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Bizarro Kaifeng
Entry 30 of 42 | show all | print this entry |
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"So, our options are staying at the place run by a sociable English teacher or the place that has that little fan picture next to it, which might mean heat. Which place should I call?" asked Erin as she cracked open her Lonely Planet in the Longsheng Bus station. Turns out we couldn't make it to Ping'an.
We decided on calling the hotel run by the English teacher because she also ran a restaurant, which we figured would be helpful since Lindsay was a vegetarian and in China, they consider pork to be a vegetable. Within minutes of calling the woman, we were shuffling behind Louis, her awkward 16-year-old son who she sent off to go pick up the laowai at the bus station, undoubtedly with the intention that maybe the laowai might be interested in him. As soon as we entered the hotel, the hotel proprietor, dressed like an over-sized Chinese baby with all of her layers, her short hair cut, and her sleeve protectors over her protective frock coat that ties in the back, waddled up the stairs in all of her layers to show us our room, chatting with us in amazing English. She showed us our room and more importantly, the heating unit on the wall that came with its own remote control. We had heat - and we could control it! This was a first for Erin and I and we were ecstatic. After laying our damp things out to dry and basking in the warmth of a room where we couldn't see our breath, we went downstairs to go explore this random city we suddenly found ourselves in.
"We're going to go for a walk, but we were wondering if there was a time when the kitchen closed?" We asked the hotel owner, who we quickly came to call Chinese Mama.
"You're going out? Don't worry. The kitchen never closes. When you come back, I make you food. No worry," she said with her no-nonsense Chinese attitude coming out in her English.
"Really?!" we said. "Longsheng already rocks," we thought as we left the hotel.
As we started to explore Longsheng, the more I realized that we had stumbled upon some type of bizarro-Kaifeng. Beng-bengs rattled over the street, there was an unexpected blend of people as Han Chinese mixed with Miao and Yao people dressed in traditional clothing as they walked along the street, and it was dirt-cheap. The city even has a nightmarket! And unexpectedly, the city was crawling with people. Outside of Hong Kong, I have never seen as many people jostling for space on the sidewalk and on the street as I did in Longsheng. It was completely baffling as to why there were so many people here.
Chinese Mama lived up to her word and as we stumbled back at the late hour of nine o'clock, bedtime for most Chinese people, she served up a home-cooked meal of fried noodles...and it was awesome. Taking care of us like a mother should, she was able to help us out a lot, letting us know that the government had banned access to the terraces, claiming that they were too dangerous because of the snow and ice that currently caked the landscape and more importantly, the roads leading to them. But, didn't we know that there are some famous hot springs in Longsheng? So, instead of heading to the terraces like we had planned to, the three of us hopped onto a Plague Bus the next day and found ourselves in a deserted mountain resort and its amazing hot springs.
The three of us just submerged ourselves into the water, allowing our bodies to feel warm for the first time in months. We hopped from pool to pool, slowly increasing the temperature every time and even went into "Doctor Fish Pool," a giant hot spring filled with fish that nibbled at your skin and your toes...which is insanely ticklish. It was the most decadent thing I have ever done in my life, mainly because I feel like the only people who ever go to "the baths" are people in British and Russian novels from the 19th century. We stayed there for hours, completely by ourselves and never wanting to leave. Eventually, once we saw the first of an eventual trickle of Chinese people, a Chinese man in a bathrobe and the always-awesome speedo, we knew it was time to leave. But it was ok, because by the time we had left the resort, the sun was out and the snow and ice was starting to melt everywhere - the storm had finally broken.
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