Work Around

I found out that the young twenty-year-old man was not a fellow guest at the Lily Pad Inn as I had assumed. On our way back from the market he and I had a chance to talk at length which was a little tricky because his English was so-so (and my Chinese is non-existent).

He was a civil engineering student who had just graduated from Beijing University. In the fall, he was going to be entering graduate school. For the summer he was volunteering at the Lily Pad Guest House. While he didn’t getting paid, he did get free lodging and three meals a day. He did whatever the owner of the inn needed from carrying in large bottles of water to keeping the three computers in the lobby operational to sweeping out the courtyard. He found this particular opportunity on a Chinese website that matches young people looking for just such an opportunity with various inns and hotels across China. It was a cheap way for him to see and experience a part of China for the summer that he had never seen before.

He and I found out that we shared a common interest in Chinese movies. With the use of his Blackberry and an on-line translation site, we were able to have a pretty robust conversation about the Third-wave of Chinese cinema. Occassionally it took some effort for one us to figure out which movie the other was talking about because movies titles –even after translation- are often different in Chinese than in English. The Chinese movie “My Mother and My Father” becomes “The Way Home” in English.

Of all the Chinese movies I have watched, “To Live” offers the most frank assessment of the dark years surrounding the misnamed Cultural Revolution. I rightly assumed that this movie is banned in China, but I thought that I would toss it into our conversation. Once my young friend figured out what movie I was talking about (thank you www.IMDB.com), he said “Yes, I have seen this movie.”

He went on to explain that using his internet computer savvy he had done a work-around and managed to watch this banned movie on-line. He said that all of his friends had seen it as well. Wow. I was surprised.

Despite the government’s attempts to control their country’s narrative, the younger generation is using new media to gain a fuller picture of their nation’s recent past.I would have loved to have delved deeper into what this young man’s thoughts were on China’s journey over the last 61 years, but alas we were hindered by both of our linguistic limitations.

Pictures of Old Dali Friday Market

Old Dali Market

As she served us our breakfast at the sturdy wooden table in the courtyard of the Lily Pad Inn, our host Erine told us that it was market day in Old Dali and that after we finished eating she would escort us to the market. I thought that she would have had better things to do, but we were happy to take her up on her offer.

A young, reserved Chinese man of about twenty also joined our little market-bound group. I assumed that he was yet another guest to whom our host had extended the same offer.

Most of the open-air markets that we have been to in Asia are largely geared toward the tourists. Lots of sunglasses and t-shirts mixed in with all the other wares. You get the sense that even the local handicraft in these markets is produced with the outsider in mind. The Friday Market in Old Dali was refreshing because it truly was a local market put on by locals for locals. It was all hand-woven rice winnowing trays and hand-made baskets with straps meant to be carried on one’s back. Lots of dried red peppers, meat cleavers, and straw brooms. All of it was made locally, intended for local use.

While ninety-five percent of the people in Mainland China are ethnically from the Han people group, China is also home to 55 officially recognized minority groups. Yunnan province is home to China’s biggest cross-section of ethnic minorities. In particular, the region surrounding Dali is home to the Bai minority people.

So many of the Bai people in the market –the women in particular- were wearing traditional Bai outfits. I couldn’t help but conclude that the locals were doing so not because they were trying to attract tourists and tourist dollars, but because that’s simply how they chose to dress on market day. Many of the older women wore their long hair in a big bun at the back of their head. But then they also wore large-brimmed straw hats. The result was that their hats were riding high and pitched forward at a jaunty angle.

Some guys have a weakness for watches, some for imported cigars. I have a weak spot region-specific, traditional handicraft that captures a little bit of the unique essence of a place. It’s a good thing I’m a social studies teacher because it provides cover and justification for my penchant for junk from around the world.

Almost everywhere we looked in Old Dali, we saw people wearing large straw baskets on their backs. Men, women; old folks, young folks. They wore them in the fields while farming and they wore them to the market to do their shopping. They were not only functional, but I found those baskets to be quite beguiling. And to my great joy, the Friday market had a wide selection of baskets: big ones, small ones, and in-between ones. I was in the process of trying to decide whether or not a medium-sized basket could fit into my backpack when I espied something all-together different in the stall across the lane.

There, piled high, was a stack of bamboo shoulder sticks to which farmers attach baskets hanging from ropes. What could be more quintessentially rural China than a farmer’s bamboo shoulder stick? In my mind, I started to formulate the lesson plan for students back in Chicago. I would affix a pair of buckets with rope and then fill them with sand or water and then I would set it on my students’ shoulder. I would make them carry this heavy load from one side of the classroom to the other. For a few brief moments, they would each get a feel for what it was like to be a Chinese rice farmer. This was going to be great.

With the help of the young Chinese man from our guest house who had come along to the market with us, I was able to negotiate the price down to twenty yuan. I couldn’t have been happier. I caught up with Julie and the girls and proudly showed of my latest acquisition.

As we walked out of the market area, an old-timer squinted at me as he tried to figure out what I was carrying and then broke out into a large smile and a silent laugh when he recognized what it was. Whitey bought himself a bamboo shoulder stick.

Lounges with the Seven Sages

Despite the fact that we had just seventeen days in the mainland, our intention was to get an overview of the vastness that is China. So after a week in Yunnan Province in Southwest China, we boarded a plane for the city of Xi’an in central China.

Julie had booked us into the Seven Sages Inn in the old part of Xi’an. The Seven Sages backpacker’s inn is on the site of an old military housing compound and has maintained the same traditional Chinese communal layout. The inn has a series of five consecutive courtyards with circular moon gates leading from one to the other. Each courtyard had six or seven rooms around its periphery . Like any self-respecting building of any age and importance in China, the complex was built of grey brick.

Of all the guest houses we have stayed in over the last two years, the Seven Sages probably had the largest number of amenities. In addition to the tree-shaded, outdoor café, it also had an indoor restaurant with overstuffed sofas providing seating for the booths. The restaurant had a large screen t.v. on which the staff kept a regular rotation of blockbuster movies for weary travelers to watch. Adjacent to the restaurant was an all-glass sunroom with a large, well-worn pool table dominating the center of the room. In one of the courtyards they had an all-weather ping pong table made of stone. The inn had a coin-operated laundry on site. And of course, they had bank of computers for internet access.

I am convinced that some people travel to the world’s most amazing locations, find a really hip and comfortable backpacker inn, and then proceed to camp out for days or weeks at a time. At the Seven Sages, there was one pair of women –sisters, by the looks of it- who seemed to be either lounging on the sofas or nursing Tsingtao’s on the veranda every time we passed through or grabbed a meal. I couldn’t help but wonder if they knew there was an entire ancient city to be explored on the other side of the walls of the Seven Sages. In their defense, some of these travelers are in the midst of multi-month treks so it is not uncommon to veg out for several days or a week to recharge one’s batteries. A person can only tour so many temples.

True confession: we spent a full day loafing around the Seven Sages Inn ourselves. The previous day, three of us had shared a piece of delectable-looking bread we bought from a street vendor in the market. That night and into the next day we were paying the price. Annika, the only one who hadn’t eaten any of the bread, was fine. The kicker was that while the bread was wonderful looking, it really wasn’t all that good. We too spent several hours on sofas in the Seven Sages restaurant watching the animated movie Happy Feet.

But it all worked out. We were approaching the mid-way point of our seventeen-day trip and were ready for a down day. Besides, the Seven Sages’ banana pancakes were really yummy.

Buildings of Old Dali

Hello, Dali

We had had enough of buses for one day, so we jumped into a taxi and called our host at the hostel. She gave directions to the taxi driver. Twenty-five minutes later we pulled up to the Lily Pad Guest House. Our host, Erine, was waiting for us. She allowed us to check into our rooms even though it was only eight in the morning.

The inn was a beautiful, picturesque, three-story inn, with a brick courtyard overflowing with large potted plants. We had booked a family suite, but Erine put us into two separate rooms for the same price. The girls laid claim to the third-floor room that opened up directly onto the rooftop patio.

The city of Old Dali is . . . well, old with large portions of it looking pretty much the way they have for hundreds of years. Dali is nestled in between the Cangshan mountains to the west and the large Lake Erhai to the east. The land gently rises away from the lake for a mile or two making for gently sloping plains that have been rice farms for generations. As the land approaches the foot of the mountains, it begins to rise more steeply so that the whole city of Old Dali is built on a slope.

A large protective wall used to surround the city of Old Dali, but it is long since gone. Fortunately, four large, magnificent gates –one for each cardinal direction- and their arched entryways still remain.

The buildings in Old Dali are all variations on a theme. Almost all of them are built with grey brick columns at the corners and the walls in between are plastered over with an impossibly white stucco. Every building in Dali is roofed with dark grey, unglazed tiles and the corners of every roof make a last-second swosh heavenwards. Almost every building in Old Dali has narrow, hand-painted murals on the white walls just below the eaves. Some of the buildings also have large murals painted on one or more walls. The murals –painted in grey and blue-grey- invariably depicted pastoral scenes that try to capture the beauty of the rugged, but beautiful Yunnan regions.

All the windows in Dali are made from dark wood with intricate lattice in elaborate, recti-linear patterns. Many of the buildings have open store fronts at the street level but instead of having sliding or folding doors that closed off the opening afterhours, each store has eight or ten hand-crafted wooden panels that are set in place each evening. During the day, the panels are taken out and stacked against an exterior wall off to one side or just around the corner in an alley. Invariably, each of these door panels has beautiful carvings on them. Unlike the angular window lattice, the door carvings are all curves and swirls, plants and flowers and birds with long tail feathers. They’re stunning. I was amazed that a people –the majority of who still scratched out a living by farming- would put so much time and effort into adorning their buildings with such beautiful and time-consuming door panels. A person could easily spend an entire day strolling Old Dali and just photographing her doors.

While all of the buildings followed this basic design, no two were exactly the same. The result is that Old Dali possesses a charming sense of place. As you wander the wide boulevards of Old Dali, you most definitely know that you are not in Beijing or Shenzhen or Hong Kong.

Bus Boy part 3 of 3

As I was in full-throttle panic mode, my wife attempted to get me to calm down, think rationally, and behave in a productive manner by getting me to retrace my steps. In doing so, she got me to realize what I had been denying for the last 20 minutes. I hadn’t left my camera on the bus.

“You took pictures of the girls last night.”

“Yes.”

“Then what?”

“I . . . I . . .”

“You what?”

“I . . . ” I slowly admitted. “I put it back in the over-night bag at the foot of my bed.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’m sure.”

“So . . . ?”

“Dog-gone-it.” I acknowledged the un-escapable truth. We weren’t ever going to track down my lost camera because my camera wasn’t lost. Somebody on the overnight bus had taken my camera while we slept.

I felt a complex flood of emotions that I had never experienced before. I was angry. I was frustrated. I mumbled words that my daughters aren’t allowed to say. But more than anything else, I was just really, really sad. I was sad that we had lost our pictures of the Stone Forest. I was sad that we would not have our camera for the rest of the trip. I was sad to realize that one of my fellow sojourners could have stooped so low as to victimize what was obviously a family of vacationing foreigners all for the sake of a beat up camera that probably had a re-sale value of maybe $40.

And I was also surprised to find myself sad for sentimental reasons. We had bought that little $350 camera specifically for our two years in China. It has made it through 23 of 24 months. In the past two years, I had taken over 40,000 pictures with that thing. It was constantly by my side. If I was out of the building, I had it with me. I always had that camera in hand.

But my wife pointed out that we should count our blessings. We only lost one day’s worth of pictures. It could have been a lot worse. It could have been stolen when it had a week’s worth of pictures on it. And, in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn’t be a big deal to replace it. It only cost a couple hundred bucks.

While that was all true, I didn’t want a new camera. I wanted that camera back. We had been through a lot together. It had served me well.

Several days later, on yet another bus ride, I was flipping through our travel guide to pass the time and there it was on page 342 in a little side bar. “Be careful on the overnight buses. They are notorious for theft and pickpockets.”

Sadly, I can attest to that fact.

Bus Boy part 2 of 3

Do the math.

We certainly didn’t.

The overnight bus seemed like such a great concept. But, the bus left at 10:00 pm. It’s a five-hour trip from Kunming to Dali.

Do the math.

That puts us in the Dali bus terminus at 3:00 a.m. What exactly are we supposed to do and where exactly are we supposed to go at 3:00 in the morning. Not exactly the best time to show up at out small, owner-operated bed and breakfast. We hadn’t exactly thought this detail through.

Fortunately, the overnight bus operators had.

When the bus pulled into the terminus, the driver didn’t kick us all off. Instead, the bus sat in the parking lot where the driver idled its engine for the next several hours allowing us passengers to get a little more sleep. Why not? The bus had nowhere else to go. It’is tricked out as a night bus with sleeping berths. It’s not as if it converts over to seats for day-time use.

Slowly, the passengers started to trickle off the bus over the course of the next few hours while my family and I tried to grab a little more sleep. By 6:30, we were the last four passengers on the bus. We would have stayed a little longer, but really bad, really loud Chinese opera music started blaring from the loudspeakers outside of the bus station as I am sure it does every morning at 6:30 a.m.. Simultaneously, the bus driver came back and informed us it was time to disembark. We were able to communicate with him where we wanted to go and he was kind enough to point us to the bus that was going to Old Dali.

As we settled into our seats on the local bus, I used the opportunity to re-organize my gear. Wallet. Left pocket. Check. Cell phone. Right pocket. Check. Camera. Small bag. Camera? Where’s my camera? Oh shoot. I dashed back into the parking lot ready to scour the overnight bus, but it had just left. I dashed back onto the local bus which was ready to leave. I had to make a command decision. I ordered my family off the bus. “I’m not leaving without that camera.”

In a panic, I went to the counter in the bus station. Surprisingly, our Mandarin phrase book actually had the phrase “I have lost my camera” in it. The man behind the counter looked at our overnight bus receipts and made a phone call on our behalf. Meanwhile, I used the phrase book and some pantomiming to explain to a sleepy looking security guard what had happened. If I had left my camera on the bus, I was going to track it down.

Bus Boy part 1 of 3

The couple of times that our family has ridden overnight trains in Asia, it has been such a fun adventure that we thought we would expand our repertoire. We decided to try a night bus from Kunming to the city of Dali where we would then catch a local bus to the town of Old Dali.

Taking the night bus was a brilliant idea, because it would save us time –instead of using valuable daylight to travel, we would be traveling while we slept. It would also save us money; it was one less night we would have to pay for a hotel. Besides, traveling by bus –during the day or night- is just about the cheapest way to get from Kunming to Dali. The 250 mile trip was only going to cost us about $12 each.

We clambered onto the bus and started checking the berth numbers to find our assigned bunks. The bus held 48 sleepers/passengers. Instead of seats, the bus was outfitted with bunks two high that ran front to the back in three rows leaving to narrow aisles. The bunks were eighteen –maybe twenty- inches wide and only five-and-a-half feet long –a little short for this six-foot traveler.

This was shaping up to be as much of an adventure as the overnight train.

We settled in and got ourselves situated. We fluffed our pillows which may have been washed since the last three or four passengers had used them, but probably not. Our big backpacks were in storage under the bus, but I had a small overnight bag with me. My bunk had a perfect spot for my mini-back pack: a little stainless steel rack welded in place right above the spot where my feet would be. The girls were a little giddy and I got caught up in the excitement. I pulled out my camera and took pictures of each of the girls in their bunks. I think we provided a few minutes of entertainment for the rest of the bus riders. I don’t think they get too many western families with young daughters riding the overnight bus. As he watched me slip my camera back into my little overnight bag, I gave a little self-assured head nod to the guy in the bunk across the aisle.

At 10:00 p.m. –right on schedule- the bus took off. The large window next to me slid open all the way from my head down to my waist. The sill of the window was even with the top of my mattress. If the bus was taking a sharp curve and it hit a bump, it was conceivable that I could roll right out the window. But it sure made for cool evening breezes. I put my hand out the window to ride the waves of night air. As the bus snaked its way out of the city limits of Kumning I slowly drifted to sleep to the sound of traffic, taxis horns, and late night bicyclists clambering down the street on their Chinese-made bicycles.Our family’s seventeen-day trek across China was underway.