More In-depth Sleeper Bus Account

Since the lowlight of our Yunnan trip seems to be the most interesting to people, you can read more about our nightmarish sleeper bus experience here. "Beautiful Country Person" is a literal translation for the Chinese word for "American" and she's my alter ego at work. You can also see a little bit of what I do for Ctrip.com, though I must warn you that the website is getting an overhaul and it's really ugly right now (I could use one of my brilliant graphic designer friends over here...JK and AH, China needs you). More later.

Yunnan Report and Happy Boxing Day

That is a late Merry Christmas to all our dear friends and readers. We had a very strange Christmas in a very strange place. We only returned a few hours ago and are blurry with the lack of sleep and general sensory overload that comes with travel. We have been to Yunnan Province in the far southwest of China. We flew into Kunming and traveled by bus to Dali, where we spent most of our time before heading north to Lijiang and back to Kunming (and Shanghai) just this morning.

The weather was glorious with full sun and the bluest skies we've let into our lungs in months. Temperatures were in the high 60s and low 70s, which was a real treat for December. When we flew into Kunming it looked gray and concrete, which is what we had just left, so we got on the bus and went straight to Dali, a small traditional town in a setting like Salt Lake City with a giant lake to the east and a long front-like mountain range shadowing over to the west. Dali is China's backpacker paradise with many ex-pat run bars and cafes serving up pancakes and burritos and all the comforts of home. It's also the traditional home of the Bai--one of China's minority groups, who entertain foreigners with their colorful tie-dyed outfits and outrageous headdresses. The hippies love it there with all that color and the cheap marijuana that traditionally dressed older women sell out of beaded fanny packs. We couldn't help but get sucked in with all the good coffee and English menus, so we stayed at the Bai Family Inn--a nice family-run place with rooms set around a courtyard with a lovely collection of potted camelias--for three nights at just over five dollars a night. We also got hooked on an Indian restaurant, where we had a great Christmas Eve feast of daal, chicken masala, veggie pakoras, and plenty of naan.

The Chinese seem to think that Christmas Eve is the actual holiday we celebrate and Dali has its own special tradition, where children in Santa hats run through the streets after dark attacking people with silly string and cans of Christmas tree flocking. No one seems to know where this original take on Christmas tradition came from, but we joined in with retaliating cans of foam we hid in our sleeves, so when kids came up to us yelling "foreigners, foreigners" and sprayed us point blank in the face with flock, we could surprise them with some spray of our own.

We eventually left Dali and spent Christmas day in a bus for a beautiful four-hour drive north through the foothills of the Tibetan plateau north toward Lijiang, another traditional village (this one inhabited by the Naxi minority group). Lijiang is a beautiful town with a maze of traditional slate-roofed buildings and a 20,000 foot glacier-clad (including the southernmost glacier in the Northern Hemisphere) monster of a mountain backing it. The town is unfortunately overrun with Chinese tourists (yes, it is their country after all, but the Chinese have a very different way of traveling--think Disneyland, senseless photography, megaphones, and matching ballcaps--that doesn't suit the Western sense of adventure). We got out of there after a few hours and took the sleeper bus back to Kunming.

This is becoming more of a travelogue than I intended, but I have to talk about the sleeper bus as it was a lowlight of our trip. Having had positive experiences in sleeper trains in China, we thought the sleeper bus would be just as pleasant, but we were definitely wrong and spent the night snuggled up to three Chinese men in the equivalent of a king-size bed with nothing to separate us from their greasy jackets and rotten-teeth bad breath. The bus had forty bunks in two levels and that added up to 80 stinky feet, 80 hacking lungs, and about 40 cigarettes. The smell was unbearable and I slept with my dust mask on (little help) and Peter hung his head out the window almost the whole time (pretty damn cold on those mountain passes). The worst part (well, hard to say what the worst part was) was that the advertised 12 hour ride was several hours shorter, and we ended up in Kunming at 4:30 in the morning. We were allowed to stay on the bus and sleep until 8:00, but without air moving through the window, we couldn't handle it and decided to head out into the city. Well, the city was of course dead and we were too, so we took a cab to the airport and got on the first flight to Shanghai we could (with a three hour pit stop in industrial river-town Wuhan).

Shanghai never seemed so clean and orderly and we're happy to be home, though the clean air was undoubtedly refreshing and the naan and espresso soothing to our souls. It was certainly our strangest Christmas but since we couldn't be with our families this year I'm glad we had an adventure.

Negligence

Working girl has been such a negligent blogger. I apologize. I have been busy and sick and writing final exams and my European friends have suckered me into joining Facebook, threatening to not invite us to anymore parties if I don't, and all that has cut into my musing time considerably.

We are finally into winter here as evidenced by the fallen gingko leaves (men on campus beat them off the tree with brooms so we didn't get to spend very much time enjoying the delicate yellow fans), the legions of sweet potato vendors, and nighttime temps in the 30s (Fahrenheit that is). It feels more like what we would call fall and it's pretty nice. However, we will be escaping the brutal Shanghai winter by heading south to Yunnan province for Christmas. Yunnan ("south of the clouds") is home to China's eternal spring with trees beginning to blossom in January. Supposedly they've figured out how to get at least one kind of tree to bloom every month in Kunming, the capital. More about it, of course, after we've been there. But we're very excited to travel again and to spend Christmas someplace totally different. Please God, don't let there be Santa Claus there.

Shanghai is feeling homey and boring, so we are trying to have little adventures here and there to remedy that. Last weekend we accidentally found one of the oldest parts of town--a maze of muddy streets and tile roofs. It was market day and fish were being beheaded in the streets and vegetables we had truly never seen before were being sold for pennies. Great refreshing stuff when you're used to the big city that doesn't feel so adventurous anymore. Just to prove that Shanghai is certainly still an exotic place here's a local menu and a baotzi steamer almost as large as I am.

Corporate

Maybe I made it sound like I was really enjoying teaching and my open schedule and coffee with Peter in the morning and all that. And maybe I let most of you know how I never wanted a full-time job again and maybe I complained a lot when I had one about how much my back hurt and how I didn't have time to write and stuff. Well, maybe I misled some of you into thinking that I wasn't going to consider that travel website job, because you may be surprised to find out that I took it. Only 20 hours a week though, so don't worry about my students--they're stuck with me.

I am now an English editor at Ctrip.com, the travel website for Chinese by Chinese, now for foreigners too with help from some foreigners. I work with a team of three other English editors and a handful of Chinese translators. We're trying to bring the insider Chinese travel info to adventurous Westerners and ex-pats living in China. The website sucks right now, so I won't send you to it yet.

Here's what it means for my life, though. Three days a week I ride my bike for 15 minutes (20 with an icy Siberian headwind), cram into a lightrail car for 50 minutes (sometimes it is so packed I can't even get my hands to my mouth to eat my breakfast), switch to the subway at one of Shanghai's busiest stations for my 20 minute subway ride, then I walk to my building, where my fancy e-card gets me in the door. I'm on the sixth floor. My building has six floors and six thousand employees, so I'll let you do the math for how many people that means are in cubicles on my floor. That's right--cubicles. No offices. I had to leave a bread crumb trail to find my desk after going to the bathroom the first time. Luckily, whoever had the desk before me left hello kitty stickers all over the computer and phone, so it's pretty obvious where I'm supposed to be. (This is not uncommon in China--the whole stickering thing. Our refrigerator came covered in cartoon stickers. Super attractive and grown-up.)

I will get into answering your questions of "why" later. But for now, just know that I'm enjoying corporate life again (though this is significantly more corporate than my last job, even though it doesn't have a no popcorn policy). I'm learning a lot about China and what it means to have an office job in Shanghai. The money's good, too, so maybe we can go out for burritos sometime at one of those fancy ex-pat Mexican cantinas everyone is talking about. Pictures of my work environment to come...though I don't think my lens is wide enough to capture 1000 cubicles in one frame. I already have a little regret though, which I'm going to express to you with this image I took in downtown Shanghai last weekend.

This is not an uncommon sight here in Shanghai. When people aren't at work, they want you know they aren't at work, so they wear their pajamas around to prove it. This is one of the better examples I've seen, though.

And yes, of course I'm glad Peter's back.