A Mushroom for an Apple

Our internet went out again.  As I write this, I am sitting in a tea shop called Tang Kou or “Sweet Tea Time”.  The shop is a small place tucked away in an alleyway close to the school where I work.  The owner is a young woman whose English name is Jasmine.  She is very friendly and has already introduced me to a new drink called ning meng hong cha which is similar to iced tea back home.  Emma and I have been coming here more and more frequently in order to do lesson planning outside of the house.  It’s nice to be able to get out of the house and learn a little bit more about our communities.  This weekend, however, we were so busy that I am now looking back on all the downtime I had last weekend with no small amount of longing.

At Thursday evening’s English corner (a weekly opportunity for students to come speak English with each other and the school’s three foreign teachers) Emma and I met two alums that had been friends of our predecessors.  Both men immediately stuck out because of their size.  At the university, the male students vary in height but all tend to be somewhat stringy in build.  William and Jordan both clearly frequent the gym and on Thursday they invited me to join them.  They are both very proficient in English and have done their best to make Emma and I feel welcome in Xingyi.  Emma and William have already gone swimming together twice and on Friday night Jordan took the two of us out to a bar where we played Da di zhu, a drinking card game which translates to Fight the Landlord in which two players work together to try and make the “landlord” drink as much a possible.  After a few rounds of this game I was invited on to the stage where a guitarist had been crooning some very sappy sounding love songs.  He asked me to play something and so I did my best not to butcher Wagon Wheel (unsuccessfully) in front of a bar full of confused-looking Chinese.

On Saturday, my host Mr. Gao invited Emma and me out to dinner to have lamb hot pot.  When we arrived at the restaurant the electricity had gone out so instead we drove out to a reservoir in the country.  By this time the whole group consisted of myself, Emma, Mr. Gao, two other teachers and their wives, two small girls, the head of the Foreign Affairs Office for our University and her husband who, unsurprisingly, is also a teacher.  Now Mr. Gao loves to drink with me and I once again had the opportunity to practice my Da di zhu skills.  This time though, we decided to share one of our culture’s drinking games and by the end of the night and after many rounds of delicious food and several bottles of Snow beer, we had the entire table flipping their cups in head to head boat races.  The two girls had become bored with all the adult silliness and were playing in an adjacent room until a scary monster started making growling noises outside their window.  The girls would scream and run back into the drinking room where I would already have returned to my seat trying my best to feign innocence.

As we finished dinner and began to leave, fireworks shot into the night sky from less than a hundred yards away.  I asked why the village was shooting off fireworks and Mr. Gao told me they were welcoming the two foreigners.  I couldn’t believe that fireworks were being shot off in our honor and given how much we had drunk that evening it’s entirely possible that Mr. Gao was giving me bad information.  Still I prefer to believe that the villagers decided to welcome two foreign teachers with a firework display among the mountains.

Today I decided to see if I could find the trail that Christian had told me about through 10,000 Peaks.  I packed a bag and set off to catch a bus that would take me to Yu Long.  From there I walked until I came to a spot I thought I recognized from photos Christian sent.  I cut through some fields and began to head up through the mountains.  The first path I took petered out after about fifteen minutes but I continued to push on scrambling over razor sharp karst rock outcroppings and trying to avoid massive spider webs that housed four-inch long venomous-looking spiders.  It wasn’t long before I realized that without a machete or maybe a flame-thrower there was no way I could make it through.  I slowly backtracked until I regained the path, which split, and this time I followed a different route.  My second choice also proved to be a disappointment and though I was rewarded with a view of the valley below, I nonetheless was forced to turn back the way I had come.  When I finally got back to the road, I had already wasted about an hour and a half so I decided to follow Christian’s instructions to the letter and set off heading south.  I must have walked for another two hours in a futile search for the trailhead.  On my return back I decided to explore an abrupt right turn in a village I had gone through earlier in the day.  Sure enough the road turned into the hills and I was soon walking along a stone path that cut through the mountains.

The path between two hills

Finally having achieved my objective I got to look around and was treated to some amazing wildlife including a hawk with a body like an owl that soared low over my head and mountain goats which were precariously perched high up on the mountain side above a cornfield.

Cow

A woman herding three skittish cows stopped to talk to me and gave me some kind of mushroom she had dug up further along the path.  In return, I gave her the apple from my backpack.  I did not do the full hike I had intended, since by that time I had wasted the majority of the day looking for the trailhead, but it was a good introduction to the area.  The one-dollar compass I had bought at a stationary store back in town worked perfectly helping me navigate my way through the mountains.  I’m eager to return in two weeks and I look forward to discovering more about this beautiful and challenging mountain range.

The bounty of the mountains