Today’s adventure: Go and see some Buddha!
And it went all right. I met 3 Chinese students who were also going to visit the stuff, and I kind of got stucked with them all day long. The girl in the group came to me asking if I wanted to walk together to the grottoes, so I said ok, so nice I am. And then the photo sessions started, they all wanted pictures with me, especially her. So every 5 min we were stopping to take pictures. Very tiring. But it was ok until we reached a platform with lots of Chinese girls… One asked the one accompanying me if she could have a picture with me, and suddenly a crowd was around me and I was flashed at least 500 times (I may slightly exaggerate).
But then came lunch time and I was relieved that we found a abandoned table away from the crowds, and even more relieved when she insisted to share their picnic with me (they even had a fried duck!).
So I finally was able to turn off my constant vigilance against Chinese weirdness; to the point when she offered me the head of the damn duck, with its beak wide open and its eyes staring at me.
And she insisted, as apparently it was 很好吃 (very good).
So I had to eat the damn thing. Lessons to learn: “always stay vigilant by all means”.
Apart from that the Buddha and his cousin Bodhisattva were quite truly impressive. It was all carved (or it started) around 550 AD! And the biggest one (25 meters high) stands in the middle of a cliff which is already high enough to give me an impressive vertigo. These Buddhist monks had it! Also it is said to have been funded by rich merchants on the Silk Road who had a permanent residency in Tianshui. Cool eh?
I also got a present from the girl: a Buddha bronze medal with my name engraved on it. It was still a nice day after all.
And now I am exhausted because I had to get up early again this morning, so tomorrow I shall finally relax.
And tomorrow I’ll go to Zhangye, continuing my Silk Road experience…
Greatly great, with spices and everything. So today I took the train from Xi’an to Tianshui; a 6hours ride on the hard seats packed with people. But this may not sound as tiring as it really was. In front of me were 3 kids of about 4 years old with their indulgent father, and they did not stop one second fighting each other and jumping everywhere and yelling… and bring attention on me, to my great sadness. Indeed one of them suddenly observed that I had hairs on my legs and this was the excuse for the whole wagon to wonder about me, so here is what the discussion looked like:
- “where is he from?” (as they usually discuss my case between in front of me, but then they all turn to me at once to know the answer)
- France!
- Aaaaah!
“travelling alone???”
- yep!
- Aaaaaaah!
“strange hairs!”
- indeed
“aaaaah”
And then more aaaaaah and ooooooh and blabla for half an hour, and the above dialogue is about all I understood. Great.
But then a girl who wanted to improve her English came to me so we talked for some time a bit in English and a bit in Chinese, so that helped to pass the time.
And then I finally arrived at Tianshui, which is not a beautiful town as I expected. But it’s so nice! I can’t believe how nice everyone is! In the shops, restaurants, everywhere! So it was a pleasure to wander alone in the streets to find a place to eat still open. People still smile and laugh at me but it’s different, because as soon as you (me, in fact) talk to them they are really nice and helpful and joyful and etc… So I tried a sort of soup with noodles, tofu, seaweed and a sort of green salad/cabbage, the whole thing in a red super hot oily mix and served in a clay pot with the stuff still boiling (or frying, I don’t know which term applies best). Very nice!
And then I had an ice cream, and I bought a Chinese CD with very-Chinese music. And now I am tired of all these emotions (and still haven’t had time to recover from the train ride to Xi’an in which I slept little).
Ciao, 再见。Tomorrow I’ll go and see the Buddha stuff.
Xi'an City Wall with crowds waiting in front of the train station
Xi’an! That’s it.
I flopped a bit my plans as I decided to go away again to Tianshui tomorrow morning. Tianshui is half way from Lanzhou, another big and polluted city on my way. But Tianshui should be nice, according to Lonely Planet. And there is some big Buddha stuff to look around. I also was disappointed with Xi’an; I wanted to take some nice pictures of the buildings and small streets in the Muslim neighborhood, but everything is under-re-construction. So everything is pretty nice, you just have to ignore the dust and machines and stuff that’s in your face.
Here, for example, is the wonderful and amazing Bell Tower (or the Drum one, I never know) of Xi’an, were awful musical show are held for the tourists all day long. But you can’t even see the damn tower because of the constructions! Well, it’s for the good cause since it’s for a subway line, which is going to be great because Xi’an traffic is terrible.
But still! What about me? And the air is really swampy. It’s actually so humid and polluted in the same time that my camera’s auto-focus doesn’t work! There ain’t no focus!
So I go around, totally unfocused. But at least that have helped me refocus on my itinerary (which I will soon have to post…): no more flopping around! I realized there is so much to see and do in Xinjiang that if I start being slow in the beginning it’s never gonna end.
So now I just have to keep caution from the hanging (see on the right…) and it all should be good. In the meantime I have to learn again to go around by myself. It always takes a couple of days to get used to, specially at meal time. But it’s good. Today I shopped for some street food, so I asked people what things were and etc… makes me discover and practice my Chinese.
I also went to see the big mosque, the biggest one in Chine supposedly. It’s quite interesting that this construction started in the 8th century, under the Tang dynasty. That means that Muslims (usually Hui people) and Han Chinese have lived together for over a thousand years. And then we hear about the threat of the growing Islam population around the world (special American fear, as they often see Europe as having been conquered by Islam). Ah. It was also quite funny to see a mosque with Chinese style architecture! It looked like the Forbidden City, except for the praying hall with the lined carpets… Even the minaret is disguised as a Chinese Bell tower or whatever.
But then came lunch time and I was relieved that we found a abandoned table away from the crowds, and even more relieved when she insisted to share their picnic with me (they even had a fried duck!).
Apart from that the Buddha and his cousin Bodhisattva were quite truly impressive. It was all carved (or it started) around 550 AD! And the biggest one (25 meters high) stands in the middle of a cliff which is already high enough to give me an impressive vertigo. These Buddhist monks had it! Also it is said to have been funded by rich merchants on the Silk Road who had a permanent residency in Tianshui. Cool eh?
