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Published: December 13th 2007
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Dong old man
Tang'An Village Well itchy. Well itchy. Well itchy. I haven't done shite for updating my blogs. No excuses really. Well I have been busy since I started working in September but I had 2 months in Singapore to catch up but I was lazy. Just a quick update of now. I am in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, China teaching English at English First Training Centre. The city is crap but I love the friends I've made and the most my students are great. Anyway. So here I go again. I hope I can remember all the good shit. These upcoming blogs will probably be a lot shorter than the "in the moment" ones since because of time that has gone by. Boh well. Maybe that is good for you if you were quite bored with them. Hehehe. Oh well. Lets get started.
JUNE 10 - 11
The first night, I was woken up with loud shooting noises that really felt like they were right next to me. I got up to take a look outside and could see smoke coming from the side of the GH. It was flippin' firecrackers at 2am!! I knocked on Han Ming's (HM) door and he was up
too peering out his window with his camera. I took a looksee and maybe 10 guys were building a damn house next to the GH!! No hammering or drills or heavy machinery was used, just there hands! No nails are used to build any of the houses!!! So these guys were building a house at 2/3 o'clock in the morning and setting of fireworks which is the norm. I just hoped they didn't do it every night!
HM and I got up early to see the town at it's busiest. Kids were heading to school. Women were washing their hair in the river. Men and women were heading into the fields for some hard labour. I had a breakfast of spicy noodles and then we were off to Tang an, an even smaller village about 5 miles north of Zhaoxing. We took a local bus up the mountain and ran into some smaller mud slides which were easy to bypass. HM was cool enough to let me use his sweet ass lens all day hence why my pics look a lot better. We spent all day in this village. So many great opportunities for photos and just loving the
Buyin
Zhaoxing scenery. The villages water supply comes from the mountain and tasted very fresh. I was a little paranoid about drinking straight from the flow but hell whats the worst that can happen. PA-HA. Little kiddies were running all over the place. Old men were chillin' on the benches, smokin' their pipes! The women appeared to be doing all the work with babies on their backs.
HM and I decided to walk back to Zhaoxing but along the way on the road we passed the 1 month celebration of a new baby (I think it was for 1 month or maybe it was a couple days old....don't remember...doh!). Anyway. We stopped to take pictures and an older man came out to greet us and invite us to have lunch with them. HM of course asked me if I wanted to do it and I was like "hells ya! why not?!" We entered the mans home and it was just filled with tables and chairs and MEN!! Everyone was eating, rinking, and joining each others company. We sat with a bunch of friendly fellows. Looking around I was the only women in the room except for the ladies serving the food.
The guys loved it. They were obviously all pretty hammered. We got served rice wine and I took a first shot but that was all I could do. I would drink it if I could but, I just don't like it. Poor HM had to take my share. He was pretty red in the face by the time we left. Hehehe. The food was good although all the dishes had pork in them. I didn't care. I ate it anyway even if I got little pork bits. Whatev man. It's all about the experience. I did draw the line of the raw pork. So ya. Hehehe. The rice was tasty. It got passed around in a communal burlap bag. It was sticky rice that you take off in chunks. Mmmm. Telling my friends about this afterwards, they were all pretty shocked that I would eat it. Ha! Like I say, whatev! HM was chatting up the locals and translating when he could. The dude on the other side of me kept telling me to drink and eat more. The grandfather who invited us into his home wanted to ganbei with us. So I couldn't really refuse. Then the pictures started
and I mean loads of them with different people. Me and boys. Me and the women. Me and top end officials. It was fun. We did meet the dude who heads the local communist party and some other dude who had a high up position. I thought after the lunch we were continuing back to Zhaoxing but the higher uppers asked if we visited the museum in Tang an. We didn't since it wasn't open. They said that we had to see it before we left. So back we went to Tang an with special escort service. Hehehe. The museum was pretty cool and newly finished. It had both english and chinese. It talked about the history of the Tang an people, the culture, the houses, etc. The people that live in Tang an and the rest of the region are mainly from the Dong ethnic minority. They live primarily in the border regions between Guizhou, Hunan and Hubei Provinces. Each village has at least one drum tower, a wooden structure built without nails and can be as tall as 30 metres, which is a focal point in the town. This is where they hold special events and celebrations, eg.
funerals, public meetings, weddings, etc. HM told me we were invited for dinner at the officials friends home in Zhaoxing. He said they felt bad that they only had pork for lunch and that I couldn't it. So they were going to kill a chicken for me!! I really wasn't hungry because of all the sticky rice but they wouldn't take no for an answer. What can you do?!
So we departed Tang an again but this time on the backs of motos. Back in Zhaoxing, before dinner, I wanted to buy a traditional baby carrier that I see all the woman use for their babies. They are really beautiful and simple. Something that I would use for my own child one day. Who needs those fancy, high tech, metal bar thingys. So I bargained for one which was already used and not as brightly coloured as I wanted it. I forget now how much I paid for it but I got what I asked for. One of the older woman in the shop, I heard her say (in chinese of course) that all foreigners are rich. Ah man, again I heard it. It's so not true. Maybe they
want to take a look at the 25 grand school debt I have.
Dinner was tasty as it usually is, especially when whatever you're having is freshly killed. More food. More rice wine. They guys got really hammered. And at one point, the one dude was taking me out of the room to another part and slurring to me in chinese.....no idea what he was saying but it was pretty funny. I just guided him back to the room and told HM it was probably time to leave. We said our final goodbyes and we were off back to our GH. We had a another long day of travelling ahead of us. HM changed his plans to come to Yangshuo with me. So it was full ass day on many buses. I prayed that I wouldn't be woken up by firecrackers and I wasn't! YA! Next morning, as we waited for the bus, the men were still working on the house next door. They got a lot done but I guess if you work into the wee hours of the morning, you can get a lot done. The bus came and we were off to our next destination of
Yangshuo, but of course not without it's problems!
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finally - more travel goodies
So glad you are finishing up the travel stories! I want more---