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?

The Tropical Village

Day 6 The Dai Village
Another 3 hours south by bus brought us right to the border of China and Myanmar, where we visited our third village, home of the Dai people. The Dai are considered to be quite similar to the Thai people of Thailand. They weren't officially part of China until it was considered a republic after 1911, and they're generally a pretty small group concentrated along the Mekong River. The village we stayed at was more touristy than the other villages (tourism is apparently a big source of income for them) but we were the only group actually staying the night, so it cleared out around the evening.

The village was like a tropical island, with palm trees lining the streets, airy bungalows on stilts, and bright colored flowers adorning pathways and shopping huts. There were also forests of banana trees surrounding the village. The bananas growing on the trees are covered in blue plastic bags to prevent them from ripening too soon, and to protect them from insects. The actual bananas were very small, only about a finger length long, but they were really sweet and more delicious than any other banana I've had before! The villagers would also slice the bananas lengthwise and fry them to make these banana chips which were also really good!

Welcome to the neighborhood

A woman weaving scarves

Banana trees!

The Dai village had some of the best and most fresh food I've had in China. Every meal we had white rice with eggs, fresh vegetables, melon, and even this type of salsa which was a bit spicy. Compared to some of the other villages where we had some strange looking dishes and unidentifiable meat, this was another appeal of the village.

In the afternoon we wandered down to the river at the border of the village, where literally right across the water was Myanmar. We saw the border markers, but stayed safely on the China side as we were told by our trip advisers.

Two countries in one picture!

The Dai people are Theravada Buddhists, and there were Buddhist shrines and a school right in the village. We visited one temple and met the abbot, a young man not much older than us. We sat on cushions on the floor and listened to him talk about Buddhism and his life in the monastery, which was quite interesting. Many of the monks were very young boys, and we learned that in the village, generally all young men spend some time in the monastery; however, they aren't obligated to stay a monk forever, and most return to regular village life. It's kind of like an additional form of schooling for them.

And the favorite monastery past-time? Ping-pong!

 

In the evening, another community party was held, with more singing and dancing and celebration for the Chinese New Year. Afterward, when we returned to our family's house, our little host sister invited us to watch her favorite Chinese TV show with her, some kind of imperial China fairytale adventure with special effects from the 80s and main characters with outrageous facial hair. We pointed at characters and asked their names ("Ta jiao shenme mingzi?"), tried to follow the kung-fu action-packed plot, and made up our own translations when we had no idea what was going on. And we laughed a lot, which is universal in any language.

 

We slept on soft pallets on the floor that night, and for once I didn't have to wear every item of clothing I brought to stay warm. We left the next morning, laden with bananas, and began our journey to the north.

Year of the Horse!

Day 5 Jinghong
After leaving the Hani village we had a long, long bus ride to our next destination, Jinghong, a city along the Lanchang River (also known as the Mekong). We crossed the Tropic of Cancer into Xishuangbanna, a tropical region of Yunnan, so we were wearing shorts and catching shade under palm trees when, back in Beijing, it was snowing for the first time all winter!

Tonight was Chinese New Year's Eve, and even before it was dark, the smell of firecraker smoke was in the air. Red Chinese lanterns glowed along every street, and the Chinese character for horse, "ma" was pasted all over town. We ate dinner at a restaurant along the river, where we traded conversation for a fireworks show once it got dark, and got free drinks from a group of Chinese students who wanted to repay us for agreeing to take a picture with them!

We wandered along the rocky beach alongside the river after dinner, waving around sparklers which we bought for a few yuan at a fireworks stand. In China, there are no regulations about fireworks, and you can casually buy a giant box, full of massive professional-grade fireworks from any number of stands around town. Luckily, most people seemed to stick with the wimpier kind of fireworks, and we only had to dodge the occaisional rogue firecraker.

Haha, just kidding Mom.

The new year commenced in one explosive, cacophonous moment at the stroke of midnight. Fireworks colored the sky in every direction, which we 'oohed' and 'aahed' over from the safety of a little park overlooking the river. China has no time zones, so it was kind of cool to think that the entire country was, at that moment, setting off fireworks and celebrating the beginning of the new year! We wished everyone "xinnian kuai le!" and headed back to our hotel an hour or so later, but the fireworks continued well through the night and even into the next morning!

 

Xinnian kuai le! Happy Chinese New Year!

We set off the next morning, New Year's Day, for our next village stay with the Dai people.

Don't Fall In!

Day 3 Jianshui

We shook the village dust off at our hotel in Jianshui, a small historical town which used to be a thriving trade center in Yunnan. These days, it's a little quieter and relatively tourist-free, so we stood out all the more as we wandered around the town, and I had several more pictures taken of me.

We saw the second largest Confucious Temple in China, built during the Yuan Dynasty in 1325. In the evening we wandered around Chaoyang tower, a three-tiered Ming-style gateway that used to mark the eastern entrance into the city. There were a lot of people in the square doing this exercise-type dancing which mainly consisted of simple arm movements in time to the music, and we laughingly joined in only to find ourselves surrounded by locals taking pictures of us five minutes later! We're just too conspicuous here in China!

The Confucian Temple

  

And the Chaoyang Tower

Day 4 The Hani Village

Alternating between hotels and homestays, our next stop was the village of the Hani people, 5 hours farther south. The Hani are a subgroup of the Akha people who can be found in Burma, Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand in addition to China. We went up, up, up into the mountains, where  the village was nestled among the incredibly terraced rice paddies, which made for some spectacular views.

 

 

The villagers met us with dancing and music and we ate lunch with our host families at their homes, which were scattered and squeezed in wherever they would fit along the mountainside. I stayed in a group with five other girls this time, and we had to work for our food and hike a dirt path a long way up to get to our house.

Our welcome parade

The Hani people speak their own dialect which is much different than Mandarin, but the children learn Mandarin in school, so we communicated with our family by speaking in English, then translating it to Chinese for the young girls in our family, which they translated into their language and back again. It felt like a game of telephone!

The little girls were 10 and 11 years old, and after lunch, they grabbed our hands and tugged us all the way to the rice terraces, which we wandered, climbed, and balanced on for the next two or three hours. This had to be one of my favorite moments of the entire trip. The scenery was absolutely, indescribably breathtaking. That is, it was when we were able to look around - balancing on the narrow edges of the terraces was no easy feat and I had to keep my eyes on the ground whenever I was walking in order to keep my balance. After I wobbled precariously a few times, one of the little girls firmly took my hand and began guiding me around. She was so worried I would fall, it was adorable! I spoke with her with my very limited Chinese, and she took to calling me "jie jie," which means "big sister" in Chinese, and which I thought was really sweet.

The balancing act

Trying sour candy!

After our hike among the rice paddies, we headed to a village house for dinner. They served us rice (surprise) and a lot of vegetable and meat dishes. They also insisted we try baijiu, which is the popular alcoholic beverage of Yunnan. It's 40-60% alcohol and it tastes like something that was fermented in a gas can for twenty years. I thought it was absolutely disgusting and tried to avoid it as much as possible, but sometimes the locals would serve it to us and then just stand there until we drank it!

During dinner the village women sang for us, and then someone brought out a guitar and we sang for them. We had another community party that night where more singing and dancing took place, and then we headed to our houses to sleep. We had to climb pretty high to get to our house, which was a little scary in the dark, but we managed. I didn't get much sleep that night, but the stars and the sunrise over the rice terraces made up for it! We left after breakfast and were on the road again, heading for the town of Jinghong where we would celebrate Chinese New Year's Eve!

Dinner time!

Welcome to Yunnan

I was 6000 feet up in the mountains and staring at the most beautiful stars I have ever seen in my life; far from the pollution and noise of Beijing and  high in the mountains of the Hani village, I had a million dollar view. Of course, the reason I was staring at the stars in the first place was because I happened to be sharing a rock-hard mattress with two other girls, which was too big for the tiny room we had been given to sleep in and as a result stuck out the door slightly, so I was basically sleeping out in the open and in the cold, which made it impossible to sleep at all. Thus, the star-gazing.

This was the Yunnan trip. There were so many absolutely incredible sights and experiences, but with these experiences came a near equal amount of challenges as well. While the trip was certainly one of the most incredible ones I've ever taken, it was also one of the most difficult. It was a far cry from the two weeks of hotels and islands of Greece, at least.

The Beijing Center arranges the Yunnan excursion as a highlight of the semester, and while it means two weeks off of classes, it's far from a vacation. We were thoroughly prepped for it via orientation sessions and reading assignments, and we're expected to complete a paper on it now that we're back, so the idea of the trip is really to teach us more about China up-close and personal.

Yunnan is a large province to the southwest of China, and it's home to more than a third of China's ethnic minorities, which we were studying and visiting during the trip. We did home-stays in five minority villages and visited an additional two more for a day apiece. It was a lot of driving and I was beginning to feel like a wandering nomad by the end of it! I'll give an account of the trip over the next few posts.

Coming in for a landing!

Day 1 Kunming
Our trip began in Kunming, known as the City of Eternal Spring because of its warm climate all year round. The beautiful weather was a huge contrast from the cold of Beijing, so we all gained a very favorable impression of Yunnan from the beginning! The city surrounds a lake where thousands of seagulls flock to every winter, and the entire area surrounding the lake is this beautiful park where just about everything was happening, from dancing and singing to elaborate cotton candy art. We passed the day exploring and window shopping, and stayed up late watching a Chinese movie in our hotel. So far so good right? Well the next day we departed for our first village, and things got interesting very quickly...

Seagull tourist season

(That umbrella is not for the sun)

The birds would snatch pieces of bread mid-air.

Day 2 The Yi Village
The next day, we drove five hours south of Kunming to get to the Yi village. The Yi people are the largest minority in Southwest China. The village we visited was relatively small, and the majority of the people living there were farmers, though in practically every village we visited the majority of the younger people go off to live and work in bigger cities.

Welcome to the Yi village

The villagers met us as we got off the bus with a big community lunch, after which we were handed off to our host families for the evening and given some time to walk around and explore. And so we explored. As we wandered around the village, we gathered a little parade of followers - young children who liked to call out "hello!" to us and then giggle and run off when we replied. We tripped over chickens and gawked at the giant bulls we saw hanging outside peoples' houses. Later that afternoon, we gathered in the basketball court (the village center) where the Yi village women demonstrated their traditional songs and dances for us and then gave us a chance to try. The Yi people are famous for their traditional "Dragon Dance" which involves the swinging around of a giant dragon.

They danced...

And we kinda sorta did something like that.

Afterwards, we climbed up to eat dinner on the rooftops. In the evening, there was a community party where the villagers did more singing and dancing for us, and then they asked us to perform for them! So we demonstrated our "traditional American dances," namely, the YMCA, Macarena, and Hokey Pokey!

A rooftop dinner

I made some friends!

After the community party, my host family invited myself and the two other girls I was staying with to eat with them, so we sat around a tiny little fire in their home and ate rice cakes dipped in sugar and drank hot water. It turns out the father of the family I was staying with was the head of the village, so we got the VIP treatment.

We slept in our own separate house in the village that night, though none of us really got much sleep thanks to the cold and what we think was a wild pig running around on the first floor...
We left the village the next morning and headed to our next destination, the town of Jianshui.

Back in Beijing

I am back from a two-week study trip in the Yunnan province of China! From hiking rice terraces, celebrating the Chinese New Year along the Mekong River, and staying in local houses in remote villages of China, I can definitely say it was an amazing and once-in-a-lifetime experience! But a half a month of traveling has definitely made me really glad to be back in Beijing again! I will try to update a lot over the next few days with details and pictures of the trip!