Knuckle Sandwiches - Part 1

Well it has been a VERY exciting few weeks for the Guihot’s since our last post, with a first time knuckle biting trip to the Post Office and a knuckle punching trip down south to Henan province to check out the cultural gems around Luoyang and the Shaolin Temple (home of the Kungfu Monks). It’s also been a busy time, so much so that when we actually sat down to do our latest blog on the Sino-Guihot happenings it soon became apparent that we had a bit to yabba on about. For this reason, and to make it easier to chew on we’ve broken this one down into two parts. So without further ado here is Part 1 of the nitty gritty from Team Guihot.

White Knuckle

It was enough to cause my knuckles to go white and make me sweat. I was shaking just thinking about it, biting my nails down to the skin. No, it was not a trip to a Chinese Dentist but rather the anticipation of my first experience with the Chinese Postal system. Straight away I had flashbacks of my first visit to the Chinese supermarket, and we all know how long that took (see earlier post :-). In addition to this there were documented stories of one recently departed Australian tai tai going head to head with the Chinese Postal System, all over the colour of the envelope she were trying to send ("I'm sorry - You can only send THAT coloured envelope to THESE places").

The trigger for this trip was the recent marriage of a friend of mine back in Canberra to his long-time partner, so I thought a wedding present with a bit of the local oriental flare was in order (albeit belated). So with the present under the arm sans packaging and my handheld Chinese translator I headed off to the China Post outlet just around the corner, located in the back of a small shop. My expectation was that I would be welcomed by something resembling an Australian Post, even if it was an Australian Post store from a few years back without all the extra non-postage guff. At the minimum I was hoping for a selection of envelopes and packaging options that I could pick from to fill in and take up to pay and post.

What I GOT was an empty and bare white concrete-walled room, with a single window on one side through which I could see two post workers having what I believed was a disagreement on the best way to fill in a form. It looked like the task might require a bit more Chinese than I am currently capable of so I pulled out the translator and managed to string together enough words to let them know I wanted to “send THIS package to A-U-S-T-R-A-L-I-A” (noting the very slowly, which is new territory for me). The problems started when she asked me a question back, to which I responded with a well-practiced blank stare followed by my standard response in this situation - “Bu Zhongwen” (i.e. “No Chinese”). Herein lies the bigger problem though – both Amy and I have found that when we say this to a local in response to a question in Mandarin they just ignore it, and launch into a long conversation in the Chinese dialect irrespective of us shaking our heads, waving our arms and calling “Yingwen, Yingwen” (English, English!) and “Wo bu dong” (I don’t understand).

After a minute or two it clicked to the workers that while they had started the journey to postmaster nirvana I was still back at the ticket office, so the female behind the counter pulled out her basic English to simply say “EMS?” while pointing at an EMS packing envelope to the side. Thinking this was the Chingrish version of saying overseas postage I nodded, hoping that now I would be able to get out of there ASAP. When she told me the price I was a bit surprised, but completed the necessary form and put all the bits into the packing envelope they provided.

As I was about to hand her over the package it occurred to me that I may have assumed EMS as the only international option, and after a bit of too-ing and fro-ing and hair pulling I discovered that China Post also offers a standard (and hence cheaper) international post service on parcels, except that this had to be done at the International Post Office a good 30min walk away. At least the next time I have a choice – I pay a reasonable price for postage back to Oz using the standard China Post service (quality of service unknown) and have to do a bit of a hike for it, or take the closer option but have to pay more than twice the price for the luxury. As for how good the EMS option is, well the jury is still out until I hear word that it got to its destination all safe and sound. Until then I might do some investigation on how the former might just travel and what REAL services I would be sacrificing for price and that extra bit of exercise (travel by air vs travel by sea? Cargo ship vs fishing boat? Pack mule vs Chinese Nuclear Sub?).

Potential Knuckle

The weekend before was our eagerly anticipated trip away down south to the Henan province with the local China Culture Club, to check out a number of key cultural spots around the city of Luoyang. The itinerary had us taking an overnight sleeper train on Friday evening and arriving in Luoyang on Saturday morning, at which time we would bus it to the hotel and have breakfast before visiting the UNESCO-listed Longmen Grottos on Saturday morning and the White Horse Temple/Cave Museum in the afternoon. Sunday was scheduled for some serious kungfu time, with the trip to the Shaolin Temple and then onto a Kungfu school before flying back to Beijing in the evening.

We had been told that it could be a bit of a trip to the West Beijing Train Station where we would be departing from, so we gave ourselves 1hr to get out there thinking it would be a half hour taxi and then 1/2hr for coffee. We grossly underestimated the traffic on the western side of town though, particularly the traffic around the train station itself. By the time we got there and through the luggage scanners (which were at the main entrance, forcing passengers to form long queues along the footpath) we met the tour group with 5 minutes to spare and only really had enough time to grab a few travelling snacks and go to the toilet before boarding the train and finding our soft sleeper cabin. These are 4-bunk cabins, so we were sharing with a American called Gail who lives and works in Beijing. She had come with 3 friends and her husband but they had booked very late and all four were in difference rooms and the two men were actually relegated to the hard sleeper section (6 bunks per cabin, no doors, and with allocation of beds being somewhat loose in documented process, making it a real potential for arguments and some real knuckle should the negotiations not go well). They managed to get the bottom bunks, and when the other Chinese passengers complained they just pretended not to understand – one for the foreigners. It was a great experience for all as we had never done the overnight train travel before and although the ‘mattress’ was more on the futon side of hardness we would certainly do it again (but take along our own roll-up mattresses next time). I tended to wake up every time the train slowed down to stop at a station, which was very regularly. I also had the lovely experience of the wake-up call at 3 in the morning by Madeline who actually thought it was time for EVERYONE to rise, and who gave me a good shake before realising that the sun actually wasn’t up. NOT HAPPY JAN! Oh well, time to roll over to the side of the body that WASN'T numb.

Amy making our Soft Sleeper feel a bit homey - they were cramped and the beds hard but they are a good way to travel for the price (and ALWAYS sell out quickly).

Luckily for the tour group all of our rooms were available when we reached the hotel for breakfast, allowing us the opportunity to head up to the rooms for an hour and freshen up with a shower and a rest before we started the whirlwind visit to three tourist places that day. Most importantly though, the hotel café sold coffee so there was no need for any of the more serious caffeine addicts to invoke the spirit of Wong Fei Hung there and then.

View of the neighbouring parkland from our Luoyang Hotel, with locals practicing their Tai Chi and Kungfu. Boxing practice is also a popular activity in the park.

Stone Knuckle
With our stomachs all full up with eggs and bacon we boarded the tourist bus with the other 22 Luoyang virgins to head out to the Longmen Grottos just out of town. There are plenty of grottoes in China (it’s a real grotto-fest here), but these ones are particularly famous not so much for the caves themselves but the thousands of Buddha statues that reside in them, many still in very good condition given the issues around the cultural revolution. They hold such historical significance that they were actually China’s first UNESCO site and the site is well preserved and set up to manage the large numbers of tourists that flood through the area. This included a system of little golf-buggy like cars to take visitors from the main car park to the grotto ticket entrance and plenty of signage in English (always a bonus, especially in the areas away from the major cities). Lucky for us Luoyang, with its population of 5 million, is considered a “medium city” by China standards so tends to be better versed in catering to the foreigners.

We were very surprised at how well many of the buddhas had stood up to the elements, although many of them tended to be suffering loss of definition of finer features due to a combination of erosion and from visitors touching them. Where the statues still had their hands (which were missing on quite a few), the finer features like the knuckles were long since gone thanks to the wind. While there was some serious amount of stairs to climb up and down as we traversed the side of the mountain, a few special features really made it worth the effort. The biggest one for me had to have been the grotto that had engraved into its walls 15,000 carvings of 2cm high buddha’s, none of them the same. And while our tourist guide was unable to confirm if someone had actually counted them all individually, she was able to tell us that the painting covering the ceiling of this cave actually stated the number of individual carvings in this grotto. How close it is to the mark is anyone’s guess (or someone’s homework), but it was really great to see the work put into this marvel of human patience.

A zoom-in of one panel of the 15,000 2cm-high buddhas in the Longmen Grotto Wanfo Cave.

One of the main sections of the Longmen Grottos.

After heading around in the tour-group posse for a while we got the opportunity to do a bit of exploring ourselves before lunch, so we moseyed up to the far end and checked out the biggest statue on this side of the river. While we looked with excitement at the action on the other side of the river we realised we did not have the time to head over there and check it out, but have already decided that there is enough parts that we DIDN’T see to make it worthwhile heading back there again (likely by ourselves next time).

No-handed Luke - One of my favourite statues from the Longmen Grottos.

The biggest statue on the western side of the river, and a hard one to photograph sans tourist heads popping up in front of you.

With all the West-side Grottos checked out we were dropped back to the main entrance where we wandered down to the bus and headed for lunch. In and out in an hour and we were on our way to check out the White Horse Buddhist Temple which was the first Buddhist temple in China. While it was nice and very peaceful it did in the end look similar to the Lama Temple here in Beijing that we visited shortly after we arrived. We were though amazed to come across one particular statue bearing a remarkable resemblance to one of my old Uni acquaintances back in Canberra (photo below).

Does the moustache give it away?

The room that Harry Potter built (inside the White Horse Temple).

Amy and I at the White Horse Temple. Photo by Maddy (who is getting better).

After a quick wander through the many cheap souvenir stores crowding the temple entrance we boarded the bus again and headed into the centre of town to check out a local museum housing some very old excavations of horses and chariots long since petrified. By this stage though we were nearing the end of our stamina for touristy things so we decided to avail ourselves of the remaining sunshine that was filtering its way through the Luoyang smog outside. Once the rest of the group had done their loop and Amy had knocked back one local's request for a photo it was a short trip back to the hotel for dinner and proper sleep on a real bed, not knowing that the next day I would more than surpass my desire to have a simple photo taken with a kungfu monk (call it a dream come true). For those knuckle stories though you'll need to wait for Part 2. In the meantime, we hope you have enjoyed reading this first bit of our first trip into the more 'urban' parts of China.