July 14: In which we fail to leave Dali but are recompensed with tea and various kinds of music

Soooo... you all may recall that on the night of July 13, I made it home at about 4:30 AM (after a vaguely sucessful attempt at defending the honor of the blue states and those who share their convictions, in French, to a stoned and/or drunk French university student). The boys made it back a few hours later. I got up first, at 11:30. None of us were aware that checkout time at the lodge was noon, mainly because it said on the back of our door that it was 6 PM. In any event, since we were going to be locked into paying for our rooms for the night, we decided to stay in Dali, rather than make the trek to Lijiang. We also decided that we should book our plane tickets for our onward travel from Lijiang... Beijing for Alan, to meet up with his girlfriend Sylvia, Chongquing for me, to start a ferry trip down to the Three Gorges, and Chengdu for Cristoph, who was going to hike some sacred mountains and visit some pandas.

As we lethargically hung around the guesthouse trying to make plans to do... something! anything! (the rain had stopped, but trails in the mountains were too wet for horseback or bicycle riding (the latter of which, along with eating dog, I had categorically refused to do anyway, if it involved a mountain of any kind)), our Taiwanese friend David stopped in the lodge and showed us a collection of CDs he'd bought at a shop that had just opened a couple of days ago. He told us that the man who ran the shop was a musician who had spent years travelling to remote parts of China and Tibet recording musicians performing folk songs (kind of a Rick Bayless of Chinese folk music, except actually being vaguely of the same ethnicity as those whose art he was collecting- I say vaguely because I believe that he is Han Chinese, while the vast majority of the songs he collected were from minority cultures and performers). For the most part, the musicians recorded weren't "officially" musicians, from a Chinese governmental standpoint, and this thus represented exactly the kind of material Cristoph hoped to collect for his documentary.

The CDs themselves were presented in an aesthetically beautiful package, with plain brown sleeves inscribed with black Chinese characters, all tied together with thin twine.


Thus energized by a Quest and some Purpose, the three of us set off after our late and rather unsatisfying lunch to find the shop. It was actually the easiest quest in history, as in involved walking four blocks down the street from our hotel, but the store hadn't been open the last time we'd gone so far down, so it FELT like an adventure.

When we found the shop, we were immediately charmed. Unlike many Chinese shops, which are hectic and crowded even when relatively upscale, this store was a calm, peaceful oasis. Qin, the musician's.... wife? girlfriend? partner? acolyte? unclear, since she tended to refer to him in English as "the man" and not, I think, in a hegemonic sense, invited us in and asked us to sit down for some tea. Qin, by the way, is pronounced something like a cross between "queen" and "cheen" but with a slight hint of a "ts" to the "ch." There's really a reason my Chinese vocab consists of roughly four words. I can't pronounce any of it.

As we sat at a low tea table, looking back through the shop to the courtyard beyond, Alan, Cristoph, and I found ourselves grinning dellightedly at each other. Aside from the table on the floor, the shop had only one small rack of clothes near the front door, a couple of elaborate robes hanging on the wall next to it, and a homemade wood and rope bookcase filled with instruments the musician had either made himself or collected in his travels.

Qin served as translator for me and Cristoph (mostly Cristoph) when Alan went off to phone Sylvia. She played many of the songs from various of the 8 cds for us, and, at Cristoph's request, painstakingly wrote down in both English and Chinese which minority groups were represented on which CD.

It became clear that each set of CDs had to be more or less made to order, as the discs were burned from the musician's home computer, and the labels on the sleeves were done BY HAND. When I return home, I'll take a picture of my set, and hopefully it will convey the artistry of the latter process. As I listened to the music, I felt that I, too, wanted a set of the CDs... both for purposes of cultural interest and to support the original effort in general. We were told that I could get a set if I came back the next morning at 10 AM (Cristoph had bought the only remaining set they had to hand).

While we waited for the musician to return with some of the CDs, a group of Qin's friends arrived, accompanied by the cleanest, happiest-looking dog I had seen thus far in all of China. Now, it wouldn't be fair to say that every dog I saw seemed abused and/ or unhappy... for the most part, to that point, I had really only wanted to forcibly rescue (look away, Mom, Roxanne, and Flo) the collie we saw chained outside the vegetarian restaurant across from our lodge, whose owner seemed to fee the need to come out and smack it regularly, for what offense I could not imagine, as it seemed pathetically friendly and eager to please, DESPITE being kept on such a short leash I would have been pissed off if that had been the only mistreatment I'd seen. It would be fair to say that my true imperialist longings show myself in this area: "Yes, yes, I know the natives are starving, but YOU! There! Stop mistreating that animal!! Here, Bunter, establish a veterinary clinic at this lamasery, will you, and let's put something of a stop to this nonsense. And you, there, Lord Fotheringale, stop mistreating the help, damn you." I would really, really, like to have the money and power to buy up and deliver any abused and/or neglected animals I came across and set up a fund for their care and maintenance with some nice Buddhists, in other words. Though I suppose that would create a market whereby people intentionally mistreated animals, thinking to make them more valuable to the crazy laowai (foreigner). Such are the moral dillemmas of the imaginary imperialist. Anyway, back to the dogs: most of the dogs I saw in China were variations on short-haired Pekinese mutts or other kinds of small dogs. I saw one purebred (or so it would seem) Dalmation, and the pitiful collie, but most of the dogs I saw, though seeming happy enough, and all quite friendly, were on the scruffy and potentially slightly underfed side, and looked like you would definitely want to wash your hands immediately after petting them.

Qin's friends, on the other hand, were accompanied by a shiny, fluffy, golden retriever mix of some kind, which was as different in carriage from the general line of Chinese mutt as Qin's shop was from the general line of tourist stand. Oddly, it was also the least friendly... to me, at least, it was very excited about the people it already knew. Anyway, seeing a dog that was clearly cossetted to the level I like to think is appropriate (I know, I know, people are starving, I'm SORRY) did nothing but add to the extremely warm vibes I felt in Qin's shop.

When the musician returned, Cristoph prevailed upon him to play some of the instruments he made, a succession of mouth harps with dramatically different tones. All in all, I think we were there drinking tea for four or five hours.

We returned to the tasty pizza place we'd eaten at the night before, then returned to our lodge to find one final music party in full swing. There was much rejoicing, as we'd all thought we'd said goodbye to each other the night before. As the tour group was also heading on to Lijiang, they kindly invited us to go with them the following morning at 9 AM. We were delighted at the idea, but there was a catch.... our plane tickets, which Alan thought would be difficult to procure later, were coming to us on a bus from Kunming, becuase the only official ticket printer in Dali was broken. We had been told the tickets would arrive at 10 AM. Our friends said they could hold the bus until 9:30. We were doubtful that the tickets would actually APPEAR by 10, and were a bit woebegone as the party ended, but decided to get up early the next morning and give it the old college try. As the say.

PS- No, I actually didn't mope around the lodge all day, I hied me off to go shopping, and procured some lovely textiles. But this way reads better.