July 12, 2018

It's here. Finally, but in a round-about, half-hearted, "kinda" sense. It's strange to have a semester of class that creeps into the middle of July, when the last four years have been spent ending classes in early May. It's even more disconcerting to realize that school will be starting up again for the fall semester in just five or six more weeks.

But, it's summer vacation - though, as a Peace Corps Volunteer in China, that vacation is a mixture of both work, travel and training: in less than 48 hours I'll be leaving site with freshly washed teaching clothes, two weeks worth, and a few snacks, and other necessities, and heading to Pingliang, another fairly large city in Gansu Province - just about 16 hours away by train.

We'll be teaching as we commence the annual Summer Project: a unique opportunity to travel to a more rural area of our province and spend two weeks teaching elementary, middle school, and high school Chinese English teachers. In a certain sense, it's strange to that we Americans, many of whom are young and have just finished our first and only year of teaching experience, will be teaching Chinese teachers who've certainly surpassed us in education and teaching experience. They definitely know a bit more than we do ...

But, that's the point of our service here - we can learn from them, and they can learn from us - for our mission in the next two weeks (in our 27 months of service, to be honest) is not to supplant traditional educational practices here in China, but rather to supplement them with our native knowledge of English, our cultural and personal background and experience, and our focus on Communicative Learning Techniques, which might simply be described as making English classrooms more active, creative, and focused on activities and lessons that allow students to use the language communicatively and actively as they learn English.

I'm sure you'll be hearing more about this project in the next few weeks, both through the Daily Discoveries, and through a full-feature blog post after it's all over.

But, the preparation of travel bags, the at-times contradictory mixture of eagerness and reluctance to leave Wuwei, and the excitement of new experiences, and stories to be shared and learned reminds me of my winter travels ... and the fact that I never managed to post my blog post sharing that experience with you.

And so, today we will mark the middle of summer with these memories of winter, and a blog post written on February 28, 2018:

It’s that time, when the blog post I have been promising you – and myself – for weeks has finally arrived, or will be arriving in the next few hours as the words begin to fill up this page. It's also that time when I realize that I haven’t been an efficient blogger, and that perhaps, just perhaps, that idea that I had on the first day of the journey (to write up a short post each day to merge into this blog post) was actually a good idea. But, at the time, I was a bit tired and just ready to get to bed before the next day, and really, I think that is the sign of a successful and enjoyable trip.

So, I’ll start today, writing about the beginning of the journey three weeks ago (er... 5 months ago :/) … Join me!

Stop 1: Dunhuang

Rebecca – that’s my college friend you’ve likely heard about in a few of the Daily Discoveries from last month – and I decided to venture out and explore quite a few stops and sights in northern China, starting from my home site in Wuwei, and heading west towards Dunhuang. How do we travel there? You guessed it: train.

Luckily, the train was a quick, comfortable ride: board around 7pm, get the sleeper car, then rest and relax until the train pulls in to the Dunhuang rail station around 11 hours later at 6:30 AM (all times expressed in this blog post are approximate). At this point, since we are in northwestern China during the winter, the sun has definitely not risen yet, and it’s a pitch-black, dark bus ride to the center of the city, where we walk through dark, empty streets attempting to find our hostel, which was hidden on the second floor of a small little entrance off of the night market area, but would have been a lot easier to find in the light. Surprise! Our hostel was a ‘pod hostel,’ that for the small fee of ¥40 RMB a night provided me with my own little space ship pod. Check it out! It was actually quite comfortable, warm when the screen was pulled down, with lights, mirrors, and outlets inside. This was home for the next two days, and three nights.

So, what did we do in Dunhuang? Well, we saw all of the sites that most people come visit in the summer, on account of the warmer weather and all, but travelling here in the winter had some definite benefits:

1. The chill in the air was refreshing, and I’d much rather be cold than sweating on my travels.

2. Not having to try and find a place to stay in a city that often sees 20,000 tourists a day during the summer (19,700 more than an average day in the winter) was stress-less.

3. Related to #2, tickets to tourist attractions were often discounted to half-price for the winter season.

4. Beyond having all of the sights to ourselves, many of the sites allowed tourists to see more during a longer tour, a pretty nice reward for braving the cold.

Day 1: After arriving in the morning, we walking around the area by our hotel to try and find some food – only a noodle shop was open – and then took a ¥2 bus ride to a more touristy old-town style attraction down the road. On the bus, we looked out the front windows and thought, “Wow, those are some nice clouds,” before realizing that these weren’t clouds in the sky, buy actually sand dunes from the desert at the end of the road. We got off the bus a bit early, walked around the (deserted) old-town destination where most of the touristy food shops and bars didn’t even both opening, and then made our way to the desert park.

The desert park was amazing. It’s likely a cliché word to use to describe it, but any of the words that I could come up with to describe the desert park area would be insufficient – even the pictures don’t capture the immense scale and size of the sand dunes, the steepness of the climb, or the thrill of being able to just balance and walk along the top of one of the tallest sand dunes, staring out other dunes that expand further than you can see. I don’t know about you, but these are the moments where I am usually just in awe of the world – nature – and it just made me feel happy, and alive. Which is ironic, since there didn’t appear to be much other life out there, but, don’t worry they had wireless internet routers providing tourists with WIFI to upload pics to their favorite social media. If I came in the summer, the experience just wouldn’t be the same – I’d be jostling up and down the dunes with thousands of other tourists instead of the dozen I saw all day, and it wouldn’t be as peaceful, with other tourists taking advantage of the experiences the park offers: camel rides, helicopter tours, dune buggy and motorcycle (sand-cycle?) racing.

The next day we took a full-day tour organized by a friend of the hostel owner: for ¥120 a person, we spent the day with 6 other tourists in a big van that drove us about 300KM between six different sites in and around Dunhuang, each with entrance ticket prices ranging between ¥20 and ¥70. We saw a few ‘old cities,’ or at least, recreations of what an old city would look like, a couple of ancient passes that were of critical importance during the time of the Silk Road and Chinese expansion, one of the westernmost, oldest and most element-battered sections of the Great Wall, an old (>1000 years) collection of natural Buddhist paintings in caves essentially carved into a cliff, and natural geo-formations (looked like rocks to me) that were discovered in the basin of an old lake that dried up years and years ago. Yeah, that was a single day. It was tiring, but incredibly rewarding, and we met two new friends on the tour bus: Tom and Ross, two high school graduates from the UK, teaching English in Gansu, China, on a gap year before heading to ‘Uni’ next fall. Yeah, I refreshed myself on all of the differences between UK English and American English during our time together.

On the last day in Dunhuang, we headed to arguably the most famous and heavily visited tourist site: the Mogao caves/grottoes. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take photos of any of the actual caves (pictures of insides of the caves can be found at this site, but doesn't do the actual experience justice), but they are incredible, and if you ever make your way to northwestern China, it is a must-see. A little bit of background – though you can find more by clicking on this link to an external website – is that each of the over 490 caves is decorated Buddhist art that spans over a thousand years of history and numerous Chinese dynasties. They started as caves for Buddhist meditation, and are filled with hand painted figures and designs along the walls, sometimes gilded with thin pieces of gold, accompanied by Buddhist statues and figures, depicting a Buddhist paradise, and sharing numerous stories of Buddhist culture and cultural exchange during the time of the Silk Road. The site also contains the third largest sitting Buddha statue in China, and it is unbelievable – literally, so, as walking into the room for the first time, I was confused at what I was looking at, or where the sitting Buddha was, until I realized that the big slab of stone that was taller than my head was only the toe on the statues right foot. Looking up was the key, and I’ll be looking forward to my next visit back here.

A final note about the caves: some of the caves are so valuable historically and culturally that in order to preserve them (as some of the dyes used to paint the figures are damaged by carbon dioxide – the thing tourists breathe upon them every time they enter) access is limited to a certain number of guests per day, and only on the days with perfect weather. Luckily, we were able to see that cave, along with a few extras (10 instead of the normal 6), due to the fact that it was the low-season for tourism.

To See More Photos of Dunhuang, Click Here!

Stop 2: Jiayuguan

It’s hard to believe, I’m sure, that you’ve read so far in this blog post already and we are just getting to the second destination: Jiayuguan.

Jiayuguan is a city located between Dunhuang and Wuwei that is most famous for its portion of the Great Wall, which has been preserved and reconstructed, and is able to be walked by tourists. We took an evening train – with our new UK friends! – from Dunhuang to Jiayuguan, arriving in the middle of the night. After a short sleep in a hotel for the evening, we managed to get a Didi (Chinese Uber/Lyft) to the first destination: the Jiayuguan pass.

The pass was empty, today, which was due to a combination of the winter tourism drop and the snow that started falling overnight. Yet, the fact that the place was empty added, rather than detracted, from the experience. And the snow made everything incredibly beautiful, much more beautiful than it would have been had we arrived on any other day of the year. The pass was built over 600 years ago, built of rammed earth and was one of the pivotal trade and traffic forts for the Silk Road. As you can probably tell, it was heavily fortified, and consisted of many different levels of defense, with tall walls and barriers encircling an inner city, with important offices, halls and opera towers sticking out above the ramparts.

Yeah, the place was empty on our visit - more for us to explore and see!

After the pass, we took a taxi to the next destination, called the Overhanging Great Wall, named such for the fact that it looks like a dragon overhanging the slope of the nearby mountains (that fun fact was found here). Having climbed the wall, which at some points had steps, and at others was simply a flat, tilted slope, to the tower on the top of the mountain, it was an incredible and exhilarating experience – similar to the desert in Dunhuang, for much of the beauty and awe of the experience came from the snow that continued to fall and change the view from a brown wall climbing up a dreary, sandy-brown slope, to the beauty of the pictures below.

That night, we send good-bye to our UK friends – who were heading back to their school – and we took the train back to Wuwei, to rest for a day before heading out in the opposite direction to our third, and final, destination.

To See More Photos of Jiayuguan, Click Here!

Stop 3: Harbin

If you know me, you know I love winter. And if you don’t know me, you might have been able to deduce that fact from my travel itinerary for this trip: while many of my colleagues in the Peace Corps travelled as far south as they could get, to warmer weather and beaches, I travelled throughout northern China, capping off the trip with a visit to Harbin – one of the coldest places in China, as I was told by all of my Chinese friends and host families who were concerned about me staying warm once I shared with them my travel plans. It was about -26C (-15F) the first day there, but luckily, it wasn’t too windy, so it really didn’t feel that cold.

We had to fly to Harbin, due to the difficulties associated with buying multiple train tickets during the week before Spring Festival – the period of time where almost every Chinese person does some travelling, with family or to family, and cities empty as families head home to celebrate the Lunar New Year; it’s been called one of the largest annual human migrations in the world. So, faced with that… well, let’s say that train tickets were a bit difficult to buy… but we made it to Harbin, and in the end, that is what matters.

Now, in Harbin we stayed in a hostel – but it was a normal hostel, with men and women separated by room, with four people to each double bunk-bed room, and common rooms on the first floor. Not too much to mention about the hostel, because the highlights of Harbin don’t reside inside a building, but outside – everywhere outside. You see, or you might see by looking at my photos, Harbin is famous for its ice festival and ice sculptures – and these ice sculptures are not always just simple sculptures, but at times fantasy worlds built completely out of ice.

We went to two of these ‘ice parks’ in Harbin – the smaller, cheaper one in the daytime, and the larger, more famous one at night to experience the ice with all of the lights. This is another time in this blog post, where I feel like words won’t do the experience justice, so let me emphasize just a few points:

1. Almost everything was made of ice in these parks – sculptures, castles, mazes, slides, houses, towers, religious sculptures, walls, you name it. All ice.

2. These ice parks were enormous – the first one took up an entire park in the middle of the city, and the second was a complex area specifically built for this festival and must have spanned at least the area of three football fields.

3. It was cold – but really, just the coldest on the toes: boots and socks don’t do much apparently when you’re walking around on ice blocks for hours at a time.

4. Some of the towers must have reached at least a hundred feet in the air, built of solid ice, and the palace like buildings were grand and incredibly detailed.

5. Speaking of details, the sheer skill that was displayed in the professional ice carving competition sculptures by teams from all over the world is impossible to capture in a photo.

6. You’ll understand what I mean when you take a look at the photos.

While Harbin is pretty well-known for its ice festival, walking through its streets also reveals a fairly large Russian influence – which is seen not only in the shops whose names are displayed in both Russian and Chinese, or the architecture that is clearly unlike any I’ve seen in my other travels throughout China, but also in the cuisine. Take a look at the Saint Sophia Cathedral, a former Russian Orthodox church turned Harbin history museum located in the center of the city, and you’ll understand. Or walk down Central Street and look at the buildings while tasting the some of the fare: I’m not sure whether or not the famous Harbin popsicle is Russian-influenced, but many of the breads, sausages, meats and baked goods that we encountered definitely were.

To See More Photos of Harbin, Click Here!

While it might appear that I say, “take a look … walk down…” the streets of Harbin in some literative, figurative manner, it resonates with me more as a hope: a hope that you, too, will one day have the chance to visit China, whether that is Harbin, Jiayuguan, Dunhuang or any of the hundreds of other cities that will surely inspire, impress and teach you. Although, I’ve only visited three cities on this trip of ten days, I’ve learned more about the history and culture of China than I’d learned in the twenty-two preceding years... and I’ve heard the stories that began a thousand years before the United States was founded, and they’ve called me to keep listening, and keep sharing. Are they calling you, too?