My Chinese Life in Gifs

So it took me a while to post all about the Yunnan trip. In the meantime I have just been going about life as usual in Beijing. I went to the Lantern Festival in Beijing to celebrate the end of the Chinese New Year in which there were neither lanterns nor a festival, visited Tiananmen Square and had a thousand more pictures taken of me, and shopped at WuMart, the Chinese equivalent of Walmart, which is slightly frightening. My Chinese is also coming along great: the other day I accidentally transposed two syllables and called my tutor “tofu” to everyone's great amusement.

I put together this post in order for everyone to get a better idea of what my day to day life is like here in China. I hope you find it informative.

How I feel when someone speaks Chinese to me and then expects me to understand:

I try to attempt to respond:

And if that fails and they still don't understand me:

When the Chinese people obsess over my hair:

What it's like whenever I try to get on the subway:

 When I'm wandering around Beijing and can't read the street signs:

How it feels when I can't get on a website because of government censorship:

When I have no idea what I just ordered at a restaurant:

 

How I feel when the smog is really bad and I have to wear a mask:

When my Chinese teacher assigns massive amounts of characters to memorize:

There goes my night.

When my friends and I find a place that serves good western food:

Anytime I have to use the water:

 Whenever I contemplate crossing the street:

Is that eight lanes of traffic or ten?

Last Stop!

Days 13-15
Our last village stay was with the Naxi people, who have many cultural similarities with the Tibetan people based on their close geographical and trading relations. While we were visiting, some locals gave us a tutorial in Naxi pictograph writing, which is the only hieroglyphic language still in use. It's over 1,000 years old and is made up of about 13,000 elaborate pictographs. We learned about 20, including how to write our names.

We spent the late afternoon wandering around the village, which actually seemed pretty deserted, save for all the wild pigs and dogs running around. In the evening we participated in one final community gathering. The locals danced, sung, and one guy demonstrated his impressive musical talent by playing a leaf. The local Naxi shaman, called the Dongba, also performed a ritual. His clothes were extremely elaborate and included a headress of long feathers, and after his performance, when he walked around and talked with people in the crowd, anyone who was in his vicinity would get a face full of feathers as he turned around. It was quite comical to watch. I slept in an attic-like room that night with eight other girls, and it felt like a sleepover as we all huddled together on the floor, albeit a very cold and uncomfortable sleepover.

The next morning we ate breakfast and took the bus up to Yulong Snow Mountain. When the path got too narrow for our buses, we hiked the rest of the way along the road to get to a village house where we gathered inside to eat lunch. Right as we were leaving, it started to snow, and we hiked back to the buses as it flurried. Even though it was cold, it was really beautiful.

After fourteen days of traveling non-stop, everyone was pretty exhausted and ready to go back to their own beds. We had about five more hours on the bus, after which we stopped back in Dali to grab dinner and kill time before we had to be at the train station. We took an overnight train from there back to Kunming, where we hopped right on a plane and made it to our beloved UIBE campus by the following afternoon. I don't think I have ever appreciated a shower, bed, and washing machine more than I did on that first day back!

And so that was the Yunnan trip. An incredible, eye-opening two weeks packed with crazy experiences, and one that certainly made me appreciate what I had to come back to in Beijing! It was challenging, especially with all the unusual sleeping, eating, bathroom, and laundry scenarios we went through, but I'm definitely grateful to have had the opportunity to see and do so much, wild pigs and all!

(P.S. Sorry for no pictures, by this part of the trip my camera was completely dead!)

In Which Good Food is Hard to Find

Days 11-12

We spent a day and a half in Tibet, where our home-stay was actually in a large lodge-like building instead of the villagers' homes. It was freezing up in the mountains at night, so they gave us layers upon layers of heavy blankets to sleep with at night, and I managed to stay warm by burrowing under them as far as I could without suffocating myself! During the day they fed us some interesting dishes, such as a hotpot full of basically just animal fat, and the village specialty - yak butter tea, which is pretty much the equivalent of drinking liquid butter. (This was right about the time when I broke out the stash of emergency poptarts).

The village boys challenged our guys to a basketball match, and we cheered them on while they exerted themselves in the high altitude; we had height on our side, however, and managed to come out victorious. In the evening, we huddled around hot stoves in a beautiful upstairs room of the lodge, eating oranges and chatting. The villagers showed us some of their dances and encouraged us to grab hands and join in, and we clumsily attempted to mimic their stomping and spinning until we were all dizzy. The movement kept us warm though!

A mountain view

We got up early the next morning, ready to leave, only to find that, thanks to the cold, the buses wouldn't start! Our bus drivers came up with the ingenious solution to thaw the buses by lighting fires underneath them, so we all stood by for a good half hour watching this odd bonfire perplexedly, until, miraculously, the engines started again!

We drove a short way to the foot of a mountain where we participated in an invigorating early morning hike (and by invigorating, I mean exhausting) up to the top where we visited a Tibetan monastery. The monastery was really fascinating; the Tibetans hang prayer flags, colorful cloth squares decorated with images and prayers, all along the hills in order to 'blow their prayers heavenward.' They also burn evergreen branches and incense in special stoves at the top. I watched several Tibetans make the hike all the way up to the monastery with bundles of branches on their backs for this purpose. Among the checkerboard of colorful prayer flags and with the fantastic mountains in the distance, the monastery was very beautiful.

Inside the temple

 

Prayer flags

Burning incense

 

More bus riding brought us to a small town in the region of Shangri-la. The town we were in was basically all closed down for the New Year, and my friend and I wandered for a good hour and a half before we even found a small place where we could get food. Picture us aimlessly wandering around what seems to be an absolutely deserted town, with all the shops and stores closed up, tired, hungry, and frustratedly demanding to know, "Why are we even here?!"

That was a low point of the trip, but once we got our fried rice, we were much better. And it turned out we were in that specific town in order to visit a friend of our trip leader's who ran a Tibetan orphanage nearby. We got to spend the evening visiting and making friends with the kids there. They even performed special songs and dances for us. I played a funny game with two little girls that, from what I gathered, consisted of spinning around in a circle and yelling out names of fruits in Chinese.

Apple or banana?

We headed out the next morning for our last village stay.

On the Road

Days 7 - 10

After the Dai village we were headed to the most northern edge of Yunnan. Coming from the southern border, that meant a lot of bus time. We spent basically all of the next two days riding on the bus, which at least gave us a chance to catch up on the sleep we missed out on in some of those village home-stays! I camped out in the very back corner of our bus the whole time, and by the end of the trip everyone was calling it "Jenny's Corner," as it was specifically reserved for me. The only problem with sitting in the very back was that I would literally become air-borne on some of the more bumpy roads!

The bus rides weren't too bad with these views to look at!

We spent two nights in Weishan, our halfway point to the Tibetan region. Weishan was a tiny little town and there wasn't really much to do, but it was nice to at least have two nights in a hotel where we could do laundry and sleep in actual beds. Typically, doing laundry consisted of hand-washing our clothes using the shampoo from the hotel (which was too strong to actually wash hair with), ringing the water out until our arms were sore, and then blow drying the clothes the next morning when they still weren't dry. At least this time around we were able to just hang the clothes on the balcony to dry, effectively eliminating step three. The downside to staying in this hotel for two days was that the showers had no hot water, so that was fun. After suffering through an ice cold shower the first day, I resorted to washing my hair with cups of water from the tiny hot water heater in our room, which was pretty tedious. So you see, the Yunnan trip had its downsides.

We took a day trip to visit Donglianhua Village, home to the Muslim Hui people, and a place of historic significance in China's Tea and Horse trade during the early 20th century. We ate lunch in the courtyard of a villager's large, mansion-like house, and peeked at some of the mosques in the town.

Later in the evening, we participated in a "Three Course Tea" ceremony, a special custom of the Bai people. While musicians played some traditional Chinese instruments for us, we were served tea in three different courses; In a traditional Chinese tea ceremony, the first course is original tea, which is made from rice and tastes a little bitter. The second course is sweet, with honey and walnut pieces in it, and the third course contains two or three Chinese spices, which makes it very strong and gives the tea a lingering aftertaste. According to Bai tradition, the tea is supposed to symbolize the process of life: bitterness, sweetness, and lingering memory.

We were back on the road the next morning heading for Shaxi Valley. We stopped for lunch at the town of Dali, a touristy town famous for its "Foreigners' Street," where tons of Western restaraunts and shops were located. After days of new (and sometimes strange) village food, it was definitely a comfort to just get a grilled cheese and some french fries, inauthentic as that may sound. We also got cheesecake at a bakery nearby...

A jewelry stall in Dali

Four hours later, we arrived in Shaxi Old Town, where we would spend the night in guesthouses. Shaxi was another small town, and it didn't take long for us to traverse the whole of it. We ate dinner at a little tavern-like place tucked into a corner of the town and played cards while we waited for our food. In the evening, we were treated to a music performance at one of the guesthouses by some Bai villagers. The Bai people are one of the most popular minorities in Yunnan and they are especially well known for their folk music. What's particularly interesting about their music is that much of it is impromptu - two singers will perform with each other, each making up lyrics to tell a story, and they will go back and forth adding verses as they go. The performers tried to get us involved by singing a verse and then asking us to come up with the next one, but our clumsily translated English verses couldn't compare to the performers', which, even in another language sounded poetic and flowing. Some of the songs they performed were love ballads, and apparently a term of endearment in their language translates to "my little heart and liver." Strange, but it sounded good in their language.

After the performance, we had some time before we had to return to the guesthouses for curfew, and a few of us wandered down to the outskirts of the town and sat on the little stone bridge crossing the river there and did some stargazing. I never got tired of just staring at the stars in the little towns and villages; the skies at night were honestly like nothing I'd ever seen before, just covered in stars. It became one of my favorite details of the trip. When we went back to the guesthouses for bedtime, I was ecstatic to find that I had been given an electric blanket to sleep with, so I spent a cozy night at the guesthouse, and was ready to go the next morning as we prepared to continue our journey north to Tibet.

 Isn't he cute?