Our vacation!

So it's been a while due to China confusion - I can't view this post still! I guess the last thing really worth writing about is our October 1st vacation to the fabled Jiuzhaigou and the Tibetan town of Songpan.

Jiuzhaigou (Nine Village Gully) is a secluded wonderland in northern Sichuan Province dappled with over 100 rainbow lakes, pools, and waterfalls. When I say rainbow, I mean that the water there is the color of blue glass and the mineral deposits (mostle CaO2) on the bottom of the lakes change the blue to yellow, green and orange.

It's quite a ways away from our little mountain town in the sticks to this fantasy colored magic land, so we started our vacation by taking the bus. Our student friend Thompson was kind enough to meet us early Saturday morning and deliver us to our bus by 8 am. We road the bus for the next four hours or so on our way to Chengdu. When we got off the bus in the big capital city we were in a dirty bus station lined with little shops selling water and beer and sidewalks littered with fruit vendors and piles of peeled fruit rinds and used tissues. I used the public restroom at the bus station (we made one stop on our way but none of the buses are equipped with toilets), which was, like most public facilities in China, a room for which one must pay a sum of 20 to 50 cents to the man or lady at the door to enter. The toilet is a 6-inch wide concrete or tiled latrine in the floor around which are placed low (3 to 4 foot tall) dividers. Toilet paper (not supplied) goes into the waste paper basket beside you, and you must balance precariously on your splayed feet until you are done and hope you don't fall over backwards or pee on your shoe.

When I was done we found a woman at the bus station who looked like she worked there and asked her if we were at the Chadianzi (Tea Shop-??) Bus Station where we were supposed to catch our next bus. After a somewhat long and confusing "no" we made our way to one of the lime green taxis and told him our destination. We were off, and about 15 minutes and 18 yuan later we were standing in from of the impressive Chadianzi. Apparently we were just ahead of the holiday rush (most people in China work on the weekends) so the station was relatively empty. We got in line behind several families going to Jiuzhaigou and bought our tickets - for a staggering 110 yuan each!

Since we missed the last bus of the day at 2pm, Oak and I were caught standing in the middle of the tiled floor poring over our Lonely Planet guide for a place to stay for the night and arguing about how to get there and which was closer - when... all of a sudden there came upon us a man with a cell phone displaying a photo of a clean, comfortable double room with a TV and - he said - a toilet and hot shower. 80 yuan for one room and he'll give us a ride to and back again in the morning for our bus. We were way skeptical, but he handed us a business card with names and numbers and told us he was native to Jiuzhaigou. Oak and I exchanged a glance, shrugged and followed him out into the parking lot. We got in his little bread loaf car and set off to who knows where.

The beds were nice, the shower nicer, and we got dinner in the local, mellow neighborhood (and free hot jasmine tea with our room!). Our driver gave us a wake up in the wee hours next morning and we loaded in with two other travelers. At the station we shelled out a mere 80 yuan and brought our bags into the sleepy bus station.

Eleven hours through Tibetan farmland later, we came to a stop in a cold mountain town lousey with hotels and tourist shops selling painted dog pelts. Lucky for us, we met two charming Chinese students from Dalian, Liaoning by the names of Wendy and Mary who were on a budget and knew how to work it. We were off the bus with the two of them and another Chinese guy (flaming gay?) from Hangzhou, walking with a woman who worked for a hotel a ways up the road. The woman was offering us a 3-room suite with a shared bathroom and hot water for 40 yuan per person - quite a deal, especially considering that we were in one of the country's most desirable national park towns on one of China's two national holiday vacations. Imagine 1.5 billion people - all on vacation. But these girls were amazing! Wendy and Mary kept walking, shaking their head at anything over 30 yuan a person. I was totally sold when the woman told us "tomorrow that room will be 400 yuan!", but the girls just shrugged - and so the hotel woman said with a sigh "Hao ba! But only for one night." We were thrilled. And all of a sudden a car pulls up beside us and we all pile in on top of each other and seconds later we're in front of our "Chengdu Hotel".

That night we all went out to shop in the extensive souvenir night market and eat dinner. We found a cute little restaurant "Xiaobu Xiaochi" where our hosts bought us yak meat soup, yak with fried green onions, egg drop soup, lots of rice, beer and tea. Man, that yak was the best thing we had all trip. Really recommended. Then we went out into town and looked at the same selection of plastic Tibetan beads and necklaces, yak horn combs and pipes, and brightly woven fabrics repeated for a quarter mile. Then we went to a store and bought food and water for our next day in the park.

We woke up the next morning at 6 am for the third time that trip into absolutely frigid air. We all bundled into our warmies and walked to the park entrance with our packs on our backs. Mary and Wendy were determined to do it the cheap way, but our friend from Hangzhou had the money and wasn't up for a lot of hiking, so we parted ways. The entrace fee for me was around 160 Y and Oak's was 220 Y because he didn't have a student ID. It would have been another 90 Y/person to ride the bus around the 25+ km long park, but we were doing it the good way.

The walk along the paths was tranquil and invigorating as the sun rose into the sky and the fields of grass and groves of trees came to life. At the first Tibetan village that we came to, about 3 hours from the gates, our two guides asked for a place to rent for the night. The woman wanted more than we were willing to pay, so we continued on. The lakes were really beautiful, but only pictures can touch their beauty.

At the next village Oak and I were told to go look in the shops while the Chinese girls bargained for a room. The second someone sees a white foreigner, prices go up by maybe twice. (That's why we make so much more than everyone else.) We were getting pretty inspired by their bargaining skills, too, so when we found beautiful white stone Guan Yin necklaces in a Buddhist store, we talked the woman down from 220 Y for one to only 40 Y. Score!

Then our guides came back with big grins on their faces and told us they found two rooms in a Tibetan home for 30/person + 15/person for dinner and a 5/person fee for breakfast. Sounded great to us, so we went up to the colorfully painted Tibetan Buddhist home where we were staying and put our bags down in the room. Outside in the courtyard, an old man sat hunched over in his blankets reading Tibetan prayer cards in a low, rhythmic drone. His hands were clasped around a circle of recitation beads and behind him a golden prayer wheel spun in the mountain breeze.

That evening we walked a little farther up to some waterfalls and a placid lake. We came back for a delicious homemade meal at the Tibetan house and talked to our friends about their plans for the rest of the vacation. We also met an English couple from an international school in Beijing. Oak talked for a full half hour straight - poor guy - they were the first people he could talk to besides his girlfriend.

Next morning we left early on our own (our friends were going to go back to Chengdu early because they heard train tickets back home were getting expensive and limited), and we discovered a certain trick in the Jiuzhaigou system. Because it is illegal to stay overnight in the park, we were over a 6 hour walk from the entrance when the park opened and the first buses started bringing in their morning tours. We flagged one down and rode the bus to the other lakes too far to walk to and got a ride out of the park for free!

We found where to catch the bus out of Jiuzhaigou to Songpan and waited around until it came. We got on and the bus driver started up the engine. Then, for some reason, he turned it off and left. Just at that moment, Oak said, "Hey!" and started knocking on the window at the heads of our two friends walking past. They looked up and smiled and waved and in a minute or two they were on the bus, sitting in the same configuration as when we came up together.

Two hours later we were in Songpan and the girls were helping us find a room while we bought a horse trek for the next day at the local Shun Jiang Horse Trek office. When we met up again, they said that all the rooms were full. The horse trek guy said he had one room left for 60 Y with a shared shower and toilet. We asked if we could all share the 2 beds and he sent us up with someone to look at the rooms. Then they told us we could only have 1 person per bed and we left our friends again for the last time. We ended up rooming with one Dutch guy and one French guy - Varte and Delorian (or something intelligible and French-sounding). The Dutch guy was pretty cool and we went out to a little restaurant for dinner where I impressed everybody with my Chinese skills and ordered us a hunk of yak meat and a plate of fish-flavored eggplant to go with our egg fried rice. Then we all stayed up late playing Crazy 8s and drinking cheap goji berry baijiu.

Next day was our horse trek. We left at 2ish with the French guy and his girlfriends and a lot of Chinese tourists all wearing matching cowboy hats and riding gloves and carrying gigantic cameras and collapsible tripods. The next two days were spent on horse and on foot climbing steep Songpan mountains and chatting with our cool Tibetan horse guides (one was a blacksmith named Tie Do who we made fast friends with). We camped in a meadow buy a highway where Oak helped Tie Do peel vegetables with his new Tibetan knife and we sat around the cookfire puffing on a yak horn pipe and practicing our Tibetan. The next day we made it out to a hot spring in a little park. The hot spring was more like a tepid spring, but we had a good time talking to another of the guides about the best way to kill a yak and how he wants us to get him a Japanese sword when we go to Longquan.

We stayed another night in the horse trek dorm - this time with our own room - and in the morning caught the bus back to Chengdu. In Chengdu, no one had heard of our town, so we had to call our Foreign Affairs Officer and ask him which station we should be at. But we made it there in time to catch the last bus out of time and we settled onto it for a nice, sleepy, 5 hour ride.

Home at last! and we got to sleep in our hard bed for the rest of the night.

We just finished our first day as a teacher!! We've both got about 18 different classes with about about 90 kids in each, most of whom don't speak or understand a lick of good ol' USA-an English. But we're managing and I (Lacy) am getting by with drawing pictures and writing simple definitions instead of speaking my hard-earned Chinese. Oak has both the more advanced senior classes and the less advanced juniors, so he can have conversations in one and can recite the ABCs in the other. I am stuck with the middle of both - but a much better schedule.

The apartment is large and spacious but smells of the six floors of defecation from the residents above us. (At least in the bathroom... and the kitchen. And the laundry room.) All the walls need a good scrub down with some brillo pads and bleach, but we've have only been terribly ill once between the two of us. Otherwise, our caretaker aka Foreign Affairs Officer, although he hates the Japanese and doesn't believe in gender equality, is awfully nice, despite the fact that we make twice his salary for one-tenth of his experience.

For the less social aspects of the country, we are situated in a delightfully rural area (think surrounded by 7000 noisy high school students) on top of an especially square mountain surrounded by farmlands, serene mountains, fresh air, and more bugs than you shake an electric tennis racket at. (How's about a giant 8-inch tarantula in your bathroom!?)

It's great to hear that some of our friends (Mikey and a friend from college) might be heading our way in a month or two. We'll try to keep everyone updated in the meantime and maybe upload some pictures (if we can figure out how to get this old dinosaur to work).

First blog entry!

We are in Yangshuo, Guangxi, China. The landscape is beautiful. We are surrounded by jadelike limestone mountains enrobed in leafy bamboo stalks and beautiful people who all want to learn English and come to America. We came through Hong Kong and stayed for three days amongst hagglers, tourists and the destitute and elderly after a two-hour layover in the beautiful Taipei airport. From there we endured a 16 hour bus trip on tiny beds through lightning and floods on our way from Shenzhen to here.

We start our teacher training on Monday the 27th so we have several days to venture out to nearby mountain temples and natural cave and limestone formation attractions. The weather is humid and hot except when it rains, usually with sustained downpours and some lightning.

The teaching itself will begin on September 2nd at a public high school in Yilong, Sichuan Province. Our school is located halfway up the side of a verdant mountain and we will be living in a teachers' apartment on campus. Our pictures might not come until we actually get settled in there, but we will add details from our trip so far when that happens.

Lots of love and fond wishes!