We’re now in southwest China and renting a room in a traditional, wooden home along a cobblestone street in the quaint, historic town of Lijiang. The oldest part of this town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so it sometimes feels a little like walking through Disney World’s Epcot Theme Park, with all the carefully preserved winding streets and meticulously painted wooden bridges that cross the winding system of canals. It’s incredibly pretty, for the most part.
But then there’s the spitting. There seems to be no social etiquette against hocking a loogie in public in China, even in a touristy place like Lijiang. Everyone – men, women, kids – are hocking loogies here, coughing up and spitting wads of flem. It irked me at first: this splattering of yellow flem all over the place, like dog terds in a city without curbing laws. Fairly quickly, though, I’ve embraced this cultural oddity, and I hock loogies too, unashamedly and everywhere. When in Rome…
Looming over Lijiang is the prominent Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, which at 18,360 feet is taller than any peak in the continental U.S. We took a bus out to the mountain and paid for a gondola ride up about 4,680 meters, 100 meters below the peak of the mountain, which left us a bit short of breath. Many of the Chinese tourists had also paid for oxygen tanks to suck on during their brief time at elevation. After two weeks of breathing the noxious fumes of Beijing and Shanghai, we took in all we could of this fresh mountain air.
Lijiang is in Yunnan province, which borders Burma, Thailand, and Laos, so there’s a multicultural mix of ethnic foods here. Even the soups and dumplings taste richer than in the northeast, so we’re eating a lot of that.
But there is a major similarity between the two regions – between the industrial, commercial northeast and the rural, mountainous southwest. In both places, it seems apparent by now, most people cannot fathom the idea that not everyone speaks Chinese. I guess that’s fair, as Chinese is the most widely spoken language on Earth. But still, it’s weird to experience. Repeatedly, I’ve tried to express that I don’t speak the local language, only to be met with another bluster of Chinese sentences. I respond in English. And the person, looking confused, responds in Chinese. Yet they just keep talking Chinese to me, a white guy also with a confused face, and I keep repeating I don’t speak Chinese, in my white guy language.
We enjoyed Jade Dragon Snow Mountain so much that we headed back to the Yulong Mountains, but next to the northwestern flank of the massif, which forms one side of the Tiger Leaping Gorge.
