Dali!! New Years!

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Nothing, I imagine, is quite as interesting as Chinese New Years. Quite honestly, the Chinese people as a whole really know how to celebrate for holidays. I’m sure it would have been insane had we been in places like Beijing or Shanghai it would have been past the point of insane, but here in Dali is was insane enough.
The first night we were in Dali we were supposed to be doing one of the ‘home stays’ but it was cancelled due to….bird flu. Kind of over the top, I haven’t heard anything about it for months, but whatever. I was much more excited to actually be in a city for New Years rather than a village where all they do is watch TV (kind of like our New Years?). We had dinner at a place called ‘Tibetan Café’ which had mostly western food, go figure, but our tour guide probably knew the owner (both Tibetans) and was able to arrange a huge buffet very quickly. The little that I had was wonderful, still starving after that, but being a vegetarian, I got used to that rather quickly. Kat and I went to the dinner full out in our Tibetan outfits that we got in Zhongdian. Ichi (ee-ch-ee) showed us how to properly wear our jackets tied around our waste and everything. Him and the rest of our Tibetan tour guides thought we were the best things ever, lol. I even had someone in the street say ‘hello’ to me in Tibetan (Ta-shee day-lay). Which made me all kinds of happy.
Walking back to the hotel (maybe 10 minutes away? At the most) was one of the adventures of my life. I feel like I was inches away from death. They had been selling firecrackers all day, probably all week, and were setting them off in the street. Had to be hundreds at different points. Every 5 feet one would be going off. I can’t even explain the mess that it was, 乱七八糟 (bad point in your life when Chinese explains things better than English). It was ridiculously dangerous, the place was quite honestly like a war zone. Everything you see in movies with people running and ducking and jumping out of the way. And then you wouldn’t see one and a giant one would go off in front of you nearly making you deaf and blind. Scary as hell.
Being a party day, we had to have a small party of our own. People were getting too afraid to go outside so we stayed in the hotel for a little while playing games. There is this Korean game (I won’t EVER try to explain it on a computer) called “Bunny bunny carrot carrot” (I do remember that carrot was ‘tungan’ though). Tons of weird and hilarious hand games. But really, it was ridiculously stupid. A few of us decided to go outside and check out the chaos ensuing outside. We ended up finding some friends in a bar. I got to talk to one of our friends that was in Beijing that I haven’t seen in a while (he moved up to Haerbing, i.e. Siberia, for school). I had one drink and headed back with a few people. We went back to the hotel at least one hour later to find them still playing those stupid hand games. Since we couldn’t go to sleep (they were in my room) we decided to turn around and go back to the bar. The party cleared out before we left the second time and headed out with us. Stayed for a while, had a pretty decent time with the rest of our group and some Chinese people at the bar. I came back and told the remainder of the people left in the room to get the hell out, I wanted to sleep.

The next day was the actual New Years Day. More and more the place reminded me of New Orleans during Mardi Gras with the throngs of people. We woke up early and as we walked out of the hotel there was a parade with a dragon going by. We headed to a semi-secluded courtyard to practice our own dragon dance. Took us a while because we kept getting stopped by multiple random dragons winding down the road. The moves are actually quite complicated. Not so much during the actual parades, but we performed in a public square; weaving, swirling, doubling back and under, etc. Intense, it was fun, we were such an attraction for the Chinese tourists.
After eating we went back to the square for a show with singers, dancers, etc. There were tons of people so everyone except for Scott (who towers over everyone) couldn’t see. They made some TBCers do some acts, no one really wanted to go up though. Brigette ended up doing some Tai Chi with Jia and Sarah sang a communist song (which was a big hit throughout the entire trip when they made people sing).
Later we had a tea ceremony that was horrendously boring. I went back to the hotel and stayed in since I was kind of sick. Sleep helps :)

The next day there were options. I chose to go on a hike/visit a Taoist temple on the top of a huge mountain. We hiked down and took a cable car up, we are entirely too lazy. I have to say, this trip didn’t change or improve my view on Taoist temples. Poorly built Buddhist Temples. Tacky and ugly. But when you look at the philosophies of the religion it doesn’t surprise. The whole trip wasn’t very entertaining, but climbing down the mountain definitely kept your mind occupied. Why they continually take us on these dangerous treks after someone broke their back last semester, I will never understand. It was an intense slope and the ground was covered with ridiculously slippery pine needles. The best thing about the entire hike was that the side of the mountain we were climbing down (it has to face a certain direction) was a giant graveyard. Sometimes there was one right in front of you, or a group of them in the forest next to you. But of course I like cemeteries, I guess I’m just morbid like that.

The afternoon we had a ’cruise’ which was a bit boring (uninteresting day apparently). Not really much to see, but the weather was nice and Graeve and I made it a booze cruise. Then went back to town, grabbed some pastries and cake at a fantastic bakery run by deaf people and chilled for the rest of the night.

We took off for Xishuanbanna in the morning!



Almost done!! Really! 真的！


~Nikki