Worst Kept Secrets

Hey, I survived my first Chinese travel experience with nothing more than a nasty cold. Last Saturday, five of us got on a bus and headed for Jiujiang, which is in the JiangXi Province (a couple of provinces south of JiangSu, which is Anne Town). It was surprisingly easy - I was ready for travel to be stressful, but we all met at the bus station, threw our bags through what has got to be the most token-y security system I’ve ever seen (the luggage goes through a conveyor belt and there’s no one watching the screening monitor, which I’m not sure was even turned on), and then we hopped on our bus. It was comfortable enough, which I’ll admit surprised me, and off we went.

We crossed the Yangtze River (Changjiang - can’t we just call it that, western people?), so that’s off my list of Important Chinese Sights to See. And, well, it was really big, I don’t know what else I can tell you about it. Then years of conditioned experience on school buses kicked in and I went directly into drooling sleep in a highly improbable position.

I woke up three hours later, to find out that we were stopping for dinner. Cool, I thought, and got off to stretch my legs and get gas station snacks. Then they locked up the bus, and everybody stood shivering around a woman selling ramen noodles and hovering around the hot water bottles. I wandered inside and found a package of Bugles, of all things, amid the shredded squid and god only knows what else. I also saw more stars in the parking lot than I’d seen in months.

Then we got back on and drove for three more hours watching a movie starring Jackie Chan, China’s Favorite Son, and we were there. Simple.

JiuJiang really, really, REALLY reminded me of Harrison, Arkansas. I guess a population of 500,000 compared to 12,000 in Harrison is a little drastic, but the whole time I kept expecting to see a Chinese Hudson’s cow on some street corner.

[Apparently I've never thought to photograph the Hudson's cow at home. It's a huge, huge, huge cow on a raised platform that sits outside the locally owned grocery store.]

Then we spent a day hanging out in a coffee shop and then meandering around the park that surrounds a man made lake. I mean, that’s high school, RIGHT THERE. It was fun, but I wished that Harold’s Donuts had been involved. It got me killer nostalgic, and I’m not exactly prone to high school nostalgia. I certainly didn’t expect to run into it in China.

Anyway, there were a lot of key differences between JiuJiang and Harrison, one of which being how entirely unexpected a group of five westerners was. Ok, I admit it: Nanjing is pansy China. Most people are accustomed to seeing foreigners, and the occasional incident is more funny than anything else, most of the menus are in English, there are places to go to meet other expats, etc. In JiuJiang, McDonald’s is the only place where you can get cheese, and the five of us nearly made a poor waitress cry she got so flustered and confused by us. Also, there’s hardly any English, anywhere, and I think that after I met Jennifer, Chris’s friend, I knew at least a quarter of the foreign population of the place.

One of the nice things about having someone in my corner who can speak Chinese and read the important stuff is that I never have to gamble too much when it comes to food. I’ve never played the “point at something and see what happens” game with a menu. And so while we were in Bonny Coffee, we thought it might be fun to play that game with dessert. The heading was “Ice Cream and Sundes [sic]“, so it seemed completely harmless, right? I mean come on, how in the world can an ice cream sundae go bad? Oh, let me show you.

I mean, if you take your ice cream as seriously as I do, then this concoction was sort of like a Black Mass situation that involves the sacrament being consumed out of a whore’s … you get the idea. We all tried it, but got no where near finishing it - it seemed to be made of a mouthful of Scope, the scrapings from rusty pipes, and a whole lot of other things that shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near an ice cream dessert.

However, the rest of the food there was pretty good - I just had some beef rice dishes (we ate there a lot) that were phenomenally tasty and carried disastrous gastronomical consequences. Unfortunately, most of the restaurants and daytime things to do were closed because of Spring Festival. But guess what was NOT closed, which made me completely revise my comparison of the place to my hometown, because the nightlife was nothing like Arkansas AT ALL.

We went to three clubs total, and got complete rock star treatment at all of them - special little rock star booths, rock star service, and rock star attention, not to mention the hero’s welcome that Chris got from everyone who knew him, which was cool to see:

[Note: this picture was taken and then I was immediately rescued, I promise]

There were sexy dancers, fun lighting, and more people who wanted to be my friend than I’ve ever encountered in Nanjing. At one place we went, we had so many new friends that the manager actually came over to stand by our table to keep the crowd at bay. After a couple of nights of that, my Chinese listening comprehension was easily tripled, and I’m now incredibly good at screaming, YOU ARE MY FRIENDS! YOU ARE MY FRIENDS! over and over again in Mandarin. Here are two of my favorite dancing friends:

While that was going on, there was a crazy fire show at the bar, which I managed to completely miss in the throes of my dance fever. In retrospect, I was pretty disturbed by the idea that I glanced over my shoulder, saw that THE BAR WAS ON FIRE, and thought, hrm, and kept dancing. That’s really the sort of thing that I should be with it enough to investigate, you know? Fortunately, Chris had my camera and got awesome pictures of the spectacle that I completely missed because I was busy making a drunken laowai fool of myself.

Repeat: photo credit is entirely due to Chris Clanton, who would be the one who dragged me off the dance floor if the building was actually on scary fire, and who also refused to allow me to pass out in the lobby, did not allow me to get kidnapped by a mob of fascinated Chinese men, etc, etc, etc. So thanks are in order. I really didn’t drink all that much in college or even in Fayetteville, and so now that I’m turned loose on the eastern hemisphere, I regret to report that I do require some babysitting…. For chrissakes, I took a shot of baijiu out of somebody’s navel last week (I did know the owner of the navel). Good grief.

So, yes, there was a little bit of a vacation binge, but I’ve been spending this week absorbed in meditation, prayer, and sobriety, I swear. Long story short, JiuJiang was a lot of fun, and completely different from Nanjing.

By the time we boarded the bus to return to Nanjing, I’d developed a gross, gross cold/flu/anthrax thing, and was more or less miserable by the time I got my stuff all arranged and my six-hour nest lined. I slept for the first hour or so, and then woke up and spent some time staring at the completely alien landscape out the window.

First of all, the highway was absolutely deserted. It would have been a pretty nightmare place to get stuck. We were driving through a mountain range of some sort - it was about the same in size as the Ozarks, but the hills were more pointy and, I don’t know, Chinese. There were also so many tiny villages - groups of ten or twenty two-story flat roofed buildings with laundry hanging out, connected by dirt paths rather than roads. No cars, television antennas, nothing. Just these houses that looked like they’d fall over if you thought about them too hard, and fields in front, where I saw people working. It was a weird feeling flying past all of that - I realized I was seeing a part of China that I’ll simply never have access to. Buses and trains don’t stop in places like that, and a blond English teacher from Arkansas would have absolutely no way of making heads or tails of that lifestyle if she had any way of getting there in the first place.

I also saw a lot of graves, which looked like little white houses (Chris had to tell me what they were). They weren’t organized into cemeteries exactly, you’d just see a little white ghost house sitting on top of a hill or under a tree. And they were about the happiest little graves I’ve ever seen, you know? I wish I’d been able to take pictures out of the bus window. It was really hard trying to comprehend everything I was seeing flying past me, and I really wish I could have stopped and walked around a little bit, so that I’d have a more coherent impression of what’s between JiuJiang and Nanjing.

We stopped at another service area, with a restaurant attached. I was too terrified that the bus was going to leave me to order a meal (and also a little worried that I might have more China tummy on the bus if I ate anything) - once again, we were out in the middle of nowhere. It was kind of a depressing, barren place, and I got more depressed about it when I found out that everyone that worked there just lived in the same building, on the side of the road, waiting for buses to unload. What kind of a life is that, you know? And how in the world do you get out of it? (the same, difficult way you get out of a roadless farming village without electricity, I guess?). And I kept thinking about what in the world I’d do if I got left behind there, since my wallet and my cell phone were still on the bus.

But no one got left, and we made it back to Nanjing in five tired, coughing pieces, and everyone was ready to be home. The trip definitely made me realize that Nanjing is actually where I live - I got the same feeling when we drove across the Yangtze on the way back that I used to get when I passed the Phillips 66 station in Goshen, Arkansas - the “I’m twenty minutes away from my own bed and my own hot shower” feeling. And that was cool.

So yes, that’s what I did last week, and I’ve been sick and lazy ever since (the cold is clearing up, though, which is sort of sad, since it’s such a great excuse to just lay up all day…).