Arriving Yangshou
Trip Start
Aug 17, 2006
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6
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Trip End
Sep 19, 2006
Yangshou, China
Friday, September 8, 2006
Last time I wrote we were at Lijiang, trying to decide what to do next. Well, two days after we took a 8-hours bus to Kunming, the capital of the region. Kunming is a very big city, with not many attractions for tourists, and we were there for about one morning.
In this morning I went to see two pavilions recommended by the Lonely Planet guidebook. The pavilions were not that impressive, but on the way I got to see few nice things. You'll see in the pictures.
From Kunming we headed to Yangshou, a known city in Guanshou region. We took a flight, to save a 20-hours train, and got there on the evening.
Yangshou, like Lijiang, is a vacation city. However, it is very different from Lijiang - while Lijiang is aimed mainly at Chinese tourists, Yangshou is aimed at western tourists. Almost everyone in the tourist area of Yangshou speaks English, and Chinese food is more difficult to get here than Western food.
Yangshou's region is famous for its geranic mountain peaks - If you don't know what geranic peaks are, don't worry, I didn't know either when I came here, but you'll see many of them in the pictures. Generally, geranic peaks are mountain peaks which are very thin and high, which gives them a very "sharp" look. Yangshou is also surrounded with Chinese villages, which still maintain some of their original life-style, with a lot of farms and agricultural works.
The first day we got there we rented bicycles and rode through some of the villages. It turns out that riding a bicycle is not really like riding a bicycle, because it took me a lot of time to recall how you do it. However, after some practice I could ride good enough and we went to a trip around Yangshou. We saw some of the farmers work in their fields, not to mention a lot of Geranic peaks. I have a lot of pictures from this ride, but the really intresting thing is what happened later.
When we returned to Yangshou, I made a little walk in the streets, and suddenly to Chinese girls started to talk with me. They told me they are students in a college for English which is found in Yangshou. Their college was doing a barbeque to celebrate its 5th anniversary, and the students were asked to invite as many foreigners as they can to the barbeque.
So two hours later Eyal and I went to the barbeque. It turns out that Yangshou has a large college for English, where Chinese boys and girls who want to improve their English go to study for 3 or 4 years. Yangshou is a very good place for them to learn english, because it is full of western tourists, so they can practice their English - which is something they can't do in most of the other places in China. There were about 80 students in the barbeque, most of them of ages 17-19, and it was very intresting.
Soon after we arrived they started to light campfires, and then they told us they are going to do a chicken barbeque. I thought they are going to make few chicken steaks, but no, they did mean a *chicken* barbeque - they took a whole chicken and roasted it on the fire. You'll see in the pictures.
Little later their teachers organized a game: The students were divided to groups and each group had to collect as much foreign money as they can. I gave our group 15 shekels, which made them pretty excited. I got them back later, of course.
Toward the end of the barbeque they have putted some music and some of the students made some performances. Some of the students danced, some others demonstrated few Tai-Chi exercises, and others sang few Chinese songs. Then they asked me, Eyal, two more Israeli girls and two Belgian tourists to perform some english song. We tried to do YMCA, but we were really bad :)
One of the students I got to talk with a lot is Katrina (or "Ka-cheena" pronounced in a very heavy Chinese accent). This was her english name, of course, not her Chinese name, which was too complicated for me (Tian-something, which means "angel"). Katrina is a 22 years old girl. She grew up in a poor family in the Guandzhou region. She quited school after middle school, and started working as a saleswoman to help her family. She then decided that she needs to learn english if she wants to earn more money. She studies in this college for 3 years and finishes at December. She then hopes to find a job as an English interpreter.
Another student I talked with is Jojo. Jojo was borned to a family of farmers in a traditional Chinese village. As a girl she did not get much attention from her parents, who focused on her two little brothers. Boys are very important in Chinese traditional villages, because there is no organized retirement system, so boys are those who support their parents when the parents get old. As for girls, the parents can only hope that they would marry a guy who is rich enough to support them too, in addition to his parents.
For this reason, Jojo always wanted to be a boy. She studies in this college because she hopes that when she finishes she can find a good job and earn enough money to support her parents by herself, so they won't have to work so hard - she told me that now they work very hard, as farmers. She cares much more about finding a good job than to find a husband, although some of her villages women already tried to "recommend" her few boys.
She is 19-years old, and she told me that in her village most of the girls are getting married in this age.
By the way, she told me that regular worker in one of the cities industries earns around 600 yuan for a month - that's around 300 shekels.
She also asked me about the war in Israel. She told me that she has two Israeli friends that she was worried about. She also told me that most of the Chinese get from their media the impression that the war is Israel's fault. I told her that we were attacked by a Lebeanese group, and she asked why would they want to attack us and why don't they want peace - now you try to explain to a Chinese girl the politics of the middle east in short...
She said that she can't understand why don't people in the middle east want peace, because the people in China want peace. I told her it's not very accurate, because not so long time ago China attacked Tibet and conquered it. She answered "Yes, but I think that we had to... Tibet, Hong Kong and Macao had to belong to us...".
"Did they want to belong to you?" I asked her, and she said "No". "So why did you have to conquer them? Don't you want peace?". She got very confused at this point.
Well, after the barbeque we went back to our hotel, and we plan few more bicycle trips for the next day, as well as to meet again some of the students we met in the barbeque. For now, you can find the pictures in
http://picasaweb.google.com/ormeir2/KunmingAndYangshou
Eyal's pictures are in:
http://picasaweb.google.com/eyalis/China4
Bye for now,
Or
