Back in the day...

…when field trips are the best part of your school year.  Still holds true here in China.  We just went on an overnight field trip in Western Sichuan.  Glorious if only for the fact that we did not have to plan a moment of any of it.  So good. 

Reno has a fall.  You can drive down the street in late October and see trees changing color.  But going to Dongla Canyon, it really doesn’t seem to compare.  Dongla Canyon and the surrounding area has these splashes of color that I only associate with falls in New England.  Not that I have ever been to New England, but we’ve all seen those images on television, right?  It was really stunning.  The air was clean.  The air in Chengdu most days is okay.  But there are those days where the pollution hangs low over the city and walking just isn’t the most pleasant experience and you see how dirty everything is.  But going out to the canyon was a little bit purifying.  Who knew?  =) 

My friend Lizzy, from a distance.

We stayed in a hotel outside of the canyon right by the Qingyi River.  Our sheets were really damp.  Our rooms smelled like river.  And it gave us a fair idea of what Chengdu will be like when it gets colder.  The name Sichuan derives from the characters "four" and "rivers."  Can't really beat a name like that.  lol  I gotta say, the hostels we stayed at during our Yunnan trip were nicer.  Endorsed by Ailene.  But it was a lot of fun just standing there and talking to my classmates, especially those that I don’t necessarily get to see as often.  That night, there was also a group of Chinese men and women gathered around a bonfire in the middle of the courtyard, who basically serenaded us to sleep.  They sang both Tibetan and Chinese songs.  You could tell that this close knit group of people truly enjoyed each others company and their heritage.  Just another memory to store away.

The next day, we had the chance to explore Qiaoqi Tibetan Village and Shenmulei Scenic Area.  The Tibetan village was unlike any other Chinese city that we have been to. ( I keep on saying that, and I keep on being surprised.  But I mean, just like in the United States right?  Every city and town has its own personality.)  This was an area where horses are still used for both manual labor and transportation.  We were also not bombarded by humanity.  Hidden up in the mountains, you would never think to go here unless you knew that it was there.  The roads can be pretty bumpy and the ride a little bit nauseating, but it was really worth it.  The fact that there weren’t a lot of people around kind of made it seem like it was all staged, but people live here.  This is a way of life.  We were just passing through.  Just more of those foreigners with cameras who they will never see again.

Off to the Scenic area where I went up the wrong path.  Obviously the wrong path since I had a small fear of being run over by horses who were being herded.  But it was neat.  Exercise.  And more stairs.  And picking my way through the horse poop.  A pretty good summary of Shenmulei.  I was spoken to as if I was a Chinese National again.  Next time, busting out some Cantonese.  At least then I can respond as if I don’t understand.  Which I don’t.  Solutions!  But Mandarin is still coming slowly but surely.

I won’t be anywhere near fluent by the end of my journey here.  But the will is there.  And the possibilities of coming back are presenting themselves to me every day.  It’ll get there.  That’s the goal.  And that’s all for today.

Until next time.  再见!

List of Ailene's American needs.

It is about halfway through my semester, and I have accumulated a small list of things that my friends and I miss about home.  

List of things Ailene (and friends) miss about Amurrica (Bush-ism)

1.       Continuous hot showers

2.       Regulated traffic laws*****

3.       Ginormous bowls of cereal

4.       A dryer (clothes)

5.       Reading English signs

6.       American sized drinks

7.       Napkins at restaurants

8.       Dry air

9.       Escalators

10.   Toilet paper in bathrooms

11.   Western toilets and driving (courtesy of Heather)

12.   Open space

13.   Days of blues skies

14.   Carpeting

15.   Set low prices without bartering

16.   Little pollution

Food Ailene wants to eat when her feet touch ground in United States:

1.       A ginormous bowl of Cap’n Crunch

2.       Salsa Verde Doritos

3.       Sloppy Joes

4.       Cantonese food (not Sichuanese/Mandarin food)

5.       Awful Awful (everybody from Reno should know this one)

6.       Deli sandwiches

7.       Mashed potatoes

8.       Rotisserie chicken and French bread

As far the food goes, I’ve already made my demands for when I return home.  Otherwise, I will rage until everything on my list is met.  I know my family appreciates the forewarning.    

Oct. 1-7 Chinese National Holiday – Dali

Dali is composed of two parts.  The new city and the ancient city.  Of course we head off to Dali Ancient City.  No skyscrapers.  Dali is a walled city with old Chinese style housing - family compounds with courtyards.  It was a nice getaway from cityscapes for a little bit.  When looking around it was pretty jarring to look up and your view wasn’t obstructed by tall buildings on any side.  Sure, in Reno, we have the casinos downtown, but that is something different than the ubiquitous 8+ story buildings here.  There isn’t really such a thing as suburbia in cities.  Everybody lives in apartments and that is definitely a shift.  For myself, I think it is kind of startling how easy it was to become used to the thought of building up rather than building out.  I suppose that’s the only way that you can contain a country of 1.6 billion people.  

But back to my trip, we are in Dali and find our way to our hostel where almost immediately we make a couple new international friends.  That actually had to be one of the best parts of our holiday.  Just talking to people and the reason for their travels.  For a lot of them, it was just a whim.  It still kind of blows my mind to think that it is possible to just up and leave everything that you’ve known to travel for several months.  Just for the sake of seeing more of the world.  It takes a certain amount of craziness and a lot of bravery to do that. We adopted a British girl into our adventures in Dali for 3 days and she turned out to be one of the most interesting and generous people I have ever met.  At least for that 3 day period.  But we do have an open invitation to visit her home in England if we are ever in her neck of the woods.  I just might take her up on it one day.  

Making new friends.

The funny thing about Dali is that the morning we arrive, the ancient city is almost completely dead.  There are hardly any people around.  However, as the day progresses, it is just a madhouse of humanity.  It was this way every day.  Dali is one of those cities where tourism booms and very rarely do locals outnumber the tourists in the city.  At first, I wasn’t a fan at all.  But after actually giving it a chance, I grew to love the busy, enterprising, touristy Dali.  It definitely had its own flavor.  Dali is very much a hippy town with hippy tendencies and lots of foreigners.  It was a lot of fun. 

Venturing outside of Dali was really neat as well.  Just like any other place, China has many facets that continue to awe me.  Ethnic villages, mountains, lakes, temples.  Short summaries for each place.

Erhai Lake – Got on a boat with the best Bai (local ethnicity) villager who good-naturedly rowed us around, sang to us, tried to get us to understand his Mandarin.  He was really cool.   

Ethnic village, Xizhou – Harassed by a rickshaw driver who wanted us first go to Erhai Lake where we had already gone, then a Bai teahouse where the prices were a little too much for us.  Got out of that by saying we would be back but actually didn’t.  That might come back and bite us on the butt.  But lots of souvenir shopping was done that day! 

Three Pagodas Temple – So much more than just Three Pagodas.  It was temple after temple after temple.  You would exit out of one and see that there was another, thinking it was the last.  We never got to the last one.  As cool as it was, there was just so much more to see in Dali.  

Cangshan Mountain – Some of the best natural scenery we’ve seen in China.  Went up the wrong path and got a work out.  Went on the right path and found that there was a landslide preventing us from completing the entire trek.  A little bit of a bummer.  But nice nonetheless.  

Had to fight our way past the plants.

Since there were so many travelers (remember – Chinese National Holiday) we didn’t get a chance to do everything on our itinerary since transportation was iffy.  But one day, I would like to go back.  I feel like there is much left to do in Yunnan.  But then again, there is a lot of China left to explore.  I’ll remember, and hopefully, coming back to Yunnan will be in the cards later. 

From Dali, it was back to Kunming to catch a plane back to Chengdu.  We rode a sleeper bus one more time and that experience was really different.  The beds were not clearly numbered so that was difficult to work through.  The bus driver was chain smoking the entire time.  And they told us to get out at 2 o’ clock in the morning.  Which we have no choice but to get off.  Groggy, a little bit grumpy, feeling a little bit grimy - we make our way to the airport and sit there for hours until check-in opens.  Sent to several different lines.  Through ridiculous Chinese security.  And this is when I start to get homesick, where at least if I am inconvenienced, I can understand what the object of my frustration is saying.  Honeymoon phase is over. 

Still a little homesick and looking forward to the day when I am back on U.S. soil.  But happy, nonetheless, and looking forward to the many adventures I still have before me.  =) 

Of course, I will keep you updated. 

Oct. 1 – 7 Chinese National Holiday - Kunming

For the holiday, a few friends and I went down to Yunnan, a province south of Sichuan.  And it was pretty amazing.  First, the train ride.  20 hours of sheer awesome.   And by awesome, I mean some awesome and a lot of exhaustion.  We met a lot of really neat Chinese people who were traveling or going home for the holiday.  It definitely forced me to speak my faltering Mandarin, but I did it and it was actually really cool that you could do so much with so few words (and hand gestures and some pictionary).  That part was really great.  But the worst part was just not being able to sleep.  We bought our tickets a little late in the game, so instead of getting sleepers we got seats.  Just about the worst seats that you can get before you only have standing room.   No comfortable way to sleep on a twenty hour train ride.  Sitting up, leaning against people’s shoulders, trying to curl into a tiny ball of misery.  That was me.  Good news though!  No squatty potty for me on the moving train.  That part was a complete and total success.

We arrived in Kunming (the capital of the province) and one of the first things we did was go and get food.  Train food just wasn’t cutting it.  It was just about the best fast food ever.  Or at least pretty good.  And then on to the hostel to put down our things and get on with our day so our adventures could really start!  After getting transportation to the next city taken care of, we went to the Bamboo Temple in Kunming.  To be honest, temples are starting to run together in my mind since we have seen so many.  But this one in particular just had something a little special.  (Other than being at the top of a mountain with winding roads that are faintly reminiscent of the winding roads in Yosemite.)  We arrived towards the end of the day, so there actually weren’t too many tourists around.  This particular temple felt like a sanctuary, not necessarily a tourist destination.  After wandering around a bit, we saw some construction – a nice representation that everything moves forward – some really nice quiet spots, and got to catch the chanting of the monks at the end of our visit.  Peaceful.  Soothing. 

Really neat stone cauldron, wishing well type thing.  =)

Because it had this inside.  Get a coin in the dragons mouth and you get good luck!  Hopefully.

Courtyard in the temple.

Roof of temple through the trees.

From that to chaos of Wal-mart in China, but I think the pictures from my last post can pretty much speak for themselves. 

While a few of our classmates went forward, four of us stayed behind and enjoyed Kunming for a little longer.  It was worth it.  The next day, after being properly rested from that train ride, we went to Shilin, the Stone Forest.  It was probably one of the most unreal things I have ever seen in my life.  It just didn’t seem possible that these stone formations exist.  It also didn’t help that there are paved walkways winding through the forest, lending to the surreal feeling to the experience, like it was all manmade and we were in Disneyland (felt like Disneyland because of the tourists).  Wandering among the stones, it is kind of cool, but you don’t really get a feel for how vast it is until you reach a viewing pagoda.  And climbed up to one, and just seeing it all just took your breath away.  We just had to sit there in silence and just overlook the park.  It changes your perspective, seeing these enormous stones rising from the ground.  Overwhelming.  We only uncovered a very small portion of the Stone Forest that day.

So we head back to Kunming after a really good day and decide to go to one of the popular streets in Kunming.  One of the first things we see is a bookstore.  Where there is no possible way that we are walking out without buying books.  And we get to know a nice Chinese girl with exceptional English.  Meeting new people.  Usually pretty rewarding!  Ate locally, walked around looking at all the stores, people watched.  It was a small lesson in Chinese nightlife in Kunming.

That night, we head out on a sleeper bus to Dali, a popular destination for many tourists.  Sleeper buses.  Wow.  Like the train ride, just one of those modes of transportation that you will never forget.  It is kind of hard to describe, but lying down while you are in a moving bus is completely disorienting.  For that sleeper bus we were assigned 4 bunks in a row, and I kind of assumed it would be a double decker bus of Harry Potter proportions.  Not the case.  At all.  =P  There is 1 bed across the aisle, but literally 3 very narrow bunks are pressed together on the other side.  It was lucky that 4 of us decided to travel together.  Otherwise, any of us could have been sleeping next to a stranger.  Which, I guess in the Chinese mentality is normal and just take it as it is moment…but for the Western mind it was really bizarre.  I am Western enough to still think that I won’t be getting on a sleeper bus again unless I am assured that I have my own bunk.  We left Kunming at 10 pm, reached Dali at 2 am.  They let us sleep until 6.  Not the most restful night we have all had, but like I keep on saying…it was an experience.  

Top bunk of the sleeper bus.  No head room, but decent!

So this is turning into a two post blog.  I’ll split it up between cities.  Next part will be Dali!