A day at the park

On Sunday I resolved to do nothing in particular. I had a leisurely breakfast of fruit in my room and packed to the sound of CCTV. I called my great-aunt Lily, a task I'd neglected to take care of before coming to China. Lilly lives in San Jose, and I was planning to stay with her in a couple of weeks. I thought I should give her a heads-up. Hers was the first familiar voice I'd heard since leaving the States.

Next I called the cell phone for the Wenhai Ecolodge, a place I'd found a few months before when I Googled "Yunnan ecotourism." Going to an ecolodge in the jungle had been the highlight of my time in Peru, and I hoped there were similar opportunities in China. I'd made an email reservation with someone who seemed to speak English quite well, and now needed to work out how to get to the lodge. My options were hiking, horseback, or Jeep; I chose horseback. My pack was nice enough for jaunts around towns in search of hostels, but I'd never hiked with it, nor did I want to try. And having someone drive me up a mountain in a Jeep didn't seem very eco-friendly.

After taking care of a few other things I rented a bike and rode to what seemed to be Chengdu's main tourist shopping drag, a place with nice dark wood buildings. It adjoined a park where I went wandering, and confirmed my impression that going to the park is one of the best things to do in China. I saw an old man painting calligraphy on the paving stones with water and a giant brush. This in addition to the usual newspaper-reading, tea-drinking, and music-making.

I did have a destination in mind in the park, namely the Green Ram Taoist temple and its vegetarian restaurant. It's interesting how similar the Buddhist and Taoist temples look to my untrained eye. The main differences I picked out are the ubiquity of the yin/yang symbol (only Taoist), and the way the monks dress.

At the temples, I've seen monks chanting and people reverently lighting incense. I've also seen monks chatting on cell phones and hawking loogies, and woman kneeling to pray in a pink velour tracksuit with "Juicy" printed across her ass. It would be nice to get a tour of a temple sometime from someone knowledgeable, but until that happens, I'm not keen on going to more temples anytime soon.

At the restaurant, the waitress put a menu in front of me that looked like it might have been a relic of the Tang dynasty, if they'd had typewriters in the Tang dynasty. The edges of the pages were ragged. But I noticed later that the other patrons had nice menus with hard covers and laminated pages, and figured the waitress had given me the antique version because it was bilingual.

I was grateful for this, but it didn't completely solve my communication difficulties. When I pointed to a dish described as "pumpkin," the waitress tried to explain why I might not in fact want it, but I didn't understand. So she helpfully went and got the vegetable in question and showed it to me. I looked like an extremely warty cucumber. I nodded--I was in China to try new things, right?--but it turned out to be the most bitter vegetable I'd ever tasted. Fortunately I'd also ordered a tofu dish. I was beginning to catch on that even if you're a lone diner, and you know that Chinese portions are huge, you don't order just one thing at a Chinese restaurant.

Afterward I found my bike--this took a little time--and went to the People's Park in the heart of the city. This one has kiddie rides, full bands giving free concerts, and a garden of Bonsai trees. It also has a famous teahouse that I wanted to try. The teahouse is huge and sprawling, set on a small lake where families rent paddle boats. Men walk around tinging their ear-cleaning instruments (a sound much like a triangle) to advertise their services. I finally agreed to a 20-minute massage from one.

He focussed mostly on my arms, gripping them so tightly at times that I thought I might bruise (I didn't). He also massaged my shoulders and back, my scalp, and even my forehead. I felt ridiculous getting my forehead massaged in the middle of a crowded teahouse, but the liberating thing about being a stranger in a strange land is that just about everything I do will seem odd, so why not?

On the way out of the park I admired a topiary structure of what appeared to be a dragon and a rooster going after a ball at the same time. A trio of pandas seemed to be in the works, but at the time they were just skeletons.

I biked back to the hostel without getting lost, and had about 20 minutes to spend online before taking the airport shuttle. While in China I mainly went online to triage my email and update my Facebook status lines.

An American named Josh was the only other person taking the shuttle from the hostel (we picked up one other person, a Chinese guy, on the way). It turned out we were on the same flight. We had other things in common too, like having been in China for about the same amount of time and having gone many of the same places there, being vegetarian, and having lived in DC, New York state, California, and the Southwest. But it was a long ride to the airport, and by the time we reached the departure lounge the conversation was flagging. Despite his very American friendliness there was something about Josh that annoyed me, perhaps a subtle sense of his own superiority, and I was ready to be alone again.

At baggage claim in Lijiang, Wangning and Henry asked if we'd like to share a taxi in from the airport, which we did, piling our backpacks in the middle seat of a van and exiling Josh to the front seat while the other three shared the back. Wangning is Chinese and Henry German; they met at college in Berlin. Wangning had been back for a year and was showing Henry around the country. I liked them.

The driver was unwilling to take Josh and I to our hotels in the Old Town, and so dropped us off at a taxi stand somewhere in Lijiang. Getting to the room I'd reserved at Mama's Naxi Guesthouse turned out to be no small feat. I'd been feeling very comfortable in China after my half-day of parks, tea, and massage, but was thoroughly tired, hungry, and grouchy by the time I found my lodgings. Even so I couldn't help but find the Old Town charming, with its narrow, carless cobbled streets, graceful buildings, and canals.