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.