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China has put a block on blogs. This entry comes to you via an email to northern Ontario, Canada. Truly an international edition. M & D


The city we left this morning, Xining, is not really a tourist destination in and of itself, but it became one for us. Lukin and I inadvertently spent just short of a week in and around this town and grew quite fond of it. When we arrived from Beijing I had big plans to take Lukn out into the countryside to the village where I did some volunteer work with students in the fall. I recalled smiling-faced students and vast bare-rocked mountains rising out of valleys filled with mud-brick homes and barns full of baby lambs. I recalled a different face of China than that which can be seen on city streets or in crowded trains. So I dug bus numbers and transfer town names out of the back of my mind and we rode North, flagged down mini vans, and made our way to the tiny villager of Guop Er Cun. This time it was different. This time we were met with the same generosity and open-heartedness that I remembered, but we were also met with by newly imposed restriction that barred foreigners from staying in the homes of village families. This year marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, and in addition to limiting the number of visa's issued to foreigners, the government is also regulating foreign access to potentially sensitive areas of the country. As Guo Er Cun is a Tibetan village only miles from the birthplace of the Dali Lama, it is deemed sensitive and necessitates a permit for anything more than a day trip. Damn. Lukin and I spent some time imagining what it would feel like to be told by local police who you can and cannot have as a guest in your home. The gracious family that we had hoped would house us tried to help us arrange a ride back down into town, but as it was nearing dark we found no ride and they laughed at our suggestion to set up our tent on the outskirts of the village, instead making a bed up for us in their back room insisting that one night wouldn't hurt anybody. Lukin and I slept lightly, nervous that our presence would cause trouble for the family that had been so kind to us. We woke to bowls of potato and pork fat for breakfast and shared a mini-van ride down the mountain with the father and daughter of the family who were on their way to a traditional Tibetan dance contest in a nearby village.

Lukin and I headed back to Xining and I was grumpy. Gone were my plans for a week filled with familiar faces, hikes in on the bleak mountains that slope into the valley, steaming bowls of yak butter tea, and the thought and conversation sparking contrasts between rural and urban China. Back to a gritty transit town. An afternoon in though and my mind began to change. Our town was full of Hui Muslim and Tibetan and Han people sharing a city. It was full of small tree-lined streets and brick-drab alleyways that hid noodle shops and hair salons. We were welcomed into shops and restaurants to chat and waved at by children and smiled at by groups of old men bearing bird cages as they took their birds to the park to sing. We spent three good days in Xining absorbing what was around us. I am glad that I was able to take Lukin up to Guo Er Cun, that he was able to see a bit of what life is like for the overwhelming majority of people living in China, but I also am glad that we were able to spend those days in Xining, enjoying a regular old city. I've realized through this that I've been trying so hard to show Lukin what I love about China and to take him to places that I think are special and to create an experience for us that is meaningful, that I have not been very good at letting this experience unfold as it will and at letting China speak for itself. In our last couple of weeks here, I'll endeavor to do that more.

Lukin and I are now sitting in twin red armchairs covered with taxi-driver style bamboo seat-mats at an internet cafe in Lanzhou China. Posters of The Sims 2 and World of Warcraft decorate the walls and cigarette-smoking men between the ages of 17 and 37 fill the hundred or so seats. Gaming is big in China. There are bathrooms here in this very building whereas restaurants and tea shops generally point customers to public toilets down the street. There is a boiler that dispenses hot water and ramen noodles and coffee packets are sold at the front desk. You could live here. From the lines on faces and the butts overflowing ash trays it looks as though some do. We're just here for a brief three-hour layover between train journeys. Our train journey this morning took us the three hours from Xining to Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province in Western China. Our train journey this afternoon will carry us another 22 hours into the center of Xinjiang province, the city of Urumqi- back to the Uyghurs...