Wanderlust

Yangshou, China.

It’s been over a week since I wrote last. We’ve been very busy with classes and also with doing some fun stuff since the weather is finally nice–sunshine and chilly, my favorite. We’ve almost finished all over our Christmas shopping and we’re planning on going to Guilin this weekend to finish up and then mail it off. I doubt they’ll get to the states by Christmas, but maybe by Chinese New Year (which is mid-January this year)! In Guilin we want to take a day trip to the nearby rice terraces that are supposed to be just amazing. We were told that they aren’t good this time of year since all of the rice has been harvested, but then we talked to someone who went last week and said that it was spectacular. In the end I think it’s the terracing, not the colors of the rice, that are interesting to us. So we’re going to give it a shot. And then from Guilin you can take a boat trip down the river to Yangshou through the karst mountains. I can’t wait!

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Yangshou, China.

What a small world! Yesterday (Monday) on our way to class, Laurie told us that we would be picking up a guy named Tom who was coming to watch us for a day and learn more about VET and possibly volunteer himself. When our van pulled over to let in this Tom, Steve and I were both surprised to see a guy from Orange County, California who we had met in Beijing the day before leaving for Mongolia! How weird! Well, I guess it’s not that weird since I’d talked to him for a couple of hours and somewhere in there had mentioned our plans to volunteer with VET and he had sounded interested. I guess the biggest shock was that we knew he was going to study kung fu for a month East of Beijing somewhere and neither Steve nor I had realized it’d already been over a month since we had last seen him! Time flies! But I guess we had both forgotten that we’d met him before going to Mongolia, so that made a big difference. But it was neat running into him again and I was glad that my recommendation had gone somewhere.

We had a good day of teaching. I took the 4th graders and Steve took the 5th graders (Sue and Gordon had the 3rd and 6th since they’re a little more difficult). The 4th grade class went really well. We sang and colored and played games. The 5th graders were a little more difficult, with one boy in particular who was trying his very, very best to piss me off. I literally just stood and smiled at the back of the class while he did who knows what behind me to try to get me upset and to also entertain his friends. Eventually he stopped, though, and asked me to help him color later on in the class. Steve did a good job of changing gears when the boys were a little too wild when they were playing a game. The older kids are a little more of a challenge just with keeping them under control. But I guess that’s probably the same with kids everywhere. 13 year olds are harder than 11 years olds. But it was a good day.

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Yangshou, China.

It has been a very busy couple of weeks. We ended up leaving Fenghuang a couple of days later than I thought… the little shrimpies we had for dinner turned on us–me especially. I was up half of the night over a squatty potty being sick. Not as easy as it sounds (and I imagine it doesn’t sound too easy). I’ve gotten pretty used to the Chinese toilets and in some ways I prefer them to Western toiliets (in public bathrooms you don’t have to touch anything–often not even a stall door). It was a long night, and I was exhausted in the morning so we decided to wait another day before taking the overnight bus to Guilin. We left Tuesday morning, I think, so one week ago today. Everything went okay, I suppose. We had to take a two hour bus to the next nearest city where we booked our overnight bus to Guilin which would leave at 5:30 pm. So we had about two hours to sit and relax and make sure my stomach was holding up. The overnight bus was pretty nice. It was similar to the bus that we took from Beijing to the Mongolian border in that it had beds instead of seats. The woman who was organizing the bus stuff (taking tickets and that sort of thing) wouldn’t let us put our backpacks under the bus in the storage compartments. Instead she put them on the floor at the back of the bus, so we ended up having to take two beds on the bottom bunk at the back of the bus (the beds are set up two high and three across the width of the bus–and maybe ten beds along the length, so 30 in all). The road to Guilin was not paved and was so full of pot holes that I didn’t sleep at all and literally flew up out of the bed a few times! It was nuts. Not fun at all. We stopped around 3 a.m. for a pee break, and I was so tired that I tripped in the aisle and fell down. All of the Chinese people laughed at me and it was so disconcerting. I wasn’t hurt, but I was exhausted and it wasn’t fun to be laughed at. We arrived in Guilin pretty early in the morning, but the bus just stopped at the station and they let anyone who wanted to stay in the bus and get some sleep until the sun came up. Small mercies. So we ended up getting a couple of hours of sleep before getting up and looking for a taxi. We had already picked what hostel we wanted to go to–a little expensive at 120 yuan a night, but it was near a lot of restaurants and we’d have our own bathroom, so it was worth the splurge. We had to wait a couple of hours until someone checked out of our room, so we ordered scrambled eggs and toast and had our first Western meal in a long time. It was delicious.

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Fenghuang, China

Steve and I have been in Fenghuang, an adorable little touristy town in the middle of China for 6 days now. I haven’t been writing much partly because we haven’t been doing much. It’s been a wonderful little break where we’ve slept in, watched movies, read books, and generally been lazy. We’ve now finished both of the China books we brought with us–“Oracle Bones” and “Wild Swans.” We both really loved Wild Swans. It was a very sad but probably very accurate history of China covering the not so distant past. I didn’t particularly enjoy Oracle Bones. Partly I didn’t like the writer’s writing style. He was a journalist and a lot of the book reads like a cross between a newspaper article and someone in the middle of Creative Writing courses. I had quite enough of journalism in college and more than a lifetime’s worth of creative writing courses in high school (I went to an art school where I majored in it…). It just bothered me. There was a lot of interesting facts and theories throughout it, though, so I stuck it out. But in the end it was a disappointing mish-mash of half-stories that never really concluded and fragment sentences that were supposed to be profound. I wouldn’t recommend it (even though it won some literary award, so what do I know, right?). We picked up a couple of classics while in Shanghai–Crime and Punishment for Steve and Jane Eyre (which I’ve surprisingly never read) for me. I’m looking forward to some nice fiction that’s completely unpolitical.

The first day or so in Fenghuang we walked around the little town a lot taking pictures and enjoying the sunshine. The town is situated around a river where one of the ancient city walls still stands (probably reconstructed, but I can’t remember). This used to be just a quiet little town where two ethnic minorities lived and fished, but now it’s become a tourist destinations for tons of Chinese. We’re still quite popularly on display with lots of ‘hellos’ and not-so-subtle photo and video ops (including another posed shot with two college-aged girls). Sometimes it’s fun and entertaining, but sometimes it gets a little old. I had the misfortune of getting my boat soaked in river water one afternoon when we were sitting by the river eating yogurt and cake (we wanted ice cream, but you can’t find it anywhere in this town! It’s completely baffling. It makes me want to open up and ice cream shop. I think I’d make a killing in yuan). People wash their clothes, vegetables, and mops in the water and one woman decided to put her mop up to dry directly up the hill from where I was sitting. I had to walk back through the crowds with a very wet arse, the whole time dodging photos and hellos and generally feeling crappy. But usually it’s just very cute and funny, and Steve enjoys saying hello back which causes lots of amusement on all sides (he usually does it in a funny voice, which makes it more fun for us).

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Changsha, China.

I feel so behind on the blog! It’s Mongolia that did it. We were away from computers for so long, and then with traveling back to China and moving on from Beijing right away I didn’t have time to really sit at a computer until it’d been a week or so. A lot (but nothing terribly interesting) has happened since we left Beijing. The night train turned out to be one of the worst nights of my life. We got the soft seats, which sound pretty pleasant especially after so many night buses of dubious quality in South America. But it was terrible. We made sure to leave the hostel 2 1/2 hours before our train so that we had plenty of time to take the subway to the station and figure everything out. When it was our turn to board we confidentally walked down the platform starting from a car in its late teens and walking down the way towards the beginning of the train since our car was #1. We got to the end of the platform and we were at car #2. So logically we should get on this car and walk through it to car #1. Nope. Car #1 was at the exact other end of the tran. After car #20. What a bunch of crap. I still don’t understand it. It was completely ridiculous. So now we had to walk all the way back down to the other end of the platform with Chinese people running past us making us incredibly nervous. When you don’t understand what’s going on or being said people running is a bad sign. But we just walked quickly determined to just jump on any car if the stupid train started moving. But we got to our car safely and got on to find out seats. The next strange thing was that our seats weren’t beside each other but across the aisle from each other. The seats were arranged in pairs on each side of the aisle and every other pair had at least one person in it. We had no idea how to ask someone to switch us seats and we highly doubted anyone would trade their window seat (which you could lean against) or their two seats to themselves (which you could lie down on) for an aisle seat by someone else. The next bg surprise was that oru seats didn’t recline. Not at all. At first I thought this was because our seats had a sort of glass wall behind them, but when I looked around none of the seats reclined! What’s going on? It was ridiculous. How are you supposed to sleep in a seat that not only doesn’t recline but that is rigidly upright. I’ve never sat so upright in my life! I tried putting my neck pillow on, but it just pushed my head forward into my chest! It was miserable. I barely slept all night, and when I did manage to pass out I’d wake up shortly there after in some incredibly uncomfortable slumped over position with parts of my body I didn’t know existed throbbing! I’m getting older, I think. My body can no longer comfortably slump. What a horrible night. I remember waking up at one point thinking it had to be close to sunrise and asking Steve (who just accepted he wouldn’t be able to sleep and was reading–something I’ve never had to accept since I sleep so well) what time it was–3 a.m. 3 a.m.! We weren’t arriving in Shanghai until 7. I had four more hours of torture before we could get off. I was not happy. And to make things worse the guy across from me (who had two seats to himself) was happily downing a six pack and rocking out to his headphones in a wife beater t-shirt while staring at me. For hours. I knew before coming to China that it’s acceptable to stare and that people were going to stare at me, but this was a little too much. Every time I’d wake up, he’d be staring. And he was facing me with just a little table between us.  I was exhausted and angry and frustrated by the whole fact that crappy buses in S. America that were falling apart were more comfortable than ths brand new looking train in China when we weren’t even in the cheapest hard seats! And this man was staring at me. It was creeping me out. I tried to just keep my eye mask on so at least I wouldn’t see him. Miserable, miserable night.

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Ulan Baatar, Mongolia.

What a wonderful trip we had! We went with Tseren Tours, and because we were on a short time-line, we didn’t find any other travelers who wanted to share the trip (and so lower the costs) for us. But it actually worked out for the better, I think.  We left Ulan Baatar on Tuesday morning around 9 a.m. We met our guide Sunny and our driver Beemba. They were both native Mongolians and Sunny was very sweet and spoke English very well. We learned a lot about her over the course of the week. She is twenty and a University student who wants to study overseas at some point. Before she started as a guide at the beginning of this summer she’d never seen the Mongolian countryside. We were her last tour group for the season, and I was the first American girl she’d ever met (she had two American guys on her first trip and none since). We learned a lot about Mongolia from her and hopefully answered her questions about America (and Germany) well. Some were a little difficult, especially ones about different social classes and the differences between rich and poor since it is so different than Mongolia. Beemba was an excellent driver who always wore a beret and had a wonderful face. I don’t think I ever got a good photo of him since he was a little photo shy, but maybe Nicole did….

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Beijing, China.

We just arrived back in Beijing after 28 hours of traveling from Mongolia. The trip back was pretty uneventful except that we didn’t really eat a meal all day today (just bread, cheese, pickles and other snacks) until after we’d checked into our old hostel in Beijing when we went back to our favorite little restaurant down the alley around 9 p.m. It was a long couple of days of carrying heavy backpacks. I’m gald to be back in China, even though I really loved Mongolia. I have lots to tell about our trip to the Mongolian countryside, but the shower and the bed are calling to me, so it’ll have to wait until later. I’ll try to fit it in tomorrow, but we’re going to try to head out to Shanghai tomorrow as well (if we can get a train). We’ve come up with a plan for China between now and the beginning of November when we go to Guilin to volunteer. We’re basically doing the same stuff as we were going to before, but we’ve found that it’ll save a lot of travel time (and probably money) if we shift the order a bit. But more on that later as well…

Ulan Baatar, Mongolia.

The last few days have been just one big silly adventure. We left Beijing Friday evening around 5:30 after making it successfully to the bus terminal with time to spare in order to grab some street food for a little dinner. We had bought some rice to go at our favorite little restaurant by our hostel and then (with Nicole’s help) bought lots of different foods on sticks that had been boiling in a vat of oil. There were noodles wrapped around the sticks, meat balls, tofu, and even some quail eggs. It was all pretty good, but some of it (especially the tofu) was ridiculously spicy! I thought my lips were going to burn off! Nicole didn’t realize that I’m still getting used to spicy food (but really doing better all of the time) and said later that the stick food was notoriously spicy and she wouldn’t have suggested if she would have known I was such a baby (my words, not hers). But it worked out, and we were soon on our bus which much to my delight was full of beds instead of seats! I think Peru and Ecuador need to take some tips from China and buy some bed-buses as it was much nicer to sleep in rather than the seats. But it also couldn’t fit as many people and we probably would have fallen out of them on all the windy roads in the mountains! But I was very excited about maybe getting a little sleep.

Shortly after we started off Nicole realized that she really had to use the toilet, but the toilet on the bus was broken and the door was locked! We were stuck in the Beijing traffic, still not out of the city after an hour on the road, and the bus driver refused to stop until we got farther out. I made lots of suggestions for her like hanging her butt out the window, but finally one suggestion won out… we took an empty soda bottle and cut off the top. Then we took one of the plastic bags from the bus (used to put your shoes in) and put it into the bag, and I held up a blanket around the back stairs while she peed in the bottle! It was awesome and pretty successful all things considered! When we stopped at a bathroom about an hour later we threw the bottle away and no one was the wiser.

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Beijing, China.

Stephen woke up very early in the morning (while I slept) and went with Nicole to the bus station and they successfully bought bus tickets for tonight to the Mongolian border. From there we take a minibus across the border, and then we buy a night train ticket for the capital! How funny this all is to me. Yesterday we were stuck in Beijing and didn’t know when or how to see any more of China until after the national day celebrations, and now we’re going to Mongolia with a friend who speaks Chinese and Russian, so will probably be a big help in getting around (especially since we don’t have a Mongolian travel book!). We’ve met a bunch of people who have traveled in Mongolia and they only have wonderful things to say about it (except for the food isn’t very good–lots of noodles, meat, and fat–which makes sense considering the climate).  But I’m very excited and we’re going to leave the hostel at 2:30 for our 5:00 bus, so hopefully we won’t miss it! It’s 12:30 now, and we’re going to go to a grocery store to buy snacks for the long trip. We won’t actually get to the capital until Sunday, so we have two nights of traveling ahead of us, but I’m sure it will be a great adventure. I’m still fighting a little cold, but I’ve gotten lots of sleep the past two nights so am starting to feel a lot better. Steve was very sweet to let me sleep this morning while he journeyed to the bus station without me (although he apparently ate a really yummy omelette/crepe/bread thing that sounds delicious and I’m a little jealous about. But I still think it was better to stay in bed!).

I am just a few pages away from finishing “Wild Swans,” and it has been very interesting and educational. I’d recommend to anyone traveling to China or anyone just curious about China’s modern history from just before World War Two until the 1980s. I can definitely see why it was banned in China since the author is very honest about her first hand experience growing up in China during very tumultuous times. I feel like I’ve learned a lot and can look at China with wiser eyes.

(still in) Beijing, China.

So, we missed our train. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I think a combination of too much experience and too little information was our downfall.  We left our hostel an hour before our train was scheduled to leav. It was supposed to take 25 minutes by taxi to get there. We figured a half an hour of wiggle room would be more than adequate to get to our platform and get on our train. But oh how we (and our hostel) underestimated Beijing traffic. I’ve noticed that the last few days have seemed more hectic and congested than before. I wonder if this is due to the fact that their big holiday is next week, that the Olympics are over so maybe they’ve let a lot of cars back in, or just a weird coincidence. But instead of taking 25 minutes, our taxi took about 50 minutes. We were sitting in the taxi, watching the time tick away and literally helpless to do anything. We couldn’t communicate with the tax driver to see if maybe we were close and could just run the rest of the way (we were in deadlock traffic), if maybe we could get out and try to take the subway (our hostel had told us that you couldn’t get there directly on the subway but would have to transfer to a bus and that it was a big pain). So we just sat and were sad. When we finally got to the train station we had ten minutes to get to our platform, but the taxi driver dropped us off pretty far away from the main doors. We had to cross a very busy highway over a pedestrain overpass, then figure out which door to go in, go through the pretty minimalistic security and then look at the board to find which platform and run like hell. According to the train station’s clock we had three minutes to spare when we got to the ticket taker, but when we handed her our tickets she shook her head ‘no’ and said ‘you are late.’ How sad! The train had already left without us and some lucky buggers with standing room only tickets were probably upgrading to our seats as we were standing defeated at the platform. The ticket lady told us to go to window 16 at the ticket office where there was an English speaking person who could help us.

We stood in line sad and angry and waited with claws out to make sure no one tried to jump in front of us (I actually saw someone jump in front of a Westerner at the very front of the line and apparently got chewed out by the ticket woman! Yay!). When it was finally our turn we told her we had missed our train and she told us that there were no seats on any of the trains to Pingyao as far as the reservation system worked. So she took our tickets away, stamped the back, and scribbled on them standing room only for the next day and sent us on our way. We hung our heads in shame and went back to our hostel which we had left a few hours earlier thinking we’d never see it again. I’ve had a sore throat for the past two days and just feel generally a little tired with a mild cold, and the day’s excitement had warped all of my energy. I just wanted to lie down and pretend none of this had happened. It was too much for us to try to figure out what to do next. We ended up taking a bus and then the subway back to our hostel (which was quick and very easy, unlike what we had been led to believe) because none of the taxis at the train station new where our hostel was (even after I showed them the little hostel card that had in Chinese “please take me to my hostel” and the address).

After sleeping for about thirteen hours and having a giant bowl of soup, I’m feeling a little better day but just frustrated and angry (at myself) for missing our train. We treated the trains in China like the buses in South America which was a big mistake. But at least now we know that the trains in China should be treated more like airplanes in the U.S. Lesson very much learned. So today we had the fun task of trying to figure out if we could get a train from Beijing to anywhere. The hostel girl who had helped us so much in the past was still very helpful and patient. She called and enquired about destination after destination (getting more far out and outlandish all the time)  until we were all sad and disappointed. Somewhere in here our friend Nicole who we had gone to the music performance with on Sunday showed up and invited us to come with her in the morning to try to get a ticket to Mongolia! She’s going back to Germany on the tranSiberian railway, but she is going to stay in Mongolia for about a week before hand, taking a bus from Beijing to the border and then transferring to a train to the Mongolian capital. We know pretty much nothing about Mongolia except that U.S. citizens don’t need a visa, so we could actually go with her to Mongolia. We’ve pretty much decided to give it a go. At least we’ll go to the bus station with her in the morning to see if we can get tickets. The buses don’t book seats in advance, so you have to go the day you want to leave in order to try to get a seat. We would leave tomorrow night if it all worked out and would travel with her and basically just tag along. It would be nice to get out of China for the week to avoid the whole national day stuff and not have to worry about getting stuck somewhere or getting desperate and buying a plane ticket out of Beijing. It sounds like quite an adventure, and why not?!

I’ll know by tomorrow morning what our next steps are and I’ll try to post something of our plans. At this point it’s either Mongolia for a week, get stuck in Beijing for another week or so (which just sounds awful at this point. Not that we dislike Beijing, but we’ve been here for almost three weeks now and we’re just ready to move on. There’s also something upsetting about being stuck somewhere, no matter where it is), or I don’t know what, really. Maybe try to get a bus somewhere else nearby and then be stuck there and have to go through this all again! Mongolia seems like the most exciting option. I’ll keep you posted.