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Lijiang is quite the tourist town, but as 96% of the tourists are Asian, I'm ok with that. :) The Old Town here is completely cobbled and no motor vehicles are allowed so it feels comfortable and isolated. Isolated from everything but the shopping of course. Mom and I were exploring the streets and alleys here today when a young Chinese girl approached us randomly and introduced herself. Her English name is Jenny, she is an English major at the University here in the city, and her homework for the weekend was to come to the Old Town and seek out English speakers to make friends with and that is exactly what she did. :) We ended up spending most of the afternoon with her, drinking tea and talking about all manner of things, then she assisted us with our perusing of shops, translating an helping us barter in the silver shop and getting my camera fixed. She was very excited to do everything with us and show us around her city. At tea, a Dutch couple sat down behind us, saying a quiet "hello" as they did so, Jenny turned right around and greeted them loudly with an enthusiastic "Welcome to my hometown of Lijiang!" This of course got all five of us into a conversation for the next half hour or so. :)
Our last day in town we decided to bike out to a little village called Baixa, the home of some tibetan frescos and the renowned Dr. Ho. We called Jenny to see if she wanted to join us and the three of us took off into the beautiful surrounding countryside. The ride was fabulous and the town was cool too. We kind of accidentally ran into the Dr., who then showed us an entire room full of newspaper clippings from all his publicity. Not bad from a little old dude deep in rural China. After drinking some of his horrible medicinal tea ("This is not very fragrant," says Jenny) we took off down the street and came across some little old ladies binding up bunches of green onions on the side of the road. They were so cute in their Bai minority clothing and one of them scooted over on her rock, patting the edge of it indicating that I should sit with her. I was on the verge of saying no when I reallized, "Why the heck not?" and proceeded to have perhaps THE greatest cultural encounter of the entire year. I am so glad that I had taken a week of chinese in Dalian before I left, because it took about 5 or 10 minutes of bits of chit chat before I ran out of vocabulary. She was wonderful, a little lady of 73 years who wanted to talk to me!
Other than hanging with Jenny, Mom and I have seen quite a bit of culture around here, what with the locals dancing and doing Tai Chi in the squares in the morning. Last night we went to a concert of what was described as "Ancient People playing Ancient Music on Ancient Instruments." It was absolutely wonderful. It was a group of about 30 people, 6 of them over 80 years old who are pretty much the only group left who knows and plays this ancient music of Yunnan province and the Naxi culture. The instruments were unrecognizable to me except for the drum and the gong. All the rest were distinctly Chinese and it fascinated me to witness them being played.
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