BMW

In China, BMW stands for a very important piece of advice. 别摸我. This means biè mō wǒ, or don't touch me. So when Chinese people see a flashy new car gliding down the crowded, noisy streets of Beijing, not only do those three letters tell them that the Chinese person driving that vehicle is wealthy, successful, and high class, BMW also reminds them not to bang on the hood of the car when that driver nudges their leg gently with his front tire to get them out of the way, or to run into the passenger car door with their bicycle.

Driving is one of the crazier endeavours in China. I have a bicycle here, and in two and a half months I have already been clipped by a motorcycle (luckily the only part of me or the bike that suffered was the spring on my kickstand), almost side swiped by a double decker bus, and honked at by at least fourteen taxi drivers who have hopped into the bike lane to jump the traffic jams. Chinese people are some of the worst drivers I've ever seen, but I've definitely learned to stay on your toes. The roads in Beijing are being widened and relined to make way for the increasing number of car owners on the road in China, and the former main form of transportation, bicycles, are having to take a back seat. Don't get me wrong - there is still a huge bicycle culture in China - there are thousands and thousands of beaten up, rusty bikes lining the roads of Beijing University to prove it. However, with more cars, taxis, and buses on the road, the air in an already polluted city seems a little thicker around rush hour times, and the roads are a lot more dangerous.

It was a day with Beijing-style traffic on Saturday when 40 of us international students climbed onto a long distance bus to go to an old town called Cuandixia. It was a two and a half hour bus ride there, and I was planning on doing some reading and taking a nap on the way, but there was no chance of that happening. Why you might ask? Our bus driver was a psycho. This is the kind of man that wanted to be a race car driver as a child and ended up being a bus driver by accident. Through the city he leaned on his horn for minutes at a time, yelling and swearing at the gridlocked cars around him. But it was through the mountains that we experienced him at his best.

The mountains and hills that surround Beijing have very small roads that wind around the cliffs with very few guard rails and narrow lanes. This didn't phase our trusty bus driver though. He swerved angrily around horse-driven buggies and slow moving vehicles, daringly made hairpin turns around roads on sharp precipices, all while smoking a cigarette and spitting casually out the window. I tried to read, but after a couple minutes felt extremely nauseous. A couple girls had their heads between their knees and the boys had their faces pressed up against the window, looking down at the drop our bus would fall down if our driver made one wrong turn. The exciting parts were when he would drive down the wrong side of the road for minutes at a time, content to just pass by five or six cars and trucks at a time, until at the last moment he needed to move back into the right side of the road to narrowly avoid killing the innocent driver heading straight at us.

It seemed he wasn't the only crazy driver. About twenty minutes away from Cuandixia we were all looking pretty green and clammy, but all of a sudden the car in front of our bus started swerving back and forth for what seemed like no reason. The car and the bus were winding through the mountains when the driver rolled down the window, still swerving back and forth on the road, and began projectile vomiting out her window. Our bus driver, funny enough, started swerving to avoid the vomit in the road and so our bus and her car became perfected in sync, gracefully curving back and forth through both lanes while she vomited for five minutes straight and our bus driver put out his cigarette and rolled up his window to avoid any stray spray. Talk about motion sickness. Finally, the women decided that she should pull over, and we saw the other reason why she was swerving besides to try to projectile vomit out the window. She had already puked all over her windshield, and couldn't see through it at all.

If that wasn't gross enough (and we all watched in horror like a slow motion car wreck), when we finally arrived in Cuandixia, three people jumped off the bus and threw up in some poor farmer's wicker baskets outside his hut from the motion sickness. After this fiasco, the rest of us all herded off the bus, avoiding the wicker baskets and the three sick students, and headed toward the village, glad to be free of the bus and our driver.
Cuandixia is a small village in the mountains, once a stopover on the journey between the Forbidden City and Shanxi province. It used to be the goat supplier for the Forbidden City and the Emperor, but now is well out of the way of the highways directly linking Beijing to Shanxi, and has become a little known tourist attraction. The town is 400 years old, and is built mostly out of stone on the side of a mountain. The whole town is nestled into a valley, and the townspeople there all offer rooms for rent and hearty meals. The people there make money for living their lives just as they would without visitors, so they nap, grind grain, shell nuts, and cook meals all with smiles on their faces for tourists' cameras. But it does not seem touristy or fabricated at all there. Wandering through the small lanes and alleways, seeing the colorful doorways and screens, and exploring the courtyard style quadrangle homes that were so typical of successful families in the Ming and Qing eras is really like travelling back in time.
After walking through the town for about an hour, my friend Georgette and I decided to go exploring in the area around the town. We headed up a path through the hills, and found a small holding pen. Inside, to our delight, were four baby goats. They were less than happy to see us as we snuck inside their pen to pet them (and potentially get whatever diseases they were carrying), but they were so small and cute. It is interesting that we got to see some goats, because Cuandixia was known as "Goat Heaven" during the Qing Dynasty.
Then, of course, I found a mountain to climb, and Georgette sunbathed while I climbed up in search of a good spot to photograph the town from above. I wandered through what seemed like trails up to a peak, got some pictures, and met Georgette on the way down. Until the 20th century, only the descendants of one family lived here, the Han family. Each member of the family had a specific responsibility in handling the businessmen and travellers that stopped in the village. They sold nuts, goats, mountain crops, and honey. I almost got to know the honey making business intimately when I stomped loudly through a dozen man-made beehives sitting inconspicuously on top of a hill. Luckily the bees were not too interested in me.

After buying some almonds from a local woman, I headed back to the bus with the rest of my group, hoping for a slightly more pleasant ride back. Luckily, one of my professors gave the bus driver a stern scolding, and the ride back to Beijing was smooth sailing and went by a lot faster.
As for sight seeing and interesting things in China, Cuandixia is about all I did. I had a pretty nasty sinus infection, so I stayed home and slept a lot, and did homework. It was nice to get the extra rest, as I have a big trip next weekend!