| | There was a college student who tried to ski home on highways closed by the snow. The police stopped him. It thought it was a great idea though. I'm more and more enamored with the idea of slow travel. Though a total of almost seventy hours in the stale air of a sleeper bus on WINDY mountain roads between Kunming and Vientiane, Laos was a little much. (To clarify, there were two different trips separated by eight days.)
Someone parked a tandem bike beside the round cement picnic tables in the courtyard of our guesthouse in Vientiane. Later I learned it was a Korean couple biking around Southeast Asia on the thing. People who live in Korea say "couple shirts", among other "couple things" are all a craze. Shoes and bags and stuff. They literally call in the morning and plan the matching for the day. I am always reminded of how my friend Miki threatened to shoot (as in, with a gun) the next guy he sees wearing one half of the Chinese-style couple shirts. If the guy's not doing it willingly (and deserves to die), he says, he's being forced into it by the girl (and wants to die).
The "v"s in Laos the language come from French transliterations of the language and are actually pronounced like "w". It has six tones to Mandarin's four, and would be fun to learn, I think, though I didn't get very far during our seven days there. Vientiane is the capital of Laos, but possibly, we thought, the world's smallest capital city. It took us about five minutes on our rented bicycles to get out to the river, and bump along dirt paths between playing children and shabby houses.
During our two days in Vientiane, when I wasn't on a bike getting burnt, or drinking on tap Lao Beer, I was mostly in the guesthouse courtyard, reading Thomas Merton or the book about China's soft power. It was sweet to read that book, which included lots of examples of how China is cultivating and using China-friendliness in Southeast Asia, while traveling in Laos. There must have been fifty tables at the New Year's Eve party in front of the huge "Culture Center" downtown Vientiane. The large building was built by Beijing. A lot of the "aid" that China gives goes toward Chinese language or cultural study or stipulates contracts with Chinese businesses. The overall message was China's soft power is growing, and that of the US is shrinking, and this is making and will make a difference in the future. I kept saying, to myself and others, "Why isn't the US smart like China is smart?" ZhaoXing's father said it's not like that. The US is still great, he said. Almost every conversation we had ended up in something related to China-US politics. He's well-read, and smart. ZhaoXing says he's also growing wise, though still too pro-West for his son's taste.
One scary thing is that China is damming the Mekong without real environmental impact assessment. The great Mekong was mostly muddy mostly everytime we saw it, but the Namsong River, which runs through HUGE tourist destination TINY Vienviang, was clear and cold and we went swimming there. ZhaoXing and his father (and lots of others, they said) fled Hanoi because of the cold. So we went to Laos, which is the least popular destination for Chinese tourists. There still were lots though, quiet funky couples from Shanghai, and the loud, middle-aged of "car clubs." They were very cute with their identifying magnetic stickers, though I didn't think the big boxy SUV/jeep thing number A09 in the caravan - was very cute. I had a bit of culture shock when I came across a big group of Chinese tourists clustered around the banana pancake (a Southeast asia tourist food staple) stand. They were shouting at each other in such a way that if I didn't understand what they were saying, I would have assumed they were all angry and fighting. But they were just saying normal things like, "Who's pancake is this?" "How many did you order?" "This isn't mine, this is that foreigner's." (An innocent European man had somehow ended up there among them and his bewildered expression was almost as predictable and amusing as the how the Chinese people were identifying him, but not themselves, as "foreigners".)
On Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) Eve, a gang of boys in matching bright red and green t-shirts excitedly prepared a truck for a parade. It was a big heavy truck, with metal gates and thick green tarps for sides. I went out on the little side street outside our guesthouse to look for water. It wasn't yet midnight, but late. The boys - mainly teenagers - were just standing around, but you could feel their excitement, so I sat down to watch. Suddenly, as if at some signal, they turned and bent and faced the knots of the ropes that held the tarp cover in place. The worked for ten minutes or so to undo it all, flip and pull the sheets over the top, fold them up, throw them in the back. They crawled up the ladder of the metal railings, and then into the back. Someone worked to get the cab open, then started and revved the engine. All the boys wore red sashes draped over their matching t-shirts. It took me awhile to make the connection to the holiday. . . at first I thought they might be preparing for a demonstration, or an athletic competition of some sort, the excitement was so great, and why in the middle of the night? When they'd finished and all climbed in and arranged themselves around the edges, bouncing and moving like boiling, they drove off. They pushed against the bars and did slow chin ups in their enthusiasm. One of them waved as the truck drove past.
The next morning they were there on the streets, and another truck or two, too, driving around with cymbals and drums making Chinese celebratory music. I heard them go past at least three or four times, then later we saw them out in front of a small business - was a it a tour agency? - on one of the main streets doing a traditional dragon (or are they lions?) dance. Leaping and twisting at every shout of the music. There was a leader with a whistle who cut them off by closing his fist, like a real band leader. I wondered if they were a club that studied Chinese culture. They didn't look ethnically Chinese. Dan wondered if they were a professional dance club hired out for the first day of the festival.
People in China celebrate by watching the big televised "performance" party. Minority dances, love songs, live comedy, etc. Thin women, glittery costumes, and lots of famous people and lots and lots of warm fuzzies. Some of them are really good. Some of them make you want to stick your finger in your mouth and gag yourself. All of them are well-rehearsed and smooth. The show lasts for hours and hours and everyone who is not out playing mahjong all night watches it. Luckily, they also play reruns, so last night I caught up on some of what I missed. My favorite of the dozen or so performances I saw last night was a reading, set to fake falling snow, sappy music, and a background of footage from the recent snowstorm, about how beautiful was all the humanitarianism that it revealed. They had ten or twenty recognizable faces - mainly actors and news anchors - reading (with emotion, everyone now!) about how it was cold, and people were stuck, but the leaders went to visit, and other people gave food, and there were pictures of soldiers pushing snow with scrap wood. Aaahh. How touching. ZhaoXing says when he watched the CNN report during the storm it was just as skewed to the negative as the Chinese national one was to the positive. |
| | Posted 2/17/2008 4:01 PM - 24 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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