Last Sunday, I finally made a break for it. I decided to chance the iffy weather and take the bus out to the Huaqing Hot Springs. I was not disappointed, although I found something more interesting in the long run.
Before I left home, I looked in the bookstore for a likely travel book to use while I was in China. Lonely Planet, my usual choice, was short on Xi'an suggestions and long on weight and extra information, so I decided to do without. I looked up Xi'an tours on the internet while I was here and got information about how to use the bus system to access a number of places, including the Hot Springs. So I planned a trip.
Just the day before, our entire group plus the group from Brookline had visited the Tang Dynasty Park in the rain, and we saw this truly over the top dance show with elaborate costumes and loud music about Emperor Xuanzong during the Tang dynasty and his favorite concubine, Lady Yang. She liked these hot springs at it turned out, so this seemed a nice coincidence, although she was forced to commit suicide later in her life. (Blamed for the decline of the dynasty, don't you know.) Fortunately it was not Actively Raining on Sunday and I headed out.
Y and a friend needed to go to the train station from where the connecting bus to the springs was to leave, so we all boarded the 608 which stopped near us. Bus 608 is a double decker bus, and we rode on the top-- the trip was about an hour just to the train station. Y talked loudly into a cell phone the whole time, and her friend who is a Chinese teacher of English sat next to me and asked me questions like the differences among the words "common","general", "typical" and whether you can ever mix tenses in a composition. Riveting.
Y has many positive qualities, but a sense of direction isn't one of them, so when we got off the bus, I told them where I needed go. Y was a little skeptical that I could tell the east side from the west side of the station, even given a look at the map earlier, (isn't that one thing you can tell from a map???) but I found my way over there all right. I waved merrily and made myself disappear into the crowd after saying goodbye. No offense to anyone, but I was glad to be on my own; I really hope it wasn't obvious.
I stopped at a snack cart to get a sort of flat bread thing -- and avoided being overcharged. The woman wanted 6 Yuen, although the sign said 1. (I can read enough to see that!) I just told her Too much; this is one Yuen in Chinese, handed her the note, pointed to the sign and stood there. Wordlessly, she gave me the bread. I felt guilty because 6 yuen is equal to something like a dollar, but I didn't want to pay the Meiguoren price. I just didn't.
The bus to the springs was a city bus, and I was the last passenger on it. They fill the buses for these out of town excursions, but no one stands; if the bus is full for a longer haul, you wait for the next one. I was lucky going out there and coming back because I was on my own -- last passenger on coming back too. I was the only white person I saw after that all day. I sat next to an old man who argued with his son about wanting to pay the fare for him and his wife (typical grandpa thing, no matter what country!). The old guy clipped every single one of his fingernails for part of the trip and then swept them off his lap onto the floor of the bus. People read papers, talked, slept, etc. The fare was 6 Yuen -- like I said before, about 1 dollar each way. We passed a huge nuclear power plant with four stacks, two of them smoking, fields, farms, a small village made entirely of bricks (big bad wolf had blown down the others, no doubt) , and a river where many, many people were fishing. I had the aisle seat and tried to look past the old guy next to me out the window. The other passengers pretended not to look at me, but they really do stare. It's not a mean stare, but they just look and look wherever I go. Sometimes I will say Ni Hao or smile and sometimes they will smile and say Ni Hao back, but not always.
The town the springs in which the springs are found stands at the foot of Mt. Lishan, one of China's sacred mountains. Even this part of China is getting built up and there was a brand new polytechnic university there along with a new resort hotel. Students got off the bus for the Uni, but the hotel didn't look it was getting much action yet. The bus went on to the Terra Cotta Warriors after it dropped some of us at the entrance to the hot springs.
The hot springs were an attractive collection of pools and Tang Dynasty architecture. You could go into a bath house and "take the waters", but the only people coming or going out of there were men. I didn't want to deal with this. Chinese society is not open, is still essentially patriarchal in many ways, and while I could not find anything in any of my reading about the baths being male only or anything, I was not going to overstep my bounds in any way. When I was in Japan, by contrast, hot springs, hot tubs, etc unquestionably were for both men and women and were always segregated in the places I went, which appealed to both a Japanese and my own sense of modesty.
The weather was hazy during the earlier part of the morning, but I wandered around and looked at everything. There were small pavilions, pools of varying sizes, dragons, pagodas, and a few places where you could sit at small stone tables with elephant shaped stone stools. I found a quiet corner of the place and sat in the garden for a little bit. Many Chinese people were visiting this area, and it reminded me of when I went for a day trip to Kamakura when I was in Japan. Like there, this was a kind of tourist destination, but it was local people, Chinese people, who were there enjoying something of their own heritage. What I was seeing was the Chinese middle class -- and a few nice looking cameras other than my own indicated that some of these people were above the Chinese standard of middle class, higher up by the local standard of living. I looked around until I figured I had seen and photographed the place and wondered what next. Since the weather cleared up, I found myself looking up at the mountain above the spa, and spied cable cars going to the top. Hmmmm. This seemed promising, so I exited the gate, and headed vaguely in the direction where it looked like the cable cars were descending.
Once I stepped outside the gates, I was approached by several people, all speaking English, basically, although they were of course, Chinese: "Taxi, taxi, taxi?"" Xian, you go Xian?" "Terra Cotta Soldiers?" "Cable cars? cable cars?" One very nicely dressed woman came up to me and simply asked in beautiful English, "What can I do for you?" I am assuming this was transportation related. She followed me for about 50 meters down the street, actually. "All set!" "No Thanks!" " Bu Yao!" "Bu Qu!!" "Xie xie!" "Seen it!" "I'm OK!" "No!" were a few of my responses to all of this attention.
Good grief. I walked down the block and found a sign to the mountain in Chinese -- was very proud I knew this character, and found a ticket booth where I bought an "Up and Down" ticket. The sign and the ticket seller both said that, actually, "Up and down." So I walked up to the cable car hut and was relieved for some strange reason to see the cable car brand was German or Swiss or Austrian -- was in German at any rate. They know about Alps and stuff there in those places in Europe, so I thought I would be safe taking a cable car in China that was made in a German speaking country. (I mentally castigated myself for my Western bias.)
I rode up with a party of 3 -- again filling out the number by being on my own. One guy asked me I where I was from. I said in Chinese I was an American. "Really? You are American?" Maybe, like so many times when Ruthie and I travel, he thought I was German. I said I was an American teacher, here with students, that I taught history. I spoke Chinese, he spoke English -- good practice for everybody. The ride was not overlong and he and his friends were harmless. At the top, there was another ticket hut if you wanted to explore the park. Or you could just hop back on the cable cars, or take a path down. I bought a ticket. They had maps of the mountain, all in Chinese and quite out of scale, so I decided to just strike out without one.
The first place I hit was a small parking area and plaza where there were food booths, souvenirs, and a place to play a shooting game. The shooting game was a toy sized rifle you aimed at an electronic target. However, the strangest thing about this game was the music. The tune was a kind of American Western style theme of 16 bars or so played with instruments that sounded like those you hear in Mao-era orchestra marches, plus traditional Chinese instruments. It looped endlessly over and over and could be heard through the decent sound system for many yards, including inside one of the Taoist temples nearby, somewhat unfortunately.
I walked past the horse men -- you could get a ride on some tired looking but festively adorned horses if you wanted -- and found myself in a huge bird sanctuary on the side of the mountain. They had netted off quite a large portion of the side of the mountain and were keeping peacocks, chickens, guinea hens, parrots, along with ducks and swans who had a nice pond fed by springs and waterfalls. Most of the birds were roaming free, kept in this very large area by the netting overhead and a gate at the entrance up the hill aways. There was also an exhibition area with a small ring that they clearly used for cock fighting. Nearby, there were roosters in cages -- different than the ones they had roaming free. I did not see this performance-- didn't want to -- but they also had a kind of small amphitheater there for that purpose as well. This was not hidden in any way, just part of what they do in China, I guess. It was a little sad.
Once I got back up the hill and past the plaza, I found two Taoist temples. Both had monks selling incense, and people were purchasing sticks of varying colors and sizes and kowtowing to the gods inside. The second one I went into had many halls, and the biggest hall contained an image of the most important goddess to Taoism, Lao Mu. Here, the hall was filled on one side with about 15 women, over the age of 50 I would say, chanting. I sat very quietly on the floor and listened for a long while until they finished. The hall was attended by female Taoist monks in black headdresses and robes. It didn't seem right to take any photographs in these places, so I didn't. I really liked that place, as it was peaceful and still filled with the energy of the chanting.
On my way back down to the cable car, I passed by a small restaurant, really just some tables on the hillside outside a small open building. The sign was in pretty undecipherable Chinglish, though I correctly gathered they served vegetarian food only, and they were cooking Baozi, large dumplings, in a wok outdoors. The chef was friendly and invited me to sit down. I guess I seemed hesitant, so these two young women who were sitting there invited me to sit with them (there were two tiny tables) and one said in basic English, "It's good. Give it a try. Cheap. Vegetarian." and only 5 Jiao -- half a Yuen for one. "Try some dippage," the other girl suggested, indicating a sauce. It was good, all vegetables. I finished one, and I ate a second. What is this? I asked in Chinese. The chef answered, and I admitted I didn't know that vegetable. "Oh!' the girl said. "Not found in stores! They pick here!" Oh! I see, it was grass and stuff right from the mountain. Picked right there around the restaurant, probably. I tried not to think too hard about this, but I suffered no ill effects then or later, thankfully. It looked like grass, actually, but the dippage gave it a good flavor.
My trip back down the mountain was uneventful, although I traveled alone in the cable car and looked anxiously at the trees which were swaying a bit. I caught a bus going back to Xi'an which was full again, but I got the window this time. Everyone in it had done something that day -- sight seeing, visiting, working -- that was keeping the ride quiet on the way back. The train station was the usual writhing scene of busyness. Many times I have seen Chinese people just sit down on the ground with their belongings and wait for whatever they are waiting for. If my experience in two visits is any indication, Chinese people do a lot of waiting. I pushed my way onto double decker 608 eventually. I stood for a while, but a guy getting off made a big deal about making sure I got his seat, which I took.
I went out on my bicycle to replenish my breakfast supplies after I got back, and it was only after I got back upstairs that it started to rain.
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