China has fortunately not felt too foreign at any one moment, with its people and its food often looking very familiar. I guess I feel more at home, I find the black oddly comforting, the view from my bed not unlike the inside of a tortoises hibernation box. What’s not to like about that? But I also feel less at home, because the homeliness I felt previously was at least in part due to how comfortable my relatives felt with me and their surroundings.
We went through the entire breakfast debacle again today, with the added distress of Janey spilling her entire coffee glass onto her plate. Sigh sigh sigh
I’m relieved to hear your opinion on the warriors, I was waiting on a swift and brutal rebuttal for my argument.
We have still only tried one out of 30 varieties of noodle. I believe this to be in part because of the village couple’s insistence upon finding the closest thing possible to cantonese food and their intense rejection of anything vaguely foreign in taste or in experience. I have been informed that only rice will fill their bellies, for noodles digest far too quickly. Sigh sigh sigh again. This leads me on perfectly to the experience of the Yellow Mountain. It was a two hour drive, which led me to the question: Is anything actually in Xi’an???????
The wife (for she is routinely referred to as ‘the wife’?) refused to join us in making our way up to the top once we had reached the mountain’s base. If you thought getting here even was easy you’d be mistaken. The simplified version of events are as such:
- We got 3 free tickets because 3 of us were over 65 years of age. In some places they do not give these free tickets to foreigners over that age. If I had to guess I would say that they only charge foreigners over 65 in areas where it would hurt their income to do otherwise. This is besides the point.
- Qu Ping, noticing that we had 3 tickets free and not 1 (he is the only Chinese over 65) took it upon himself to lodge a lengthy complaint and inquiry into why it was that we received the free tickets.
- I want to say that this took the best part of 40 minutes.
Once we overcame this hurdle, as I said, the wife refused to go further than the base. “Why did James make us come here” she apparently said. Good Lord. We said our goodbye’s and boarded the cable car. It sat four people and felt extremely unstable. Fortunately I can (and I will) say, that it was an extremely sexy mountain. I’d go so far as to say that if I could do one mountain, this would be it. And i’d say it with confidence.
There is not much to say about the bath houses, very limited information yet again. I think that China’s historical monuments might just be a museum and gallery studies student’s wet dream in this respect. What I did catch was that one, flower shaped bath was intended for the Queen’s favourite concubine, a fact I remember because my Uncle kept telling me that it belonged to her, her being the “contubine”. Bless him.
I actually replaced the word ‘reluctantly’ with ‘hesitantly’, so count your lucky stars I guess. I only mean that I hesitantly put faith in you but do it all the same, its not too deep.
LOve from,
Dirtsen
A little bit of a Hou 