Summing Up

What a silly post title, "summing up," as if I could sum up China. It seems to be the fashionable thing to say that even if you spent the rest of your life there, you could never really understand China (well, Anthony Bourdain said that, anyway). Apparently one of the most vivid things Chinese have historically believed is that it's easy to fool a foreigner, and there we were, extreme foreigners.

gorgeous morning light in Dali

I had the hardest time finding a good grasp of whether China felt foreign or not. In many ways it was the least foreign place we've traveled in Asia, and I once told Marc that aside from the language, I felt like I 'got' China and understood it. Maybe it was as simple as the fact that they drive on the same side of the road as we do, and driving didn't feel as impossible there as it does when we travel in SEAsia, where they seem to navigate by echolocation, horns honking constantly. China, on the other hand, was orderly, straightforward, quiet driving. (But slow.....even on the busy highways, all our drivers drove so slowly it was strange, and of course we don't know what the speed limits were.)

But on the other hand, we encountered almost no English at all -- not even an understanding of the word "English." Someone would be speaking Chinese to our bewildered expressions, we'd shake our heads and shrug and say "English" and they never seemed to know what that word was conveying; ordinarily, people say, "no English" but in China they didn't know that word. As always, it isn't that we expect English to be spoken everywhere, by any means, it's just that it was so striking how absolute the absence of English was (where we traveled, anyway). I don't know why that would produce such a profound feeling of foreignness, except for the implications of that fact, such as how hard it made it to eat, and how little we were able to pick up about the places we went. I often say that we travel like little children, having no idea what we're seeing, and that felt even truer in China than anywhere else.

now these were some great spicy noodles!

Another thing that added to the 'foreign' column was the complete absence of western tourists. Like, NONE. We'd be in touristy places, even, with hundreds of people, and not see one other obvious westerner. Some of the Chinese or Asian people we saw may well have been tourists from the US, but if so they didn't speak English in our hearing. And one of the most startling experiences that added to the foreign experience happened as we were coming into Guilin on the first day -- I still have to ask Marc about it, to be sure it happened. The flight attendant said that no newspapers were allowed to be brought in, so everyone needed to leave their newspapers on the plane. Of all the places we've traveled, that has never happened.

"Summing up" is also silly if I now think I've seen China, because we saw such a tiny bit of it -- and only southern China. No big cities, and we have no desire to see the big cities, either. I can sum up our experiences of two places in Guangxi, and four places in Yunnan, and as long as I'm summing up those experiences, I'm on solid ground. Maybe. One of the funniest things about looking back at our trip is how much I simultaneously LOVED it, and how little I came away with in terms of understanding. When Marc and I travel, we don't really like to hit the famous "must-see" places; instead, we like to walk a lot, go to the markets, eat where people eat, and try to get a feeling of a place in that way. Whether we do or not, really, it gives us a feeling that we understand a place, that we have a sense of what it would be like to live there. I'm not sure, now that I'm home, that I really have that sense.

This, I will NEVER forget.

We went into the trip with hesitation and a bit of anxiety, worried that we might really dislike China. Every time we've encountered big groups of Chinese tourists in our travels around SEAsia, they've been so loud and taking-over; when we were in Siem Reap, for instance, at Ta Prohm, we waited and waited for huge hordes of Chinese tourists to leave so we could get close enough to see some of the ruins and finally we just left. I have a long and deep fascination with China, as I had with India, born of literature and books, and hoped desperately not to feel permanently disconnected from that by a bad experience.

But we enjoyed it, a lot. From the very beginning, from our first moments at the first hotel in Guilin, by the lake, we loved it. The places we went were so beautiful, such breathtaking landscapes. We have a particular fondness for markets and villages and places with little boats, so that is the China we sought, and for the most part, the China we found. Our experiences with Chinese people were mixed; if we were paying (at our hotels, for instance), they were very friendly and helpful and warm. For the most part they were utterly indifferent to us, though, and that's just fine. I was anticipating a possibility that because I'm so tall and light-skinned I'd stand out in a noticeable way, but that didn't seem to be the case (even though, literally, I could stand flat-footed and look out over a sea of people's heads, almost always). The high-school aged people we encountered were often quite mean and even cruel. Of course it's hard to know how to interpret people's emotional responses, but we often felt like they disliked us . . . and maybe it's nothing more than the old "easy to fool a foreigner" contempt. And it's also possible that were we in big cities, this would've been different.

One very notable difference between China and Vietnam, especially, was the presence of old people. When we're in Vietnam, it's always striking to us, no matter how often we go, that we don't see very many old people. When we first went to Vietnam in 2005, we read a statistic that 65% of the population was under the age of 35. All those wars, all that slaughter. But in China, I think we saw as many old people as middle-aged people, and it was kind of wonderful. So many ancient-looking Chinese women I encountered, almost all walking, giving me a chance to look at them and say hello, and hear their delighted hello back to me. Ni hao. I had an easier time with that than Marc, perhaps because women are more open to other women, I don't know.

incredible produce everywhere

Another notable thing we experienced was the overwhelming amount of food being grown. I've been re-reading Paul Theroux's Riding the Iron Rooster, an account of his trips by rail through and across China in the late 80s, when Deng Xioping was remaking China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, and he commented on this too. He noted that there are very few trees left because you can't grow crops in the shadows of trees. I felt like the Chinese must be master farmers, because every possible bit of land was shaped into beautiful fields of crops, gorgeous gardens outside a house or village. Every possible square inch. When we were riding bikes around Xizhou, the fields were full of people -- morning to night -- crouched over planting or tending or harvesting crops . . . and they are beautiful, if they're the same ones we always saw in the markets.

One of my connections to China comes through Maxine Hong Kingston's incredible book The Woman Warrior, which I also re-read while we were in China and that was quite an emotional experience. Being a girl in China has historically been a pretty awful thing to be; boxes of clean ash were kept next to a woman in labor, in case it was a girl -- in which case the baby could just be smothered in the ash and killed immediately. Kingston says the character for 'girl' is the same as the character for 'slave.' I've read that book dozens of times and was always moved by the easy and constant contempt the culture has for girls, but reading it IN China, looking at the women who grew up with that kind of constant, constant, CONSTANT contempt, it was very hard. China is the country where women's feet were bound -- how dangerous women must be, to have to be hobbled like that.

I was so happy in Shaxi!

Our last couple of nights in Hong Kong were a bit overwhelming for me, and I hate to say it but I did not like Hong Kong at all. I guess if I hadn't lived in NYC, I might have been dazzled by it (though it's true that Hong Kong at night is extraordinary, especially from the water). Kowloon is extremely crowded and overwhelming, and Hong Kong is great if you want to shop at Cartier and stores like that, but otherwise it's a big, busy city and it wasn't my cup of tea. It didn't help that the weather was looming and quite heavy and I had such an extreme headache our second day that I couldn't even leave the hotel. The public transport there is remarkable, as everyone always says. We never got any food that was better than mediocre, but with one exception that was true in China, too. The people in Hong Kong were quite helpful and nice to us, giving us directions with generosity and smiles. I imagine that my experience of Hong Kong was heavily shaped by the terrible headache I had, but at the same time I don't personally feel a big desire ever to go back.

The URL for this blog is "China finally," which reflects our long hesitation to go, and our decision, finally, to go ahead and visit China. I'm very glad we did, and I have so many beautiful memories of being there, of seeing the various places we visited, and of traveling together. I'll always remember bicycling around Yangshuo and Xizhou, and how exceptionally sweet and wonderful the air smelled in Yangshuo, of orange blossoms and jasmine; I'll always remember that bamboo raft trip among the karst mountains; I'll always remember the tiny little villages we found in our wanderings, and how beautiful so many of them were; I'll always remember the noise and shattered red paper of Tomb Sweeping Day(s); I'll always remember freezing in Shaxi; I'll always remember how it felt to walk around Dali; I'll always remember walking with Marc around the lake in Guilin and having that moment of connection with the woman who invited me to join the group dancing that one morning; I'll always remember our delicious meal the last night in Shuhe Old Town at Number One Restaurant; I'll always remember riding the night ferry from Lamma Island back to Hong Kong, and then a second ferry back to Kowloon and seeing the dazzling light show of the dramatic Hong Kong skyline.

A woman Marc knows advised us to take a roll of toilet paper with us, which we dutifully did and never once (obviously, probably) needed, but I will always remember, and will advise you, that napkins are almost never available in any form, so you might want to take paper towels along.

I really LOVE this picture so much, and
I so love traveling with Marc, the very
best travel partner I ever could have.

I'm not sure we'll return to China, though I would certainly be glad to! I gather the north of China is extremely different in every way from the south; one thing about China is the dominance of all the minorities, and their influence on the various places, and if nothing else the landscape and minority groups are different in the north. Our visas are good for 10 years......

transit, the flu, and Dali

Because of the near-disaster (read about it here), our trip required a very short overnight stay in Kunming to go from the Guanxi province part of our trip (Guilin and Yangshuo) to the Yunnan part of our trip (Dali, Xizhou, Shaxi, and Lijiang). It was a late afternoon flight, so we had the bulk of the day to spend biking or walking around Yangshuo, which we'd been enjoying doing.

Except I woke up with the flu, and it rained pretty heavily the whole day. I stayed in bed, curled up and wishing it would just all go away, and in the brief respites between rain showers or storms, Marc took short walks. It was a long, long morning and afternoon. Erica, the woman who managed the hotel, kept inviting us to have tea with her, and I'd kind of kept that as a "last day we're here" kind of thing, so the end result of that was no tea with Erica, and I still feel bad about that. She held an umbrella over me as we walked to the car, and we took the 1.5-hour drive back to Guilin, to the airport.

Oh I felt bad. Terrible. Leaned over and rested on my suitcase whenever we had to pause for any reason. I slept in the gate area while we waited for our flight, and Marc walked around. I slept on the plane. I slept in the van that took us to the hotel right near the airport. I crawled into bed and went immediately to sleep when we got to the hotel. Poor Marc had no dinner and just went to sleep, too. The hotel was super cheap ($26, including airport transportation in both directions!) but oh so fancy--although it reeked of cigarette smoke, which was disgusting, and the bathroom held a sink, a toilet, and a shower head that wasn't enclosed in any way, nor was there a drain in the floor. Maybe the point was to aim it toward the toilet and just stand in between. Super bizarre.

But it was fine -- we slept, the van took us back to the airport early the next morning, and my flu was 85% gone. The flight to Dali was easy as could be, so our transit went as well as it could go, especially considering that I was sick.

The hotel was supposed to send a driver to the airport but Marc didn't have a lot of faith that it would happen -- and in fact, there was no one waiting for us. Plenty of signs held up for Novartis, so there must have been a big meeting or something. The main reason we especially wanted the hotel driver this time was that the hotel was supposed to be tricky to find, tucked away by the north gate inside the walls of Old Dali and then also down a long alley. As always, Marc was completely prepared, with directions to the hotel printed out in Chinese, and a detailed map showing the hotel's location. Still, the cab driver had a bit of a tough time, and finally just parked at the end of the alley and left us to walk. By the time we were finally settled in our room, I was famished and feeling almost frantic from needing to eat something. So we dumped our suitcases and headed out to find food.

So here's the thing. We do not read Chinese. At all. When a noodle shop or restaurant has pictures on the wall or the menu, we have options and can just point to usually hard-to-identify dishes -- otherwise, it's all Chinese to us. :) So we walked and looked in little stalls and shops, hoping to find pictures of food we could point to, and we stopped in the first one we found.

See the pictures on the door to the left -- we pointed and took our seats. I took this picture after I finished
eating my noodles -- there's Marc still enjoying his. 

This woman owns the place, we guess -- she made our food. Pay NO attention
to the grease on the wall above the woks behind her. I tried not to.

Marc's dish, which was hot and greasy and SO yummy, he said. And spicy -- which was not the case for the
food in Guanxi. Yunnan food does seem to be spicier as a default.

Mine turned out to be a cold noodle dish, which was WONDERFUL. And very spicy -- see all those
chilis? I was a little worried about my still-slightly-flu-y tummy, but it was fine. Happy.

So we walked around town a lot, rested, bought water, walked some more, figured out the lay of the place, and started thinking about dinner. Marc had seen a guy hand pulling noodles in one of his wanderings so we headed there.

This is our hotel, the Yinfeng, which we absolutely LOVED. It was tucked away in a very quiet corner, and we were
upgraded to a larger room (ostensibly because the driver wasn't there waiting for us at the airport,
but Marc had read on TripAdvisor that people are always being upgraded). We were up on the third floor,
not much fun carrying our bags up those stairs, but the views were so beautiful.

Right next to our hotel was a large park, quite pretty and filled with poinsettias.

Old Dali is known for its Bai architecture, which is quite distinctive and quite beautiful.

And the city streets are lined with trees, and nice stone sidewalks. Lots of kids running
around, and babies cradled equally by mamas, daddies, and grandparents.

Here's where we stopped for dinner -- like so many shops, this one was owned by a Muslim family. He pulled the
noodles which were quickly turned into.....

my mushroom noodles and....

Marc's beef noodles, though he said the beef was mostly symbolic. :) He loved the green vegetable,
we aren't sure what it was exactly except delicious. So many vegetables and mushrooms to try.

When Marc was paying for our dinner, he accidentally gave the guy a 50CNY bill instead of a 10, and the guy
was so great he kind of got a horrified look on his face and handed it to Marc and gestured for the
correct amount.

The sky was looming thick and dark, but we felt like walking some more, so we kept wandering.

very traditional architecture over the door

No idea at all what this gorgeous building is -- it was just on one of the main streets.

Christian church in Dali -- and a side door marked
"Church of Christ." Hmmm.

I took this picture just because the sky was always so dramatic in Dali. Look at that!

This is the Research Dept of Dali University. WOW.

Through the giant front door, you can see the dramatic sky behind. Marc took this great picture.

What a stunning building. Just, wow.

Sigh. We pretend we are Canadians. American 'culture' abroad.

Almost back at our hotel -- the looming gray sky over the gray tiled roofs just killed me.

We had a few hours the next morning before the car was to pick us up to take us to Xizhou, just 20km north of Dali, so we headed out to wander the streets and see what we could see, never once dreaming we would find the magnificent Saturday morning market.

But first -- look at that light! We stepped out of our room and there it was. The light in Dali was
frequently extraordinary.

there it is, shining on the faces of the buildings.

Different minorities around town -- this woman wasn't Bai, but I don't know
which she belonged to. I loved their clothing.

We got out so early, all the shops were closed but we passed this guy, not knowing he was probably going
to the market!

So anyway. We love markets. When we travel, we have three missions: walk as much as we can, eat as much as we can in places local people eat if at all possible, and find the market. We hit the jackpot.

look at those cabbages!!

Lots and LOTS of chickens, and some ducks. Apparently you buy your chicken, and if you want you can take it
to another part of the market where it will be killed, de-feathered, and butchered for you. I wasn't expecting that,
and rounded the corner to see a chicken hanging upside down, bleeding out. People waiting. As upsetting as it was,
it felt very humane compared to US factory farming; I once worked as an OSHA consultant and had to be on
the kill floor of Tyson foods, sounds and images I'll never forget. And a very funny thing about this market
was that women kept trying to get me to buy a LIVE chicken. Me! An obviously western tourist, the only one
like me in the whole place. What would I do with a chicken?!

SUPER busy, Saturday market day. Traffic jams all around.

eggs and chicken feet -- plain or pickled.

I'm really not sure what the deal is with these eggs.

Some kind of fungus, I gathered, since it was in a giant bag next to another giant bag of a fungus I recognized as such.

SO many vegetables, all so beautiful.

Hairy tofu, fermented. In a word: NO.

This fabulous vegetable seller had it all going on: black leather(ette) pants, a big old floppy hat with an
organza bow that would be the pride of any 1970s southern bridesmaid, and gorgeous vegetables
that she kept misting with water to make them look even fresher and more beautiful.
The hat thing is SO common here. 

Such an abundance, my eyes were dazzled.

This was one of the couple of meat rows, and the symphony of pounding cleavers was remarkable. All
kinds of meat, any cut, any organ, any part, just for you.

Oh! And the mushrooms! So many kinds. And garlic, which we haven't really found
in the food. It is often chopped in oil, in a condiment bowl for spooning into you
food, and it must be featured heavily in the pickled vegetables too.

Nuts? Seeds? Grain? They've got it.

We're going home with intense cravings for pickled vegetables, after the tremendous variety and abundance
we've seen in the markets, and in the little food stalls. Makes my mouth water just seeing this picture.

yes please. All of them.

Roots? Tubers? Melons? I also love this picture because of the secondary colors -- orange and purple and green.

oh, and plenty of seafood from the lake -- crawdads and fish, snails, eels, and
the fish ranged from really pretty huge to tiny little minnow-sized.

spices

so many kinds of tofu, from giant creamy slabs to these tiles.

these are unbelievably delicious.

I'm always so proud when we (by which I mean Marc) navigate a purchase. There are zero words in common between vendor and vendee, and thank heavens either they have a calculator to show us a number, or we have one on our phone. In the market, Marc bought a cabbage bun and a Xizhou baba, which is fried bread with either pork or red bean paste inside.

Point and open the wallet and it works out.

Look at that stack!

isn't that cabbage bun pretty?

and super yummy inside.

Xizhou baba -- really pretty greasy fried bread, but Marc said the pork filling was good.

After that fabulous coup, we felt happy and satisfied and ready to head back to the hotel to leave for Xizhou. Dali, Xizhou, and Lijiang are all situated on the western side of Lake Erhai, so the rest of our trip -- the China part anyway -- will be connected to that landscape. And the mountains, which belong to the Cangshan range, and I just never ever get enough of a beautiful mountain. So off we go to Xizhou....

Cangshan Mountains