If you
didn't already know, Eastern Asia has the most diverse species of cranes in the
world. When I saw my first crane, I thought I was extremely lucky to see this
rare sighting, but then I realized they are everywhere!
China is
a developing country whose infrastructure is rapidly growing. I remember
reading an article in the past about China’s growth. The article stated that
every five days a new skyscraper is built. In addition to living in Beijing,
the capital of China, I had the chance of a lifetime to explore the historical
and cultural sides of China. I spent 14 days traveling along the Silk Road. I
began in the city of Lanzhou and ended in the city of Dunhuang. Due to the
instability in Kashgar, I was unable to take the Silk Road route to the border
of China. However, I spent the extra time (which would have been used in
Kashgar) to travel to China’s old capital city, Xi’an. What is to follow is a day-by-day
outline of my trip. I will be posting this trip in two sets of 7 days. I will
post the second 7 days next week ( I will still be blogging on my current week
this Friday or Saturday).
Day 1:
Beijing – Lanzhou
The Gansu
province is considered the outer limits of ancient China. It connects the
Chinese heartland with the desert regions in the northwest. It is also one of
the poorest regions in China, with the mining and nuclear plants as its main
industries. Unlike the rest of China, the Gansu province has a large Muslim
population.
The first
stop on my 14-day adventure was Lanzhou, the capital city of the Gansu
province. I took a bus to the Beijingxi station where the group would catch the
overnight train to Lanzhou. In order to enter the station, I had to show my
train ticket and passport. Each ticket had the individual’s passport number on
it, so the attendants had to make sure both numbers corresponded. After that
ticket check, I had to go through a security check. Compared to airport
security in America, this was a cakewalk. I put my bag on an x-ray machine and
then walked through a metal detector. The metal detector went off, but the
attendant just waved me through anyways. Inside the train station, there was a
KFC, a restaurant with Bruce Lee as their logo and many convenience stores.
Before I could eat, I had to drop off my bags and check into my waiting room.
To enter into the waiting room, the attendant had to check my ticket again!
My first
story of the trip happened in this first waiting room. While journaling in the
waiting room, a little Chinese boy approached me and squatted next to me. He
watched me journal for a little bit and then I asked him, in Chinese, what his
name was and how old he was. He then asked me what I was doing. I told him and
then asked if he knew how to speak English. He practiced a little bit with me
and then another girl approached. She told me she was going to be a freshman in
college. We chatted a bit about Lanzhou and then their parents came over to get
pictures of us. The experience was quite cool because it showed me that even
though my Chinese isn’t perfect, I am still able to communicate. This
experience was monumental in giving me the confidence to continue practicing
Chinese with people throughout the remainder of the trip.
Before
boarding the train, I ate KFC and bought a Chinese book from the convenience
store. For the entire Silk Road Trip, I took a total of three overnight trains.
The layouts of these trains were all very similar. There are about 20 cars per
train with at least 10 cabins per car. Each cabin holds 6 people. There are
only beds and no seats on these trains (unless you count the two spring-loaded,
pull-down seats by the windows in front of each cabin). The Lanzhou overnight
train lasted 19 hours. I mostly listened to music, chatted with friends, and
slept. It was very peaceful to see the countryside by train and it was quite
affordable (about $50).
Day
2: Lanzhou
Once in
Lanzhou, the group checked into our hotel and some of us went to the Yellow
River. It is China’s second longest river (3,395 miles). It is named the Yellow
River because of its color, which is caused by the silt it picks up as it
carves its way through the soft clay of the loess plateau. Around the Yellow
River, there were a plethora of pagodas to explore. We ended up climbing a
large hill to see all of the brightly colored buildings and get a better view
of the city. As the sun went down, a few friends and I decided to descend the
hill to find some dinner. We ended up finding a western comfort, Pizza Hut. The
restaurant was much nicer than it is in America and it had quite a few more
options to choose. We chose a bacon-wrapped sausage pizza. It was very
delicious, but we ordered a large and it turned out to only be a medium by
American standards! The night ended by browsing the night market in Lanzhou. It
was a mile long street filled with exotic foods and various clothing/electronic
accessories. The street vendors really loved my mustache (hu zi in Chinese). One man selling lamb heads was just as surprised
at my mustache as I was with what he was selling!
Day 3:
Lanzhou
My
first-ever Chinese breakfast was at the hotel in Lanzhou. There were lots of
eggs, warm green vegetables, rice porridge, spam, and sweet breads. I tried the
vegetables, but to be completely honest with you all, I had a lot of the sweet
bread for breakfast. It was delicious. I also had cheng zhi, which means orange juice, but it was served hot and
didn’t really taste like orange juice. After talking with others, we concluded
that the mystery orange drink was Tang, the powdered drink.
The event
for this day was to travel to the Binglingsi caves. These are a set of Buddhist
grottoes carved into the cliffs of a 60m high gorge about 1,600 years ago.
There are 183 caves in total. The most impressive cave is an 89ft high, seated
statue of Maitreya (the Future Buddha).
In order
to reach the caves, we drove to a boating dock and took a 45 minutes boat ride
to the island. The lake that we were cruising on was actually man-made by the
Yellow River. It was extremely dirty and filled with litter. The color of the
water went from green to brown to yellow depending upon how close to shore you
were. The caves were only a short hike away from the shores of the island. The
first thing I saw was the huge Maitreya carving. It just impressed me that with
limited tools, someone was able to carve this magnificent piece. The statue was
well preserved too. I was able to snap a few pictures from outside the
grottoes, but I was unable to go into the grottoes due to the price. I asked a
guard how much it cost to enter and he said it was $50 to enter the lower level
grottoes, and $100 to go visit the highest most grottoes. This doesn’t seem
outrageous to American tourism standards, but most attractions only cost about
¥60-100 ($10-17). I felt as if I was getting ripped off being a foreigner, so I
didn’t “let them win” by paying their price. Some of you might think I passed
on a great opportunity (Dad this is aimed at you), but I knew I would visit
some nicer and cheaper Buddhist grottoes later on in my trip. I was glad I
saved the money.
Besides
visiting a greatly historical site, I also interacted with some Chinese
tourists. I had ventured off from the group and explored some of the grounds by
myself. I found a nice rock overlooking some of the grottoes and took the
chance to reflect on where I was and what it meant to be there. A Chinese
family with a 2 year old were very intrigued by my actions and sat nearby to
watch. As a small tangent, it is quite common to be mimicked in China if you
are a foreigner. It isn’t because they want to make fun of you, it is because
whatever the foreigner does must be the correct way to do things. Back to the
story, the 2 year old came over and sat next to me and started to mimic me. It
was extremely cute so I took out a piece of paper from my journal and started
folding it. His parents came over to apologize, but I told them it was fine.
The woman asked me what nationality I was, and after I told them, the husband
chanted “USA” a few times. It made me laugh a little, but they didn’t
understand why I was laughing. I finished folding the piece of paper into a
little boat and I gave it to the little boy. I told him it was a boat. He was
really impressed and kept showing his parents. His mother thanked me and then
they left. I finished reflecting and kept thinking about the great hospitality
of Chinese people. I wondered how that interaction would have gone down had I
been in America. I am sure it wouldn’t be enormously different, but the
curiosity that both the parents and the little boy had would not have been
matched by their American counterparts.
I
returned back to the city of Lanzhou from the Binglingsi caves and immediately
looked for dinner. A small group came along with me to a restaurant that I
didn’t know only served fish. The waitress brought all 11 of us into a back
room and then 5 more waiters appeared. We told them we wanted to look at the
menu before ordering and we would call them when we were ready. They only took
a few steps back and just kept looking onward as their heard this foreign
tongue trying to decipher where the beef and chicken was on the menu. Once we
figured out they only served fish, we were in too deep to leave. To make
matters worse, we were in the western part of China so the dialect was
different from the Beijing dialect and they couldn’t completely understand us
when we talked. The cooks even came out because of all of the confusion. We
struggled, but we finally ordered some spicy carp. It came heads, bones, and all.
The meat was quite good, although I wouldn’t classify myself as a fish lover.
The most annoying part about the meal was all of the little choking hazards,
bones, in the fish. I would use my chopsticks to grab a piece of meat off of
the fish and I would have at least 2-3 bones in each piece. I never choked though, so that was a success!
The meal came to an end and the team of waiters and waitresses came back out.
They took pictures of us because they wanted to show their friends they had
foreigners in their restaurant. Everyone just threw up the cheesiest peace
signs we could and made a good effort to look ridiculous. The check came and it
turned out to be about $2 per person. I have found that I will never be able to
complain about food prices in China. I can eat like a king everyday for only
about $10. The night ended with a beggar trying to get Tim to give him money.
Tim speaks Mandarin very well, but he acted as if he didn’t understand the
beggar. He told me after the encounter that the lady wasn’t saying very nice
things about us. That was enough for the day, we all retired back to our hotel
in order to get rested for the next day!
Day 4:
Lanzhou – Xia’he
Day 4
started with a 5-hour bus ride deeper into the West to Xia’he. During this leg
of the trip, the elevation changed a lot and the landscape was full of tall
mountains. Upon arrival to the hotel in Xia’he I noticed the drastic change
from other Chinese cities, buildings were brightly colored and there was a stranger
tongue than Mandarin being spoken, we had arrived in cultural Tibet.
The
biggest difference I noticed was the cuisine. Xia’he is full of nomadic
peoples. They don’t have very much time to cook or eat, so everything is made
fast and extremely calorie-dense. I went to a local eatery conveniently called
Nomad Restaurant. We had snacked on the bus so we only got a light lunch. Our
lunch consisted of Tsampa, Yak Butter Tea with Salt, and Yak dumplings. Here
are my impressions of each dish: 1) Tsampa – It is made of oats, sugar, and yak
butter. It had a warm, nutty taste with a slightly wetter consistency than that
of cookie dough. 2) Yak Butter Tea with
Salt – The milk was from a yak and tasted a lot like whole milk. The yak butter
was extremely rich. The salt was a nice touch, but the yak butter ruined it for
me. (I learned that next semester during the next excursion I will have the
pleasure of waking up to one of these drinks every morning provided by my
Tibetan host family.) 3) Yak Dumplings- YUM. Dumplings are always good, but the
yak meat was actually really good! It tasted a little bit like lamb. As you can
see, I am not really a food blogger so I don’t really know how to taste test. I
guess you will just have to visit Nomad Restaurant to find out for yourselves!
We had a
few hours before our next scheduled activity, so I went along with a group to
hike in the mountains. It was extremely beautiful to catch a glimpse of the
entire city at once from the high mountains. The oxygen was really pure here
and quite the change from Lanzhou’s air quality (Lanzhou used to be the most
polluted city in China until recent times).
The
scheduled activity for the night was to visit a Tibetan family’s home and take
part in a dinner + ritual. The dinner was interesting to say the least. First
course was yak dumplings, bread, and lamb. The second course was a noodle soup
that was extremely hard to eat with chopsticks. The third course was a bowl of
rice with a cup of sugar and a couple tablespoons of yak butter on the top. I
did my best to eat around the sugar and yak butter. The last course was yak
yogurt. These people really love their yak foods. The yak yogurt was very
similar to Greek yogurt, so I enjoyed it.
After
dinner, we were introduced to a Tibetan band that was going to sing songs for
us and perform a greeting ritual. The ritual consisted of putting a white scarf
around the neck of the guest called a hada. Then you dipped your hand into what
I thought was water and flicked it once to the heavens, one to the ground, and
one outward followed by finishing the drink. When I took the drink I instantly
knew it wasn’t water, but it didn’t burn or taste bad. It actually tasted
sweet. A while later, when I started to feel the buzzed feeling, I confirmed
that the drink was some sort of alcohol. Ever heard of the infamous baijiu of China? Baijiu was what the clear liquid I had mistaken for water. For
those unfamiliar with baijiu, it is a
hard liquor of with a varying range of the percentage of alcohol (I’ve heard
45-65%). This sounds infinitely stupid; to take a drink that you don’t know
what it is, but this was in a controlled environment with the leaders of the
trip present (I promise I am wise, mom)! It was quite the surprise when I found
out what it was, but no harm, no foul. The night ended with an American-Tibetan
cultural exchange. Some students sang English songs and the Tibetans returned
the favor with more of their music.
This video is of the 1st welcoming ceremony.
Day 5:
Xia’he
There is
a common morning ritual in Xia’he to turn the prayer wheels in the Labrang
Monastery. I had been told by an English-speaking monk that the reasoning
behind the prayer wheels is that years ago, many people were illiterate and
were unable to read religious texts. These prayer wheels were developed and
each clockwise spin (very important detail, otherwise the spin went to Hell)
equaled 1 reading of the sutras. So I walked around the perimeter of the
monastery, about two miles, and spun these wheels for about an hour. I counted
the wheels and 1 circuit was roughly 1041 prayer wheels. The people along the
way would also lie down, flat on the ground and pray. The sight was quite
inspiring because most spinners were older folks, 75-85 years of age. There
were also younger people, but the dedication from the older people was the noteworthy
part.
Later
that morning, I went inside the monastery for a tour. A monk named E’Ang
ZongZhe built the Labrang Monastery in 1709. He became the 3rd
highest in Tibetan hierarchy behind the Dalai and Panchen Lamas. This monastery
houses close to 1500 monks. There are young, children monks and old monks. It
is also an academic institution for monks to study a variety of degrees such as
mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. The tour ended with a walk through the
Grand Sutra Hall while all of the monks were chanting something in Tibetan.
The
afternoon was reserved for shopping and resting up for the party later that
night with Tibetan Nomads in the grasslands. I didn’t really buy anything, but
I tried bargaining and it turned out to be a lot of fun. I think I may be a bit
cheap because they never liked my prices! But the process was just as much fun
as actually purchasing a souvenir.
The party
with the Tibetan Nomads was short. We arrived and heard them perform two songs.
Then all of the Chinese tourists left while our group leader told us to hang
back. Our leader had setup an after-party with just our group and the nomads.
We received another hada and cup of baijiu,
but this time I was prepared. I did my three flicks and then I acted like I
took a large sip, but in reality I only drank a little, spilling much more on
the ground than in my stomach. After the welcoming ceremony, we performed the
cha-cha slide for the Tibetan Nomads and then two students from Columbia
performed the Salsa for everyone. The Tibetans really liked the dancing so they
taught us 5-6 of their dances. Their dancing is based off of flow. You use your
arms in long, controlled movements and tap your feet on the ground
simultaneously while moving in a large circle. Anyone that knows me well knows
that I am not a talented dancer nor can I do anything that requires a large
amount of multi-tasking, however I held my own with the Tibetan dancing! The
whole night was a success and both cultures left knowing something new about
the other.
Day 6:
Xia’he – Lanzhou
It was
time to leave the wonderful city of Xia’he and return to Lanzhou to take the
train to Dunhuang. Instead of driving the 5 hours straight to Lanzhou, we made
a pitstop to Linxia. This city played an important role as the trading link
between the Han and Tibetan regions and also in the spread of Islam from Centra
Asia. 98% of the people who live there are Muslim. It lives up to its nickname,
“Little Mecca.” There are roughly 500 mosques in the surrounding area and most
of the people survive as traders or restaurant owners. We were lucky enough to
visit the Xichuan Big Mosque in Linxia. Along with being a place for religious
ceremony and prayer, Xichuan Big Mosque is also a school. It is free public
school whose students receive the same education as other schools and in
addition, learn Arabic scripts and textile making. We toured their classrooms
and saw their textile factory. We also saw their break room, which was filled
with ping-pong tables and many students playing. Some people in our group were
brave enough to challenge some of the Muslim students, but none of them came
out victorious. I remember watching one game where the Muslim student put a
nasty curve on the ping-pong ball and my friend swung and completely missed the
ball. I decided I would not play as to avoid embarrassing myself after seeing
that happen. We concluded the tour with a cultural exchange. A group of Muslim
girls came and sang a song for us. Once they finished, our leader came over and
told us to sing a song for them. As a group of mostly Americans and being
unprepared, we chose the only logical choice, the National Anthem. I felt bad
for the sole Canadian in our group. I heard a lot of humming coming from his
direction, but I should give him more credit because he knew some of the
lyrics.
After the
tour, we went to a local Muslim Restaurant for lunch. We had a lot of spicy
foods and bread. It was really good, but I started to feel sick shortly after
finishing. It was gan mao (to have
the common cold). I wasn’t the first to get it, but I also wasn’t the last.
Over the course of the next few days, everyone had either just gotten over the
cold or were just starting the sickness. Luckily, we arrived in Lanzhou and the
wait to get on the train was short. Once I got on the train, I took some
medicine and was able to rest for the night.
Day 7:
Dunhuang
I woke up
the next morning feeling refreshed and slightly better than the day before. We
arrived at Dunhuang station and immediately went to Castle Rock hotel for
breakfast (this is not the hotel we were staying at, we were just here for the
view and the food). The view was amazing because the sun was just rising over
the high sand dunes and in one direction we could only see desert. The food was
also very delicious. This hotel was the place I had my first tastes of fruits
since I was in America! I was quite hesitant to try fruit in the other cities
because I didn’t want to get sick, but this hotel was really fancy so I assumed
it would be okay. The peaches were fantastic and there were some sort of cross
between an apple and a pear. I was glad I tried the fruit because the sugar
rush perked up my spirits a lot and I didn’t get sick.
The
schedule for afternoon was quite empty due to all of the recent traveling, so I
decided to rest up for most of the afternoon instead of exploring Dunhuang. I
watched The Voice of China (a spin-off of the American version of the show).
The format was the same and the talent was impressive, but the difference
between the American version of the show and the Chinese version was the drama
involved in each decision. Each performer would be picked at the last second
and the performers’ families would almost always cry. Then during the time when
the performer picks the team they would like to join, they would almost always
state that their father or mother was a huge fan of “fill in the judge’s name
here” and that was the reasoning of their choice. I found the whole show quite
entertaining and insightful on the inner workings of their culture.
I had to
leave the hotel to find dinner before going on our night of camping in the
desert, so I went to a popular chain restaurant called Dico’s. They sell
chicken sandwiches and fries. It is fast food, but the quality isn’t too bad. I
tried ordering for myself, but the part I had trouble conveying was that I
didn’t want the combo meal. After minutes of struggling, I said the price I
wanted to pay and the worker understood what I wanted. My friends ordered their
meals and we went back to the hotel to eat. The only flaw to my plan of saying
the price of what I wanted was that there are also other sandwiches of the same
price. Instead of getting a chicken sandwich, I got a shrimp sandwich. You may
be thinking I was quite surprised when I bit into it and found out it wasn’t
chicken, but you’d be wrong. I finished the whole sandwich and I thought it was
chicken. It wasn’t until the fishy aftertaste that I wondered what I had
actually eaten. Good thing the wrapper had the name of the sandwich (Shrimp
Sandwich) on it or otherwise I would probably have never eaten at Dico’s again,
which has become a comfort food restaurant when I feel like I need a
Westernesque meal.
The real
adventure for the day began at dusk when we arrived in the desert. We had small
tents that would fit two people, so my friend Tim and I decided to be
roommates. We hiked a good distance away from everyone else so we could get a
“good desert experience,” but right off the bat we thought we were in for a
long night. Tim had taken the initiative to start building the tent, little did
he or I know that he was only using the rain cover and not the actually tent.
15 minutes later, after everyone else had already finished, Tim had almost
given up and wanted to get a new tent that wasn’t defective. He then found his
problem, not having the right tent, and set up the tent almost instantly. I’d
say he redeemed himself quite quickly, but he was still frustrated from the
lost time setting up the tent. We only had a few minutes before complete
darkness, but we wanted to climb to the top of a sand dune to get a good view
of the land. We made it just as the sun had gone away. It was an extremely
beautiful sight to see a uniform landscape of sand that would shift as the wind
blew. We made our way to down from the sand dune and to the bonfire for
watermelon and scary stories.
Here are some of the pictures from my trip. I accidentally uploaded some from the next blog post, but I didn't add descriptions.
