Longsheng

Our next stop was Longsheng, which is really a mountain region in the Guangxi province about 90 km north of Guilin. When we flew into Guilin from Chengdu, we had to spend one night in Guilin. We ended up staying in this snazzy looking hotel in the center of the city, but once we moved into our rooms we realized it was only an upscale hotel to sleezy businessmen and their young asian girlfriends and prostitutes. I won't go into details on the products available for complementary use and purchase in the hotel rooms - this is a PG rated blog : ), but needless to say, as soon as the boys found the hotel contraband available in the hotel bathrooms, they were running up and down the halls with them, and they stocked up on dirty joke fodder for the rest of the trip.

The next morning us girls endured the boys' dirty jokes on a three hour bus ride north through green karst mountains, on bumpy back roads and winding curves until finally our bus came to an abrupt stop. We were then instructed to sit with our luggage in our laps on a smaller bus with a crazy bus driver. Thus began a harrowing journey through steep cliffs and sharp curves for another thirty minutes. And finally, with our rolling suitcases and backpacks, we were told that we needed to hike thirty minutes through the mountains to the hotel.

I was in my glory! All I had was a backpack so I was ready to hike at a moment's notice, but many of the people in our group had heavy rolling suitcases (mostly girls who packed too much and boys who decided to purchase lifesize terracotta statues in Xi'an.) The air was humid and it is rainy season in the Guangxi province, so the stone steps through the mountains were slippery. Longji, the part of Longsheng that we were staying in, is famous for its painstakingly carved rice terraces. The terraces are carved to look just like a contour map, and the Zhuang people, famous for their colorful clothing, have spent centuries keeping the rice terraces and developing an extensive all natural irrigation system through the terraces.

The Yangtze River Adventure Team were reunited again, and Cara, Jay, Richie and I took the lead in hiking blindly up the mountains to look for our hotel. Wet and sweaty (and probably smelly), everyone survived the hike through Zhuang-built wooden houses and hotels to the very top of the mountain, where our beautiful wooden hotel was conveniently located. The view was amazing, and even though we were all soaked from the humid air and the hike, we were given boiling water (Chinese people believe that warm liquid is better for your health even in hot weather) and encouraged to explore.
We set out to explore the rest of the mountaintop and admire the rice terraces, and we spent the rest of the afternoon climbing over narrow dirt paths, crossing log bridges, and looking out over the mountains.
We got to the top, and found a hotel with a large cement patio in front and steep steps leading down to the rice terraces. Cara and I decided we would pay homage to my Grandpa and pretend like we were hanging off of the patio. We weren't very good at the trick.

As the sky got darker, we saw a farmer working on his rice patties, and I decided that I wanted to meet him. Jay, Georgette and I walked over to where he was washing his feet in a stream, and I held out my hand to shake his. I asked him in Mandarin whether I could take a picture with him, and he didn't understand because he only speaks Cantonese. Even though he didn't understand me, he took off his hat and handed it to me to try on. Jay handed the farmer his own hat, and we all got some pictures with him.
The next day, we were encouraged to wander off and explore the neighboring villages in the mountains. I headed out by myself in the morning, hoping I would get to talk to some people. I got my wish, after wandering through the rice terraces and down into a valley, I came across a Zhuang woman weaving a pink scarf outside her home. I asked if I could sit and watch her for a while, and she immediately got me a stool and started chatting with me. She and I both spoke a little Mandarin, so I was able to ask her a little bit about the scarf she was making, and she was able to exclaim over and over how she thought I should be wearing more clothes in the rainy weather. Then she offered to let me try to work her loom, and showed me how to thread the material. I did about ten rows on the scarf, and then she finished it for me. I bought it from her for about $1.50, and she gave me a little embroidered pouch as a gift. My favorite moment was when I asked her if I could take a picture of her, and she got so excited. She asked me to wait a moment while she took off her overcoat to show me her beautifully embroidered clothes.
I met one more woman when she called to me from the second floor of her house and told me to come up and sit with her for a while. By that time it had started raining pretty hard, and I was wearing shorts and a tank top. She was like a fussy mother over me by the time I reached out to shake her hand. She slapped my shoulders and told me I was soaking wet, and she ran downstairs out of sight for a while. I sat down on a stool and she came running back upstairs with tissues and started wiping my arms and legs off, dabbing my face and patting my cheeks with these tissues, as if that would make me dry again. Then she demanded to know whether or not I was hungry, and without waiting for an answer, ran back downstairs and up again with a cucumber. So I sat there, chatting with her, and munching on a whole cucumber while she showed me the waistband she was working on. She was such a funny lady, and I couldn't figure out how to tell her I wasn't cold and I had planned on getting wet, so every time she told me I needed more clothes for the rain, I just told her I was "crazy, a crazy American."

Later I met up with the rest of the group and we explored the villages, walking into shops selling scarves and clothes, and drinking soda and eating noodles on mountainside restaurants.
Later that night, the hotel we were staying in, and in which we were the only guests, set up a dance party for us in the lobby. We were goofing off outside on the porch when two Zhuang women showed up in their colorful garb. They wanted to learn how to dance! They were so happy to be there, just watching us and trying to copy whatever we did.

Our time in Longsheng was very relaxing and the rice terraces were amazing. Despite the long hike through pouring rain back down the mountain in the morning, we all had a great time and loved the beautiful views and the friendly people.

Chengdu

The third stop for our end of semester trip was in Chengdu, a city famous for one thing and one thing only: pandas. This is not really true - Chengdu is a gateway for people traveling to Tibet and has great food, but because the Woolong Panda Reserve and the Chengdu Panda Research Center are located in the city, China's favorite furry friends are what most visitors to Chengdu come to see.
Our program made the trip out to the Chengdu Panda Research Center in the morning, and the day was not the most beautiful. It was cloudy, and it was drizzling when we left. However, this turned out to be a good thing, because it was cloudy weather the pandas all came out in the cool air. There were so many pandas, at all ages. Many people don't know that there are two different kinds of pandas - Red Pandas and Giant Pandas. Red Pandas look more like raccoons.

After exploring some of the habitats, Georgette, Molly, Cara and I decided that we each wanted to hold a red panda. The cost to hold a red panda is 100 Yuan, or about 15 dollars. We head over to the red panda breeding center, and they dressed us in plastic gloves and blue hospital gowns, and had us sit in a chair. I gave my camera to Jon so he could capture all the magic. Imagine my surprise when a very adorable baby red panda was placed into my lap, chewing on apples and seeming very unconcerned with where he was.
We each took turns holding him and petting him, and he never seemed upset or scared, he just kept eating his apple and staring straight at the camera. Jon decided that a red panda was not good enough for him. He wanted to hold a baby giant panda, which costs 1000 yuan, or 150 dollars. Luckily, out of our group, he chose me (for my camera) to be the one person who got to go in with him. It was the most amazing experience ever. Jon also had to wear the hospital gown and the plastic gloves, but we both had to wear blue booties over our shoes. They make us wear these to protect our clothes and to protect the baby panda from our scent.

When they brought the panda in, he looked like a marshmallow. He was sleepily slumped over the researcher's shoulder almost like a towel. He looked like he weighed about 40 pounds, and he was totally adorable. Jon was in his glory, holding the panda's paws and petting his head. The baby was so sleepy he just stared up at Jon and out at the camera, a little dazed.
After the baby panda adventure, Georgette, Molly, and I went out to look for more pandas. We hit the jackpot when we found four pandas munching on bamboo conveniently close to where we were standing. We took lots of pictures, and watched them play with each other for awhile.
The next day, 17 of us woke up and checked out of our hotel at 6:30 am, earlier than the rest of our group. We left our luggage at the hotel and boarded a bus to Leshan, a town about two hours north of Chengdu. We were determined to see the biggest sitting Buddha in the world before we left Chengdu, even though it was not organized by the program. The biggest sitting Buddha in the world, Dafo, is located outside the town of Leshan.

Dafo was built on the side of a river in 713 AD. A Chinese monk named Haitong decided that, if they built a Maitreya Buddha on the side of the river, the turbulent waters would calm and ships and fishing boats would be able to pass through unharmed. As the buddha was under construction, temples began springing up around the site, and villages moved closer in order to enjoy the benefits of such a big buddha. Haitong's idea worked, and all the rubble and stone removed from carving Dafo was tossed into the river, lessening the strong current and making the river sailable. The buddha took 90 years to complete, and the monk Haitong actually gouged out his own eye when Chinese officials threatened to pull funding for the project in order to show his sincerity. Consequently, there are Buddhist temples, Haitong's burial site, and memorials to Haitong dotting the area.

We explored the hills surrounding Dafo, and finally made it down the winding and steep stone steps to the base of his statue. His big toe is large enough for six people to stand on it, and his ear is 7 meters high. The area also includes a park commerorating the many different styles of sculpting Buddha, with originals and recreations of Indian and Chinese Buddhas. The park surrounds another giant Buddha, the gigantic Sleeping Buddha, which stretches across a rock face over several mountains. This one is not as famous as Dafo, as it has eroded quite a bit.

My favorite part of the park was an old fishing village that has been reconstructed in the shape of a boat. The men and women still fish for a living, and they displayed their live fish and turtles in buckets for prospective visitors. We decided, from looking at the quality of the river they were fishing from, that we were not that hungry.

We also visited many burial tombs, complete with stone carved dogs and horses, clay pots and beds. This used to be the biggest fashion for burying family members, and caves are quite deep. There I am sitting in somebody's previously final resting place.
While I was being disrespectful and picking a smaller reconstruction of Dafo's nose in a cave, I made a new friend who was not as happy about me being there as I obviously was. If you look closely at the second picture, you can see him on the right side of Dafo's neck.

Xi'an

Our first day in Xi’an, we went to a lecture on the Qin Dynasty. The professor was from China Normal University, which is a very prestigious school, and he only spoke Chinese, so one of our professors translated for us.

After the lecture, we went to a restaurant to taste some of Xi'an's finest. Xi'an is famous for its dumplings, or as we call them jiaozi, and we were brought 18 different kinds of dumplings in round steamed crates that stack on top of each other. There were dumplings with pork and chives, steak and onions, and odd ones like eggs and catsup. Each one was amazing, and I was stuffed once I had sampled all 18 of the different dumplings.

To burn off all that jiaozi, we went to Xi’an’s city wall. Xi’an is one of the only cities in China with a city wall that is almost fully intact. It is also the only city in China that will let you rent a bike and ride along the top of the wall for as long as you like. The top of the wall is about the size of a normal road on the street, so Cara and I, Jon and Jill, and Georgette and Molly rode on tandem bikes while Aaron and Richie both rode singles. We spent a half an hour racing up and down the wall, illuminated by red lanterns and city lights all around us. It was very beautiful, and probably the most fun I’ve had on the trip so far. And of course I had to freak out my professors and climb on the edge of wall, just to keep them on their toes.

The next morning, we woke up early to visit the Terracotta Soldiers. An army of eight thousand soldiers were constructed to surround the tomb of Qin Shi Huangdi during the Qin dynasty. They date from 210 BCE, and were only discovered in 1974 by some farmers. Every single soldier, each of the 130 chariots and 520 horses are different, with different facial features and adornments. The majority of the soldiers are still buried to protect them from air contamination, but about 1,000 of them are on display. It was overwhelming to imagine that each soldier was individually constructed and worked on, and the faces and positions were not created by simply filling a mold. This is one of the sites that is firmly on the tourist line, so we saw more white people than usual.

In the afternoon, we visited the Great Mosque in Xi’an and spent some time in the Muslim quarter, shopping and talking to Hui people, who make up the Muslim minority in China. The mosque was very beautiful and very distinct from both Middle Eastern mosques and Chinese temples, with colorful gardens everywhere. The shops and stands had cheap souvenirs, and reminded me of a more laid back silk market experience – they even sold North Face jackets and fake Pumas.

Luoyang

After a week of final papers, Chinese exams, and recovering from late nights and our very full day in Datong, it was time to pack our bags and prepare to leave Beijing. I packed my whole room, moved the suitcases into a designated hotel room and took my backpacker’s backpack and my laptop and boarded a train with 24 other people in my program. We were beginning a two week long trip that stops in Luoyang, Xi’an, Chengdu, Guiling, Yangshou, and Long Sheng.

I am, as we speak, on a train from Luoyang to Xi’an, recounting my exploits in our first city. Luoyang was very interesting, and as I mentioned in my entry about Datong, it was the second capital of the Northern Wei Dynasty after they left Datong. The first place we visited was the Shaolin Temple, the place were Kung Fu originated. Kung Fu is much more interesting than I every imagined, and I have learned a lot more about it since I came to China. The martial arts form began as an effort of the Shaolin monks to counteract the hours upon hours they spent in meditation with meditative exercises. They would study the way animals moved when trying to defend themselves or stalking prey, and they would spend hours hopping around like frogs or trying to imitate the way a leopard sprints on all fours. Watching the monks do some of their moves, it’s easy to see some of the animalistic origins of their movements.

These activities force them to be extremely flexible, and they are just as creative and talented as the acrobats I saw with my mom. They train for twenty years to achieve proficiency in Kung Fu, and they strengthen their body by punching hundreds of pieces of paper glued together on a wall. Eventually, the paper wears away, and they punch the wall. You can see people who are training in Kung Fu hitting their heads repeatedly against walls and trees. The end result is that they can break steel blades and pieces of metal with their foreheads. We got a chance to watch the Shaolin Monks perform some of their coolest feats.

Wandering the grounds of the Shaolin Temple, we saw a huge flock of white birds, and my friend Richie and I both bought some bird feed. The birds climbed all over us, trying to get the food we had, and at one point I had five white birds on my arms. It was crazy!

The one thing I was hoping to see but did not get to was Drunken Boxing. The monks get one monk drunk and study how the monk reacts to an aggressor. Because he is already a very good fighter, his reactions are still generally successful at avoiding the blows of the aggressor, but he is loose and more flexible. The monks study the movements and try to imitate them, and the end result is that they are able to fight sober fighters by avoiding each punch or stab by fluidly moving their bodies, bending at weird angles, and avoiding the hard, jerking movements of how they would move as a sober fighter. I saw Jet Li do it once, and I thought it was pretty cool.

However, for my brother, I picked up some weapons so that he can stop going back to the Asian Wonders store, which is a store that apparently sells Asian martial arts weapons but sounds like a brothel and totally irks me. I did try out the weapons on some of my friends, and an all out battle ensued.

The next place we visited was the White Horse Temple. This is one of the first Buddhist temples in China, and is still an active place of worship. The monks there adhere to a very simple life, and spend most of their days in worship and monitoring guests, though I swear I saw one of them talking on a cell phone. The temple complex is beautiful, and the monks grow exquisite flower gardens and fields of crops for self sustainment. I made friends with a few of them when I bought a purse (I didn’t bring one with me on the trip) and was able to answer their questions about Beijing in Chinese.

Our next day in Luoyang, we visited the Longmen Grottoes, which is a bigger version of the Yungang grottoes in Datong. The caves were very similar, mainly because they were built by the same people, just in a different location. We weren’t allowed to enter these caves, and we could only take pictures of the large sandstone Buddhas from outside fences, but I snuck over one fence and pretended to be a Buddha successfully, without getting in trouble. While I was more impressed with Datong’s caves, the location of the Longmen Grottoes was really beautiful, with the Yi River running past the caves and more greenery and gardens in the area. We spent three hours wandering the grounds, exploring the caves, and visiting a temple.

That afternoon, in search of something to do, a group of us headed over to a park we could all see from our hotel windows. We could see a Ferris Wheel there, and we decided it was worth a visit. The park turned out to be a zoo and an amusement park rolled into one. We all got into bumper cars and spent the next fifteen minutes ramming into each other. Then Heidi, Jon, Aaron, and Richie had a go-cart race, and Gill, me, Aaron, Jay, Georgette, and Cara rode a Chinese roller coaster. This roller coaster went upside down twice, was incredibly rickety, and my seat restraint that came down over my shoulders wouldn’t stay down by itself; the attendant wrapped a seat belt through the middle and fastened it to me. But I survived, and I get to say I rode a roller coaster in China.

The other part of the park was very upsetting. Lions and tigers paced back and forth in their tiny iron cages with no hope of proper care or exercise. The animals are poorly treated and have no where near enough room to move around or really do anything. Hundreds of birds are crammed into aviary cages, and grizzly and black bears loll around in small cages with filthy, polluted water. It reminds me that China has no animal rights policies except pertaining to Great Pandas, and the animals in China, whether they are domestic or wild, are treated with great disrespect and neglect.

That night we decided we’d like to all stay in and relax, and a group of five set out to get pizza from Pizza Hut armed with everyone’s money. We ordered four pizzas, and went out to wait outside for the pizzas to be made. The hostess came rushing out to tell us something, and Molly and I leaned in to hear what she was trying to tell us. She didn’t speak very much English, and Molly and I couldn’t really understand what she was telling us, but we were starting to believe she was saying that Pizza Hut had run out of pizzas. She kept pointing to our four different pizzas and telling us we could only have two. Meanwhile, a beggar decided that while we were arguing with the hostess and freaking out about the idea of Pizza Hut running out of pizzas, this would be an appropriate time to come over, push aside the hostess, and shake his bowl at us. Then, a woman walked by into McDonalds next door with a whole dead chicken. Finally the hostess gave up and showed us the picture of a stuffed crust pizza, and then told us we could only have two. She only meant that Pizza Hut had run out of the cheese used for stuffed crust, and we would have to get two stuffed crust and two normal pizzas. Whew, what a crazy 15 minutes of confusion and weirdness.