Kaifeng and my birthday

4.14-16.11
I was a little bummed because Yuri was gone in Hong Kong with her study trip during my birthday but my buddies were hell-bent on celebrating the event. The night before we went to my favorite bar, club DaDa, for Motown music night. In the morning I had class and then I met up with the rest of my group to go to Kaifeng on our weekend study trip.
The forty-odd number of were booked on a hard bunk sleeper for twelve hours to the ancient city. Getting on the train we were greeted with the raw stench of a cooped up a travelers and an unclean toilet. The beds weren’t too hard anyway.
Any feelings of discomfort were soon forgotten. My compartment filled up with people and we started drinking the cocktails we smuggled in our rucksacks. When it comes to a competition of who can be more obnoxious, Chinese migrants or rowdy Americans, the college students win. I had a lot of fun. Spending my birthday on a train was just what how I wanted to celebrate!
In the early morning we arrived in Kaifeng. It was a real funny feeling stepping out into the train station at 7 in the morning; it was like I had stepped back into time, 10-20 years—maybe one or two thousand years. Kaifeng was something else. Everything was communist era buildings. The traffic plaza in front of the train station was clogged with wandering rickshaws, tricycles, bicycles, busses, human feet and cars. The town was not sleepy in the morning; it had been used to such a wake up routine for thousands of years.
We checked into our five star hotel and had a huge breakfast. When we were about to leave, people acted kind of weird, like there was something they weren’t telling me. Then out of nowhere, Michelle led a waitress wielding an enormous birthday cake to my table. We had cake and Annie put her piece in my face. On the bus Alex commandeered the stereo and put on a birthday mix of music I like. It felt really nice have my buddies pitch in for a good birthday.
The bus took us to the village of Shaolin—the bus got lost along the way for about an hour. The town that is world renowned for finding the art of kung fu is situated in between some bumpy mountains. We had lunch and then stood outside looking at a completely empty field. It was about the size of two football fields and I thought it would serve a purpose along those line but later that night I learned that the space was actually used for hundreds people practicing kung fu.
We got to the Shaolin temple and had to walk through hundreds of trinket stands to get there. We were led for a while as a group through the temple area then left on our own to explore through the various shrines. Most of the shrines were obstructed by gates and souvenir stands, at least the stands were being operated by monks.
There were a few blossoming trees that I took pictures of but I was not too interested in the temple, it was simply too nice and too well put together. I ventured on and found the cemetery. It was special because the graves were above ground and were shaped into small pagodas. Apparently this practice dates back to the Song dynansty, which is quite a long time ago. It felt a bit like walking around a graveyard in New Orleans but much more peaceful.
I walked across the monastery because I heard loud and flashy music. On a stage close to the entrance the monks were giving a presentation of their kung fu skills in front of flashing Chinese tourists and oriental hip-hop music.
That night after returning to the hotel I headed out to a street market with Steven, Alex and Annie. Steven and I had a strange hankering for either McDonalds or street food, both options were abundant but somehow street food just seemed like the thing to do. We arrived on at an intersection of two alleys. There were wooden two story buildings on the street; one was blasting Chinese opera music. The music sounded awful, with its terrible intonation but it was all fitting. With the slow movements cars, bicycles and rickshaws crawling through the streets, the horrible music and the fact that the street always had trash on it, but never seemed dirty, I felt this was probably the most Chinese moment I had yet come across.
We ate fried dumplings, lamb kebabs and some chicken necks. We passed on frogs and roaches on sticks and stayed clear of stinky tofu, which literally smells like feces. We looked at a street vendor stands but it was all junk. During our walk down the alley, people would stop us and ask us questions like where we came from and what were we doing in Kaifeng. People in this city were exceptionally nice to us and happy to see foreigners. One couple reminded us how lucky we were to be there, if they saved up for all their lives they could never travel to our country.