On the Road Again

My classes in Beijing came to an end on Friday, January 28th. I graduated from my four week course with an A-, achieving the status of Beginner (which is one step ahead of "total beginner"). Now THERE is something to write home about. Earlier on that week, I took my passport to the PSB to get it extended as technically, I was supposed to be out of the country by Jan 30. For those of you who don't know, Jan 29 marks the beginning of Spring Festival in China, also known as Chinese New Years. It's the biggest Chinese holiday and most people take off up to two weeks for it. Everyone goes home at least for the weekend and unless you book your travel plans far in advance, you aren't going anywhere that weekend. Little did I know, that also meant that the PSB would be closed during the first week of Spring Festival and were therefore unable to return my passport until the following Monday, February 6. What fun. So I moved into an apartment with my friend Michelle and spent the next week lazing about and enjoying Beijing during the holidays. This is the first year in maybe 4 or 5 years that the government has legalized fireworks, so every night during the week before and the two weeks after New Years, fireworks were exploding on every street corner. Slightly worrisome that not too reliable Chinese fireworks were being operated by every other amateur in a dry, dusty, over crowded and fire-hazardous city, but we made it through without any tragedies. On the actual night of New Years, there were so many fireworks that you couldn't talk on a cell phone and expect to be heard, no matter where you were. The sound-triggered lights in the hallways of my apartment complex would flicker on when the nosiest of the fireworks exploded. I had a perfect view from Pat's 16th-story apartment of the fireworks (that's about as high as most of them made it) and spent most of the night either watching the fireworks from there or walking around the complex. It was amazing. My friend Lisa reported that while no fireworks were exploding over Tiananmen Square, there were a group of people huddled across the street in front of the portrait of Mao that hangs over the entrance to the Forbidden City. Later, we realized those must have been Mao worshippers. The rest of the week was a party. While most Beijing residents aren't actually from Beijing and therefore leave the city to return home for the holiday, those that were in Beijing went out every day to parks and carnivals and out partying. The parks and carnivals I went to were pretty amazing to see. The red decorations were overwhelming and stalls were crammed next to each other selling everything you could imagine from souvenirs to street food to plain clothes hangers, which begs the question who decides today would be a good day to go to the park and buy clothes hangers?? They had man made ice slides and horses to ride little kid roller coasters. They had all sorts of carnival games like throw the ball into the bucket or shoot the animals and win a prize - all of it at rip off prices of course. I spent the week with my few remaining friends (most people go home or traveling over the holidays, so most of the friends I made left Beijing that week) at these carnivals and shopping at markets and going out and finding all the greatest restaurants and seeing tourist sites and preparing for the next leg of my journey.

Which brings me to my current activity: backpacking. I am starting a job working with a small NGO (non-governmental organization) in Kunming that does micro-credit projects in villages throughout Yunnan Province. I'm getting paid RMB 1500 of month (about $190) which believe it or not is enough to live on. Currently, I am enroute between the two cities. For those of you who don't know Chinese geography (which includes me up until about 5 months ago), Beijing is the top right corner of China and Kunming is in the bottom left. So I am spending about a week and a half training/bussing/ferrying my way down the country. We left on Tuesday night and took a 12-hour overnight train from Beijing to Xian and have been here since then. Xian is a surprisingly cool city. I am forced to eat my words from last semester when I swore I'd quit the group if they made me go to Xian. Sorry guys! The city is still surrounded by a historical wall and has some imperial architecture left (not much inside the city walls, but much more outside). I've walked all around the city center and the parks and the muslim quarter. The muslim quarter is my favorite part - small bustling side streets lined with street food. What more could I ask for? Last night, we spent the night walking around trying as many different types of food as possible. If I can't convince Ben to leave Xian with me tomorrow, it is because he has fallen in love with Muslim pizza - round pizza-like bread topped with a spicy sauce and hua jiao (a special kind of pepper that numbs your mouth). We also went to go see the Terra Cotta Warriors (of course). Not as impressive as one would hope. It is done up very much so in the style of a Chinese tourist site. There are three pits that make up the buried army, each of which has a huge building built around it. There is also a huge museum that contains artifacts from the pits, pictures of the pits when they were first discovered and (drum roll please) an exhibit on the development of the museum. How exciting! It almost made the hour and half bus ride worth it. I am actually very glad that I came to Xian and saw the warriors - what China experience would be complete without it?

Next on our itinerary: The Three Gorges Dam. If you don't know about it, I highly recommend looking up information and pictures. It is one of the largest public works projects ever undertaken. It should be completed next year and the valleys that I am going to see will be flooded, so this is the last chance to see them. Quite exciting. I will be taking a train to Yichang (a city on the Yangtze River) and then taking a ferry for a few days up the river to view the dams and what not before arriving in Wuhan where I will bus to Chongqing and then take the train to Kunming. There was a little bit of a mishap with the tickets today. I wanted to leave for Yichang last night after getting back from the warriors, and we could have, but Ben and Pat didn't want to cut their time in Xian short. As fate would have it, the Friday of end of the two weeks of Spring Festival is a ZOO for traveling and we were unable to get tickets this morning to Yichang. We decided instead to get tickets to Chongqing, but then Pat and Ben thought maybe if we shopped around a bit more at travel agencies and hotels, we could get our desired tickets to Yichang. I disagreed, arguing that if we waited, we wouldn't have any tickets at all and guess what happened? We waited, and now we don't have any tickets and we are stuck in this city until tomorrow. This is actually a bigger problem than it seems because the amount of time we have to get to Kunming is limited. Somehow "I told you so" just doesn't quite seem to cut it. But all's well - we are all taking steps to extend the ammount of time we have to travel (I'm pushing my work back, Ben's changing his plane tickets, etc) and Xian isn't that bad of a place to get stuck. Hey, who could complain when offered a chance to eat more Muslim pizza?

Well, that's all for now. If anyone has any suggestions for itinerary adjustments (aka somewhere between here and Kunming that I just have to go), do let me know! On of the best parts of traveling this way is the flexibility. All of your comments have been greatly appreciated, it's nice to know that there are people out there actually reading this!