Okay, so before I took a break from the China Chronicles, we had spent a sleepless night on a hard-seat overnight train full of cigarette smoke, puke, and pee-smell followed by a fiasco-filled day at Xi'an wherein we did not see the terracotta warriors. So that evening we arrive in this crazy huge city that no one has ever heard of, called Chongqing. Here we boarded a Chinese cruise ship to travel for three nights up the Yangtze River.
Sure, we could have found a fancy-pants Western-owned cruise, there are plenty of them, and it probably would have been quite nice, but what is the fun in that? Instead, we picked up second-class tickets on this Chinese cruise at a cost of about seventy dollars. It was dirty and stinky and no one spoke English. It was so hilarious and fun fun fun.
(Actually, though I laugh about the persistent smell of urine and the threadbare carpets, I can't top Mikey's story re his Yangtze cruise a few years earlier, when a rat ran up his shorts while he was in bed.)
Because we got second-class tickets, we had two roommates, an adorable couple we called Mr. Fong and Mrs. Wee because we could not pronounce their real names. They did not speak a lick of English, we knew how to say Ni hao and Xiexie (Hello and Thank You). They were so great; we found ways to communicate and taught each other words all the time. Mrs. Wee would patiently repeat the words over and over and over again and we'd spit them back at her, and then forget them fifteen minutes later.
There were very few Westerners on the ship, which was basically full of old Chinese people. On the first night, I cozied up to a group that was playing a mind-boggling sort of card game. They welcomed me to their table and tried to explain the game to me, which was hilarious because they did not speak English, and the cards were not regular playing cards, and the game is incredibly difficult I was later told by a young Chinese girl--Mali--who spoke some English. In the end, I learned to count to ten and made a bunch of new friends.
As I was sitting there with these peeps, some dude comes up to me and asks me to sing "My Heart Will Go On." That's right--there is karaoke on this here ship.
Am I living in a dream? Someone is asking
ME to sing? And not just anything, but Celine Dion? I will stay on this ship forever, I think, pee-smell and all. I will sing American songs to these people until the end of time, if they will listen. And they did.
The river, by the way, was the same color as joLynn's Nescafe (blech, the closest we could get to coffee):
The air was filled with pollution and coal dust. Everything looked foggy.
The first stop was a place called
Fengdu. Since all the guides spoke Chinese, I did not really get what it was that we were seeing, but I came to understand that this "Ghost City" is where people gather when they die, before they move on to the next world. Or something like that.
joLynn was feeling sick, so I had taken this tour alone. The group of Chinese whom I had befriended (or, rather, whom had befriended me) the night before took care of me--"Miss Anna! Miss Anna!"--they did not let me wander off, made sure that I wasn't alone on the gondola, etc. This was really a good thing, because the place was huge, and with no one speaking English, I had no idea where to go or how to get back to the ship or what time to get back to the ship. They made sure I stepped into the temple using my right foot, that I rubbed the statute that would help me get rich, and that I walked through this box thing properly so that my spirit would not linger around hopeless and lost when I die. All of these things were explained somehow despite the language barrier. They were so great. I learned to call them each "aunt" or "uncle."
This was a really bizarre place to visit without having any information about what it was and without being able to communicate. There were temples, these wacky statues everywhere, and then there was a haunted house thing, and then this creepy dungeon thing where this woman was getting her head sawed off by three-headed demons. It was bewildering and hilarious.
Anyway. Back on the ship. Our next stop was the
White Emperor City. There was a huge staircase heading up the river bank and then the stairs continued winding into the surrounding hills where the temples were. Here I spent the best twenty dollars ever--I hired a couple of dudes to carry me all the way up and down on a palanquin.
I wish I could give you an idea of how many stairs there were...it was probably a 15-20 minute ride, and those guys were moving at a pretty good clip. People had to part as my palanquin passed them by. And then because I get giddily gregarious when I'm having a hilarious time, I was waving and shouting "Nihao!" to everyone we passed, and they would smile and laugh and point and shout "Nihao!" back. I felt like the queen of the world. I also felt like a shamelessly lazy slob. YAY!
So from the top of this thing, we had an amazing view of the first of the three gorges, which incidentally is the picture that appears on Chinese money--the 1 yuan note, I think.
And here is where I broke that promise to Shad about not eating street foods. I could not resist eating these tasty-tasty-lookin' fried fish. And look at this cute little guy selling them, how could I say no? He scooped a bunch of fish into a styrofoam container and I gobbled them down. So delicious.
