Silk Road Series: Post 3: Arrival in Dunhuang and the Dunhuang Villa

I took the plane from Harbin to Beijing on the Sunday before the trip.  Beijing I won’t spend inordinate amounts of time describing – it is not, after all, the intent of this series to be describing Beijing, but to be describing the Silk Road.  So!  Suffice it to say I tooled around Beijing’s hutongs for a day or so before heading on out to the airport on the first of October.

Now, the October Holiday, in China, is one of the long holidays.  You may know it as the Golden Week; in China it’s also called the National Day Holiday (国庆节).  Schools, offices, and other places of work are generally given a week off (but with makeup days added on the weekends for the weekdays missed – in China, three-day-wekeends aren’t three-day-weekends; you have to make up the weekdays missed on the weekend days), and overall, people take the opportunity to travel.  Not everyone can – some people are constrained by work (restaurants, shops, etc), some by other duties, some simply by the wish not to be crushed by that enormous migration.  But still: imagine 200 million people making up their minds to  Vacation, and imagine those 200 million buying up every bus, plane, and train ticket they can get their hands on.

A word of advice to the Alert Reader of this blog:  Don’t.  Just don’t.  Don’t ever go to Beijing during the October Holiday.

Why not?  Well, if I have to spell it out: imagine Tiananmen Square at full capacity – a giant open-air square filled with so many people you can’t turn around without bumping into someone.  Imagine two hundred thousand – I’ll write that out in numbers so it looks as big as it is – 200,000 people circulating through the Forbidden City in one day.  In one day.  Have you seen the pictures of the Great Wall filled with people?  No?  Go.  Google it.  “Great Wall October.”  I’ll wait.

Back?  Yes?  That’s why.

Now, the Perspicacious Reader may be wondering: “Oy, Ekscursionist!  Aren’t you just the biggest hypocrite?  You’re telling me not to travel on that holiday, yet here you are, travelling on that holiday!  HAH.”

And I’d say, “shush, Reader, I have my reasons.”

My reasons are these: it’s a week-long holiday: of course I’m going to do something.  I’ve lived long enough in China, though, that I know to pick my battles.  And this battle was won early – a month before the holiday went into action.

I bought my tickets for the trip at China Culture Center (http://www.chinaculturecenter.org/)’s website.  CCC has three prices for its trips: the early bird, the normal, and the latecomer.  You buy your tickeys early, you see a couple hundred fewer kuai of price, and you also can recline upon your ticket-buying laurels, secure in the knowledge that someone else is going to be doing that frantic ticket-buying and scrambling for seats, and that that someone else is Not You.  In short, you prep early for October Holiday, you take a tour rather than fight the crowds, and you have got your ducks in a row.

(Note that I have, in fact, gone through the fun-filled fight-the-crowds experience enough times to be able to tell you: you do not want to do it.  It will turn you into a hot, sweaty, temporary misanthrope.  So, though I generally don’t spring for tours, this one’s a weighing of convenience over pain and relaxation over irritation.  Kids?  On October Holiday, spring for the tour.)

At the airport, we had a particular meeting place and time – one Alex was meant to be there, meeting us by one of the entrances.  I duly met Alex, but, as it turned out, no one else did.  I very quickly found out that this is one of those tours where, rather than travelling as a group, you’re instead thrown together incidentally and actually regroup once you’re on the tour itself.  Thus, I ended up talking to a few of my travelmates before flying, but didn’t actually meet them til we landed.

The flight was an evening one: the sun was going down to the right of and behind the plane, under a clear sky and over a Beijing haze.  We flew over mountains in the dark, and landed in Dunhuang airport at 9pm, in full dark.  So my first impression of Dunhuang was based not on the land, which I couldn’t see, but on the two things I met that evening: the airport map, and the hotel.

In the airport, after getting my bag and meeting the tour guide outside the baggage carrels, I gravitated toward a map on the wall.  I wanted to read up on the places we were to go.

Not To Scale - those train stations are two- or three-hour drives.

This map is a delightfully accurate look at Dunhuang: this city is made of its sights, and aside from the sights, there’s barely a city.  I saw this, in full glory, from the dune the next day: the city really does look like that map – long, single lines of streets with small clusters of tourist-buildings around the main sights – and then nothing.

The nothing at that point was darkness, though.  I didn’t know what kind of landscape to fill it in with.  So I went out to the tourbus and sat down.

In typical style, the seat you first claim on your first day is the seat you have from then-on-out.  I grabbed myself the first seat behind the driver because I like to get a good view, and the others filed into their respective places.  The bus was curiously empty – our tour guide, Christie, didn’t tell us why.  She just bundled us on and had us driven, through dark and empty streets, past long stretches of nothing punctuated with bright-lit hotels and tourist sights, about an hour out to our hotel.

Our hotel was – there’s no other way to put it – a spectacle.  It was done up in the style of a great old fort, with imposing sand-colored walls and turrets on top of the roof, and Chinese gables on all of the roof-corners.  Huge red signs above the main doors proclaimed that this was the DUNHUANG VILLA.  (Its English name, the Silk Road Dunhuang Hotel, is much more lackluster).  Its arched entrance had ten-foot gables swinging majestically over the driveway.

This was the entrance hall:

And, as I always say, when you’ve got three floors of columned entrance hall filled with twenty-foot murals, you’ve gotta be compensating for something, amirite?

… okay, maybe that’s not a joke that works, but the point is sound: this lobby is magnificent!  Majestic!  Grande with an E on the end!  But it is precisely in this grandeness that this lobby is clear in its aim: you have entered the Impress You Zone.

Let me note here that Chinese folks and Westerners come at tourism from very differing angles.  In the West, folks, want to see difference, and they want to see it in comfort.   They want to see what make This Place unlike their own – they want to see those oddities that make the place “foreign”.  There’s a wide variety of this: some people (like me) want to see what daily life in this place might be like; some people want to experience everything in new ways; some people want to see the amazing, impressive stuff; some people want variety and no repeats; some people want the stunning, flashy tricks, with all the lights and sound effects.

In China, tourism is different.  There is overlap – big sights, yes, foreign places, yes yes.  But three things that are often parts of Chinese tours are Spectacles, Photo-Ops, and Shopping. 

1.) Spectacles: sometimes a place is beautiful on its own.  Sometimes, though, in the Chinese tourism industry, it is considered necessary to the touristic value of the place to add to it a certain je ne sais quois, and here by “I don’t know what” I actually mean “tourist trap”.  Spectacles are constructed in front of, behind, around, and among tourist sights in China – Potempkinlike structures that can often be eyesores, and serve no purpose other than…
2.) The Photo Op.  In China, taking pictures is elevated past a pastime: it is what the trip is all about!  Selfies with Spectacles are popular, since the Spectacles are big and flashy and show your opulence and ability to travel – and isn’t that what travel’s about?*  Often, in Chinese tours, you’re given X amount of time to view a thing and take pictures with it, and then you’re rushed off to the next thing to take picturesof that, and so forth, all the way until you arrive at …
3.) Shopping!  A great tendency on Chinese tours is to stuff in a visit to a shopping district, to sanctioned or sponsored stores that cooperate with the tour company in order to sell things, sometimes at force.  I’ve been on tours – several of them – where they’ve locked tourists out of the bus until a certain amount of sales were made.  I’ve also been on tours where Chinese tourists were eager to make those purchases, and spent more than the allotted time in the shopping area, buying local products they couldn’t get at home.

* Let me note here that, of course, there’s ugly tourists and good tourists of every stripe in every country.  This I know.  But I will also note that there’s a far greater tendency for Chinese tourists to prefer Spectacle and Photo-Ops than other countries’ tourists I’ve seen. I’ll give more example of this in later posts.

So!  The Impress You Zone: that area of tourism that makes the tourist either “Wow!” or “well … there’s that.”  This hotel had a little of both: the thirty-foot murals of historical splendor were both impressive and gaudy; the bossed ceiling with octagonal lights was both pretty and ostentatious.  I’ve experienced a lot of this in China: mixed reactions, with one reaction being the sought-after one, and the other battling it and saying “yes, but!”  In this particular case, I accepted the ostentation as a given, and just set out to enjoy the hotel. 

We checked into rooms, and immediately there was issue: Christie had picked up the second half of our group earlier in the day, and to hear them speak of it, she hadn’t actually been there to pick them up – she’d just sent the driver.  She proved less than helpful in the room issue as well, booking private-room people with double-room people without notice or prior knowledge of either party.  (Note that among the three tour operators we experienced, Christie was by far my least favorite – neither helpful nor informative, nor particularly caring of her charges.)  It took some phone-calling and arrangement, but finally we were in our proper rooms, and most folks bedded down for the night.

I decided to go exploring.

The Dunhuang Villa became my favorite of the hotels we experienced on that trip.  It’s not only that the rooms were cool – small, high-ceilinged, with exposed-wood rafters and traditional weavings on the chairs and quilts, and a tiny complimentary stuffed camel For You – but also the surroundings were so extraordinarily extravagant.  Wood ceilings and floors.  Beautiful rugs linings the walls.  Clearly this was a hotel determined to Provide For You, and that’s what it was going to do, to the best of its ability.  I wandered the inside first – three floors constructed, fortlike, around a central courtyard, and bizarre signage along the way:

Now, looking at that sign, you’ve got to have figured out what I wanted to see.  But I restrained myself, going around the hotel methodically.  I went out the front and explored the outer buildings – the restaurant was a whole separate complex, complete with courtyard and huge red doors, closed now for the night.  Behind that was the garden of the place – queerly bare of ground, no grasses or flowers, just shrubs and willows with the occasional poplar. 

The garden led in perpendicular paths to the Health Center, which was an interesting interlude on its own: a complex of buildings with a central covered walkway down its central courtyard.  To the left, empty windows.  To the right, on the gravel, several long lounge chairs had been set up, and several hotelgoers were being massaged by young women, most of whom sat up to watch The Westerner go by.  Inside, the man at reception was eager to show me around – he gave me a list of massages and prices and showed me several rooms that were all the same – bed with towel on it, chair.  Then, though, with great pride, he introduced me to the VIP room.  A large bed with a towel on it.  A large TV mounted upon the wall, cabinet and candles and bowl set altarlike underneath.  A large shower taking up the entire corner of the room, the walls around it made of plexiglass.  A large, full-length mirror along the wall.  And, on the wall next to the door, a large, full-color, blown-up photograph of an attractive couple caught coitus interruptus.

Leaving the Health Center slightly faster than I had entered it, I returned to the garden.  Signs showed me that the Ghenghis Khan Camp Fire Party was somewhere to my left, and I made for it.  I found the Courtyard Villas along the way (a villa in a villa?  I guess they were feeling invilladated.)  – small-sized gravel courtyards with a donut of rooms surrounding them; the rooms were curtained with more traditional weavings, and the courtyards had little lounge-chairs with magazine racks, and little long tables with full tea-ceremony duds along them.  The magazines were all tourist things, about the trips you Could Be Taking, although one magazine rack definitely had Confucius’ Analects stuffed into its wicker folder.

The Courtyard Villas were, luckily, right across from the Ghenghis Khan Camp Fire Party, so I crossed the path and went to that.  After all this searching, it ended up being a bit of a letdown – there were a few slightly-greasy picnic tables and benches, a few propane-burning stoves and grills, a couple grass-covered tents and enclosures, and what would probably, in the Season, be a bar, but at the moment was just a sad little wire rack standing behind the grill-counter.  Desert dirt and gravel crunched underfoot, and over to the left, construction went on, despite it was eleven PM already, with giant bright lights leaking out acrosst the Camp Fire Party.

But if you covered the ground and the lights from your view and looked up, you could see the stars.  Not perfectly, not as bright as they could’ve been out in the open desert, but still enough that you could see the haze of the Milky Way stretched along the middle of the sky, with the few familiar constellations outshone in brightness, fading into the rest of the stars.

I headed back through the carpeted halls to my room, where my unexpected roommate was going in the direction of sleep.  I figured that was a pretty good direction to be heading, and we went to sleep around midnight, on the sixty-fourth anniversary of the founding of the PRC.

Silk Road Series: Post 2: Answers To Questions You May Or May Not Have Asked

Ekscursionist's Note: In point of fact, I wrote this entry some months ago (early November, when I still thought I had time to do such things), and have been meaing for en longtemps to post it.  Apologies preemptively/postemptively/all-the-emptivelies for not having posted this before, but life sort of fell on my head in November.  I will, in theory, be posting more in this Silk Road Series at later points in time, but I figure this post's good anyway: it gives some of the basic information about what this trip was, and why it's important, interesting, and awesome.

Besides.  Old posts are like wine.  Everyone thinks they get better with age except for those people who know better.

SO WITHOUT FURTHER ADO: 

Silk Road Series: Post 2.

~:~

So.  There are a few certain things that are probably on The Collective You’s minds. Please feel free to check multiple of the following:

□ “Oh, you went to the Silk Road!  How exciting!"

□ “Why did you go there?”

□ “Wait, what’s the Silk Road again?”

□ “And uh, where is it?”

□ “I didn’t know the Silk Road went into China.”

□ “Who did you go with?”

□ “How much did it cost?”

□ “How on Earth did you go out there?”

□ “Why didn’t you go there earlier?”

□ “Why didn’t you go there alone?”

□ “I didn’t know the Silk Road still existed…”

□ “I wouldn’t actually check any of these boxes.”

□ “Why are you still offering checkbox options?”

□ “Stoppit and get to posting already ugh.”

□ Other: ___________________

(fun fact: you can’t actually check any of those checkboxes.  Sorry!  I call this my Patented Bait-And-Switch Checkbox Technique (not actually patented).  If you actually want to tell me which ones of those would you check if you could (but you can’t so you won’t), you can leave ‘em in the comments!)

Actually, since those questions above have given me a perfect framework from which to write this post, I’ll use ‘em to … write this post.  (“Wow, Ekscursionist, you’re a genius!”  “Thank you, Hypothetical Reader, but I wouldn’t go that far.”)

IN WHICH THE EKSCURSIONIST ANSWERS HER OWN QUESTIONS

□ “Oh, you went to the Silk Road!  How exciting!”

---- With this I certainly agree!  It’s not really a question, more of a statement, but I certainly agree – there was a whole lot on this trip that I’ve never seen, nor would never have gotten to see, had I not gone. 

I’ve been so long in China that it’s familiar to me – I’m familiar with the culture, its rules, its mores, its weirdities.  I know how people do things, I know the overall ways to expect people to behave, I know what to eat and why, etc etc.  Going to a place that’s still technically China, but that already changes some of those things – that’s new and awesome to me, and I really enjoyed having that difference around me.

□ “Why did you go there?”

---- Well, hypothetical reader, I gotta say it’s because I was curious. 

I’m like this: I love to travel, but I’m not really particular about where.  (Note that doesn’t mean I’m up for going to dangerous or iffy places – I’m leery about going to a place I can’t walk around alone.)  What I mean here is that if I have the chance to go to a place I’ve never been, and it looks reasonably safe (and is not ballsingly expensive), then there’s a good chance I’ll say yes.

So I’m up for going to a lot of places in China, and I have indeed done that.  However, there’s four main things in China that I’ve solidly Wanted To See for a while:

+ The Silk Road (various cities)

+ Dali and Lijiang (and I guess if I’m down there Guilin and Kunming)

+ Chengdu and Chongqing

+ Tibet (eventually, when it’s open again?)

I’ve picked these places because they’re all so starky different from each other, and from what I’m used to in China.  All my time here, I’ve lived/traveled in the East, North, and Center.  I’ve been to a ton of cities, sure, but I’ve never seen (past passing) the West or South, and I want to see how it differs from the China I know (and sometimes love).

□ “Wait, what’s the Silk Road again?”

□ “And uh, where is it?”

---- You may remember this from your high school history classes (or maybe from reading lotsa books), but if you don’t, I’ll remind you:

The Silk Road was a mass of roads and caravan routes that intersected, interspersed, and circumvented Asia anywhere from a thousand to two thousand years ago.  There’s evidence for older than that (and in a later entry you’ll see evidence that there was indeed long-distance trade up to 4000 years ago!), but the Silk Road’s heyday was in the 0’s to 500’s, though it got a little less major as history went on long enough that ships became more expeditious ways of trade than did overland routes.

Saying “The Silk Road” is kinda like saying “the vein in your body”.   There’s really not just one – it’s more like a Silk Web, really.  Tons of roads and routes went from East to West, and, concerning China, there’s a few main areas you shouldst know about:

+ Chang’an: Chang’an’s the old name for Xi’an, a major city in China today, and the place where the Terra Cotta Army was discovered.  It was a major city even Way Back When, being a capital in several dynasties*, and it’s one of the termini of the old Silk Road.

+ the Taklama Desert: huge desert in the West of modern-day China – it split the Silk Road into Northern and Southern routes, depending who wanted to go which way around.  (A couple people did go through the desert, but, uh, it’s kinda hot.)

+ the Tarim Basin: a large lowland area in the West of modern China: lotsa mountains around it.  Silk Road(s) ran through/around/into-and-out-of here, too.

+ the Dzungerian Gate: an amazing mountain pass just outside modern-day China – the only (and literally only) way to get overland through those massive mountains north of India.  Good place for bandits and windstorms.  Bad place to try to get through.

So the most accurate way of talking about my trip is to say “the Silk Road that I went to”.  Alternately I could name the cities I visited, and you could find them on the Googly.    We’ll get to that.

* note that China’s capital has changed in various dynasties, at the whims of emperors and for economic and military and dynastic reasons as well (“we can’t leave the capital here for the enemies to come in and loot! we’re taking the capital with us.”)

□ “I didn’t know the Silk Road went into China.”

---- I kinda covered this above, but yes, it does!  The Silk Road had multiple termini in China, and several of those cities still exist today.  The Wiki of Pedias has an entry  about just this - some of those cities don’t exist anymore, but a good handful of them do; some of them have been outdone by other cities (eg one I’ll tell you guys about later whose nearest railroad connection is three hours outside of town) justbecause of changing priorities and so on.

□ “Who did you go with?”

---- And now we get to the tour group! 

Me being on a tour group is already a rarity.  You see, the Ekscursionist is 1) familiar enough with much of China, and 2) familiar enough with Chinese-style tour groups that she very rarely takes Chinese-led tours.  (I’ll expound more upon this subject later, but long story short: pointless shopping trips instead of main sights, touristy attractions as opposed to genuine natural/untouched places, not enough time to look  upon things, and generally being led around by the hand like a six-year-old: these are not how I wish to be toured around.)

So!  The group that I chose to go with for this trip is called the China Culture Center.  ( here, and no, I’m not getting paid by them, either.)  I was originally recommended the CCC by a friend who lives in Beijing – she’d gone on precisely this trip about a year or two before, and came back absolutely raving about how excellent it was.  This was already a good indicator that I maybe ought to try ‘em out, but then I took their Ming Tombs/Great Wall tour.

Son, I was impressed.  Our guides knew what they were talking about, and were able to talk about the subjects lucidly and interestedly; we weren’t pushed to Buy Things From these Friendly Vendors, we weren’t herded like a gaggle of six-year-olds, and we were given ample time to wander, look at, and do things that were out of the way but still interesting.  None of this “and now you will take pictures okay done please follow me!” that I’ve found to be endemic of a lot of tour companies here – CCC knows its tourists are adults (mostly) and treats them accordingly.

So!  I chose  The Silk Road trip, and kids?  It was worth it.

□ “How much did it cost?”

… which leads us quite nicely into price!  I’ve lived long enough in China that I’m not squeamish about talking price details anymore, and when you’re considering a trip like this in China, neither should you be.  I recommend CCC’s trips, but they are a bit pricey – I paid 13,700 RMB, which translates to 2,249 USD, or to 1,664.88 Euros.

Your opinion of this price may vary.  I look at it like this: for people from/living in developed countries, it’s a bit pricey but worth it (everything’s covered and the only thing you-the-tourist have to pay for is souvenirs); for people from/living in developing countries it’s pretty high-bracket and you really have to want it.  Including my Single Room Supplement (paid because I ended up never getting a roommate), I ended up paying 15k, which on a Chinese paycheck is three months salary.

Kids, it was worth it.

□ “How on Earth did you go out there?”

Planes, trains, and automobiles! 

No, really. Plane’s the best way to get out to that area from the Eastern part of the country – you take a train and you’ll be sitting on that train for two days straight, and when you’re pressed for time, you wanna weigh price with time-spent.  Xinjiang is about 1,500 miles (3,700 kilometers by rail) from China’s capital, and it’s rugged and remote enough that really, you don’t want to go on a non-mass-transit form of transportation unless you’re really sure of what you’re doing.

□ “Why didn’t you go there earlier?”

□ “Why didn’t you go there alone?”

---- These two tie together, so I’m going to answer them together.  They mostly have to do with remoteness, China’s economic situation, the tensions in the region and between Eastern and Western China, and linguistic troubles.

+ Remoteness: Xinjiang (the province most of these cities are in) literally means “new border”, and it’s in some ways a very fitting name: it’s the far, far, far west border of the modern PRC.  I classify it both in the ‘China’ and in the ‘Central Asia’ categories – it’s massively far away from the mainland.  It’s as far from Beijing as London is from Venice, or as far as Maine is from Miami, or DC to Houston.  It’s a huge, massive amount of space, and it takes a fittingly massive amount of time if you’re not willing to drop a couple thou on a plane ticket.

+ Economics: China divides itself economically into “East part” “Middle part” and “West part”.  The thing you should know is: due to centuries of shipping, trade, dynastic et cetera, wars, and the availability of arable land, the East Part is the most economically viable.  Second is Middle part.  The west of China is considered 落后: lagging behind, retro, not up-to-date.  There’s a wide disparity between West and East even within China, and even some basic things like infrastructure and non-agricultural development are rather lacking.

+ Tensions: This is one thing I’m going to be a little quiet on, since it’s so inherently political.  There are political tensions between China’s east and China’s west, and they’re a mix of economic, political, cultural, and other.  Due to the fact that I’m living in China right now, I’m not going to go into any great detail about these – You-the-Reader can use the Googly if you’re curious – but I’ll just give them a nod, say they’re there, and mention that yes, they played a part in why a single female traveler wouldn’t want to wander around somewhere.

+ Linguistics: This one’s a factor all over China, but especially in far-remote areas that aren’t north or east.  China’s a huge country, full of people who speak regional dialects.  Some of these dialects are true dialects (like the differences between Britland and US of A English), but some of them are straight-up languages, completely discrete from each other and from Mandarin.  The Uighur language is one of these – it’s totally unlike any Sinitic language, and is in fact most closely related to Turkic languages (apparently it’s about 30% mutually intelligible?  I’mma check up on that and get back to you guys).  It is, in other words, so completely different from Mandarin that for me, it wouldn’t matter how good my Mandarin was, it’d do me no good out there.

So: TL;DR: I didn’t want, as a single female traveler, to go out to the far end of China with only touristic knowledge of the area and no knowledge of the language, and then fumble confusedly around a place I didn’t know.  Far better, safer, and more exciting to go with a group, who can tell you the history and culture of what you’re seeing, and who can help you learn.

□ “I didn’t know the Silk Road still existed…”

---- It sort of does.  The cities – some of them do.  The highways – those are paved-over versions of a lot of the old routes.  The people still live in some of the same ways, off most of the same crops/animals, with some of the same technologies (more on the irrigation system later!).  Sure there’s differences, but it’s still there.

□ “I wouldn’t actually check any of these boxes.”

---- No?  Well, that’s okay – feel free to put any thoughts you might have in my comments section – if I get questions I’ll endeavour to answer them, as it’ll up my NaNo wordcount whee :D

□ “Why are you still offering checkbox options?”

---- Because it’s funny.

□ “Stoppit and get to posting already ugh.”

---- Okay, hold your horses, hon.  It’ll happen.

□ Other: ___________________

---- Again, if you wanna say something or would answer something that’s not on my Lovely Little Bait-And-Switch Checkbox List, feel free to comment!  Next post I’ll be getting into the trip itself, so if you’ve got any questions, let me know now and I’ll endeavour to answer them!

See you next post!

In Which The Ekscursionist Flies Over The Ice

Hello, people and bugs! I keep making these aborted attempts to return to this bloog, and they keep, well, being aborted, like this:

 What I blame: my schedule. This last semester was like a multi-car-pileup on my brain. It was like the energizer bunny of semesters: the work just kept going and going and going. The homework was interminable. This is mostly because I had four Academic Writing classes, composed of 104 students all told, who kept giving me things. Every class! They just gave me more things! And then my Listening and Speaking students (72 of them) also gave me things! There was no relief! The flood of things never stopped!

 Until the second week of December, when I gave final exams, wrapped up my classes, and waved a warm goodbye in my students' direction. All 176 of them. And then I just graded the things I already had (all 9000 of them) and returned them/turned them in to the department, inputted my grades, and went my merry way on home.

 So right now The Ekscursionist is at home. How, then, could she call herself the Ekscursionist? Ah, gentle reader, that's because she intends to write about advnetures she had, as well as about adventures she will have. So: this bloog has been transformed into a sort of retrospective as well as a current-adventure blog. Also, I don't intend to stop having adventures anytime soon, so there's that.

 ONWARDS

 ~:~

 My return from China begna precisely three weeks ago. (I know, I know, I left off on a Silk Road post, but I wrote that post a while ago, and right now I want to tell you about my return home.) Anyway, that last week was a pile of stress. On the 18th of December I ran from bank to bank to bank, getting an online version of my account set up. The rest of the day was last-minute packing, then last-minute seeing, then I went. I took the Foreign-Office-sent taxi with two of my chorus friends to the airport, and at the airport we checked my bags in and talked for a while til I get antsy and left. Security with my bag that weighed some ridiculous number of pounds, and then sitting in the waiting room for 20 minutes, and then sitting on the plane, and then sitting on the BCIA shuttle, and then stumbling up the lane to my hostel.

 I always stay at Ming Courtyard when I go to Beijing: it's a quiet little place right off Beixinqiao, this little nook of quiet being the gobble and bustle of Ghost Street, Beijing's premier Food Street. Most of the staff I'm on friendly terms with, but a new girl this time - friendl, but as yet unknown; she put me in a new room. I'd opted for a women-only-four-beds place, and, it being off season I was the only one in the room: a nice way to get privacy without going the extra hundred kuai. The other 4women room is a cave, but this one had a long, wide window set in the opposite wall, and so when I slept it wasn't like being in a tomb, but like the world was still going on out there.

 Drop bags. Lukewarm shower. Buy a drink at the corner store. Stumble back. Bedtime.

 I slept from ~1AM to ~10.45AM.

 I woke the next morning rested for the first time in a week. Did some errands, then went and lunched with my Filipina Beijing friend in 日坛, the Temple of the Sun. Every Beijing tourist knows the Temple of Heaven, with its main sacrificial hall ubiquitously printed on bus passes and tour sites alike; what The Mass Public is less familiar with are the Temples of the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun. The Temple of Earth is off in Andingmen, a lovely little hutong (traditional Beijing housing; four-walled courtyards in gridlike, mazey patterns) area; the Temple of the Moon is in Fuchengmen, off west of the second ring road. Ritan, the Temple of the Sun, is a place just outside Jianguomen, a line-change on the subway and a crossroads of highways above. The area's thick with embassies, and consequently with barbed wire and young, nervous, good-looking armed guards who all watch you very closely as you pass.

 Pass on by all of them, though, and you're headed into a small but serene little park, closed off from the streets around it. The Temple of the Sun isn't just one single temple - it's a park, which in China means a planned garden with many parts to it. There's a long, wide avenue rowed with aspens and leading up to a carven wall. There's a pair of asymmetric, curved ponds, with bridges and gazebos. There's a tiny few rolling hills with paths crossing them all over, and planted with cherry trees for the Spring and roses for the summer. Toward the back of Ritan Park is a long little restaurant called Xiao Wang's. It gives the impression of having been several unrelated buildings once that had gotten built into each other, but is nice for all that. Large, pleasant, airy rooms, and a traditional atmosphere. My friend was waiting for me upstairs, and we had a good variety of standard Beijing foods: shrimps-with-pineapple, fried tofu in sweet-and-sour sauce, green beans and pork. My favorite was the mutton ribs cooked in cumin and hot pepper. What can I say? I've acclimated to Dongbei more than I realize :)

 We wandered a bit and talked a bit, and my friend invited me to a dinner, and, as she still had work, we parted ways. I hopped onto the subway and zoomed over to Nanluoguxiang, another Beijing Favorite of mine - a long street full of traditional shops and eats. No time for window shopping now, though: I was an Ekscursionist on a Mission! It was called Mission: Umbrella, mostly because it involved zooming through NLGX to the traditional umbrella shop down at the far end.

 

 若水堂 (Ruoshuitang) is a traditional Chinese umbrella shop. You'll know it when you smell it - it's a thin, small alcove hidden between larger shops, but the smell of tung oil pervades the neighborhood. Inside, bright lights illumine painted umbrellas from behind. There's the traditional umbrellas, solid brown, blue, red, or purple ones, that can withstand a downpour; there's the pretty-girl brellas, painted with cherry-flowers or peony or lotus or villages and mountains, that act as parasols and little else; there's the childrens' umbrellas, little cloth-covered things sewn with sequins.

 

 I've wanted one of these for years. I went for a mid-size rain-withstanding umbrella of deep purple. It was so thick with tung oil that it thrummed when you flicked it with your finger, and when the saleswoman demonstrated its hydrophobic qualities, she did it by taking a spray bottle and kssshing it right against the paper. The water rolled off like - well, I'll spare you the anatidae, but suffice it to say: I now had an umbrella.

 I also had nowhere to pack it.

 My bags, filled with the detritusof three years' life, were overstuffed. I took a bus back to Beixinqiao and discovered, to my delight, that the Post office shut at 6!

 It was 5.30.

 So: a ZOOM down the hutong backstreets, half-lit grey mazey corridors that, did I not know this area, I would've been irretrieveably lost in. Grab up my lighten-the-load bag from my hostel (extra stuff I'd removed that morning), and ZOOM back, veering aroudn cars, trucks, car washes, tricycles, bicycles, cycles, chidlren, dogs, and all manner of household items - and get to the post office with ten minutes to spare.

 I posted my umbrella and lighten-the-load bag, and Metro'd on over to Sanlitun. Sanlitun and that nights' concert I should save for a whole nother adventure. In fact, so ought I to do with the next day, my wander through 798 Art District, because that's a whole adventure unto itself. But I'll sum up that I returned and erranded and public-transportation'd my way to the airport on time for my 6.30PM plane back to the US of A on the 20th.

 There were so many white faces. So many! It was weird to see and listen to: a whole different type of small talk. I sat myself down in my window seat and enjoyed the journey, particularly after dinner, by which time the lights had gone off and it was dark inside and out. We were, by then, flying over the Kamchatka peninsula - always one of my favorite parts of the US-China flight. This night was particularly excellent, because, aside of being 30k feet overtop the cold land - there was a moon out.

 It was a gibbous moon, and there was almost no cloud. I first started watching out when I saw, below us - but not so far as it could've been - mountains like sand dunes. This place hadn't unfrozen since - well, hell, for all I knew it didn't unfreeze even in the summer, by the look of those mountains. They were like drifts of sand, only white, with a bluegrey cast from the night. They were sharp and long and along the edge of them was the edge of the land. We were flying right along the coastline most of the way, and you could see how the mountains' smooth white turned into the ivory, striated white of the plains, and then rolling back up again into cliffs, and all along them, the edge where they ran into the coast. It was scalloped like lightning, crusted with rime. You could see it in blue and white lines of broken and clumped and close-floating ice, all drifted up against the edge of the earth, with some openings of black and flowing sea between them.

 The sea showed more often as we flew further north, and further east. Mountains again, on the land-side, and over above them a haze of diamond dust - high-altitude ice crystals falling slow and flat - that reflected the moon hazy below as well as blinding bright above. Then the mountains stopped and there was the dark sea again, this time breaking off the ice into shoals and then large reaches of black water with a little sheen of moon over it. There was one place where I could see, below us, if I concentrated, darker patches -- land? islands? an archipeligo that hadn't been iced? -- but when the moon's reflection rode over them, I saw in their place, giant waves. They must have been monstrously huge, because I saw them moving, tiny and ribboned, even from 30,000 feet - and between then, the normal sea waves were like little lines acrosst the surface of the planet. You couldn't see horizons - everything went to dark mist along the edges - but you could pick out the stars beautifully. I saw Orion rise - first low and large on the horizon, early in the journey, then creeping up and Taurus after it, and the Pleiades, and meanwhile the moon, brighter than you could ever see it from the surface.

 Past the huge waves, we continued over land, long and snowy, broken by lakes ice-edged and black. Then plains again, with rivers, whiter than the scruffy white around them, flowing down to the water. Once, on one of these, I saw one yellow light. Only one. Monitoring station? Border? Fishing? How did they have power? How many people - five? Two? One? I watched that one til it fell behind us, and then watched for more. There were few others - one, one ,and then nothing for a long time. I got so excited when I saw two, within - I guess it must've been miles of each other. One was toward the end of one of those twisting, giant rivers of ice. One was somewhere in the haze above the black water, a couple lights instead of one. Once, later, I saw a whole row of lights - five? six? twenty people? fifty? it was out on the black water, and then we returned to white land again, and stay for a long time.

 The east came to us after 8 hours in the dark. I'd forgotten that, so far north, even late afternoon is in the dark. We flew into the lightening sky for an hour, and after a time my camera grew confident enough in its abilities to deliver non-fuzzy pictures I could take photos of the blue and white and windblown land. Here there was all snow and no sea, and the lakes were frozen over, and the rivers were so old that they had oxbows on their oxbows and curves overlaying their curves, all those extra tiny, unfinished flows and round little loops looping back in; they looked like if I left my braids in for three days.

 The stewardesses made us close the windows, then, because the sun was finally up, and this far north it shone directly in our starboard windows from two fingers above the horizon, brighter than you'd ever conceive of below. But it almost didn't matter anyway - three hours later the sun was setting behind the plane wing, and the darkness we'd just flown out of came back over us from in front. By now, though, there were orange splotches below us, spread out and patched across the land. It faded into cloud, and then there was greydark cloud for a very long time. Only at the end of the flight could we see again - lowering over the capital, flying over the Kennedy Center and the Potomac, and the spread-out suburbs of Reston and McLean, and then finally coming down into Dulles airport.

 

The Ekscursionist's Return!

Hello there, ladybugs, gentlebugs, and everyone who is not a bug! 好久不见, long time no see, etc etc, though I figure “see” in this case might also read “blog”. (好久不博客?) I apologize for the long radio silence – it’s not that I’ve forgotten this blog, it’s more that I’ve been so unholyly busy that the very thought of sitting down and writing a Beautiful Blogwriting Blogpost has been its own greatest discourager. “Oh god, I have to do that on top of everything?” And then I would go and seek out a distraction.

 BUT NO LONGER. I am bound and determined, now, to return to this poor lonely blog. The perfect opportunity has in fact come along: NaNoWriMo!

 Let me explain (No, is too long. Let me sum up.):

  NaNoWriMo (short for National Novel-Writing Month) is an annual event where hundreds of thousands (yes really) of people try to complete one goal: write 50,000 words of fiction in 30 days. This averages out to 1,667 words a day, and it is an overall fantastic way to get a kick-start on something you want to write, or to get your proverbial ass to just produce writing you’ve wanted to write down for years. (It’s got a website here, btw, for the curious – no, they’re not paying me to plug, this is just me being all helpful-like to You The Reader.)

 SO! You might notice a certain Fatal Flaw in the logic of the above: 50,000 words of fiction. “Um, Ekscursionist?” “Yes, Hypothetical Reader?” “Yeah, about that ‘fiction’ thing…”

 NOT TO WORRY, little Hypothetical Reader! I will not tell you a story here! (No, you can read my stories elsewhere.) Here it is 100% truthiness, nothing more, nothing less! You see, I have gotten around this troublesome clause by becoming


A NANO REBEL!
Yes, these do exist. A NaNo Rebel is someone who’s writing something that’s not “technically” within the bounds of NaNo rules (eg – continuing an already-started novel, fleshing out a novella, writing a memoir (HELLO) or a biography, or maybe nonfictioning, etc). Basically, a rebel abides by the spirit of the law while sliding carefully around the letter thereof.

 tl;dr: I am not cheating, I promise.

 My aim, as you may already have guessed, is to get my patootie to write them 50k, but as blog entries. I consider this a noble endeavour, and you should too, since you have a absolutely delightful privilege of getting to read this, right?


 …right?


 (Hypothetical Reader, where are you going? Please come back, it was just sarcasm!)


 I suppose it is time for a MISSION STATEMENT: The Ekscursionist would like to take this NaNo-opportunity to write down many things onto this blog. Primarily among them (because it’s 1) most recent, and therefore 2) freshest in my mind, as well as 3) one of the most amazing experiences in my life) will be my recent trip to some of the Silk Road cities. If that should fill out the full 50k, great! If it doesn’t, then I’ll write more of various things until I do.

 In the event of grading and such coming in the way, and also real life, and etc – due to all those distractions, in the event that I don’t finish the entire 50k – well…

  Sic friat crustulum.

my twelve-hour walk

(A note of forewarning - this is not Beautiful Blogwriting; this is something I wrote elsewhere and figured to post here, since I'd already written it and I wasn't going to re-write 5,000 words of Personal Life.

So! Here you have it: my twelve-hour walk!)

~:~:~:~:~

June 21st

I went for a walk.

A 12-hour-long walk

I'd been getting sick, for a long time, of just not moving. There's something nice about being able to just pick up and walk. Just get up and go, just a bag with whatever you need and just go and walk and not think about Stuff You Have To Do.

So I walked.

I set out at five past noon, and I got back at fifteen past midnight. Ten of those hours were straight-up, unadulterated walking.

Someday I'll check out how long that is. My internet's slow right now, so not right now. But it's a long, long way.

I walked on out to the Lilac Garden. That's an hour right there. I'd been there before, but I continued walking, now, down the main drag out there. The Lilac Garden is right at the beginning of the new development area, the section of the map that's few streets and long, unbroken areas of orange. It turns, very quickly, into what I like to term a Construction Wonderland. Long, long stretches of road where new trees have been planted, sure, but they're like toothbrushes; on the outside of the sidewalk are a corrugated steel fences with posters on them showing plans of What Will Be Here. they look like they've been there for ages - the colors are washed-out, the English is sparse and bad ("Chinese Coldly Region Of Rivers"). Tall, cool-looking lampposts line the roads, sure, but there are hundreds of them, the road is long, and it goes nowhere.

And outside of the roads, on either side of the roads, construction. Clumps and clusters of tall buildings swathed in green mesh, each with a tall yellow crane buttressed to the side. Some are nearly finished, white-painted and with the windows being put in, lower floors empty-eyed and the lowest floors unpainted. Some are barely started, scaffolding all around and the green mesh outside that. Buildings huge and continuous, bunches of fifty at once, and on the other side of the road a newly-created park, its trees sticks, its flowerbeds scraggly, its bushes pruned to oblivion even though the number of park-goers tops out at three, two of whom are bug-eyed toy chihuahuas.





I kept hoping to go right, and to follow the river back to the city. I came, finally to a crossroads, and saw buildings before, beside all everywhere but right. right must be the river. I went right.





More construction. Nothing to my now-left, but it was cordoned off my corrugated steel anyway, so no one, absolutely no one, could dare to go frolic in the patches of weed and construction-dirt on the other side. To my now-right, construction, construction, steel. A street cleaner came by, and here in Harbin, street-cleaners sound like ice cream trucks. A cluster of women - construction dudes' wives? - passed by me, staring at what the hell is this white girl doing all the hell way out here in nowhere? The steel broke, every now and then, to admit roads, and these times I could look in. It looked like a wasteland inside: the earth roiled up and ground flat by heavy machines; blue steel fencing and green mesh in piles and along lines. Long housing units, or maybe office units, made of bad plasterboard and blue tin roofs; huge, fifteen-story-tall Chinese characters, one on each building, telling what unit you were looking at. Scaffolding, in pieces or assembled, in piles or spidering up building-sides, swaddled over in that clinging green mesh. Yellow cranes inbetween, above, around, stuck to buildings and looming over them, over me, over the road, over the empty dirt.



Avenues of this, of massive tall buildings and cranes and empty dirt, going on so long I could see the city at the other end.

I came, finally, to the river.

Sort of.

I'd gotten turned around, and I was, yes, going to the river, but away from the city. So the park that I finally found myself in was, technically, beside the river. No matter that it was a kilometer at least from where I was standing to where the river flowed. I had hit the riverside border of the construction.



There was a main road alongside the construction, and another road following the park. I opted for the park road, even with it being unfinished as it was: more q-tip trees, no shade whatsoever, more crappily-cut brushes of bush, more weeds, more sweltering flowerbeds.



Opposite the park was a long, low area of land. Farmland. Farmland, right acrossfrom teh Construction Wonderland; long strips of crops not even a mile from the half-finished buildings.

I started walking.

The city took two hours to reach. If you factor 2 miles an hour, that's 4 miles; if you make it 3 mph it's 6 miles. That picture up there? That's one I took after I started walking.

Walked, walked, walked. It was straight-up sun for miles and miles, with only asphalt and dry-dirt and concrete around me, and I decided, fine. Fine, I would do the Chinese thing. And I pulled out my umbrella and walked under it. An improvement, certainly - I had sunburn for the next week, but at least not as bad as I thought it'd be.

Miles and miles and hours of walking, and long though it may sound, it was exactly what I was looking for. I wanted to walk without thinking of Stuff I Had To Do. So this was it. I was thinking about the construction, I was thinking about the trees. I was thinking about the park and the farmland. I was thinking about the weird-shaped building coming up and what it was. I was thinking about the spread-out flat land either side of me. And I was thinking about the heat of the sun and how it was long out here, and how I had a couple sips left in my bottle, and how long those would last and that I'd wait til I was within a half-hour to drink the last, just to make sure, and how I was glad I brought my umbrella, not just my fan, and how I should tell Marcy about this road, it would be great to rollerblade on, and what this area would look like ten years down the road, those toothbrush trees all grown up and those bushes grown body to and those buildings finished and renting, and how long it would take til people actually lived, not just worked, out here.

Miles and miles and hours of walking and thinking and walking, and I finally got within sight of the main part of the river - the place where it curves away from the city. Small tributaries around, with people fishing; a van full of bathers and fishers slowed down to drive just beside me, all staring out the windows at me, and after a a few minutes kept driving, its occupants laughing. I kept walking, hit a bridge over one of those tributaries, kept walking.

There was corrugated steel fencing on the other side of the bridge. There was no way past. I went up to the fencing and peeked through.

On the map, this particular street was represented by a broken, dotted line. I found out why.

The street ended, right there.

There I was, another half-hour, forty-five minutes walk from the city, my water bottle with one calculated gulp left, and the street before me dropping twenty feet down and a mess of construction equipment, concrete tubes, and piles and piles of rebar.



I looked back behind me. So that's why no one else had been taking this bridge.

I looked down along the tributary. Another street, there, crossing it. Cars zooming along it. Good.

Okay, so turn back, off the bridge, and walk along the tributary's side.

This wasn't a street anymore. This was an embankment. It was nicer than the Construction Wonderland, because the native trees had been left to take over the piles of construction-dirt, and weeds grew over the rest. There was a dust road winding along the streamside, and a beehive-shaped concrete pour of embankment down to the actual water. People had planted gardens down beside the water. A mess of early waterweed and trash and dirt scummed the banks and floated downstream in chunks.

And on the other side of the embankment, a completely different story. What looked like private land, or a park, maybe - it was long, and willow and aspen trees came up to the waterside honeycomb. Apartments rose up behind that - pink-painted and crumbly, but rather nice all the same. Behind them, a few more being-constructed buildings, but not nearly so many. It was nearly the city, after all, things were Civilized here.

So I followed the stream. The actual water couldn't been more than 20 feet wide, but the silty gardenland added 50 more at least, and the embankments another 20 each. All told it was probably a hundred feet or more across to that parkland.

But that bridge was getting closer. I waited til my suspicions were confirmed about it being parkland - til I saw, just across the water, a tiny houselike structure selling drinks - and then took my final pull of tea.

Kept on walking. Gardens, stream, trash, construction souds and smells but also green smells and the smell of river water. There was a structure on long stilts reaching out into the tributary. There was, down among the gardens, a small hut with a pepsi-advertisement top, and what looked like a ferry - a dude in a small metal boat, just big enough for three people to stand in, poling people across fifteen feet of water.



I hit the bridge, finally. I crossed it. I figured out where I was.

Right next to the entrance of the Lilac Garden.



...well, okay. They had little 仓买 out here, anyway, and I dove into one and bought two cold-as-I-could-get-em drinks, a water and an apple juice, and then found a park bench and basked. In the shade, not the sun.

I basked for a good thirty minutes. I had been walking for 3 and a half hours.

Then I found a park loo and bought a honeydew popsicle and wandered the park. Lovely park - not very many lilacs, but a lot of trees and a good layout, very naturey, and I walked all the way through it, aware that I was following right back along the tributary I'd just walked down. This side was a great deal nicer.

And out of the park, I saw that unfinished road again. Closed off to everything but construction.

But, well, I was inside the city now. The very edge of the city, sure, but within the city, and I had a map. Checked it, and then wandered vaguely along the riverside til I hit Zhongyang Street, the big city-center tourist street.

And there I had delicious Korean food and basked some more. This was five hours in.


Looking out along hte river to the place I've just walked from. This is about when my camera ran out of batteries.

The rest of the trip was, well, the rest of the day. Wandered up to the end of Zhongyang, crossed the railroad bridge to watch the sunset, came back. Down Zhongyang, and back toward my school; then round a circle and up another walking street. Eight hours. Down to the end of the walking street, and by now it was dark, 10+pm, and I was leery of going down unfamiliar unlit areas, so back down to another big street (Zhongshan) and up that, then up the winding peopled streets between the flood canal and the main street til I reached the university.

And, at 12.15, entered the building again and went to my bed and fell asleep.

The Chatting Cafe

Yesterday, when I woke up, the weather was yellow. The sky was grayish-yellowish-white, it was spitting rain, and the air smelled like rust and dirty coal. It was an inside day, and so I did inside things: grading, reading, playing solitaire, cooking. It was nasty, lazy weather.

But it finally cleared up late in the afternoon. As the day progressed, the clouds went more whiteish than yellowish, then more bluegrey than white. Maybe around six I looked out the window: the sky above was thick with dull clouds, but there was sunlight reflecting off the buildings and shining off the windows at me. I went over to the window; over to the west, the clouds were finally breaking up, and the sun came through white and gold.

I had an appointment at 6.30: a "Chatting Cafe", as the organizer called it. Full-time foreign teachers are requested/required to take part in at least one (two?) extracurricular activities, and so I was contacted by this guy a couple days ago. He's a PhD student here, and told me about the Chatting Cafe, inviting me to attend/help/host. I wasn't entirely clear on which - when you're a Foreign Teacher, it's an even chance whether you'll be asked to be the Star Attraction Of Our Show or just a guest - but I figured okay, sure I'll go.

So I went.

Peter - my contact - was about my weight but a few inches taller than I. He kept his jacket on even though he was sweating, and I think he wasn't sure if I'd show up. He showed me to the room, talking about his major and about the English club. It was being held in the main classroom building, one of the smaller classrooms. I recognized the setup from my usual teaching room: long benches, long desks, a roll-up-and-down blackboard covered with a screen. There were maybe fifteen people in attendance; when I walked in, they applauded.

Peter went to the podium and I went and put my stuff down at a desk. This was apparently not kosher; people stared at me, and Peter asked me to come to the front. He'd prepared a powerpoint, but asked if I could host; this pinged my "do they want me to lecture? D:" radar, and I asked what hosting entailed. Well, talking, apparently. I hastily made clear that I could work with them, but I didn't have a lecture ready, and since Peter and the other hosts looked a bit crestfallen, I asked them to show me the powerpoint, so I knew what they'd prepared, and I could help with some things.

Well, it was kind of like an informal class. Five minutes self-introduction, watch a video clip, try to write down what you remembered from the clip, discuss a topic (from the email: "On Learning English: How do YOU `see` an English movie?"), free talk. We discussed briefly, and I pointed out places I could contribute. They still looked dubious, so I turned on my Teacher manner, all confidence and "it'll work out"-ness, and they were reassured. Then I went back into the crowd and sat back down.

Well, self-introductions, and I was politely mobbed. "Would you like to sit with us?" and a gift of coffee-from-a-packet and then six people in the benches around me, all curious to hear where I'd come from, what I was doing in Harbin, how old I was, why I'd come to China, what I thought about China. I answered most of these, then turned the questions back on them - their names? majors? how long they'd been here? (people come to HIT from all different cities.) Two people had time to answer before Peter called the room to order and had people introduce themselves up front. The prize for doing so: a half-sized, Chinese-wrapped Snickers bar, 士力架 on the back.

After that we watched a clip from Inception. For those of you who've seen it, the part where Cobb is telling Ariadne about him-and-Mal's life in Limbo. The clip was only a minute long, and subtitled both in English and in 普通话. Peter switched to a google screencap after, trying to explain Limbo. "It's a game," he said, and then pointed the mouse to the second link, "it's a Christian idea." I could see people didn't quite get it, so mentioned, "I can help explain this."

And did. Brought in Dante and got some nods - some people knew Dante, some didn't. I explained first where limbo fit in Christianity, then where it fit linguistically. One person raised his hand and asked me, "how can you prove limbo exists?" (He assumed I was Christian, and trying to prosthletyze.) I quickly explained agnosticism and how I just figured people could decide for themselves what to believe. This got a congratulatory round of applause.

I went over to the side of the room and stood/leaned. People seemed more comfortable with this than with me sitting among them, and so I stayed there as the meeting continued. I got consulted on several things, and weighed in on several other things: reduced forms (gonna, wanna, coulda, shoulda, dunno), watching movies to practice language (when alone, rewatch, when with friends, watch uninterrupted), accents and dialects of English (and how no one in the room could understand Indian English or African English), history and literature ("speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounce it to you").

I was halfway in Teacher Role and halfway in Guest Role, and I prefer that a great deal to the wholly Lecturer Role or to the Star Attraction Role. The presumption that I could come in and take over was not appealing to me: I didn't want to act like this was a class, and I didn't want to be seen as some Authority On Western Things, even though, as a Westerner and thus a representative not only of your own country but of all Western countries, that is the role that you are often put into. I made sure they knew that there's regional differences not only in speech but in culture and thought and history, and that I could ony talk for someone from the DC area.

And I think it worked: by the time Free Talk rolled around, people were comfortable with me. I told them, "I'll go around to different groups and try to talk a little with all of you," and this got applause too. So that I did - go from group to group and talk. Same questions, each time: how long have you been in Harbin? where are you from? are you a student? a teacher? what do you teach? how old are you? why did you come to China? what do you think about China? I spent a good ten minutes with that group, telling places I'd been and what I taught and all, and then told them I've move to the next group, and then did. And then got asked again: how long have you been in Harbin? what do you teach? how old are you? What do you think about China?

I'd originally intended to leave at eight - indeed, I think the meeting was intended to end around eight - but at fifteen after we were all still talking. I got a call from a friend to meet her for noodles at 8.30, and when 8.30 rolled around I told people, "I've gotta meet a friend, but it was great talking to you, and I hope to see you again." Applause everywhere, exchange of phone numbers, congratulations on having come. Peter followed me out, discussing the logistics of future meetings, and I saw that behind us, people were grabbing their bags and leaving the room. The main attraction was gone.

Just as Peter and I were about to leave the hall, a girl caught up with us. Woman, actually - she was older than I, and a teacher at another college, and in the meeting she'd talked a lot, gotten my phone number, discussed history and poetry with me, testing the waters to see if I knew this poet, that poet, this general, that book. I apparently passed with flying colors, because people around me grinned and nodded that I knew Li Qingzhao and Xu Zhimo, and that I had read Three Kingdoms.

Peter and I stopped. People from the classroom passed by us, looking back curiously. "I want to give you something," the girl told me, and I turned around. She handed me a Snickers bar.

Original sent on May 8th.

Harbin Hotpot Happenings

Tuesday evening, I went to a hotpot restaurant. It was very different from the one I'd frequented in Beijing. The one in Beijing was a biggish, fancy place, with Western toilets and hand soap, with a picture-menu, and with a hundred or more choices of soups, meats, veggies, tofus, and noodles.

This one, on the other hand, was a little 12-by-15-foot room into which about 20 could be seated - 25 with a squeeze. Its back wall was mirrored, to make it look bigger. It did not cook on hotplates but on little, individual gas stoves set into the tables - water was poured into the bottom, to keep it cool, and then the gas was lit with a lighter and kept on with a little dial on the side.

But it was tasty. The menu was short - one single page of blue paper, thin as airmail paper, upon which you marked your choices of food. There were about 7-10 choices of meat and veggies, 5 each of noodles and tofu, a few mushrooms, a few starches. My friend and I ordered, and, within a few minutes, were served. We ate, sharing a liter of Harbin beer.

The food was good, and apparently the place was popular. It was talkative inside, and around the middle of our meal a table of partiers stood and escorted a very drunk member of their group outside; he had to be puppeted, since he couldn't stand. My friend looked at the table and said "baijiu", and then I saw it too: a small, clear bottle with the familiar red label and the familiar red box. No wonder he was drunk: every country has its super-strong, paint-stripping, one-sip-and-you're-floored alcohol, and China's is baijiu. This bottle was empty.

But the food was good, so we kept eating. Filled up, finished our veg and our meat and much of our soup. We were just finishing up when a girl came up and leaned on our table.

Leaned on our table with a cup full of beer. Uh-oh.

"Essacuse me," she said to me, and then switched to Mandarin, "you're an English teacher? and you know English and you teach English?"

"Uh, yeah..."

Back to English: "Oh my goooddddd! Woulda you teachme English! You speak -" Chinese again, "you speak Chinese? Do you speak Chinese?" English again, "you teache me English! Okay?"

I stared at her.

She switched back to Chinese. "You are a teacher, you teach English, I heard your English is very good, you speak Chinese? You speak Chinese, I teach you Chinese, you teach me English, okay? I want to learn English." The effort of standing became too much and she pushed my coat aside and slid into the booth next to me. English: "you teache me English, okay?"

I didn't want to harsh her buzz, so I said, "well, my schedule's a bit full-"

Chinese: "But you're an English teacher right?" English: "oh my god! Oh my GOD you teache English right?" Chinese: "you speak Chinese? So I can teach you English, I mean I you teach me English because you're an English teacher," and she leaned close to me, five inches from my face, and, thankfully, put her full beer down on the table.

I tried my schedule excuse again. She would have none of it. I said I spoke Chinese, yes. She was delighted. I said maybe, we'll see, I needed to check - and "OOOHHH THANK YOU! OH MY GOOOODDDDD THANK YOU" and she took my hand and shook it and then kissed it and became quite incoherent and entered my cell phone number on her phone and got my name wrong five times and thanked me again and kissed my cheek and got up and drank her entire beer down in one gulp and wove her way back to her own table.

"We're leaving," I told my friend.

"Quickly," she agreed. "I think the guy behind you's getting up."