新年快乐！

Happy New Year!

Today and yesterday were about the most...out there, adventurous days I've ever had the courage to try. Seriously. This was really jumping out into the unknown. Where to begin?

Okay, so I'd known Jin Rong about a day and we got along well. Went to see the pandas. Hotpot. Wrote about that. Anyway, she wanted to go the countryside to celebrate the new year. I thought, why not go along as well?

So, after a four hour escapade of her helping me buy a train ticket for Beijing (I leave the 6th - there were major complications because everyone will be going back to work and the trains are completely full...but I got my ticket), we bought tickets for a train heading to Dujiangyan. We waited in the station for about an hour before leaving. I'd never heard of this place and she had only just learned about it the night before (or the morning of?). Anyway, we knew nothing. Except that it was small, rural and we didn't really know what we were doing. She kept asking me if I was scared. Haha, I fear nothing. Seriously, I started getting worried about how not worried I was.

Anyway, on the train, Jin Rong did what she does best: start conversations with all the strangers on board. Of course, everything started with 新年快乐 (xin nian kuai le, Happy New Year).

Eventually, the conversation she stuck to the most was with the middle aged man sitting next to her. His name was Yang. He was going home for New Years. He works at a factory in Guangdong. He has a wife and a daughter.

Somehow, it ended up being decided that we would spent New Years with him and his family. When we got to our stop, we literally said good bye and happy New Years to everyone in the car. We followed Yang outside. Jin Rong accidentally broke one of his suitcases when she was trying to help him. Oops. We ended up riding in a taxi to his house. By the way, this was about seven o'clock at night, so it was dark.

During entire taxi ride, the world sounded like it was in the process of exploding. There were fireworks going off in every single direction. I do not exaggerate. Every single direction! And firecrackers going off in the street. People everywhere! People everywhere in the middle of random roads in the countryside surrounded by fields! I didn't know there could be so many people in the countryside! All the migrant workers home for the New Year.

So we got to Yang's home and met his family: mother, daughter, brothers and other family members I don't remember (his wife was at work). We ate dinner there, lots of dubious looking meats and what looked like meat but was actually tofu (I should know better by now...) and a yummy bowl of steamy rice which was so good because damn was it cold.

Then Yang, Jin Rong and I went for a long quest to buy firecrackers. Which were surprisingly difficult to find. We somehow picked up a gaggle of children (I don't know who they belonged too..) and we just walked along the main road, kids bounding about as cars swerved around them and the firecrackers being set off everywhere (this totally never would have happened in the US). Eventually we found some firecrackers and Jin Rong bought candy for all the kids. We set them off in the street, like everyone else. They managed to convince me to set off a few, although I don't generally appreciate being near explosive masses that could forever blind me or whatnot. Still, I figured if the eight-year-olds could do it, so could I.

We stopped around midnight and went back to Yang's house, where Yang and Jin Rong set off bigger, scarier firecrackers. Jin Rong tried to get me to set some off and I refused. "Why? You scared?"

Hell yes.

Anyway, we went to sleep at around 1 AM in Yang's daughter's room (she was at her boyfriend's place), which had an electric blanket! Yay! Except Jin Rong has this habit of being unable to stop talking. Two in the morning, I've finally become comfortably warm, I'm dozing off and I hear this: "费舒安？你睡觉了吗？你热吗？我太热。" ("Fei Shu An? Are you sleeping? Are you warm? I'm too warm.") And off goes the electric blanket...

Not that Jin Rong isn't wonderful. Just a tad talkative and sometimes maybe overbearing...but amazing, really. She purposefully speaks very slowly around me so I can better understand and carries around a translator that has proved to be very useful.

We woke up this morning around 9 AM (which is my record thus far, with the jet lag and all). We ate noodles with tofu for breakfast. I was all ready to return to Chengdu so that I could meet up with DT, but alas that was not to happen...

At this point, in the middle of this small rural town, I was kind of fully reliant on Yang and Jin Rong. Unfortunately, Jin Rong was pretty set on staying in the town a little bit longer (AKA: the rest of the day) and I kind of just had to go along with it. Flexibility. Key.

So we went to a park, walked around and then went to the house of a friend of Yang's. We made...something that I can't remember the name of. Ah well. It was good. A kind of dough-stuff with sugar in it. I'd had it before in Shaxi.

Then we went to a mountain with a temple on it (I know, I'm big with details and names, aren't I?). It was very crowded because everyone from Chengdu was visiting to pray for an auspicious year. I lit some incense Yang gave me and prayed for Mom, Dad, Julia and Eleonore. Then we went to the tea house and sat on the balcony, drinking tea and eating peanuts. The Chengdu life, even if it wasn't actually in Chengdu...

I have to stress how kind and generous Yang was. He just invited us - two strangers on the train - to celebrate New Years in his home, eat the food prepared by him and his family, and sleep in his daughter's bed (I kind of wondered how she felt about that...). Jin Rong managed to force a gift on him, but he refused to take any money from us no matter how we tried (Jin Rong and him actually had this really funny kind of fight where she tried to shove the money into his hands and he just kind of ran away, pushed her away, hid behind other people, etc).

After the tea house, Jin Rong and I took a bus into the main town area somewhere (you can tell how well I knew what was going on at this point) and found a bus that was leaving for Chengdu. Mind you, the completely wrong part of Chengdu but Chengdu nonetheless. We got there and took another bus across the city, where Jin Rong and I split ways because she wanted to eat dinner and I didn't (I also kind of wanted some alone time for the first time in about three days). It's good to be back in the hostel.

Too tired to post photos, although I have some really good ones. Tomorrow?