My visit to Dujiangyan, four months after the quake...

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After traveling for quite a few months, I had finally arrived in Sichuan province. After spending about a week in Chengdu, Zack and I were invited to spend middle autumn day with Liu Li and her family in Dujiangyan. This is a big festival in China, and it's a time for families to get together and enjoy a big meal. Another side to the middle autumn day festival is mooncake. This is basically a small, dense cake with a seemingly endless array of fillings. I tried many different types of mooncake in the days leading up to and following the festival, and even the spice that the province is famous for (hua jiao, 花 椒 or Sichuan pepper) can be found in some mooncakes. It never ceases to amaze me how widely Sichuan pepper is actually used here. It is a spice that essentially makes your whole mouth tingle while slightly numbing it at the same time. This is actually quite tasty in savoury or meat dishes, but even the usually sweet mooncake couldn't escape the Sichuan pepper treatment. I have to say, it wasn't as bad as it may sound, but when it comes to cakes, I generally prefer the sweet and fruity variety, not the meaty, numbing, tingly variety that can't seem to make up its mind whether it's sweet or savoury.

After checking out of the loft hostel and promising to return in a week or so, we made our way to the bus station and set off towards Dujiangyan. We were staying in Liu Li's mum's house, while her mum stayed in another house with her sister. This was ideal as we had a pad to chill in, and it was a nice change from staying in hostels all the time. We had a laptop at our disposal so we could watch pirate DVDs and a supermarket down the road that could supply us with beer and/or baijiu (Chinese rice wine).

We had arrived in Dujiangyan a few days before the festival, which gave us time to check out the place. Dujiangyan was one of the main areas affected by the Sichuan earthquake on the 12th of may. Chengdu was largely spared, but many of the near by cities were badly hit. As I was planning to make the province my home, I felt I had to see what it was like now. I'm writing this blog entry quite a while after I made the trip, but the day I arrived in Dujiangyan it was 4 exactly months after the quake.

The first evening we didn't get up to much more than watching a few films and having a few beers, but the second day Liu Li gave us a little tour of the city. At first I didn't see much earthquake damage as the area we were staying in was largely okay, but as soon as we got into the centre of town things started to look worse. Every now and then one of us would point out another building that was half collapsed or where the inside of the building was totally destroyed. There would also be big gaps in between buildings, where a house or a shop or an office block had just completely disappeared. The crazy thing was the contrast between buildings that were right next to each other, and obviously took the same amount of earthquake violence. One would still be okay, and all that was left of its neighbour was a pile of rubble.

Around the centre of town there was a lot of damage, I found it quite shocking to think what it must have been like during the earthquake itself or in the minutes and hours following the quake. Whole houses collapsed while their neighbours remained standing, whole areas of the city were reduced to rubble while the rich areas survived largely unscathed. The sheer level of destruction was really what got to me, there wasn't anyone here who wasn't affected in some way, directly or indirectly, by the earthquake. Many people had lost family members or their businesses or both, and at the same time it didn't feel like people had given up. The atmosphere in the city felt positive, and clearly people were picking up the pieces and getting on with their daily lives. Admittedly, this was four months after the earthquake, but I can see how it could be difficult to get over something with such constant reminders of the disaster everywhere you look.

Apart from just how much damage was done to the city, and how much still had to be cleaned up, I was also struck by how many people were still living in tents. There were tent camps of differing sizes scattered throughout the city, and it showed how many people were either still waiting for some other kind of temporary housing to be made available to them, or were still too scared of aftershocks to move back into what's left of their homes.

Clearly a lot of work had already been carried out to clear the rubble off the streets, and the condition of every building had been assessed. There were three categories, green stickers which meant the building was okay, orange stickers which meant the building had to be repaired but you could still use the building, and then the red stickers which meant the building was to be destroyed. In the central shopping district of town I saw a lot of green stickers, more towards the outskirts of town I saw many more orange stickers and even large areas with only red stickers, areas which had essentially been turned into ghost towns.

After walking through an area that had been almost completely destroyed, you would suddenly walk into an area that was still bustling with life and where the memory of the earthquake seemed a distant one. Markets selling fruit and various cuts of raw meat hanging on hooks in the open air were still open, and we even saw some marriage adverts. There wasn't actually very much information for their potential other halves to take into consideration, as it only stated age, sex, occupation and then something about how much money they had or what car they drove or something. It's mainly the idea that you go on a date with the intent of getting married that amused me. Why not just go on a date to see what happens, maybe the person will turn out to be a total freak or something, why does marriage have to come into it so early in the game?

After a day of walking around town, we were ready to go back to the flat and relax a bit, have some food and watch some more films. Luckily for us our street had an arcade on it, so before we got some food we spent a few kuai blowing off steam while shooting as many hoops as we could in 60 seconds. Of course if you made over 30 or however many it was, you would get another 60 seconds. If you then made another 60 or something ridiculous then you would get another 60 seconds, but unfortunately I never got past the second minute. Still, money well spent honing my basketball skills.

The next day we were due at Liu Li's grandma's house for the big middle autumn day festival. Her grandma lived in a particularly damaged area of town, but her flat had an orange sticker which meant she could still live there. It was cool joining a Chinese family for their meal, and the food was absolutely delicious. Of course the first two things people always want to know about foreigners are if they can use chopsticks, and if they can eat spicy food. Both of these things are no problem for Zack and I, so we made a good impression on the family 😊. We had a big lunch together, after which everyone seemed to go back home for a bit while the ladies stayed and played mahjong.

We were going to have dinner a few hours later, so in the meantime the three of us went for a walk around the area. This was one of the worst hit areas I saw in Dujiangyan. Even though the few flats Liu Li's grandma and aunt lived in were okay, a few blocks further down the road it was quite a different story. Here, entire rows of flats, basically entire neighbourhoods had been destroyed. The flats were still standing, but every single one of the had a big red sticker on the outside, which meant they were just waiting to be leveled. The area was a complete ghost town, walking around on the wide roads that obviously used to be filled with traffic and were now totally empty was a really strange experience. I took the video that I attached with this blog entry here. I was standing in the middle of a big road, and nothing but the one man on his scooter at the end of the video passed me in that minute.

The title photo with this entry was also taken there. The entire street was completely destroyed so nobody could live there anymore, and a fire hydrant was still pouring water into the street, like it presumably had been doing since the quake four months earlier. I also saw some of the biggest tent camps around this area, as whole neighbourhoods needed to be rehoused.

After walking around for a few hours, we returned to the house and sat down to dinner with the family once again. We managed to finish quite a lot of the food, and Liu Li's mum and grandma were very pleased that Zack and I enjoyed their food so much. After everyone had finished dinner and we had watched TV for a little while, most of the guests had left. Zack and I were instructed not to help with cleaning up, but we were stubborn and did all the washing up to say thanks for a lovely meal. This was something that had obviously never happened before, the guests doing the washing up, and to top it off, we were men! I think we did a lot for emancipation that evening haha.

We spent another few days hanging around the city before we headed back to Chengdu, days we spent mostly eating delicious food and sampling the occasional beer. To date, the best chuan chuan I've had was in Dujiangyan. Chuan chuan (串串) is basically just hotpot, you get a big tub of oil which people like to call soup, you bring it to the boil and cook your food in it. Instead of having to pick items off a menu however, chuan chuan restaurants have a kind of walk-in fridge where you just load up your tray with tasty looking bits of meat and random vegetables. It's ideal if you don't speak enough to Chinese to order everything you want, and it's cheaper too 😊.

Another great meal we had was a duck hotpot, for lack of a better word. Apparently it wasn't a hotpot as the soup wasn't spicy, but the duck was a big pot, which was heated by fire. Whatever it's called, it was absolutely amazing and I can't wait to have it again. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a similar place in Chengdu. Yet. A few days after I got back to the 'Du, I taught my first lesson at what is now "my old school". It was pretty cool, although I'm glad I teach adults now instead of 7 to 12 year olds.

Here are my photos:
Dujiangyan


I'm off to teach my last class of the day, about a first day at work. That sounds dangerously exciting. After that I'm going to the new little bar to go see a Chinese rock band, and then the idea is to go home and get some decent sleep, although we'll see if that actually happens...
Take it easy 😊

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