Train Ride, Boat Ride, and Minorities!

This past weekend Lindsey and I took a trip out to a little place called Xichang. This city is located a couple hours north of us on the train and it is the capital of the Yi minority here in China. The city is also the Chinese Cape Canaveral equivalent, they have launches every once in awhile and have had some supposedly incredible failures that ended in whole towns being destroyed when the rockets plummet from the sky, but this is all covered up. Last little fact...this city was one of the places that the Communist party trekked through during the Long March. They had to secure safe passage with the Yi locals or they never would have made it through the then foreign, unwelcoming lands of the Yi. Oh, the Yi also had slaves until the 1950's.

We jumped on the train here in Panzhihua on Monday just to take a little trip before I head off for the summer and Lindsey heads home (she'll be returning in the fall). I had looked up the city of Xichang in my China travel book and it looked fairly interesting, part of the old city wall still exists, there's a lake nearby, and we could buy some minority trinkets, most importantly a handmade Yi minority skirt for my Mom (I still haven't sent anything home...it costs a lot!). So, we pulled into town after the train ride and checked into a decent hotel. We spent the night walking around the main shopping street which could easily be confused with downtown Denver. Every Chinese city I've been to seems to have these incredily well-maintained, fancy shopping streets with trendy expensive stores, yet these are really the last places you want to be when your in China. They all look the same, have the same stores, and have the same people walking around looking at you. While it's fun to people watch in these places for a little while, your interest starts to wane as the fiftieth group of gigling teenage girls dressed in a seeminly haphazard assortment of colors and hair styles strolls past. So, our first impressions of Xichang were mostly dissapointment; it was the same as everywhere else in this country.

The next day we headed off to go found the South Gate, the only part of the ancient Ming Dynasty city wall that is still standing. Around the wall, there was supposed to be an eclectic local market and teahouses. Before we reached the wall, the buildings lining the street started slowly growing older. It was then that I found an antique shop that had the Chinese 2 yuan bill from 196o that I had been looking for (I started collecting the set of 1960 bills a month ago and the 2 bill is the rarest. Most stalls sell the bill for between 100-150 yuan, but this old, rundown shop sold it to me for 50...pretty sweet huh?). Further down the road was the local market, full of women and men dressed in their ehtnic garb. The road by the city gate was a congested nightmare, but it was more entertaining then annoying. We walked along and looked at the puppies, old fortune tellers predicting the future by looking at the contents of cracked eggs, the bird market, and the shops selling Yi crafts. I ended up by my Mom a pretty nice Yi skirt with Lindsey's help and then I bought a couple hand painted wooden bowls.

The next day we took the bus over to nearby lake, where one can supposedly swim. We got off the bus amid miles of lakeside construction and stumbled around looking for the park, but couldn't find it. Eventually we found a place to rent little electric boats. After we crawled our way across the lake in our painfully slow boat we saw a small wooden boat being paddled towards us. When the woman paddling the boat got closer she yelled to us (yes the woman paddling the boat was going at least two times as fast as us). We didn't know what she wanted right away but she ended up coming right over and tethered our boat to hers. It turned out to be a mid-lake BBQ boat, fully equipped with beers that tasted like they had been microwaved for five minutes. The woman had a small charcoal fire and different food that we could pick out. So, we had two beers, potatoes, and this green vegatable called jiucai that Lindsey loves. After we ate, we jumped in the lake to cool off and then made our way back to the dock and then hotel. All in all it was a great little break from the average day around here. It was nice to get away and see something different here in China. Sometimes, everything starts to look the same and things start to get a little dull, but we can still get rid of that feeling by taking little trips here and there.