An Airport Is Still Around Me

Every Day an Adventure: Day 1 of Bingyu Valley

 

July 11, 2015

 

By Rachel

 

The thing about being in a foreign country is that so much is new.  There are so many times where I think I’m doing something relatively ordinary, only to discover that it is much different than I anticipated. Using the bathroom is one such example. There have been a couple public bathrooms I have walked into only to discover that none of the stalls have doors. When we went to Bingyu valley, we found out that we had to check in to the police station so that they could check our passports and register us – to “protect us special” they said. So our quick overnight trip included a trip to the police station.

 

We woke up early this morning so that we could board the bus for Bingyu valley. My mom had read about this place in a travel book and mentioned wanting to go. Dad’s coworker arranged it and soon several of his son’s schoolmates’ families wanted to go so their children could hang around with American children. We ended up needing a twenty person bus. On the bus ride there, the kids wanted us to teach them Let It Go from Frozen in English. They were quick learners. They also taught us Twinkle Twinkle in Chinese, but we weren’t fast learners at all. Chinese is a very hard language! Christian was also very excited because another five-year-old boy came with us. Even though the boys weren’t able to communicate, (Christian only knows English and the boy only knows Mandarin) they became friends.

 

It was a long bus ride, so it was afternoon by the time we got there. First on the agenda was rafting. All of the other kids had brought water guns, so they shared with us and we entered the river armed with water guns. I wasn’t quite sure why, until I realized that there was a full out water war while going down the river. And people weren’t concerned about whether or not they knew me when dumping buckets of water on my head. I was in a raft with Taylor and we both got soaked. At one point, we had to start bailing the water out of the raft because of all the water dumped on us. Christian really liked getting out of his raft to swim, so he was also very wet. The scenery was gorgeous. Occasionally, we rafted by local people washing their laundry in the river.

 

 

 

 

After the rafting adventure, we went out to a Chinese barbeque. Before going to eat, my dad mentioned that he had enjoyed the bread and honey at the Chinese barbeque when he had eaten out before. This barbeque place didn’t have honey, so some people from our group went and bought us honey. Everyone throughout has been super nice to us. Teddy’s family especially, goes way out of their way to accommodate us. Sometimes I feel badly about how hard people try to make us happy. I think we are kind of high maintenance.

 

Here we are eating dinner

 

 

Eating at the barbeque was an interesting experience. None of us had plates, so we just ate the meat as we grabbed it. The food was kind of spicy, but I liked it a lot. There were many different types of meat including goat, lamb, beef, chicken, and some part of a cow that I’m glad I didn’t know what it was... The goat meat was really hard to eat because it was super chewy. It wasn’t my favorite, but the lamb there was amazing. By evening, the whole town had erupted in a party and there was flashing lights and carriage rides blasting disco music as they took people down the street. Luckily, I was tired enough to sleep through the noise.