Advertisement
Published: September 28th 2005
The Chinese Must have Invented Stairs...At least on our Yangtze River cruise we climbed so so many of the darn things it was amazing! Up from the boat, up to the pagoda/temple. It seemed never ending.
Anyway, 'Ni Hao', that’s hello in Chinese if you haven’t figured that out already. Where to start, we both have a lot to say about our time here in China.
This is the most ‘foreign’ place that I have ever visited. Here they have a different language and of course they use a different alphabet than English. Fforget about reading anything in Chinese characters except maybe city names on a train schedule or man/woman on a toilet, or entrance/exit… hey, we are learning something! On top of that, the culture here is so different!
I’ll update you briefly on the past week or so. First, we have been moving around a LOT. We have covered some serious distance, from Beijing to Xian (12 hr train), Zian to Chongqing (pronounce this CHOUNG-ching, 14 hour train), then along the Yangtze, which the Chinese call Chang Jiang. This was a 3 night trip on a Chinese tour boat, sharing our 4 bed room with a Chinese woman and her daughter. The trip was some 250km and coupled with a nice little bus ride at the end we were way way East in Wuhan. We didn’t stay there, but took another night train down to the South to Guilin and then to a smallish, very touristy town called Yangshou. Here we plan to STAY PUT for awhile. Sleeping on a train is do-able, but not preferable. Sharing a room with other people, again do-able, but after awhile really difficult.
On our Yangtze cruise we also saw the 3 Gorges dam, part of an absolutely huge and somewhat controversial project that is flooding towns, covering historic sights, and hiding scenic gorges. Of course, it is also providing the power of something like 12 nuc plants. We toured the dam and it was lame lame lame (the tour I mean). The best part may have been the scripted 'war horses' show. You never know what you're going to see on these tours. It was all in Chinese anyway. Worst part of that tour, waiting on land until nearly 2 am for our boat to navigate the dam's locks. Ugh!
Anyway, we plan to poke around Yangshou here for perhaps 5 days or so. Landscape here is super pretty. It has been my observation that many of the scenic areas are scenic because of the limestone geomorphology. And, the guidebooks aren’t afraid to insert ‘limestone’ in front of most descriptions of hills/cliffs/islands. It is as if ‘limestone’ always conjurs up more scenic imagery in people’s minds?
Anyway, let me give you very quickly hopefully ‘bests’ and ‘worsts’:
WORSTS:
- The toilets. Bar none, this is the worst part of China. The toilets here are generally disgustingly dirty, non-traditional from a western perspective, and always coated in various liquids (water?) and solids. They have mostly squat toilets here. That is all public toiilets. Hotel toilets (in rooms) are standard western. You squat and you go. If it takes you awhile to go, your knees hurt. You may have to stand and stretch in the middle! Toilets on trains are the WORST! The train is moving, you are squatting (note, if you are a guy going ‘number one’ you don’t need to squat!), there is water everywhere, possibly slosshing, the person in front of you didn’t flush, you get the picture. In train and bus stations ‘going’ is a very public experience. You will see other people squatting and they will see you. Some of you probably have visited places with perhaps less comfortable conveniences than here, but believe me, China is the worst that I have seen. It sucks to be a woman here. Oh yes, forget about soap and definitely forget about drying your hands on anything. Also, forget about TP, bring your own! Oh yes, youngsters, babies mostly, have holes in their pant let them poop/pee without diapers. Kids squat and sh
- t, really, on trees and onto plastic bags just on the street!
- Hocking up loogies/coughing up phlegm. This is an older habit here and it is gross. The women do it, the men do it. I am trying to be understanding of other cultures, but it is hard. They’ll mostly spit in garbage cans or toilets, but basically they’ll hock anywhere.
- Volume/decibel level. It is LOUD here. I wish that you could here the loudspeakers/PA systems, I wish you could here the muzak version of ‘auld lang syne’ or a kenny G. song every morning to wake you up on a train or boat. There must be some kind of subliminal worker’s message in these recordings. Chinese is also a language of tones, so it really can’t be whispered all that easily. Still, it is amazing how loud a conversation can get, and if an out-right argumet or shoving-match breaks out (we’ve seen this several times), it’s like you’re on the floor of a commodities exchange.
- Getting oggled. Okay, I don’t have a problem with this, but really Sherry is having most of this problem. We are different lookig people and the men will just stare and look you up and down if you are a woman. It is not dangerous, but it really can get uncomforable. If you trave without a man, perhaps in a group of women. You will get asked to be in many many photos with Chinese people.
- No such thing as a queue. The Chinese are not familiar in anyway with so-called FIFO data structures. That stands for first-in, first-out. What I mean is that there’s not any concept of waiting in line for anything. Push, shove, line-cut, or perhaps even hock your way to the front if you have to. Getting off a bus is insane. Everyine pushes, everyone together, everyone in a hurry to get there, even if for no reason. Sherry and I have gotten right into this. It’s great being caucasian and not speaking the language in these situations. We just push through with our bags. It’s fun!
Okay, enough of that, what’s great about China?
- Food is cheap and some of it is amazing, though not all of it. Basically you can get meals from 50 cents to maybe 2 or 3 bucks. If you’re payig 4 bucks, that’s an expensive meal for one person.. If you order pork yu might get bacon, but we’ve also had some good western food, including Pizza Hut in Chongqing for delicious pan pizza, most expensive food we’ve had in China. Anyway, sodas/beers = cheap. Food on the street here cheap. Food in Yangshou so far, not so cheap. We paid 1 dollar for a coke and we were pissed. Rightfully we should be, cost of living is so low here.
- Bartering. Okay, this is a plus and a minus, but I like bartering and in China you barter for everything. Just about the only fixed thing might be a train ticket. Postage can be bartered! A beer can be barted! More commonly you’re bartering for souveniers (obvious), street food/drink, but really anything. Case in point, we barted to have our laundry done and saved about 35%. The negative side is that you’re always paying too much, even if you think you got a deal. Sherry hates bartering because it is tiring and can be very intimidating.
- Smiles and hellos. We have a lot of children and adults say hello and they mean it! They just don’t see that many english speaking tourists. We had more than a few people come right up to us and just start talking to practice their English. This guy ‘Michael’ was our best friend on the train last night and helped us out with everything. To quote him (paraphrase rather), he had trouble sleeping because he was worried that WE would miss our train stop.
- Accomodation is cheap and generally clean. Sheets generally clean, hotel bathrooms clean, pretty nice. Tonight we pay 10 dollars for our room. Now for the bad news. October 1 is Chinese National Day. The day the nation was founded in 1949 I believe? Anyway, it’s huge and it kicks off a week where, yes, nearly every single person in China takes a trip somewhere! Aghhh! That’s 1 billion people on the move, taking up trains, buses, hotel rooms. This is a bad bad thing for Sherry and Cory. Our room here goes from 10 dollars a night to over 30 a night. This is after bartering (not a very good job by me apparently). The difficulty of goings somewhere during this time cannot be determined until we do it. If necessary, we may bite the bullet here and bunker down in Yangshou for more than a week. I know that you think that 20 dollars a night isn’t much, but imagine the price of your accomdation more than tripling, would you be happy? We’re hoping that the holiday has some good scenes though.
Well, the restaurant/internet place (free with a meal!) has Simon and Garfunkel’s greatist hits, and it’s cycled through a 2nd time and I just can’t listen to ‘The Boxer’ a third time, so I’ll let you all go. Sherry says a hello. She’s been busy keepiig up here private e-mail correspondance, so sorry, but you’re getting more of ‘me’ on the blog.
As you probably ascertained by level of ‘negativity’ in the BEST list above, we are having our share of difficulty here. Travel is hard, but we knew it would be. The language/alphabet is a huge barrier, but independent travel is possible here in China. We are seeing a lot of this country that is changing so much. The younger generation here are apopdting many western habits (shopping, mobile phone, other cultural things). There is a lot of building, a great, massive I would say, difference here between those that have money and those that don’t, and it won’t say this way forever. We are both glad to be seeing it before in changes again.
Sorry, but again, no photos. I find machines with Windows XP, but the camera sometimes doesn’t have the right driver. We’ve got some good ones, but you’ll have to wait!
Thanks for reading.
Cory and Sherry
Advertisement
Tot: 0.089s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 10; qc: 53; dbt: 0.0582s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Trucano
non-member comment
Stairs
I believe the Chinese did, in fact, invent stairs. This was back during the Ming Dynasty. Or was it Tang? Yes, definitely Tang. Of course, this was all before the "Chinese with Disabilities Act" was passed.