List Post 4 - The Finer Things in China

After this afternoon, I’ll only have two more days in Beijing before heading home. I’ve enjoyed it here, but I’ll be really happy to head back and sink my teeth into some Chipotle. I finished my Chinese final today, which was an awful slog through endless squiggly lines that apparently represent words. Inspired and renewed by my completion of all of IES’ silly requirements, your lists today will be joyful ones, in celebration of the country that has graciously hosted me for the past three and a half months.

THE GOOD LIFE
Top Five Things I’ll Miss Back in the US
5. Yogurt. American yogurt is really gross-tasting and weird. Chinese yogurt, however filled with industrial chemicals it may be, is delicious. It comes in great flavors like “fig and golden raisin,” “kiwi and aloe,” and my favorite, “raspberry and black tea.” It also comes in pints.
4. The libations. Once I get back to the States, I only have about six months until I can drink legally, but I’ll miss going out to bars with my friends during that time. Beijing has a ton of great bars (see the entry a couple days prior) and when I’m back in Sebastopol watching South Park at night, I’m sure I’ll think back fondly to the Pimm’s Cups I drank at Q Bar into the wee hours of the morning.
3. The good life. Even on my relatively modest spring/summer job savings, I managed to live very well in Beijing; I ate out at restaurants (albeit super cheap ones) for all my meals, took cab rides across town regularly, did a ton of shopping, and went out to bars a lot, and I still have almost half my checking account left. Other than gas, I think getting back will be a bit of a sticker shock for me.
2. The food. See previous entry; I may well cry during my last supper at the Dumpling Restaurant.
1. The culture. Beijing is very old (surprise!) and is imbued with a kind of ancient history that doesn’t exist in the US. Even just walking around, you’ll happen on buildings that are older than my entire home country. Although Beijing seems to be doing its best to get rid of this culture at times, it’s still remarkably integrated into the city, and it’s been very interesting to live in a city where girls my age walk past 400-year-old buildings talking on mobile phones that cost more than my car and old men playing dominoes accompanied by their pet birds. As every crappy, opening-line-starved journalist covering Beijing has written, this is indeed a city of contrasts.

Top Five China Experiences
5. Climbing the Great Wall. It’s SO OLD, and going to such an undeveloped section of it really drove this home. In addition, I’m pretty sure I climbed it on the last sunny day in Beijing, so the weather and the view were stunning.
4. Living the high life in Shanghai. All I did was eat dumplings, go to nice restaurants and bars, and shop. It was super relaxing, and a sorely needed rest between midterms and finals.
3. Learning to bargain at the Silk and Zoo Markets. Although many people would justifiably find this annoying, I think it’s super fun, and haggling is such a key part of shopping in China that I feel it deserves a place on here.
2. Yunnan Trip! Between the Aini Village homestay, the delicious food, and the Mekong River trip resulting in the ultimate destruction of the insidious Umbrella Lady, Yunnan Trip was one of those things I didn’t really appreciate until I got back from it, and also until the weather in Beijing dipped below freezing.
1. Exploring. Many of my favorite places in Beijing were found randomly on foot – Nanluogu Hutong, the Niujie Mosque, even the dog restaurant. My habit of getting off at random subway stops and looking around ended with Beijing’s good weather, but it was infinitely rewarding and fun, and the best way to get to know a city.

Top Five (non-restaurant) Places in Beijing
5. The Summer Palace. The Chinese version of Versailles, this was built in the 1800s as pleasure quarters for the imperial family, and is remarkably well-preserved (I guess it’s not technically that old, though). It sits beautifully on a lake, and the day I went was sunny and clear, so it was about as idyllic as you can get.
4. Yonghegong. I’ve been here a couple times, and I always leave feeling a little more peaceful than when I came (although with me there’s nowhere to go but up). It’s also an interesting look at how Tibetan religion functions within “mainstream” China.
3. Propaganda. I love the dancing. I love, love, love it, and Propaganda has the best of it, and I have nothing but fond feelings for the nights I spent there dancing in front of the DJ tables. Also noteworthy is the middle-aged "sweater man," who frequents Propaganda despite literally everyone else there being half his age. He looks kind of like a fatter, mulletier version of Tobias Funke. You will know him when you see him, from his sweater. The sad thing is, he’s always dancing with college-aged girls, and I am just…me.
2. Jingshan Park. I went here on my second day in town and haven’t been back since, and now it’s too cold to go again. This park, though, has lovely temples, beautiful gardens, and a killer view over the Forbidden City, and it’s filled with traditional Chinese people doing traditional Chinese things.
1. Nanluogu Hutong. Yes, it’s gentrified and for hipsters. But with bars, restaurants, cozy coffee shops, and boutiques this good, it won a place in my heart nonetheless, and it makes for a beautiful stroll on an uncrowded summer weekday afternoon. I do regret to inform my readership that the pudding place I loved so dearly on this street has gone out of business. I will never forgive the responsible parties.

I’ll probably write a vaguely introspective post about my time here before I leave, but other than that, you won’t be hearing from me until I’m back in the USSA. I also wish to direct you to a superb one-act play written by Max, based on a true story. I believe it is at least of Arthur Miller quality, and am currently trying to get Zooey Deschanel to play myself in the off-Broadway debut.

Picture Post: Shanghai

From top: old-style apartment blocks, the new theater academy, Max two-fisting pure liquified America (it's flavored Starbucks lattes), the outside of a fancy private school, the inside of the Source store, trendy Xintiandi shopping area, garden in the French Concession, me and my new boyfriend, quiet residential street, Christmastime at one of the malls, Nanjing Lu at night, me with Haibao (Haibao is the omnipresent mascot of the 2010 Expo, whatever that is), excellent Chinglish, me narrowly escaping ingestion on the Bund, the old customs house, Bund buildings, and a typical downtown scene.

Shanghai'ed!

So last Thursday Amy, Amy’s friend (a last-minute replacement for Elise, who had lost her wallet and her train tickets), Max, and myself departed for Shanghai. Our train on the way in was a soft seat, the second choice of accommodation, as all the hard-sleeper tickets were sold out. However, this proved a very pleasant way to travel; the second car of soft seats was almost completely empty, and so, accompanied by another roving band of IES students, we invaded it and sat around its tables playing cards and very intense word games. (I defeated Max in a hotly contested round of “ghost” despite his repeated boasts that he “hardly ever lost” at it.) When it came time to sleep, though, things got less comfortable. Soft seats are analogous to plane seats: they’re about as thick, roughly the same size, and they recline the same negligible amount. I’ve never been able to sleep well on planes, and catnapped fitfully throughout the night even though I had a row of seats to myself.

Day 1: This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
I woke at 7 am with the recorded announcement that we’d be arriving in Shanghai shortly. Despite approaching China’s largest city, the view of the countryside from the window looked as provincial as any countryside I’d seen in Shanxi or Yunnan: the same poor farmers in their fields and thin brick houses, heated by the same coals that sent plumes of smoke lurching into the already filthy air. I was equally unimpressed once we entered Shanghai proper. It looked almost exactly like Beijing, with nondescript concrete buildings punctuated by China’s uniquely hideous 1970s apartment blocks. By the time we stepped out of the (standard) train station, I started to worry that I’d wasted my time and money coming here. This was not alleviated when we tried to catch a cab to our hotel, which, judging by the map I had, was a fairly short ride from the train station. The first cab we hailed tried to make us pay a flat rate of about $9, a huge sum given the short distance. The second told us it was “too far.” Finally, a third cab talked to the hotel receptionist to find out where exactly the place was and cheerfully took us there for a fair and reasonable $3. The legendary sneaky Chinese people who consistently try to rip foreigners off seem to have eluded me thus far, but it was a frustrating experience; I don’t think anyone’s tried to overtly cheat me until the first cab driver (the Silk Market is different, as it’s their job to cheat you) and it was a frustrating experience.
The cab dropped us on the corner of a little lane branching off what looked like a fairly major road. Before we even checked in, though, something caught our eye. Baozi! A tiny stall was set up a mere twenty feet from our hotel, and a cluster of hungry Shanghainese, ranging from businessmen in suits to the quilted-pajama-wearing townsfolk* inexplicably found everywhere in China, was gathered around waiting for their fist-sized steamed bundles of joy. We joined the fray and eventually got some delicious pork and potato baozi. Full and relatively happy, we checked into the hotel and caught up on sleep until lunchtime, at which point we went back for more baozi, this time including a delicious veggie variety with mustard greens, all for only 15 cents each.
We braved Shanghai’s subway system (not actually hard; we only used one subway line the entire trip) to go to the Bund, the town’s equivalent of the Magnificent Mile. Situated along the Huangpu River, the Bund showcases some of China’s finest treaty-port architecture, including exclusive clubs that Chinese and women weren’t allowed into at the time, old stately bank buildings, and the still-functioning customs house. For the first time since arriving in China, I got the feeling that I could have been somewhere else. The style of the buildings reminded me of what I’d seen in Vienna or Prague, and they didn’t have even the faintest tinge of Chineseyness to them save for the small red flags fluttering at the top. For all their stateliness, though, the Bund didn’t make for super-interesting strolling. The buildings were all either offices or the occasional luxury retailer, and except for a luxury phone store called Vertu that Max wanted to look at, nothing caught our attention.
So what’s on the other side of the river? The exact opposite of the Bund’s buildings: ultramodern, sleek skyscrapers, the most ridiculous of which is the Oriental Pearl TV tower (pictured above – you’ll be able to tell which one it is because it’s ridiculous). This part of town, called Pudong, was visually arresting, but my Lonely Planet book told us that it lacked anything of real interest to visitors, so we didn’t venture over there. (Yet.)
After the Bund wore out its welcome, we made our way back to the main shopping street, Nanjing Lu. The eastern part of the street, closest to the Bund, was obviously overdeveloped for tourists and was crammed with neon-lit shops promising clueless white people knockoff jade statues, “Chinese” jewelery, ostensibly high-quality tea, and other such souvenirs. Even though the area was pedestrianized, it was a madhouse. The cars that would have been on the road were replaced by packs of Chinese people who seemed just as determined to disrupt the natural flow of foot traffic. We eventually struggled out of this section of the street and escaped into…a mall.
Shanghai has SO MANY MALLS. Most of the ones located on East Nanjing Lu were nice but not unreasonable, getting more and more expensive (and the items sold within getting less weirdly ugly and Chinese) as we headed farther west. This strip of street had seemingly endless malls, all of them huge; we actually got lost in one twelve-floor behemoth. By the time we got home, we were all mall-ed out, and we had seen two more Vertu stores (according to Max, Manhattan has a grand total of one). Their phones, which in China retail for upwards of $10,000, sold at about the rate of six per week, according to one of the workers, mostly to Chinese and Japanese people. This sort of summed up the atmosphere in Shanghai; the city proper is overflowing with more luxury than anyone could ever possibly need, or even support, in its rush to become cosmopolitan and “modern”. In a lot of ways, this was great: the city was cleaner (although the pollution was still pretty bad) and laid out in a much more familiar and Western way, but it was also very weird to feel distinctly poor in a developing country.
After returning to the hotel (and the dumpling stand) we decided on dinner at a Moroccan place called Barbarossa, in the middle of People’s Park in the city center. The recommendation in Lonely Planet** did nothing to prepare us for the restaurant/bar/lounge’s beautiful sitting. The building looked like a softly lit Moroccan palace and sat delicately aside a pond in the middle of the park. During the summertime, when the weather was warm and the curtains open, it must be nothing short of magical. We quickly ordered (the kitchen was about to close) and enjoyed some amazing food, the kind all too rare in Beijing: a delicious, lemony, flawlessly herbed chicken tagine and a salad with arugula, blue cheese, and pears. I was never a huge fan of salads of any sort, but this was the first one I’d really had since arriving in China, and it was delicious. We contemplated staying at the restaurant for drinks, but decided they were too expensive, at about $8 each (keep this number in mind for later, kids) and headed back instead for a good night’s sleep.

Day 2: The Gao Sheng Huo***
This was by far the most fun day. The previous day left a little bit of an odd taste in my mouth, between the lovely but empty Bund, the omnipresent flashing neon and squawking vendors of East Nanjing Lu, and the weird commercialism of the luxury stores. We woke up late, grabbed some dumplings on the way out, and headed on foot to the French Concession, described as an elegant, low-key area with shops and cafés.
Though most of the journey there showcased the same omnipresent construction and heavily trafficked streets I’d come to know and despise in Beijing, the French Concession itself was a treat. It’s not a clearly delineated area, and it sort of sneaks up on you, at least the way we approached it from the north. You notice that the buildings are statelier and better kept, and that the trees lining the roads don’t look like haphazard afterthoughts, like they do in Beijing; instead, they are healthy, leafy, and happily growing. The neighborhood reminded me of the nicer side streets of Belmont, Fremont, Ballard, or maybe a less-busy Rockridge (here I have successfully hit the Chicago, NorCal, and Seattle residents with a slew of comparisons so that all of you can hopefully imagine what this is like), in architecture, demeanor, and retail options. We stopped at a hipper-than-Ikea home boutique, a shop selling luxury herbal teas, and innumerable small, classy clothing stores. Unlike the little clothing shops ubiquitous in Beijing, these stores carried more than shoddily made, thin knit cardigans that would have looked at home on girls ten years younger than the actual intended consumer. Instead, these little places had the kind of effortless cool found in little boutiques in San Francisco, or other celebrated creative cities in the US. I was smitten until I saw the price tags, but eventually caved in at one particularly amazing store called Source. The bottom and top floors had men’s and women’s clothes, shoes, and accessories in the hip-hop tradition, but the top floor also had a large, empty section that was currently playing host to an independent art exhibition showcasing photos and printmaking. It also had a fully functional DJ deck and bar, and apparently hosted many excellent events throughout the year (including, to my great joy, the adidas Originals opening party in 2007). I couldn’t help but think how much fun it would be to party in there.
Speaking of adidas, this same store would play host to one of my happiest moments of the trip. The very astute among you may recall not only my joyful pilgrimage to the adidas megastore in Beijing but my taste for a specially produced shoe entitled the Flavors of the World Vin Qing Ming. As these wonders had been discontinued in 2007, I despaired of ever finding one and assumed they’d all been bought up by more affluent sneakerheads.
Enter Shanghai.
I moseyed over to the sneaker section and immediately saw a real live Vin Qing Ming ahead of me. I rushed to cradle it in my hands with the same care with which one would handle a baby panda (they’re about as common). One of the store workers, noticing my ongoing mystic experience, came over and informed me in English that the shoe was a limited edition run, etc, so forth. I responded in Chinese, “I know, they’re my favorite brand and I’ve been looking for this shoe for a year!” which prompted them to compliment me on my Chinese. I didn’t get the shoes because they were over $200, but I did get a shirt, and as the girl at the register rang me up in broken English, I heard the salesperson say “Don’t worry, she speaks Chinese well,” which made me feel really satisfied. Chinese people will readily tell you your Chinese is awesome, even if you can only say hello, when they’re trying to sell you something (always) but to overhear two coworkers talk like that was extremely flattering.
We shopped around for a while longer but returned to a Lonely Planet-recommended café for dinner, which for me was a delicious focaccia sandwich and a banana crepe. Back at the hotel, I decided to do something I’d had my heart set on for a while: take advantage of China’s lack of drinking age and a nice blouse I’d bought in Beijing to finally live the high life. Amy and her friend decided not to join me because my super-cool plan was too expensive, but Max and I put on our finest (for me, this was the aforementioned blouse, corduroy pants, and flats) and headed over to the Jinmao Tower, China’s tallest building and home to the world’s highest bar on the 87^th story.
Both Friday and Saturday, Shanghai had been overcast and drizzly, although the temperature was pleasant enough. By the time we went out, it was outright raining, although not very hard, and the city had a lovely, foggy, Seattlesque feel to it. The close fog obscured the tops of the tallest buildings, including ours, but lent the rest of Pudong an ethereal, floating feeling as the multicolored neon lights and logos shone faintly through the haze.
Once in the tower, we took our first of three elevators to the 53^rd floor, where we got a chance to look around. Already, the city looked impossibly small, and we were only a bit over halfway to our destination. The 53^rd floor and up belong to the Grand Hyatt Shanghai, and this, their “lowest” floor served as a lobby with its own bar, which we eschewed in favor of a second elevator to the 56^th floor, which had another bar and a couple restaurants, as well as the elevator to our final destination. (It’s also worth mentioning that an adult ticket to the observation deck on the 88^th floor is about $10.)
We were welcomed to the bar the minute we stepped off the elevator and ushered to a darkly lit table about ten feet from the window. The fog was so thick that it obscured the ground entirely from this point, which was sort of disappointing, but also amazing in that it gave the impression that the building has just sprung into the heavens from nowhere, and had no basis in the terrestrial world. Feeling emboldened by my settings and my temporary classy life, I ordered a $14 drink called a “Dragon” (ingredients: Courvoisier VSOP Exclusif, Kahlua, Bailey’s, Grey Goose, and milk) which, despite all the alcohol that was ostensibly in it, had a delicious coffee-milk taste. This pricing was average for the bar. In fact, the champagne cocktails on the list all sold for at least twice as much as my drink, and a number of premium whiskeys were offered that sold for about $500 per glass. Perhaps inspired by our fancy surroundings, Max and I spent most of our time at the bar talking about medical malpractice lawsuits before returning to the hotel.

Day 3: Follow Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Fight American Imperialism
or
I Love You, California Pizza Kitchen
We woke up at a similarly late time, ate a similar lunch (tasty dumplings!) and then went over to yet another place suggested by Lonely Planet, the Propaganda Poster Art Center. I was glad the book suggested it, because I never would have found it on my own. It was on a residential street, in a typically ugly Chinese apartment complex. Once we walked to the back building, we had to take the elevator down to the basement. It was the sketchiest, least museum-y museum I’ve ever seen.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, we were the only people there. The collection of posters was impressive, though, and the ones on display were just a fraction of what the curator, a kindly older man who spoke great English, owned (some were traveling, some were on sale). Since we were the only group there, he showed the four of us around and explained the political climate that led to the creation of these posters, all of which glorified Mao, communism, and peasants and denouncing all forms of capitalism and imperialism. “The Americans always really like the anti-American ones,” he said, showing us a stretch of posters in which square-jawed, hearty laborers destroyed tanks piloted by fat American businessmen. “They were very common in China, too, until 1972. That was when Nixon came, and all the artists were told to stop making them.” I love Communist kitsch, an affinity installed by my visit to the Czech Republic a couple summers ago, and I had a great time at the museum. In my mind, though, the most interesting posters were the ones with only characters scrawled on them, kept in a small side room. I went in alone and was looking at the when the curator stepped in and started to explain what was going on. These posters, called “big character posters,” were common during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, when intellectuals and capitalists of all stripes were denounced. At universities and in city centers across China, people were forced to write these posters denouncing their family, friends, teachers, and even themselves to avoid severe political persecution at the hands of the Communist Party. Some parts of the posters were written and underlined in red; these were quotes from Mao’s works. My favorite posters were the ones that had had the original characters written over, usually broadly with a big brush. These were the works of vandals, people who had dared to disagree with the poster’s original contents and risked who-knows-what to voice their disagreement, no matter how silently. The posters were huge, written on butcher-paper sized rolls, and one of them lasted five sheets of paper, an illegible (to me, anyway) forced screed against something the Chinese government probably supported now anyway.
We then went over to the west section of Nanjing Lu for more shopping. Unlike the eastern section, this part of the street was blanketed with only luxury malls selling only luxury Western brands (Dior, Prada, Bulgari, etc.) The stores were all weirdly empty, as their merchandise was well out of range of even upper-middle-class Shanghainese, but we spent an enjoyable hour strolling and coveting before we decided that our love for the West should not start and end with window shopping. Instead, we decided, the time was ripe for some delicious American chain restaurant food, so we went into a California Pizza Kitchen, an establishment I abhor in the States,**** and ate a delicious meal of pizza, Coke (with free refills!) and salad. I was having too much fun being American to give up my temporary Western lifestyle when the meal ended, so afterward, at my behest, we popped into Starbucks and sat in the lobby of a nearby luxury hotel to drink them. Other than the occasional Asian person crossing our field of vision in these places, we truly might as well have never been in China.
Shanghai doesn’t have Beijing’s ancient history by a long shot. (It wasn’t much of anything until the Europeans made it into a treaty port in the mid-19^th century.) However, it is infinitely more Western, and more civilized (I’m going to use that word despite all the baggage it carries with it) than anywhere else I’ve been in China. If you’re visiting the country, stay in Beijing, and get a feel for what “real” China is like. That being said, if I had to live here in the long term, I’d move to Shanghai, no question. As long as I was being paid on an American salary, that is.

Dumpling tally: 240

*For some reason, grown adults think it’s acceptable to wear quilted pajama sets, which more often than not have cartoon characters on them, out in public. I thought that in cosmopolitan Shanghai this would not happen, but I was wrong.

**I am deeply in love with Lonely Planet, even after reading the excellent confessional Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? by Thomas Kohnstamm, which everyone should read. At any rate, every place they’ve recommended has been amazing.

*** High life.

****Max, a New Yorker, and I got into a huge argument about thin crust vs. deep dish pizza. Everyone who is at all smart knows that deep dish is infinitely better, and so I will not discuss this matter any further.

Pingyao

This past weekend, all of the IES students were put on a weekend trip to a nearby-ish destination. I went to Pingyao, an overnight train ride east of Beijing. I had been told beforehand that Pingyao was very touristy, so I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, but I was going with my closest friends and figured I could handle the kitsch for three days. Boy, was I ever wrong. We set out Thursday night from Beijing’s train station (which has been designed to look like Tibet’s Potala Palace…oh, China).

Day 1: I Could Have Done That in Two Hours
Our sleeper train arrived at about 7:30 in the morning. We got our stuff and disembarked, expecting a bus to take us to our destination. However, what awaited us were not buses but…large golf carts! Apparently reputable vehicles are not allowed in the streets of Old Town Pingyao, so we had to take an alternate form of transit through a gate in the old city wall.
Pingyao is about in the middle of Shanxi province (not to be confused with Shaanxi province, where the terracotta warriors are), two provinces west of Beijing. It was historically a very important part of China, used both as a strategic point for various armies and as a center of commerce (Pingyao itself) and religion (the Buddhist Wutai Mountain, where some of my classmates went). Now, though, it kind of sucks. The economic changes in China have sort of left Shanxi behind – its climate is dry, dusty, and frigid in the winter/scorching in the summer, so farming is difficult – and most of its income comes from its large but rapidly dwindling reserves of coal. The pollution wasn’t nearly as bad as it is in Beijing, but the Shanxi residents’ persistent attempts at farming make for awful erosion in an already parched ecosystem, so the constantly dusty air meant my lungs didn’t get the respite I’d hoped for. In addition, it was cold, cold, cold. I lived in my commemorative Yunnan Trip hoodie the entire time, as did many of my tourmates,* which prompted us to frequently make wistful comments like “I bet Xishuangbanna is really nice this time of year.”
“New” Pingyao looks like pretty much any other place in China, but the Old Town is beautiful, at least at 8 am. It reminded me of a less-restored Dali, but more typically Chinese: all the buildings had the slanted, tiled roofs, the intricately carved wooden doors, and the paintings of traditional Chinese people in traditional Chinese clothes. Instead of being painted over and re-carved, though, all of these buildings had been left more or less untouched on the outside, which I liked. It lent the town an air of authenticity that I would be clinging to desperately in a couple hours. As we drove to our hotel, I thought of towns in the American Old West – dusty and wooden.
Our hotel, like all hotels in the Old Town, was in a converted one-story courtyard house. There was a restaurant in the front, and behind that was a courtyard lined with rooms. I was rooming with Becca again, and much to our delight, we got a room with a kang bed. Invented during the Qing dynasty (the last one before the nationalists took over in the early 20^th century, and the dynasty in which Pingyao was a thriving commerce center), the kang is a huge, huge bed (ours was maybe ten feet wide) on top of what was traditionally a fire pit but is now electrically powered stuff. At any rate, the kang is very big and very warm. I immediately knew why this was necessary; as previously stated, Pingyao in late October is not a warm place.
After settling in, we headed out in a group to explore two of commercial Pingyao’s most important sites. Almost immediately, we were joined by other tour groups, all led by flag-wielding young women frantically barking into microphones. This was about when Pingyao’s charms started wearing off. Although the Old Town was a beautiful place to explore when it was relatively unpopulated, it was a different world entirely when mobbed by tourists and souvenir vendors. Given my distaste for touristiness of any kind, I started becoming more and more irritated.
Our first stop was the office of a bodyguard company. Merchants were frequently coming in and out of Pingyao during the Qing dynasty, carrying huge amounts of goods and money, so bodyguards were needed to protect the businessmen and their cargo. This office not only handled the business side of the bodyguard operation (we saw the offices where companies reconciled their accounts, for instance) but also trained the bodyguards – we went to a courtyard filled with rusty weapons and paintings of people practicing Chinese martial arts. Apparently the bodyguards were very skilled: their salary was extremely high, and the company was so confident in their talents that they promised merchants that, in the event a robbery were to occur, the company would compensate them for the loss of their goods and “punish” the slacker bodyguards.
Our next stop was China’s first bank, also in a giant courtyard complex. Although the bodyguard operations were very successful in protecting goods and money, the system was still pretty inefficient, and so some smart people in Pingyao devised a system in which promissory notes could be written in one office and delivered to a branch in another city, whereupon the promised amount of money would be given to the person indicated on the note (this is actually more like a Western Union office than the banks we know and love/hate today, but the Chinese banking system developed from it). Each branch had a special watermark and a secret code used to indicate the date, recipient, and amount of money, and to prevent forgery. Since the robbers couldn’t collect on checks bearing someone else’s name, robberies dropped dramatically. The banking system was historically interesting, but aside from the architecture (lovely, but the same as everywhere else in Pingyao) the buildings itself weren’t that great – just offices furnished with mannequins in Qing clothes.
After the bank, we were given free time to get our own lunch and wander around until the late afternoon. The moment we stepped outside, we were immediately surrounded by mobs of Chinese tourists wanting to take pictures of us. This was a step up from Yunnan, where we had only been stared at, not photographed. Jackie, Becca and I thought quickly and started demanding that people pay for their “special souvenir photos.”** People were very taken aback, because we (myself especially) were quite loud, sharp, and insistent about it. Once we started speaking Chinese, demanding money, and pointing at people who still had their cameras out, the photos stopped, except for a few people who began fishing their wallets out before our chaperones, a teacher and a 23-year-old office assistant who spoke perfect English, assured them that although we didn’t like being gawked at, we were just joking. I wonder how much we could have made from that – probably enough to buy lunch.
Or so I thought. In a group of six or so, I wandered around looking for a cheap place to eat, comparable to Beijing’s $1.50 restaurants. We went through all the main streets, but every restaurant we found had the same food and was empty and expensive. After a wild goose chase through the side streets of Pingyao, which, we found, were strictly residential, we resigned ourselves to eating at a pricey but very nice hostel, where we sampled the local delicacy of kao laolao: thick buckwheat noodles fried with meat and green onions. We spent the rest of the afternoon strolling, shopping, and exploring a relaxing and lovely Confucian temple, which provided a peaceful respite from the touristy Old Town. The star of the day, though, was Pingyao’s freshly made peanut brittle, produced as follows:
1: Take a stump.
2. Spread some shelled peanuts and honey on it.
3. Hit it until it’s flat and looks like peanut brittle.
4. Let it cool.
5. Sell each IES student a kilogram of it for about $3.
It is impossible to overstate how delicious this was, especially when it was warm. It seemed like the only authentically Shanxi thing I was likely to find (true) so I got some for myself and some to bring back to Zhang Ran.
We met up back in our guesthouse’s lobby to get our scripts for the next day’s performance. We were set to perform a traditional Chinese comedic lawyer dialogue (yes, really) for Chinese tourists the next day. The four speaking roles were immediately snapped up by fourth-year students looking to brown-nose the language pledge section of their grade (the fourth-year teacher was one of our chaperones), while the rest of us needed only to dress up and stand on the sidelines. This was fine by me; I just wanted to escape the experience with as much dignity as possible, and memorizing five pages of lines in Chinese wasn’t my idea of a fun night.
We had a bit more success with dinner that night. The same group of people from lunch found a hostel that advertised apple pie. Although nobody ended up ordering it, the food was a bit cheaper and the owners were very friendly. We also invited a thirtysomething Chinese appliance salesman who was in town on business to join us for dinner, so we chatted with him for a while and gave him an English name (Thomas) at his request. Apparently some of the less studious students among us found some semblance of nightlife in Pingyao, but I chose not to waste $30 on drinks in a dump of a town with no ambiance or post-sunset activities. Instead, the dinner crew retreated to our giant kang and played a very intense and long round of Uno. I have never heard such insults as when Amy played one “Draw Four” too many on poor Elise, who bore the brunt of her wrath the entire game.

Day 2: I Also Could Have Done That in the Same Two Hours
The morning started with the same unsatisfying breakfast as the first day: lukewarm porridge and cold buns. I ate and ate but never felt full, which surprisingly never happens to me with Chinese food.
Then we regrouped in the lobby for a lesson in Chinese paper-cutting. We weren’t expecting to make anything brilliant, but were a bit disappointed when we were all required to make butterflies. Then the guy who was teaching us did it wrong, so we ended up with two halves of a malformed butterfly instead of a whole malformed butterfly. At the end he confessed that it was his mom who made the beautiful paper cuttings he’d been trying to sell us the whole time.
We had free time until the afternoon, when we toured Pingyao’s old courthouse and jail. After walking through an interesting array of torture instruments, we watched some professionals in fake costumes put on a court dialogue similar to the one we would be performing, at which point we were ushered into a back room and shoved into ill-fitting polyester robes and hats that had covered I-don’t-even-want-to-know-how-many heads, then shoved back out to an exceptionally giggly band of tourists. I halfheartedly yelled at them to pay for the pictures they were taking, but this was ineffective, and there was no way I could complain about them taking pictures because this time, we actually were the tourist attraction.
We were put into position onstage and started the dialogue. The crowd was pretty rude – I overheard them saying snotty things about the speaking abilities of the students who had lines, which I shushed a couple times by hissing “How’s your English?” at them – and the play had all the flow of a pile of bricks. Some of the jollier students stayed behind when it was over to take pictures with the tourists, but I fled back to the changing room, threw the clothes off, and found a quiet corner to be alone in. All the staring had started to make me almost physically uncomfortable, and I wanted a few moments to myself. The whole experience was without a doubt the nadir of my time in China so far.
We had more free time for the rest of the night, so we were led up to the supermarket by another group. Thankfully, there was a nearby restaurant that had our coveted $1.50 bowls of noodle soup, so Becca and I filled up and called it an early night.

Day 3: The Deepest Pits of Smell
We awoke for a bus (a real bus this time) ride to the Qiao family mansion, which had been home to one of Shanxi’s most prosperous merchants, about an hour out of town. A couple people said they would have liked to stay in Pingyao, but most of us agreed that we’d seen all the town had to offer, and the group as a whole was happy to get out.
I hadn’t seen any of Shanxi’s countryside on the train ride in, since I’d slept the whole way there. As I looked out the window going to the mansion, I was struck by the poverty I saw. The highway was flanked on both sides by what seemed like miles after miles of auto repair shops, and what little arable land was behind them was used for cornfields irrigated with dirty, sludgy water. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a depressing place.
As we pulled up to the mansion, I let out an involuntary groan. The tour bus parking lot alone was, I kid you not, the size of the Northwestern campus. We shuffled out of the bus through countless rows of souvenir vendors, although I did stop for a grilled yam, one of my more beloved street foods, especially in the cold weather. The mansions themselves were about a twenty-minute walk from the bus lot and were infinitely worse than anything I’d seen in Pingyao; I could barely see the walls or hear our guide due to the overwhelming crush of tourists. The buildings were indeed beautiful (the complex was used to film Zhang Yimou’s “Raise the Red Lantern,” for those acquainted with the greatest hits of Chinese cinema) but impossible to appreciate among the masses of people. Tourist groups notwithstanding, my throat was also getting hoarse from yelling “TWO KUAI!” at people trying to take pictures of us, so I was happy to leave.
We then got back on the bus and went to the provincial capital of Taiyuan for lunch. Although the ride in showcased more depressing poverty, the city center of Taiyuan was surprisingly very nice. It was clean and modern, with a lovely town square in the center that reminded me of the courthouse square in Portland. We got a good, cheap lunch, complete with dumplings (although the restaurant didn’t have rice, mysteriously) and then toured a vinegar factory. A lot of people complained about this, but I actually really enjoyed it. Chinese vinegar is made from fermented sorghum, not grapes or apples or whatever is used in the Western world, and we came in close contact with the machines that cleaned the grains and the pots in various stages of fermentation. As the distilling process continued, the pots became smellier and smellier, and the rooms hotter and hotter. By the time we reached the final room, my eyes and nose burned from the stench. Nonetheless, I always like seeing how food is made, and the factory used pretty traditional methods to make their vinegar; it was sitting there and bubbling of its own accord in big clay pots just as it had been doing for hundreds of years (and some of it smelled like it had been sitting out for a hundred years, too).
After that we had three or so hours of free time before our train left, which most of the group used to watch a Chinese horror movie (in the movie theater, you could rent a private room). Even with Josie, the office worker, there to translate, the movie made little sense – it was something about a girl going through all the levels of hell in an abandoned dorm building, but the hells were really just a figment of her imagination created by her evil psychologist. About halfway through, Josie admitted that even she didn’t know what was going on, so we all just laughed about it.
At the Taiyuan train station, we met up with the group from Wutai Mountain, which included excellent people like Dan and Michael. We had a nondescript train ride back and got into Bei Wai this morning at about nine, at which time I had two jianbings for breakfast despite my roommate’s protests.
The entire time I’ve been here, I’ve been on this hunt for “real” China – something without the modernity of Beijing, but also without the fakeness that hordes of tourists bring. I sort of came to the realization on the Pingyao trip that “real” China doesn’t exist. Real Chinese people don’t wear conical hats and farm rice. They live in cities like Taiyuan and go on big group tours to places like Pingyao. Even if they do farm rice, they have satellite TV and wear jeans. Like it or not, China is modernizing rapidly, and the longer I spend looking for some semblance of ancient China, the more and more it will disappear and become Westernized. Considering some of the Shanxi toilets, this is a good thing. Really though, I was probably a little overzealous in expecting as much Chinese-ness as I did. Now that I’ve gotten this into my head, I feel like I’ll enjoy my remaining time here a little more.

Dumpling Tally: 139

*All of Yunnan Trip’s best ladies were back: Amy, Jackie, and Becca, plus a superb young woman named Elise whose father worked for the US Embassy. As a result, Elise has lived in excellent places like Denmark and Greece. None of the dudes were with us this time, though.

**Around town, there were various opportunities to pay and get your picture taken – with the monkey in costume, with the guy in Qing clothes, in the “traditional” bridal sedan, etc. – so I can’t pretend this was an original idea.

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.