It Took Moving to the City to Live Like a Country Girl

Okay, okay, you country folks can take all the issue you want with this entry's title, but be patient and allow me to elaborate.  I stood on my balcony today and looked out at the view: apartments, other people's living rooms, the mountain in the distance.  It was hard not to feel stifled after some of the other places I've lived that are more visually spectacular.  Urban life can make you feel suffocated sometimes, especially when the people just won't go away, it won't get quiet even at night, and it never gets dark.  Yet, in the last 5 months, I have engaged in more "wholesome country" activity than perhaps I ever have in my whole life, even when I lived on a teeny-tiny farm.  Here is my list of recent rural (or at least non-citified) activities:
-hanging my laundry; don't even have a dryer
-making my own everything: bread, non-toxic household cleaners, dressings, beverages...the list goes on (the pickles this week were excellent)
-buying fresh vegetables from the local market almost every day
-living an active lifestyle: we walk most places, and the 20 pounds I don't have anymore attests to it
-cloth diapering my baby; it is much cheaper, and without a dryer, even more economical than when I cloth diapered in the States
-getting outside: not having a car means making more short trips, which is fine when everything is a bit closer.  Thus, to get our needs met, we get outside every day.

Now, to the purist, these things don't count, I get it.  But living here has forced more resourcefulness upon me, and our family benefits.  Amidst people here who have frequent digestive complaints, we thrive; our dental health is superior, our skin looks great, and we have good energy despite having two very young children.  And I'm definitely jealous.  Someday I'll have that big garden with the chickens running around and the fresh milk flowing (oh dear, now I'm starting to salivate), but next fall I'm going to try balcony gardening and see where it takes me.  I may not have the darkness and sweet air that I miss, but being able to get fresh food and having the skills to do something with it is a good place to start.  Perhaps I'm honing my skills for the country living I crave right here in my concrete jungle, so that when we do get that place I picture in my mind, I'll be ready to hit the ground running.

P.S. Today, I'm styling the rural look, with pigtails and a bandanna.  Pigtails are for keeping the baby from grabbing my hair and pulling, bandana for holding my bangs back...

Deeper Into Yunnan

We got out of town this last week, and before I share about our trip, I have to extend this caveat: our camera's memory card got corrupted and we lost ALL the pictures!  So, I am pilfering some photos off of the Internet to give you an idea of where we were and what we did.  Unfortunately, we are just not in the photos.  Maybe we can recover them at some point, but we were understandably disappointed that we lost them!  

Getting There

The main thing we learned: traveling with kids is hard!  You may be thinking already, "Hey, you already do that!  You crazy people live in China!  However, live is the operative word.  We live in China, we had not (except the getting here part) actually traveled with them yet.  With this week off for spring break, we felt brave enough and ready enough to attempt the traveling.  Thus, with many changes of clothes, lots of diapers (potty training went out the window this week), snacks, water, toys, our umbrella stroller with the wonky left wheel, and oh yeah, our own stuff, we hauled them to the train station to take the 9-hour night train ride to a city called Lijiang.  This is a picture of Kunming Train station, or Kunming Zhan (Jahn).  It's a huge train hub, and it is a huge train station.

Kunming Zhan

We paid extra bucks to get Luxury Class, which meant a bed you can sit up in and only four people per compartment.  It was not unbearable, and both the girls slept all night.  Michael and I really did not sleep, and I found the whole experience to be a bit too claustrophobic for my tastes.  Since we were traveling at night, there was nothing to see and the compartment was, thankfully, dark.

If we had not bought Luxury Class, we would have been in Hard Class.  Thank goodness we decided not be be cheap; it would have been hell with little kids.  Hard Sleepers are six bunks to a compartment.

Lijiang

Anyway.  We arrived in Lijiang about 7:30 in the morning.  We caught a taxi and got our first taste of some of the frustrations we experienced in this city, namely, that it was expensive and that we would get ripped off a lot.  A good lesson for travelers: it's okay to haggle with your taxi driver, or at least try!

Michael's classroom assistant was kind enough to arrange our hotel in Lijiang.  We stayed in an area called Shuhe, which is supposed to be a very ancient part of the Lijiang area.  I am sure that many of the buildings are new and made to look old, but some aren't.  The stone streets are the real deal, and the era of this area is probably about 500 years old.  I thought that was neat.  Evie even got to take a horse ride through this neighborhood back to our hotel (we had made her walk all afternoon, and the horse made the whining stop for 10 whole minutes--bliss).  I think the horse was the highlight of Lijiang for us all.  I'm really bummed we don't have that picture!

Old Town Lijiang is a Unesco World Heritage Site.  Here is the entrance.

This is the famous picture that seems to show up anytime you search for Lijiang on the Internet.  Snow Mountain, in the background, is a very outlying part of the Himalayas.  We set out to get this picture ourselves and discovered that we had to pay about $20 per person to get into that part of the park.  We decided to decline, and Michael in true fashion, found a side entrance and snuck in that way.  What a surprise to find that right now there is no water in that lake in the picture!  We were glad we hadn't wasted all that money!

Another shot of the Shuhe area.

Dali

We only stayed a day in Lijiang, which really, was enough.  Getting around was expensive and somewhat difficult, and the food was a bit more challenging that we felt like dealing with.  The real attraction that brings people to that area is the hiking, and we were not about to attempt such an ordeal this time.  Thus we hopped (or in actuality, hauled ourselves) on a bus that looked a lot like the one above and spent three hours riding south to a town called Dali.  Michael had been there in the fall without us and really enjoyed it.

Our bus driver was a very flexible fellow, and once we were in Dali, he began letting people off in the places that were convenient to them at their request.  We picked up on this, and when Michael recognized that the bus was passing by an area close to our hotel, he asked the driver to stop and let us off, which he did.  This was great, because the bus station was quite far away, and that would have been yet another taxi ride.  This way, we were able to stretch our legs and walk about 15 minutes to our  hotel.  This was part of our walk.

Dali is quite friendly to Western tastes, and we stopped for lunch, coffee, and refreshment at Bakery 88 before checking in to our hotel.  It was lovely to sit in a clean place where no one was smoking and enjoy a prosciutto sandwich and a latte.

Then on to our home away from home for two nights: the Sleepyfish Hotel.  Lovely!  It had a great, fenced-in courtyard in which to meander, sip my coffee, and watch Evie.  Our room was clean, bright, and comfortable.  I was really able to relax here.  I would come back again--maybe not in a heartbeat, since the traveling there was somewhat arduous, but I certainly look forward to my next visit there.

Our room basically looked like this.

One of the things for which Dali is famous are these three pagodas, which Michael was able to go see with the bike he rented.  He told me he was standing right next to that golden eagle.  Me, I think I was napping back at the hotel...

The Bai people are a predominant minority group in this area.  Their clothing is just stunning, and they actually wear these outfits out and about; it is not just a tourism gimmick.  These outfits are fairly dressy, but we saw them pretty frequently.  Evie calls them princesses.

We headed home on Friday, tired but happy.  We got on another bus and were treated to three loud and violent Chinese movies.  I gazed at the rural countryside while the sound of screeching tires, gunshots, and screams echoed in my ears (those sounds were from the movies that were played).  People still farm by hand and use horse-drawn carts to haul things to and from the fields.  They work hard.  Anyway, it was a bit hard to enjoy the pastoral scene with the violent movies in the background, not to mention trying to keep my toddler from watching them.  Not only that, but Chinese bus drivers lean on their horns very heavily.  The driver seemed to need to use the horns when: he was passing another car, when he wanted to pass a car, if there is an oncoming "bus comrade," so to speak, or whenever the paroxysms of his hands forced the horn to blast.  So peaceful... Then, with about two hours left of our 5-hour bus ride, Evie threw up all over Michael four separate times.  All the clean clothes were beneath us in the bus, so we wiped everything up with the Moby wrap and gagged and apologized a lot.

As is always the case, trips are fun, but they make home even sweeter.  Evie and Emma were so happy to return home, to the things that have become familiar to them.  And we learned what we already knew: traveling with kids is hard!  We learned to accept our limitations (not as much hiking as we would have liked, more barf and whining than we would have liked), but we had fun anyway and are glad for the adventures this new chapter in life brings to us.