Having Been in Beijing, now Being in Paris

it’s funny how many of my friends will get dreamy-eyed when you talk about french boys on electric scooters.  “ever since i saw that mary-kate and ashley go to paris movie”, they muse, “i’ve always wanted to see paris from the back of some super handsome french boy’s moped.”  and it’s not just my friends. hundreds of american girls are swept up by french accents, the city of lights, and romantic encounters involving a vespa.

well, girls, the secret’s out.  french boys now understand this weakness and are trying to exploit it as best as they can.  i was with friends on one of our all-night clubbing adventures at a “hip-hop club” that, in all actuality, sounds just like any other american club without the hip-hop specialization.  at the end of the night, my two girls and i were waiting in the club’s entrance for the metros to start running at 5:30am.    a tiny band of boys walked by us… and back… and back again… and back.  one of them attempted to make small talk with us which we shut down, then left… and returned AGAIN, this time with the other ones in tow.  two of them started trying to chat up my non-interested friends, and the third sat next to me and immediately revved up his french seduction game.

a sidenote about french men:  they accost women on the street and say throatily, “bonjour mademoiselllllllllllle” in their sexiest manner- which, if they’re older and creepy and you’re just trying to get to the library, comes off horribly unappealing and scary.  french boys and men will tell you that you’re ravishing, that you’re the most beautiful woman they’ve seen in their life. or they’ll say really awful, gross things to you in a cajoling, dirty manner.  hopefully not much of the latter.  they sometimes follow you through the metro, “accidentally” fall against you on the bus… the audacity and serious creepiness of some french guys is astounding to me.  french girls and women, in return, are excellent at ignoring these men completely and never giving random men on the street so much as a glance or the time of day.  i have guy friends studying here that complain about how cold and heartless french girls are, but i must admit that i’d do exactly the same to them, if i didn’t know them.

anyways, this boy (whose name i couldn’t quite comprehend from his slur-mumbled response) told me that i was the most beautiful girl blablablahbla.  i laughed and said, “man, you’re really french.  nice pick-up line”.  he got offended and told me that he wasn’t like those other french guys. he wasn’t dangerous!  so, i asked him for some evidence that he wasn’t a sweet-talking stereotype, and here were his reasons (mind you, he wasn’t exactly in his most rational state of mind):

he had a good family. they were very close.  sometimes, he helps with chores in the house.  he went to la sorbonne and studied econ.  he was very interested in econ philosophy. he has a gold card.  he has nice hands. his mom bakes great pies.  he enjoys great pies.  his friends are nice (and handsome, eh? here, he nudged me and winked).  he works for a well-known financial institution. ah, and then his eyes lit up.  here, he said, is why i’m not dangerous (and therefore why i should fall in love with him).  “i have,” he says, dramatically, “a little red vespa”.

any other girl, and they would have done the whole swoon thing that he expected. i just laughed.  vespas do not impress me.  i disliked those mary-kate and ashley movies.  and i will NOT be charmed by this man who obviously has done his research on american girls.  anyways, i had a great time listening to his hilarious logic, and decided to give him my number and just not respond.  to shorten an extremely complicated story, i ended up accidentally agreeing to a date with him and then having a surprisingly intellectual, wonderful time during the date.  then at the end of dinner and ice cream on the little island in the middle of the seine, he drove me home on the back of his little red vespa.  and, much to my chagrin, i really enjoyed it.

that’s right friends, i was at fashion week.  in PARIS.  to update you, this blog used to be called “Being in Beijing” and, since I am no longer in Beijing, has been changed.  My style of blogging hasn’t though; I still post a month after cool things happen.  My apologies.  Anyways, back to the real meat of this blog: runway shows.

For those of you who intend to be in Paris during the month of March and feel like rubbing off a bit of this city’s glam, write Paris Fashion Week into your calendar.  Here’s the secret: you can get into the fashion shows! For free!  And rub elbows with the biggest names in the fashion/celebrity world!  I went to 4 in all, starting with Giambattista Valli, then Victor & Rolf, afterwards Kenzo, and finally Chloé.  I attempted Alexander McQueen (ha! why in the world I thought I’d get in, I’m not quite sure) and Paul & Joe.  What my friend clued me into was that if you go to the fashion show venue, and they’re spread all over the city during this week, at least an hour early and stand in the Standing line, you have a decent chance of charming your way past the bouncers.  Most Standing line people have Standing invites, but if the list-holders and the bouncers see you standing there first in line with that dogged determined grin on your face, their hearts might just melt enough to slip you in after all the invite-people.  It works!  My friends and I (usually one or two other girls) made friends with the bouncers, chatted up the list-holders, and got to look really cool when we showed up in line and the big unfriendly security men lean over to say hello and let us move to the front of the line.  Sometimes, people in the Standing line with invites will have extra, and they’ll slip one over to you too. That happened to me at Chloé.

See?  All you need is patience, a chic outfit, determination, and a disarmingly charming attitude!  It worked for me.  I loved seeing the shows, not just for the famous people (though that was pretty fun spotting out the celebs behind their massive glasses and little entourage) but for the ridiculous/fabulous fashion on the spectators and models!  We saw Nina Garcia, Anne Hathaway, some girl from the Hills tv show, a ton of skinny young models, and KANYE WEST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the man himself, representing my ‘hood. I got a great picture with him after the Victor & Rolf show because when the show ends, everyone goes out the same door and you end up getting pushed out the door with the head editor of Marie Claire or the next fashion designer darling.  Some of the people were wearing the strangest outfits (like a giant neon furry vest?) while others were drop-dead gorgeous.  I saw a lot of leather leggings, all sorts of ankle boots, great big shapeless coats, and really hot heels.  Giambattista Valli’s fall-winter 09 line was half-inspired by peacock’s, V&R had these amazing snow-white accents to their darker grey dresses, Kenzo was inspired by Russia, and Chloé was, as always, classic.  My favorite by far was Kenzo because of its sexy playful ethnic boho chic look.  I’m so inspired to go shopping now; alas, price shock from being in China hasn’t quite worn off yet. Another result of Fashion Week: I got a mad cold after standing out in lines for hours and was the irritating sniffling blowing-nose-er in all my courses, but it was so worth it.  Only in Paris, right?

i’m still not done writing about the semester!  it’s kind of weird that every post on cmcabroad is now written by me (everyone else was responsible and wrote theirs within the week, not months after like i’m doing), but i figure it’s better to write it anyways than not at all. this one’s about boxing.

i started boxing casually at cmc, with a friend. he had wraps and little gloves and pads, so he’d sometimes bring me out to parents field and teach me how to jab and left-hook.  when i interned in the philippines, i got really into thai boxing.  my friend at the office there was into MMA, and she suggested that i take thai boxing at a gym nearby.  it was and continues to be the most fantastic and fun sport i’ve ever done, hands down.  i love how dirty thai kickboxing is.  you use your elbows, your shins, and your feet in addition to your fists to pummel the opponent in the most devastating way possible.

i kept meaning to find a gym for muay thai (the thai word for thai kickboxing) in beijing, but all of them were far, i was too involved in sightseeing, had tests… all excuses that prevented me from going.  the last month or so, i decided to finally go to a free class on some saturday afternoon all the way in guomao, across the city.  i got there late, and when i walked in, the entire group of sweating, fierce guys stopped… and stared at me.  great.  while they continued their set, one of the head guys (an american from somewhere) chatted with me while his boss kept working the class.  i told him that i trained a bit in the philippines, that i can pack a decent punch, and that i only had 3 weeks left to be in the class.  then the boss came over, and he basically gave me a one-on-one training, since it was my first time.  vince was awesome. while we were chatting, he told me about how he doesn’t really speak chinese because he’s either at his gym (and teaches in english) or at home. or traveling to compete. i said, oh, that’s great!  do you travel locally? like around bejing? around china? no, he said. internationally. he has to defend his title. me, being a curious idiot, asked him what kind of title he had. i was thinking that he was mabye bangkok’s champion or something, and he says all non-chalantly, “oh, my title? i’m the world middleweight champion.”  and, with that, he made me resume my uppercut-hook-cross combinations.

the next time, i got another one-on-one session while everyone else had to pair with other students. it was awesome.  i was training with a world champion!  i learned a lot of good technique from vince, and wish that i had shown up earlier.  i’ll have to try and find another gym in paris, for next semester.

the chinese have a word for foreigners, besides waiguoren (foreigner).  it’s laowai, which translates in chinese vernacular to white devil.  there were only 3 chinese-americans on our program, so we spent all our time with a pack of these laowai. makes it so much easier to find a bright blond head when you’re lost!  but when chinese people meet some of us, this is what they think:

my blond boys: foreigner they can definitely rip off (if we’re at the markets). then, when the boys speak to them in chinese, they compliment them profusely on their chinese and then have to figure out whether they can still rip them off or not.

alan, a taiwanese-american friend: tour guide.  he was walking with a friend, explaining something about the neighborhood he was in, and when he turned around, a couple of strangers were listening to him expectantly.  they thought, since he was a chinese guy speaking chinese, that he was a free tour guide they could tag along behind.

girls who work out: weird.

phil, the only black guy on the program: kobe bryant.  i didn’t believe him when he told me about all of his kobe catcalls, and “oh my god, it’s KOBE!”, but then when a bunch of us visited the forbidden city, some guy came up to him and asked politely if he was kobe.  an hour or so later, we overheard a bunch of teenage guys whispering something about “basketball” and “great player” in chinese behind us; i turned around, and they immediately stopped staring at phil.  phil says he also gets asked if he’s obama.  he doesn’t really look like either of these two guys, besides the fact that he’s a cute, tall black guy who’s got close-cropped hair.  i always thought he should just pretend to be kobe and get us into some vip clubs, but we never tried it out.

kyle, one of the blond boys: doesn’t speak chinese.  this would be a decent assumption, but they continue to assume that he doesn’t speak chinese AFTER he’s trying to explain something to them in very clear, proper chinese.  one chinese couple (they must have been out-of-towners) asked me for directions to so-and-so, assuming that i was a native girl with some waiguoren bf, but i don’t know directions.  kyle knew how to get to wherever they wanted, so he told them in chinese. then they looked at me.  and i said the exact same thing in chinese to them. after that, they were very grateful.  all “oh, thanks!” were directed to me, and kyle was duly ignored.

me: now, for some reason, they’re always keen to know my entire family history.  they first assume that i’m korean, because i look chinese but my speaking chinese is definitely not good enough for me to be chinese, so… korean?  no, i say. i’m american.  either they insult me for speaking chinese badly, saying i’m neglecting my culture, or they get really excited for a wayward daughter of china to return. the latter is when they give me discounts!  and the insults… well, usually i haven’t learned those insults in my textbook yet, so most of them go over my head.  after all that, they demand to know my whole history. where’s my dad from? my mother’s maiden name? why was she in the philippines? when did they go to the US? and i didn’t speak chinese at home? how many times did i go to chinatown as a kid?  etc. etc.

we went to haerbin for our last program-wide trip. since everyone and their roommates were invited, we had at least 100 people rollin’ up to the restaurants, train stations, and museums with us.  that’s a lot to plan for.  on thursday night, we took 2 big coach buses over to the train station and then spent the night curled up on train bunks.  almost all of us had taken chinese trains by that time, so we weren’t surprised by the drunk guys on the train (a common sight), the mandatory lights-out that make you feel like you’re at camp, and the blaring radio in the mornings.  when we woke up, we were there!  at haerbin!  it’s a historic city, renowned for its russian influence and hagia sophia, a beautiful russian orthodox church.  and its cold temperatures.  everyone warned us about how cold it was, and we still weren’t prepared.  i had accidentally bought snowpants at silk street (and i had congratulated myself on such a good job haggling, until i found out that they weren’t sweatpants but really intense snowpants), and they turned out to be a fabulous investment!  especially for this weekend.  we stayed at the modern hotel, the nicest place in haerbin. after we threw our things into our rooms and had a very strange brunch, we boarded some more buses and went to the TIGER PARK. i know, you’re thinking a stuffed-tiger hall, right? wrong. it was like jurassic park (think: little jeeps with bars on the windows) meets.. well, tigers!  our little van-jeeps drove around an enclosed park where tigers roamed around our cars and snuggled with each other. i’ve never been so close to a giant, dangerous cat!  i was surprised how affectionate tigers are to each other.  when we finished our little jeep tour, we walked on this raised walkway where you looked out onto the tiger’s sparse habitat and, for a tidy sum, could feed them live animals.  a bunch of the boys decided to feed them a live chicken, and the poor chicken tried to fly away but got snapped up by the greedy tigers instead. i’m pretty happy it was too crowded for me to see the feeding frenzy, but all the boys thought it was the coolest thing. dangran.  we heard later, when we were huddled inside the souvenir shop-museum for warmth, that some of the other boys handed over a handful of cash to watch the tigers devour a live sheep.  a whole, baa-ing sheep.

our next stop was a jewish musem. that was an interesting place, mostly because it talked about how great the jewish community was in haerbin and how much the chinese accepted them… but on the street, there were no jewish people to be found.  there was a LOT of propaganda going on about how wonderful and kind the chinese government was to the haerbin jews, but their blatant one-sidedness made a lot of the students uncomfortable/not pleased. we then took over the entire top floor of a korean restaurant and had a great korean buffet.  after that, we wandered around the hagia sophia (my favorite place in the city) and gazed at its very un-chinese beauty.  from there, we were set free and our little group immediately headed back to the hotel in order to put more clothes on and relax.  we wandered around, trying to find a good restaurant, and on the way found hilarious russian souvenir shops that had furry russian hats, lots of daggers, and handles of vodka called AK-47.  the dinner was too filling, and afterwards we wandered around some more to see what the “old town” of haerbin had to offer, and also to find a good bar to hang out in that night.

no success.  we parted ways with another group from our program and instead went to have a great little hotel party in one of the boys’ giant rooms. that was really, really fun.  around 1am or so, we got a call from some other friends that were partying at the mysterious russian club that we had tried (and failed) to find after dinner.  andy, kyle, and i hopped in a cab and found the place, which was called “russian club”. ingenious!  inside, the place was packed with smoky-eyed russian girls and a bunch of seedy-looking guys trying to get lucky.  the guys there were, as we say at CMC, “sketch as hell”. thank god our program rolls in a tight pack, so we just danced with each other and had the boys fence the other guys out.  i hadn’t changed out of my snowpants, and i was soon dying on the hot dance floor.  but it was fun!  we partied to some crazy eurotechno and the boys had a wild time with the stripper pole, trying to spin around as fast as they could. then we went home and passed out.

the next morning, we packed up our things and put them in a massive pile near the concierge while we went to a terrifying japanese biochemical warfare museum, built during WWII. some of the descriptions and models that they had out there were so difficult to handle that i had a hard time not flipping out.  for example, the soldier/scientist/torturers took chinese out into the harsh haerbin cold, chained them naked outside, and saw the effects of frostbite and hypothermia on the body. if they thought it wasn’t cold enough, they set up fans around the “subjects” and froze them a bit quicker.  there were cases of injecting people with horrible diseases, cutting of limbs, putting them in chambers and slowly taking the air out of them, etc. etc.  i’m not going into it more. if you can think of horrible things, it was probably on display there.

then we had a free afternoon where it took us forever to find a place to eat (and the little hole we found had the worst food i’ve had in a good while), then walked around some more until andy, erik, and i separated from the group to hang out in a little bakery and eat cake.  when we got back, we wasted time until it was time to catch the saturday night train that would take us back to beijing by sunday morning.  this time, i was with all of my great pals on the train, and we set up forts on our little train bunks, chatted until late in the night, and fell asleep warm and happy.  when we woke up and eventually got back to our dorm, we still had the whole afternoon and night to mess around and procrastinate on homework.

a bunch of us signed up for a 4-month gym membership at this brand-new little gym a couple of bus stops away from our dorm.  i’d go there sporadically, sometimes 4 times a week, sometimes none.  one of my favorite things to do there was taking their fitness classes, esp hip-hop dance and kickboxing.  we had a little group of girls, edith, laura, mariel and i going to the hip-hop class together firstly because a) we wanted to learn some sick moves to break out on the weekends, since we went out every weekend, and b) because our instructor was undeniably and heartbreakingly hot.  if you looked at him while he was standing still, his face isn’t actually that attractive. but when he moves…. whole different story.  even when he goes through cooldown exercises, simple ones that everyone on a sportsteam has done, it’s mesmerizing.  and hot. did i mention that? i rarely use the word, but the other girls will agree. it’s the only way to describe this man.

it must have broken his heart a little every time he taught our class, a bunch of semi-competent or just plain incompetent giggling girls and wrinkly older women.  there were also two guys there, but- i don’t know what they were doing there, since they were exceedingly nerdy.  one guy came in wearing a turtleneck. first, i have to explain gyms in china. chinese girls don’t work out.  in general.  my chinese roommate thought i was really weird for wanting to go to the gym.  she was shocked when i, bored and annoyed with my own laziness, started doing push-ups on our floor.  anyways, there were a growing number of women going to the gym, but some would wear jeans.  and spend an hour leisurely walking on the treadmill while watching soaps.  the ones that went to class, however, came decked out.  when american college students work out, they wear oversized t-shirts and slummy, awful-looking clothes because they come to sweat, not look good.  the girls that came to my hip-hop class would wear tight cropped shirts and fitted cargo pants to show off their flat bellies.  they’d wear enough makeup to be mistaken for a xiaojie, do up their hair, and even wear push-up bras. i have no idea how they actually did the moves without sweating or splitting a seam, but they did!

another interesting thing about the other people in our dance class was that they never danced out of sheer joy, like we would in the back. whenever the music started to shake our unbearably hot dance studio, we girls would dance around and let loose.  the others never did.  for them, it was a class. and in china, you must practice again and again to reach perfection. so these girls would practice the moves, practice and memorize them until they could recreate the entire routine in their unnatural, stiff way.  no improvisation, no attitude, no fluidity… no beauty.  that’s not the way dance was intended to be!  at least, not hip-hop dance.

we had another class that we’d go to whenever we weren’t studying for the weekly test, and that was kickboxing.  i had been really excited to go to it, but i realized during the first session that it only vaguely resembled real boxing. should have known. anyways, our instructor was a hilarious chinese megalomaniac.  he’d flirt with the push-up bra girls, then pose in the mirror when we “weren’t” watching. the guy loved watching himself in the mirrored dance studio and assumed that everyone else was as enamored in him as he was, though he wasn’t particularly good-looking in any way.  also, he had a limited english vocabulary that didn’t extend beyond what he (we presume) saw in richard simmons fitness video.  he’d speak chinese peppered with “oh yeah!”, “oh baby!” “oooh yes!” “c’mon!” “that’s right”, and “1,2,3″.  nothing beyond three, though.  it was like hearing a bad 80’s fitness guru remixed with chinese fitness lingo.  our little american group always cracked up when we had class, because listening to him speak was, honestly, unreal.

old news, i know.  mariel and i started getting excited about halloween way too early. i’d say at least a month in advance, well before we went to xinjiang for fall break.  we’d all throw out various plans, toss them, and develop new ones.  one was for our group to dress up as ghetto fabulous alice in wonderland characters, another was for all of us to be yao ming, etc. etc.  what ended up happening was that on the friday before hween, everyone had a mad panic and went out shopping.  china has no particular halloween shop.  the only place to find real outfits were adult toy shops or things of those nature, so we all had to improvise. there were plenty of ridiculous things to be found at the vast chinese haggle-markets (chinese people don’t often go to malls. they wander through giant markets with stalls set up in a claustrophobic maze and haggle for things there.  the market we had right next to our school, called dongwuyuan (zoo), was well-known for its übercheap basics.  that night, we assembled and threw our costumes together. i was surprised at how well it turned out!

so, i stuck with the original alice plan by being the queen of hearts in a black dress with red hearts mariel sew on for me, a pointy yellow headband that was turned upside down for a crown, and a queen of hearts card sewed on to my dress.  a cheap but recognizeable costume.  mariel was a spectacular smurfette, edith an eighties girl, andalu as david beckham, ben as a bleach-hair tintin, and brett and rob were the hiphopippotamous and rhymenocerous.  the boys were the cleverest of all, dressing up as different aspects of the american economic recession: two lehman brothers in ripped-up suits, the glost of iceland in a sheet with iceland drawn on it, suave alan with a golden parachute in his backpack, sexy bear sterns wearing an extremely unsexy and cumbersome bear-pimp coat, and the government bailout happily tossing fake dollars from his bucket.  i loved their costumes the most.

we rallied the troops and took a small fleet of taxis over to where the yen fetish hween bash took place, over by the lama temple.  inside, my friend reid got his first taste of stardom.  reid was shirtless, wearing child-sized faery wings he picked up from somewhere. when we got inside, he completed the costume by taking off his sweatpants and wearing only those wings and his high school waterpolo speedo, which had devils all over it.  the chinese went wild over our beautiful blond boy, taking pictures of him and trying to touch him.  after dancing for a little bit, he had to go back and put pants on because so many people, guys and girls, were trying to touch him.  whenever i was with him, i couldn’t help but laugh at how many girls were following him/tv videocams were watching him/guys were hitting on him.  that was the highlight of the night, by far.

mariel got a couple of wedding proposals, and brett had a danceoff with some eurotrash idiot.  the economic crisis boys got locked out of the club and almost didn’t get back in while we danced and ran around, danced some more, and didn’t give up until really late.  it took us almost an hour and a half, to get our coats, since we had lost the key and the coatcheck people were being unbelievably uncompromising.  some of us didn’t come home until 5 or so!  coatcheck fiasco aside, it was a great night.

we got out of turpan by taking a bus to urumqi, the capital of xinjiang.  from there, we spent forever haggling with these drivers in order to drive up to tianchi (heaven lake). tianchi is one of the biggest tourist attractions in xinjiang, and we definitely weren’t going to miss it.  we elected our new friend, who had lived in nanjing for awhile and had the best chinese by far, to haggle for a driver while i chatted with the other ones. they, like practically everyone we met, couldn’t figure out what nationality i was.  obviously i wasn’t chinese, since my chinese was abhorrent for a chinese person.  so… korean?  “no, i’m american,” is what i’d always say, and prompt them to laugh at me. “you’re not american. that’s obvious.”  but i am!  i don’t identify with anything more than my american nationality.  by the end of the trip, even my tripmates would rattle off the whole schpiel of how i’m american but my parents are from china one’s from hong kong and the other’s from fujian province but grew up in the philippines and yadda yadda yadda.  it was amusing how many times we had to go through it, and sometimes i’d just give up and tell them i was chinese.  sometimes, like when i was talking with these urumqi drivers, they’d get all excited because i’m what they call a “huaren” or a chinese from abroad.  and since i’m returning to my motherland, they like me a lot more.  while matt (our haggling new friend) was arguing the price down, the drivers struck up a bargain with me- from one chinese to another.  just like that!  we hopped in the little breadloaf van (that’s what they’re actually called, breadcars, because they look just like them) that was still a huge ripoff and drove up.

when we got there, they informed us that it would cost another 30 kuai for the bus ride up. and they offered to charge us ridiculous amounts to stay there overnight. we had already arranged for the bus to drive us down tomorrow, and we REALLY wanted to stay in some yurts there, so we were furious. furious that everywhere we went, we got ripped off horribly despite our bargaining skills and speaking chinese.  we found out later that it wasn’t just because we were foreigners. we went there in october, when there was nary a tourist to be seen. since a lot of tourist places only open when tourists come (summer and spring), we didn’t have many options.  well, we staged a protest and decided to hike up with our enormous backpacks up the mountain, to tianchi.  it was hard, but we did get some jumping pictures in and saw some gorgeous snowy scenery.  once our sweaty, tired group reached the top, we had to argue some more in order to get a yurt for the night.  it was a palatial yurt, and we ordered a feast.  after that, we stumbled along the icy paths to look at stars over the lake, then fell asleep in a jumbled pile.  if you ever sleep in a yurt, find the smallest one you can. those retain heat a lot better, unlike ours.  since ours was so big, the little stove did little to keep us warm.  so we huddled together, and i almost got squashed to death when erik, snoring besides me, decided to roll over.

but we survived the night!  and when we woke in the morning, ben and i took a horseback ride up to a high ridge on one of the tops of the mountains to see the most gorgeous view of the lake.  tianchi, lake, is nestled between a bunch of snowy mountains at a fairly high altitude.  i decided, while galloping through the snow on my beautiful white stallion, that this was one of the best moments of our memorable trip.  and even though we got ripped off the horseback ride when we came back to the yurt, it was still worth it.  we drove down and immediately found a public shower.  before we hopped into the communal shower rooms (separate for men and women, obviously),  we said goodbye to matt.  for some odd reason, mariel and i were ready before the boys were.  on our way to the train station, we couldn’t find a single cab!  when we finally did, we arrived at the train station with time to spare.  from there, we spent friday night to sunday morning on that train.

it was a glorious trip, for sure, but by the end, we were tired. and sick of people invading our personal space. like the drunk guys that seemed to love our little “room” on the train that consisted of 3 bunks stacked on either side. they’d sit on our beds while we were trying to sleep, or listen to our conversation, or be their rowdy, drunk selves while we quietly read our novels.  one guy was really nice and tried to teach us some chinese, but after having a good 4 hour-conversation, he didn’t get the hint that we wanted to be left alone.  horrible chinese talk-radio shows were blaring from speakers from 8am to at least 10pm, and on sunday morning i finally got out of my bunk, marched up to a little wallswitch that i had noticed before, and shut off the maddening noise.

we got off the train, glad to be “home”, or at least in beijing.  instead of heading straight to the dorms, we stopped by grandma’s kitchen and ordered a giant spread of american/familiar foods.  it was just what we needed. even with the frustrations and rip-offs, it was the absolute best trip that i’ve ever had.  erik ended up taking over 1000 pictures, and we all couldn’t stop blathering on and on about all the amazing experiences we’ve had.

the 24-hour train to turpan was an experience. at the end of our hall was a wildly rowdy bunch of 30-something people who, when boarding, brought cases and cases of beer to keep themselves company. our bunks weren’t in the same “rooms”, and we got yelled at when we were chatting in the hallways outside our “rooms”. otherwise, the train was fine. when we arrived in turpan, we met up with this random american guy that made friends with us at the sunday market in kashgar. with our xin pengyou, we set our day’s agenda to see the flaming mountains, a really cool mosque, and some ancient ruins.

the flaming mountains, obviously, spurred a whole lot of ridiculous jokes. we spent a really, really long time taking jumping pictures together, trespassed beyond this silly little sign, and then proceed to climb the mountain and CONQUER. well, we got bored and didn’t quite get to conquering, but the boys did jump off small cliffs into the gullies and take videos of their hilarious attempts at being stuntmen. the mosque was next, and it was gorgeous in the geometry and the simplicity of its architecture. we got to the ruins by sunset, and ben and i got lost while the other 3 wandered around the really well-preserved ancient city.

we got back and were determined to find some food. for the 25 minutes that we were walking, however, we found nothing. nothing! not a restaurant. we finally settled for this one hole-in-the-wall that had little cute mice scurrying around the back and a really sketchy looking fridge propped up against the wall. also, to make the meal more weird, everyone but erik and i decided to try what looked like testicles. on a stick. they said it tasted fine, but i wasn’t convinced. we think (hope) it was a kidney. but we’re not sure. we tried to go to a bar afterwards and first got into a black cab that refused to turn on its little meter or let us out until we started shouting, and then got into a cab where the cabbie assured us he knew where this one bar was, then proceeded to get seriously lost and ended up asking 2 other cab drivers and a random lady crossing the street. when we turned the corner, someone said, “hey, isn’t that the bar we’re looking for?” and then we told the clueless driver to stop there.

the bar was empty. since we had a small ordeal getting there, we really didn’t care. xin pengyou argued with the waiters to give us a deal, and then we just relaxed. i sweet-talked my way into the DJ’s booth so that i could change his horrible eurotrash music, but once i got in there, i realized that he had absolutely no hip-hop or cool songs that we were familiar with. so i left, in a hurry. we decided to dance regardless of the music, and were going crazy on the dance floor as the other chinese businessmen and businessmen’s wives stared. my favorite moment of that night (besides the wedding) was when we were playing this imaginary-ball dancing game and, in an effort to punt the imaginary ball, i completely wiped out. almost slow-motion, cartoon-style. and in front of the growing crowd of people watching the insane american kids. we took a break after that (to save my shrinking dignity) until the older chinese group beckoned us back to the dance floor. we danced with them, doing the whole circle-up-and-push-someone-in-the-middle-to-perform thing. i got pushed in continuously, and whenever you pushed in one of the chinese people, they would get so sensationally embarrassed that they would actually fight you to get back out.

and then the wedding. walking back to our hotel, ben and our new friend matt spotted a wedding reception with a live band. we could see people dancing and smoking cigarettes from the opened doors. ben and matt drag us in there and dance us right into the crowd of happy celebrating kashgar people who immediately got confused by these dirty (we had been hiking, remember?) foreign kids. mariel, spinning around with ben, and i, spinning around with matt and STILL WEARING MY BACKPACK, were embarrassed beyond reason. the people didn’t kill us, and erik even got offered cigarettes while he was waiting for us at the door! i think everyone was pretty chill about us crashing their party… except the bride. i don’t think she was too pleased.

after our sunday market, we drove up to karakul lake to stay in a yurt for the night.  we arrived at about 11 and had to wake up the yurt people to be allowed in. It was freezing cold, since karakul lake is in the mountains and the weather is a lot like what desert weather would be: hot in the day, freezing at night.  since we arrived so late, they had no fire to heat our little yurt. we decided to improvise and make a giant nest out of every single comforter they had stacked up, which was close to 20.  i’ve never seen such stars as i had there.  we even saw the milky way!  like, not a hazy faded version but all of it.  it was gorgeous.  and then we woke up stiff and frozen.  the blankets were so heavy that it was a mental struggle to decide whether going to outhouse was worth braving the cold, and then a physical struggle to move from underneath the heavy comforters.  we woke up well before sunrise, since xinjiang is (stupidly) on beijing time even though that means that the sun rises at 8:30am or so.  the lake, surrounded by snow-covered mountains, is one of the most beautiful places i’ve ever seen.  as the sun comes over the mountains, it also reflects in the glassy lake below and looks unreal. simply unreal. we were just tooling around the lake, waiting for sunrise and taking levitation pictures with each other, when this little wizened woman came up to us and beckoned us into her little hut. there, in the early dawn, we hung out in this amazing woman’s yurt that she’s lived in for forever while she made us an authentic kirghiz breakfast of hot yak’s milk chai tea and homemade kashgar-style bagels. it was the coolest, most 地道 experience ever! we got to chatting with our yurt man and the woman’s son as we ate our leisurely breakfast, then saw the sunrise and hopped in the car.

straight from the mountains of karakul, we sped off (and nearly died, with the crazy driver we had) to a completely different environment, the desert that’s close to kashgar in the other direction. in the desert, we got to ride sand-buggies at crazy high speeds in the sand dunes. the sand and wind was so bad that for the great majority that i drove back, i had my eyes closed. also, i had never driven stick before. since you couldn’t see over some of the high dunes, we’d just gun the buggy straight up and then free-fall down the other side of the dune for however far down it was. ben was a great driver, but i managed to completely mangle the flags we were supposed to drive between, not on top of. after that, we climbed up on some extremely docile and boring camels for a great camel ride around the desert edge. as we drove back to kashgar, we were exhausted and chock-full of sand in places we hadn’t even imagined sand could have gone. i swear, even with scrubbing and scrubbing, we still had sand in our ears weeks afterwards. went back to our bedbug hotel (the same room, by our request) to battle our “little friends” and readied ourselves mentally for the 24-hour train ride to turpan the next day.