The Cave Homes of Gansu Videos!

Hey, guys!

I finally finished putting together my second video about visiting rural Gansu (赵台，in the country) and staying in a cave home with my friend's relatives. It was a rare opportunity, and I'm really happy that I got to experience it. Hopefully, I'll be able to go back soon!

For those of you who don't know, I visited an area in rural Gansu Province with two of my friends to visit some of their relatives. They live in some of the most beautiful (and remote) countryside I have ever seen. I was blown away by the difference in our lives, and I think about it every day. Please watch these videos. There are embeds from both YouTube and Youku.






This was my original video about going there - I'm sure some of you have already seen it, but I thought I'd put it up again anyway so you guys could watch them in order. As always, it's on Youku and YouTube! Thanks for watching! I'll have more to say on the second video! Scroll down!

 


The second of the two videos is the one that deals with the underlying reality and what I was (and am still) thinking about in regards to the experience. I hope it'll give you something to think about! Please watch them and enjoy them - it's not a huge investment of your time.

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The Cave Homes of Gansu

One of the things that I was looking forward to the most on my trip to Gansu in June was the prospect of going to a remote mountain village and staying in a cave.

Yeah, a freaking cave. People do actually live in caves in China - it's not just those stereotypes in the Middle East.

That's it there on the left - it's not just a giant hole in the side of a cliff. They've made it into a home, believe it or not.

They cut out a door-sized hole and a window-sized hole into the side of the mountain, and just burrow out a decent-sized hole, round it out and make it work, and then - BAM - time to move in!

For some reason, I didn't take a picture of the inside - but I do have a video clip of it included in the video below, if you are so inclined to watch it.

The cave itself was pretty nice - it was cool although the weather outside was nice. There was a big bed, wallpaper, a dresser, a TV, and all the other "fixings" for a home. It wasn't this big scary unlivable place - it was rather nice.

Where is this place, you might ask?

It is called 赵台 (Zhao Tai). It's in the  countryside.

I just know that we drove from Huan County (环县) for about 5 hours to get there.

5 hours of the craziest, bumpiest, and scariest roads through some of the most beautiful countryside I have ever seen.

This is the stuff that I had only read about in books and seen in National Geographic.

Terraced mountains literally surround the caves that me, Elena, and Ben are staying in.

The signs of the harvest are everywhere.

The few people that have chainsaws or weed-eaters are letting them loose in the fields, but the rest of the people have their scythes and are at work under the bright glare of the noon sun.

Wheat and apricots are what's being harvested now - the potatoes, corn, and other foods still need some time.

Life here is fundamentally different from life as I know it.

There are no shops nearby, no paved roads, no sound of car horns, no street vendors, no........well, anything.

It's just quiet, clean mountain air and the sound of the goats, donkeys, and other animals that Ben's family raises. Life revolves around the land, and there is little money to be had, and little to spend it on.

It's so different from the money-driven, ambition-fueled society that I have spent my entire life in.

Life here is hard, but I feel like although these people are poor in material ways, they are rich in family and rich in life.

They were so caring and hospitable to me, and it was easy to see that they cared deeply for one another.

I just wish I had been able to better enjoy the moment. I was pretty sick at the time, and I couldn't do a lot of stuff. But I did what I could, and I cherished the time that I spent in this place.

How often do you get to lose yourself in the mountains, be moved by spectacular scenery, stay the night in a cave home, witness (and participate a little bit in) the harvest, be surrounded by new people who nonetheless care about you, and also become buddies with a donkey?

I don't know about you, but that's not something that happens very often to me.

As I said in one of my videos, I'm very grateful to know Ben. He's let me see a side of China that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to see, at least not easily.

I want to take this chance to thank him for that, even though he will probably never read this post, if any posts that I put up on here.


Thanks, Ben.

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Double Happiness: The Shuang Xi

First off - I've put up a cool new menu that you can browse through my various pages, such as Photos, About Me, and Links. I'll be tweaking it over the coming days, so keep checking it out!


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One of the cool things about China is that over its long history, a great wealth of myths, legends, and stories exist within the fabric of everyday life. One such example is the Shuang Xi (双喜), which means "Double Happiness".

"Shuang" means "a pair" of something, and "xi" means "like" or "happiness".

The actual character looks like this: 喜喜

You'll see it a lot when people get married. They've got it up on their door, their car, the gate to their apartment building - everywhere! It's a symbol of good luck, but it has a really cool story behind it.

So, here goes:

In the Tang Dynasty, there was a student who was going to the capital to go to take the national final examinations, after which the top scorers would be selected as the ministers in the court. Unfortunately, as he passed through a mountain village on the way, he fell ill. Thanks to a herbalist doctor and his daughter, he recovered quickly due to their good care. When he had to leave, he found it hard to say good-bye to the pretty girl, and she felt the same way. They fell in love and decided to get married after his examination. The girl wrote down the right hand part of an antithetical couplet for the student to match after he finished and returned from the examination to marry her.

"Green trees against the sky in the spring rain while the sky set off the spring trees in the obscuration."

In the examination, the student won first place, and was recognized by the emperor. He was then interviewed and tested by the emperor. As luck would have it, he was asked by the emperor to finish a couplet, which needed its other half to be completed by the student. The emperor wrote:

"Red flowers dot the land in the breeze's chase while the land colored up in red after the kiss."

Suddenly, the young boy remembered what his young love had written for him. Realizing that it was perfect answer to the emperor’s couplet, he answered the emperor with her words. The emperor was more than happy with his reply, and appointed him as a minister in the court. He also permitted the boy some time to visit his hometown before assuming the office. The young boy went straight to the young girl and told her everything about the examination. 

He kept his promise to her, and they got married. On their wedding day, both of them wrote the same right half of a couplet, which had kept them together, as well as the character for happiness, 喜. This is how the double happiness character came to be. 

Now this character is used on just about everything connected with marriage, and is also used in other random ways such as Shuang Xi cigarettes and the subject of films. It's one of the things that a person living in China cannot ignore - it's simply everywhere. 

This is one of the things I love about China - you can be walking along and see something on someone's car, and say, "What's that character?" -- "Oh, that's such-and-such, it comes from a classical Chinese legend that says such-and-such, and to this day, we commemorate it in such-and-such way." That just blows me away - floors me every time. 

To have a culture so steeped in tradition, where everything hums with meaning, is something that I cannot get over. The expats and old China hands who live in the "developed" regions of China are laughing their asses off, because that's not the way it is in their part of the country. In the Northwest - in Gansu, tradition is still very much alive and well, and the tradition of China is what I fell in love with and still love to this day. 

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