Hello,
I thought that I would share with you what I wrote about my week-end in Datong, China.
Just to warn you, this is no literature material, just notes I took for the book I'm writing that's inspired by my travels, but it's good enough to stand as an update as to what I'm up to these days.
I miss all of you dearly. Take care, let me know about how you are doing and talk to you soon!
Annie ;)
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I looked up at the street intersection signs. Nanchizi Dajie and Dongchag'an Jie, the crossroad right outside Tienanmen Dong subway station. "There's no error to be made, you are at the right place", confirmed the Lonely Planet guide I was holding in my hands. Well, ok; but then, where was Carlo?
I know what you're thinking: Lonely Planet guide? After living in a city for five weeks, doesn't one starts to get his way around it? Doesn't one get the 'feel' of the geography, and therefore can easily get from A to B? I'm afraid the answer's no, not so - not with Beijing anyways.
Before I set foot in Asia, I took great pride in the fact that when I am walking around London, Montreal, Warsaw, New York, Berlin, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Krakow, I feel just as at ease as a fish in the sea. I even spent a whole week in Paris two years ago without even ever looking at a single map, getting from la Gare St-Lazare to l'Eglise St-Sulpice on foot without much more than a second thought. "I guess I'm one of these lucky people who, just like migrating birds, are born with a compass attached to their brain", I used to think. Beijing brought up a new challenge for me: because even after more than a month, I'm still at lost.
The city is so large and spread, and everything looks exactly the same (in my foreigner's eyes). Given the fact that they destroyed and rebuilt it with a pace that no occidental city has ever known, there was no creation of particularly central and recognizable places or things (fountains, statues, funky road sign??) within each districts, because these things are those that often only Time can bring about. Also, there was no such phenomenon as the one of polarization of 'smaller buildings' being built right next to X or Y 'big building', something that only a slow process of clustering around a center can bring about. Instead, what happened is that the Beijing civil engineers just build a big square of 15, 25 big indistinguishable buildings in one go, in the lapse of a few months. This resulted in giving the city of Beijing an eery feel – like something is missing from view, something unspoken of, a silenced presence hanging in the air; something that was once out there everywhere, but that's now covered in plaster, highways, plastic static smiles adverts and concrete.
I was still pondering about the latter point of my reflections, sitting on this street corner waiting, when my friend Carlo decided to finally show up. I gave him a great big enthusiastic hug, not having seen any of my Montreal friends in more than a month, and missing all of them so dearly. We started chatting right away about this and that – trying to get a taxi at first, but failing to do so - you know when you walk with somebody and you haven't set on where you are going, but just keep on talking and walking because the conversation is too interesting to be cut with silly details such as where you are actually going?
(In front of a "Chinese Gate", ft. Carlo)
We ended up walking to this 'Peking Duck Restaurant » Carlo's guide recommended – and that actually served food 10 times the price anywhere else I have eaten in town so far. But Carlo was inviting me and the duck was good – though a bit too greasy –, so no complains on my part. After our meal and a lot of catch-up convo, we decided to go venture a bit into the night market.
You know these pictures that at least one of your Facebook friend has taken, where street vendors sell Scorpios, sea horses, sea stars, crickets, boxer frogs, snakes etc. on a stick ready to be eaten ? Well, guilty as tourists may be, we took several of them too. We then set up to buy a two kuai red pastry that was sitting in the window of a small shop in the night market. In a very broken mandarin, I asked the vendor what kind of pastry was the small round red thing, but instead of answering, he just smiled at me, and said « liang kuai, liang kuai! ». I gave him two kuai, and once we bit into it, we realized that it actually was just a piece of dry bread crump painted over; a fake pastry! I had never seen, nor ever heard of such a scam before. The place screamed 'tourist trap' altogether. But we didn't care – we smiled, laughed it off, and had a great time walking around the kiosks.
(Yummy stuff, ft. Carlo and the Dead Impaled Jiminy Crickets. Would that not make an awesome metal band name???)
We then decided to go for a beer on a terrace nearby, where a perfectly normally constituted man was begging, holding his arms close to his body and out his sleeves to make himself look handicapped. He was holding onto two pieces of plastic that sortof – but not really – looked like amputee arms. I just gave him a knowing smile when he approached me, which resulted in him instantly going away from us and ask some other tourists for money, his face unchanging, without any reaction to the fact that I had just seen right through his little game.
« so, do you have another Montreal friend coming to visit you during the rest of your trip? Eight months is kinda long. » Carlo said after a couple of sip of his Tsingtao beer.
« No, no Montreal friend. My friend Mikey from England is supposed to come visit me in a couple of weeks, but other then that, nope. Nobody ». I answered.
« Well, there's always Alain, Did you know he's also traveling in China right now? »
I knew I had heard this name before, but when trying to think about a face, my mind drew a blank. "No, and I don't think I've ever met Alain", I answered.
It was getting late. Carlo was tired from all his travels, and I didn't know until when the subway lines ran, so we both decided that it was the right time to call it a night. He walked me to the next metro station – which I later found out to be already closed, which made me have to taxi back - we hugged, said goodbye and walked in opposite directions.
(Artistic-ish picture, ft. Carlo. Wait, this is not satisfying....)
(....Ahhhh, that's a lot better. Don't pictures always look much more "artistic" when they are in black and white, overexposed and with bad grain?)
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It was Friday night, and the week-end had started with a tint of bittersweet humor. Friday morning, my mind was set on going camping on the great wall with Xiao-Laura and Abbey, but our plans "sont littéralement tombés à l'eau".
(Exploring the Hutongs: a cute dog/ Abbey and I/ Charlotte at the restaurant we went to to hide from the rain/ Little Tsunami, Paraish and Charlotte, peaking in somebody's hutong)
Indeed, Friday afternoon, Paraish, Abbey, Charlotte, Shiao-Jiun, Xiao-Laura, JinKenh and I set upon exploring the hutongs North of the Bell Tower. However, we were suddenly caught in the midst of a tropical rain starting - and rain it was! It was literally as if buckets where poured upon our heads that forced us back towards campus. I had never seen such thing before [note from 2009: and I never saw anything the same after - that is, before going to Singapore!] Two hours later in Wudaoku, after a taxi ride, a 20 minutes walk in a foot of water (NO jokes), a bus ride and yet another taxi ride, I was sitting with Abbey and Shiao-Jiun in front of oh-so rewarding sushis. Abbey suggested a back-up plan to the week-end to come, which consisted in going someplace « where there was an « hanging Buddhist monastery - or something like that ». I just looked at her without saying anything; I wasn't terribly thrilled by the idea to say the least. To be completely honest, thoroughly drenched and tired after our journey through the rain, my hair glued all over my cold, wet forehead, my two elbows on the table and my two hands holding onto my face, I much rather pictured myself staying in Beijing, sleeping twenty hours straight and then taking it easy. Plus, the rain was supposed to be a little bit lighter on Sunday, so I could just go shopping around for these pearl necklaces that I had planned to go buy since I landed in this city (like any good tourist).
Shiao-Jiun cabbed back to the hotel to sleep and Abbey and I set up to go for « one beer » at Lush, a cute bar inside a bookstore on the other side of the street with a mixed crowd of foreigners and Chinese. I really liked this place and had been going there often for a while; the food was good, there was exported beer and there were often live music being played, as it was the case on that particular night.
That's where Abbey and I met Carter – a Chinese guy whose 'real name' I have no clue of – as well as Yang Liang – whom gave me the honor of giving him an English name. I choose Brian (Why? Why not?). These two looked like nothing but nice Chinese pals at first: one 27 and the other either 27 or 33 years-old (he did not make it very clear once I told him I was 21). Plus, they were very willing to feed us free beers, hookah and cigarettes in exchange of smiles - which is all that Abbey and I could ask for.
They both had been working for the same company whose name escaped my understanding due to the very loud music. Carter started to chat with Abbey because she was the one sitting the closest to him, and I started to tak with the other guy, Brian. I was surprised about the extent to which he was willing to talk about Chinese politics, getting on the subject of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 himself and talking about the pros and cons of a single-party system. I knew I had made a friend right there. A bit drunk both from the MaiTais I ordered and the Tsingtaos Carter kept putting in front of me, I excused myself to go to the ladies. Once I came back 5 minutes after, Carter asked my number – he really wanted Abbey's, but since she didn't have a cellphone, took mine instead in order to contact her.
I ended up regretting this last bit dearly, because from that very moment he started texting me 5 to 10 times a day and calling me at least 3 times a day, wanting to know « if Abbey was with me » or if « Abbey received his email » and « how Abbey was doing ». How annoying was this weirdo raising up my phone bill and calling me during class!!! I wanted to tell him to fuck off, but Abbey liked the idea of a sugar-daddy buying her beers (that's what she said), so I let it go for a couple of days. Besides, once or twice I just turned off my cellphone and we'd have a laugh at all the pathetic things he'd text me at the end of the morning. Poor Guy. To this day I still wonder what exactly Abbey did to drive this guy so nuts about what she did during the 5 minutes I left to go to the Ladies'... Oh well. I guess I'll never know.
I wanted out around midnight, and giving « the glance » to Abbey, she asked me if « I was all set », I said yes and we left. The first thing I did getting off the cab we took to go back to the hotel, still wet to the core, was to take a hot, long-awaited shower and to scrub off the brown-ish dirt the acid rain left on my skin, a typical gift from the Beijing skies. I didn't do much more that night; my body felt as heavy as a potato bag, and my eyelids closed themselves even before my head hit the pillow.
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I woke up at ten, much later than I'm used to, because I had woken up at five AM first and, realizing that such an hour didn't make sense for me to be awake, I ended up going back to bed. And yes, that's when you typically oversleep. My body was still a bit sore and I could feel a slight cold coming up. Outside, it was still pouring cats and dogs, so no big motivation arose in me to hit the road that day. I ended up just going around the rooms in the hotel, chatting with a couple of friends from the programme who were equally unmotivated to go outside the halls of the hotel. Besides, many of them had taken a train to Shanghai a few days before, so the lobby on our floor was quieter than it uses to be. The only things that could be heard really was how the TV from one of the Chinese guest rooms was blasting the news from afar, as well as a loud snore. There was nothing to do. Before I realized it, I fell asleep again.
I was awoken by a death-scream from 大Laura who came up into our room without me being aware of her presence. Apparently, she hadn't seen me at first, and had quite a scare when she saw a hand hanging out from inside the covers just as she was about to go and sit down on me. That was very far from the most pleasant way to wake up, let me tell you. After excusing herself and calming down (well, at least to the extent this girl has the capability to ever calm down, hehe), she told Connie and I, in her typical cute slurr-like accent, that her initial week-end plans were ruined, much like many of us. She then told us she wanted to go to the "hanging monastery thinger" instead, and asked us if we wanted to join her.
« sounds interesting », I said rubbing my eyes with my thumb and my index, not having a clue what she was talking about, my mind still hazy after this shock awakening. « I'm going to go get more informations about it then », she said before I even finished my sentence, bouncing out the door in a very 大Laura manner. When I opened the door to our room 45 minutes later, I was greated by a piece of paper three centimeters away from my face and a shrilling « HERE'S YOUR TRAIN TICKEEEET!!!! ».
Well then, I guess I'm going to that place after all. Even though I have no clue what it's called, or even where it is. All I knew was that it was somewhere in China. Well, hopefully?
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We met at 21h45 later that night in the lobby downstairs to go take a train to Datong. By 'we', I mean Connie, 大Laura, 小Laura, Abbey, Mathias, Jinkenh and I. Datong is in the Shanxi province; and it is the closest city to where the Yingxian Wooden Pagoda is (aka. the 'Buddhist hanging monastery thinger'). That would be the extent of the information I had the time to Google in the couple of hours since I had been given a ticket.
It would be a night ride on soft-beds of 6 hours, arriving Sunday at dawn and coming back on Monday by another night-ride taken on a Sunday night. Someone jokingly came with the idea that we should all get drunk enough to pass-out so that we would for sure sleep and be awake for the whole day coming up. I smiled, but I knew I didn't really need to drink to sleep, so I set up on taking it easy instead. However, not everybody took this idea lightly. Already at ten o-clock in the lobby, Connie, 大Laura and Matias had, let's say, a head-start on us – and by head-start, I mean they had been drinking since 3 in the afternoon. Matias was particularly plastered, drinking his remaining six bottles of Tsingtao out of his bag in the same fashion a fish would have had to drink water if it's intentions were to survive living outside the ocean.
Once in the train, Matias was acting like a star – running around everywhere, stumbling, talking and hugging random strangers (poor, poor Chinese people), dancing, and generally being incredibly loud; the whole wagon was looking at him. Even some Chinese folks took pictures of him with their cellphones while he was trying to walk a straight line in their direction, screaming « PENGYOU!!! » every time somebody came within his field of vision. He had an uttermost genuine smile, and he was doing the whole « duibuqi-duibuqi-duibuqi » thing and curling in a ball every time he was standing in the way of somebody in the hallway. I mean, how cute is that? I was having quite a blast watching him. He'd go nuts every time he'd see a small Chinese kid; later on (once he was sober), he told me how much he really wanted to adopt one (or many) Chinese baby someday.
There are some things you need to know about Matias. Matias is an adorable person. He's French Canadian, but once he's drunk, he is only able to speak English – with an English accent from North London, at that. Believe me, I have tried talking to him in French, but not a single word en français was able to escape from his lips. Matias is a lot of fun altogether; so full of energy and happiness, once you know him it's impossible to hate him – unless you are a stuck-up homophobic idiot, of course.
Even though we probably pissed off the half of the train who wanted to sleep by being so rowdy and loud, Mathias did end up making a lot of « pengyous », and we all got to talk and laugh with many nice Chinese people that night. Not to mention, that's how we met Harriet.
Harriet is a nice 25 years old girl from Wales who took up on herself to quit her two years old job to fulfill her dream and go backpacking thorough Asia for a couple of years. On that Saturday night train ride from Beijing to Datong, our happy cheers and clearly distinctive from afar English language made her approach the part of the train where we were. At first, she was just shyly standing there, looking at us a couple of meters away, not saying anything; but a quick smile and 'hi, how are you doing, where are you from' from my part made her set her mind on sitting with us. We all chatted for a while about the usual introduction subjects, and since we realized that she was really sound and had similar plans to ours for the day after, we invited her to spend the following day with us going to the hanging monastery and the Yungang Grottoes. She just smiled very wide, and we welcomed her in our small group by handing her a beer.
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We arrived in Datong at 6:30 in the morning. After we bargained down a van for the day at 55 kuai per person at the train station tourist information center, the seven of us went for breakfast while Harriet went on a quest for an Hostel. The only restaurant opened at this hour and location only served beef noodles, so I set up on getting something vegetarian-friendly at a convenience store instead while people chewed on their meat meal. Connie, finding a dead cockroach in her bowl a few minutes after having started to eat, ended up following my lead. We met up with Harriet and the tourist information center guy again at eight in the entrance of the hotel the guide had pointed at us. In front of it there was the van, in which a smiling, yet a bit timid driver was already sitting waiting for us to board.
After testing the first (and last) sitting-down toilet of my life that could be converted into a shower, or a bath (a very gross affair), we all embarked on the van and started our trip to our first destination, the hanging monasteries. Matias was still acting fabulous, still drunk, and of course still drinking.
I fell asleep on the ride to the hanging monastery, which was about an hour long. The mountains popped out of nowhere from the until then flat scenery – « like mountains in China always do, because they are so old », as Los-Angeles-Jesse once explained to me. Let me tell you, this place, niched in a turning part of a valley with a river running at the bottom, is just like heaven on Earth. A thin, sinuous abrupt road into the valley leads to it; and suddenly, out of a particularly sharp turn, it pops out in front of your widening eyes. On this side of the mountain, the surface is almost completely vertical, without any cracks or plateaus for at least a good 400 meters of height; this makes it look very slippery. However, the wooden structure, with its seemingly fragile typical Chinese architecture, managed to courageously clung to the rock for the last 1500 years. The thought that its fingers must be damn hurting go through my brain, plastering a smirk on my face as we start climbing towards it. The monastery, I later find out, has rooms that are directly dug inside the sedimentary rock, with many tunnel and labyrinth-like en suites that we tourists unfortunately cannot access. Still, it's a sight to see.
(Yingxian Wooden Pagoda, ft. 小Laura and I)
After a bland meal at a local restaurant and another two hours drive, we get to the second and last place we had planned to visit that day – the Yungang Grottoes. This is just as much, if not more, impressive than the first part. All in all, 51000 Buddhas sculpted out of a mountain rock facade, some 5 centimeters high, some 50 meters high. best part: although one and a half millennium old, many still had colorful paint over them! Worst part: many statues where covered by a thick black cover of black pollution dust, due to the national road running nearby the site. I saw that as a real shame: in Canada, the only tourist attraction we have are the Niagara Falls, and we take care of them as they are the sole jewel around the country's neck; it might be naive on my part, but I feel like if we had something as culturally significant as the Yungang Grottoes in Canada, we would not treat it as badly as the Chinese government does.
But obviously, 'The Government' has other priorities than cultural preservation. That's something anybody who ever heard about the disappearing hutongs dilemma in Beijing understood pretty quickly.
(51000 Buddhas in the rain: Connie, 大Laura, Abbey & 小Laura)
(Lighting Incense sticks, ft. Jinkenh, Abbey and I)
After exploring all the Buddha caves and giving into many more 'woahhs', we drove back to Datong and had some Peking Duck for dinner. Matias had sobered up a bit by then, so of course we thought the best thing to do in order to kill the time before our train back to Beijing was to go out and get wasted.
This is when we hit a technical problem: Datong, although having a population of 3.1 million people, felt much like a ghost town and didn't really have any bars. Therefore, I suggested we go buy many bottles of Tsingtao and go get drunk in Harriet's hostel lobby, since it started to pour out outside again. Matias had already curled up on one of the big chair in the entrance of the restaurant in order to silently dozed off, so I went to wake him up and out we went.
The hostel was one of the most drab I ever went in – that is, it looked more like a one or two stars hotel with bland off-white walls, no decoration and a humid air that seemed to make your clothes cling to your body in the least pleasant way. One of these off-the-road hotels you get in America of which you can know, just from looking at the run-down reception desk, that they are crass dirty with a vermin problem. One of these place that you accept to sleep in only because you are in the middle of nowhere and you don't have any alternative. And in this case, for Harriet, it was the language barrier that made so she indeed was in a situation that did not have any alternative. At this early point in her trip, she didn't know how to say things such as "sorry" or "where are the toilets" in Chinese yet. Can't be blamed, it is the hardest language to learn in the world, after all.
There were three beds in the Hostel room she was staying in, on the 6th floor. Her roommates, which she had never met, were not back from their day's activities yet. Un-bashfully we sat on their beds and started to drink our senses away, playing drinking games and talking about our mutual plans after this. Harriet told me she wanted to go from village to village until she'd reach Shanghai, and then backpack a bit through Southeast Asia – the latter part much like what I wanted to do further in my trip. – and then go work for a year in Australia, another year in New Zealand, then set the cap for South America. I knew then that we could get along in the long run and therefore I asked her if we could exchange emails and numbers.
That's about then that the two other roommates came back in. Two guys – one white and one Asian. They looked like easy-going people and they didn't seem to care much that we had already filled their bedroom floor with empty beer bottles and the likes. They could both speak English, and even decided to join us with our drinking games. Since I was sitting on his bed, I started to talk with the white guy first- David, an Aussie guy who didn't study, just 'took it easy, enjoying life as it came' - like much of the Aussies I had met so far in my life in Hostel thorough Europe. He was a very nice guy, and also was supposed to head north towards Beijing in the next couple of days. Therefore, we exchanged numbers so that we could meet again later in the coming week.
Then, taking out a card from the pack spread face down on one of the beds, Connie stated a new rule for the drinking game where I had to drink every time the Asian guy was drinking, It was the ice breaker for the conversation, and that's how I found out he was Canadian. After a couple other sips from him followed closely by me, I also found out he was quebecois, and French-speaking. And after much, much, much more pijiu, that he had just graduated from studying in engineering at Concordia and that he was the Alain that Carlo had been talking about. What are the odds! We happily chatted about the incredible coincidence that made so that we met, in the small town of Datong, somewhere China, after having heard about each other before from common friends. Had it not been raining, had Da-Laura not bought me a train ticket, had Mathias not been drunk on the train, had we not met Harriet, and had this town not have bars, we would have never met this way. We took pictures together as a reminder of the weird coincidence in which we had met, him holding bottles of Tsingtao and me of the 56% rice alcohol bottles which killed me later on the train in order to prove our friends that it indeed took place in China. Once it was time for us to leave in order to go to the train station, we set up on meeting again in Montreal once I would come back, that is, around Christmas time.
(Alain and I, in case you didn't believe me. Also featuring Mr. Fabulous (Matias))
The ride back was a pain. The only spots that were not sold-out where hard seats instead of the soft sleepers we took on our way to Datong. Therefore, we set up on buying even more three kuai rice alcohol bottles to be able to handle it. Having no chaser at first, I to eat marshmallow to try to erase the intensely disgusting taste from my mouth, but to no avail. I don't recommend rice alcohol to anyone, even though I think my friend Patrick back home would probably love it. I can't tell you to which extent it is an awful concoction, but the closest comparison I could come up with is that it is like going ten times to the dentist in a three second period. But anyways, it did do the job, and made me very, very drunk in a very, very short amount of time. Again, we were really loud and made a lot of « train pengyous », playing cards all night until we passed out from both the heat and the alcohol. The journey was both a real pain in terms of comfort and a lot of fun. I woke up sore all over and it's not exactly with a smile that I greated the bright sun, which decided that it was then the best timing to finally show itself after 3 days of hiding behind the heavy cover of raining clouds. I was to completely skip class that day in order to sleep the pijiu away. After all, it's not in order to see yet another classroom that I decided to expatriate myself on the other side of the world, right?
( Drunk on Baijiu? Bring it on! (We look terrible, don't we?))
Another moral to this story? In case you didn't get this part by now, I heart you, 大Laura.
