through the looking glass

Leishan is a sleeps two road town that thinks it’s a city. or city that thinks its a town, either way it’s having a bit of an identity crisis. the roads were paved but coated in a sheen of redbrown mud. the bus station is the side of the road, each way heading out to a bigger city. behind the two street mao faced buildings lay the remains of an old town, we crossed a bridge over a little river half a k away to get there, finding the nicest hotel in the city vacant and willing to let us in for a mere 80 kuai a night. the zealous central heating system warmed both our wet bones and my laundry. a late dinner at the only restaraunt in town yielded not only beautiful, delicious food but a welcoming, if a bit touchy feely, owner, who passed around the homemade mijiu (like baijiu but better tasting, with cranberries I believe) and cigarettes and gave us a discount on our meal as I was the first american he’d ever met and he loves america. on the way home we stopped in a bakery where they provided both tomorow’s breakfast and directions to the best place to catch the bus to rongjiang, which they believed ran about every hour.

refreshed we set off out of this strangely pleasant place and walked the road in search of our bus. after only 15 minutes, at almost exactly noon, it arrived and we flagged it down, only to find out packed to the brim, people spilling into aisles and sitting on luggage. the money lady (on every chinese bus there’s the driver and the person who collects the money, 99 out of 100 a woman) tried to give me her front row seat, I proceeded to try and give it to a tired looking girl student who wasn’t biting, and followed hu into the belly of the beast. sitting on a little stool in an aisle isn’t nearly as bad as you’d think, and it would have been almost pleasant if four of the people sitting around us didn’t keep getting motion sick. for reasons I have yet to understand chinese women are particular prone to this problem, and the twisty mountain roads (*stunning*, when I could see them over some guy’s left arm or, when standing for a while, past the mud and condensation on the windows) did nothing to help the matter. the movie they played was american, mousetrap. hu believed they put it on for me, as most busses show kung fu fliks or slapstick chinese comedy shows, which I found amusing as I would have much preferred kung fu. two hours in to our four we stopped for a meal, fifteen minutes later a half empty bus to congjiang pulled up behind ours. hmm. congjiang’s only an hour past rongjiang….inquiries made, refunds given, and though it cost a little more and we had to wait another fifteen for this bus to eat we had real seats. just before we bought the tickets we checked the map and realized that we had wanted this one to begin with, as we were headed to zhaoxing, a dong minority villiage 15km outside congjiang. we’d been on the wrong bus. whoops ; )