Old Town Tourist trap

Lijiang

So we had to meet at 4:30 a.m. the next morning to go to the airport and catch our 7a.m. flight to Lijiang. Before leaving the hotel in Chengdu we got “to go breakfast”s.

Ok, quick tangent: Chinese breakfast is no pancakes and waffle experience. I have yet to discover something that is specifically a breakfast food here. In the US you have your cereal, pancakes, oatmeal, toast, all the good things you can usually find at hotel breakfast buffets. Not so much here. Chinese style breakfast is a lot of regular Chinese food. Fried rice, pork, noodles, cabbage, etc. It’s definitely fine to eat but there’s nothing particularly delicious or special about breakfast. Sometimes, when you’re lucky they’ll have watermelon.

So anyways, this to go breakfast was … for lack of a better word, interesting. We all got a plastic bag with a water bottle (nice and hydrating but as we were getting on a plane we couldn’t bring it through the gate with us), an apple (delicious choice), then a little box or food which included some funny little cakes with green powder sprinkled on top of the tasteless spongy cakes, a hard boiled egg, a Chinese hotdog type thing no one ate because at 5 or 6 a.m. it’s hard to find the courage to take a bit out or a Chinese hotdog. I am going to have to try it at some point but all I can thing about is the comparison to American hotdogs. I mean, if the Chinese normally eat pretty much everything that goes into the good old Oscar Myers, what exactly goes in the Chinese hotdogs? Sometimes it’s better not to think about what you’re eating. If it doesn’t make you sick its fair game. Bummer you can’t know how it will react with your digestive system until after you eat…

So we got to Lijiang. Lijiang airport had one runway and one carousel for the bags. The whole airport building was probably the size of my house in Wisconsin… decent size but not really as big as I usually consider airports to be. The countryside was absolutely beautiful going to the city. The city itself was pretty cool too. It’s more of a working class city with this big “Old Town” taking up half of it. Old town, where we stayed was initially really cool. All the buildings had amazing wooden carvings, cobblestone streets. Unfortunately after an hour of being there it started seeming a little bit… fake. We asked the program leader and she said that indeed there was an earthquake in 1995 or 1996 and the old town was rebuilt as a first class Chinese tourist trap. That discovery certainly took some of the charm – no wait, a lot of the charm out of the Old Town. Apparently everyone who works there has to be in traditional Naxi (the minority group from Lijiang region) costumes. The Han people (about 98% of the Chinese population) seem to be fascinated by Chinese minority groups and therefore use them as tourist attractions.

Our second day (out of four) in Lijiang we went to Jade Dragon Mountain. This was absolutely incredible. We took a cable car up to a higher spot on the mountain and walked around for a while. Unfortunately it was really cloudy so we couldn’t see the top of the mountain but it was so beautiful with the trees and waterfalls covering the mountains I didn’t much care. Towards the bottom of the mountain there was a lake that was this bluish/ turquoise color. Apparently it is because of the presence of minerals in the water (copper?). Anyways, it was probably the most beautiful place I’ve seen in China so far. I’ve got pictures that will be posted… soon.

The rest of Lijiang was not too eventful although I did buy some tea at a shop in Real Town Lijiang. I just got some cheap tea thinking it would all be the same and it smelled good. Wrong. It is not good and now I’m stuck with half a jin (I think a jin is 500 grams) of this awful tea. It might be good English style with lots of sugar and milk except they don’t have much milk in China…….