we went to hefei yesterday to visit friends. the train ride was only 1.5 hours and passed quickly enough. hefei is a lot like huainan, only bigger. i got my hair cut and ate this tasteless gelatinous soup that was roughly the same consistency as snot and had little wet rice balls in it. we went to the park and got on a ferris wheel. unlike rides back home, you can stay on the ferris wheel for as long as you want. which is kind of funny because the ferris wheel is largely unoccupied during the day, so for a paltry 5 yuen you can basically keep this giant piece of machinery in motion for hours for your own personal amusement.

it was cold and wet yesterday; i wish it had been warmer. the restaurant where we ate dinner had a tv mounted against the wall, and this particular tv was airing a show that revolved around bears fighting each other while wearing boxing gloves. it was pretty brutal. i tried to snap a picture but everyone in the restaurant immediately frowned at me.

the ride home took a bit longer, but a chinese man who could speak english kept us occupied with questions about canada. i couldn’t quite get the concept of a bachelor degree through to him; he kept asking if we had masters’ degrees, and when i replied in the negative he would think for a while and then perk up and say, “oh! you are junior school!”. i would then explain that i have, in fact, successfully negotiated the eighth grade, to which he would reply, “so… masters’ degree?”

overall it was a good trip, and i’m glad i can say i’ve been to hefei. jing’s dad (i might be spelling her name wrong) washed and cut my hair in his barber shop, i saw a monk step outside his temple for a few minutes, spent far too much time waiting for taxis, narrowly avoided going to the ktv, and didn’t fall off the train on the way home. you can’t ask for a better trip than that!

At the offer of visiting the legendary Yellow mountain we could not decline. We bought the tickets and endured our first Chinese train ride in the sleeper berths. These consisted of six beds per unit with small seats and tables in the hallway. Having the option to stretch out is fantastic, I tell ya. I let Dave sleep on my lap and rest his legs while I took in the Chinese country side which was comprised mainly of micro-farming plots and concrete ghettos. I was told that many of the buildings are actually pretty new, but no one keeps them up and they all just seem to fall to piece after about 10 years. This is the case of our apartment – the inside is completely fine, but the outside looks like a concentration camp. Anyways, after the 6.5 hour ride (oh, and they can still smoke on trains!) we arrived in Huangshan (?) and promptly procured ourselves a cab which allowed all five of us to squeeze in and we ventured forth to Mount Huangshan. We stayed at a reasonably nice hotel, which was a surprise because I thought we were gong to a hostel. The rest of the night was uneventful – Chinese television, raw spicy beef noodles without the beef seasoning, and sleeping.

The next morning we awoke bright and early (and completely clueless) and took another taxi up to the base of the mountain. Even at 8:30am the place was quickly filling up with tourists – and when I say tourists I mean 99.7% Chinese people. We walked up the driveway past small shops which sold packaged food (of course), souvenirs, cucumbers, and walking sticks. Our original plan was to take the tram up the mountain and then walk down, but by the time we went to the washroom and made it to the tram line up, the wait time was pegged as three hours. Being the opportunists we are, we opted to hike up the mountain and then tram down. BAD CHOICE. First of all, no one really explained to me the magnitude of this mountain or the fact that it is a huge deal to climb this thing. Second of all, I am a relatively inactive 26 year old female from Canada who has absolutely no marathon training. Clearly the latter was working against the former; after about 50 steps of vertical incline I actually wanted to die. Go back down, go home, hop on a plane and hit up Babylon. I, along with Martin, was looking in pretty rough shape. Sure enough, after 50 more steps, off came Martins shirt while all I lost was my composure. At our first official stop we took a picture and all i could do was roll my eyes and act out an exasperated gesture. Dave got pretty angry at my pseudo joke pose and said it would be nice to have a picture of me smiling. Even at this early point, any sort of sarcasm was going to throw me off the handle – I was just so furious that a mountain was kicking my ass. My despair continued up 6.5 vertical miles of stairs and along the way I actually stooped so low as to follow suit with classic cartoon images of people climbing up hills using all fours – using your arms makes a world of difference, but unfortunately having 80 year old Chinese men and women laugh at me was not worth the ease. Although I was adamant about my journey ending upon reaching the tram stop, upon reaching the top (or where the paths diverged into smaller trails) I quickly realized that literally ANYTHING was more bearable than climbing that mountain again, so we decided to continue along the trails. And it’s a good thing we did.

One of the best views I have ever encountered was “Beginning to Believe” mountain and it was here that Dave made me climb to the edge of a big rock and look out over the vertical drop-off below and onto the most beautiful mountain one could imagine. Percy Bysche Shelly would have been jealous. At that point the mist had lifted to reveal a calm blue sky which complimented the grey peaks and all I could do was just stare silently, and attempt to absorb every minute detail of the moment even though I knew I would never again recapture the essence of that particular moment. I wanted to jump off of the rock and fly and the butterflies in my stomach (though not induced by fear of heights but rather an encompassing excitement too great for my body to handle) reaffirmed that I was not dreaming this feeling, but experiencing it.

Since that trip I have had fleeting, though extremely intense, visions of falling off that mountain and I have to open my eyes and make sure I’m still alive in my bed. I guess it really made its mark on me.

plastered in the window of a hair salon:

so they sell baijo in squeeze bottles here for something like 2 yuen, which i think is somewhere in the 20 cents cdn vincinity. this stuff is fermented rice wine, usually 110 proof, and tastes terrible. my first night here i got suckered into drinking a large glass of it, but have fortunately only had to hit up the squeeze bottle once after a late night run to the ‘big profit center’.

anyway, here’s a picture of what the south end of our city looks like at the foot of the mountain. they seem to be tearing down the remains of a small village (that people still live in) in order to build god knows what. the results is miles of brick rubble and trees. we found some graves way up in the mountain while exploring, that was kind of weird.