We arrived in Tianshui at 1 in the morning after passing through Xi’an. With the melancholy of Huayin City still fresh in my mind, I braced myself for another city full of those permanently empty high rises. Once we cleared out of the train station, and found a decent hotel, we all went to sleep. The next morning, I woke up, and looked out of the window. There was so much activity! Our hotel happened to be on a busy shopping street. There was a mosque across the way from us, which was jarring at first, because you don’t really associate mosques with China. However, after eating some Muslim beef skewers for breakfast (Martha, I know you hate when I call it Muslim. However, Chinese Muslim people have their own name, 回民 and are seen as their own ethnicity, despite being Han. The direct translation is Chinese Muslim, and so their food and customs are called that), I fell in love. Ben and I wandered around, buying a bunch of snacks, like dried kiwis, corn, and some milk tea. Many, many people stared at us! Some people selling clothes came up to us and asked us for pictures. When they realized we could speak some Chinese, they started asking us about America and our cities. I told them that my hometown had only one million people and that it was the 8th biggest city in the US, and they didn’t believe me at first. We told them that corn in America was sweet, and they were all kind of grossed out by that.
For a ‘small’ rural town, there were a lot of high class stores that sold 100-200 kuai clothes (for comparison, you can get clothes at a bargain market for 20 kuai. 100+ kuai clothes are seen as Western-style, and are gaining popularity in China). The area where I got my beef skewers was next to a bargain market, which seemed much more popular than the rest of the high class shops. Also, there were many other shops gearing up for Grave-Sweeping Day. There was a bridge nearby, which crossed a ditch, and it reminded me so much of Tijuana, when you cross by foot. This ditch had farms at the sides, though. I asked someone, and they said it was farmed by poor people, and that was usually the only thing they had to eat for the rest of the year.
That night, we ate at a Muslim restaurant, which only concreted my love of Muslim food. Some people from our group were slightly icked out by eating lamb, but after my assurances that Muslims were the number one people I trusted the most with a lamb, they tried some dumplings. At the end of the meal, everyone was agreeing that this was probably one of the best meals of the trip. It turned out that the family had 4 daughters. Because they were Chinese Muslims, they were exempt from the One Child Policy (which is slowly turning into the Two Child Policy now).
Tianshui was a nice break from the stressful environment of Beijing. Even though the town had 3 million people, it still felt small and quiet to me. A random person asked one of my friends if she could hang out with an American they had just hired for their school. She told us this story, and I found myself slightly jealous of the American. If I had the chance to teach English at Tianshui, or a town like it, I would gladly take the opportunity to. I’d love to go back.
No comments:
Post a Comment