The weekend captured something I haven't really experienced since college probably. Something like a retreat, something to do with camaraderie, something about a place removed from time and everything usual.
It started with a packing frenzy Thursday night, and rushing to get an assignment done by 5pm on Friday afternoon.
Friday
Both accomplished, we piled into a taxi bound for Beijing West train station. We were stressed out about making our train -- Friday traffic is the pits -- and I was already going to that peaceful place where it didn't matter if we made the train or not. But make it we did, and we wound around other travelers and threw our bags onto the sleeper bunks. I can't really remember much about our conversations, only that they were good-natured and the kind you can't get enough of. We ate from plastic carry-out boxes, we nodded our heads in exhaustion, we played Set. I began to see a beauty in my coworker-friend that is equal parts hopeful and hungry for knowledge. Even when the train workers turned out the lights and we crawled into our bunks, we shared ghost stories and talked about l-i-f-e.
Saturday
The morning light was gray, the countryside dreary. The train was quiet except for the clanking of wheels on tracks and people slowly going about their morning business. I was groggy. We got to our stop, Jie Xiu, and almost missed it, but luckily Yang caught it in time. We went in search of breakfast on a lowkey snack street:
- Youtiao (Chinese doughnuts)
- Doujiang (soy milk)
- Soft tofu - 2 sweet, 2 salty
- Xiaolongbao (different from the Shanghai variety - these were more like mini-buns stuffed with ground-meat goodness)
- Jiaozi (dumplings)
- And two kinds of soup noodles with pork spareribs, one with regular noodles and one with clear.
Took a bus to 王家大院 (Wang jia da yuan), this gigantic courtyard mansion in the middle of nowhere, where the Wang family started. It was super oldschool Chinese. John was so good as to lend me his camera from time to time to take pictures of cool things. The place was interesting enough, but probably not as interesting as debating whether Hero by Zhang Yimou is a good movie for what it is, or not. There was a small dog who took a liking to me for no good reason. The garden with its trees stripped bare of leaves was a somber and stony place, but I liked it.
Lunch was super “local," with many different kinds of noodles: knife-cut noodles, knife-peeled noodles, flat noodles, and this amazing dish we all fell in love with - shanxi youmian, or oil noodles, these flat noodles made with, I presume, oil, and steamed in beautiful shapes. It looked a bit like a fungus that might grow on a tree:
After a prolonged bout of bargaining, we got on a passenger van bound for Pingyao. Drank in some canyon-like land formations that would have been stunning if not for the perpetual and pervasive smog-haze. I hear that the area around Pingyao is especially active in coal-burning, for what purposes I don't know, but it makes for some pretty terrible air quality, worse even than Beijing.We were dropped off at the east gate of the City Wall, one of the most impressively intact in China. Inside, the old town was not petrified like I imagined (I would call the old town in Lijiang petrified; this was just a bit rundown and choked with dust). There were a few gorgeous things to see, like one of the gates inside town:
The place where we stayed, Yamen Hostel, was another story altogether. We felt it as soon as we stepped in the warm, inviting, and laid-back lounge in front, where backpackers lolled about, reading, checking e-mail, watching Brokeback Mountain in the DVD room. It was the kind of place you wanted to hang around forever. We got our rooms and stepped back into the courtyard portion -- the hostel was converted from an old Chinese mayor's residence. It was like stepping into a movie, specifically Raise the Red Lantern by Zhang Yimou. The courtyard looked exactly the same, this magical and storied place, this portal into a past life:
We had a lowkey dinner from the place across the street and tried to watch several movies before giving up. The rest of the night was spent sipping local beer and half-singing songs we knew while ah-kuan (as we've come to call him despite his protests) showed a guitar who was boss. The girls' room was cold that night, our heater busted, but the blanket was warm and I slept well for the first time in days.Sunday
Woke up rather late to the sound of my cell phone ringing -- Garry! After talking, we got ready to check out and find food to eat. Lunch was similar to dinner, with the addition of a dish called cat's ears, little pasta-like things shaped like cowry shells. We spent the afternoon browsing shops in the old town. I bought lacquer bracelets and contemplated a pair of lions cast with a striking turquoise glaze. Then, to escape the cold, three of us opted for a Chinese-style massage. I've had better, but it was still relaxing (not to mention cheap). Then it was time to catch our bus to Taiyuan, the nearest major city, where our train waited to take us back to Beijing.
We had soft seat tickets, because the stupid transportation system wouldn't allow us to buy return tickets from Beijing, and had to try our luck scoring sleeper tickets once we got on the train. This entailed much negotiating on Yang's part, plus a bribe of Y150 per head to one of the train workers. THEN, we had to swim through a sea of humanity to get from car #13 to car #2 - not an experience I really want to repeat, ever again. People were standing, sitting in the aisles, crouching at the ends of cars, smoking, vomiting on the floor (that was a kid). Finally, finally, we got to our designated sleeper spots and collapsed in relief. The rest of the night was uneventful...more talk-talk-talking, sometimes the topics so serious that I felt almost guilty. At 1am we crawled into bed, only to be shaken awake at 5:30am by the same guy who sold us our sleepers.
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