Traveling the World

You take the wine out and begin pouring it into the cups. It tastes great entering your mouth and going down your throat, but as the taste begins to fade, you look into the sky and fear the worst: rain. Even worse, you didn’t bring an umbrella and your hotel is on the other side of town! As the drizzle becomes a full-blown storm with lightning and thunder, you huddle with several other people underneath a vendor’s humongous umbrella.

You bide your time in boredom and angst, waiting for the rain to stop. A genius of a man approaches those of us who’ve become trapped like prey, and offers to sell us umbrellas for 10rmb. You are surprised by how fair he is being, as he obviously has the upper hand and could easily sell them for twice the price and you would pay it just to free yourself from the hell you’re enduring. You open the umbrella, grab your best gal’s arm, and run as fast as you can across the river and through the town, trying hard not to slip on the flooded cobblestone streets. After a rough time, you collapse on your bed, soaked to the bone. It’s something you realize you’ll never forget.

Beyond my head lies the real picture of life in China. The majority of people live in inadequate, dilapidated housing that by Western standards would be considered unlivable or should be slated for demolition. The only reason these houses aren’t destroyed and rebuilt is that people don’t have enough money to do it, even though Chinese people have a very high personal savings rate. In addition to these already unfavorable living conditions, to make matters worse, it is common for several generations of one family to live under the same roof.

One thing that strikes me as odd is that Chinese people don’t care about the outward appearance of their homes. Many buildings that look old and terrible are actually quite beautiful and new inside because of the emerging middle class and its desire to live more extravagantly.

Having lived in the USA for most of my life, I became used to the idea of an indoor washer and dryer for cleaning clothes. Living in Austria wasn’t tough for me because my host mother insisted on doing the laundry, which was dried on a line outside! In Israel, we had enough clothes that we didn’t have to clean them at all! In China though, almost no one has a dryer like in the states. They exist, but they cost way too much money, more than two months average salary for a Chinese person.

As is life, we must adjust to the home environment, and that meant using a drying line in my room to clean my clothes. Because I have a washing machine like almost everyone else in my city, I didn’t have to resort to the old style of taking the sheets down to the river and beating them with a paddle like this woman! Fenghuang is still very traditional, and that means using the river to clean the sheets and clothing. It’s something I would hate having to do, but to see how much it sucked, I asked this woman to let me try it for myself.

She said, “sure, why not,” except it began to look as if it were going to rain kittens and puppies, and she almost yelled at me to hurry up and give her back her paddle because she needed to finish in time to get back to her house. It was a fun experience, but only because it’s not my reality!

I’ve decided to continue writing photo posts, even if it means having to paste the Picasa URL to a friend and have them get my the picture’s URL so I can actually write about it. It’s a lot of work and quite annoying, but worth it to keep you guys happy and content with new things to read about! If you weren’t aware, I just wrote a new personal blog post which can be seen here.

This picture shows you just a single area of where boats are docked and waiting for tourists and even locals to board! As I mentioned in a previous post, there are only a few places within the town to cross the river, and so boats are the most common way of crossing. I paid 20rmb ($3.20) for a private ride that lasted around 45minutes, and was quite worth the trip.

The boat ride experience you have depends on where you pick up the boat! I saw some people at the very north end of the town going downstream, and I saw people in the south end going upstream! Each boat will have custom-tailored their experience based on the previous trips they’ve made, like the one I went on had a special stop on the other side of the river at a rice winery that was amazing.

Another option we had was to pay a bit extra and continue going down the river and further away from the town. They even had markers out on either side of the river to show you just how much further you’d be going if you paid that extra amount, something which helped me decide it’d be a huge waste of time, not to mention the poor bugger was already tired and we hadn’t gone back upstream yet!

This picture was taken during our private boat ride on the first morning we arrived in Fenghuang. Because the town is still not very modern, they have only a few methods for crossing the river. Such options are by wooden planks, stepping stones, boat, or the central brick bridge. I used all 4 methods and found them all quite enjoyable. The first set of stepping stones I came across got my feet soaking wet, whereas the others found further in the up town area were sure to keep your dry, that is unless it is raining! When walking on the first set of stepping stones with water running in between, make sure to take your shoes off or your shoes will be soaking wet!