Blog #2: The Silk Road Part 1

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 3^rd 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.