5/2/09: Luoyang, Xi'an, Kunming

Hey folks, I'm back safe in Kunming, although my computer still doesn't work :-(. I had a long, sort of interesting day of travelling yesterday, so I'll just write briefly about that.

Luckily, my train back to Xi'an wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be, or it very well could have been, thanks to the help of a friendly Chinese woman and her ten year old kid. Indeed, my ticket on the train was a standing ticket, and I still had no idea what to do, but this woman, whose son wanted to play cards with me, ushered me over to sit with them. We played Chinese poker (yes, it actually is in China, although the rules are slightly different) and another game, where certain cards were highs, but I couldn't remember which ones, and they had to keep repeating which ones were trumps to me. The woman was basically playing for me at points (it's been a long time since I've played Chinese poker), which was kind of annoying, since sometimes I was trying to strategize, rather than not knowing what to do. I slept for a good three hours, to their great amusement, and then woke up and taught them Rummy 500, and immediately remembered how tedious that game can be at times. As the mother said when she was adding up her cards, "This is exercise!" They were really nice, exceptionally warm people, and I thank them for making that train ride pleasant.

I had a really terrible lunch of bland noodles in soup with grey beef and bread (a Xi'an specialty, believe it or not), and caught a cab to the airport. I got to the airport ok, and had a fun conversation with the cab driver, where he talked for a while about the different forms of martial arts in China ( I did not know that Taoism and Buddhism had different forms of martial arts). He also had a great line. "You're from where?", he asked me. "America", I said. Then he started making a machine gun notion and jovially announced, "Americans are always fighting wars everywhere!" I couldn't help but laugh and offer a meek "sometimes..." Since you can't check in to the gate until two hours before your flight, I finished Sister Carrie while drinking a seven dollar (that's American dollars...ecch) cappuchino in an airport cafe. Sister Carrie is a very strange book. It strikes me that the socialist-moralizing populist voice is a very American voice thatused to be very common in American literature and has now almost completely disappeared. The book is filled with very irritating moralizing and judgment from the author, and yet it seems to succeed in spite of itself; the fact that the author's moral judgments seem to have no bearing or no actual relation to the events of the novel kind of makes the novel better in a way.

The plane flight was also very painless. I sat next to a girl who had obviously never been in an airplane before. It was funny, because she kept reminding me to put on my safety belt and keep my tray table in an upright position, as if she had been studying up on flying. When I landed, I had another interesting cab ride with a cab driver who loved America, and had very strong negative opinions on Chinese culture and society that I had never heard openly spoken by a Chinese person. Interestingly, as a way of expressing his dissatisfaction with the current state of Chinese society, he said that today's society was not influenced by socialist ideologies, but rather, by Japanese ideologies (his shorthand for capitalism). It was also kind of funny because he insisted on displaying his knowledge of American history, and recited American history from the revolution to the Civil War, as if I had no idea.

So now I'm here, safe and sound. I've got another four weeks of the program left, and accordingly, I'm going back to once a week dispatches. Hopefully, I can figure out my computer, and go back to posting photos. Now I'm here, with the exception of Luoyang and my computer, I feel like I had a pretty good time with it. I can't decide whether I want to travel another week after the program, or fly back home ASAP. I think I might travel another week if Sarah and Michelle are doing something interesting; it's when I'm alone that I get nervous and anxious and homesick. I don't know, I'll see how I feel. Touch base with y'all later.