The perspective has not been changed
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).
Food in this town has been a little hit and miss. Almost all of the restaurants (and they’re everywhere) have their fresh vegetables and meat (live ducks, chickens, fish, snails, and a funny rat-like creature with a bare, pointy tail) out in front on display. They often don’t have menus, which aren’t that useful for us except that we can see the prices. We don’t like to just point at the veggies since then they can charge us whatever ridiculous price they want. We’ve had some pretty yummy stuff and have encountered some very patient and helpful people, but there has also been the occassional people who it seems like they just don’t want to deal with the foreigners. The worst experiences we’ve had, surprisingly enough, is when they’ve tried to get someone who speaks English to help us (usually by just yelling out into the street while we stand in the restaurant looking at the menu and feeling uncomfortable and confused). A couple of times we’ve just left and gone somewhere else, but last night we were really hungry and tired and we just wanted to eat. I think part of the problem was that I was having one of my food-specific moments when I really want something very specific (last night it was pad-see-ew from the thai place by my old work. see, very specific). But I was willing to settle for noodles of any kind as long as they weren’t in soup. So we were walking around, pointing to the character for ‘noodles’ in our guide book and then saying no in Chinese and pointing at the character for ‘soup.’ I think I was doing okay with one girl, but then the yelling into the street from an older gentleman at the restaurant started and then came along a very nice young woman to help us. She spoke a little bit of English, but not that much on the food front. We’ve found that it’s easier to communicate when they don’t speak a little English. The more English they know, the more complicated things become. When she left (after quite a long time and lots of back and forth with the older man and us) we thought we were getting a dish of vegetables, a dish with meat, rice for Steve, and noodles for Gina. But then came two bowls of noodle soup. Something had gone terribly wrong. And suddenly we realized that we not only were getting two bowls of soup, but somewhere in there we had definetely ordered mushrooms and something else with meat. We were going to get way too much food and it was probably going to cost more than we wanted to spend. Especially since neither one of us wanted noodle soup.
At this point, the looks of shock and confusion alerted the old man that something was amiss, and he again called for someone to come help us in English. After trying to explain that we didn’t want anything after the soup, that it was too much food, we got a cryptic note from the old man that read: “the perspective has not been changed.” It sounded like a secret spy code, and I’m sad I wasn’t able to keep it (as it was also very awkwardly written since I doubt he had much practice with writing our letters). At this point we just gave up, told the pseudo-English speaker thankyou, everything was okay. And we hung our heads and ate are very unappetizing soups, then dish of mushrooms, then dish of meat. We didn’t eat much of any of it since we were both embarassed and a little annoyed (and none of it was very tasty, really). But afterwards we treated ourselves to cookies and orange juice which sort of made things a little bit better.
On the cookie front, we’ve had a difficult time finding good treats. The cookies were okay, but they looked substance. They sort of turned to powder when you bit into them. We did eat some really yummy pastry puffy things in Changsha which were very good (I also had a little egg custard thing there that was tasty). I keep trying different bags of candies and snack foods thinking that it will be new and interesting, but it’s been pretty universally disappointed. I think I’ve had too many Japanese snacks back in San Francisco and I thought Chinese snacks would be similar (rice puffs with seaweed and wasabi and gooey rice paste ball candy things…), but they’re not. A lot of things are meat flavored (like little crackers shaped like whales that I thougt would be like goldfish, but were meat flavored and strange). They also eat a lot of packaged meat that looks dried or preserved some other way. I haven’t gotten the guts to try it.
Tonight we had an interesting dinner. We ordered a plate of scrambled eggs with tomatoes that we saw on someone else’s table, and then the waitress picked something else for us, which we always like and usually turns out really well. But this time we got a giant, heaping plate of tiny little shrimp. Thousands of them. Heads, tails, beady little eyes, antennaes and all. It was literally a plate piled up with dead shrimpies. There were a handful of green onion bits thrown in for good measure, but otherwise, all shrimp. We both gave it a try and Stephen didn’t particularly like the fishy taste and I just couldn’t get over the creepiness of eating thousands of tiny, intact baby shrimp. When I’d scoop some into my mouth I could feel their antenae tickling my lips and there were definetely some pokey things on them somewhere because my tongue and cheeks were getting pricked. The shrimpies were taking their revenge! Needless to say, we did not finish our pile of shrimpies. I feel guilty that so many shrimp died for no good reason, but what can you do. We ordered another plate of the yummy eggs and ate our rice and were happy. I had noticed that there were a lot of baskets of dried tiny shrimp around this town and it’s good to finally know what they’re all used for. I’ve eaten some dried shrimp from time to time in my bowls of instant noodles, but one or two at a time is different than a giant spoonful fo them. We of course took some photos which I’ll have to post later since this computer doesn’t seem to want to read my memory card.
We’re going to move on from Fenghuang tomorrow. It’s been nice relaxing for a while, but the food is all the same and since this town is so touristy it’s also very noisy. We have a private room in our hostel with our own bathroom for only 60 yuan (a little less than $10), which is really nice, but it also overlooks one of the busier streets with lots of people walking by and talking loudly late into the night. We’ve been having a struggle trying to figure out what to do next. Originally we had such grand plans for all of the things we were going to do and see in China. But the reality is this country is huge and most of the things recommended in the guidebook are very expensive and sometimes difficult to get to. We wanted to go to Chengdu next where there are Giant Panda breeding centers, the largest statue of Buddha in the world (something like 71 meters tall and carved into a mountain), and a little town where part of the movie ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ was filmed. But in the end, our Mongolian side-trip was really expensive and our China funds are running low. We’re managably over-budget at this point since we’ll be saving money while we’re volunteering, but in order to go to Chengdu we would have to spend another $200 on transportation alone. It just seems like too much of a stress and a hassle. It’s been difficult for us to get train tickets that we’re happy with. One problem is that we have to go to the train stations in order to find out about routes and prices. Usually no one speaks English and even if we luck out and they do, we still have to wait in giant lines in order to talk to someone and then they’re not really in the mood (or the position with dozens of Chinese people pushing behind us) to help us figure out the cheapest and best options for what we want to do. We ended up taking a hard seat from Changsha to Jishou (which is the nearest city on the rail line from Fenghuang) overnight which was a nightmare. At first it seemed like it wouldn’t be too bad. We were seated across from each other again, but we were able to trade with a girl so that we could sit together. We were on the second floor of a double decker train and there was lots of music and talking and food and we were having a pretty good time. A fight even broke out between a man and a woman with a cell phone being thrown and a poor guy in a hot pink shirt being kicked out of his seat since the couple sort of took over their three-seat area. But then people got on the train and apparently we were in their seat! We were supposed to be on the first floor of the train. They were numbered exactly the same, but (I guess) somewhere on the ticket it said in Chinese that we were on the first floor (even though Steve had specifically asked which floor we were on before getting on the train…). So we had to move ourselves and our giant bags through the sea of people who didn’t have a seat and were just in the aisles and on the stairs down to the first floor where there were people already in our seats (and no room on the overhead racks for our giant bags). We showed them our tickets (after waking them up) and let them discuss among themselves what was going on as we moved stuff around on the racks to put up our bags. One side of the train had three seats together, and the other side had two seats together. On the second floor we were in a two seat section, but now we were in a three seater. There were already four girls squeezed onto my side of the bench, and when they finally moved out of my seat they only sort of scooted over, so I ended up being squished against the window and a wall of Chinese girls. Steve had to sit across from me in between a sleeping woman and a very stoic older gentleman. It was awful. I tried to sleep, but I was pretty awake after the fun on the second floor. Eventually as the night went on people got off and we were able to sit together. But it was just really stupid to get the hard seat. After our miserable soft seat experience from Beijing to Shanghai I had sworn never to get a seat overnight again, but after all of the traveling from Shanghai trying to get to Fenghuang I just wanted to get there already. I thought knowing it was going to be awful would make it better, but it didn’t. To make matters even more interesting, we met a guy in our hostel here in Fenghuang who had taken a train from Beijing to Shanghai and gotten the soft seat and he said it was the most comfortable seat ever! It went all the way back almost to a full lying down position and he had so much room and arm rests and it was padded, and on and on and on. Our soft seat from Beijing was nothing like that. But we had no way to know. There are so many different classes of trains and since people can book train tickets so far in advance things get filled up really early. So tomorrow we’re leaving Fenghuang and going to Guilin. We’ve emailed V.E.T about starting our volunteering two weeks early. If for some reason we can’t, we can still hang out around Guilin or maybe go to Hong Kong or somewhere else that’s closer (and cheaper). We’re both looking forward to all of the different kinds of food that are in Guilin and Yangshou (which are promised in our guide book), including Western food and breakfasts. I miss breakfast. We’ve eaten one Western breakfast since coming to China, and that was before the Great Wall and was included in the cost (eggs and toast with tea and coffee). Otherwise we’ve either been just eating lunch around eleven or eating instant noodle soup which gets old after a while. Hopefully we’ll be able to start volunteering early though, and if we like it we might stay longer than a month.
I’m slowly accepting that China is just too big to see everything. And one of the big mistakes we made in South America was trying to go absolutely everywhere instead of taking our time and getting to know a couple of nice places. So we’ll really get to know the area around Guilin, which it sounds like is just bursting with places nearby that would make great weekend trips and that are (hopefully) skyscraper free. Another reason to get to Guilin soon is so that we can hurry up and vote. Steve’s sister Laura is amazing as always, and has found out that the easiest way for us to vote from here is to print out the practice ballot and mail it in. Easy enough, except this town has no printers! Really, it’s amazing. And even if they did, I wouldn’t want to mail it from here since it’ll be faster from a bigger city. So the first order of business in Guilin is finding a printer and a post office. Then I’m in search of banana pancakes and milkshakes and french toast…. mmm. The food has been so good here that I haven’t really missed Western food too much. I’m not sick of rice yet (even though I eat it at least twice a day) and it’s still exciting when we get a plate of stuff that we can’t recognize but that turns out to be delicious. I’m getting much better with spicey food, which is good since this area has bright red peppers in almost everything. And I can’t wait to get to Yangshou where we plan on taking cooking classes. I want to learn how to make dumplings and all of the different sauces. I feel like if I can get the sauces down, the rest is easy–just add veggies, lots of garlic (and we’re talking cloves here, so you have to bite into it), and green onions. You wouldn’t think I just got done eating dinner!
Tags: China, Fenghuang, Guilin
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