Lijiang wakes up at 9:00, and is very peaceful before that. Shops are shuttered, and people squat at the little canals and brush their teeth. Pink rose bushes are everywhere. Tried a “Naxi Pizza” for breakfast, but it was an inedible thick pancake soaked in grease. When I checked out, Mama Naxi gave me a little bag with bananas and joghurt, and hung a little charm around my neck. If you ever make it to Lijiang, you know where to find the only accomodation option that makes sense. Call 0888-5100700, Mama speaks English. 50 Yuan for a dorm bed, 150 Yuan for the best room with its own covered patio (mine).
The China Eastern Air plane departure time at 12:00 to Xi’an came and went. First it was “delayed”, a Chinese word that means “in a few hours, maybe, or cancelled”, then it had a very minor technical fault and an engineer would be flown in, then it was officially cancelled. They put us on another plane to Kunming where we’d transfer at 22:00. In the meantime they put us in a quite decent hotel to rest and for dinner; the staff was always quite helpful. Back at the airport, 22:00 passed, no plane, it’s “delayed”, a Chinese word that means “you are dead”. Sometime after midnight they found a plane for us; we boarded and sat around the runway for a long time because there was a “delay”, a Chinese word that means “gotcha”. Some passengers actually got into a shouting match with airline personnel (unfairly I think). Chinese is very well suited for cursing. (The picture above is hard to see, red text in the last column reads “delayed”, a Chinese word that means “go climb a tree”.)
I arrived at the hotel in Xi’an at 4:30 in the morning, eleven hours late.
Ok, coming from Hong Kong it’s easy to forget that China is not like a modern European country with bad taste in architecture. It’s a country with twice the population of the EU, where oxen plough rice fields and large numbers of people subsist on less than two euro per day. Lijiang airport looks like a Tokyo subway station and Kunming airport is a large but cheaply built shack with a corrugated metal roof that is deafening in a rain shower. You can’t go from zero to Lufthansa in a few years. Maybe the ox that pulls the airplanes back from the gate had a headache. (Just kidding about the ox. I hope.)
Comments
2 responses to “”
..”China is not like a modern European country with bad taste in architecture”
I am sure Thomas is referring to the fake baroque city castle some confused Germans want to build in Berlin. 🙂
You have no idea… That was good solid architecture and the only debate is about whether you can “use the blueprints twice”.
What I am talking about is oppressive concrete boxes with no sense for aesthetics or city planning. It’s like the worst of Los Angeles, Marzahn, and Nazi bunkers all rolled into one, and then neglected for a few decades until rain damage runs down the walls and those ugly bathroom tiles on the facade start crumbling. Plus the inevidable traffic chaos in those places.
Most of the places I have visited are quite nice, but they typically have a ring of ugliness around them like a cancer, and some cities are nothing but.