Oh The Places We'll Go

China doesn't stagger holidays. Instead China condenses days off and gives the entire country the week of the National Holiday off. Oh yes, 1.3 billion people get the same one week off, and nobody wants to be where they are. Since just about everyone who lives in Beijing is actually from the countryside and came to the city to work or study, during the National Holiday they are all rearing to leave the smog and chaos of Beijing behind for a few too-short days. Not knowing any of this, I decided to leave making travel plans until the week before the holiday. No train tickets. No flights. No magic carpets. Then Vivian, a Chinese ICB student, kindly offered to take us to the national travel agency and translate. After walking to four different branches of the ludicrous establishment that is a Chinese travel agency we found a trip. A 26 hour overnight train ride sounds pretty good when your alternative is wasting the only multi-day trip opportunity you have during a semester in China. Now the story gets interesting.

We found a wonderful trip to Hunan Province - revered for its scenery and spicy cuisine - that would take six days and hit everywhere a sight-seeing tourist could ever want to see. The day of the trip Jacob and I are out in Beijing searching by bike for our favorite dumpling street vendor when Peace gives us a call. "There are two Chinese ladies calling me over and over, shouting at me in Mandarin, and then saying they will meet us at our train in one minute!", she exclaims. But our train doesn't leave until 4pm we tell her, and it isn't even 11am. So we go back to our dorm, take her phone into our room and start calling anyone who can translate, negotiate, or understand what these damn women are shouting about. After an hour off prodding we learn that the travel agency sent the wrong itinerary. We received the information for train K987, but our train was in fact K687, and by then it was 45 minutes outside of Beijing with five empty beds in it. So the girls went back to their room and cried themselves to sleep, I think Jacob went to eat his anger at the cafeteria, and I watched Glengarry Glen Ross in complete dejection. Eventually though the agency called us back and told us that they had found us tickets on a new train leaving the next day to Hunan. So the next day we get to the train station three hours early. The travel agency is due to meet us in one hour to give us our train tickets. So we play poker for an hour and a half until we start to get very anxious. By two hours we start calling anyone we can think of. By two hours and ten minutes we find our contact, who is a 15 year old girl being given instructions over the phone by our travel agent. By two hours and twenty minutes we finally have our tickets and get into line. At two hours thirty minutes we learn that our ticket number and passport number do not match and we may not enter the train station. We descend a level and stand with three more equally young 'representatives' off the agency. At two hours forty minutes we are considering scribbling our passport number on the tickets in Sharpie. Two hours fifty minutes we running full sprint through the station led by a boy on a phone. We stop in a holding area, see the boy pull a guard aside, and then get let through a guard gate in plain view of 100 milling Beijingers. We climb an empty set of stairs to our train and the boy now pulls aside the guard at the train door. At two hours fifty five minutes we are on the train, on our bunk beds, in a whirl of frustration and relief and gratitude. Who knows what favors, money, or threats exchanged hands.

We spent the first few hours entertained with Nancy's Vietnamese card game and swapping iPods, but trains get boring fast no matter what you do. Two bays of bunks down the train a family of men are eating meat from a bag and playing cards while the women watch over their shoulder. Eventually they invite us over - to play cards, right? Oh no, it was firewater time. Since Jacob is the only one with Mandarin experience but drinking is pretty universal, we all learned GanBei! within the first week. Unfortunately GanBei isn't take a drink, it's finish your drink. So we passed the next hour eating donkey meat from a bag and trying to avoid being the next one to take a shot of the Chinese national pastime.

Upon arrival in Chang Sa, the capital of Hunan Province, we find our tour group and learned that our fluently English speaking guide does not in fact speak a word of English. This turned out to be a blessing though, because we befriended every single person on our tour bus who spoke English and thus met some of the warmest, kindest, most giving strangers I have ever known, in Beijing or not. These were the sort of people I wish were my countrymen, just to get to be proud of my country. And now here is the trip itself, in pictures:

Photo Credit for almost every picture in Hunan goes to Jacob Clark!

http://fishing4dragons.blogspot.com/

And the rest goes to Alex Engau, an ICB mathematics professor.

The Beijing Zoo & Great Wall shots are mine - iPhoneography is just grand.

Hunan street food. Pig face, bat, whole crab, fish, chicken heads, and of course, peppers.

Mists of Zhangjiajie National Forest.

Green lake of the Emperor's temple.

Apparently the mountains of Zhangjiajie are one of the areas that inspired the Hallelujah mountains in the movie Avatar. In that mist it wasn't hard to believe. I kept waiting for my banshee to arrive but it must have taken a wrong turn.

The lights of Phoenix Old Town south of Zhangjiajie City.

We started the climb into Zhangjiajie National Forest at 5am. The mist and the silence in that forest was like nothing I have ever felt, even in the most perfect Rocky Mountain morning.

We made lots of new Beijing friends! That is Guo and Clydia on the left, then Alex who is an ICB mathematics teacher and professor of optimization, then Nancy, Peace, me, and Jacob, my roommate. It was a pretty good gang.

The last day Alex and I took a sunrise walk into the hills surrounding Zhangjiajie City. We met basically subsistence farmers, we got charged by a skinny little pig, we got lost in a thicket of rose-like thorny vines, and we met fishermen fishing six poles at a time.

Since Hunan is famous for its spicy peppers I HAD to try one off the vine. I chocked, gagged, and suffered for 45 minutes.

Zhangjiajie is a river city. These fishermen were using lights, presumably to bring squid to the surface.

So there it is. My first exploration outside of Beijing. Not bad, not perfect, but an entirely wonderful time. The five of us bonded more on that trip than we might have in a year on campus. When you are five Americans in a sea of staring Chinese faces it isn't hard to find solidarity.

And when we came home we went to the zoo, the aquarium, and back to the Great Wall!

Pandas are entirely unimpressive.

Red Pandas are not. They are still the coolest.

Nancy and Simba!

I sat listening to these two Beluga Whales calling to each other and playing in their tiny little pen for at least half an hour.

When we stopped for lunch the local professional photographer was selling Great Wall wine. So we all walked crooked the rest of the way along the wall. But that's ok, it's hard to make a wrong turn up there.

Fall colors have arrived at the Wall!

There are Stars Above China

I went for a run tonight at about 10:15pm tonight which meant that the lights around the athletic track had already been turned off. When I got down to the end of the track near the foreigners dorm I saw that about 15 students were practicing diligently with nun-chucks. It was almost pitch black so I could barely even see their silhouettes, but I could hear them. Half a dozen pairs of metal nun-chucks whistling at once with the black-grey outlines of martial arts moves performed in incredible precision. Each student not practicing sat on one knee with both fists on the ground, silent, watching the others. The sound they made was rhythmic and beautiful. Eerily high notes and fast flurries of twirling, swooping melody carried their way all the way around the 1/4 mile track. Each lap I completed I watch them while I ran past, still disciplined, still focused completely on what they were doing.

Whatever else I can say about Chinese students, they are disciplined in a way I never seen American students anywhere. Of course it is partly government and military instilled, but it is also parental, cultural, peer-expected, and the result of 6,000 years of social discipline. I hadn't expected such a small detail as this to be so infectious, to stick so resoundingly in my mind. It gets into your bones. It makes you want to do every little task in your day singularly and mindfully. Every run should be the most conscious run I have ever completed. Every step taken in perfect stride, at perfect pace, in harmony. When I finished my run I laid down on the turf to rest. With the echoing notes still dancing around the air I noticed that Beijing's sky looked purple tonight, and that it was perfectly clear. The smog was gone and sitting there above my campus were the stars.

In due honor of the nun-chucks I tried to see the stars mindfully and completely. Laying on the turf it felt like a normal night in any city on any campus in the modern world. Students were going about their lives, exactly as we did in the States. Life progresses with all the same ebbs and flows here that it does for students at home. When the context of the social and governmental problems in China rollback, like the smog, even if only for a day, it isn't hard to see China's potential beyond them. A country filled with optimism, hope, confidence, and especially discipline. It isn't hard to see that there are stars above China, just like there above the rest of the world.

Photos from India

Smelly Delhi

Unfortunately I am back in New Delhi and missing the cool mountain air so much! I fell in love with Himachal Pradesh last week and I can’t wait to go back. After our week at Kayakalp we spent the night in Mcleodganj which is a tiny town tucked in away in the mountains near the border to China where the Tibetan government is in exile and the Dalai Lama lives. We had fun shopping and eating delicious tibetan food (momo’s!). Unfortunately I didn’t get to meet the dalai lama but I did see lots of lama’s (monks) and saw the huge Buddhist temple in town. I can’t wait to go back there during my independent study, Beth and I plan on spending the last 3 days or so hanging out in Mcleodganj. 

After leaving Mcleodganj the reality of India sunk in. At the Pathankot train station we were bombarded by the usual beggars who were relentless. People were taking pictures of us as if we were some sort of spectacle. I swear there must be so many pictures of me on random Indians phone. Usually I don’t let it get to me but the way they were doing it at the train station and the fact that we couldn’t escape it was very upsetting. In the train after a lively debate about the validity of Ayurveda between Archna Ji and Paul Ji we went to sleep in the sleeper train. Luck for me across the way was a snoring Indian man. I didn’t get any sleep and was exhausted by the time we reached Delhi. Arriving in Delhi was even more hectic, at 6am Old Delhi was swarming with people and we were again bombarded by rickshaw drivers attempting to charge too much to drive me home. The air pollution was so much more visible after a week in the mountains, it was even a little difficult to breathe.
Needless to say I am so glad I chose to go back to Kayakalp for my independent study. I connected with the two Ayurvedic doctors there and look forward to working with them. My research topic is essentially perceptions of Ayurveda. I want to explore why people choose to use Ayurveda and other traditional systems of medicine when they have so many options in India.  Part of my field study is going to be participant observation and I will get treated by the Panch Karma department. I will be detoxified and treated for weight loss during the first couple weeks I am there, not only for the health benefits but also to understand exactly how the treatments are working and how they make a patient feel. This experience will help me to identify with the patients and improve my relationship with the doctors. I can’t wait to go back to Kayakalp where I can do yoga and meditation every day and get a massage or shirodhara whenever  I want.
These next two weeks are very hectic academically. I have 2 papers, and a presentation this week. And next week I have another two papers, two hindi exams and a hindi project due. I have to finish a lot of background research about Panch Karma and Ayurveda before I return to Kayakalp. There is a light at the end of the tunnel and it is full of fresh air and majestic mountains.
Namaste!

You Enjoy Life More When in a Foreign Country

It's only been a day and I've been out from dusk until dawn. I live in a hostel and even the other people living here are out all day. I remember back home I would mindlessly surf the web and read Facebook updates for hours. But I've realized one thing while staying here...

You enjoy the abundance of life more~~~
That is if you already haven't before~~

My week is absolutely booked! I'm at a point where I can't see myself slowing down at this point because I am having such a blast here! And you will too, once start preparing for the experience of your life!

Post from CU Denver Student Lateefah Young
Source: internationalbliss.blogspot.com

rajasthani dancer and picture of a house in the first village we visited

 

And Back Again

This is part 2 of my update related to my week long travel through Hunan province. Let's start off with some pictures of my favorite place, Phoenix Old Town (Fenghuang). I described it a little in the previous post.

Busy street in Fenghuang, many of the shop owners live in apartments built right on top of their shops.

Fenghuang canal at night.

We ducked under here to get out of the rain, and had some of Hunan's famed spicy food.

Fenghuang is the Chinese word for Phoenix. This is the statue in the middle of the main square.

Thought the visit was brief, I fell in love with the place. I'll be back for a more thorough exploration the first chance I get. After we departed the Phoenix Old Town, the next stop for us was the main attraction of the trip, ZhangJiaJie. Famed for its unique mountainous landscape of steep towers of rock, which was one of the locations of the world that inspired the design of the floating mountain region in James Cameron’s Avatar. We started at 5am to get there early and beat the crowds, and the first several hours climbing up to the top were sublime. However once we got to the top of the hike around noon, all of the tourists who took the busses to the top were their to meet us and it quickly became a storm of people, bargaining, and unfortunately trash was sprawled all over the area. Despite all of this, the place was beautiful and I believe that if it weren’t the National Holiday, the place wouldn’t be such a zoo. We ended the day by taking the world’s largest outdoor elevator from the top of one of those rock towers down to its base. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures of the elevator or the amazing place it spit us out at, because of both the rain and the rush we were in at that point. 

The ZhangJiaJie landscape

The final stop for us was a Traditional Chinese museum, and an art museum that specialized in paintings made of sand, which were phenomenal. If there was one thing that never ceases to amaze me in China, it's their beautiful and variant forms of art. And their food. So that makes two things.

Another example of a preserved traditional chinese area, with industrialization happening right outside its walls.

This whole thing was within a frame. The tools, stone, and wooden doors were built onto the canvas with the painting in middle, made of sand adhered to the canvas. The red tags on the door read "long live the Communist Party and Chairman Mao"

You can see the texture that the sand creates on the dome

Once again, made entirely of colored sand. Pretty unreal huh?

That was the conclusion of the trip with the tour group. We stayed one extra day in the city of ZhangJiaJie while the rest of the group went back home via train. During that day we walked the city streets and generally took it easy. I ate bat on a skewer, which was delicious. I felt attached to many of the people I traveled with after the week I had spent with them in Hunan province, talking about China and life here. Some I could even call friends. During my time in China I've met so many kind people, with seemingly infinite patience in teaching me their language and culture, and an easy going willingness to help in any way they can.

3 Chinese children I got to know along the trip. All 3 of them are learning English as a second language, and at 7 years old can speak it very well.

My buddy Kevin, son of Rambo.

Heading back home was a 26 hour train ride. As usual we made conversation easily with the Chinese people near our bunks. Some spoke great english, some spoke none at all and our interactions were done through simple Mandarin, friendly gestures, and card games. I learned much during this last week, about traveling within China and about the people of this country. I have positive impressions of both, and look forward to my next trip.