Aliens with Blonde Hair

One thing that was particularly funny about Guiyang was how unaccustomed the locals were to seeing white people. Apparently a lot of Chinese people visit the place, but westerners don't get that far inland. Think about it. Most people when traveling to China make it to Beijing, Shanghai, and maybe Xian. And that's about it. This is one thing I am really grateful for while living over here. We get to go to less popular places that are still very much worth seeing.

So, basically, we got a lot of stares, a lot of double takes, and a lot of puzzlement. Are those real people? Am I imagining something? This actually happened to me one time in Anchorage, AK. We were graciously given a ride to a trailhead by a bi-racial family. The mom was white, the dad was black, but he must have also had some white ancestry, because, somehow, their children were black with red hair. I kid you not. And I stared at those kids; I couldn't help it. If I was being rude, I didn't mean to be. But I had honestly never seen anything like that before in my life. It was beautiful and mind-blowing at the same time. I imagine that's how they thought of us in Guiyang. Except instead of beautiful, they probably thought we were awkwardly large and frighteningly white. :)

The end result is that we had about 20 different groups of people openly ask to take pictures with us over the 4 days. And those are just the people that asked. A lot more just took pictures of us without us knowing. Drew thought it was hilarious to walk slightly behind the rest of us and watch people's reactions as they passed up. "Shock and awe, boys, shock and awe."

In our group of 4 people, each of us had particular characteristics that were foreign. Luke is over 6'3'', so that was amazing to them. I looked up some average national heights, and it is quite shocking. The average Chinese male is only 5'5'', so Luke must have been a giant to them.

On a side note, the average Filipino woman is only 5'0'', and the average Indonesian women is only 4'10''! The vast majority of helpers in Hong Kong are either Indonesian or Filipino. I see them everywhere, and I always thought they looked tiny, but now I have statistical confirmation! Ha!

Anyways, to continue our super powers list, Luke is super tall, his wife Jill has super curly hair, I have super blonde hair, and Drew is super buff. All unique to them. Enjoy the pics.

Huixi Park and The Colorful Guiyang Show

After the Qingyan Ancient City, we went to a city park, which is more of a local hangout than a tourist attraction. However, they did have 4 person cycles, so, of course, we had to rent one! Funny though; the section of park that we were in was separated from the other (larger) part by stairs. Uhhh... people with regular bikes were just carrying their bikes up and down the steps, but our little contraption was too cumbersome to move. So, we rode around in a few loops, with Drew's expert steering, then called it a day with the bike. Probably the only real scam of the trip that we succumbed to. 

Isn't this awesome? What a bunch of BAs! I hope I'm still playing ping pong, oops, I'm sorry, table tennis, when I'm their age!

I have to honest; the majority of these amazing pics were taken by our friend Luke. While I'd like to say they're mine, everyone who knows me knows I don't have this much artistic ability in my body. So good job Luke! Also at the park, we saw a community center of sorts where other groups of older women were gathered in groups of four around automatic mahjong tables. They were the coolest tables ever. Imagine Grandma Pat, if there was a table that had a built in card shuffler in the center that would shuffle then deal the correct number of cards to each person. It was just like that, except it was for mahjong tiles!

Also at the park, we saw a community center of sorts where other groups of older women were gathered in groups of four around automatic mahjong tables. They were the coolest tables ever. Imagine Grandma Pat, if there was a table that had a built in card shuffler in the center that would shuffle then deal the correct number of cards to each person. It was just like that, except it was for mahjong tiles! We also walked past another street that was filled the locals eating and playing homemade arcade and fair games! Like the balloon pop made from a piece of plywood, balloons, and darts. And the people were having a blast! Their own Sunday afternoon entertainment!

After the park, we cleaned up at the hotel, then went out to dinner for some hot pot. Hot pot is essentially fondue (without the cheese and chocolate courses), and the broth is the same sour and spicy one as was used in our fish soup the other night. This time, we had lots of veggies, tofu, lamb, and beef to put in there. Delicious! And all of this was only $15 per person. 

No, Drew is not growing a soul patch; it's just a funny shadow.

After dinner, we went to the Colorful Guiyang Light Show in downtown Guiyang. Apparently this show is so popular with tourists, they put it on every night! Basically it was a show displaying all of the folk songs and dances from the numerous ethnic minority groups that live in this area. 

This guy was walking up a staircase of swords. He had just proven how sharp they were by cutting vegetables on them! Ouch. Maybe one half of the swords were sharp, but the half he walked on were dull? I dunno.

We got such good shots because we were sitting in the front row! Look at all the mainland tourists! Not a single other westerner in there. And they gave us plastic clappy hands to cheer with. Very entertaining. 

Half way during the show, they asked for 5 male volunteers to come up onstage and race to see who could get dressed in the traditional costumes fastest. I tried to get Drew up there, but he wasn't game. What the volunteers didn't know was that all of the clothes were XXXXL, so they had to find a way to tie the clothes on appropriately so that they wouldn't fall down as they attempted to replicated a traditional dance. The only other non-Chinese person in the audience was a Pakistani family, and the dad actually won the competition. He was quite hysterical, and deserved to win. However, please look at the older Chinese man on the left. Is he not the cutest older Chinese man you have ever seen in your life? I wanted him to win for that reason alone. 

Aren't the traditional costumes crazy? So many colors! And the headdresses are made of silver, or aluminum, something shiny but light. And they had all of these tiny silver beads along their forehead so that they ladies always jingled when they moved. Jing jing jing jing........ 

Qingyan Ancient City

On the second full day of our trip, we went to the Ancient City of Qingyan. It was built in 1378, and originally was a functioning military town in the Guizhou Province. Now it is more of a tourist attraction, with lots of temples, street stalls selling strange food, and cool architecture. It was one of the few ancient towns built mostly of stone, so I like to pretend it is all original, but I'm sure that's not totally true. 

This is one of the famous gates in Qingyan, and it's original! It is called longevity gate. Funny that it's named that when in Europe about this time, my ancestors were dying hand over fist from the plague. 

This was the entrance gate to one of the Chinese temple compounds. 

Once inside, there was the main temple with lots of practitioners. There seemed to be a whole group of people actually going through one at a time to pray, get their fortune discussed with a priest, then tie a red ribbon just outside of the temple. Not sure what the red ribbon was for. Notice in front of this temple is a big yin-yang symbol? I always remember how as a kid, we would wear these silly hemp necklaces with beads on them, often yinyangs, peace signs, hearts, etc. We were genuine hippies, but we had no idea what the symbols meant. I even thought it was Ying-Yang, not yin/yang. It turns out, yin means light, and yang means dark black, hence the well known colors. Most people get the balance part of it, that you can't have one element without the other. But, the symbol originally represented two fish in a swirling dance with each other. Therefore, movement is inherent in this symbol, or, in other words, flow. This links to the flow of chi that the Chinese believe govern all aspects of life. Like tai chi? Crazy huh? It's all linked together! 

This was a unique painting on the ceiling of a pavilion just outside of the main temple. I am going to pretend that this is super old too. Makes it feel more special that way. 

One thing I really liked about this particular temple was its human like depictions of gods inside of the temple. This reinforces how their "gods" were really just people who, in their lifetime, were particularly good at one thing or another, and the Chinese now go to pray to them, or show respect, so that these ancestors will help guide them in that specific area of need. I like to think of them as saints. 

This was a calligraphy station set up so you could practice your characters. But, the best part was we weren't using real ink. It was simply water than turned the paper dark, and then later dried and lightened it again. Infinite fun! Plus, we didn't have to worry about making mistakes or wasting ink. Perfect. 

The city is completely walled in by a substantial wall. Like a mini-Great Wall. The funny part was, the top of the walls weren't high enough to cover our tall heads. So, if we had really been fighting a battle from up there, we most certainly would have been shot in the head by an arrow. Oops. Apparently we need to be about a foot shorter for this wall to be effective. 

The other funny thing about this town was the amount of food they were selling that was unrecognizable. Or, if it was, you wish you hadn't recognized it. For instance, not really sure what kind of meat that is in the first picture. But, I can certainly tell you what the second picture is! Can you? Needless to say, we did not partake of any of this....

Finally, the last cool part about this town was that aside from the stuff set up for tourists, real people actually lived inside or just outside of the city. At one point, we wandered through their own market, where they were selling real life things an every day person would need. For instance, this guy is selling the heads of farming tools, axes, hoes, etc.

As we were walking around this local market, I decided I was too hot and wanted a tasty ice cream treat to cool down with. We saw the ice cream guy, and I asked him in mandarin how much it cost. He said "1 dollar 5. I assumed he meant 15 dollars, as I was still getting my dollars and cents vocab mixed up. 15 yuan is like 2 bucks, so it didn't seem outrageous. So, Drew handed the old man a 10 and a 5. The guy smiled at us, handed Drew back the 10, then gave us 3.50 back in change. The ice cream had been only 1.50, (or about 20 American cents) not 15. This is a perfect example of how the people in this area have no intention of scamming people, or taking advantage of clueless westerners, unlike Shanghai and Beijing. The old man could have just taken our 15 dollars, and I would have enjoyed my ice cream. But, he didn't. 

Rural Anshun

On our way to another beautiful scenic area, we passed through a small, rural village near Anshun. It was amazing how "scenic" the town and surrounding rice paddies were. As you can see by the picture below, the town was really concrete buildings along side the one main (paved!) road going through town. It was mainly a farming town, with rice (duh..), corn, and red peppers being the three main crops. 

It was also harvesting time, as you can see by the beautiful yellow color the rice has turned out in the paddies. Nearly every paddy had a group of people, both men and women, doing back breaking labor of cutting off the rice stalks, and then beating them against the inside of a wooden box, I assume to get the rice kernels to fall out into the box. In this picture below, the paddy in the middle front has just been harvested. Also, notice how none of the paddies have a uniform shape; instead, they follow the shape of the land, as so much of rice farming depends on water flow. Well, this also means that making the farming process mechanized would be very difficult. Your tractor would have to be no bigger than a lawn mower. This explains why so much of the process is still done by hand. That's my theory, and I'm sticking with it, even though there probably is a lot of mechanization around. These people are just too poor to own it. 

Once the rice was threshed(?), the farmers would burn the leftover stalks in piles in the field. It amounted to an amazing amount of small fires than accumulated to a ton to smoke going into the air. When we first got to Guiyang, we were really hoping to find clean air, hoping this area was far enough away from the huge industrial and manufacturing areas of Guangzhou and Shanghai. However, even while we were landing, we could see smog everywhere. Our immediate reaction was "Man, is there any place in China that doesn't have bad air quality?" Still not sure as to the answer to that question. However, after seeing all of the farmers burning the rice stalks, I'm not sure if the smog here is caused from large manufacturing blowing in from elsewhere, or if it is primarily from these fires. The reason why it matters is that maybe when it is not harvest season, Guiyang actually has nice air quality, and we just came at the wrong time for it. Drew created a good analogy for the amount of smoke going into the air. It would be like if every family in Michigan burned a huge pile of leaves in their backyard. 

We then saw tons of driveways filled with drying rice, corn kernels, and peppers. 

This is an example of how tough of a life these people have. How old do you think this guy is? 80? (Granted, determining the ages of older Chinese people is extremely elusive for me...) And he is still working, walking his horse to the next paddy, so they can load up the horse with the newly threshed rice, then walk it up to the driveways to be laid out to dry. I doubt this guy (nor the horse for that matter) will ever experience retirement from work. Nor will he ever be fat. 

Finally, the last thing shown by these pictures is the unique geography present in Guiyang. There were these hills, shaped like gumdrops everywhere, like an image straight out of Dr. Seuss. The hills were amazingly steep, so much so that I think they are unhikeable. I can't understand how these were formed geographically. By plate tectonics? They seem too gum-droppy for that. From glaciers? Maybe....but how would a glacier give the rounded shape? Any ideas?

I remember going to Chinese restaurants when I was a kid. I'd see these types of scroll paintings on the wall and think, "Their mountains are so funny looking! They can't actually look like that in real life..." 

Blam. Yes, they do.