Yeah I Kick Ass and Cook!

July 17th, 2008- Nothing Says Chinese Culture Quite Like Cooking School and Kung Fu!

Julie and I got to sleep "late" until 8:30am because the first of our planned activities for the day didn't start until 9:30am. At Lisa's Mountain View Lodge you can book all these different activities and they send someone to pick you up to take you to the activity. The owner of the lodge, Lisa became quite infamous with our group because she did everything from book tours, to serve food, to do laundry, to run two separate hotels. She was pretty much amazing and if you don't believe me she was even mentioned in Lonely Planet and that is definitely an indicator of fame. So our first activity for the day was to go to cooking school. So our "head chef" who's name was Panda came to pick us up at 9:30am. The funny thing about Panda is she weighed maybe 80 pounds and was about 4 foot 10. She spoke really good English. We then headed to pick up our fellow chefs at another hostel. There were eight of us total; 4 English boys from Oxford, 2 Swedes and us. We were told to pick two meat and one vegetable dish between us from this list and we would cook the same things in a group. We picked sizzling beef, guang bao chicken and vegetable dumplings. But one of the English boys was a vegetarian and went and made things more difficult for Panda and wanted three vegetarian dishes all for himself to cook. I don't think he knows that there is no such thing as vegetarians in China, they'll eat anything and everything here (which we soon quickly found out).

What would a cooking school be without a trip to the local market to pick out our produce and meats? So off we went. Its hard to picture anything quite so grotesquely smelling and disgusting looking than this market. We were asked by Panda outside the market "who wants to see the dog?" (Yes they do serve that here and it really is only a big deal to foreigners). I thought I misheard her but she repeated it and I quickly said I would not like to see it so Julie and I were guided on a different route through the market by some of Panda's helpers. There was produce on the tables and on the floor. There were puddles of what could be water/animal guts gathered all over. The fish were crammed into buckets too small and looked like they were about to fly out. The red meat was literally nailed to the table and the same guy who was wearing no shirt and rubbing his belly was also cutting the meat with his bare hands and a cleaver. What a sight! The sickest part was that all the food served in this town came from that market so thats all I could think about anytime I ate again in Yangshou. This was the point where I started to want to become a vegetarian.

Then we were off to our cooking location which was actually the top floor of a restaurant off set on a patio in a nicely air conditioned room. We were basically cooking using a wok. The best part is we were given a hat and apron, which pretty much makes anyone an master chef. First came food prep for each dish then we would cook one, eat it then cook the next. It was a pretty good deal because it ended up being like $12USD for three hours of entertainment and lunch. But I did have a little trouble actually eating the sizzling beef after that market trip.

We then had to get ready for our next activity; Kung Fu. The thing about signing up for these classes offered by Lisa is that you didn't really know the details so basically anything could happen. This was exactly the case for Kung Fu. I thought it was going to be a nice little demonstration of some Kung Fu moves and we would practice them. Not in China. Instead it was an hour long Kung Fu cardio class. For this class, Julie and I weren't the only participants from our group. We were also accompanied by Henry (American), Sarah (English), and Hannah (German). We were met by our Kung Fu instructor in the lobby and we were escorted to his dojo. When we got there we met our other fellow participants. There was a little 5 year old boy with his parents, and two shirtless blond guys who turned out to be like 16 and 19 years old guys from the Netherlands studying marshal arts and learning English in Yangshou. A little eye candy never hurt anyone and they basically demonstrated the moves for us to perform. So the first thing our instructor does is tell us to jog around in a circle... and reverse. It was a pretty intense workout to say the least. The whole time the instructor was just kind of giggling to himself because I'm sure we looked ridiculous, I know I felt ridiculous. Oh did I mention he trained in Shaolin for 7 years. He was most impressed by Sarah because he could tell she actually had some practice in this whole marshal arts thing, she had studied tae kwondo for over twelve years. Sarah later told me that the Kung Fu instructor was also the Mandarin instructor for another class that Lisa offered.

Our next big activity was the Yangshou light show. Julie had read about it in her book and to say she was extremely excited for it would be an understatement. We knew it had to be good because Lisa herself had seen it three times and said it was "amazing". Our Kung Fu instructor said it was "perfect". So pretty much rave reviews from all the important locals. Our initial expectations was that it was going to be like us and three other sucker tourists who showed up to watch a couple lasers on a wall. Boy we're we wrong. It turned out that this light show is the biggest thing this town does. We had to take a mini-coach to the outdoor theatre where it is held. It was basically an outside theatre with around 2000 seats set up looking towards where the Lijiang River and Tianjia River meet with the mountains in the background. The place was packed full. It's hard to describe the actual show but Julie and I agreed it was basically an opera on water. There must have been like 150-200 performers in the actual show which was just crazy. The only drawback was that there were like 4 loud yelling Chinese kids behind us who kept re-arranging their seating and hitting me in the process. Apparently I was the only one who noticed how annoying they were because their parents sure didn't. Ahh China.

When we returned we went for dinner to the same place as the night before. We then took a stroll through town and I finally got the courage to get my t-shirt done. I basically sat on a stool on a street while an old Chinese guy painted my face onto a t-shirt while all these people watched and stared. I had my hair back in a pony tail so the guy basically painted me with extremely short hair. Besides basically looking bald it kinda looks like me. I even signed my name at the bottom. I'm not sure who I'll be giving that to as a gift when I get back.


July 18th, 2008- Flying Dutchman. Not just the name of a ship in the Pirate's of the Caribbean.

We only had till the afternoon in Yangshou until we had to catch our next overnight train headed for Xi'an. So Julie and I decided to grab breakfast down the road at the Flying Dutchman Cafe. I of course ordered the All-American Breakfast which wasn't very American at all. I received some weird yoghurt (yes that's how they spell it here) with Museli in it, eggs, bacon, toast and the seasonal juice (which literally turned out to be blended pieces of watermelon in a glass, seeds and all). After lunch we booked ourselves some massages. I personally have never had a massage before so I didn't know what to expect but we talked to another woman on the tour who went and got one the previous day and it didn't sound like they were too invasive here in their methods. So we once again booked it at Lisa's and a younger woman who spoke pretty good English came to get us this time and she took us to Dr. Ling's (who apparently specialized in so many traditional and herbal specialities that she wasn't actually available to perform massages listed in the brochure so we got some other subsitutes). So we were taken to a room upstairs and were followed by a guy and a girl. The woman who lead us there asked us "who wants a harder massage" and when I repeated the question to Julie, this conveyed to her that I wanted it, whoops on my part. So I was assigned the guy and Julie was assigned the girl. We were in the same room at least. It was definitely a hands on experience to say the least and I'll leave it at that.

We had a little time before our scheduled tutorial of majong (you know, that cool tile game you see in pictures) at four so we took a walk down by the Li River. When we returned for our majong lesson we were informed the instructor was running behind so someone else would take us over to the location. The location ended up being Lisa's other business; Lisa's Cafe. It was weird because we just sat there for a bit and then these like 18 year old boys came to teach us. So majong pretty much was like a clever, all out version of rummy with Chinese tiles. It was only an hour lesson so we didn't master it quite yet but it was pretty much amazing anyways.

We then met up with everyone to catch our coach back to the train station in Guilin; same fun, different train. We once again tried to hit up the dining cart but were shut down immediately and had to trek back 8 carriages in the dark, lame one China. At this point we were starting to feel like they didn't really like foreigners in this country.