We'll be in Kunming for two days; then we'll take a little flight up to Lijiang. From there we'll bus over to Shangri-la and maybe Dali. Who knows? I guess we'll figure it out in the next couple days.
Internet aplenty still (when we stop to use it). Sorry I'm not writing more.
Xi'an has been a great place to spend extra time. Yesterday we hiked Mt. Huashan (well, half of it...we took the cable car up the beginning. The stairs of DEATH were not appealing.)
Our first couple days here were tame. I got some food poisoning as we arrived, so Hannah went to see the Big Wild Goose Pagoda on her own. The next day we walked around a bit and I tried eating some food. The next day I felt great! So we set out to see the Terra Cotta warriors, but left a little late and took a bus the wrong direction, so by the time we were ready to leave Xi'An it seemed to late to fit it in.
Instead we went to the Great Mosque, China's biggest mosque and spent the brilliantly WARM afternoon wandering through it, shedding coats and sweatshirts. (25 yuan entrance fee).
The Muslim quarter, by Xi'An's Drum Tower, is loaded with vendors and street food. Hannah bought a bag of deliciousness we later learned are jujubes, or Chinese dates. They lasted us as snacks for a few days. We picked up some souvenirs (argh: bargaining is SUCH a workout. I'm good at it, but I hate it), and put down some persimmon pancakes. Then, real hunger set in, so we ate so much chuanr for dinner (10 kebabs each), and some nan-like bread. We made friends with the Tibetan guys who were making the bread. They were a hoot. Communication was difficult as their English and Chinese were poor and my Tibetan is non-existent. One would roll dough over a rounded stone that had a cloth on it. Then he'd pick it up from under the cloth and slam it down into the oven (his whole arm inside the vertical oven). His colleague would spear it to pick it up out of the oven. Another guy, still, would brush oil over it and then it was slammed back down over the stone inside the oven before being speared and laid on the table by another guy. A young boy (maybe 10 years old), kept fetching water...I think for the oven. An old woman sat by in the warm evening air, close enough to catch the bread's aroma from her chair. It was delicious.
We made some friends at our hostel (Suji from Korea and Toshiki from Japan) and REALLY saw the Terra Cotta Warriors with them the next day. Suji is super adorable, outgoing and hilarious. She shouts "ni hao" at everyone and when people holler things in her direction regarding their shops, souvenirs, food, or bus information she proclaims: "Duibuqi ninnn, ting bu dong!" aka: "I'm sorry you (polite)! I don't understand!" But she's so chipper and cute that everyone seems to love her. They laugh at her butchered Chinese bargaining and want to give her the price she said (or tried to say).
I tried to teach her that in China you have to bargain hard. Be mean. Instead, her Korean whining escapes her mouth and she pouts. Her bottom lip comes out and she stamps her feet like a 5-year-old. Worse than my five year olds! I helped her get some souvenirs and she shouts the numbers wrong in Chinese. The shopkeepers end up wanting to give her the price. She makes a slight compromise and walks away with knit booties to display in her room. When we board a bus, she isn't shy to wave her finger no when people she doesn't like try to sit near her. She was a riot to hang out with.
Toshiki is much quieter, partly because he is still working on his English skills (and also can't speak Chinese). He was well-mannered and polite and trailed behind us girls as we cooed over the brightly colored stuffed dragons and hand-sewn zodiac animals. He came hiking with Hannah and me at Huashan Mountain yesterday. We started referring to him as a mountain goat as he galloped up and down staircase after staircase in his converse-like shoes. He rocks a Nikon camera and busted it out repeatedly in order to capture Huashan's immense rock peaks, birds in the bushes, and locks along the chain handrails.
We spent so long hiking that we missed the last bus out of the small town (two hours or more from Xi'An). We had to take a cab to the train station and get a "hard seat" ticket to Xi'an. Sadly, this ticket gives you a car number to ride, but you don't necessarily get a seat if the train is full, which it was. We walked through and through to the front of the car and sighed and stopped at the penultimate set of seats. Three seats on each side face a table between them. In the twelve seats whose aisle we stood between, eleven were filled with Korean tourists. Within three minutes they were shifting and smooshing together to give us the ends of their seats to rest on. Out came the cameras and we were a big family taking goofy photos. None of them spoke Chinese. A few spoke limited English, and between Toshiki, Hannah and me, we could saw various words in Korean. We found out that the one younger Korean goes to University in the very neighborhood in Seoul that Hannah and I just moved from. A couple of them spoke varied phrases in Japanese with Toshiki and it was great fun landing next to the other foreigners on the train car--especially when they turned out to be incredibly generous with their seats, their food and their alcohol! We shared travel stories and exchanged email addresses and wished each other good journeys in China.
We finally made it back to our hostel after a 13-hour day. My calves are sore.
We should catch our shuttle bus to the airport in just a half an hour or so, so I'm gonna go pack it in.
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