Sino-psis

To be continued… :)

XIAHE

The long-awaited final chapter arrives and does its best to appease the avid readers of this paltry blog. I have had a hard time sitting down and finishing off this story. One, because it deserves a good sitting down and a good tell. It was a really good couple of days and I wish to do it justice. Two, I’ve been really busy with teaching and life and thinking about other things than updating a blog. That has been the main reason why this has taken as long as it has to put down in type. And Three, honestly, I’ve been hyping up this Xiahe thing, and it’s prolly going to be a big let down. Sorry guys. Let’s get it over with tho. To the sultry sounds of Utada Hikaru….

XIAHE

Hold on, lemme reread what I’ve already written… ah. I see. Let me lay down the setting again, just for those who don’t want to go back and read the novella I’ve already written about a basically uneventful trip. Setting is important, or, at least, that’s what I’m trying to tell my sixth graders. It is early afternoon on a sunny brisk day in the Gansu province. I am again sitting on the wrong side of the vehicle and the sun is baking the left side of my face and is at just the right angle where I have to squint occasionally. The man to my right is smoking an odd smelling concoction of herbs and tobacco on and off, which causes Jena and Scott to my rear to tell me to open my window on and off, open and shut (the smoky buddy tells me to shut it when it gets too cold). I’m just lost in the scenery, trying to quickly translate signs as they whiz by, looking ahead to see what is coming next. The bus is crowded, absolutely no empty seats. The way is shut. We have to stop for a moment when we near the city because of some type of road block that is prolly just made of other busses stopping for people to pee. Our bus inhabitants do exactly the same thing. Men seem to have the advantage in this respect (as always), where they can pee just about anywhere on the road. Jena and Jeanne were never too happy on the road, I never figured out why.

We move on. The signs are counting down the mileage remaining and where there are no signs my mind is taking over the job willingly, willfully.

Jeez, more distractions make this blog entry harder to complete. Here, how bout I throw down a table of contents and then just fill in the blanks.

I Xiahe
We roll into Xiahe and it is much larger than I had imagined. At first, I start looking at the signage to make sure that this is the right place, but sure enough, all of the signs have the characters for Xiahe in them, so I accept our destination for what it is. That being – one long street running down a narrow valley branched with narrow alleys and jammed packed with inviting doorways. For the time being, that’s all I was seeing of Xiahe and it was disappointingly reminiscent of Linxia. My smelly seat mate exited the vehicle before we got to the bus depot (presumably because he wasn’t supposed to be on the bus in the first place) and I stretched out a bit for the last five minutes of the trip. Luxury.
The bus begins to spill its guts out onto the road as all of the passengers ahead of us disembark and the luggage is jettisoned. We are about last off, but are greeted with glee nonetheless. Everyone wants to give us a ride, no exceptions. I feel blessed and honored, but I’m at a loss. No idea where I’m going. We look to the Bible, and it tells us to head to a hotel up the street that our driver seems to know intimately. I’m super psyched. We get in our moto-carriages with our bags and race up the street towards the end, now that it is in sight. I am seated with my back to the driver facing Scott and Jena and I watch the expanse of shops and restaurants perspectively pile up behind us as we go up up up the street. Our bike cuts out for a second and the driver has to kick-start it again, but, no worries. Off again, to our lodging.
1 Hotel
a across the street
We get to the hotel and Jeanne and Thorsten (spelling his name right now) immediately jump at the room that is offered. They don’t have three-bed rooms though, so Scott and I go check out the one across the street. This one has a nice suite set-up with a rollaway bed available. So how it ends up is that the five of us are in two hotels across the street from one another. This causes less problems than you’d think, so it never came to anything. Too bad, I was really hoping for strife.
b rollaway bed
The room was really nice and the couch was comfy. I woulda been fine with that, but then they brought in an even comfier bed for me. Jena and Scott have the “master bedroom”, but I have the tv and the water boiler. *On a side note, I really loved the blankets in all of the hotels we stayed at. They were really warm and heavy and comforting. Surprisingly, they weren’t too short. I enjoyed all of my sleeps.
2 street
a colorful vendors
We went out into the street and found once again the corruption of money. This place was geared for tourists, as I’m sure is every “exotic” place that I will ever go in this life. I am just not a shopper at heart, so I was not having too much fun walking around and sight-seeing/window shopping. The colored cloths and the expectant eyes of the salespeople was beginning to bother me and, as I was already tired from the trip there, I was letting it get to me. I kept catching glimpses of the mountains through the gaps in the stores and I knew I was missing something by just shop-jumping and gawking at trinkets. I also thought that we’d only be in Xiahe for two days, counting this one, so I was eager to explore. At one point I just got so sick of it that I turned left. Down into an alley went I and found part of what I’d been looking for. Just a step back from the shops were the habitations of all of the shop owners and anyone else that lived in the town. The pace dropped to a slow steady heartbeat and I could hear myself breathing again. I walked around the back alleys for a while, smiling as I passed children and passersby, just happy to find that there was actually warm blood flowing through the town and not just the ice I felt in the stares of the shopkeepers. The day was getting colder as night pressed in, but I was feeling much more comfortable.
b cornucopia of restaurants
That there were. We found that we had to decide amongst the throng of eateries in order to get our eat on, so we adopted the blind beggar routine and just felt around in the bowl for what came to hand. As always, the fight between Jena and I (team veggietastic) and Scott Thorsten and Jeanne (team hunkameat) produced some interesting results. Thorsten pulled a nice I’ll-have-what-he’s-having move right off and got some good results. You’d think that pointing at a monk’s meal would be suspect, but Thorsten said it was tasty. I think I just ended up having a random assortment of vegetables and some kind of fish soup. It’s possible some egg was thrown in there too. Not many of the meals in Xiahe were all that amazing, but they were all very satisfying. Sorry that I can’t go into many details on the specific types of food I was devouring during my stay.
3 surroundings
a doorstep of the mountains
Let me set this place up for you. Xiahe is a little nook in a crevice in the craw of the Tibetan plateau. Then you take one monastery, some monk huts, a street full of assorted goods and some yak fields and shove them in the nook. The nook was carved by a river that cuts through the scenery with a highway by its side. The hills are well groomed by voracious yaks and goats and stretch their naked paws toward the town with the slow determination of a glacier and the curiosity of a young black bear. You can tell that the slopes want to know what this city is that all of a sudden sprang up in their midst. The city dwellers don’t seem to mind that they have geological onlookers mulling over their daily activities, but this just entices them all the more. Far off peaks peek over the top of the nearer ones, trying to catch a glimpse of the cause of such cacophony. A loud truck horn beeps and the surrounding crags mutter quietly to themselves. The question of coexistence will never be put to a vote, but its apparent what the chew shorn surrounding hills think (a couple of them sporting a nice goatee thanks to some rare environmental-minded fencing). We need to talk.
b monastery atmosphere
The blast of a deep horn lifts upward to the sky and then descends upon the afternoon. Upon realizing what direction it is coming from, I remember what draws the crowds of tourists and pilgrims to this area. I change lenses and see the area in a new color. Mostly red, actually. The street is filled with monks in their red robes, some with purple sashes and some with other kinds of red. They are everywhere. The oddest thing about it is, they fit. Before, whenever I saw a monk, he stood out like a tall white guy in China. Here in Xiahe, the area was so covered with monks doing monk things, that you just didn’t notice them after the initial recognition. They were seated in cafes, riding motobuggies, walking and laughing. And it wasn’t only the monks. Pilgrims from afar, Tibetans coming to pray at this most notable of monasteries, and others wearing traditional garb were all mixed together. The exoticism of the clothing and the lifestyles was lost on me when I let myself just fall into the pattern of life there. Nothing seemed out of place. Except, of course, for the foreign legions parading about taking up close pictures of Tibetan women prostrate in prayer on the ground and blatantly flaunting their wealth and prestige by single handedly keeping most of those shopkeepers in business. I was no different from them. I got the same stares from the monks and the sellers and the children. But if any of them took the time to look into my eyes, I hope they didn’t see an arrogant look staring back at them. My eyes lingered on faces, studying the rosy cheeks and intense looks of people living on the plateau, memorizing them like I was hoping to see them all again one day and not wanting to be caught not remembering an old acquaintance. The monastery was calling to me through the people surrounding me just as the mountains were calling to me in the spaces between those same people.
c and half was sky
A striking part of the surround was the vertiginous lack of a ceiling on the whole land. We were walking around, directing our attention to that on the ground. But if you took the time to analyze the input your eyes were digesting, you’d see that half of that input was just empty space dyed blue. I had a temporary habit of lifting my chin slightly as we were walking about. This probably made me come off even haughtier to the locals, but I was doing it to keep my eyes pointed above the horizon as much as possible. The sky was just plain amazing. I wanted to walk on my tiptoes just to get closer to it. That just ended up giving me a kind of jaunty walk. I’ve looked through a lot of the pictures I took while in Gansu and I’ve noticed that some of them seem like I wasn’t paying attention when taking the shot, or the camera tilted upward at the last second. I now remember that I wanted myself to remember how much sky there was and how I wished I could flip gravity and swim in it.
4 events
a shopping
I’ve already talked about shopping and don’t want to go into that more right now. Meh.
b walking the prayer wheels
So, on the first day, the closest we got to the monastery was the end of the street where shops meet stupas. Here there was a big ditch, lined on our side with blanket peddlers, dividing the spiritual and the mundane. You can cross a pedestrian/bike/vehicle/whatever comes/yak bridge to get to the other side and then head straight ahead to get to the front gate of the monastery. Or you can head up blanket hill a bit and cross the chasm on a wobbly footbridge made of a couple of boards (like me). Here there is a large white stupa and a string of eave-covered buildings going in either direction, serving as a large religious obstacle course for the many visitors. The pilgrims, tourists, monks, and locals alike all circle the stupa a certain amount of times and then proceed on down the line spinning a succession of hexagonal cylinders on end with Tibetan and Buddhist symbols tracing their sides. The wood handles on the spinners are worn as smooth as the path you walk. There is a strong sense of perpetual motion I got from participating in this long walk around the monastery. All of the circular motion, the sense that you were keeping the wheels spinning ad infinitum, the sense of unity one gets with the other pilgrims on their own journeys, and the metered pace at which you have to walk made me sink into a deepening groove of peace with the human tradition and the broad undulating timeline of human history. I gave each wheel a strong push and circled the stupa more than twice.
c tour of the monastery
The next day our first act of business was to go and give the monastery a good whirl. We found a large collection of foreigners waiting for us at the ticket booth, for they also were wanting to take part in one of the few English tours given at the monastery.
1) monk who speaks English like a monk
It turns out that our tour guide was a monk skilled in English, Tibetan, Chinese, and probably a couple other languages. His English was fascinating tho. He chanted rather than speaking. He would get started on a sentence and then start to drone the words together, making each syllable come out one by one on a set rhythm. It was very soothing to listen to, but I have no idea what he was talking about half the time.
2) feature/future Buddha
At one point he was talking about the future Buddha in conjunction with the past and the present ones, but for the longest time, I thought he was saying feature. Now, perhaps, he may have been saying feature. My knowledge of Buddhism is scant at best. I just found it amusing that I couldn’t tell. The large golden statues of these respective Buddhas were beautiful and ornately adorned. Bright cloth stretched from the hands to the helpful hands of the nearby statues of the bodhisattvas, creating a continuum of the spiritual and the worldly. His words were confusing and the French translation by one of the tour guides even more so, but I was eating up all of the visual victuals. Large bowl candles made of yak butter stood on tables, joined by various offerings to the deity, and looked upon by the benevolent stares of holy Buddha incarnates peering through their glass frames. The atmosphere was thick with reverence and nowhere more so than in the communal prayer room. Lines of prayer cushions were laid out before the eyes in an extremely dim room with fantastic paintings of the many incarnations of Buddha on the walls. Of course, no pictures were allowed. You all just have to go and see it yourselves. Pbthhhht.
3) printing room
For a couple extra bucks, we were let into a building where the monks were printing scriptures onto sheets of paper. I don’t think I know the proper term for it, but they were basically doing an ink rubbing. One monk would hold the piece of wood with the scripture carved into it and then the second monk would take an ink swabbie and rub it over the wood once. The first monk would grab a piece of paper and position it correctly on the wood, while the other grabbed a flat wood piece and rubbed it once over the paper. Voila. A miniature version of the printing press. There were wooden blocks of scripture lining the walls and in the room above there were even more. It was an astounding collection of knowledge that was probably all burned up once before during the “accidental” fire right around the time of the cultural revolution. The wood looked pretty new, on a whole.
4) Dispersal
After the tour, we all went our separate ways. Who knows where the others went, but I ventured up farther into the depths of the monastery grounds, finding hidden paths and secret courtyards. It was just good to have a nice long walk. Then I went back to the hotel and took a nap.
d assortment of eating adventures
I’m just gonna briefly outline a few of the places at which we ate. Eating was a big part of the trip, so I don’t want to leave it out. However, since it was kind of unimportant to me, I won’t be very descriptive. Not sure why I’m doing it anyway. Ah well.
1) third floor place(2)
This was a nice restaurant overlooking the gorge splitting the shopping street from the monastery half of town. I ate there once for dinner, which was a production as always. Scott took the yoke and ordered as usual, while we all threw our different wants and needs at him. We tried out some HuangHe (yellow river) beer there, which, despite its name, was actually pretty good. For beer, that is.
2) back room place
One night we ventured downstreet a bit and found a place that was open after 8pm. The table by the door was a bit cold, so we got shafted in a back corner room where the waitresses couldn’t see us and neither could any of the other customers (which may have been the point). A large round table that could fit many dishes and a big revolving tray on top so that everyone could get to the food.
3) hotel café(4?)
We ate at this place one too many times. It was the tourist café attached to the hotel that Jeanne and Thorsten were staying at. It had pancakes and eggs and good things to eat, but it got old quick. The one waitress wasn’t the best in the world (prolly cuz there’s no city called tipping in china) and it was always too busy. The chocolate pancake was scrumptious tho.
4) yak butter milk place
I ate a snack once with Jena on a patio overlooking the street frenzy. It looked much better from up there. I tried yak butter milk tea. It isn’t all that great. Just turned out to be a pad of butter dropped into some warm milk tea. The oily surface didn’t do anything for my complexion.
5) best place in town, worst service? Hard to say(2)
The last night there, we found a great place just on the monastery side of the bridge. The food was excellent and the service adequate for China. However, the next morning when we came by in search of pancakes and other goodies we had noticed the night before, everything changed. The service bombed out and none of our food arrived when we wanted it. I was eating at the end when everyone else was finished. And the waitress poured scalding water on a little Dutch girl at the next table. I had such hopes for that place, but I got my apple pancake in the end, so, no harm to me, no foul.
e hike w thorsten and Jeanne
The third day we had made a decision about. Since the end of the second day had been kinda drizzly and overcast and drab, we said that if the third day were nice, we would stay to check out the countrymountainside… mountryside, instead of heading back for two days of Lanzhou. The morning was bright and beautiful, so we stayed. However, we had drunk a bit of baijiu the night before (arful poreful shtuff) and scott and jena were being sleepyheads. So I met T n J at the requisite hotel café for breakfast and then broke camp and went on a walkabout. We walked up the river/road for a while and then turned off left onto a cart path, into the scenery. I think I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t a cardboard backdrop, like in those country western movies. But no, this was a country eastern flick, so the mountains were for real. We walked up and up and up, winding through valleys, pointing out herds of sheep way up on the hillsides clinging impossibly, seeing the odd eagle, skirting the occasional mountain compound guarded by dogs. We kept going until we hit snow. It was just a little bit in the shadow of a hill, but it was enough. And then it started to flurry. I thought I was the luckiest boy in the whole wide world, sticking my tongue out to catch the snowflakes as they fell. It was a joyous moment. The walk down was nothing special. We just.. walked.. down.
f hike on my own
After getting back, TJ and I ate at the third floor restaurant, pretty good. We then parted ways and I went back to the hotel room. SJ weren’t back then and, as I was still pumped from the hike, I jumped at the chance to explore on my own. There had been a particular route that I had been wanting to try ever since I saw it. Right behind the closest white stupa was a path that climbed straight up into the sky. Now, the path TJ and I had taken was a slowly ascending one, meandering its way up to higher ground. This path was no joke. It had taken TJ and I two hours to reach the altitude we attained. On this path, it only took me a half hour and I was still only halfway to the top. Needless to say, I had to stop to catch my breath, oh, about… twenty thousand times. High altitude + strenuous exercise = tai tired elliot. The view was worth it. All that I’ve been describing to you about how the mountains and the city interrelate is from this trip. I could see everything. The shopping street seemed pointless, the people ants. The mountains just kept going on and on. On nearby peaks were small shrines dangling colored cloths. On my own roost were scattered little pieces of paper marked with religious pictures that travelers had burnt in offering. I sat there for a good long time. What occurred there is between the mountain rabbits and I, but it was one of the most beautiful vistas I think I will ever see. Sadly, at that point, my camera was not cooperating, so I had not taken it along. I probably would have divested myself of it along the way tho, that trek was tough. I took a Sprite along and that was it. And boy was that the wrong drink to take. I was burping all the way down the mountain. I thot I might burp myself right off the side. But no, I made it down safely and rejoined society (under protest).
g buying a jacket
I decided to take something home with me besides the flowers I had picked and the rocks I had gathered. Scott had bought (scott had bought scott had bought la la la) a nice jacket from a nearby jacket, so I went with him to get one of my own. The guy saw us coming and knew that I would be getting the same price he had promised Scott, so didn’t even bother with the sales tactics. Just showed me the way to the extra large jackets. So I tried on a nice wool jacket with colorful fringes.
1) run into megan and kyle
As I was trying on the jacket, kyle and megan from earlier on in the trip walk up and make fun of me. We exchanged pleasantries and talked about what we’d each been doing in Xiahe. They were headed on the next day further down south to see one of their friends. I tried to make dinner plans with them, but as had happened before with them, we just didn’t meet up after that. I kinda regret not hanging out more with them during that trip, they were cool sorts.
2) Fleecin
So yeah, I took my jacket back to the pad and looked at myself in a mirror and approved of my purchase and felt very good about myself for having taken part in the money culture that I had been denying for so long. I was one of the fold again. Baa.
h bumpy ass ride out of there, emphasis on ass
The next day, we had breakfast with the scalded child and headed back to the hotel to catch a ride with a van we rented the night before. This was the speediest way to get to Lanzhou, taking five hours, and so we took it. GOOD LORD, the words I need are not at my disposal to convey how bumpy that ride was. The DOT has not made its way to western china. My butt hurts right now just thinking about it. Every now and then we would hit a bump that surprised me even more than the rest and some expletive would escape my lips that I’d never heard before. This van ride expanded the dictionary it was so bumpy. I think one of my yelps was the same translated into Chinese as it was in English, because the driver actually slowed down at one point. That didn’t last long. So happy to get to Lanzhou. That didn’t last long. Good thing that we stayed in Xiahe longer and not in Lanzhou that extra day.
Lanzhou had no more appeal. It was just a big dirty city with no chocolate. Scott and I went on a chocolate hunt that night and couldn’t find one bit. Eventually we did find a store that sold crispy chocolate biscuits and something like moon pies, but jeez. We ate at a Japanese restaurant that night that wasn’t really good (I ate well as always tho, I’m not too picky) and then hid in our hotel room until the next morning when we lit out of there at some ungodly hour.
We took cabs this time, which was expensive, since the airport is way way way out of town. The airport had no food places open, which ruined ideas about breakfast (I had moon pies, I was good. For some reason, no one wanted any tho. Huh).
The flight back was uneventful, longer than the way there - no anticipation to egg time along. When I stepped off the plane I remember why I had wanted to get out of Shanghai so badly. The weather was miserable and the air blechy. I was not happy to return and definitely did not want to teach classes the next day. Scott Jena and I tried to eat away our back-in-Shanghai blues by going to Papa Johns on the way back. It kinda worked. That pizza is good. I picked up some good soy milk at the nearby City Supermarket as well, so I was all set. All in all, a good trip.