In a million years I'll never understand how some people can see things one way and someone else will see the same thing a hundred and eighty degrees differently. I mentioned in an earlier post that I was apprehensive about visiting China. For years I'd heard how difficult it is to travel here. ''Virtually no one speaks English. Being a vegetarian is impossible. The people try to trick you on prices.'' These and more are commonly heard travelers' laments. By the same token, for years but especially since Tami and I left on this trip, we've heard not a single disparaging comment about Laos, which we just left.
We've only been in China for about six days but, if our experience thus far is any indication, this place is going to be fascinating and enlightening. As I said below, the people here have been the best. Sure, we've had to haggle on some prices but much less so than Vietnam or India. They have been so nice that, in some sense, we feel, for lack of a better analogy, like old family returning after decades abroad. The smiles and enthusiastic hellos are killing me. I helps that we haven't seen the floods of foreign travelers, backpackers or otherwise, that ply all the routes of SE Asia. For the first time in a long time, we feel like we are in a place very far from home.
It goes w/o saying that China is huge. Area-wise it's about the same as the US and it has more than FOUR TIMES the population. This is a world unto itself and you can feel it. In other countries there are lots of concessions to western sensibilities, spoken English, for example. So far here, we've been approached several times by people who start coversing in Chinese as soon as we say "ni hau" (hello). When we try to explain that we can't understand them, they don't get it. One guy yesterday kept pointing to his ear. He thought my lack of understanding was b/c I was deaf! One young woman, when she and her friends realized we couldn't understand what they were saying, took a full minute to write out a phrase . . . in Chinese. She thought we'd at least be able to read it.
Many people here seem to be so inside the Chinese experience that they think everyone else must be, as well. It makes for very interesting travel b/c you really can feel that they're living their lives with no regard what some tourist might be willing to pay for. You can still find that kind of unselfconsciousness in villages in some countries, but it's a rare thing in cities.
The city where we are currently, Jianshui, is great example of this. It looks what I imagine many of the mid-sized American Rust Belt cities looked like fifty or seventy-five years ago. It's kind of grey with mostly masonry construction. All the streets and lanes are lined with shop fronts owned by local small-business people. People are out and about shopping, drinking tea, eating or just socializing. The general mood is genial. People smile and laugh. Employment seems to be fairly robust. Activity really picks up in the early morning and at the end of the work day. Factories (actual factories with smokestacks!) are scattered off in the distance around the edges of the city. People seem comfortably busy.
China has a lot of coal. The smell of it burning permeates the city but that smell is something best taken in small doses. It is, at one and the same time, comforting like a campfire but, because of the sulfur, irritating. (The sulfur dioxide from Chinese coal burning is dumping tons of acid rain onto Japan and killing many of its lakes.) My eyes and lungs have a slight burn especially in the morning and evening when people cook and heat the most. Most of the coal comes in shallow cylinders like those in the photo to the left. Holes are drilled in the center to make the coal burn faster and hotter. The smell of Jianshui reminds me of the cities of the Midwest back when I was young.
I already mentioned that getting some vegetarian food has been no problem. Actually, we've been finding as much interesting veggie food here as any country we've visited. It's cheap, too. We can both have a decent, full meal for one American dollar.
As for people not speaking English, for the most part, that's a big plus. We're forced to learn some basic Chinese words now. Pantomime and struggling to pronounce words correctly do a lot to bond travelers with locals. So, yes, it's early days for us in China but we both feel like we know a good thing when we see it. I'm looking forward to more.
This, of course, has led us to ask ourselves how we ended up spending so much time in Laos. Check out the next blog to see how that unfolded.
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