China 2017, day 10: Leshan

For the time Julia’s parents were away for Tize’s college reunion, Fan bought Julia and me a two-days organized trip. For that, we had to be outside, ready to be picked up, at 5:30 in the morning. Then, we witnessed again, as we did last time we were in China, tourist trafficking at its best: a van, already occupied by other tourists, picks you up, then it runs a few red lights, drops somebody off who gets picked up by another car, and so on for 5 minutes, until you get dropped off and get picked up by a bus. A lady on the bus, the organizer, gave us some ground rules. Julia translated for me, and there was no real substance. Still, the lady wouldn’t shut up for half an hour, while we just wanted to catch up on some sleep.

Eventually, we got to a crystal museum near Anzitang. We got badges to wear and a neatly dressed, young tour guide. The place is beautifully designed, with some impressive crystal art. The tour guide kept emphasizing that we should stick around with him if we want to see the good stuff. That was odd. Where else would we go?

We were then led to the huge store in the upper floor, where we were supposed to wait 30 minutes until 9:30 in the morning, when they would let us into the restaurant for us for lunch. At 9:30. The organizer’s argument was that later, when we’re travelling, there would be no other opportunity. Julia’s theory was that they want to keep us in the store so that we would buy bullshit crystal jewelry, and lunch is just an excuse.

We got back to the bus and went to see the Leshan big Buddha. On the way we picked up a new tour guide, Xiao Peng, a young woman with chubby cheeks, who refers to herself in the third person. When we got there, she explained to us the proper ways to take a picture with the Buddha, like having him in the background and stretching​ your arm to make it look like you’re rubbing his nose or ear. These are supposed to bring you good luck or some other bullshit. Anyway, we looked at the Buddha from up the hill, and then started climbing down.

There’s a certain degree of violence that is acceptable in China. It’s ok for you to squeeze in line in order to get ahead of other people, even if it causes significant discomfort to them. This is really hard for me to grasp, even as an Israeli. Even though we were doing our best to go with the flow with the rest of the people, everyone seemed to be passing us. Julia overheard a person who noticed us summarizing to his friend the cultural gap: “do foreigners even know how to shove?”

We got to the bottom and started climbing back up the stairs.

Back at the top​, we joined Xiao Peng and our group, and we all walked to a temple.

There, Xiao Peng would not shut up. Some of her spiel was about Chinese astrology bullshit, and how some people are missing one of the five elements, and an analysis of a person's name and date of birth can determine which. Some of it was about herself: she has been a tour guide for 12 years after graduating from a school for tourism. I guess you can say she got a B.S. in BS. She said her commission is per group, so she only has to take one group a day, and then she can go home to play Mahjong. Speaking of Mahjong, she wins nine out of ten games, because she’s very lucky, as one can tell from her name and date of birth. Naturally. She offered to anyone who’s interested to write their names and date of birth on a piece of paper and she’ll gladly figure out which element that person is missing. Some people, led by a pretty young lady wearing a rainbow scarf, rushed to give her tiny pieces of paper. We thought that Xiao Peng can go fuck herself.

We walked down the mountain and then the entire group had to take a public bus, which was strange, because we had a bus. We went two stops to see pictures of funky things that happened to the Giant Buddha, like how it looked like he was crying or closing his eyes after natural disasters. The pictures were located on a wall in a store, that sold little buddha pendants. As the tour guide then explained, different kinds of pendants complement the different elements people are missing, and what do you know - some people in our group discovered, very recently, what element it is! Miss Rainbow was super happy about this fortunate coincidence and bought herself a stupid little pendant.

It was now pretty clear that peddling is a major part of this trip, and we must, as the zeitgeist commands, resist.

Next, we were taken to visit the Yi, a minority group that lives in the area. A Yi lady greeted us, took us to a room where we were served boiled potatoes, something that looks like tamales, and a tiny shot of some alcoholic stuff. Then she started talking about the Yi. Very quickly, the focus of her talk moved to two topics: how poor they are, and how their health is maintained by using silver bowls in which they mix their medicine. Sure enough, when she was done talking, we were led to their store, where we could buy silver stuff. This must have been Miss Rainbow’s lucky day. She bought herself a silver bracelet.

Dinner was actually OK, and it included a show, which was also pretty good. We sat a table with people from our group and another group and had hot pot. The show included a Wu Shu act, a pair of acrobats and an act of traditional Sichuan opera face changing masks: the performers wear masks that change instantly as they move around on the stage. The technical side of this artform is kept secret, and I couldn’t find a definite explanation of how this is done.

Afterwards, two Yi fellas brought out twisted balloons flowers and lit a small fire. The evening ended with a rampage of old Chinese people fighting for balloon flowers and dancing with them around the fire, like a bunch of idiots, to the singing of the Yi.

China 2017, day 9: Dujiangyan

Early morning, Julia and I, the parents, Lili and his wife (everyone keeps calling her “Lili’s wife”, even though she has a perfectly valid name which I don't remember) and Erjiujiu and Erjiuma, drove to see the Dujiangyan irrigation system. Like any other day, I got stared at a lot, but this time, one family insisted to take a picture of me with their toddler. There were a few seconds of commotion, me and the toddler just facing each other in confusion while swarms tourists threatening to trample us both down, so eventually the mother just stuck the toddler in my hands. It wasn’t happy.

The irrigation system itself is an incredible engineering endeavour, built around 2300 years ago to control the water supply for agriculture in the Chengdu basin. I have to admit, I still don’t fully understand how it works.

Then we went to a hotel for a big family reunion over lunch, to celebrate Yeye’s 90th birthday.

As I explained a few posts earlier, Chinese family members call each other by their relationship, like “Erjiuma” - wife of the second maternal uncle. Therefore, a significant portion of time was dedicated to figure out how each one of the 30 or so family members should call all the other ones. Also, being politically correct, polite, or tactful are not qualities recognized by the Chinese people, so people feel free to comment on other people’s weight, or touch their bellies and ask if they’re pregnant. To put it in other words, I’ve seen Julia in a better mood.

Lunch was great. Once again, my drinking capacity was challenged by one of the uncles, which was fine with me. Then we had cake, which was decorated with fruit, including some cherry tomatoes. Julia protested, while Lili’s wife claimed it’s legit, since tomatoes are technically fruit. Hours later, out of nowhere, Julia exclaimed that eggplants are fruit too, yet “nobody puts a fucking eggplant on a cake!”.

Then Erjiujiu drove Tize, Julia, me, Lili and his wife to the old city of Dujiangyan, where we just hung out. When we came back, all the aunts were sitting and gossiping in one of the lobbies, while the men were playing Mahjong in the Mahjong room.

Julia’s parents left to the airport, to go to Tize’s college reunion, while Erjiujiu drove us back to Yeye and Laolao’s place. After he left, the four of us had dinner and sat down to play Mahjong. Back in the days, they would shuffle the pieces by hand. Now, of course, the table does it for you.

China 2017, day 8: Dayi

We had a full day planned by the family. First, we all drove to Liu Manor in Dayi. Liu Wencai was a rich landlord who leased land to farmers and cheated them in order to keep them in a constant state of debt. After the communist revolution, his manor was turned into a museum, with items from the estate on display, and a set of sculpture depicting the injustice done to the farmers. It’s an impressive exhibition, even if the facial expressions of the sculptures is extremely exaggerated.

Then we walked around in the old city of Dayi. You know this video?

So they were selling these in the souvenir shops. I grabbed a bunch of rubber chickens that were hanging from a hook and tried to recreate this fantastic effect. Instead, I חן managed to drop the chickens and toys from some of the other hooks. I tried to hang them back and instead dropped more toys. Then I accidentally made eye contact with the store owner. Then I ran away. Then I saw the expression on Julia’s mom’s face. I thinks it was disappointment. I’m not sure, because she wears that expression a lot.

Next stop was the Jianchuan Museum Cluster. Julia and I like to take our time when we visit museums, but this is not the way the family, namely the Xiaos, does things. Julia and I were constantly pushed to move faster so we can see as many museums as possible in the two hours we allotted to the cluster. Fan’s (Julia’s mom) rationale is that it’s the same thing spending an hour or four hours in a museum because you’re going to forget everything anyway, but if you come back it will all come back to you. I don’t understand this woman at all.

So we saw the Earthquake Museum, dedicated to the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, and a couple of museums dedicated to the second Sino-Japanese war. I sat out of the fourth museum. This whole ordeal took only two hours or so.

For dinner, we met with Fan’s high school friends for hotpot. Julia and I sat at the kiddies table with Lili and his wife and two other couples in their late twenties. They spoke no, or limited, English, which I was OK with as it gave me the opportunity to concentrate on my food.

As you come in, they give you a bowl, an apron, and a small bag of sesame oil, and send you over to the dipping sauce making station, where you put the oil in your bowl and add vinegar, garlic, oyster sauce, and other goodies.

Then you go to the giant fridge and pick the meats and veggies you want. These come in little trays or on skewers. Most of the veggies are unidentified leafy greens. The meats range from simple chicken and beef slices, through tripe and kidneys, and all the way to pig brains.

Then you sit at your table and start cooking your food in the broth. At the end of the meal, all the skewers at your table are weighed to determine their amount, and the trays are counted. Then, as the custom in China goes, you physically fight for the right to pay the bill for your table, unless you sit at the kiddies table, even if you’re over 40. Then you get to sit back and watch grownups fight.

China 2017, day 7: Pandas!

We woke up to a lot of yelling, which is how the Xiaos, Julia’s mother's family, communicate. From what I later gathered, Erjiujiu was mad because we saw the Wuhou Temple without him, while he was looking forward to this reunion so that he could spend time with us. He made all these plans, rented two cars, but then everything gets trumped by Julia’s mom who just has to be in the center because she’s the favorite child. Julia’s mom was mad because she thinks Erjiujiu just resents her for being the favorite child.

So Julia and I dragged her mom out to go shopping. We got me a jump rope which I need to start using to recover my healing foot, and a nice traditional Chinese shirt. For Julia we bought 7 pairs of socks for 10 Yuan. Then we went to the shoe district to buy Fan some shoes. There are enough shoes here for the entire population of China.

It took us forever to find something Fan was happy with, but we finally did, and then it was time to walk over to the restaurant where we were supposed to have lunch. The grandparents joined us, as well as Erjiuma, who is Erjiujiu’s wife, and Lili, their son, along with his wife, Liu Shuting. Lunch included a soup served in a unripened papaya, that had frog meat in it. It was actually pretty good.

Then, to try to bring peace back to the family, Julia and I drove with Erjiujiu to the panda park. They have pandas, and red pandas, which are even cuter, and peacocks.

They also have a small museum of endangered species, with some of the world’s worst taxidermy.

Throughout our visit there, Erjiujiu drove me crazy. If he thought there was a better viewing angle than where we stood, he would forcefully grab me by the arm and drag me while yelling at me in Chinese. He would also get impatient when we watched a panda, and yell at us “zou le!” (let’s go). Finally, he would walk twice as fast as us, and scold us for being too slow.

We drove back, but now Erjiujiu asks if it’s cool for us to tag along to get the second car. I didn’t want my frustration with him to affect our relationship, so I agreed - it’s just picking up a car, right?

Two hours later, we were back home. I’m never letting him take me anywhere anymore.

China 2017, Day 6: Chengdu

An airport is also a good opportunity for coffee. We had already settled down at the gate, so I decided not to bother Julia and Tize and get coffee on my own. I walked around, found a place with a lady in front, and asked “you meyou kafei?” (do you have coffee?). She led me inside and pointed at a table. “Bu yao zuo.” (I don’t want to sit) I said. Then she took me to the barista and showed me a menu. I pointed at the cappuccino, and gave the barista 100 Yuan bill. She gave me my cappuccino and 22 Yuan back. “Liu shi ba!” (sixty eight!), I exclaimed, and after checking with her boss, she gave me 10 Yuan more. After 10 minutes of being unbelievably satisfied with myself, I realized I had just bought shitty coffee for ten bucks.

Then Julia wanted to fill her water bottle from one of the water fountains. In China, people don’t really drink cold water, so the fountains dispense water in three temperatures: hot, warm, and cold, in case you have completely lost your mind. As Julia examined the machine, an airport employee decided she needed help.

- “You want hot water?”
- “No, cold."
- “You mean warm?"
- “No, I mean cold.”

He didn’t like it, but filled her bottle with cold water. Half way.

- “Do you want to add some hot water to that?”

At the airport in Chengdu, Julia’s mom, Fan, picked us up, and we took a taxi to her grandparents’ home. Yeye, Julia's grandfather, is an impressive man who will be 90 in June, yet can't sit still for more than five minutes. Laolao, the grandmother, is a tiny old woman who, how shall we put it, is more affected by her age. We were also welcomed by Erjiujiu (another second uncle, but on the mother's side), Fan's brother, who is very warm, if sometimes loud and too physical for my taste. I still like him. It was also good to finally be back in civilization, with running water and WiFi and stuff.

We all went out to get lunch. And then Julia and I wanted to see the science museum, so her parents tagged along. The weather was great - so much better than in Shanxi. We took a bus and got to the science museum, which unfortunately was closed for renovations.




Julia high-fived Mao.



Then we checked out the library. It's a beautiful building, and the difference between it and the public library in San Francisco is incredible - this one is quiet, packed with young people, and there are no used needles lying around or homeless people changing clothes in the aisles.



Then we went to the Chengdu museum. This building is also beautiful.We spent most of our time there in an exhibition about shadow puppetry, and in the little time we had left, we quickly went through most of the other galleries - these have exhibitions about Chengdu in various points in history. The museum is really great.

Then we went to the Wuhou temple.



And then to Jinli market. We bought all kinds of street food, and that ended up being our dinner. We had things like squid, and rice cakes, and the highlight of the day: pig noses on a stick.

China 2017, Day 5: Taiyuan

We woke early in the morning, packed our stuff, had breakfast, said our goodbyes and got into a taxi that drove Tize, Julia, and me back to Taiyuan. It was a long and extremely uncomfortable ride, but after four hours or so, we were in our hotel. Tize wanted us to have some local food, so we walked around and surveyed restaurants for quite a while until we found one​ that Tize liked. Each of us got a bowl of noodles. Tize’s and Julia’s had goat internal organs in theirs. Mine had goat face meat. Achievement unlocked.

We went to see the most famous attraction of Taiyuan, the Jinci shrine. It’s known for its extremely old trees, some over a thousand years old.

When we were done, we finally had time to attend to one of Julia’s main goals of this trip: to see the Trump chicken. Since it’s the Year of the Rooster in the Chinese calendar, one of the malls in Taiyuan put a big statue of a chicken in its plaza and gave it some of Trump’s prominent features. So we took a taxi to the mall and took a bunch of pictures. Some kid got really excited to see a foreigner in the middle of Taiyuan and asked to take a picture with me. We also took a picture with my phone. After all, why should he be the only one who gets a picture from this encounter?

A mall also seemed like an opportunity to finally get some coffee, but Starbucks was closed, so I settled for coffee at Burger King. It was terrible and yet everything I wanted at the moment. The mall also had the best indoor playground I’ve ever seen - it’s basically a giant ball pit, with slides and balls of all sizes, including ones a grown man can climb into.

Tize found a restaurant that served other kinds of local food, so we had several dishes with different kinds of noodles, and went to bed early - tomorrow we leave for Chengdu.

China 2017, Day 4: Xingxian

There was a lot of commotion again around the bathroom this morning. It turns out that last night it was Julia who clogged the toilet. We're not being very good guests.
Tize took us for a walk around the city. We walked to the main street that branches to the market.

Everybody was staring at me. The vast majority of people here have never seen a foreigner. Some followed us around for a while, some did the "double take", and some people inside the stores stopped everything they were doing to stand at the storefront to stare.
We went into a temple. The term "temple" can be confusing around here, as society is mostly secular, but they do build temples to commemorate people and events. This one is for the the local people who participated and died in the communist revolution.

We walked over to the main square and watched the old folks play Chinese chess.

We went back home for lunch. Sida kept his word, and the food he made was much better than the food we had at the restaurant yesterday. We played cards for a bit and took a nap.
Let's role back a couple of days: right when we got here, Julia got a phone call from her mom. She said Julia and I should cook a meal for everyone to show gratitude for their hospitality. We don't need to worry about anything because she packed the ingredients for us in Tize's suitcase.
Now, there are two problems here. For starters, we don't mind doing it, but we generally don't like it when decisions are made for us (and you know how a mother-daughter relationship can take that notion up a notch), and second, the packed ingredients were two packs of pasta, two cans of tomatos, Italian salad dressing, and a can of chicken breasts - not what we would have picked. Anyway, it looks like we're making pasta. When we came to peace with the idea, we decided to upgrade our dish with some fresh ingredients from the market.
Back to today, Sida volunteered to go with us so that the vendors won't rip us off. We got a nice fresh piece of pork, some tomatos, cucumbers, onions, and red sweet peppers, and a bottle of some really nice rice liquor.

We went back home, took a nap, and started cooking. You can't get ground meat here, so Sida ground our meat for us with a butcher knife. We fried some onions, added the pork, and then we were ready to add the canned tomatoes. There's no can opener. The pork was getting over cooked. I lowered the fire while Sida was hacking the cans with a knife. Ergugu noticed the fire was low and turned it up. I turned it back down. "Oh, low heat!" she said in awe and Mandarin. The water for the pasta was boiling. Dagugu turned the stove off. I turned it back on. We added the tomatoes to the pork. Mali, who somehow was also in the kitchen that really can't​ hold more than two people, ran outside to report to anyone who wasn't in the kitchen, which according to my math was no one: "they are cooking the pork with tomatoes!"
We served them the pasta along with some Israeli salad, which they found even more confusing, except for Sida who enjoyed it. Sanda started another drinking duel with me, which ended poorly for him. Then Sanda took us to another place where we could take a shower, and called it a day.

China 2017, Day 3: Weijiaca

The family had a busy day planned. We ate breakfast, then the nine of us squeezed into two cars, and we drove to the countryside. At some point, in the middle of a windy road, we stopped at the shoulder, got out of the cars, and Sanda got a shovel out of the trunk. It turned out we were going visit the Ma family's burial site.

It's a small hill between the fields. Julia's great grandfather is buried with his wife at the top, under a small mound of dirt. a few feet down the hill, his sons are buried with their wives. and so on. First, we gathered around the grave of Julia's grandfather, and placed some offerings: fruit, candy, canned food, and some liquor. Then we burnt sheets of paper that are scored to look like ancient money and placed them on the grave.

Then we climbed back to the top of the hill, and started a sequence of bowing down to every single grave. This made me pretty uncomfortable, since Jews don't bow, but I'm also reasonable, and it seemed like the respectful thing to do at the time. I settled for kneeling behind everyone else, adding a symbolic nod of the head. Crisis averted.

We took some of the food that the dead didn't eat and ate it ourselves as we walked down the hill. We got back into the cars and drove to the village where the family used to live.

It's a shithole. There was nobody around, and everything looks abandoned. We went to the old house and looked around. In the middle of the inner courtyard there's a cage of corn kept by Sanda. I saw a lot of these piles as we were driving around. The corn is dried, then the kernels are removed and sold to farmers who use it to feed their livestock. The abandoned house itself had two rooms, with a large raised surface that is both the stove and the bed, as the fire under it is used to heat both.

When we left the house, somebody was yelling down to us from a close by hilltop. It was one of Tize's cousins who is still a farmer and lives in the countryside. He came down to talked to us - a man in his fifties, wearing blue work clothes with a tanned, wrinkled face. They all talked for a while, and Tize forced him to accept some money. The cousin tapped on Erda's stomach and made some snarky remark about it, and then we left.

Then we drove to a museum that tells the story of the communist revolution and the role of Shanxi in it. Then we drove to a restaurant. Lunch cost 500 Yuan, and Sida complained that the food wasn't that good and claimed that he can do much better for half the price. Well, it's on - the siblings will collect 250 Yuan which will be the budget, and Sida is going to cook tomorrow's lunch.

Then we went to see Yellow River.

We drove back to the city, and Julia and I collapsed on the bed and took a nap. We were really jet lagged, and to be fair, there's not a lot to do here. It's really cold, and there's no heating. They have WiFi, but our phones don't seem to work with it. There's a TV, but something is wrong, and nobody speaks English other than Tize, Julia and myself. Taking a nap is a good idea.
Tize woke us up for dinner. Food is great, even if not very rich, and everything is with vineger, for which Shanxi is known for. We had some kind of a rice liquor, and every time somebody wants a sip, everybody has to clink glasses. Erda wanted to chug a shot with me, so we did that. Now Sida wanted a shot with me, so we did that too. Then I had another one with Sanda. I'm not sure what they were trying to achieve by that - I have incredibly high capacity for alcohol, and most Chinese people lack the gene that breaks down alcohol, causing drinking to be an uncomfortable experience for them. Taking shots with me seemed like a weird fight to pick.
Then they taught me a card game, in which what really matters is that when it's your turn, you slam your cards on the table to make as much noise as possible, while you trash-talk in Mandarin.  

China 2017, Day 2: Xingxian

Early morning, people on the train started waking up to the sounds of the same two songs playing in a loop through the train's speakers. We arrived at the train station in Taiyuan. We found our way out to the plaza, where we were greeted by Tize's youngest sibling, Tuti, whom I'm supposed to call Sida (pronounced "SIH-da") - "fourth uncle". He flew in especially for this gathering from his home, near Shenzhen. We had breakfast at a small restaurant and walked over to a junction where Sida arranged for a car and a driver to pick us up. Driving through the city we also picked up Ergugu ("Second aunt", pronounced​ "ER goo-goo"), the younger of Tize's two sisters, and then we started heading to Xingxian, where Julia's grandmother lives.

After about four hours of driving, we arrived at Nainai's (Grandmother's) house. There I met Nainai; Sanda - Third Uncle, who lives with Nainai along with his wife and Mali, one of his four children; and Dagugu, the elder of Tize's sisters, who came with her husband. Needless to say, none of them speak English, so the encounter was a little awkward, but they were happy to see Julia, and seemed happy to meet me.

We had just concluded about thirty hours of travelling, so we could really use a shower. It turns out the water supply here in Shanxi is in a pretty bad shape, and water runs for only a short amount of time every day. Because of that, residents take advantage of that short window to fill their bathtubs with water, which is then used throughout the day for cleaning and "flushing" the toilet. Now, since the bathtub is full of water, showers must be taken elsewhere, and a number of business places around the city supply that service. Tize took Julia and me to one of these places, and paid the 25 Yuan fee for our showers. The owner just assumed we were together, and led us to a room that had a bed and a shower with two shower heads. I'm sure this place is used not just for showers.

We came back to the house and collapsed for a nap. When they woke us up for dinner, Erda, Second Uncle, had already came in from a close by city. All six children of Nainai were now there. We had dinner, and Julia and I managed to pull through until 10PM or so, when jet-lag hit us again. 

I woke up at 2AM. I was wide awake, extremely cold, and had to take a dump. The toilet, in contrast to what I was told by, well, everybody (I asked Tize in confidence, and he, of course, asked everybody if it's ok for the white awkward dude to take a dump in the toilet) did not handle it well, and got clogged. Surprisingly, filling a small tub with water and dumping it into the toilet did not help. I used a plunger to no avail. I gave up and went back to sleep. I got out of bed twice more over the night from having a need to urinate mixed with guilt, and tried unclogging the toilet again. Nothing helped. I finally fell asleep, and when I woke up in the morning, I saw a big blister on my hand, that I got from a night of putting everything I had on that plunger. As we were watching the aunts clean the bathroom, Tize recommended that from now on I use the public restroom down the street.