Woven bamboo baskets are used by the people of rural Hunan province to transport all types of goods, food, and, yes, even children. These baskets are often provisioned with shoulder straps, and are worn like backpacks. It was from the train up to Zhangjiajie that I first saw a kid being carted around in one of these baskets. A woman was working in a field and had a toddler packed in the basket she was wearing on her back.

This is the traditional Chinese answer to the specialty backpack-style child transporters that are sold in hiking stores in the United States for top dollar, and I know well the advantages of being able to bear the weight of a child on your back rather than in your arms or over the front of your torso. Though the design of these basket baby carriers inhibit the kid from being snug up against the body of the person carrying them, like the clothes that the Maya use to carry their babies, it is an optimum system for being able to lug a child long distance or while working more comfortably. In point, the back is the best place to carry heavy loads for a long duration of time. Children are heavy.

I got to check out one of these bamboo baskets that was being used to carry a child more closely on the train back to Changsha. The set up is ultra-low-fi, yet practical and functional. The kid just stands up in the basket and wraps his arms around the shoulders of the person carrying him. Though it appeared far less comfortable for the kid than the Ergo that I used to carry my daughter or even the various types of traditional cloth and sling carriers that are used all over the world, these Chinese children did not seem overtly uncomfortable — in fact, they are pretty used to being moved around like this.

This is a different type of basket that’s being used to carry a baby but it’s the same idea

Video showing how to make a bamboo basket

Every morning, I become a tourist attraction.

“This street is called Foreigner Street, because foreigner friends like to come here to eat,” tour guides announce every time they lead Chinese tourists down this street.

When they see me eating breakfast, they pull out their cameras and start snapping photos. Ladies will often come up to me and ask, “Can I take a photo with you?”

Being a Westerner in China is enough to make you feel like a celebrity.

It was for Kanye West.

“I think being in China got me ready to be a celeb,” he said.

Kanye West went to China at age 10 when his mother, an English professor, taught English in Nanjing for a year.

“At that time, a lot of Chinese had never seen a black person. They would always come up to me and also stare at me, fishbowl me and everything. And that’s kind of the way it is for me right now,” West said in an interview with Cris Campion of Sabotage Times in 2011.

“They would come and surround you, and that kinda like got me ready to be a superstar. I was a celebrity in fifth grade!” West was quoted as saying by Contact Music.

One of West’s classmates, Hua Dong, who is now the frontman of the post-punk band Re-TROS, remembers West being shy at the time.

“I remember in primary school, he was a very shy and introverted kid. He didn’t like to talk a lot,” Hua said in an interview with me. “When I just happened to find out a few years ago that he is now Superstar Kanye West, I was extremely surprised and extremely happy for him.”

“They’d even come up and rub your skin and ask your mother how old she was,” West told Contact Music. “I mean, this was way back when I was in fifth grade, so its probably changed now.”

These days, Chinese people might not be rubbing foreigners’ skin, but there’s still no lack of interest in foreigners. In cities like Xiamen and Hangzhou, Chinese people will pull out cameras and snap street shots of foreigners. Toddlers will sometimes point at foreigners and yell, “外国人 (Foreigner)!” A young Westerner at a bar who knows how to speak a little Chinese won’t have to buy many drinks.

Some people have even paid me to drink with them in Dali. Kanye West used to breakdance on the street in exchange for free barbecue lamb skewers.

Why are some Chinese so interested in foreigners?

When I asked the question on Weibo, one popular response was: “物以稀为贵. (Wu yi xi wei gui.)”– Objects that are rare are precious.

In most places in China, foreigners are still rare.

“Most Chinese people have never seen more than a few foreigners in their lifetime, especially those who come from small cities. Just a few foreigners live in their city, so seeing a foreigner is an especially fresh experience for them, and they would hate to not take a photo to remember it,” said one Chinese Twitter user.

Indeed, people in Shanghai and Beijing don’t show any special interest in foreigners because there are already a lot of foreigners in those big cities.

Foreigners are treated like celebrities elsewhere because they look like celebrities. Hollywood TV shows and movies are popular in China, and “some people have only seen foreigners on TV, not in real life,” Han Zhang, a recent Chinese Study Abroad graduate living in New York City said. “It’s just like people in NYC stand in line waiting forever to take pictures with celebrities.”

Some Chinese have come to adopt Western beauty standards. “European and American people’s appearance is in line with contemporary Chinese people’s beauty standards: tall, high bridged noses, white skin, and big eyes,” Echo Lu said.

“The Western countries are more developed than China. Their material possessions, education, and lifestyle are all of a higher standard than China’s. This outstanding standard of living causes a lot of Chinese people to ‘worship foreign goods and ideas.’ So they are especially interested in white people,” said Dora Chen.

This obsession with Western beauty standards and Western culture is in part an outgrowth of the Century of Humiliation China suffered from the Opium Wars through the Japanese occupation. Being dominated by foreign powers caused the Chinese to have a chip on their shoulders and caused some to feel they needed to emulate the West in order to modernize.

You can still see this “worship of foreign goods and ideas” when discussing popular and consumer culture. Many Chinese view local Chinese products as the worst quality and use Western products as a display of sophistication. A meme became popular online last year called “hierarchies of snobbery” that listed things in order of elite taste preferences.

Some examples summarized by ChinaSmack include Gtalk chat reigning supreme over MSN and then QQ and “art films from little known countries” topping “European art films,” “Japanese/Korean/Taiwanese “xiao qingxin” films,” “classic Hong Kong films,” “Hollywood blockbusters,” and finally “mainland films” last.

Director Feng Xiaogang tweeted in 2011 that he thought some Chinese people still have an inferiority complex.

“Why do company employees have foreign names even though they are Chinese? Why are China’s residential communities shamefully called Champs-Elysee (Xiang Xie Li She), Provence (Pu Luo Wang Si), Roman Garden and California Water County? Why do many artists from north eastern China speak in a Taiwanese accent?” he asked on Weibo. “You think you have ‘face’ when you are called William, Jennifer or Catherine, live in a Roman Garden and speak like Taiwan people? Actually it’s because you look down upon yourself!”

In fact, there is a disturbing phenomena of Chinese viewing domestic events through the prism of ethnicity that causes feelings of inferiority towards their own race or resentment and animosity towards foreigners.

When an American shared french fries with a beggar in 2012, the image went viral on Weibo, and a number of commenters posted that they were “ashamed” that it was a foreigner and not a Chinese who did the good dead. When a Brazilian got assaulted while trying to stop a robbery, the story went viral.
“An incident where our countrymen have stood by watching while a laowai rendered aid has once again happened in China, this time in Dongguan,” reported an article on Netease.

But when a foreigner commits a crime, there is often some anti-foreign bigotry thrown around. After a British man was filmed trying to sexually harass a Chinese girl, CCTV host Yang Rui said, “The Public Security Bureau wants to clean out the foreign trash: To arrest foreign thugs and protect innocent girls, they need to concentrate on the disaster zones in [student district] Wudaokou and [drinking district] Sanlitun. Cut off the foreign snake heads.”

Many Chinese think that foreigners get “special treatment.” But to the extent that is true, it is caused by Chinese themselves. When Chinese netizens focus on the nationality of a good samaritan, they themselves are giving special treatment to the foreigner.

The Global Times reported a story in February when a Japanese citizen had his bike stolen: “Initially, after losing the bike, Kawahara’s friend posted the incident on Sina Weibo. The post unexpectedly became a sensation on the Internet. Over 50,000 responses called on web users to help find the bike. “It’s a matter of China’s face,” one post read, followed by many similar messages. An overwhelming number of posts expressed clear displeasure at the theft.”

When the Wuhan police found and returned his bike, some netizens thought the police gave special attention to the foreigner.

Not so long ago Jiangsu Taizhou wasn’t much more than little communities of old grey brick, ceramic roof traditional houses arranged along winding, pell mell allyways separated by canals. These neighborhoods are now being replaced with Wanda shopping centers, high rises, and modern, concrete and rebar cookie cutter buildings. This is normal, old buildings are demolished and new ones are erected. Cultures change, neighborhoods vanish, urban design morphs, architecture evolves, times change, the wheels of entropy spin on and on.

But as I sit here on the bank of a canal, looking across at a little old brick house that the wreaking crews seem to have momentarily forgotten, I can’t help but to feel a longing for what is fast becoming history. As I watch the old couple who live in this house go about their daily chores — she goes and refills a basin with water as he continues washing dishes — I can’t help but to feel a foolish sort of romance for this life. I will not cross the bridge and subject them to one of my impromptu inquisitions, as I am taking enough joy from just watching and daydreaming.

A old neighbor walks up to the couple and they have a quick chat, touching base on daily happenings. The neighbor walks on and turns a corner. An old woman then shows up and has a short conversation. Neighbors keep coming and going, the old couple continues to go through their work at an easy pace.

The sun is bright overhead, but the day is not too hot — it is just a slow, even cooking, like late summer days in Upstate NY. Everything has slowed, the nearest road is out of earshot.

If someone gave me an old house on a Chinese canal, friendly neighbors, daily chores, and a small place within a shrinking community I may give up this wandering and just watch the leaves float slowly by on the surface of the water before my door.

Travel is about watching other people live their lives, it’s about superimposing daydreams over observations and memories, it’s about being the subject rather than the object, but it’s not about being a part of the matrix of a community. We float through the world watching, learning, inquiring, but we seldom descend to the ground and take a role among our well-placed brethren.

Give me an old grey brick house on an old canal in China and I may become the landscape.

Wanda Plazas abound throughout China. They are epicenters of this country’s expanding middle class’s frivolous spending, the central shrines of commerce wherever they are built. They are shopping malls built around movie theaters, and are run by the Dalian Wanda Group — which operates the largest movie theater chain in the world.

Other than representing the ascension of The New China, the Wanda Plaza in Taizhou is a model for something else: shoddy construction. The place is hardly a year and a half old but it is already showing signs of crumbling. Next to racks of trendy, over-priced apparel are buckets to catch the water that drips down from the ceiling each time it rains. The place leaks, bad. Walking through it on a rainy day is like venturing into a damp and dripping cave — albeit one with all the latest fashions and gadgets at over bloated prices. The hallways are an obstacle course of buckets, and women with mops stand guard throughout the day, emptying the buckets when they fill and drying any spills. The ceiling in Starbucks is soggy. I watch a young boy kick over a bucket of dripped water as though it was a soccer ball. A cleaning lady armed with a mop shoots and angry look at his father. From time to time windows from the roof break free and crash to the floor. Though just built, this place seems to be falling down.

I was told that the construction of this mall was rushed to completion with incredible haste so then president Hu Jintao could see it during a visit. Apparently, the short term benefit was realized, now we are seeing the brunt of the long term backlash of a mall that seems to be degrading at the same pace it was built.

One of the most annoying aspects of living in China is that everything is made in China. This is a global stereotype to mean junk that reality all too often lives up to. Products here seem to be made to sell, not to use, and all too often fall apart much quicker than you would expect them to. Beds break, new clothes tear, appliances work only occasionally, bridges collapse, schools crumble. Many of the products made here should  come with a label that says Not intended for actual use.

This is not to say that the Chinese cannot make quality products. They can, and it is this fact that I find onerous. Many of the products that we call quality in the West were made in China. They are made well, they last as long as they are expected to, Chinese manufacturing can be on par with any country in the world, but what is manufactured for the domestic market is all too often of inferior quality. This is a country that is selling its own people the dregs of production.

What gets me is that crap products sold in China are often priced the same as their quality counterparts sold abroad. It is almost as if Chinese companies know that their people have been conditioned to accept a low quality or have no idea what high quality is. It’s low quality at high prices here: a win win scenario for those on the selling end.

As I walk through the Wanda Plaza in Taizhou nobody seems to find the buckets catching water from the leaking roof out of the ordinary. It has always been like this here: you go to a shoddily built high end mall to buy shoddily manufactured high end goods. Shopping here is a status symbol in and of itself, just be sure to bring your umbrella. The prime shopping center in this city is degrading fast, but I’ve yet to hear anyone complain. It’s amazing what societies can be conditioned to accept as normal, and it’s the normality here that’s startling.

They travel the world and build it too. If you’re looking for a job that pays well and will send you to all corners of the planet, it’s engineering. Building is global: American companies are putting up massive works in China; Chinese firms are working in Angola; Swedish designers are in the United States . . . If you get into this fray you can rest assured that you will be lead around the world from project to project, ever going to where the work is. There are perhaps few better professional type jobs available if you want to live a life on the road.

I met a couple of wandering engineers in the Zhangjiajie part of Wuling park in the north of Hunan province. One was originally from Bangladesh, the other from Michigan. They work for a German company that specializes in building unique, gigantic, or otherwise non-standard types of elevators, and were in the active process of installing one on the side of towering cliff face. After talking with them for a moment it became clear that their work has taken them around the world: they set up for a project in one country, build an elevator over the course of a few months, and then move on to the next project somewhere else on the planet.

Interview with Solmon and Ben about the lifestyle and work of a traveling engineer

“If you wake up in the morning and you find yourself in Changsha, you know you’re a loser!” my father proclaimed with a laugh after taking a look out the window of his hotel room in Changsha.

It was the end of 2006, and he was in China with my mother to adopt a little girl that I named 美丽. They did not particularly enjoy their foray in to the heart of China — travel is not their thing — but I can remember not really being disposed to disagree with my father’s analysis. Changsha looked busted.

I remembered the city as a wash of grey — a real communistic monstrosity of big, rectangular blocks for buildings, straight streets, 90 degree angles, with little of interest and even less to brag about. I remembered the people wearing dour grimaces on their faces and a depressed feel that hovered over everything as thick as the smog.

Now, nearly seven years later, I’ve returned to Changsha. I think I may have remembered it wrong. It is still the same uber-typical, big Chinese city that it was the last time I visited, but something about it feels different. I stepped out of the train station and into a street that was full of life and color. I jumped on a bus and road through an overtly kinetic downtown area to a hostel that sat right near a couple of big parks and a lake.

The discrepancy between my memory and present reality was absolute, and their incongruousness was disorienting. It seemed as if I was in an entirely new place. But I have to admit, with the rate that China has been revitalizing their cities, I may have been. Perhaps this place developed for the better in the intervening years? Perhaps it was I who had developed and became more appreciative of the subtitles in my surroundings over these past seven years of travel?

It’s difficult to find something to like about Changsha, and that’s what I like about it. It is a raw, real, halfway between hell and heaven sort of place. It is typical China, and shows a mix of the temporal, cultural, economic, and political influences that are spinning the country today as though it were a kaleidoscope.

If you’re hanging out in Shanghai for your time in China, you are only going to know Shanghai; the same goes for Beijing, Shenzhen, and a host of other very vibrant and very unique urban centers. The impressions that these places give off are very particular to themselves, and have a look, swagger, and vibe that is incredibly different from the rest of the country. If you spend your time hanging out in Changsha, you’re getting a real taste of China. It is sort of like living in Louisville, St.Louis, or Memphis as oppose to NYC, LA, or San Francisco. Changsha, Wuhan, Zhengzhou, Chengdu: this is the heartland of China, the cities stuck somewhere between bumfuck and the 21st century.

All countries are composites of their unique and more mundane places, but there is some line of commonality between a good number of the cities on the latter side that can be called typical. In China, this is Changsha. This is China’s random mundane, the baseline from which the more economically and culturally vibrant cities diverge, and that is what I like to see as a traveler.

I walked through the streets of this place and felt at home in the normality of it all. I went down by the Xiang river one night and watched a friend play music. There were literally thousands of people walking up and down the embankment. There were street performers performing, hawkers hawking, and beer drinkers drinking.

It was the place to be in this city at that time, and I leaned on a railing that separated the crowd from the river bank and just watched the scene. This is where the people of this place come every night to stroll and socialize. People were sharing the news of the day, reestablishing social bonds, watching the performers, and just hanging out.

A city of people doing nothing down by the river: that’s good stuff.

The next day I returned to this river. By daylight I could see that it was one of those colossal rivers so huge that it appears to crawl slowly and steadily through the landscape, its power somehow magnified by its lethargy. Big rivers are always mysterious.

The Xiang river starts in on Haiyang Mountain in Guangxi province in the south of China, and then flows north 856 km to Dongting lake, and the Yangtze River beyond. The Xiang is Hunan’s river, as three quarters of it is within this province.

Like so, the region’s folklore and history are intertwined with this river. Legend has it that the two wives of the former emperor of Chu committed suicide in the river in despair after their husband’s death. They then became the river’s deities. The first emperor of Qin, the enemy of the Kingdom of Chu, traveled in a boat down the Xiang river. When near the point where the deities are said to have committed suicide an incredible wind overtook their boats, forcing an emergency landing. Upon finding out the story of the vanquished emperor’s wives, he retaliated against the goddesses by sending 3,000 convicts to cut down all of the trees on a nearby mountain and then paint it red.

I guess this is what emperors did back then.

Today, around 20 million people live near the Xiang river. The people here depend on the river for water, many taking it directly from the banks. This river also ranks as one of the most polluted in the country, being chock full of heavy metals and other types of industrial waste.

Today’s emperor’s no longer strip mountains bare and paint them red; no, they’ve move on to killing entire river ecosystems.

From Sina:

It might take a hundred million years for the land to create a river; it takes ten thousand years for a river to nurture a group of creatures; it takes a thousand years for these creatures to build a city beside the river; but, it might only take a hundred years for a river to be destroyed.

There is something about big rivers that captivate me. There is something about river cities that I like. There is natural motion in these places: the river moves through, bringing in the new and taking it right back out with it, leaving the places they pass somehow timeless.

Changsha now has all the modern shopping centers, posh areas, and new districts of any provincial capital in China, but something about it seems suspended in time. One night I walked down the main commercial drag and turned off on a side street. Suddenly, I was in an area of lopsided old brick buildings with dilapidated plank board fronts. This was the China of another era rising up like a bush that refuses to be uprooted within the glossiness of the modern age. There is something about this jarring temporal contrast that shows the deep resilience of culture.

It was dinnertime and I stopped off at a crowded little curb side restaurant, got a packed bowl of rice, vegetables, and meat for a buck, and sat down with a large beer. Laborers, street vendors, and beggars — the bulbous underbelly of China — poured in through the door and took seats

Nobody called me laowai. Nobody gawked at me eating my food. Nobody debated with their buddies if I could understand Chinese or not. At one point a man with severe burns all over his body looked as if he was going to start a conversation, but then held back. They let me feel typical in a typical restaurant in a typical neighborhood in a typical city. There is something about Changsha that I like.

Video of Changsha

Location of this article

Changsha and Hunan province

Additional photos

Hey Wade,

I really enjoy reading your articles. I was wondering if you can write something about how you deal with all the random people constantly asking you the very, very same questions.

I have to admit that I don’t really know how to deal with it, since on the one hand, those people are just interested in this stranger with whom they maybe even practice their basic English, but on the other hand most of the times it is just annoying, because after the basics there is not much more coming. Are you always happy about those conversations hoping that at the end you are hearing or learning something or how do you feel about that?

Also those random “Hello, Mister! How are you?”-shouts?

Cheers,
Markus

******************

Hello Markus,

Yes, those repetitive questions are one of the more onerous aspects of World Travel. Hostels and backpacker bars especially are flooded with people talking about the same things over and over and over again. Everybody eventually gets annoyed with this, but most keep doing it anyway — apparently for lack of anything better to ask. But interacting with locals is often no different, and if you don’t make something of the conversation and dig deeper they are more often than not going to lead in circles:

“Where are you from?”

“What do you do?”

“What do you think of [country you're in]?”

“Do you like [country you are in's] women?”

“Do you like [name of politician]?”

On and on.

People everywhere are in a perpetual hunt for things to talk about with each other. As you state in your question, you are bored of the conversations you are having. There is nothing out of the ordinary about this: everybody is bored with the conversations they are having. Gossip, Facebook, reality shows, sitcoms, sports, the news are so popular all over the world for a reason: they give people stuff to talk about.

Travel is a global exercise in meeting new people, and these baseline questions is just part of the territory. There is no way to avoid it other than not talking with people or not traveling. You don’t get these questions in the sedentary life because everybody knows the answers already.

But while these same old, same old questions can be annoying, you generally need a groundwork of understanding with someone before you can really have a good conversation. So those irritating inquiries serve a function. After they are over, you can take things deeper.

I always view it as my responsibility to make a conversation worthwhile. Then again, my work is based around asking people questions and collecting their responses. If I was just traveling around the world, having conversations for kicks, I probably wouldn’t engage a tenth of the people I end up talking to. In point, I found that it helps to have a reason to talk with people, a purpose for making temporary friends. If it’s your mission to find out as much information as possible about a country then most all conversations with locals can be engineered to have value.

To these ends, I carry around an ever-evolving list of questions with me to ask the various people I meet. When my natural, off the cuff, conversations go a bit dry I consult my list (which I also try to have memorized) and dive into various topics that I am interested in learning more about. In this way, my conversations all too often become impromptu interviews.

It is my opinion, and I could be wrong here, that the main impetus to travel is to learn about the world we live in, so having set objectives helps me to move forward with this endeavor. Though I’m sure it helps that I have an endgame for these inquires: I write articles that draw from the responses I receive.

To get technical about my strategy, I always carry a small notebook with me that has a page that is specifically for lists of topics that I want to talk with people about in a particular place. Before entering into a social situation, or sometimes when I am in the process of conversing, I will open up the notebook and glance at this list. I will then try to naturally include these topics in my conversations. Often, people seem to enjoy me taking an interest in them, their country, and culture, and simply showing an initiative to learn more is enough to open doors and drive the interaction deeper.

Humans are natural teachers.

My current list of topics for China:

Evictions
The disenfranchised
Where do you want to be in five years, in ten
Do a survey to gaugue the state of this culture
Religion
Collision between tradition and modernity
Mobile public chatting
Courtship
Migrant workers
Anxiety about the future

These lists are always changing and evolving. When I want to learn about something else I add it to the list, after I collect a good amount of information on one topic I will try to focus on others.

There is also a general rule of humanity that makes these inquiries possible:

People everywhere tend to like talking about themselves.

As I stated earlier, sedentary people don’t ask each other basic types of personal questions because they think they already know the answers. So take advantage of being an outsider, ask people about their lives, and chances are you will be giving them an opportunity to talk about things they don’t usually get to talk about. I’ve had people tell me stories that they have never bothered mentioning to even their families, and it is not uncommon for someone’s kid to exclaim with surprise: “He/ she never even told me about that before?”

In point, showing an interest and asking questions can become a stimulating venture all parties involved.

What is even more exhilarating is that once it becomes known in a place that you have an interest in what is going on, more people will come out to engage you. Ideally, what I want is to give people something to talk about. I want them to talk with their families and friends about the foreigner who asked a bunch of fool questions and took a lot of photos. This opens doors for my work.

Give people something to talk about and they will answer your fool questions.

My conversational shtick is based on being the fool. I go out acting ignorant and try to get people to show and teach me. If I go out in the streets acting as a know everything already I will learn nothing.

It is amazing to me how many travelers are bent on telling the world the way things are. These people learn nothing because they are always talking, not listening. And they are seldom heard. Everybody already knows how the world works. You are not going to convince anybody of anything, whether it’s Politics, religion, or attempting to show that people from your country are different than they think. What I find interesting is discovering worldviews that are different from my own. So I try to act foolish and I go out looking for people to “learn me.” At the end of the day I often come out ahead.

When you’re someplace new, surrounded by a culture you’re not familiar with, and people you’ve never met before it is almost impossible to have mundane conversation. Just stick to the basics: who? what? where? why? when? how?

My biggest problem comes when interacting with other Americans of my peer group who see me as “one of them.” I can no longer enact my fool routine and must interact in more of a “normal” fashion. There are many questions that I can’t ask because it’s assumed that I already know the answers. These interactions are hit or miss for me. If the other person listens well and is also an inveterate question asker on a perpetual hunt for information and knowledge then we will more than likely hit it off well. If not, then the conversation will probably not go very far. 9 out of 10 times this situation ends up being the latter.

But, generally speaking, I don’t travel to hang out with people from my own or similar countries. If I wanted to do this I would go to the USA or Canada. So I tend to not put an emphasis on frequenting traveler hang outs. I have nothing against them, I just don’t find them the best places to go to have good conversation.

Ultimately, f you have nothing to say to someone then there is no fault in not talking to them anymore. It’s OK to sit silently.

That said, it is easy to fall out of the conversational loop when traveling abroad long term. If you’re not watching the same sitcoms, the same sporting events, reading the same websites as the people around you then it is going to be hard to connect. So I  find out about the popular TV shows or music in the country that I am in and try to follow them. As far as communicating from people from a similar background as myself, I try to keep up on the news and sports in the USA and Europe. At the very least, this provides some conversational fodder and common ground to connect with people through.

Developing good conversation skills

It seems to be as if there are two types of conversation:

1) Interrogative – asking questions about something you don’t know.
2) Discussion – talking about something you share in common with somebody.

Mastering both types of conversation is an art. To be blunt, having a good conversation takes preparation effort. Once you are living a life where you are not having experiences in common with the people around you you’re going to need to look for other things to talk about. As I mentioned earlier, having a list of topics that you’re interested in learning more about is one way; educating yourself about what other people are interested in is another.

Conversation skills are cultivated from years of experience, and older travelers tend to have better conversations than young. Many people are simply not willing to put in the legwork to have good conversations or they have not yet built these skills (or even realize that this is a skill set they should be building), and there is nothing you can do about that.

The problem is if it is you that needs to work on conversation skills. Conversations go two ways. If you’re bored talking to someone then rest assured that they are more than likely equally bored talking to you. As the great Bill Nye the Science Guy once said:

“If you ever say that you are bored what you are essentially saying is that you are boring.”

Make the most of the people around you. Just about everyone can teach you something if you ask the right questions. It’s good practice to try to take a mundane and otherwise boring conversation that twist it into something that’s interesting.

I traveled with a friend once who got so sick of being asked the same conversations over and over again that he would just flip the switch and come back with the most random, probing questions he could think of.

“Do you believe in God?”

It worked.

In the end, it is my impression that conversations are more about connecting with people than anything else. They don’t always need to be good to be worthwhile. Simply engaging someone verbally is often enough to satisfy some deep social need.

Most people in this world are talking gibberish to each other most of the time. One of the most amazing things about learning a foreign language is when you get to the point where you can understand the conversations that are happening around you and you realize that they are 90% bullshit. Good conversations are rare everywhere. It’s the connecting, not the content, that counts.

Changsha shook the world by announcing that they were going to be the first city on the planet to actually build a sky city. A sky city is just that: a skyscraper large enough to house an entire city worth of people and everything that they need. The idea is that if you could compress 100,000+ people within a single structure you could optimize space within a city while cutting out some of the demand placed upon its infrastructure. This vision started out in Japan in 1989, and has been floating around East Asia ever since.

Now, a local company called Broad Sustainable Building boasted that they were going to build a sky city in Changsha. Not only would this be the first sky city to actually be constructed, but it would also be the largest building in the world. On top of this, they claimed that they could build it in just 90 days.

Needless to say, this sent the international media and the world’s engineering communities into a frenzy.

But nobody in Changsha seems to have even heard of the damn thing.

I had a little free time in between researching stories in this city and set out to find the proposed building site of the sky city. I knew that the project had previously been postponed, but I wanted to check in on it anyway. It sometimes takes a while for news from the interior of China to make its way to the international stage.

I figured that if the largest building in the world was going to be built in this city then somebody would have at least heard of it and could perhaps tell me where to find the building site.

Unfortunately for me, this project is called Sky City One, and the Chinese name is a pretty close translation: 天空城市; pinyin: tiānkōng chéngshì. This means “sky city,” and as I found out it is taken to mean something along the lines of “city in the sky.”

So I went around Changsha asking taxi drivers, people in engineering firms, and just about everyone I could find if they had ever heard of this city in the sky. Invariably, they looked at me as if I was cracked.

At one point I found a group of engineers looking over blue prints in front of a development, and asked them if they could tell me how to get to the sky city. They looked at me bewildered for a moment, then one of them spoke seriously:

“I think you need an airplane.”

************

The Broad Engineering Group announced a plan to the world that was so incredible that people could not help talking about it. They have a very innovative method of construction that consists of putting together entire buildings with prefabricated pieces — kind of like legos. They have gained attention for being able to throw up high-rises in a matter of weeks, but when they said that they were going to put up a sky city with this method the world took notice.

It was a four for one media pitch: a sky city, the world’s tallest building, prefab construction, all to be built in record time. The international media took the bait, and the Broad group got a literal deluge of media attention and global air time.

Now that this project seems to have been put on indefinite hold, I have to question whether it was a genuine proposal in the first place or a media hoax to promote a very innovative engineering company?

The first sky city proposal was made public by Japan’s Takenaka Corporation. It was merely a visionary projection, and was not meant to be taken as a serious plan. It was simply a tactic to promote the engineering firm, and to inspire thinking on future urban designs.

Perhaps Broad took a page out of Takenaka’s page book.

Skepticism about the project is widespread. Lauren Hilgers at Wired professed that, “It’s hard to say for sure that the 16-million-square-foot plan isn’t entirely a publicity stunt.”

It is looking like Changsha may not be getting a sky city or the world’s tallest building after all. But nobody here seems be grieving the loss — in fact, few seem to have even known about it to begin with.

I can not go as far as to say that I was looking upon a pristine, natural scene, but I can say that I was far outside of any city, in an area of lakes, rivers, farms, foothills, and wide open spaces. But in a flash this rural landscape of green, brown, and blue will be flipped upside down into a massive city of black, white, and grey. They are calling it the Meixi Lake Eco-City.

Positioned just outside of Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, a 40 hectare, 4 kilometer lake was created to be the central prop of a new city that will include a world class business district and residential capacity for 180,000 people. Apparently, Changsha felt they needed a new city too. These uber-modern, utopia-posing, built-from-scratch new urban districts have become incredibly popular throughout China, and it seems as if just about every larger sized city in this country is in the process of getting one for themselves.

These new cities essentially act as newer, better looking mirrors of the pre-existing cities whose banner they are built under, and they create an interesting phenomenon where each big city in this country is being doubled down and divided in two.

James von Klemperer, the design principle of the Meixi development, put it as follows:

Over the last 10 years, China’s cities have grown in two ways: by increasing density within the historical cores, and by adding new cities adjacent to the old. The latter phenomenon has resulted in a twin city paradigm. Thus, we have Shanghai’s Puxi and Pudong, Beijing’s old center and new CBD. Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and many other cities have sprouted new towns.

The area surrounding Meixi Lake before the skyscrapers

China’s new cities are pretty much being built for the rich and middle classes, and are thus dividing China along class lines. As masses of working class and poor people move from the countryside into the old cities, those wealthy enough are moving out to the new ones. This is China’s take on “white flight,” but rather than migrating out to suburbs, those who are able are going out to massive, super-urbanized, brand new downtown districts.

Though these new cities are meant to provide for the Chinese what the suburbs promised for Americans in the 1950s: more personal space, cleaner living, roads made for a lot of automobiles, more green space, and neighborhoods deficient of poverty, overcrowding, traffic jams, and the social problems that plague the pre-existing cities. Though the urban designs look different, it’s the same idea: think of China’s new cities as suburbs with skyscrapers.

The Meixi Lake development is meant to be Changsha’s new Central Business District (CBD), and will contain the city’s first supertall structures. The 180,000 prospective residents will be divided up into 10,000 person residential sub-units, aptly called “villages.” The city is arranged in a horseshoe around the lake, and will have canals criss-crossing and separating the various parts into well-defined sections.

Klemperer continued:

“These radial canals extend into the heart of the distinct residential communities that surround the mixed‐use CBD. At the end of each of these radial canals is a vibrant town center which is meant to provide identity and services to the community.”

This development is a fairly recent conception. The plan for the CBD was just accepted in December, so I could find very little information about it’s exact location. In fact, this project is so new that I could not even find a map that had the name of the lake printed on it. But after scouring Google Maps I detected a body of water that looked very much like the one shown in the renders of the city. I took a shot and walked for an hour and a half out from the center of Changsha through the sprawl and into the countryside, and chuckled in a self-satisfied way when I saw a sign with the characters 梅溪湖 right where I though it should have been.

I was in what would become Meixi Lake Eco-City.

The words “eco” and “city” combined together in any fashion sounds like an oxymoron to me. It seems as if the agricultural fields, small villages, rivers, streams, and foothills here were doing ecologically well enough before some developers and officials decided to plop an entirely new city down on top of them. But this could be my own backcountry American prejudice. Such contradictions mean little to the Chinese, and this is the new building buzz throughout the country: rather than just building an ordinary new city, want not make it an “eco-city?”

Before I get too tongue in cheek over this, I will first say that one of the unique advantages of building an entirely new city on a singular model all at once is that it can be engineered to include many macro-elements of green urban design that would be far more difficult, or even impossible, to implement in more organically evolved cities. In this way, China is taking advantage of the fact that they are able to build hundreds of new cities and is cooking up some wild engineering concoctions that have never been tried on a large scale before. In point, these new cities are being provisioned with the latest green gadgetry, layouts, designs, and eco-urban initiatives that are the stuff of engineering fantasies.

China is not only making new cities, but new models for urban development.

Likewise, China’s new cities are playgrounds for the world’s architects and engineers. Unbound by stringent architectural traditions and the confines of pre-existing urban plans, they are able to attempt new feats of engineering that could scarcely be imagined elsewhere. ”Meixi is an experiment in future city planning and building . . . It’s a kind of live test case,” one of the city’s chief designers stated.

From ArchDaily:

The master plan seeks to establish a paradigm of man living in balance with nature. A densely concentrated urban plan, packed with a full variety of functions and building types, is integrated with mountains, lakes, parks and canals, resulting in an environment that promotes both health and prosperity. As a new center within the larger metropolitan area of Changsha, Meixi proposes to offer a new model for the future of the Chinese city. Advanced environmental engineering, pedestrian planning, cluster zoning, and garden integration are all made part of a holistic strategy of design in this healthy city.

The radial geometry of the city plan allows for a highly efficient transport system, reducing potential pollution and energy use. Other environmental strategies include collective gray and black water systems, distributed energy plants, and urban agriculture. A river flood plane is turned into a linear park which includes recreational areas, micro farms, and residential rows.

Tourist checking out Meixi Lake for the flower festival

I was standing on the bank of the massive man-made lake that was shaped to look like a swollen thumb. A residential district was being built on one side and there was pretty much nothing on the other. Nothing but farmland. It was hard to fathom that in a place where there had been nothing but peasants planting rice for hundreds, if not thousands, of years would soon be a city. I watched an old woman who was bent over in her small field, tending to her vegetables as if a tidal wave of urbanization wasn’t soon going crash over the mountains and wash the centuries away.

But the disbelief could not be suspended for very long — the racket of jackhammers, backhoes, and cranes demolished my illusions fast. This city was already in the active process of being built. There would soon be skyscrapers, strange looking “eco” neighborhoods, shopping malls, and an ultra-futuristic cultural and entertainment center.

Though I have to admit that I struggled to see it. This place just seemed too meek, too remote, too Podunk, too deserted to even imagine anything that looked like the artistic renditions of what this city is supposed to be. I thought of Changsha’s now defunct Sky City One, which was proposed to be the world’s first sky city and the tallest building in the world, but just ended up being a media blitz that fizzled out fast. Changsha perhaps has a penchant for announcing huge engineering projects that transgress reality.

But , on the other hand, this is the type of rapid nothing-to-something transformation that China has become known for. They are building it.

Then what?

Constructing a “village” in the Meixi new city

I can hear the chorus of chatter from the international press already: “Ghost city, ghost city, failed development, empty city.” It seems as if every large scale new urban development that is built in China is put on the chopping block of international ridicule. There is a deeply embedded insecurity in the West that China could come out on top, that these insane plans could work, that our sense of possibility and probability may be askew, and we mock this upstart of a country because of it. Almost as soon as a new city is built here the jeers begin:

“Where are all the people?”

As though cities are populated in a day.

There is an insecurity in the United States that the Chinese may be able to do what we can’t, and we try to belittle and marginalize them for it. Our media plays into this insecurity, and crazy, “death by irresponsible China” stories are exaggerated while the sensible ones that show a country that knows what it is doing are ignored.

What isn’t understood is that this is a different model for urban design and development. These places are not being built to fill demand, but to create demand. This is a concept that makes no sense in economic paradigm of the West, this is not how we do capitalism. But in China things are done differently: create something first, cultivate a need for it later.

The towers are rising

China has built hundreds of new cities with this formula. Applying Western models for development on this scenario spells only one thing: bust. This would be the case in the United States, but things are different here, economics are done differently. China cultivates their new cities by gradually creating a demand for them by artificially giving them a place in the grand scheme of the country. They move transportation hubs, government offices, the best schools, public facilities out to the new districts, and give big incentives for businesses to follow. They follow. The properties sell. Eventually, these places become relied upon, the demand for them has thus been manufactured as idiosyncratically as the seas of high-rises and fields of skyscrapers that are covering this country. These new cities are coming alive.

I’ve seen it happen.

I can hear the scoffs now, but I have to silence them: the Chinese model of development, as absolutely insane as it sounds, is showing signs of working. Shanghai’s Pudong district was deserted for years, now it’s one of the country’s financial capitals. Ordos Kangbashi, known as China’s most famous ghost city, came alive last year. Dantu, one of the oldest underpopulated new districts in the country, is now no less inhabited than any other new urban development, and Zhengzhou’s Zhengdong New District, shamelessly showcased as one of China’s largest developmental flops in the international media, is now on the verge of thriving. China is pulling off many of their colossal new city initiatives, as unbelievable as it sounds.

But there is something about Meixi that didn’t sit right with me. Changsha is not a boom town like Ordos, it lacks the kinetic atmosphere of Zhengzhou, and it just doesn’t possess the economic stimulus of Shanghai. I may someday have to eat my words, but as I looked out across the lake and tried to imagine it cradled with skyscrapers I could not stop myself from saying, “New South China Mall.”

Meixi Lake before the skyscrapers

The largest mall in the world is in Dongguan, in the south of China. It was meant to be the greatest shopping center the planet has even known but instead ended up being one of the greatest developmental busts in recent history. Eight years after it was completed it sits over 90% empty, a husk of a shrine to capitalism, China’s biggest white elephant. The ball was simply too big and heavy and misplaced to get rolling, and the demand it was meant to create just hasn’t yet materialize. In point, China’s “rise to the top or crash and burn trying” model for development does burst into flames on occasion.

As I looked out across Meixi Lake at the nothingness that will soon be a city, I had to wonder if this is the Chinese dream or a fantasy that has spun out of control? Whatever eventually happens here one thing is for sure: this city will be something the world has never seen before. It will be new.

Watch our video of the building of the Meixi Lake new city

Additional images

The plan for the new cultural center

These new Chinese cities are designed to be urban utopias

To say that it is not common for young Chinese people to drop out of the rat race to travel perpetually would be an incredible understatement. Many young people of this county travel, yes, but very few do so as a lifestyle — especially those who have received a higher education and are primed for a life vying for the spoils that are now on the table.

This is a country where wealth, good jobs, and status symbols are not only voraciously sought but are actually accessible to an ever increasing amount of the population. There are more middle class people in China as there are Americans on the planet. “To be rich is glorious,” is the mantra here, this is the Chinese Dream: score high on your gao kao, go to a good university, get high-paying job at a big company, marry appropriately, make the right connections, and with a little luck you too can become wealthy. For a young person to turn their backs on this feeding frenzy, bow out of the competition, and live the life of a vagabond is incredibly out of the ordinary — though many are beginning to crave such liberty.

There are those of the up and coming generation, who fully grew up in The New China, who are beginning to question the get rich at all costs mentality. Some are starting to doubt whether money, a high-paying job, a car, and an expensive apartment are the true keys to happiness, and are becoming open to the possibility that there may be other, more personally satisfying, self-determined, individualistic lifestyles available. They are very much in the minority, their voices are now just whimsical whispers, but they are gradually growing louder. This is China’s transitional generation, the ones who never knew a country that was not economically on the rise, the ones who grew up on the other side of the fence where the grass was greener, so to speak. Though some speak of other realities, very few actually step out of line and give up their place in the rat race.

Ryan Lee performing

But one who did was the slightly built, slender guitar wielding traveler who was sitting in front of me in a hostel in Changsha. He told me his name was Ryan Lee, “Like Saving Private Ryan.” He introduced himself by saying that he was traveling around China writing a book about the experiences he has and the people he meets.

“Hey, that’s what I’m doing!?!” I replied with surprise. This guy stole my line. I had met a friend of the Way, and I was determined to not let him out of my sights until I knew his story.

Right off, it was clear that this kid was different. He then told me that he left his home six months ago and planned on traveling around China for three years. Really different. I wasn’t expecting to meet a Chinese traveling writer on a long term journey around his country without the backing of a big publication, an over-bloated expense account, and an array of assignments. I sure wasn’t expecting to meet another travel writer in the $6 per night dorm room I was staying in. I was beginning to doubt if there was a Chinese version of the impoverished, free-wheeling, independent writer, but the specimen before me renewed my hope. This is a culture that is changing fast, and the story needs to be documented from those on the inside.

I looked at him curiously for a moment, then asked how he makes his money, thinking that he may have been an eccentric breed of rich kid adventuring on his parents’ dime.

“I sing in the streets,” he replied.

This was no rich kid, this was a vagabond.

At 24 years of age, Ryan stepped off the ladder of professional ascension and now travels around China doing what he enjoys: playing music in the streets, working on his book, and spreading a message to his peers that they can determine their own course in life, that they can walk their own path, just like he has done.

You don’t have to slave away in a job you hate, live a life that was pre-determined by your parents, follow the beaten path just because that is what everybody else does. You can live your dreams and do what makes you happy. Your life is your own and you have a choice as to how to live it.

While these are worn concepts in the West, in China, a society where traditional ethics are still remarkably well-ingrained, they are radical. Someone singing in the streets, telling people that they can make their own choices in life, that they don’t have to follow the program their family and society laid out for them, that they are not going to keel over and croak if they don’t indenture themselves to an employer is heretical. But as with many heresies, it is one that is exactly what many people are straining to hear.

“Life has many possibilities,” Ryan said, “I want people to think about their life again.”

Starting out with a 4,000 RMB investment ($560), Ryan bought an acoustic guitar, an amplifier, a mic, and prepared to go out and meet the people of his country. He had no intention of playing in bars or becoming a formally employed musician, as freedom was what he was after, not a job.

“I asked my friend if I could just sing in the streets with just music playing from my Ipod but he said that people would think that I was missing an arm or a leg or something. He said that I needed to play guitar too,” Ryan explained.

The problem was that he really didn’t know how to play guitar at that point, but he quickly taught himself. I looked over at his bunk in the dormitory and found sheet music without tablature. He responded in the affirmative when I asked if he could read it. He taught himself that too.

Now provisioned with equipment and ability, Ryan began performing by the beach in his home city of Qingdao, in the northeastern province of Shandong six months ago. He told me that he made a good amount of money fast, and realized that his plan was possible. He then left home and cut a loop all the way around the east of China: from Shandong to Shanghai to Hangzhou to Guangdong, and then westward to where we were in Hunan, a distance of over 4,000 kilometers.

He sets up in the streets where there many pedestrians, opens up his guitar case, turns on his amp, and starts belting out his songs. If he is lucky, by the end of a few hours the case will be full of bills and coins.

He said he makes between a couple hundred ($36) to a couple thousand ($360) RMB each time he goes out. But it’s hit and miss where he can perform without the police shooing him away and if he can make much money even if he can perform.

“I have to earn money where I can and spend it where I can’t,” he stated. He then added that Qingdao, Xiamen, and Hangzhou are good for street performers, while Shanghai and Changsha are not.

Even on his bad days, the amount of money he brings in is not too shabby. This is a country where preschool teachers are hardly making 3,000 RMB per month, taxi drivers are earning 3 – 4,000, and even low to mid-level white collar workers are often not taking in much over 10,000. This traveler with a guitar is chalking up a comparable salary as his peers, doing exactly what he wants to do.

“Do people sometimes insult you?” I asked, figuring that this young guy so blatantly doing something different than what his society determines he should do may come off as rebellious and provoke hostility.

“No,” he responded, “they just sometimes tell me that I am stupid.”

He added that some people tell him to get a job.

“If you’re not the same as them they feel threatened. I just want to do what I want, they just do what their parents want. In China, they say get married, get a good job, but you have to do what you want,” he emphasized.

Very often, when I tell young Chinese people that I travel the world writing, they appear overtly envious. “I wish I could do that,” they say. “Why can’t you?” I reply. Almost invariably, the answer is, “My parents want me to have a good job.”

This prompted me to ask him what his parents thought of this lifestyle, and he did not bullshit me when he said that they were initially not very pleased. When he first proposed his idea to travel around China and write a book about it he was promptly shot down, but after working a few years at dead end jobs that obviously didn’t make him happy he was given the OK to go. He now travels with his parent’s good wishes, and his mother even visited him for a stretch.

He also refuses take money from parents, even though they offer, which is intriguing because it is very common for young adults in China to be partially financially supported by their families. “I have no face to take their money,” he stated proudly. He then added that that their money is their own and it is his responsibility to earn his own living.

I told him he sounds like an American. He did not respond.

But as Ryan was preparing to leave home it was his friends who reacted the most harshly. They called him a fool and said that he had to be back in two months. But six months later, when it became apparent that he was making something of his travels, this scorn turned to admiration. “Now they think I am very strong,” he said.

Ryan seemed to have never really gotten the hang of walking his culture’s beaten path. He bombed the gao kao, the standardized test that determines what colleges a student is eligible for, and didn’t seem overtly concerned about it. When all of the other students were cramming day and night he told me that he was writing stories. He wanted to be a writer, something no test score could grant him.

With limited university options he went to school to be an electrician, like his father. He said that he couldn’t write in college so he took up music. A friend heard him singing, complimented him on his voice, and invited him into a band. This is how he got started performing.

He then told me a story about how he once auditioned for a television program that was a Chinese spin off of American Idol, but had this venture short after he was invited into the hotel room of one of the judges.

“He said he likes cute young boys and told me that if I had sex with him that there was a chance I could do better in the competition.”

Ryan’s foray into the Chinese music industry was abruptly ended.

He now sings his heart out in the streets for pocket money, though often makes nearly as much as many of his peers in more conventional pursuits. What’s more is that he seemed happy delivering music in this fashion.

I then set up my camera and did a formal interview with Ryan, as we continued talking.

Watch the video interview with Ryan Lee

This guy hasn’t only come up with a way to continuously finance his travels through an independent micro-business, he seemed to get the lifestyle on a philosophical level as well.

“Travel is just normal life too.” he said, and I nodded in agreement.

There is a certain point when you begin traveling long term and working on the road that it becomes your everyday reality, all of a sudden you realize that you are not doing anything special, that travel has become regular life. At this juncture travel is no longer an activity, it’s a way of life.

“Before I began traveling I thought of things like good and bad,” he spoke, “but now that I have been traveling I know that there is no good and bad, there just is. Travel taught me that everything is OK. I have good times and bad times but I can’t go back, I just go forward.”

Ryan then placed a journal with a black cover in my hands and told me that it was his prized possession. I opened the cover and found it full of used train tickets, labels from various products, and notes written to him from other people. It was his traveler’s scrapbook, a collection of the places he visited and the people he met along the way. His favorite part seemed to be the messages that other people had left for him, and he went through them and told me about a few of the characters who wrote them.

It reminded me of my early travel notebooks — a practice that I regret I had given up on a long time ago.

“When I have nothing, I have this,” he spoke.

It was his traveler’s wealth: memories.

The traveling musician’s notebook

I then told Ryan that I wanted to watch him perform, and we arranged to meet later that evening. I returned to the hostel at the appointed time and found him ready to go, carrying his guitar and pulling his amp behind him on a dolly cart. “I have too much stuff,” he said with a smile. I had to wonder how he managed to get across the country with this music rig and his luggage, which was a mid-sized suitcase. We then went out to the street and boarded a bus that was heading downtown.

We arrived at the bank of the Xiang river and Ryan began scouring the area for a location to set up. The place was rocking, there were thousands of people walking up and down the river bank and some were drinking beer on the slope that lead down to the water. There were buskers galore. There was a woman belting out pop songs, a man running a mobile karaoke operation, a guy with a film projector showing a movie on a small, retractable screen, and a singing and dancing midget — interestingly, the later seemed to be incredibly popular in this city.

Ryan disappeared in the crowd to check the lay of the land. He wanted a good spot to perform in but didn’t seem to want to step on any of the other busker’s toes. He eventually settled on a place right where the sidewalk bowled out into a semi-circular shape next to the karaoke guy, and manically began assembling his gear. Within moments, his amp was on, his guitar was tuned, his banners were unfurled, his Ipod plugged in, his mic set up, and he was ready to begin.

Ryan Lee singing passionately

A crowd had already formed. It is my impression that China is perhaps the easiest country in the world to attract a crowd in. Seriously, when one person stops to look at something others will follow suite seemingly on principle. And when a few people are looking at something the general consensus seems to be that what ever it is it has to be interesting, and viola a crowd materializes. Before Ryan played one note he had an audience.

I moved over to the front of the crowd to take a better look at his banner. It was all written in Chinese and told his story. It said that he was traveling around China writing a book, and he was earning his keep by performing music in the streets. The crowd seemed particularly attracted to this guy, and many were his peers who could perhaps relate to his message.

After saying a few words of introduction into the mic he pressed a few buttons on his Ipod, and the music to a pop song began playing through his amp. A moment later he was singing. He was singing passionately. I don’t know if I had ever seen a street musician get so ardently into his songs before. The kid was cooing, virtually crying into the mic, sparing no degree of emotion.

The audience, which was of all ages, men and women, and of mixed classes were held captivated. They did not sway, they did not join in the song, they did not dance. They just stared. It was difficult to tell what they were thinking, as their faces were blank. There was no clapping between songs. This lack of response probably would have punked me out as a performer, but Ryan didn’t seem to notice or care. The guy was a street performer, a profession that demands very thick skin. But the fact of the matter was that the audience remained staring, and most were not even checking their mobiles: signs that they must have like something. Gradually, his guitar case began filling with bills and coins.

Ryan performing

But the night did not bring in the large bounty that he sometimes gets. After performing for a few hours through the evening and into the night, Ryan had only made 250 RMB (around $40). He said that it would cover his train fare to Hangzhou. He had made enough in Changsha to travel on.

I asked Ryan if he felt he was an inspiration for other young Chinese people who have aspirations to step off the well-trod trail and travel. He replied with a paraphrase of Han Han:

“I am just sitting here in a chair but you are on your knees, that’s why you think I am higher.”

It was an adequate role model to quote. Like Ryan, Han Han also bombed out of school, took a less conventional road, and etched a niche out for himself based around his art. He wrote a novel and it became a best seller. He runs a successful magazine. He is also China’s, and perhaps the world’s, most popular blogger. Han Han also speaks to the up and coming generation in China, and has become one of the thought leaders of a generation of Chinese who have become less content to just follow in line and do what they are told.

The banner telling about Ryan’s travels and how he makes money

“Don’t do what people want you to do, do what is in your heart,” Ryan summed up his message. These are words that are being spoken louder and louder as China continues to transition into the future.

The life they want to escape

Are you interested in seeing the places in China that have appeared on Vagabond Journey over the past year? Would you like to meet the people, observe the phenomenon, and experience the culture that I have been writing about for yourself? If so, then maybe you would be like to work as an English teacher here in China.

I am currently helping a top notch English training center find qualified, native speaking English teachers, so if you are interested in working and living in China for a year, get in touch. I 100% vouch for this employer, I know many people who work for them, and know that they are legit, pay on time, keep their end of the contract to the letter, and treat their foreign workers extremely well.

The pay is good, private accommodation is provided, and your visa fees and a portion of your airfare will be reimbursed upon the completion of a one year contract. As far as work goes, this offer is hard to beat.

The main qualification that you must be a native English speaker, beyond that, everything else can be worked out. Generally speaking, you need a university degree to get a work visa, otherwise you will be doing visa runs every three months — which means taking a trip to Hong Kong or Kinmen Island.

If you are interested, contact me at vagabondsong [at] gmail.com, and I can help you through the entire process — from applying, to visas, to actually getting here.

Until the next time I visit, Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei province, will remain in my mind as the place I yelled at a bum who was trying to steal my coffee in a McDonalds and I realized how truly awesome the Chinese language is for reprimanding people. I almost frighten myself each time I raise my voice in this language, as it is spoken from the back of the mouth and can be given gruff aspirations and guttural growls with ease. By comparison, English is a Nancy tongue: flabby, weak, and spat out from the front of the mouth with the momentum of a spit ball.

Well, this will be my memory of Wuhan coupled with the fact that I found out the hard way that it is another car-choked, old Chinese city that is currently giving urban designers headaches as to how to adapt it to the automobile age.

Many cities in China are solving this problem by building massive new urban districts adjacent to, rather than on the ruins of, the old. More than likely, Wuhan has similar plans in the works, as there is a reason why China is awash with new cities being build from scratch that goes beyond inflating GDP, boosting employment, and making officials look good. Many of China’s older cities are simply not built for a society where large numbers of people are driving personal automobiles, and the result is all too often gridlock. The new cities are built for tons of traffic and are meant to act as pressure release valves, freeing the old cities from the surge of cars that they cannot comfortably contain.

I had to transfer from Hankou station to Wuchang, a move that would pretty much take me across the city. Wuhan is historically three different cities separated by the Yangtze and Han rivers that grew together. I took the metro for most of the way and then emerged roughly two or three kilometers from the station. The line that goes all the way to the station is still in the process of being constructed, so I initially endeavored to just walk this span. I was not really in a hurry, my only preference was to make Changsha by nightfall, and it was still early in the day.

I began walking, but the jam packed highway-landia coupled with road-side construction demanded that I trod in the road. Not a good place to be, not only for safety reasons but because of sensual ones as well: it’s just not enjoyable walking down a crowded highway where cars are roaring past you on one side and the jackhammers are going full tilt on the other. A taxi would cost about a buck, and I am not so tight-fisted as to not not pay this small amount to be out of that situation.

That was until I got in a cab and we started moving — or, I should say, started sitting.

I became convinced that the pace of traffic was slower than that of my natural gait, and I momentarily considered jumping out of the taxi to complete the short journey on foot. But I held my rashness in check, as much out of curiosity of how truly long it would take to go the few blocks to the station as anything else. In the big cities of this world is has become a prevailing myth that cars can always get you to your destination faster. I kicked myself in the ass for not bringing my folding bicycle on this trip.

The taxi inch-wormed through the street and, eventually, I made it to the station.

Getting a ticket to Changsha was standard: wait in line, fight off bumpkins and meatheads who think they have the right away to cut in front of me. I got the ticket for the train I wanted, and a handful of moments later I was rearing to go, sitting in a hard seat bound car bound for Changsha, the capital of Hunan province.

More on Vagabond Journey: How to keep people from cutting in line in front of you

Riding hard seat — which could rightfully be called steerage — is a different game than hard sleeper. I had just gotten off a train where I comfortably slept in a bunk through the nightt. Travel paradise. In hard seat, which is just a normal seat — it’s really not that hard — the level of comfort is drastically altered.

More on Vagabond Journey: Riding in China’s hard seat train class

First of all, you have to get to your seat and establish yourself as quick as you can. Establishing yourself means getting your luggage in the overhead rack in a place that is above your seat, claiming as much legroom and elbow room for yourself as possible, and stacking out a position on the little table that sticks out from the wall under the window.

Upright seats in hard seat class

There are two ways that the seats in this class can be arranged. The first, which is far more comfortable and less common, is where all the seats face one direction, and you ride looking at the back of the seat in front of you, bus style. The second way, which is horrendous though the most common, is where the seating is arranged in four or six seat blocks, and you face passengers who are facing you. The second way means that your legs are going to be interlocked with those of the passengers in front of you and your elbows and shoulders will vie for space with the passenger next to you.

What is worse about this latter set-up is that your seat shares a back with the passenger behind you (who is facing the opposite direction) so they are solidified in a completely upright position. Basically, sitting in these seats is like sitting in the crotch of the letter L. To put it bluntly, sitting inside of a 90 degree angle for hours and hours on can fatigue even the most hardened traveler. If you get a window seat, you can at least lean up against the wall; if you don’t there is pretty much nothing to rest your body against. Falling asleep in these L seats means toppling forward or to the side. A real shit show.

But, ultimately, hard seat class is not that uncomfortable for daytime journeys. Seriously, if you are conditioned to taking long train journeys these rides are truly nothing to complain about. It is pretty much the standard class that people take for all trips under five hours. It is only on night trains that the hard seat class becomes rather difficult, as it is incredibly challenging to get into a good sleeping position — which is made worse by the glaring lights that don’t dim and train employees loudly hawking junk the entire time.

Girl trying to sleep

I entered my car on the Changsha bound train, sat down and roughly knocked the legs of the guy next to me into their rightful position in front of him. I then nudged him over, as his shoulder was crossing the brink between his seat and mine. This is important: it is much easier and sociable to establish your position when you first take your seat rather than at a later point in the trip. The first way is simply seen as taking your seat, the latter way is seen as fighting someone for space.

I then noticed that the two guys in my seating block were nervously glancing at the incoming passengers, and it was clear that they did not have tickets that permitted them to have a seat. One young girl got on and booted the guy next to me out. Then a tried and true dragon lady kicked out his buddy.

“If you don’t have a ticket then why are you sitting in a seat?” the dragon lady snarled at the seatless drifter as he got up and scampered off to another part of the train.

The dragon lady had eyebrows that were intentionally plucked and shaped to come together in a sharp V formation, like an evil cartoon character. Luckily, nobody else her a reason to bite.

Another young woman sat in the seat that was directly in front of me, completing our four passenger seating block. This would be an easy ride, my companions were all apparently urbanized women, so the chance that they were going to smoke cigarettes and get drunk off baijiu and talk about how funny I look the entire trip was drastically reduced. Peace.

Location of this article: Wuhan, Hubei province, China

You never know when you are going to need a copy of your passport when traveling. While it is oftentimes a better idea to keep your actual travel docks locked up in your room rather than carrying it around in the streets while abroad (there are marked exceptions to this) you should always have a copy of the information page and the visa/ entry stamp of the country you’re currently in on you at all times. You never know when you’re going to be accosted by a cop or soldier, need to show ID when checking into a hotel, buying train or bus tickets, need to run to your nearest embassy in the event of an emergency, or, as the case may be, lose your passport or find yourself unconscious or even dead.

Having a copy of your passport on you will make all of the above scenarios play out a little smoother.

In the old days we used to carry around photocopies of our passports in our hidden pockets, backpacks, and money belts just in case we needed to show identification or as an ass-saving/ body tagging mechanism in the event of disaster. While I still do this — it doesn’t hurt — I now also carry digital renditions of the ID page and visas on my mobile phone and tablet.

I simply create a folder on all of my mobile devices called “travel docs,” and I fill it with photos of my passport’s information page, signature page, and all of the visas and entry stamps that I collect. In this way, in the event that I am unable to access my actual passport in a situation that I need it, I can still have access to the information/ documentation that is contained within it. In point, my mobile phone and tablet pretty much go with me everywhere I go, and while I aim to have photocopies of my travel docs on me at all times, having digital copies on my mobile devices is actually a far more reliable method.

While digital copies of the information page of your passport and visas are by no means a substitute for the originals, they can have many useful purposes:

1. If your passport is lost or stolen. It is much easier to prove your identity and get a new passport if you have a copy of it to show to your consulate. While I don’t think you will be denied a new passport on the grounds that you don’t have a copy of the missing one, being able to produce some show of ID makes the process go a lot smoother and faster.

2. In the event of disaster. You never know when you are going to be caught in some kind of disaster when abroad, and under these situations it is rather easy to lose your travel docs. When my friend Steve Mendoza was in the Sendai Earthquake in Japan, he lost his passport but he maintained possession of his phone.

Also, carrying some way that you can be ID’ed at all times is essential if you want your embassy, and by extension your family back home, contacted if you end up hospitalized, unresponsive, incapacitated, or, otherwise, dead meat. As few foreigners carry their passports with them in the streets at all times, it is more than possible to have a major medical incident without any form of identification. So be sure to at least have a copy of your travel docs that can be found in an easily accessible location. When trying to discover someone’s identity from the contents of their phone, it is my impression that the first thing that is looked at after the contacts is the photos. Make sure that your travel docs folder can be easily accessed from the photo gallery of your mobile devices.

3. To show to authority figures during ID checks. In countries that have major political problems, a tumultuous or totalitarian government, or where it is demanded by law, you may want to carry your passport with you at all times. The reason for this is simple: you may be regularly asked to show identification to police or military personnel. This is often just standard operating procedure in countries like Iraq, and I can remember being surrounded by soldiers there who wanted nothing more than to check my passport. But in some other countries, like Russia, these random passport checks are often precursors to being robbed, scammed, or forced to pay a bribe. In this later scenario it is best to first show a digital or paper copy of your travel documents, and if they insist on the real thing find the nearest police station to get things straightened out. Sure, the police in the stations are probably just as corrupt as the ones in the streets, but at least you will know for sure that you are not dealing with impostors.

While a digital copy is by no means an adequate substitute for the passport itself, it can sometimes satisfy the demands of legit security officials doing routine ID checks. If the digital copy is not accepted in a country where you are not required by law to have official ID on you at all times, I would heighten your level of suspicion.

4. Random events. Every once in a while you’re going to have to show your passport in random situations. These are not always official scenarios, but if you don’t have your ID you could be in for some minor annoyances. I’m thinking of situations like buying train tickets, going on some tours, entering into some bars or clubs etc . . . While the genuine passport is always preferred, you can sometimes get through the road block with a copy or digital rendition.

Additional tip: keep an online backup of travel docs

As always, it is still prudent to have copies of all your travel documents stored in a secure virtual location, such as in your email or an online storage service. In this way, even if you lose everything (which is an ever present possibility), you can still at least access a copies of your travel docs.

Conclusion

Again, it is often better to not carry your passport with you in the streets, but be sure to always have a copy, as you never know when you’re going to need it.

Now watch the video

Whether you’re on a continental road trip or an extended stay abroad, at some point you can expect to be manning a vehicle for long periods of time – periods of time in which you probably can’t go without calling or text messaging someone close to you (or, worst-case scenario, 911). Distracted driving is a big issue – and a big killer – in most developed countries, particularly the USA and Europe, so ensuring that you have hands-free access to a device (must you use it) is not ground to be tread on lightly.

I recently tested out one of the newer in-car Bluetooth systems, the SuperToothHD. Ancient Bluetooth devices, while they can be bought on the cheap, require several attachments and even come with built-in keypads – if you need to punch numbers in on a keyboard, you might as well just be texting. The streamlined design of the SuperTooth, along with easily-accessible features, makes it an option worth considering, but the “HD” label has yet to live up to its name.

Design

I have to admit that I was immediately impressed with the SuperTooth design seconds after taking it out of the box. Unlike other in-car Bluetooth devices, it was sleek and simplistic; a no-frills nugget of plastic and metal that Steve Jobs would covet. It has only three buttons, and you will probably only ever use two. The one you will use most often is huge and easy to press from your car visor, and the device itself is light as a feather. This is all the more accommodating to the metal clip, onto which it grips effortlessly via magnets. This in particular was a major selling point for me, because the second something dares to fly across my front seat, it flies right out the window. (I’ve said farewell to many a GPS anchor this way…)

Responsiveness

The SuperToothHD is like the little engine that could: it’s small, and on the outside looks tough…but it can barely transmit a voice above a whisper. While the device voice is robust and thundering (and also happens to sound like C3PO’s romantic interest), the actual call quality is mediocre at best. Despite attempting calls in various locations (my room, my car, outdoors, indoors, beneath ground) and different distances (local, out of state, out of country), I could never get through a call without asking the other callers to repeat themselves profusely.  Moreover, the greater the distance between us, the poorer the quality, which cuts the SuperTooth a liberal amount of traveler points.

Could it just have been my phone service, or crummy U.S. cellular towers? Perhaps. But what it comes down to is that I could hear the caller better through my phone alone, and focusing my attention on getting a caller to repeat himself/herself while yelling into the device is definitely going to increase my chances of getting into a car accident. In fact, it would probably double them compared to me actually using the speakerphone and touchpad on my phone to conduct a call. It’s not so much that the device isn’t loud – oh no, the beeps between commands rip straight through your ears – as that the quality is dreadful. Voices are muffled, and even the otherwise crisp voice commands coming from my phone were cloudy.

After taking (an extensive amount of…see below) time to read through the user manual, I tried out a few voice commands. The SuperTooth is responsive to voice commands, but I can’t really give it all the credit – all it did was bring up S-voice (the Galaxy S version of “Siri”), which in turn processed all commands for me. When I tried the “send an email” command, my phone, through S-voice, told me it “couldn’t send an email”. When I tried to “send a text,” something went awry and it called the last person I called instead (fortunately, this particular individual was a frequent guinea pig in my Bluetooth trials and wasn’t caught too off-guard). Then I realized that, oops, I was supposed to have downloaded the “SuperTooth HandsFree Assistant” in order to use those functions, which is only free for 6 months. Bummer.

This was all particularly disappointing because I am personally a big fan of using voice-to-text on my phone while I’m driving – it allows me to send a text 95% hands-free – and it works every time. So again, it was Galaxy S: 1, SuperToothHD: 0. It seemed that I could accomplish more on my phone itself using voice commands than I could with the SuperToothHD.

User-Friendliness

Once paired to your phone, making and answering calls with the SuperToothHD is fairly simple. I personally didn’t have any trouble pairing the phone to my Galaxy SIII, though who knows what the process might be for users of older phones. I was relieved, at least, that the process took mere seconds on an Android, as most devices these days are customized for iPhones. It also connects lightning-quick.

Simply saying “answer” didn’t always work – pressing the rotary button was much more efficient and did not require much hardship. The phone clip is extremely sturdy and the device won’t budge, even in formidable pothole territory. It’s important to note that a clip like this may even be useful for backpacking, or elsewhere that hands-free phone usage might be useful.

The device does, apparently, provide a host of options: enough to spawn this colossal user manual. Perhaps this size of manual is standard for Bluetooth devices, but I certainly didn’t feel like reading it. Then again, when am I ever going to use three-way calling or multipoint pairing…while on the road? I don’t even know business travelers who have phone conferences so pressing that the entire meeting must be conducted while they are driving. And yet, in the true spirit of testing, I did attempt the multipoint and three-way features, both of which worked just fine but required a generous amount of effort (translation: multiple re-readings of the user manual) to enact.

Apropos, the battery life of the SuperToothHD is glorious. I’ve talked on it for about two hours total and let it sit in varying intervals for more than two weeks, and the battery levels are still high. My phone battery will probably die about 10 deaths before the SuperTooth’s battery drops below 80%. It’s a shame it can’t be used for resuscitation of other devices. Another convenient, and also cool, feature is that the backlights on the device dim automatically so that you aren’t blinded by a red glare as you drive at night.

Overall Value

The SuperToothHD retails for $129 direct from SuperToothStore.com; not exactly a steal when you can get a comparable model for about $70. There does exist the SuperTooth Buddy, which is only $69, has an excellent design, is lighter, has all the necessary features, and is in my opinion a much better deal. If the “HD” call quality is what sets the SuperTooth apart, well…I don’t buy it, pun intended.

However, I believe the biggest issue with the SuperTooth, or any Bluetooth device, is that a Bluetooth seems to lack relevancy in the current era of smartphones. As evidenced throughout this review, my phone already does a decent job of hands-free calling and texting without me needing to shell out an extra $60-100+ for a Bluetooth device. One can only imagine that hands-free options will expand as smartphones continue to evolve, and Bluetooth devices will have to evolve with them, lest they become extinct. For the handful for outliers who refuse to upgrade, a Bluetooth device is still a worthwhile item, especially for those who are on the road, or otherwise on the go. It will simply be a test of time to see whether devices like the SuperToothHD will be able to ride the backs of travelers into the next decade.

The young guy on the train next to me had talons. Yes, his fingernails extended a quarter to a half inch from the tips of each of his fingers, and, from the way they were finely filed and shaped, it was obvious that this was some sort of fashion statement. In fact, bona fide claws protruding from the hands of men in China is such a normal phenomenon that you just stop noticing it after a while, but as I watched the guy sitting next to be brandishing his grappling hooks it struck me that I have never talked to anybody about this style before.

I had my assumptions about why these guys were sporting such long fingernails, but it is folly in travel to leave your assumptions as they are and deny yourself the possibility of being surprised. You have to question the obvious sometimes and make uncomfortable, strange, and base inquiries. So I asked the young man with claws sitting next to me:

“Why did you grow your fingernails so long?”

He sat upright in a jolt of surprise. “What!?!” he said. Heads all of a sudden popped up from personal mobile devices all around us as our conversation became the new attraction. Not only did the laowai just speak but he asked a very strange question. The be-taloned understood my words but seemed unsure that I really asked what I just did. I had clearly taken him off-guard.

“Your fingernails are very long. Why?” I asked again.

He thought for a moment. It is the most banal cultural questions that are often the most difficult to answer, explaining the obvious is sometimes a surprisingly challenging task.

“It looks rich (很贵的)” he finally answered.

************

“It is so people know that they don’t do hard work,” another Chinese guy later told me when I questioned him about the long fingernail phenomenon.

If you are out working in the fields or doing manual labor, long fingernails become an obstacle and will often get broken, splintered, or otherwise gnarled. If you sport soft, slender hands with half inch long, well-groomed fingernails it is taken as an indicator that you don’t work with your hands, that you are above the social station of a common laborer, that you live the sort of life that allows the luxury to possess such a pampered set of paws. It was the response I expected. This is not a unique cultural symbol.

But modern China has a culture where many people are transitioning from poor to middle class, or even rich. “To be rich is glorious,” is the rally cry. Being poor here has perhaps never been seen as worse, as there are now more opportunities to socially ascend, and many fashions or bodily alterations are being done to give off the impression of being high class. What is interesting about the long fingernail style is that it costs nothing, and many men seem to be sporting it regardless of class. In fact, it actually seems like more of a popular think to do among young men who were born into working class or peasant families, perhaps as a way of distancing themselves from their toiling predecessors.

Though I have to say that these long fingernails seem to send an out-dated social message. In point, while these talons may inhibit manual labor they also inhibit something else: the use of the trendy, new phones and electronic gadgets that are the hallmark of this planet’s arisen classes. I sometimes watch men with outrageously long fingernails working their phones and typing on computers with a touch of amusement — click, click, click, you can hear the sounds of nails striking touch screens and keyboards. They pull these Scissorhands maneuvers off deftly, I have to say, but watching it happen is almost a marvel akin to a woman running in high heels or a guy in a sleek white suit making it through dinner without dropping or spilling anything all over himself. It is amazing the extents our species will endure for fashion and a feeling of status.

In the last week of April, the fair came to town in Dali.

There were games, fried foods, “snake women,” horse racing, music, and crappy trinkets for sale. It was a Chinese carnival. The occasion was the full moon in the third lunar month. That’s when the local Bai ethnic people hold their biggest festival of the year: San Yue Jie, or Third Month Street.

When a friend first told me about San Yue Jie, I thought it was San Yue Festival. In Chinese, the word “jie” (节) means “festival” while “jie” (街) means “street.” They have the same sound, and most festivals are called “festivals.” But San Yue Jie is called Third Month Street because the festival takes place largely on the Third Month Street, a place where merchants come to set up stalls selling food and items.

By now, the festival has extended to many more streets than just Third Month Street. Western Yu’er Road and the road parallel to Third Month Street are also packed with stalls. Yu’er Road is the main road in Dali, but the western portion of the road is mobbed with people and stalls, turned essentially into a pedestrian street, and cars slowly drive behind lines of people. National brands set up promotional tables at spots all around the ancient town. (It’s a good time to enjoy free samples!) Merchants come across the border from Burma, and pretty college girls get hired from across the country to promote various brands.

It’s not just a market festival, though. It also has horse racing and Bai traditional music performances. There is a stage in the main square of Dali Ancient City and another stage at the top of Zhonghe Hill with music performances all week. At the horse racing arena, they have horse races all week, and also skill riding displays. This year, a group of motorcyclists came from Australia to put on a motocross freestyle show.

It’s one of the largest temple fairs in China. According to a paper put out by the Canadian Center of Science and Education’s Asian Social Science department, total trade during the week-long festival surpasses 800 million yuan.

Temple fairs sprung up out of Buddhist religious festivals. When masses of people descended on Buddhist temples, so did merchants hoping to make a profit. By now, people go for the merchants themselves, and the religious aspect of the festival has faded.

The original basis behind the festival was to celebrate Guanyin, a warrior who saved Dali from a flesh-eating devil. Guanyin is represented in Buddhism as the bodhisattvah Avalokiteśara, and many cultures believe different legends surrounding this deity. In Dali culture, Guanyin fought off the devil Luosha during the 7th century, and since then the Dali people went to San Yue Street, officially known as Guayin Street, to sacrifice to Guanyin.

Now many believe a different legend, reflecting a more commercial version of San Yue Jie. On the 15th day of the third month, with the full moon out, the Third Princess of the Dragon King looked up at the sky and remembered about moon goddess Chang E’s street festival. She and her husband flew to the moon on a dragon. They were amazed by all the items on display at Chang E’s street festival, but they weren’t allowed to buy any, so they returned to earth and hosted a festival of their own on San Yue Jie.

Walking up San Yue Jie today, you can buy a lot of things: snacks from across the country, traditional Tibetan medicine, toy guns, apparel, “Sansnmg” and “Nckia” knockoff cell phones, iPhone branded polo shirts, CDs hawked by musicians. When a fire damaged the packaging of some soap and shampoo products in Kunming, a vendor took them to San Yue Jie and laid them out on a table. Beggars also found a way to make the most of the crowds. One beggar sat down in the middle of Yu’er Road and started writing calligraphy on a long sheet of paper. As the paper got rolled out, it became covered in piles of 1 RMB notes.

Walking up the street, I was most interested in the rice wine vendors giving away free samples. Not that rice wine tastes good, but it is wine, and it is free…

I had never tasted Maotai before. It’s the most famous brand of rice wine, the brand that is often used for giving gifts and/or bribing officials. Maotai went down smoother and had a subtle tasty flavor to it. I don’t know if that was the rice wine or the reputation, but it was good. Both the rice wine and the girls promoting it came from Guizhou, a poor province to the northeast of Yunnan famous for Maotai, poverty, minorities, and scenic waterfalls.

At the top of San Yue Street, the market stretched out into the grass and completely became a food market. There were restaurants with headless donkeys outside and yak meat hanging from the ceiling. There was an even larger selection of wine. There were also vendors selling Tibetan qingke wine, which tastes better than rice wine. I tried them all.

The two rival “cool tea” companies were squaring off all over town. At the top of the market, Wanglaoji and Jiaduobao both had tables set up. The two brands had a trademark dispute resolved in such a way that they now use identical red packaging and advertising slogans. When I went to the Wanglaoji table, I said, “Jiaduobao is only 4 RMB. Why are you charging 5 RMB?” The sales girl told me Wanglaoji was the real thing but gave me a discount. At the Jiaduobao table, multiple sales girls surrounding me when they saw I was carrying a Wanglaoji bag and said, “No! Jiaduobao is the real one!”

Inside the horse racing arena there was another cool tea battle emerging. The advertising slogan by Wanglaoji is, “If you fear fire, then drink Wanglaoji!” (“怕上火，就喝王老吉!”) Now there’s a new tea in town, and it is called, “Don’t Fear Fire” (不怕火). They were promoting it in the horse racing arena, Wanglaoji’s and Bu Pa Huo’s ads seemingly creating a dialog.

Before the races started, a horse riding team from Shangri-La, a Tibetan city in northern Yunnan that used to be known as Zhongdian, warmed up the crowd with trick riding. With their horses decked out in multicolored flags, they rode standing up and lying on their sides.

The races started with the top tier racers competing for the regional bragging rights and continued for two hours. Afterwards, there was a target shooting show. Riders mounted horses with guns and sped down the track shooting at balloons. The Bai people have traditionally engaged in hunting.

Back in the town square, Bai people were performing traditional songs in front of the “Foreigner Street” gate. For some of their songs there was a man and woman singing back and forth, a Bai traditional style called antiphonal singing. The instruments are covered with python skin. At night, a group of Bai people danced in the street in a circle.

The festivities continued for a week. It gets kind of tiresome walking up San Yue Road with packs of people moving slowly for tens of meters on end. One local waitress in Dali said, “I don’t like San Yue Jie. My phone was stolen on the street.” Some people think that it’s just one big annoying market.

Most places in China have temple fairs during Spring Festival that are packed on the day after New Year’s eve. In Shanghai, the “temple fair” was at Yuyuan Garden, and it had all the people of temple fair, but none of the allure. In fact, Yuyuan Garden has already been turned into what amounts to a permanent temple fair. There are stores selling trinkets and malls selling jade jewelry in and around Yuyuan, so there were no merchants there with their own tables for the temple fair in Shanghai, nor were there traditional music performances or games. It was just shopping at existing shops.

For San Yue Jie, they bring a spectacle you can’t see any other time of the year.

Now watch some videos of San Yue Jie

Location of this article: Dali, Yunnan Province, China

One of my first loves of travel is waking up early in the morning on the tail end of an overnight train or bus journey. You open your eyes, transition from the dreamland of sleep to the dreamland of travel, remind yourself what you are doing cramped into a moving vehicle with a gaggle of other uncomfortably contorted strangers, look out the window and remember where it is that you are going, re-calibrate for your new position on the map, and take in the full effect of having been transported to another world as you slept. This momentary discombobulating feeling of vertigo makes travel seem like a mystery again, as though you are on the verge of a surprise. You are. Ride a train or a bus overnight just about anywhere in the world and it is almost a guarantee that the landscape you wake up to will be vastly different than the one you last looked out at before falling off to sleep.

I was traveling from Taizhou in Jiangsu province to Wuhan, the capital of Hubei. It was slated to be an eleven hour ride, and the train left at just the right time to make the jaunt a true over-nighter:  I boarded around 7:30 PM and would arrive a little before 7 AM. Perfect: this train is moving hotel.

The last thing I looked out upon the night before was the train station at Fuyang. We were sitting idle in a station for far longer than what is warranted to  drop off and pick up passengers, and I got annoyed that the steady beat of chunk-chunk, chunk-chunk, chunk-chunk that had rocked me to sleep had come to an extended halt. I got curious that something interested may have been outside, and I am extremely poor at putting down this feeling — even if it means waking up from a comfortable sleep and stumbling through a train of snoring Chinese. I jumped down from my bunk and rushed for a window.

Outside was one of the most forlorn places this country has to offer. If any place in the deserves to be called forsaken it is this Fuyang. Over a three year period at the end of the 1950s two million people reportedly starved to death here. It was the height of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, and the worst famine in modern history was in full effect. The death rate during this time in this city was higher than in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Then, in the 1990s, widespread blood selling programs lead to entire villages here being infected with HIV. In 2003, the contaminated milk scandal — where 189 babies grew abnormally large heads and suffered malnutrition, of which 12 perished — had its epicenter in the place I was looking out upon. In 2008, an outbreak of hand, foot, and mouth disease infected 3,000 children, killing 20. Add to this a string of major government corruption cases thrown into the mix (some resulting in executions) and Fuyang has perhaps earned its reputation as a “wounded city.”

Lets get out of here.

It was now morning on this train and everybody was getting out of their bunks, putting clothes on over their long underwear, opening packages of dehydrated noodles, and heading to the bathrooms. I avoided the later for as long as possible, as I know what is done to these places at this time. I will put it this way: if missed marks are frequent during the best of times on Chinese trains, mornings seem to be when the collective aim is at its worse. But no missed-mark on this train was perhaps as bad for me as the one that occurred on my bunk before I got to it.

When I boarded this train the night before the conductor hesitated and got really nervous when I handed her my ticket. On long train journeys, the conductors also serve as babysitters for the passengers in their car. It is usually a standard procedure when getting on a sleeper car to give the conductor your ticket and receive a plastic card with your bunk number on it in return. This is so you don’t lose your ticket and so the conductor can make sure you get off the train at your stop. Yes, they actually wake you up when you’re close to arriving. This may seem at first like a kind service, but actually there is a good chance that another passenger is hop into your berth soon after you leave it.

But this time I handed the lady my ticket and she just stood there nervously repeating my bunk number over and over again as though she was trying to think of a solution for something. I thought that there may have been a straggler left over in my bunk, but she eventually called her meditation to a halt and just handed me my card.

I found what may have been the problem the moment I climbed up into my berth. There was a giant puddle in the middle of it, as though a baby pissed through its split back pants or someone spilled their tea. I wasn’t inclined to stick my nose in it to find out, so I just hoped for the later and covered the mess with the quilt that accompanied my bunk.

You see, though the train attendants usually fold the blankets and make up the berths between passengers, the sheets and blankets are only changed once every time the train travels down and then back up its line. As rail lines in China are often 1,000 plus kilometers long, this means that many passengers share the same linens. One gets out of a bunk and another jumps in without a change of sheets, blankets, or pillow cases. So unless you are the first passenger in your bunk at the start of the first run down the line you are more than likely going to crash out in a bed someone else was just chilling’ in.

No problem, this is travel. The worse that I have ever found before in these pre-enjoyed berths were food smears, errant soda bottles, crumbs, and maybe a newspaper or some garbage. This time though it could have been a piss puddle. Oh well, it did not absorb through the blanket. Peace.

Regardless of where my place is on a train though, I can most often be found in the dining car. Riding here is pure travel luxury — well, if you think talking with the train’s crew, greasy cooks, under-worked waitresses, and the occasional train cop as they hang out together smoking cigarettes in a closed compartment is fun.

Besides these companions, who often just sit around talking about me or throw thousand yard stares into the distance, the real reason why I like riding in the dining car — other than the over-priced, ill-prepared, and occasionally gut wrenching food of course — is that I can sit right next to a big window before a table, watch the scenery pass and write. A train can easily be transformed into a moving office, and I spread out my notebooks, my tablet, and my mobile over the table, and dig into some work. Moving and working at the same time is perhaps the quintessential action of the digital nomad, so much so that it is almost lamely typical — kind of like a businessman in an airport talking shop loudly into his phone as though it impresses the lay passengers within earshot.

Often, the dining car is also not really a very popular place between meal times — mostly because it is expensive to eat there — and I can recline in comfort with my legs stretched out and enjoy the ride. In point, being able to look out a window at the passing terrain, having a locked-in group of people (the staff) to shoot questions at, and being able to write up at a table makes the dining car experience almost worth the bloated price of the food I sometimes need to buy to sit there.

On this train though I did not want to buy any food. I tried to get away with just ordering a beer, but immediately I knew it wasn’t going to work. Oftentimes, the dining car staff doesn’t give a shit that I am just hanging out; other times they make me pay 10 RMB for a “cup of tea;” once in a while they tell me to buy food or hit the road.

On this train, the dining car was full of hard seat passengers who were trying to escape an overnight ride in stellar discomfort. The hard seat cars on this train were overflowing with seat-less passengers, and those with a few coins in their pockets and a few brains in their heads were filing into the dining car. It was a buy some food or get out type of scenario. I weighed my options, and as I was already being crowded out of my table by a fat couple with a baby and a mass of luggage coupled with the fact that it was dark outside so there wouldn’t be much to look at I decided to retreat to my berth, feeling grateful that I wasn’t taking this trip as a seat-less refugee.

I clamored up into my bunk, which was the top one — the most undesirable by Chinese standards, the one preferred by me. There are six bunks per berth in hard sleeper class on a Chinese train. They are stacked three high, one across from another. I don’t aim to ride in the top bunk because it is a little cheaper, but because it lends for a more comfortable ride — well, once you have climbed up to it, which requires the agility of a monkey and a short prayer. Up in the top bunk, there is only one person on the train that can see you, and that is the person in the top bunk directly across from you. So you have a good deal more privacy and far less distractions. There is nobody walking by you, nobody clambering over you, nobody sitting down on your feet or hanging out on your bunk, no crowds gawking at and talking about you because you look a little different than them. You are pretty much up at the level of the luggage rack when in the top bunk, and can ride across the country just as inconspicuously.

This ride, the first trip I’ve taken in three weeks, was pure travel perfection. There is perhaps nothing that I know that is more enjoyable than riding through the night across a massive country in a train. The chunk-chunk, chunk chunk of the wheels on the rails becomes the same rhythm as your pulse and the churning of your thoughts. Everything calibrates and soon you are dreaming.

I switched worlds by morning. I was no longer in the eastern plains of China but in the foothills of the central highlands. The same small rice paddies and mini-farms still abounded, but they were interspersed with uncultivated hills that sprouted patches of woods and green space. In fact, green was everywhere. It was as spring should be. The varying and contending shades of green created a luminescence effect in the dewy morning light. The frog-hued fields seemed to glow, the serpentine hills radiated. Whoever travels across central China and calls it barren either took their trip in winter or spent all their time peering into their personal electronic devices, missing the colorful magnificence of the agricultural spring.

Chinese people do not seem to be overtly inclined to look out the windows on train journeys. Unless passing something magnificent or some kind of catastrophe — like an accident or the after effects of a factory explosion or something — they tend to look at me like I am cracked when I glue myself to the window, locked on to the scenery passing by. Maybe they are wondering what I think is so interesting out there, more than likely they are probably wondering why I am not playing Angry Birds on my mobile.

The passengers on these trains seen to be on their smartphones and tablets whenever they are not eating chicken feet, in the John, or in between the cars smoking cigarettes. From time to time, I look over their shoulders at what it is they are so intently focused on, and find that it is more often than not a game or a movie. Seriously, just about everybody on these trains have their own personal entertainment centers. Woe be the passenger who runs out of battery life mid-trip. Games and movies, this is truly the reason we advanced communications technology this far.

I can remember a time in the early to mid 2000s when I used to talk with the people that I bunked with on these trains across China. Not anymore. Now whenever we feel socially awkward we no longer have the impulse to make small talk; no, we just crunch up over our devices, unfurl our social palisades, and go into the private worlds of our own personal entertainment devices. Me too, I guess.

I am not sure if I really wanted to speak with the bunch I bunked with last night anyway. After listening to the one across from me snore and fart all night the inclination to start up a conversation was at an all time low. After being robbed of sleep by suctiony, gurgly snores and whip-cracking wind breaks I ready to get off that train ride.

May! The lovely petal pushing month of May! When the urge to flee a barren cubicle imprisoned life concretizes. No one absconds in the winter. It is too cold. Too depressing. Not unless the calloused mitts of the law are closing in on your ass or the bank, in their never ending quest for more profit and caviar to gobble, forecloses on your home and tosses you out and into a snow bank wearing only an ill-fitting pair of pajamas that are missing the important buttons and allow your dangling bits to peep out and see what’s going on.

May is the time to flee. To tell America and all of its problems to go fuck itself. South Seas islands beckon. There you will find nirvana and live on a higher plane.

The South Seas Islands beckon me to come hither. So I hither.

I scamper off of a long boat onto Hoga, a small island amongst a scattering of atolls in Indonesia’s Banda Sea.

A self directed tour of this empty island sees a large and varied collection of clapped together shacks. Some are dissolving into the jungle; others awkwardly perch on spindly stilts upon crumbling pumice. I rent a suitable candidate for $5 a night from whom I assume is the caretaker of this motley village.

For two weeks I revel in my tropical solitude. My steadfast companions are rats, snakes, and a monitor lizard. Coconuts and fish sustain me. Brackish well water demoralize me.

I grow bored and feel the call for the camaraderie of civilization. Any civilization will suffice.

Rumor (the caretaker’s) has it that there is an internet cafe in Kaledupa. This same rumor expanded to include restaurants and coffee shops. A veritable glittering metropolis lay beckoning a short distance across the Banda Sea.

I need a break from these melting days on Hoga. A long tonic draught of reconnecting with the world at large and a leisurely lunch to savour hot chips delicately embroidered with hot sauce and frosty Bintang beer is just what Dr. Mike orders for patient Mike.

Eight hours should suffice for this day trip. Three hours to answer long overdue emails and to assess the current state of the world followed by a languorous lunch will allow for a comfortable few hours to stroll through the market and tour the various sundry sights.

Passage across the strait is arranged for 08:30 and the skiff will return at 17:00; a sunset cruise to cap what is expected to be a very fine day. Every hour is exquisitely parcelled.

The appointed morning sees me deposited onto Kaledupa’s wharf at precisely 09:00. The day begins with a flat sea and bouncy waddings of cloud above me. The perfect sort of morning for touristy affairs. ‘I’ll see you at five!’ I sing out to my dutiful boatswain and salute him adieu with a cheery, if somewhat imperial, wave of my hand.

I march to where I am instructed the internet cafe would be. Time is a wasting. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Lo and behold the internet cafe is exactly where it is expected.

Inside the cafe is hot and stuffy. Tiny flecks of sunlit dust float down from the stilled ceiling fan like fairies casually flung off a cliff. These, however, are minor details.

There are five spanking new computers with large flat monitors and all of them are available. They flirt with me, call me witty, even handsome … “choose mec choose me,” they all chime enthusiastically. I am the sole patron in a brothel of bytes and pixels.

I call out for a clerk. I am eager to begin. A grumpy, thick-waisted, middle-aged woman emerges from the twilight of a back room. ‘No internet,’ she mutters.
Surely she is mistaken about my intentions.

I reply: ‘Yes. I need internet for three hours.’

‘No electricity. Come back at six o’clock.’

‘Huh?’ I stand there stupefied. I glance over at the row of hard-drive harlots; their bytes are soured and their pixels dulled.

‘Six o’clock the generator comes on. Then there is internet. OK? You understand?’ Mamasan clearly wants to resume her beauty sleep. I am, for now, an unwelcome interloper.

Foolish me. I had forgotten that power is generated only in the evenings in these remote islands. The day’s itinerary will need to be fast forwarded. Perhaps breakfast is being served at one of the several rumored restaurants yonder. Perhaps … perhaps they might have wifi.

A dusty and rutted road points to where the cafe and restaurant district might be. After a kilometre of strolling and sightseeing I descry a cow tied to a pole in a littered field. I enquire of a local denizen as to where a fine dining establishment might be. She averts her eyes from mine and walks past me shaking her head. My inquiry goes rudely unanswered.

I continue onward. Uneasiness picks at me. I pass a few dark and unattended kiosks. Their scant offerings hold little possibility for hot chips and frosty beers. Surely these clapped together … no, don’t be silly. Soldier on: chips Ahoy!

This rutting road ends abruptly at a fetid canal. Black sewage oozes and bubbles in the hot mid-morning sun. A fish corpse suspended in the fecal sludge grins grimly and appears to intone ‘no chips here for you.’ Dead fish are ignorant of many things.

Across this despairing channel I can see stalls and bustling human activity. Oh! Oh! How do I get over there?

Tip-toeing across this black shallow channel would be a cha cha with cholera. A more suitable conveyance to the festivities yonder must surely be inland. A shabby broken path skirts this foul hepatitic rivulet of shit 100 meters to my left.

Hot chips and icy Bintang beer beckon. Oh boy! Oh boy! I skip lightly over ruts and broken bric-a-brac and innumerable hillocks of strewn garbage. ‘Hello Mister!’ bright eyed little children cry out. This is the universal greeting called out continuously, thousands of times every day, it seems, to the foreigner, the Bule. ‘What is your name?’

‘Brad Pitt,’ I respond cheerfully.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Why, Hollywood, of course, of course.’ A little Dr. Seuss never hurt anyone. Not sure about Brad though … I digress.

My merry skipping slows and stumbles. Something is amiss here. The hip hive of frivolity I thought I saw is a fish market. Four tarp covered tables display a sorry selection of sun-desiccated fish lorded over by four mean-looking women. ‘Fish! Fish! You buy fish!’ the apparent priestess of these humorless mongers demand of me.

‘I’m looking for chips and beer.’

She looks at me with pricking eyes before turning to a more promising customer.

Eight, maybe it is nine, short steps follow. My tour of the fish market is concluded. A mangrove swamp now lay before me. Perhaps … on the other side of this swamp … damn it man, soldier on … into the bayonets if you have to. Chips could await. Well, maybe. The initial stirrings of despair crudely stroke my hungry viscera.

‘Hello mister!’

‘Brad Pitt. I’m from Hollywood.’

‘Money. Give me money!’ A dirty little girl confronts me. Her black feral eyes clap onto my melancholic orbs.

‘No. No money.’ I scold her and brush past.

‘Give me money. Bule fucker!’

Well. I never. I turn to wag an indignant finger at this elfin menace. She beans me in the forehead with a rock. It hurts. She stoops to pick up another rock. A dilemma quickly unfolds: it would be unseemly and unwise to engage in throwing rocks at a little girl. Should I bean her well in return it would be difficult to explain to an angry mob of machete wielding villagers that she started it. Better to pack my dignity and walk away.

‘Give me money, bule fucker!’ She beans me in the back of the head. Her aim is uncanny. I quicken my pace. She throws the third rock harder. Her anger skews her accuracy and the rock strikes me in the ass. I break into a trot. Likewise, so does she. She stops briefly to re-arm.

I run and turn down a pathway strewn with sharp rocks. This barefoot amazon warriorette pursues me. The sharp rocks underfoot do not deter her from the hunt. My long cowardly strides gradually purchase a safe distance from this diminutive maniac. She gives up the chase at the edge of town and fires one last volley toward me. Despite the language barrier I am sure she warns me: ‘You better not come back here, Mister Brad Pitt!’

My watch reads 09:38. My fun filled itinerary has been torn to bits and pieces and picked up by the wind. There will be no internet. No hot chips. No frosty beer. And I have been banished from Kaledupa by an angry little sprite who, no doubt, eagerly awaits my return.

After allowing for a prudent measure of time to elapse I sneak back into Kaledupa peering down streets and lanes for my tormentor before skittering to the next sheltering corner.

There is a bamboo gazebo at the foot of Kaledupa’s wharf where I can wait out and endure the seven-and-one-half hour chasm that lay before me in a modicum of shaded comfort.

Life on these remote islands, casually seeded throughout the Banda Sea, is an interminable length measuring decades of numbing boredom. Children play and scamper amongst broken structures and garbage, sleep then eat then scamper again. Until the onset of puberty their tropical existence appears idyllic. At 12 years, sometimes 14, the girls are corralled and presented for marriage. Contracts and compromises are negotiated. Few young men can afford the dowries outright. Not every girl is claimed. Despite their easy social banter loneliness is a constant.

At 14 years a stone is rolled across a young boy’s dreams: he will not be a doctor, or a policeman, or a teacher, nor anything other than a laborer, scavenging for whatever shards of work might avail themselves. The young boy’s liquid smile hardens and concretizes into a scornful grimace. The bule’s eager expectation of welcome is an unsolicited slap in the face. The bule possesses both the freedom and opportunities that are denied to the vast majority of Indonesians. Were I an Indonesian, I, too, would throw rocks at the bule fuckers.

It is almost noon. For the past several hours I have watched cargo laden skiffs arrive and porters scramble for a small piece of work. Once the skiff is emptied and has sailed the wharf is quiet again. The porters melt away into shadows somewhere to wait for the next skiff. I shift my position in the gazebo to concord with the shifting shade. Away from the biting sun. This is my singular activity. The boredom is excruciating. A thinking person would twist their head off of its occipital anchor and toss it into the sea. Just for something to do.

If I can sleep from now until late afternoon then this unbearable day will be done. I am dreaming of a waterfall. But something feels wrong. I awaken and a boy is pissing next to my head. I sit up and glare at this impertinent delinquent, but he is undeterred. I am a foreigner and he knows that I can do nothing. Sleep now would be a foolish endeavor. Perhaps this delinquent might team up with the rock-throwing menace on the other side of town and drive me into the sea. What then? There are spiny urchins and venom laden rockfish underfoot there.

Instead I watch clouds drift by and half-hearted waves lick the wharf. For hours. For eternities.

Location of this article: Banda Sea Islands, Indonesia

It is alright to travel in places where you can’t speak the language. It is alright to request specialty foods or meals prepared in a particular way when in other cultures whose dining customs differ from your own. But it is my opinion that when you are traveling in a place where you can’t speak the language you forfeit the right to be a picky eater. If your pantomime, pointing, and grunts land you a plate of food that wasn’t exactly what you ordered, just eat it.

A couple of Europeans in a hostel in the mountains of China’s Hunan province were having some issue with the meal they had just ordered. There was a steaming, delicious looking pork and cabbage hot pot boiling at full steam on the table in front of them, but they were avoiding it like it was a warm turd. They had their laptop opened on the table and were trying to use Google Translate to communicate with the hostel manager what was wrong with the meal he had just made for them.

What could possibly be the problem? This was the question everyone in the room seemed to have, and a small crowd of guests and workers gathered around the table to see if they could help. A spectacle was in the works. The Europeans continued trying to force the manager to understand them with meaningless words, with digital translators, and pantomime. It wasn’t happening. The problem, as it turned out wasn’t just language, but culture.

The mananger, caught in an uncomfortable position, began glancing in my direction. I was on the periphery of the room, hoping that I would not be called into action. Shit, I made eye contact. Too late.

I asked the European guy what he wanted. He couldn’t even really speak English. I was exasperated that they were able to get this far off the prime foreign tourist trail without a language they could even hope anyone could understand. When out of the borderlands, any foreign language besides English in China is about as useful as a rubber chicken.

I eventually understood that they didn’t want as much food as they were given. I communicated this to the manager in Chinese. He had me tell them to just eat what they wanted and to leave the rest. Simple enough. This did not satisfy the Europeans. I then figured out that they only wanted a hot pot for one person even though two of them intended to eat it. It is clearly stated on the menu that pricing for this meal is calculated by how many people are eating it, not by the portion. So two people eating one hot pot is still two people, regardless of how much or little food they wish to consume. These two tourists essentially wanted to walk into a buffet, eat, and only pay for one person.

I should have told the guy that he couldn’t have it the way he wanted, that he was in China and needed to do things the Chinese way. But I missed the opportunity to be so bold. I instead translated what he wanted to say.

“It can be done, a hot pot for one person,” the manager replied. He didn’t understand, and I was feeling embarrassed in my role as the go between for tourists who were being overtly difficult, petty, and unrelenting.

I told the Europeans that they had a meal for one person, then they both began eating. Of course.

“What are they doing?” the manager asked me, “You said that they wanted a hot pot for one person.”

I gave up: “I can understand his words but I don’t understand what he wants.”

“Doesn’t he speak English?”

“Not really.”

This couple was almost wantonly making a simple procedure complicated to save three fifty and not have to stare at more food than they wanted to eat. They were picky eaters without the toolset to take such a liberty.

If you can fully communicate with people in the restaurant you are ordering food in then you have earned the right to be picky: request what you want and the restaurant can accept or decline your order. But when you can only point to something on a menu and squack some gibberish you are not really in a position to complain when you are not understood and a meal is laid in front of you that wasn’t prepped to your specifications. 

Part of the trade off of traveling in a place where you don’t speak the dominant language is occasionally not getting what you want, being misunderstood, and accepting the consequences of your linguistic ignorance. This is the deal for all travelers, newbies and those who have been out for decades: where you can’t verbally communicate you take what you get, smile, and say thank you.

If I request something special when traveling and don’t get what I asked for because I failed to communicate properly I eat my error. I am the one who screwed up, not the person going out of their way to attempt to understand my foreign accent and askance sentence constructions. So I try to learn from my mistake, enjoy my meal, and do better next time around. I don’t always win in travel, but I know that it is OK to lose: to lose and learn, to lose and endure. Not always getting your way is called tolerance.

Travel is about adapting, rolling with a different culture, other languages, and occasionally getting something different than what you order. Without these twists and turns, trials and errors, World Travel would lose a major element of its appeal. Imagine a world where everybody understands your native tongue, where food is made exactly to order, where there are no cultural misinterpretations, where there are few surprises. This place exists: it’s called home.

When traveling abroad, just eat it.

I prayed for exact change as I pulled up in a taxi to the train station in Taizhou. The driver had more fingers up his nose than on the steering wheel for the entirety of the 20 minute ride. At one point I thought starring at him may provoke some insecurity and thus inhibit the nasal excavation, but I thought wrong: he just stared right back at me and continued twisting away, knuckle deep. He wasn’t pulling out because some foreigner was starring at him with a gross face on. I tossed the fellow an extra kuai to save having to take change from his freshly boogered fingers. Sure, I interact with disgusting hands all day long, but there is just something about seeing the soiling for yourself that removes the comfy veneer of doubt.

I am on my way to Changsha and then the mountains at Wulingyuan. I am sitting in the waiting lounge of the train station feeling that empty feeling that comes from departing from my family. They can’t do trips like this. They have school and they would not really enjoy hurtling across China to research a couple of stories and then spend a week tramping in mountains. They like to travel, they don’t like going on vagabonding trips into oblivion. This means that I travel away from them often, and I always leave with an overbearing feeling of “What’s the point? Why am I doing this? I am perfectly happy at home, why do I need to tear off on yet another grueling, forsaken, rapid pace trip across this country? I can just churn Chinese news and social media infinitely like most other websites published for an audience of foreigners are, why do I feel the need to see these things for myself?” Oh yeah, as Burton said, the devil drives.

But this emotion quickly disintegrates the moment the train or bus pulls out of the station or I get up to full speed on my bicycle. The spinning wheels of travel and those of thought synchronize as they both race ahead for the singular goal of what lies beyond. Onward. By this point I have been fully taken over by the other side: I am into the journey, my focus becomes absolute, my wits feel sharper, and I descend into the spiral of rapid fire decision making that is a large part of the stimulation of travel. Life becomes simple, my needs are basic: food, water, and shelter; the nonessential layers of life vanish. I start talking to strangers, asking foolish questions, chasing fleeting intrigues, putting myself in uncomfortable or otherwise challenging circumstances and documenting everything with an endless procession of notes, photos, and videos. There is nobody to remember my embarrassments but myself, so I don the cap of a fool and set out to learn something new.

Downtime is extinguished until the moment I return to my family’s home: the work has begun. The job is simple: keep your senses astute and look for anything that piques curiosity and find out more about it.

It is about time to board the train, jump into another venture across China. The prime fear of modern travel is with me: what if nothing happens? What if this becomes a journey where everything works according to plan and I don’t end up with a story worth retelling? What if my plan doesn’t produce adequate results? But then I look at the milling hoard of people in front of me who are already jostling for position and getting ready to fight for the seats they are assured by their tickets, at the guy carrying the bundle of white, root-like sticks the likes of which I have never seen before, at the family who is talking about the way I look right in front of me, at the old man carrying his weight in giant bundles tied to the ends of a bamboo shoulder pole and I know that my fears are not only unfounded, but in a country like China completely impossible.