My first night here was a amazing mix of new smells, tastes, sounds, and experiences.
After arriving in Guilin and picking up my luggage, I found a man holding a sign with my name and made the 75km long drive to Yangshuo. It was a pretty quiet trek, well, when I wasn’t looking anyway. The driver weaved in an out of the slower traffic, constantly flashing his lights to indicate he was going to pass. I slipped in and out of consciousness after the 36 hours or so where I had gotten only 2 hours of sleep. I couldn’t sleep the night before I left, only one hour, and didn’t rest much at all on of the three flights to get from Minneapolis to Guilin.
When we got to the Buckland office, there was a group of last week’s teachers-in-training, offering me a beer, but I was a little too tired to accept. At the office I finally met Ping – my only contact up until this point with the Buckland group. After filling out some minor paperwork, one of the staff named Yuen (or Euan according to the contact sheet) and another by the name of Liu (Leo) brought me to my dorm a few blocks away to drop off my bags before grabbing a bite to eat. They brought be to a very small restaurant nearby, run by a very nice Chinese couple. As I didn’t have any money, Yuen paid for a beer and some dumplings, then pointed me to where my dorm was (though only around the corner, I was so drowsy I didn’t recall), and was off. I was alone.
I sat there drinking my beer and staring out at the new world before me. I couldn’t discern much from the surrounding landscape, but this was certainly China. All around the signs lit up and begged to be read, but my eyes – and lack of keeping up on my Chinese reading/writing comprehension over the summer – did not cooperate. After one beer I was ready for bed, almost forgetting that I had an order of food on the way.
The dumplings were amazing. They were simple steamed dumplings with spinach inside and made with love. I dipped them in a hot (辣) and sour (酸) sauce, like the sauce found on every Chinese restaurant table back home – I was in heaven. Full after the plate of dumplings, I nearly fell over when the female owner came back out with two more trays of said dumplings. Evidently they are served in a set of three trays. So. Much. Food. But so good. When the owners asked me how it was I quickly replied with the only Chinese I seemed to recall, “好吃!” – delicious! The couple then sat down and we began to chat in our broken foreign tongues.
I sat there for a few hours, talking about where we were from and what brought us to Yangshuo. I learned that she had moved to Yangshuo from Beijing (which might have explained why I found it relatively easy to understand her over a few of the other Chinese I had met a few hours earlier). Any shred of nervousness or hesitation quickly vanished, the kindness and warmth they displayed had immediately put me at ease. After a while, the male owner went and retrieved their full menu for my perusal, and as I couldn’t recognize many of the characters, I asked for him to read a few of them aloud. Of the characters I could comprehend, among them I immediately noticed that dog was on the menu (evidently cat soup is a specialty in the neighboring town of Yongzhou). I previously thought it was only eaten in the north-eastern parts of China – I thought wrong. The female proprietor then brought out the (somewhat poorly done) English translation of their menu, and this drew the attention of the neighboring shop-keep. Well, I don’t know if she was the shop keeper, but maybe just a girl who worked at the shop next door. (I would find out her name the following night as I returned seeking more dumplings – her full name is Wu Lunlun – all rising tones – but I couldn’t find the right characters on my computer.) Lunlun came over with a few of her friends, and soon there were about five girls sitting at the table, and three more hovering around it – an English lesson, it seemed, was about to begin. After a half-hour or so of this, a couple guys showed up on motorcycles, apparently the girls’ boyfriends, and wanted the girls to head out with them. Lunlun kept telling them ‘ten more minutes’, but I took this as a good time to head back and get some much needed rest.
I thanked the owners profusely for their good food and kindness, promising to return the following day, and made my way back to the dorm. Just after settling in, a knock came on the door, Yuen had arrived with my roommate, a French-Canadian named Philippe. He was a bit hungry and I didn’t think I would be able to sleep anyway, so we went back out (it was about midnight then) and roamed the night time markets for some fresh fruit. We found vendors selling fruits I had never before seen. Philippe had some Chinese Yuan, and bought us a couple of waters and the craziest looking fruit ever (have you ever seen a dragon fruit? – huǒ lóng guǒ 火龙果 – or fire dragon fruit in Chinese.) The woman who sold us the fruit had to help us figure out how to eat it, and peeled it for us to share. We sat down on a couple of tiny, tiny, tiny stools, and ate. It was awesome.
After that, we made our way to another little store and Phil bought us some toilet paper. Yeah, probably a good idea since it had been two days since my last bm. Just sayin. Travel does that to a person.
Finally at two a.m. we made our way back to the dorm and went to bed. It was a good day and a wonderful first exposure to China. Halfway around the world, and a wholly different culture, the people were great, the food was delicious, and I could not have dreamed up such an experience.
