Advertisement
Published: September 28th 2006
City Wall
The main street in Pingyao, our guesthouse is on this street. So quaint!Pingyao is such a great little town! We are enjoying ourselves immensely here. This morning we woke up and pulled back the curtains to see the entire place covered in fog (real fog, not smog). We dressed and headed down to order some breakfast. Our guesthouse is certainly one busy place! There were streams of other travelers coming in with reservations. The owner has a brother who owns another guesthouse 2 buildings down and he sends Chinese guests there (the owner of our guesthouse speaks very very good English, his brother speaks none) and he was taking a lot of guests down there because his place is full! We ordered some dumplings and scrambled eggs and settled down with some tea to watch the commotion. We spoke with a fellow Canadian (Montreal) who was overjoyed to meet another Canadian. There aren’t many of us around it seems. We also chatted with a friendly American couple who have been traveling for 9 months and just came from India. They shared some stories about India, and how much of a struggle they found it to travel there. Wonderful (sarcasm!). After we’d stuffed ourselves and the excitement died down we headed out to explore.
Surrounding the city
Pingyao claims to the only city in China with the entire city wall still intact. It is approximately 6km all the way around. The children here are definitely one of the highlights. As we were walking we heard this tiny little “hello” and turned around to see this itty bitty 2 or 3 year old girl perched on the back of her mom’s bike smiling at us. We called hello back and you would have though we were Santa Claus the way her face lit up! She kept looking back and laughing and smiling at us and she was just cute as a button. Cuter even. Almost every child we see loves to say hello or ni hao and smile and laugh at us. They are all so adorable! After wandering the streets we came back to the guesthouse to use the washroom (2 yuan to use a public washroom! Outrage!) and the owner mentioned that there was a performance with 16 different countries happening just outside the city wall in a half hour! So we trekked off to find seats and see what all the fuss was about.
In front of a big stage there were 3 rows of white chairs all lined up. No one seemed to be there yet, so we snagged seats front and center. The American couple
South Gate
The performance was just on the other side of this gate. The gate is at the other end of our street, about 2 blocks away. At night it's very beautifully lit up! we met earlier spotted us and came over to sit with us. We waited and waited and looked around and realized no one else was sitting in these white chairs. Hmm. Eventually police officers came by and bumped us out, the chairs were for special people apparently. By this time the crowd behind the chairs had grown so large we had to jostle for position to even see the stage. Chinese people, especially tiny old women, are sure tough little things!! They can push and shove with the best of them. We watched in amazement as little 4 foot tall grannies made their way from the back of the crowd right to the front in less than a minute! Somehow each time the crowd shoved together 3 more people would sneak in front of us! And then the green military guys came out in full force, screaming and yelling instructions at people, pointing at people to sit down and move back. Another thing Chinese are very good at is squatting for hours on end. I think it’s more comfortable to them than actually sitting! Me, a plain old North American, can only squat like this for 3 minutes before my
Pingyao Kitties!
The city is almost overrun with cats! knees start to seize up and my legs start shaking so we moved to the back “standing row”. We were in the front row of the “standing only” but more pushing and shoving and suddenly there were 10 rows in front of us! The show finally started, an hour late, and we could hardly see the stage! We were the first ones here, how did we get bumped all the way to the back of the crowd?! 16 different countries were represented and all wore fancy costumes and did “national” dances. There was Mexico, Greece, China, Bolivia, Germany, America, Columbia…that’s all I can remember. We took some great video clips. After being pushed and shoved far too much we decided we were fed up with being sardines and squished our way out of the crowd and into the open air. As we walked around to the other side of the stage we found an even better spot where we could see much more and it wasn’t as crowded. The finale was a fantastic lion dance and dragon dance from China.
The performance was pretty neat, I’m glad we happened to be here for it. This was the first year
it has happened, and it was organized by a foreign group. There was even a guy from Germany who sang a terrible rendition of “My Girl”. It’s hilarious watching Chinese people watch a performance. He kept telling them to clap along, and no one understood the concept of clapping. Actually, even when a country finished their dance, no one in the crowd clapped! They just stood and watched with the same stoic expression on their face. We sang along to My Girl and I think more people were turned around watching us than the actual stage!
As we headed back into the town we bumped into the 2 couples we were originally standing with (the Americans and a super nice couple originally from India but now living in Chicago) and shared funny stories as to what we thought of the whole thing.
It was dinner time now, and all that shoving worked up an appetite! Back to the guesthouse where the owner whipped up another great meal. Smoked pork and some kind of noodles. Very tasty! We chatted with a bunch of other travelers from Australia and then went out for a walk to get some ice cream.
Mexican dance
This was the Mexican performance. When we found a store with an ice cream freezer we perused the selections and I decided on banana and strawberry. The girl took the package out of the freezer and told me “8 yuan”. I thought it was a bit high, but I held onto it while Dev dug through and picked out a box of chocolate coated vanilla ice cream cubes. When he pulled that out of the freezer, another girl told us “10 yuan” for both. The look that she received from the first girl was priceless. We couldn’t understand the exchange they had, but we assume it went something like “10 yuan for both! I just told them 8 for the one and they were going to pay it! You could have charged at least 16 for both!!” We laughed to ourselves, quickly handed over 10 yuan, and went on our way ice cream in hand.
We spotted some really cute “Friendlies” (the Olympic mascots, remember?) ornaments at a street stall. You know, the ones where you pull the string and their arms and legs jump up and down. We negotiated with the seller and walked away with all 5 Friendlies of our own, for a really good price! (~50 cents a piece). We also got a “Doraemon” ornament, which is the blue cat cartoon character that we fell in love with in Japan. Time to start collecting more stuff to post home! We weren’t sure how to store them so they didn’t break, and Dev had the brilliant idea to wrap them in toilet paper. Good thing we bought an entire roll just for us at the train station. Note: If you are ever thinking of traveling in Asia, make sure you always ALWAYS have a roll of your own toilet paper in your pocket. Because there is none, anywhere. Even at our guesthouse there is no toilet paper in the washroom. And please remember to throw it into the wastebasket provided, because their plumbing is not built to handle paper.
The toilets in the train stations are just big long troughs that run through all the stalls. And the doors are maybe only waist high. Frequently a big gush of water comes and flushes all the waste in the trough down to some holding receptacle at the end. Everything is fine and dandy, until you are squatting there and the big gush comes and you get the pleasant experience of watching everyone else’s crap float by you. Ew. At least the doors aren’t as problematic as I expected, once you are squatting no one can see you over the door. I don’t know why they bother putting locks on the doors though, no one uses them and I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve opened a stall on someone by accident because the door lock was green and not red. I’ve started only going to wide open stalls, and even then sometimes there are people inside!
Pingyao is also FULL of cats. Everywhere are cats. Some have collars, meaning they are someone’s pet, but with so many cats around everywhere they breed and there are lots of strays. We asked the guesthouse owner about the cats, and he said years ago they used to kill the mice with medicine, but when the mouse would die then the cat would eat the mouse and also die. So they stopped using medicine to kill the mice and now the cats take care of them all. But there is nothing to control the cat population so they are a bit overrun! Nevertheless, we are cat lovers and I enjoy seeing kitties everywhere. They all look happy, although most (even pets) are pretty dirty and scruffy looking.
Tomorrow is the end of our stay in Pingyao. We have train tickets on a sleeper to Xi’an which departs at 7:40pm. It will be sad to say goodbye to this little town, it’s been a highlight of our trip so far. It’s so different than the large cities, everyone is very friendly and it’s very laid back. This morning the man who tried to kidnap us (aka, the man who followed us relentlessly on the train here) showed up at the guesthouse because he was bringing many other groups of travelers here. Turns out he is a good friend of the owner, and honestly was trying to help us. He smiled and came over and spoke some Chinese to us and we all had a good laugh (I have no idea what he said, but he was smiling and laughing, so we smiled and laughed also. All is ok between us now). Maybe next time we won’t be quite so paranoid that everyone is out to get us. At least not until we get to India, apparently…
Until next time!!
E&D, World Travelers
Advertisement
Tot: 0.056s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 9; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0347s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Lins
non-member comment
Your entries are pretty interesting to read! Man, I was worried reading about the guy at the station - better to go with the gut feeling - glad it turned out okay.