Chinese Easter (Nanning, China)

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm sidelined in Nanning while I await my Vietnamese visa being processed. I can't complain too much, however, all things considered: Although Nanning is somewhat lacking in the cultural experience I'm aiming for, it's high on convenience--a mall and Super Wal-Mart are located within a few blocks of my hotel. My hotel's not bad, either--it's the nicest place I've stayed so far (aside from my friends' apartments in HK), and comparable in price (~$15 per night).

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Briefly, a few final notes on Yangshuo:

I concluded my last post just before heading to my cooking class. There were four students in the class--me, and a family of three from Cognac, France. We began with a trip to the big Yangshuo farmer's market. A lot of what we saw you'd expect; some of the more unusual items included live birds, rabbits, and of course dogs, skinned and gutted and dangling from meat hooks.

Back at the cooking school, where class was held in an open-air room overlooking the river, we made five local dishes: mushrooms and tofu balls stuffed with minced pork and scallions; fried eggplant slices; beer fish (fish filets fried with sliced peppers and other vegetables, and then braised in beer); chicken with cashew nuts; and fried bok choi. We used woks for everything, except for the stuffed vegetables (which were steamed).

The food was excellent. And we conducted dinner--we sat down to eat once all dishes were completed--entirely in French. I also was able to do some translating between Nancy, our teacher, who spoke English but not French, and the Moreaus, who spoke French but (surprisingly) little English. (Most of the translating related to the food itself, whose terminology is familiar to any 1st- or 2nd-year French student).

Finally, a few hours after dinner, Shahak and I performed our second rock show--this time in a slightly more intimate setting (acoustic vs. electric, with no bass or drums, for example) at an Israeli-owned bar near our hostel. We didn't do terribly, but the show sort of disintegrated into all-hands karaoke by the end of the night.

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I spent six hours yesterday on a bus to Nanning. Uneventful.

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Today is Easter Sunday. This morning I attended the service at Zhongshanlu Christian Church, about a mile away from my hotel. I understood two words: Jesus and Mary.

The church was packed full, with about 250-300 people in the pews. The service itself contained several traditional elements: confession & response; public reading of Scripture; hymns (which were sung in Mandarin, of course, but whose melodies sounded Western); a robed choir; prayers; and the benediction. After the service, the pastor stood in the doorway and greeted the congregants on their way out. He and I nodded and smiled to each other. I even got an Easter egg, evidently painted by one of the kids.

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Otherwise, I am using my time in Nanning to get organized. My NYC roommate, Derek, is flying over in a couple of weeks to finish the trip with me. I expect to be finished with Vietnam and somewhere in Cambodia around that time; from there, it probably makes sense to meet in Bangkok and do a south-north tour of Thailand. It's becoming increasingly likely that I'll have to sacrifice other parts of the trip--specifically Laos, Malaysia, and Singapore--based on my loose itineraries for Vietnam and Thailand. Six weeks, it turns out, is not a lot of time.