Hands down, I would have to say that most amazing experience I’ve had here was when my sister came to visit me; and together we traveled through East China: Beijing, Shenyang, Xi’an, Guilin, Yangshuo and Hong Kong, for ten wonderful days.
We met up in Beijing, where I arrived at the airport about three hours too early. I waited for her at the terminal filled with anticipation: I couldn’t believe that someone from my real life was going to join me in my China adventureland.
Finally, after what seemed like forever, I spotted her in the crowd of arrival passengers. She was wearing pink Victoria Secret sweatpants and her jet black hair, which is now streaked with brown, was back in a braid. I shrieked and gave her a big hug. We got her luggage, a humongous black suitcase that weighed more than me, and we caught the airport train to our hostel.
That night, Sunai and I met up with my friend Michael, near the Lama Buddhist Temple. He took us to a huge restaurant, lit up in neon lights. There he ordered us different kinds of baozi and vegetable and meat dishes.
After dinner, we hit up a bar in the Sanlitun District where all the bars are located. This bar was an Irish Pub, filled to the brim with expats. With my sister on one side, my University friend on another, and snatches of English conversation floating around me, I felt like I had been transported back to the states.
The next day we walked to the Bell and Drum Towers, which are located a few blocks from our hostel. I love the neighborhood which is surrounded by old hutongs. Hutongs are narrow alleys lined with traditional courtyard residences.
These traditional courtyard residences, which are entered through a large gate, contain small houses. One to the north, one to the south, one to the east and one to the west, in the shape of a quadrangle. Usually an extended family will all live together in a courtyard.
Anyway, the neighborhoods of the hutong are bustling. Everywhere there people are, talking, laughing and sweeping the narrow streets. Sunai and I walked through the hutongs and toured the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower. Both towers were utilized to keep track of the time. Afterward, I negotiated down for the hutong tour.
We traveled through the hutongs in a red and yellow carriage hooked to a bicycle.
The day was beautiful, the sun was shinning and all around us old men and women lined the streets, chatting noisily. We paid extra money and went into a hutong courtyard.
The lady kept talking to me in rapid fire Chinese, of which I could understand, maybe one out of five words. She led us inside and showed us old pictures of her family and of the other people who had come to visit the hutong. I tried as best as I could to translate the little I understood, to Sunai. Sunai and I liked her dog the best out of everything in her house. The dog was small and white and flopped on us like a rug.
Afterward, I took Sunai to the Silk Market, where we negotiated like fiends for purses and shoes. Sunai’s eyes absolutely lit up. She loved how shady the market was: when she asked for a knockoff purse, the shop lady would call someone on a cell phone and it would arrive five minutes later, hidden in a canvas bag. After the silk market we had dinner and crashed out, exhausted, at the hostel.
The next morning we woke up early to the Great Wall Jinshanling Tour. My friend Mike, emailed me about this tour, which is done through Beijing Hikers. It’s an amazing tour. I’ve seen the Great Wall before in Shanhaiguan, but the experience there was more commercial. There were other tourists. Here our tour group of 20 people, experienced the Great Wall in the solitary beauty of the mountains.
The hike up to the wall was about four miles up narrow passageways and breathtaking mountain views. I realized, running aside, I am not in great hiking shape. Early in the hike, Sunai and I had made fun of the hiking sticks that were offered to our group. Later on, as we skidded down a passage lined with run down remnants of the wall, we wished that we had had the foresight to take one.
My favorite moment was when we had finally taken a break ontop of one of the outlook points. I leaned against Sunai’s back, as we starred out into the twisting bricks that slithered through the green hills.
After we had a wonderful lunch, in a small village house at the foot of the mountain. There we had a variety of traditional dishes such as egg and tomato, steamed fish and cucumber salad. We paired the food with beer and talked to the people we had hiked with.
One man, ethnically Indian and raised in Farmington Hills, had gone to the University of Michigan, my alma mater. Now he lived in Hong Kong, where he was doing finance. He was visiting Beijing for a few days with his American born Chinese wife. Generally, the Americans I have met in China are much more open and eager to communicate than the ones I’ve met at home.
After the Great Wall hike, poor jetlagged Sunai passed out. I walked around the neighborhood and found a cute little bar and got a delicious Philly cheese steak. On the big screen “Super Bad” was playing. So I took the movie in along with the action playing out in the next table over.
There two Canadian expats, surrounded by a gaggle of Chinese women flirted loudly. The fatter ex-pat kept making fun of himself and his lack of Chinese speaking skills.
The other more suave ex-pat, engaged the women in conversation. The fat man kept trying to get the conversation back and his voice turned louder and louder. At one point he tried to engage me in conversation, since I was sitting alone. He pointed to the screen where the looser guy is walking alone.
“That was me in high school,” he chimed. “You too?” he asked. And he looked hopefully over at me.
I mumbled a reply and shrugged my shoulders noncommittally. I wanted nothing to do with the loud rambunctious group. And I definitely wasn’t going to break my silence to admit to being a high school looser, regardless of whether I was or not.
Foreign men in China generally make such a fool of themselves. You would never see this scene playing out with ex-pat women. Obviously, a lot of the women aren’t into Chinese men, but I also think women find elements of a relationship, like sharing a common language, necessary.
After the bar, Sunai got up and together we went searching for a place to go out. I was looking at a place in my guidebook, but with my wonderful direction skills and my broken Chinese, I somehow ended up in exactly the opposite direction of the bar.
After 20 minutes of walking, we finally found a bar. Not the right bar, but a bar nevertheless, and we walked in. The bar had guitars strung on the walls and two boys were sitting at a table opposite us strumming their guitars. We had found our way to the guitar bar. Although it was empty, it was cozy. We both ordered drinks and listened to the workers strumming away.
There were four men, between the ages of 19 and 26. They all had sad artist eyes, and the best one was 19. He looked much younger and was shorter that I was. But he could play anything.
Since we were the only customers there, it quickly turned into a sing along. The short one started strumming, “Hotel California,” and Sunai and I, always looking for karaoke opportunities, wailed along. At the end of the night, the English songs stopped flowing freely. The air quieted and the boys serenaded us in beautiful soft Chinese.
The next day, we went to the Summer Palace and back to the Silk market. The Summer Palace was massive; it was the vacation home of the Qing emperors. At the end of that night we boarded a sleeper train that would roll us during the night to our next destination: Shenyang.
In Shenyang I found out my kitten, which I had been keeping with a colleague, had been taken and released in an unknown location. I was a little depressed about that. But this is also China i.e. I am used to the unexpected. And to be honest, this wasn’t completely unexpected; I knew I wasn’t supposed to have pets in my apartment.
Sunai and I got in an argument about flight booking complications. And we decided that we needed some rejuvenation. We spent the rest of the day in the bathhouse across the street. There we took long hot showers, soaked in hot baths and sweated in the sauna.
Later, and still naked, we got scrubbed down by two women in red underwear. They took these abrasive scrub gloves and scrubbed hard until strips of dirt fell off of your skin. It looked like small animals had been shitting on me. It was gross. But afterward, my skin felt soft and clean. And generally, the experience was relaxing and perfect for two weathered travelers.
That night I had dinner with my best friends in Shenyang: Kristen, Christiane and Taylor. It was a nice dinner at a vegetarian restaurant. But Sunai was feeling very sick. The pollution had affected Sunai more than I realized. She was tired, her throat was hurting and she kept coughing. It’s sad. I’ve gotten so used to the smog that I can run in Shenyang and not be affected. But Sunai was coming from the land of Environmental regulations, and our coal mine of a city was taking its toil on her health.
The next day I took Sunai to the orphanage. She was shocked at the conditions of the children, so many kids stuffed in such as mall space. She suggested looking for more sustainable long term solutions for helping the orphans.
Afterward we took a flight to Xi’an and got in at around 11 pm. Outside of our youth hostel was an alleyway surrounded by bbq pits and rowdy teenage diners; they embraced the summer night eating chicken wings and drinking pints of cold Tsinghua beer. We sat down on the short wooden benches and ordered rounds of beer, and I ordered chicken wings.
The next day we went on a tour, arranged by the hostel, to see the Terrecotta Soldiers. Our tour guide spoke was really hyper and animated. She also seemed threatening. She had a purple floppy hat and she would interrogate the people in our group randomly, and then laugh loudly. There were a lot of terracotta soldiers, about 8,000 warriors in all. They were cool, but after awhile they all start to look the same.
After Xi’an we flew into Guilin, where we spent the night. The next day we took a bamboo ride over the Li River to Yangshuo. The Raft ride was breathtaking. I have never seen mountains like that, piercing the sky on either side of the muddy water.
We stopped at a rest stop island that caters to tourists. There you can buy seafood chwar, or bbq seafood on a stick. There was also the opportunity to take a picture with two black raggedy looking live birds, tied to a stick.
We went back on the river raft, Sunai put Jack Johnson on and we both listened to him one ear phone each. Rocking along the Li River as the lyrics for “Do You Remember” came through her Ipod.
“Well, all these times they come and go
And alone don’t seem so long
Over ten years have gone by
We can’t rewind,
We’re locked in time
But you’re still mine”
And I smiled at her, my sister. Because after all the stuff that has happened to both of us, we are each other constants. She will always be my soul mate, my other half. And sitting there, rolling down the river, there was no one I’d rather share the raft, or this trip with.
Once we got to Yangshuo, we were literally entranced by the beauty around us. Everywhere, the rugged mountains sliced through the sky; and all around our hostels the land was dotted with rice terraces. Sunai and I rented bikes one night, put on our head lamps and rolled through the beautiful scenery: listening to the gurgling of the frogs and chirping of the bugs. After Yangshuo we went back to Guilin and caught an overnight bus to Shenzhen.
The overnight bus experience was an interesting one. We were boarded into a sleeper the size of a coffin. Mine was the top bunk and the space between my head and ceiling was so narrow that I couldn’t sit up. All night they played a mix of Chinese karaoke and bad action films, one of which starred DMX. It was never really quiet and there were always more people boarding. By the end of the ride there were people sleeping in the aisles, under the beds. When asked to describe the bus ride Sunai said, “This is my vision of hell.”
When we got to Shenzhen we met an American named Anthony, who was going to med school in the fall. He was also going to Hong Kong and we rode with him on the van and then through the metro. Anthony took us to a hostel where Sunai would stay. And Sunai and I wondered off to Stanley Peak, where I bought blueberry pancake mix, syrup, butter and a book. The little luxuries you take fore granted. Hong Kong is amazing for any one who’s been in China as long as I have. You have all the Western amenities and it’s just amazingly beautiful and clean. Thank you England, for that nice stretch of colonialism, I now take nothing for granted.
We also watched a shark fin protest. Where Hong Kong yuppies, mostly teenagers and young adults, protested eating shark fins. They protested by standing absolutely still for three minutes in different poses. My favorite was one 9-year-old boy, with an afro wig who was grabbing his crotch. That was definitely shocking. I’m not sure what that had to do with shark fins, but it made for an interesting photo. I also like the eight year old, who was biting on the fin of a shark she had stuffed in her mouth.
The time in Hong Kong went by too quickly, and by 3 pm I had to take a subway back to Shenzhen.
It’s hard to summarize a trip like this. Sunai and I took an epic road trip after high school and this was similar. It was a coming of age experience for us, as she turned 25 at the end of the trip. And we have become real adults. Still, it’s also a lot different than that road trip. We’re not 15 and 17 anymore, but this freedom and this trip was more like a warm hug than a shot of adrenaline.
Granted, China was amazing and exploring another country is a must-have experience. But what made this trip for me was my sister. And to be honest, I could have done this anywhere and still been perfectly happy as long as she was besides me.
“Well, all these times they come and go
And alone don’t seem so long
Over ten years have gone by
We can’t rewind,
We’re locked in time
But you’re still mine”
