Avoiding Plague and Adventure Planning

In between studying for midterms, planning a trip for my inter-semester break, and trying not to be sick, there hasn’t been much time to write.

My roommate starting coughing violently throughout the night about two weeks ago, and I figured it was just a bad cold.  But after he went to the doctor and told me it was fèi yán (pneumonia, lit. “lung inflammation”), I started asking questions.  It turns out he had mycoplasma infection—a bacterial infection in the lungs, which is apparently fairly contagious.  So, after some minor freaking out (including wearing a mask in my room for a night), I realized if it really was a mycoplasma infection, it was probably too late to avoid getting it, and I should just minimize its effects.  I got the name of an antibiotic from an American doctor, translated the name into Chinese, and headed to the pharmacy.  One good (?) thing about China is that you often don’t need a prescription to pop some pills.  Instead, you just walk into the pharmacy and either point to what you want, or tell them what your symptoms are and have them recommend (usually incorrectly, from my limited experience) a drug.  They tell you that the more expensive brand is of course better, you pay, and walk out with a week’s supply of antibiotics.  (For the record, I don’t know if it’s the same process for more serious medication.)

In any case, the experience of living with a sick Chinese roommate raised some concerns about general health sanitation in China:  coughing without covering one’s mouth, coughing into one’s hands and then handling other people’s chopsticks, spitting (as usual), sharing food, going out as normal instead of isolating oneself, and so on.  In addition, the question of what a cook or a fuwuyuan (waiter) in a restaurant would do if they had a similar infection came up, to which the response was, “probably just go to work anyway.”

Despite my concerns about getting sick, I, like a sick cook in a restaurant, had no choice but to go about life as usual.  Actually, I normally wouldn’t be that concerned over getting sick, except that my midterms were approaching this week, followed by a week-long vacation next week.  And fortunately, while I definitely think I did get sick, my friends doused me with Chinese medicine and vitamin C, and it’s been rather mild.

Midterms haven’t been too bad.  All essays here have to be hand-written, so I spent the weekend writing a 9-page essay about linguistics.  Then on Wednesday, I gave a presentation on language contact and evolution (in Chinese, of course) to a panel of teachers, and answered their questions.  I think that my Chinese has definitely already improved, and I have about two more months to make even more progress.

We have this upcoming week off to travel before getting back to class, so a few friends and I are planning to go to western Ningxia and Inner Mongolia.  I went to Inner Mongolia last year to see the desert and the grasslands, but this trip (since we have a full week) should take me a bit farther afield.  We’ll take the train from Harbin down to Beijing this weekend, and then fly out immediately the next morning to Yinchuan, Ningxia.  Ningxia is a small province in what is actually China’s northern mid-west, but which is considered the country’s north-west.  As far as I’ve been able to discern, in China Ningxia is known for two things:  being somewhat barren, and hosting the largest group of Hui (Muslim) Chinese in the country.

In any case, it should be a real adventure.  We’ll land in Yinchuan, and then take buses across the southern portion of the Gobi desert.  From there, we’ll hire a driver to take us into the Badain Jaran desert for a couple days, including hopefully an overnight stay in a Mongolian yurt and some camel riding.

The Badain Jaran desert seems to be a truly remarkable place.  In addition to boasting the world’s highest sand dunes, some reaching higher than the Empire State building, spread throughout the desert are hundreds of salt- and fresh-water lakes and several Buddhist temples.  It should make for some beautiful sites and great photography.  I’ve seen it described as both “awe-inspiringly beautiful” and one of the most mysterious deserts in the world.

From Badain Jaran, we’ll head back towards Yinchuan, spending a few days exploring the Helan mountains and the Western Xia Tombs at their feet (pyramid like tombs of the Tangut Empire), the Tenggeli Desert (and Moon Lake), partaking of some Hui cuisine in Yinchuan, and perhaps riding horses on the grasslands.

I went to the train station a couple nights ago to buy our return tickets from Beijing to Harbin.  I know it’s been said over and over again, but it’s amazing how many people there are in China.  The train station seemed busier than if the entire state of Rhode Island were evacuating.  I waited in line to buy tickets, only to be told that I had to go downstairs to get the tickets we wanted.  So, I went downstairs, asking several guards for directions along the way, since the train station is huge.  When I got to the main ticket hall, I found that it was even more crowded.  So, rather than wait in the wrong line, I waited in the line for the Information Desk, to ask which line I should wait in.  The rather overwhelmed fuwuyuan told me any line would do, so I picked a “shorter” one and waited.  And waited.  While waiting, I took it upon myself to count how many people were there.  I would say that there were on average a constant 15-20 people rotating through each line.  Multiplied by the 30 lines in the hall, this means that there were roughly 450-600 people at any given time waiting to buy tickets.  Add to that the small children running around, and the fact that this was 8:30pm on a Wednesday evening, and China was truly showing itself.  It should be said, however, that despite the huge numbers of people, and the poor lining up skills, the Chinese really do handle it well—the next time you’re waiting in line at the DMV or cafeteria think about how much quicker things could go if the Chinese were managing that few people.

Needing to relax and pack, that’s all I’ve got for now.  I’ll write more about what we actually do on our trip after the fact, and provide some more information about the places and things we see.  And hopefully, some amazing photos.