I Have My Reasons

In case my Shangri-La rant has left you with the impression that I’m just a complete crank, let me catalogue some other things about this trip to illustrate where I’m coming from:

Every restaurant we ate at had people smoking in it.  Some were chokingly full of smoke.  If we tried to escape the smoke by eating at an outdoor table, we were usually within smelling distance of an open sewer.

Every long-distance bus we were on had a vomiting passenger (EVERY bus, I’m not kidding).  Our assigned seats on one bus had suspicious brown stains on the seats (we sat elsewhere).  On at least two buses, the driver smoked non-stop, right beneath the “smoking strictly forbidden” sign.

The toilets in Yunnan were horrifying.  The squat toilets I used thirty years ago in India were pristine models of hygiene by comparison.  I won’t even describe them, lest I give you nightmares.  Except to say that at some of the bus rest stops, the toilets were separated only by three-foot-tall knee walls and the fronts of the “stalls” were wide open, so you had the pleasure of shitting in full view of anybody who walked by.

In rural areas, people don’t seem to know what to do with non-biodegradable trash, so it just piles up.  Markets, villages, bus rest stops—they all had piles of smelly trash swarming with flies.

Our last stop was the village of Duoyishu, in the Yuanyang rice terrace area.  We were stunned by the beauty of the landscape.  Well, we saved the best for last, we thought.  Until we went for a walk around the village.  As we walked past one house, a little girl ran across a terrace to spit at us; Tom took a direct hit.  Later that day, other little kids were so hostile to Lillia that she started crying and said she wanted to go home.  Lillia is so friendly and warm, she could make friends with a stone, but not with these feral brats.

Even the food was disappointing.  Usually the food is one of the great pleasures of travelling in China.  And don’t get me wrong—we did have a handful of really great dishes.  But mostly it was rice noodles, with the same ingredients every time.  We love noodles, so at first this was fine.  But after rice noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a few days, we didn’t care if we never saw another rice noodle for the rest of our lives.  When we returned to Kunming from Shangri-La, to our hotel surrounded by rice noodle restaurants,  I needed to take action.  I went to the reception desk and managed to say in Chinese, “Excuse me, is there a good restaurant nearby?  We really like Chinese food, but we don’t want to eat noodles.  We want to eat rice.”  The restaurant he sent us to really was pretty good.  It would have been even nicer if it hadn’t been hot, noisy, and full of smoke.  Also, Tom reported that the men’s bathroom was appalling and there was a guy vomiting in it.  See a theme here?

What with all this plus all the illness, some of which I’ve already chronicled, we were more than happy to be leaving.  When we got back to the airport in Kunming, we felt so happy and relieved.  For about ten minutes.  Until we found out that our flight had been cancelled.  Now, no one at the airport seemed to speak much more English than I speak Chinese.  So we were in a confused state of anxiety for about the next hour and a half.  A woman at the Hainan Airlines desk made multiple phone calls and ran around with our passports to argue with people at other desks, before finally producing boarding passes for us on another flight.  I’m sure when she got home from work that day, she had to lie down and take some Tylenol.  We then had about 20 minutes to get through security and out to the gate, which of course was the very farthest one from the ticketing area.  When we arrived, gasping, at Gate 59, we found that our 9:00 flight had become a 10:00 flight.  Then we sat on the tarmac for two hours.  When we finally took off, the passengers erupted into applause.  We were lucky to make our connection in Beijing.

We are thinking now about next summer.  Canada’s looking really good. 

Lost in Translation

I know that half the time I speak or write Chinese, I sound like a complete idiot.  So I have great sympathy for the people here who write signs in English for tourists.  It’s not at all like translating from, say,  Spanish;  it’s more like translating from Klingon or Mimbari.

Here are some signs we’ve come across on this trip.

 This one has the simple typo-like error.  You can find ones like this all over the world.  Actually, they could have saved themselves the trouble of translating it;  it wasn't the English-reading tourists who were spiffing all over the place.

Here’s an interesting example of choosing the wrong meaning of a word.  I’m sure I do this all the time when I look up a word in the dictionary.  What is a yak angle, you may ask?  That third character, jiao, means corner, angle, or HORN.  (Why Salisbury?  I've got no idea.)

This one was at the Yak Meadow on Snow Mountain.  They were trying to say “stay on the path; don’t trample the meadow”.  If you look up those last two characters, the dictionary does indeed say “lawn”, but a real lawn as we think of it in the west is a pretty foreign concept.  Chinese gardens generally have trees, flowering shrubs, water features, and in between, elaborate stonework rather than grass.  How they came up with “stampede” is anyone’s guess.  It makes me picture a herd of startled tourists galloping across the meadow in a panic.

Here’s a translation that was just too literal.  The Chinese literally says, “caution fall water”, but it came out sounding like a command in English.

Now here’s a real head scratcher:

 It starts out making sense and then just goes careening off the rails.  When I have access to a character dictionary again, I’m going to look up all the words and try to decipher the meaning of this train wreck.