The City Wall

The next morning we packed up our bags and left them at the hostel lobby in a big heap while we went off to the city wall for a bike ride. The four sides of the city wall make up about eight and a half miles. Bryan got his bike rented first and he was off like a shot, leaving me to meander after at my own pace and Brennan and Max to figure out how to ride a tandem bike.

I would like to present this picture as proof that it is impossible to ride a tandem bike without grinning like a fool.



The surface of the wall was a bit rough, and my bike may as well have been named Rickety. The sun was out in spades, which made it kind of brutal. I had to stop at each of the directional watchtowers to rest in the shade. The orange juice and chocolate from my breakfast didn't think this whole heat thing was a great idea, but there were some pretty keen sights from the walls.










As you can see, by the end of the ride I was red-faced and sweaty, but ever so pleased with my Xi'an experience. From here we headed off to the airport and flew to Guangzhou, capitol city of Canton. I experienced a bout of pickiness and homesickness, all I wanted was recognizable food to eat. I ate a hotdog and a "fruit salad" at the airport, even though the fruits were cherry tomatoes and watermelon. Brennan also shared a potato from his curry and it was so decadent. I missed potatoes.

The Guangzhou airport was all curved glass from floor to ceiling and rain was pouring down it when we landed, so much rain that it looked like someone was standing outside and hosing everything down. We took a bus to our hostel, upping our modes of transportation to feet, bike, plane, taxi and bus (and we could have taken the subway and a boat, too!) The rain gradually slacked off, but the advertisement playing at the front of the bus repeated over and over and over again, so that we got to see more then enough of the 30-second shampoo commercial. I swore never to use Slek shampoo, in fact, if I ever saw that actress sitting on her damn swing thinking about using Slek shampoo I'd probably go and shove her off.

Our Guangzhou hostel was on Bai'e Tan, one of the city's bar districts. We walked past neon lights and live music and more neon lights and found our place, right across the street from the Pearl River. In the evening I walked along the waterfront, looking at flotsam in the river (which was mostly organic, big bunches of river reeds that had washed loose of their moorings) and the neon reflected on the water. Guangzhou was a beautiful city at night, for sheer gaudy neon delight. It was also a beautiful city during the daytime, because its grey concrete apartment buildings were decked with greenery, as each balcony held as many live plants as would fit and true to the humid tropical air, they all thrived by pulling moisture straight out of the air.

Since we were right there on the bar street we went out for a drink--and some heavily/heavenly salted french fries--at the Amigo, which had live music in the form of a woman in a denim shortshorts (bordering on hotpants) and cowboy boots and a man playing a keyboard, I think they were both Filipino. When she wasn't singing the woman dragged people bodily onto the dance floor, so Max ended up out there multiple times, dancing with the middle-aged Chinese ladies who were already dancing. The woman kept coming back and trying to grab me, but I was much more content with my fries and my beers and I would not be moved.

This fresh, bright day was spent exploring the city within Xi'an's old city walls. We wandered towards where our hostel's handy map indicated there was a "Bird Market" and even though we never found that we found plenty to occupy us. In the morning and afternoon we found people sitting at card tables on the sidewalk playing Mahjong and Chinese chess.



We found a street full of food and restaurants, including a window I could peek through and see every bit of a chicken fried up and ready to eat.



See? Even greasy little chicken feet waiting to be eaten.

At one point we passed a fence and a sudden waft of foreign sounding music came to us. We peeked through the fence and were faced with an unexpected sea of brilliant, organic green.



We found our way around the fence, over a wall and were suddenly in a very pretty public park. We followed the sound of music to its source and discovered, well, several sources. There were at least three separate musical activities going on in the park. First we found a few musicians seated at strange few-stringed instruments which made very alien sounding melodies and squeaks. Then we ran into a flat, paved section of park where a small cluster of people were dancing ballroom. A Chinese man asked me to dance (I think, or at least urged me to dance) and I had to duck my head and claim that I didn't know how. Which is a true enough claim, I think. Finally we discovered a saxophone-heavy jazz band in yet another part of the park.



The people who were standing around weren't just listening, they were also singing along in Chinese to songs I didn't recognize, but were in a must more Western style than the other music we had encountered.

Towards the park entrance--the real one, which didn't involve climbing fences or walls--we found an adult playground full of ordinary gym equipment that was weatherized for the outdoors and covered in primary-colored plastics.



It's harder to tell in this picture, but there was StairMaster-esque equipment, and leg presses and stationary bikes and even some elliptical equipment!



We ate dinner at a hotpot restaurant next to the hostel. We tried the restaurant's special warm-yeast-beer before we decided to stick to nice cold Tsingtao. Dinner came to our table and was cooked on the hotplate set in the middle. The broth contained basically all that there is of a chicken except for the head and the feet. There were actually parts in there that appeared to be perfectly inedible, bone and gristle and what appeared to be... neck bits? I could find nice recognizable pieces of chicken, and there was cabbage and radish and noodle to eat, but every now and then I would fish up a long, white segment of... /something/. The Something had the exact texture of animal fat (I know, because I tried one before I knew better) but the pieces were too big to be chicken fat, and it had the wrong flavor for pork fat and even as the broth bubbled and boiled it didn't cook down or react like fat normally would. I swore off the mystery lipid after my one piece, and concentrated on the noodles and the hunt for recognizable chicken meat.

After exploring all day I was a bit hot and fried, so the idea of running through sprinklers definitely occurred and appealed to me. So, for our second visit to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, Brennan and I came prepared.



By prepared I mean that we wore our bathing suits and money in a Ziploc bag. This time as soon as the music started people streamed into the fountain, mostly children and young people who dragged their protesting friends in after them. Brennan attempted to teach me a box step, but I'm pretty crap at dancing under the best circumstances, let alone when I'm dancing into cold jets of water every few steps. We did manage some theatrical spins and a pretty good shuffle step.

I need to take some dance lessons for when I travel abroad next time. I want to be able to accept a dance from a stranger in the future, whether it is in a public park or a fountain.

Terracotta Warriors

I don't think I was hungover, because I felt fine in the early morning, but by the time we had bussed out to the terracotta warrior site I was sort of limping, and another day of blistering hot sun left me feeling completely fried. Of all the sites I saw on my China trip, I'd have to say that the warriors might have been the biggest letdown. Not because they weren't cool, they just weren't as cool as my mind had cast them as. I remember poring over the National Geographic magazine that had pictures of the warriors when I was little, and I was just fascinated by how they all had different faces, and the details on the weapons and the chariots and all that stuff.

In person, you have to climb a long but gradual incline to get to the three pits where the warriors live. Climbing the hill you pass by vendors selling water and ice cream and hats and fans and, rather perversely given the incredible heat of the day, fur caps and scarves.

By the time we got up to the front of the warehouses that house the pits I was having little hot-cold tingles and was thoroughly overheated. The rest of the afternoon was kind of a blur, but I did retain a couple of fascinating facts.

The chrome plating on the arrows and the shafts of most of the weapons found in the pits was pretty advanced stuff. In fact, the chrome plating technology was so advanced on these 2,000+ year old weapons that similar technology was not utilized again until the 20th century by Germans and Americans.

Also, I made sure to take plenty of pictures of headless terracotta warriors from above, for my brother, because you can see right down into their neck holes. I did find the warriors oddly easy to empathize with, which meant I was doing a lot of anthropomorphizing. "They're not real people," I kept having to remind myself, even though I was feeling more upset by their broken bodies and tangled torsos in heaps down in the dig site that I've felt at actual graves before, or in the plague pits in Europe.

Got back to the hostel and I slept for the rest of the night except for a brief time when I got woken up and fed some sort of crispy tasty meat-inna-bun that Brennan found in the nearby Muslim district. I guess I earned at least one day with malady on my trip.

I felt completely recovered by the next morning and woke up fresh and bright and early. I went walking before it got miserably hot out and decided that really all that I'd needed was an incredibly long nap to heal myself.

Goodbye Tianjin, hello Xi'an.

The word for ginger is "jiang", which--in the same tone--is also the word for arrow, river, about to, will, shall and--with a different tone--also means to say, a prize or to fall. I'm seeing a language just designed for making terrible puns and "Who's On First?" comedy sketches based on misunderstanding.

The train ride from Tianjin to Xi'an took 18 hours, but where that time spent on a plane is overwhelming and cramped, that time spent on the train in our plush sleeper car was lovely. We had the "soft sleeper" set up as a two level bunk bed, whereas the "hard sleeper" has a three-tiered bunk. Our beds were especially luxurious after the hard sleeping arrangements at the Tianjin hostel, I melted when I discovered that we each had two pillows. Two! The epitome of decadence. Somebody likened the train to being rocked gently/jerkily by a robot nanny. We spent a couple of hours playing word association with each other, my favorite segues were feminist--Frankenstein, bondage--cabbage and seduction--mousse (moose?)

The car next to ours had a food car. My freakin' train had a freakin' food car. What an awesome way to travel.

We slept through the night and didn't arrive in Xi'an until mid-day, so there was a lot of staring out the windows the next morning. The land we were passing through changed from flat farmland to hills of pale yellow earth. The guidebook said that it was loess, clay blown in on rough Siberian winds. Some of the hillsides had been terraced some time in the long past, because the terraces were overgrown with weeds and pioneer plants. Hell, those hillsides were probably being farmed hundreds of years ago.

The railroad tracks were lined with hollyhocks and Western-style headstones, which Bryan assured us are indeed grave markers.

We made it to the train station and managed to find the Xiangzimen hostel without any difficulty, even though the directions there were terribly zen (and by 'zen' I mean entirely unhelpful.) "Take the 603 bus 6 stops and get off at the nanmen exit. You will find our hostel in 3 minutes." I mean, the prediction ended up being right, but even so. The hostel was probably the prettiest one we stayed in, main building was 200+ years old and had a series of open courtyards. The main building with most of the bedrooms had rooftop access and balconies and heavy wooden furniture. It reminded me of a place that I had a good dream about years ago, and a marvelous atmosphere.



The common room/restaurant/where the wireless lives.






The upstairs hallways walls were crammed with messages from past guests. My favorites were definitely a bright green spider stencil, the comment about Karl's head and of course the strange anti-knitting graffiti.

As we passed from the main house (built during the Ming dynasty) into the main building where our rooms were we passed a dusty ginger and white cat curled up in a chair. The cat was almost perfectly still, and if it hadn't been breathing shallowly I would have sworn up and down that it was a moth-eaten stuffed cat. When I petted it Hostel Cat made absolutely no response, no purring thrum, no stretch and arch, nada. I guess when you get poked by foreigners all day you just kind of shrug it off and continue your nap.

By the time I had showered and cleaned up from long trip Bryan and Max had vanished, so Brennan and I went off in search of dinner. We found a place near the hostel called Cantonese delights and, since Canton was our next stop we felt we ought to get a preview of culinary pleasures. That and we were starving, and besides this restaurant the street looked like it was mostly banks and upscale clothing boutiques. We climbed a staircase up to the restaurant, which had a gleaming front lobby that resembled a hotel except for the bubbling water and tanks full of fish at the far end of the room. Most of the lights were off in the restaurant, but that was because we came in between lunch and dinner. We were taken to a table with chairs that had those button-up-the-back covers and given an epic menu, full of pictures. We took at least fifteen minutes to leaf through the menu, gazing at pictures of every kind of meat imaginable, chicken, pork, eel, jellyfish, fish, fish, fish, other fish, oxtail (which isn't actually beef tail, I don't think) and lots of liver (which comes form the Liver Animal, obviously.) It was just the two of us in the restaurant, besides the waitstaff. While our waitron stood guard over us a few feet away, the cooks peeked out at us, and the man who seemed to be the manager (from the way he kept fussing over other people's uniforms) kept an eye on us. In spite of the eeriness of being watched by an army, and eating in a "fancy" sit-down restaurant for the first time in China, the place was pretty surprisingly tranquil. And then good came and it was mightily delicious.

We ate porkbelly from a bed of what were basically collard greens, a savory tea gelatin with coconut milk, and amazingly slippery cold grey noodles from a spicy red broth that were equal parts tricky and delicious. I think it was while eating those noodles that I realized that my chopstick skills are perfectly adequate. If I can eat well-oiled noodles I can probably manager most things. We also shared tall bottles of Tsingtao over the meal. Chinese beer comes in liter bottles (or somewhere around that) and is drunk from smaller glasses. Like in other parts of Asia, in China pouring is an important aspect of the guest-host relationship, so in mock-homage we kept sneakily refilling each other's glasses.

When we got back to the hostel I did my laundry (with Chinese Tide!) and while it spun I went up on the roof. There were men on the roof next door, breaking roof tiles with hearty smacks from the flat of a shovel, it made a great breaking noise. The sun was too hot and merciless to stay on the roof for long, though, so I slipped back down to my room in the basement which, though windowless was perfect because it was cave-like. After my laundry we went for a long walk through the South Gate and further south towards the Wild Goose Pagoda. I saw a recommendation scribbled on the wall upstairs at the hostel for the fountain show in front of the pagoda. On the huge square around the pagoda we found people doing some kind of Chinese line dancing, or it may have possibly been Falun Gong practitioners. They moved in synchronicity, which was kind of eerie as a big square of 40 people all moving together.

The fountain show started, lights glowing through water in blues and greens and reds. Some people jumped into the fountain, running underneath the water plumes and whooping loud enough to be heard above the loud techno-classical accompaniment to the lights. We plotted coming back in our bathing suits so we could play in the fountain again.

We limped back to the hostel after only a half hour of the fountain show because Brennan had a a sinus headache. I brought him how water for tea and he curled up in his room to nap through the headache. I went up to the little outdoor courtyard and sat at the heavy stone table writing in my journal until Bryan and Max found me out there and invited me to the bar street. The bar street was conveniently located right behind our hostel, and was literally a street of just bars. In the first bar we found a fairly unremarkable band playing strange Chinese-jazz fusion, I say that the band was unremarkable but the saxophone player was marvelous as smokin' jazz or some pretty hot blues.

While Max and I drank beer (and he tried unsuccessfully to order a double vodka tonic) Bryan joined us in a comradely teetotaling fashion, drinking juice and getting just about as silly as us drinkers did. By the time we had enjoyed toasts at the last bar, which was overrun by the family owners who were celebrating somebody's birthday (and thus totally more sloshed than we were) Max was drunken-ravenous, he was pretty much, "A hotdog! My kingdom for a hotdog!" so we went off in search of food. It felt miraculous at the time, because I was giddy and drunk, but we stumbled (literally) into an outdoor 3am Chinese food court, set up in front of a bunch of posh banks and shops. We ate fried rice and gobbled it while sitting in what felt like child-sized stools at a child-sized table. This might be the drunk talking, but it was amazingly delicious.

On our first night in Tianjin the trio of non-Mandarin speakers were on our own, as Bryan went off to spend time with the rest of his family. Against the advice of a Frenchman at the hostel who told us that the city had no soul we went looking for some night life, or at least liveliness. After taking my first Chinese taxi, we found a block of Korean restaurants and a place called Zero Club to explore. Eating Korean food was funny, since Brennan and Max had left South Korea less than a week before. They pointed out familiar things to each other like people who were homesick. We ate fat noodles with clams and tomato sauce, spicy kimchee and peanuts in a sweet sauce before deciding that the early morning train ride had really left us with no great desire to go dancing at Zero or any other number. We meandered back towards our hostel, passing under Tianjin's huge TV tower.


Note, we did not take a ride in a helicopter and thus this is not my photograph. Our path beside the water and the TV tower led us to a little park full of teenagers rollerblading. We watched their antics for a while, until we couldn't help giggling from sleepiness and the bizarre experience of listening to Liva La Vida Loca from some kid's portable stereo while they sped around the park on their oh-so-1990's wheels. We got back to the hostel at a reasonable hour and went to bed. I was in the female dorm all by myself, so much for experiencing hostel life, but Max (a much more experienced hosteler than I) said that the male to female ratio is usually 2:1.

The sun the next morning was sickly, struggling to shine through thick smog and dust. Women would ride by on bicycles and scooters, their faces entirely swaddled in netting or scarves to keep out dust and smoke. This day (and most of the other days until halfway through the trip) I woke up too early, much earlier than the guys. I wish I'd had the gumption to go exploring further afield, but as it was I curled up in the downstairs common room and knitted. The woman who cleaned at the hostel came and admired my knitting and seemed to take a living to me, she remained friendly towards me the whole stay while Max was quite intimidated by the disapproving looks that she cast at everyone else.

I got a map of the city from the front desk and proceeded to fold is down to just the bit that I needed--I felt that somewhere my mother was cringing at the terrible fold mangling I submitted that poor map to.)

Our main aim of the day was the Monastery of Deep Compassion, which we found without much difficulty (but not before finding meaty breakfast baozi.)



This is the Fu Dog (or Foo Dog) guarding the gate into the monastery, which might be called a monastery but is really a temple? I dunno, the Buddhist stuff had me pretty gobsmacked, as far as iconography and terminology went. The buildings were gorgeous, even though the outside walls were sometimes grimy, the inside bits were incredible and the colors were gorgeous.

I want a ceiling painted so brilliantly:



People were actively praying and prostrate themselves in front of the various altars in the temple buildings. Incense was lit and adherents would kneel on vinyl mats in front of various altars set before Bodhisattva statues (which all look like Buddha to me, oops.)

In the courtyard in front of one temple there was a bell tower about two stories tall. People would throw little coins (probably the 1 jiao coins, worth about a tenth of a penny) up into the tower and hit the bells which made them peal in gorgeous clear tones. The whole thing was very aesthetically pleasing.




The temple buildings were, as I wrote in my paper journal, "hella glitzy, deep turquoise, purple and white in stylized waves, red interiors and gold as an accent color everywhere." Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy (I can read a plaque, after all), sat behind her altar with her eight pairs of golden arms. She looked plush and comfortable, seated among stacks of fresh apples, each piled in a pyramid with three on the bottom and then one and then the last stacked on top and surrounded by silk flowers.

After the monastery Brennan limped back to the hostel, utterly limp from the heat (he would submit himself to Cloverfield in the relatively cool hostel common room, which was punishment enough.) Max and I found a huge, busy bazaar. I ate raisin ice cream and we wandered through food stalls and clothing stalls and looked at counterfeit watches and jewelry. There was such an abundance of stuff, which shouldn't surprise me at all, since it's where all of ours comes from. It reminded me of an overgrown flea market because stalls were set up willy-nilly and the lanes in between were extremely narrow.

When we got back to the hostel--in time for the dregs of Cloverfield--we met up with some other hostelers, the Singaporean Justin (whose first language was English, but with a very thick accent) and Helija (a Finn, heading to Japan after studying in Southern China for a year.) They came with us for our evening adventures. We waited until around sunset, and then hiked over to the Tianjin Eye, a ferris wheel modeled after the London Eye. By daylight the ferris wheel was pure white and appealing, but at night it was lit up and ever so grand. (Bright lights, ferris wheel, forgive the midway loving rube in me.)





The view of the city was funny, since one side of the river was obviously much more developed than the other. If we looked at the side of the city where our hostel was then we could see dark looming shapes of unfinished apartment buildings jutting up, scraping the sky and towering as strange silhouettes framed by cranes. To the other side of the city, further south along the river we saw neon and lights and more established cityscape, but even that was dotted with the odd empty lot where something had been knocked down to make way for something bigger and better.






At the base of the Eye an impromptu fair was going on, with merchants selling plastic gewgaws, toys, watches and jewelry squatting behind blankets spread on the sidewalk. There were also games of ring-toss and a game where you threw darts at balloons. Max was being goofy, and trying to impress Helija, so he stopped to throw darts. He won bubble solution, which he proceeded to blow rather fantastically for the rest of the night.



We ate dinner with our fellow hostelers in a dingy outdoor mall food court. Easily the worst food that I ate over the entire trip, a broth with noodles and quail eggs in it. I will be forever suspicious of quail eggs now. We left Justin at the hostel and went in search of a bar called Ali Baba's. I guess we didn't know to shout "open sesame!" from the taxi, since our driver couldn't find the place. Finally we settled on hopping out and checking out the KTV, instead. KTV is Chinese karaoke, which has a lot in common with Korean and Japanese karaoke. You get your own room for a set time, they bring you snacks and if you're lucky Max brings you lots of tall bottles of beer from the restaurant next door and Brennan will have a belt buckle suitable for opening bottle caps.

While most of the songs from the list we could choose from were in Chinese there were a number of familiar English tunes. Helija sang ABBA's Voulez Vous, we all sang The Beatles and I grooved to an extremely synthed-up version of April Come She Will. While the covers of popular songs were sometimes funny, far funnier were the videos that accompanied them. They all had a very homegrown quality to them, like someone just wandered around a city park and filmed people walking and sitting on benches with creepy, leering close-ups. One video was for a Chinese version (?) of a song /called/ Yellow Submarine that bore no relation to the Beatles song involving a boy and a dog walking across an otherwise deserted beach. One video just showed a woman dancing sexily/uncertainly beside a motorcycle. My favorite video was of a very early 1990's looking couple with big teased hair standing in front of a house, holding each other and smiling like an ad for real estate. That was the entire video.

And that night I fell asleep, and dreamed again that I was trying to use sign language to shape Chinese characters in the air so that people could understand me.

Inside painting and the way to Tianjin

After the wedding festivities were really over (except for the drunken sleeping stupor in the lobby) Granddad asked us to come see Hengshui's museum of "inside painting." Having no idea what this might be we, of course, said yes.

This style of painting is done on the inside of a clear glass bottle, one that is traditionally filled with snuff tobacco for disgusting snorting up the nose. The glass bottles are small, most of them fit in the palm of the hand. The artist reaches a tiny brush into the bottle and paints a completely mirror image to the one that shows up on the outside of the glass. The paintings are mostly traditionally Chinese in style and subject-matter (with an exception I will describe below). Many were of scenes of small, peach-fuzzy kittens with fat heads and birds on branches. In my opinion the most impressive ones involved a lot of little black lettering, the Chinese characters have to be painted backwards, as if you written in a fogged window to be read from the other side. I can't even remember which way my 'e' and 'r' are supposed to face when writing backwards, let alone take care of characters like these:



(Oh, btw, the bottom-most character on the left is literally the symbol for day and the symbol for entrance or opening. Nice.)

The inside painting museum had a bunch of unusual and beautiful bottles displayed upstairs, as well as a collection of snuff-snorting tools. I got a tour of the museum with my very own personal English-speaking tour guide. He hovered, following me around the fairly small showroom. It only took about fifteen minutes, but he was eager to tell me all about the everything, so I was relieved when I ducked into the alcove in the middle of the room and he only half followed. It was also there that I discovered The Presidents. A set of glass bottles on a slowly spinning pyramid showed presidents one through forty-one (that is, Washington to Bush, Sr.) slowly swiveling under a bright light. The little presidential portraits were finely detailed, but they weren't quite right. Even Theodore Roosevelt looked just a little fishy, as though they'd been copied from a copy or a copy. They didn't look like the expected portrait, exactly. They were so odd and delightful.

After the museum we had to track down some internet so that we could make hostel bookings for Tianjin the following day. We tried to use the dim, hot internet cafe near our hotel, but they refused to let us because we were foreign (at least that was what our mimed conversation and the repeated use of the word 'passport' led us to believe.) Everybody in the internet cafe was playing World of Warcraft. It was spooky and smoky and dark.

For internet use, Bryan's uncle swept us off to his apartment once again, to use his computer. He uncovered it (another electronics-hiding doily!) and we booked up at the only hostel in Tianjin. While we made our plans for the following day the uncle and his wife brought us nuts and seeds and dried fruit and tea, continuing to press us with fierce hospitality. Max made some joking comment about wanting some lychee fruits, and then repeated with as best a Mandarin intonation as possible, "Lychee?" The aunt and uncle both nodded vigorously. A short while later, they filed out, leaving us in their apartment with Granddad. Bryan was back at the hotel, so we couldn't really make conversation, but filled the silence and the time by playing what felt like Pictionary. Granddad would draw a picture, and then draw a Chinese character, letting us know what he was drawing. We went through the numbers, then drew some maps and some names of countries. The most useful ones that he showed us were the cardinal directions, bei (north), dong (east), nan (south), xi (west).

Granddad also tried to write our names with Chinese characters. He managed to write out "Chesley" just fine, but when I showed him how I spell my last name he kind of squinted and frowned at me, and underlined it, as if to say "That whole thing??" Yes, that whole thing. Hyphen and all. So the Digges-Elliott sparks cross cultural confusion, nice.

At this point, Uncle and Aunt came back completely laden with fruit. They gave us tiny nectarines, fresh slices of melon and whole branches of lychees with white-grey flesh and pupil-glossy black pits. There was again, so much food that plates and bowls had to be stacked on top of each other on the coffee table to fit everything.

We slept at the hotel that night, and then woke up early, fresh for a train ride. Bryan's family took us out for breakfast, a salty boiled egg that had been soaked in soy sauce and a bunch of tasty meat wrapped in bread. I looked at the paper wrapping the whole thing came in when I was done eating and it had a few words written in English. Looks like my tasty meat wrap was made out of donkey. Noms.

The whole family, both Bryan's and the family of the bride waited with us at the train station. The women in the family admired my knitting when I pulled it out. I showed them the pictures of the finished sock from my pattern so they knew what I was making. I got approving looks.

We finally boarded the train bound for Tianjin, looking forward to several hours of travel. Our seats were not all together, so I ended up sitting with Brennan across from a two year old boy and his mom.



The boy was thoroughly engrossed in eating his hot ramen noodles and stretching his feet out towards me, poking me in the leg with his hot little toes. The little boy eventually got into a poking match with Brennan, especially delighted when Brennan made great "woobwoobwoobwoob!" noises and bugging his eyes out in surprise when the kid poked him. This occupied our next hour, easily, until the kid pulled out his finger gun and started shooting us, "pop pop pop!" We faked our deaths valiantly, which excited him. so that he hopped up and down and up and down and up and down and vomited his noodles into his mom's purse. She took it in stride and cleaned him up, and he was completely and utterly unphased.



As a nice, calm sit-down game Brennan made him a little origami hop frog out of a one yuan bill. The kid lit up at the frog, he made it hop all over the place, including (sometimes) through the goal post that Brennan made of his hands. When he finally tired of the hop frog he gutted it, unfolding and yelling "gwah! gwah! gwah!" which is a damn sight closer to a bullfrog noise than "ribbit."

Hengshui - Baby fashion and adult gluttony

As promised, baby fashion:



The picture is small, so I will explain. Those are in fact buttless pants, and they are what most babies up to about two years wear. Convenient, and reinforces my notion of the Chinese as what Brennan called, "not fecal phobic" people.

Finally the baby got cleared away, and so did the furniture in front of the couches. The bride and groom came out of their room and after the window they were facing was ceremoniously closed, they faced the empty couch, looking goofy and nervous.



The young couple faced the couch, and two-by-two the older relatives would come and sit on the couch. Bride and groom would bow and address both people by their titles and bow again, and then the relatives would leave a red paper envelope of money on a tray for them and the next relatives would take a turn. We went through Grandmother and Grandfathers, Aunts and Uncles, and parents in this way. It was very symbolic of accepting the other person's family completely, and the mingling of relatives going on in the background indicated that people took this uniting of families business pretty seriously. On a whole this part of the ceremony was really nice, very low key and informal, since very few people were actually paying attention to it, and sometimes people forgot their envelopes of money and dashed off to hunt for them in big purses while the ceremony continued without them.

We were finally ushered back to the hotel by the engineer, and given an hour to rest before the reception. I wrote about my day and the guys dozed, and I heard more fireworks going off out in front of the hotel.

A room just off the lobby in the hotel was set for a banquet. The room was crowded with tables, easily twenty or so great round tables, each table set for at least ten diners. The room was just beginning to fill up when we trailed downstairs. Tables were wet with tiny cups, plates and bowls, chopsticks and spoons and more peanuts and candy. People shelled their nuts and threw the shells on the floor. Great big gold boxes on our table housed delicate red and white ceramic bottles of potent wine, and there were liter bottles of Sprite and Coke, which seemed incongruous.

The room filled up with crowds of people and their noise and their smoke. Even people who didn't normally smoke would smoke on a wedding, Bryan told us, translating for Granddad, it was lucky. Only one pictures kind of gives the impression of how the room was, and then only a bit. This was taken as the bride and room entered, and it was the only time for the rest of the afternoon that there was anything approaching a quiet or hush.



The bride and groom marched up the center aisle and then stood awkwardly on a platform at the front of the room, being stared at. A man with a microphone (who seemed to be a professional, though so far removed from a minister or justice of the peace that he reminded me more of an auctioneer) led them in another part of the wedding ceremony. He had them bow to each other, and then drink a toast to each other. Making this toast more difficult was the fact that it was done by hooking arms around each other, and giving each a drink from the other's glass. The bride kept covering her mouth and making embarrassed giggly faces. After repeating some things into the microphone with varying degrees of giddiness, they were (I suppose) married. After that they went around and drank a toast at every single table in the place, patiently making the rounds as the food started to come out. I can only imagine that they were exhausted and/or drunk by the end of their rounds.

The food... Food arrived, plateful by plateful for the next hour and a half at least. Everything came out and was served family style on the big Lazy Susan in the middle of the table. The uncles and cousins were impressed by how us awkward white folks could handle chopsticks at all.


Some sort of noodle thing with cilantro and green onion and soy sauce, and some sort of preserved plums that were ultra sweet and sticky.





An entire (recognizable) duck arrived, plated in such a way that his little bill could face his devourers. The bill was deformed from the heat of the oven, and he looked like he was leering slightly.



Corn, shrimp, an entire fish, salt flavored salad, bacon and celery, some sort of meaty meatballs, noodles, a whole chicken, preserved pressed ham that was more pink than flavor, liver and green pepper, green onions and porkbelly, stew, buns, food food food food food.

The uncles kept toasting us, which was dangerous since as soon as a glass was empty they made sure that it was filled again, with the potent brew. They made us feel very welcome, that is for certain.

As an entertainment towards the end of the meal a woman came up front, hotel staff I think, and sang karaoke for us. She sang a piece that involved many alien noises and vocal twitches in a high soprano, so it was impressive and irritating at the same time. The door from whence all of our food had come was soon clogged with what looked like kitchen helpers, all listening to the singing. They were smirking a great deal, and some of them looked to be really enjoying it, but others looked more amused than anything else.

There was an all call for people to do karaoke, but no one else came to the front to sing, un/fortunately. People began to trail out, leaving the carnage of devoured food and smoked cigarettes and demolished wine. The lobby furniture, a few sofas and chairs was covered in the unconscious bodies of the heaviest drinkers of the afternoon. It was just like Thanksgiving!

I will continue with a post about inside painting, the American Presidents and the train to Tianjin!