taken into the factory itself, where we strained to listen to the tour guide's statistics over the dull roar of machinery. The entire time, I was struck by the resemblance to the Jelly Belly jellybean factory near my hometown - they probably had a similar smokes/beans per minute output. The whole building did smell really good, though, very fruity and sweet, with none of the noxious crappy smells that come in cigarette smoke.
After that we were escorted to an outdoor park built by the company and given tiny sample boxes with two cigarettes in them. The group members that smoked started doing so immediately, but those of us that didn't began screwing around, lighting cigarettes and putting them in the hands and mouths of these ridiculous statues depicting people happily harvesting tobacco. As my packet was handed to me, I asked our factory tour guide if she smoked. She and her two coworkers started laughing. "No," they all said. "It's bad for your health."
Most of the rest of the day was spent on the bus going to Mojiang, an awful little town useful only as a one-night stopping point. Our bus ride did, however, give me a chance to meet my fellow group members in earnest:
My roommate for the trip, who I obviously already knew, is a sweet girl named Becca who goes to University of Puget Sound (where I would have gone had Northwestern rejected me). We have similar internal clocks and senses of humor, although she's a touch more sedate and responsive to alcohol than I am. We make a good team.
The two of us frequently hang out with this other girl named Jackie, who is quite possibly the chillest human being ever. The girl will go along with anything, and will do so enthusiastically.
Jackie's roommate, though, is a different story. We have nicknamed her Complainer, because that is what she does, incessantly. Nothing is good enough; there are too many bugs, the hike is too steep, etc. Ostensibly 21, she could pass for fifteen due to the sheer lack of willingness to adapt to what's going on around her. The thing she hates most, though, is the food, which I find puzzling because I'm eating better on this trip than I probably ever have before in my life (the food is Thai- and Vietnamese-influenced, since we're so close to the border). Everything she's presented with "doesn't look that good" and gets pushed around on her plate for fifteen minutes before she is willing to taste it. Oddly enough, she likes everything we coax her into trying.
We also spend a lot of time with a set of male roommates on the trip, both from University of Redlands. One is this crazy Texan guy named Cody who is drunk half the time and hilarious all the time. (Becca is enthralled by his Texas-ness and keeps asking him things like "Have you seen an armadillo? Did you eat it? EEW.") The other is an Oaklander who we all call Pei Rei for some reason. Pei Rei is sarcastic and laid-back: the anti-Cody. Besides Andrew, who I mentioned earlier, the others of note are a set of girls whom pretty much everyone calls the Barbies. Educated in Europe, they are constantly complaining about how [name of thing] is better in Switzerland, and they wear each other's clothes and try and get our trip leaders to let them stay at the hotel instead of doing anything. This does not go well for them.
So we arrived in Mojiang, looked around, determined that the town was an awful hole with nothing worth seeing, and left for dinner. For the first time, we stood out. This was not a tourist town, and we were constantly being gawked at, pointed out, etc. The entire thing made me really uncomfortable, and after being subjected to so many stares, not all of them simply kind or curious, I was grateful for the first time to be traveling with a group.
This actually led to an interesting incident later. On our way to a karaoke outing, a group of high school girls accosted Andrew, his friend T (who is black), a couple other people, and me. They wanted to talk to all of us, but were especially interested in T, who they were convinced was from Africa. We tried to explain that, no, T's ancestors were from Africa, but T was from the US like the rest of us, but the girls would have none of it. Eventually, Andrew told the girls that T was Kobe Bryant's little brother, figuring they would recognize him from the Olympics. They fell into a shrieking, giggling girl-pile, had their pictures taken with poor T, and left promptly.

Dumpling tally: 31 (dumplings aren't common in this part of China, but we got them with lunch at one place)

*The most common offering was a chicken. First you bring the live chicken to the altar to show the god your gift. Then you take it down to the pool and ritually slaughter it (I saw this like five times and I have pictures). Once the bird is cleaned, you take it back up to the altar and leave it there.

**I really only listened to three things on the trip. During the times when I was in the middle of traffic jams, climbing hills, or trying not to breathe in immeasurable amounts of dust, I put on Black Rebel Motorcyle Club. For the desolate farmland sections, I played "The Engine Driver" by the Decemberists (this song is so amazing), and for the rest it was all Girl Talk. I discovered that the more you listen to Girl Talk, the better it gets. The unfortunate corollaries to this are that a) eventually when you listen to normal music you start asking yourself why the riff has lasted more than ten seconds and when Three Six Mafia is going to come in and b) you start humming Girl Talk and people wonder why you're mixing Biggie with Elton John.

Our minority cultures, let me show you them

This will be short, since the keyboard I'm using has sticky keys and I'm supposed to meet up with people soon and and and and and
The day before yesterday I hopped an obscenely early flight to Kunming, in the southern Yunnan province, for two weeks of solid, regimented, IES-organized fun. I slept more or less for the entire plane flight there (this is a testament to how sleepy I was), but perked up once arriving in Kunming, the "city of eternal spring". The climate was indeed pleasant and springy, but the city itself didn't impress me much - there just wasn't anything to do, short of shop fruitlessly, which I did. I also visited a pleasant park with a group of people and went on the bumper cars with some overzealous middle-aged Chinese men, but I went to bed that night feeling like I'd exhausted most of Kunming's possibilities.
Fortunately (?) the next day was full of scheduled activity time, which started with a Kunming lunch specialty - noodles and meat cooked in hot broth - and continued with the most fruitless field trip ever, to Asia's largest flower auction house. This had a lot of potential, but the auction was not for about six hours, so the giant warehouse was largely empty, occupied only by a handful of bouquets and some people doing quality control (checking to make sure the flowers were pretty enough? I don't know). Kunming also has a legendary flower market, but we don't get to visit that until the last day of our trip so we can bring the flowers back to the Beezh with us.
After that we headed to Xi Shan (the Western Hills park outside of the city) for a wonderfully short hike up to the Dragon Gate, an altar dedicated to dragons and various Daoist deities. If our guide had it correct, the symbolism was as follows: the carp on one side of the gate symbolized an ordinary person who hadn't yet taken the Confucian government exams. By jumping over the gate (the exams) the carp could turn into a dragon (a bureaucrat). This was ridiculous, but I had a good popsicle on the way down so I considered the activity a draw, fun-wise. We went back to the town center for a stunning dinner on my friend Andrew's recommendation and then walked back along the lake, near which all the buildings were lit up with twinkling neon lights. I suddenly found myself with a new love for Kunming; the scene reminded me of Sanlitun without all the drunk morons and with personality.
We arrived at the hotel ready to take our sleeper train to the smaller town of Dali. I had never really traveled by train before, and based on last night, I wouldn't recommend it. The bunks were pretty much the same thing as graham crackers (in terms of stability, thickness, softness, square footage...everything except delicious taste, not that I tried) and stacked three high. The train also made periodic ten-minute stops waiting for other trains to switch tracks, which disrupted my sleep whenever it happened. All in all, a rough night for sleep.
We arrived in Dali tired and smelly this morning, and after a mediocre breakfast and some showers set off for a pretty good lunch in a touristy hotel. Afterwards came the Nightmare Forced Cultural Experience that was the Bai Minority Cultural Villa. Our intinerary had promised us a visit to a "traditional Bai village" so I was dismayed to see that the village was more like a theme park - you had to pay to get in, and once there, you could watch locals of questionable ethnicity unsmilingly shuffle their way through "traditional" Bai dances* wearing cheap, polyester costumes and Nikes. The entire thing really pissed me off for some reason I can't fully put my finger on; I guess it just bothers me that people are bastardizing and dumbing down this culture to make it a tourist attraction for stupid white people (and also stupid Han Chinese people, apparently). These people and their culture aren't Disneyland, and they aren't there so that their customs can be pimped out, ogled at, and then purchased. I wanted to ask our guide how many gift shops the traditional Bai villages had, but I forgot the word for "gift shop" which was probably for the best. All that aside, I'm a little annoyed at the way the trip is set up - we've seen some neat things, but all the restaurants we've eaten at with the group have been touristy and empty, and when I came to China I intended to live the life of a student local, not a tourist.
Happily, we next moved on to some random lady's** actual traditional Bai house, where she taught us how to make cheese with the milk from her actual cow, who was hanging out in the stable about twenty feet from everyone else. I did not try my hand at the cheesemaking, but some of my friends did, and it did not look easy. The cheese was malleable and dough-like in its new form but was then wound around thin poles to dry before this family sold it. The family was incredibly warm and kind to us, and I couldn't help but notice that despite their traditional clothes and way of life, the TV in the living room was a big hit.
Finally, we went to a tye-dye factory nearby. The Bai are credited with inventing tye-dye, and we got a brief run-through of all the steps and a taste of some indigo tea, which was actually blue. It was interesting enough, but I was happy to get back to the hotel and have some time to explore on my own.
I have some really mixed feelings about this trip so far - all the best times I've had have come spontaneously, instead of being a forced march by an overly-enthusiastic tour guide. I think traveling is almost better with one or two people, where you can just do what you want on your own schedule. The level of touristiness here is also pretty appalling - I can understand why it exists, but IES has been operating here for close to 20 years, and I'd hoped they could come up with more authentic things for us to do.*** All in all, I'm really looking forward to getting back to Beijing for more Chinese (I feel like our language lessons have gone by the wayside here) and more chances to explore on my own.

*I'm pretty sure one of the men's dances was taken directly from the Broadway version of Jersey Boys.

**To the best of my knowledge, our guide literally picked this woman up off the street. WUT.

***And with better nightlife. There are seriously no good clubs anywhere near anywhere we're going. Is one night of dancing too much to ask?

Dinner of Champions

Moving out was interesting. The Zhangs were pretty chill about it the night before and the morning of, but when I came back at three to get my stuff they flipped out. I have no idea why, but they both started shouting at me in Chinese the moment I walked in the door, saying different things and speaking really quickly. All I could do was look at them helplessly and say “I’m sorry, I don’t understand” repeatedly. Eventually they realized we were at an impasse and called Bin Bin, who sweetly and apologetically told me that I “must give them their keys back and leave immediately” while both parents continued to shout in the background. (They also gave me my unopened jam back, but I noticed they kept the bottle of wine in its usual spot behind the TV.) In the middle of all the ruckus, Max, who had told me he’d help me move out, called saying he’d arrived, so I excused myself amidst more shouting and took Zen breaths all the way to the gate.
We made quick work of the suitcases despite having to carry them down six flights of stairs and walked the two minutes or so to the international students’ dorm. The IES literature claimed it was the “nicest dorm on campus”. That may well be true, but I’d hate to see the other dorms. It’s pretty average – small rooms, crappy lighting, communal bathrooms (albeit with Western plumbing). We do get close to 70 channels of TV though. The Chinese roommates aren’t here yet. They will arrive after we get back from our long trips.
Max took a nap on my bed while I went to my final class of the day, calligraphy. For the first time, we got to use the brushes and write. I actually use the term “write” pretty loosely, since we only made single horizontal and vertical strokes. I knew calligraphy wasn’t something you could pick up in half an hour, but it’s way more difficult than I expected. Fang Laoshi’s strokes are so straight and even, and mine are invariably wavy, blobby, and malformed, although I did get a couple nice ones in, probably through sheer beginner’s luck.
I returned to the room and Max and I decided to go out for hotpot, a uniquely Beijing style of eating. Allegedly brought here by the invading Mongol hordes sometime before I was born, hotpot involves taking a sizzling kettle of broth or oil and dipping various meats and veggies in it to cook them. It’s very popular here (as the first volume of my Chinese textbook series explained, “Beijingers just love to eat hotpot!”) and restaurants are common. I vaguely remembered seeing one further up the street from my bus rides, so we set off not really knowing what we were looking for.
The place I’d thought sold hotpot turned out to be a standard-issue noodle place. By this point I had my heart set on hotpot dinner, so we continued up and about a block further discovered a relatively upscale-looking place packed with Gen-X Chinese. We were seated, provided with aprons with the restaurant’s logo (so dorky, so cool) and given picture menus that explained exactly what we could order.
How it worked was like this.
1. Pick a style of broth that you want to cook your stuff in. We chose the fairly standard half-mild, half-spicy broth. Half our hotpot arrived with clear, lemongrassy chicken broth, and the other half had a mouthnumbingly hot mix of chili oil, Sichuan peppercorns, dried hot peppers, and the like. The spicy half was further divided into halves – one with all the fixings, and another that was strained so that only the oil could get through and it was less spicy.
2. Pick things you want to dip in the hotpot. The options ranged from the bizarre (duck heads, baby bullfrogs) to the relatively mundane (beef, carrots, tiny steamed buns). We got plates of thinly sliced mutton, tofu, dumplings, mushrooms, and yams.
3. If you ordered a spicy hotpot, get a beer, because water alone is NOT going to make the burning in your mouth go away.
Once the food came in, we took turns randomly cooking it in the different sections of the pot and making fun of our aprons. This is an incredibly fun way to eat, and I imagine it would be even better with a big group. Dipping foods are surprisingly rare in the world’s cultures, which I don’t understand because the potential for playing with your food and laughing about it is really high.* It was by far the best meal I’ve had here, and we left very full but having eaten almost everything set before us. The cost? $7 each, AND I got a coupon for about $4 off next time I come in, which will undoubtedly be very soon.
Then, this morning, I woke up with an insatiable craving for the fried sesame-paste balls I’ve fallen in love with here. (This happens every morning, actually.) I knew of a stall conveniently located near ______________** but decided I wanted to do some shopping first. However, as a budget-minded student, I wanted to go somewhere cheap, so I decided to set off to what may well be the bargaining capital of Beijing, if not all of China: the Silk Market.
The name is a bit of a misnomer. This enormous, six-floor plaza does have some silk for sale, but the vast majority of it is taken up by knockoff designer goods. Want a D&G top? Some Calvin Klein jeans? A Prada bag? You’ll find a fake version of it here, and dear God, do the people who work in the stalls there ever want to sell it to you. Going in is pretty overwhelming, because the salespeople are hyperattentive and if you walk within a half-mile radius of their stall, they’ll try their best to suck you in, sometimes even stepping in front of you to make you stop walking, all the while saying things like “Lady, want pants, want a belt?” and “We have cheapest jacket, cheapest Armani, Gucci, lady, jackets for you.” I wasn’t prepared for the level of sensory overload I got going in, but acclimated pretty quickly and learned to deflect everyone’s propositions with a quick “bu yao” (I don’t want it) and keep walking. The stuff there was all right, but the atmosphere was much more interesting, so I resolved to walk around and see what all there was to see.
If there’s one thing I’m bad at, though, it’s “just looking” when I go shopping, and I soon found myself drawn to a gray flannel trenchcoat. The girl running the stall, who was maybe 25 or so, immediately noticed that I was looking at one of her things and shoved her way over to me through the masses.
“You like jacket, lady?” she asked.
I responded in Chinese that I thought it was pretty. She seemed happy that I could speak Chinese, and we chatted in that language for a while about where I was from, how long I was in China, and how old I was (and if I had a boyfriend, weirdly). The whole time, she was pulling various sizes of the coat off of hangers. The biggest size – an XXL – ended up fitting. (I’m a pretty standard width for China, but I’m tall and have long arms and legs for the clothes here.) “You’re so tall!” the girl exclaimed, using English now. “Very tall, very sexy. Beautiful. Ok, let’s speak English.”
Here is where the bargain part comes in. The stalls in the Silk Market aren’t like clothes in boutiques or department stores, where the prices are posted and you pay them. In the Silk Market, there are no prices, nothing is nailed down, and you have to work it out with the person at the stall. Our exchange went like this (prices converted to USD):
Her: It’s $140.
Me: I can’t pay that. I’ll give you $20.***
Her: You’re so pretty. It will look so nice on you. It’s Max Mara [it obviously was not actually], it’s an American brand. $90, because it will look so nice on you. You’re American, you’re rich.
Me: I’m American, but I’m a student and I don’t have much money. I’ll give you $30.
Her: You’re clever, you speak Chinese really well. Since you’re a clever girl, $70.
Me: $70? Too expensive.
Her: Shh! Don’t let other people hear! They can’t know I’m giving you that price. They’ll all want that price. This is a special price, special for you.
Me: I’ll pay $40.
Her: I can’t make money like that! How about $60?
Me: $45.
Her: $50. What is the most you’ll pay?
Me: $45.
Her: Not $50?
Me: $45.
Her: Okay, you can have it! But you can’t tell anyone else you paid that little. They’ll all want it that cheap. This is special price, special only for you. Give me a kiss. [She turns her cheek up toward me and I give her a peck.]
She bagged my coat up (“You want a bag? I’ll give you one, only for you!”) and I walked off, happy with my success. The knockoff Coach bags looked nice, so I’ll probably end up going back, with a couple pointers in mind.
Tip 1: Know exactly what you want to buy. I looked at the coat on a whim, not realizing that at places like this, once the salesperson gets it on you, you’re never going to escape without it. (I’m happy with my coat, though – I didn’t bring a warm one here with me, and it can replace my heinous, unfitted Old Navy one that makes me look like a man. See how I rationalized this to myself?) Here, even walking away is a bargaining method – more than once, I saw sellers chasing prospective buyers down the aisles, offering them ever-lower prices. Anyway, if you’re not entirely sure you’re interested in something, don’t pick it up or try it on.
Tip 2: Know exactly what you want to pay. Before buying my coat, I watched some other people bargain and got a sense for what was a decent starting price to offer and what the average prices people actually paid were. In this way, the Silk Market is great, because if you go in saying “I want a handbag for no more than $30” you can refuse to pay more than that. From the little that I saw, the salespeople usually came around, and the final price was much closer to the buyer’s first offer than the seller’s.
Coat in tow, I subwayed it over to sesame balls and then Nanluogu, where I did some gift shopping for various family members and tried a couple interesting street foods I’d seen around.
The first thing I tried is called suannai, which means “sour milk” in Chinese. It’s essentially a really liquid version of plain yogurt, about the consistency of a smoothie. Although you can get it prepackaged at some supermarkets, the best ones are also the sketchiest: at the omnipresent neighborhood stores that sell cartons of cigarettes, liquor, and bottled drinks, neighborhood suannai vendors come around every morning and fill up the store’s little ceramic jars, a bit smaller than a soda can, with fresh suannai. The jars are then covered with a paper lid and a rubber band. When you buy one, you drink it and just return the jar to anywhere that sells suannai when you’re done. They’re very good, especially in the mornings.
The other thing I ate is a mystery to me. While walking on NLG the first day I was there, I saw a giant line outside a small mom-and-pop storefront. I couldn’t even see what was for sale inside, but since Chinese people are willing to actually line up for only two things (good food and permits for something or other) I figured I might have hit on something great and decided to line up with them.
A couple minutes into the line, I noticed that many people coming out the door were carrying with them cups of frozen yogurt, suannai, or smoothies. When I finally got to the front, I couldn’t read the menu, so I tried my luck and asked for what the person in front of me had ordered. The woman at the counter handed me a half-pint cup of…something white, with sugared red beans on top. I took it outside with a spoon and ate tentatively.
The Chinese don’t do dessert well. They make killer pastries, but dessert as a concept is relatively new to them. This, though, was amazing. It was the consistency of a very liquid pudding, but less sweet, lighter, and milkier. It wasn’t too sugary – the dominant flavor was definitely light, fresh milk, which nicely contrasted with the sweet, slightly nutty red beans sprinkled on top. I could not believe how good it was. I’ve seen it a couple other places since then, but I got another one today for the first time since I’d first tried it, and I couldn’t believe how good it was this time either. The store where I got it just calls it hongdou de, but that just refers to the beans on top of it, so I have no idea what its actual name is. I will find out someday, and then…oh man.
I'll be traveling around the south for the next couple weeks, so don't expect any significant updates until after the 24, when I get back.

Dumpling Tally: 30

*An example: Max started pretending his little foods were political prisoners undergoing interrogation when he was dipping them in the hot oil. (“I’ll never tell you where the tofu treasure is hidden! Not the oil! NOT THE OIL! NOOOOOOOOO glub glub glub…”)

**Shame on you if you weren’t able to fill in the blank with “Nanluogu Hutong”.

***This seems like an almost insulting discrepancy, but it’s not. The expectation with bargaining is that the seller starts way higher than they’re willing to accept, and the buyer starts with way less than they’re willing to pay, with both parties gradually working their way toward the middle. If anyone ever accepted the other person’s initial offer they’d be a huge chump – it’s just unheard of.