Beijingers in the desert

One of the fun things about my blog is getting to see what people Google in order to find me. One of the most popular searches is “how to get sand out of ears” and it leads to a post from Abu Dhabi last year. Well, I got sand in my ears again last weekend, but this time in China. (Sorry people, I still haven’t found a good way to get sand out of my ears except for just taking a shower!)

wonderful translation

I just got done spending nine days in a place where most people just pass through. Ningxia is northwestern province made up of mostly desert. There are many Hui people who live there, one of the Muslim groups in China. I went to Ningxia with my internship, CAI, to run six days of teacher training for teachers around the province. I taught a phonics class for English teachers along with Amy, another American living in Beijing. In total there were seven of us. Amy, her husband, and I were the Americans. However, they are both Asian-Americans, so I stood out as the weird one as I rode my bike down the street or ate my breakfast in the small house that served as a restaurant. The other four in our group were Chinese. One of them, Rona, was our translator. She studied English in college and speaks it extremely well. I was lucky to have her as my roommate throughout the whole trip.

Rona, me, Amy and Wil. Notice Amy's camel's proximity to my leg. He loved keeping his face smooshed on my leg.

So what does one do in Ningxia? Our first two days were spent preparing for the teacher training and relaxing in the rural environment. The generous teachers of Taole school lent us bikes for the week, so we biked down the road to the Yellow River. I still cannot find Taole on the map, but it’s in northern Ningxia on the Yellow River and just a few miles from the province of Inner Mongolia. The road to the river was awesome. We were surrounded by fields of sunflowers and corn, and old men herded sheep at our sides. We met more cyclists on the road than we did cars. When we reached the river, we were met by fishermen, boat constructors, and mosquitoes. I have never seen so many mosquitoes in my life. They were literally swarming me. Luckily deet really works, so as soon as they landed on my skin they flew off. However, I did not deet my clothes, so I got four enormous bites on my back from mosquitoes biting me through my shirt.

this is my freak-out face because i am literally being eaten alive

a farmer and his sheep near the Yellow River

Our other adventure into the Ningxia landscape was to the desert. This part of China is really interesting because there is so much green, so many fields and trees, and also so much sand. (Apparently it all used to be desert.) We went to a desert theme park. We tried to come up with a better description of it, but all we came up with was that it is like a winter wonderland, except you are in the desert. You can ride horses, camels, and mules, you can toboggan down a huge dune, zipline across a sand valley, go to museums showing Ningxia’s finest artifacts, meet Tibetan Mastiffs, ride a mini roller coaster, ride a mechanical bull, and drive a jeep through the dunes. There’s a lot more, but those are just the highlights. We rode camels and slid down the dunes, but my favorite part was just riding into the desert in the giant vehicles. They must have been old military vehicles or something, because they remind me of ducks, those car/boat things used in American city tours. Anyway, the driver goes as fast as he can over the dunes and we all have to hold on to these poles in front of us to keep from falling out the sides as we bumped along the dunes. Everyone in the car loved it, but they all looked so calm! The only ones screaming were my friends and I.

they ask you if you want the fast or slow sled. fast please!

We really wanted to meet the Tibetan Mastiffs, because we heard these dogs are as big as lions. When we went to the area in the park where they live, a sign said that you could not visit the mastiffs today. So we went to the office, where we told them that we came all the way from America to see the dogs. That didn’t convince them. They said they only open up the mastiff area one day a year, and the rest of the time even the governor of Ningxia can’t see the dogs. Oh well.

Our evenings in Ningxia were spent either lesson planning for the following day, or watching movies and playing cards. In the end, it really started to feel like summer camp. It was a week-long getaway from the big city, getting to know new people, eating every meal together in the same cafeteria, riding bikes through fields, trying to avoid bug bites, and playing lots and lots of games. I’m already missing everyone and our daily routine. Three teenage boys from Beijing who helped us out at the training actually had us sign their t-shirts on the last day. Ningxia Summer Camp 2010! I’ll write more about the teacher training in my next post.

mini roller coaster in the middle of the desert? in china, all is possible

A month in Southeast Asia

I cannot believe our trip is one-fourth over with.  We are off to China now, and the Middle East and Europe are to follow.  While this past month has been spread out among four different countries, my experiences here have been connected, flowing from smiling northern Thailand, through peaceful Laos, around the contradictions of Cambodia, and into the chaos of Vietnam.  Although I am no where near an expert in any city or town, there are a few observations I picked up along the way that I will always remember and wanted to share.

1. Beeping. If there is one thing I will not miss, especially about Cambodia and Vietnam, it is the beeping.  Instead of staying in driving lanes, cars and motorbikes whiz around each other as they please.  To let others know that they are passing, they honk.  On a twelve-hour overnight ride from Hue to Hanoi, for example, anytime our bus passed another car, the driver was layin’ on the horn.  Lovely.

2. Welcome mats. In America, a welcome mat can look like anything.  But all across Southeast Asia, a welcome mat is one thing: a solid color rectangle with the word WELCOME in white block letters.  From restaurants to hotels, everyone has these mats.  Some guy must have taken the idea very literally and marketed it across the entire region!

3. Pajamas. PJs aren’t just for sleeping!  Apparently any matching outfit is good enough for a day out on the town.  Women, especially in Cambodia, can be seen donning teddy bears and smiley faces while riding their motorbikes through the busy downtown.  More than once we have seen signs for museums stating that pajamas aren’t appropriate attire for entry.

4. Counterfeit books. I knew that we would see lots of fake DVDs and CDs, but I never expected books.  The most popular is Lonely Planet guidebooks, but you can find all the latest fiction at low prices here…because it’s all fake.  Open up a book, and the pages are blurry and slightly off-center.  We actually got a book for a really low price by arguing to the woman “It’s not even a real book!”

5. Man bellies. It’s hot here.  Really really hot.  We dealt with it by drinking tons of water and running from shade tree to shade tree.  While locals do the same, the men also have a strange habit: they fold up their shirts so that their bellies are showing.  I have never seen so many man stomachs!

6. Greetings from kids. In every country, kids had a way of letting us know that we are foreigners.  In Thailand, they would shout at us “farang!” while in Laos the word for us is “falang!”  In Cambodia and Vietnam, we got huge “Hello!!!”s, often from kids riding with their parents on motorbikes.  The cutest greeting came from a little girl in Na Taer, Laos, who would hide behind trees while she followed us around the village, and whenever we saw her, she would burst into giggles and run away yelling “falang!!!”

7. Hilarious clothing. The clothing line that struck me the most was Playboy Bunny Kids.  Another funny sight was shirts that said Adidas with a big Nike swoop underneath.  Some of the clothing sold in Hanoi was so out of control, I had to take pictures of it to remember:

"Nice" dresses that line the streets of the shopping districts. Prom, anyone?

My favorite shirts in Hanoi, these colorful vests hang off of t-shirts with confusing English words. And these are just the tame ones!

This one takes first prize. Please please tell me if you can decipher: "You to me sture live with as it's frat is don't wif to atay I movie away."

Many things surprised me about Southeast Asia, one being that it’s a lot more comfortable here than I had imagined.  I could definitely see the attraction of living here, especially in Thailand and Laos.  I think if I had to pick one place to live, it would be Vientiane.  The biggest surprise in this entire month was the mosquitoes.  No, not the huge amount of them swarming me: the complete opposite!  I was mentally prepared to have dozens of bug bites every day.  But no.  Guess how many bites I got during this past month.  Got the number?  Ok, if you guessed more than one, you’re way off.  I got one measly bite the entire month. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy I only got one bite, because I didn’t take malaria medication while I was here.  But I am shocked about how much mosquito-borne illness is talked about, and how little it mattered once I was here.  Yes, it is the dry season, but still.  Where are all the bugs???

There are things I will definitely miss about Southeast Asia, like dogs running around by themselves, the scent of incense when passing temples, and the colorful music videos with karaoke on TV.  I will never forget how much fun badminton now looks, or how brilliant a handle on a large water bottle is.  But the great thing about all that is that I know I will be back in Southeast Asia someday.  That’s the coolest part about travel; for every place you go, your dreams add on a dozen more places for the future!