getting into Wuhan was like seeing a completely different sort of China. While Hong Kong is shiny and urbane and condensed, and Shanghai is schizophrenically expanding and dirty and shiny, Wuhan is a big messy sprawling city where the propaganda attempts to stop people from spitting anywhere that is convenient and little babies from pooping in the streets haven't reached. It is a city that has shiny tall buildings and renao bustling nightmarkets as well as dirty tunnels and street food and the most bewildering confusion of smells. It is an entirely fascinating city, without any kind of pretense or apology for what it is. It is not a clean city, but I liked it very much nevertheless
My first day there Issac took me to see his favorite noodle place, where they hand-make the noodles right there in front of you. this process seriously looks like magic, I went back there for breakfast every day just to watch them pull my noodles. Wuhan is near to Hunan province (which is known for it's mouth blistering spice), so the food there has some sizzle to it. It's the sly kind though, a red oil that builds up over time as you eat it, and sneaks up on you from the other end the day after you've eaten it. For all that, the food is terrific, and I got used to the amount of spice fairly quickly.
I had a fairly mellow time in Wuhan, wandering around seeing Issac's neighborhood, going to see the east lake where dozens of soon to be brides come every day to take wedding pictures with their future groom in silly costumes. I saw so much lace and silly hats it was fantastic!
My friend Issac (whom I was there visiting) is currently teaching English to elementary kids. I got to go with him to see the classroom and what teaching English in China is all about, which is pretty cool considering it is something that I am thinking about doing next year. He has a first grade class, two second grade classes and a fourth grade class. I showed up the first day and was mobbed by small adorable Chinese children. After class on the first day they all came up to me with questions wanting to hug and cuddle and sit on the wai guo ren (white or foreign person)'s lap. So many kids piled on me at once with such exuberance that I ended up having to grab the white board in a desperate (but ultimately unsuccessful) attempt not to fall on top of the children who were hugging my knees from behind. We all ended up going down in a pile of limbs, and needless to say became fast friends. I came away from the experience that teaching little kids is a lot like herding hyper intelligent cats: both incredibly fun, but exhausting. I totally want to do it.
While I was there, one of Issac's friends and co teachers had a birthday, so we all got on a van/bus thing and drove a couple of hours to a hot springs where we spent all day lounging in the warm water scented with everything from beer, coffee, red wine, milk, chrysanthemum, ginkgo, rose, lavender, to soup. One of them had me smelling a lot like chicken soup. All of them made me feel very relaxed and soft. They had slightly more involved baths as well where you could sit and have little fishes nibble the dead skin off of your body, or be buried in warm sand, or massaged with hot stones. As all of these cost extra, I stuck to the beer baths and the massaging high powered super heated showers and the water massage chairs. Such a good weekend.
More non-sequiter,while I was there Issac's mop of hair got to be out of control. I went with him to get it cut (I really enjoy haircuts, both having mine cut, and watching the transformation. for some reason it fascinates me) While I was there one of the hairdressers had an incredibly cute haircut, one that was pretty much the haircut I've had in mind for a while. I mentioned this to Issac and he encouraged me to go for it. With much gesticulation and broken Chinese, I let them have a go at my hair. The woman washing it must have taken 30 minutes on the shampoo alone, trying to small talk in Chinese is no easy chore. My head ended up thoroughly massaged and cleansed. The man cutting it was the most meticulous hairdresser I have ever seen, cutting it and reexamining it and blow drying it and reexamining it and tripping here and shaping there. The end result was spectacular. As Nicole said when I came home : now you look all urban, like the quirky cute best friend in a hip sitcom! I think it looks rather fetching, and I must say I am totally happy with it. I'll post pictures asap, but I feel VERY ute at the moment, and am so happy that I made that particularly impulsive choice.
After Wuhan I took a train to Guilin (bought the tickets in Chinese all on my own!!!!) and from there took a riverboat down the Li river to Yangshuo. Yangshuo is a rural tourist town snuggled in between gumdrop fairytale mountains that I never really believed existed outside of Chinese scroll paintings. They're real. Taking the boat down the Li, these gumdrops float at you out o the fog, exploding into rolling peaks of this intense green. Going from the gagging pollution of Wuhan, the purity of the air was enchanting. In addition, there are hawkers (yes, even in the middle of a river in a rural idyllic area of china) who sidle up to the riverboat on rafts made of about 4 large pieces of bamboo and try through the glass window of the 3 storey tour boat to sell you jade Buddhas and enormous painted fans. These people have some serious commitment. There are also others more gainfully employed on the river who fish all day and bring their loads of river crabs and fish to rear kitchen on the boats as they go down the river, where the catch is fried up and served about 20 minutes later. In case you're wondering, deep friend river crab isn't bad...kind of like eating chips but a little...fishier. Mostly very crunchy though. They also offered us another delicacy from the region on the boat: snake wine. This is pretty much a rice wine with the same alcohol content as vodka with - and I kid you not - a snake fermenting in the jar with the alcohol. A friend of mine got a cup, and I took a sip from it...it was...snakey. And to be honest entirely rank...but a good story...
In Yangshuo I joined up with a tour group that was pretty small and mostly french (only french people I met the whole trip...mostly there were dutch or brits), and went on a bamboo raft to a pretty area outside of Yangshuo and watched cormorant fishing. They basically take Cormorants, tie a string around their throat and set them out to try to eat a fish. The fish will get stick in their long throat above the string, and the fisherman will pull it out, and throw them back out to do it again. It apparently takes about two years to train a cormorant to do this. It seemed a little cruel to me, but does look very cool, and apparently is now done mostly for tourism. On the raft there was also a traditional Chinese singer dressed up in a very silly hat with the traditional style clothing of one of the "minority peoples" that are in that area. I am still unclear as to what exactly this minority people is exactly, but she sang some very cool songs and had really cool clothing. She was quite sweet. After that we got to feed and pet a water buffalo who was very cute and kind of smelly and dopey.
At the end of my stay in Yangshuo I got onto a sleeper bus and headed off to Shenzhen to get back to HongKong for my flight back to Taipei. This sleeper bus was both hilarious and deeply uncomfortable. Imagine if you will, 39 beds organized into three rows with each row comprised on upper and lower bunks, squished onto a normal sized bus:
The "beds" are built for a person about my weight, and about 5 inches shorter than me. Now to those of you who are fuzzy my actual dimensions, I am 5'3". This makes me marginally taller than most Chinese women. This bus is built for midgets. The head room is non existent (you can just barely sit up) and your feet are slid into a metal box about the width of my shoulders that slopes downward as it is also the pillow/backrest part of the "bed" in front of it. I hope this is making some kind of sense. Add to this that traffic in China doesn't include any kind of laws, and you're in for an exciting night. The strategy I discovered was to wrap the thick blanket they provided around your lower body between the metal edges of the foot-box and the railing that was at about hip level so that when you inevitably slammed into the many metal part of the bed and / or the window as the bus screeched to stops or sped around corners, you would thud rather than bruise. It was kind of horrendous in the amazing exhilarating way that only traveling can bring, and while I'm definitely happy that I had the experience, it is not one that I am in a hurry to repeat.
I got into shenzhen at about 8 in the morning, having slept for about 3 consecutive hours during the 13 hour bus ride and got to pantomime with my broken Chinese, to figure out where the bus to take me into the boarder crossing to Hong Kong left from. I ended up playing travel by zen, armed with a bus number and a phrase which I translated (correctly as it turned out) to mean opposite. Playing travel by zen is when you follow the nearest group of people similarly armed with suitcases who like like they're probably going the same place you are. This led me up over a pedestrian overpass to a bus stop and onto the number seven bus, safely to the boarder crossing where I got into Hong Kong and back to the English speaking territory without a hitch. I think my Chinese might be better than I give it credit for, I just tend to worry that I'm translating things wrong, but so far all of the train, bus tickets and directions I've gotten have been entirely successful.
Anyways, I am now home, and in Taipei, and while I enjoyed my travels and adventures thoroughly (and they are far from being over) it is nice to be back in my home away from home, among family in a neighborhood that I know.
