Quanzhou Day 1

This past weekend, I went with the class to Quanzhou 泉州. It was better than I expected.

At first, I was scared since our professor told us that Quanzhou was known for its sexual tourism and neglected to mention other things. He talked about how you can go to most hotels and you'll get a call from downstairs asking would you like any special 服务 or "services." Of course what they're selling is not just the shoe shines and the massages, but a special massage...where you need it the most.

My feelings of dismay weren't relived when we got there, and all you see for the first 30 minutes into the city are rocks, quarries, more rocks, cranes, and the billboards of oil and mining companies that are in the city. What the fuck is the wasteland, i asked? We pulled over once to go potty, and stopped at some broke-neck gas station with dirty ass toilets that smelled suspiciously of propane. I smoked a cigarette and courted death.

And battled my stomach. Grace's birthday was the nice before, so we celebrated by going to a fantastic Indian restaurant called "Indiano Jones'". Great food, but not the food one should eat before going on a busride, without coffee, for a couple of hours.

We made it into the city, which at the time was unimpressive, and stopped at some old Muslim place where this guy explained to us about the Muslim communities and heritage of the area. Our tour guide kept getting the translation wrong, so the Chinese Americans in our program helped us get a richer understanding, and by richer I mean perfect. The building we saw allegedly built by the same man who's name is stamped on our building. Apparently, he was a somebody important. Neat stuff about the place: the roofs were flat and the houses built of stone. It was great learning about how Muslims built stuff as opposed to hearing about how people other than the whack-ass Europeans do shit.

We ate a whack ass lunch in a hotel where you could rent rooms for 2 hours for only 60 kuai. They had a western-style toilet, but no toilet paper. After that, we went to a temple, stood outside of it because we couldn't go outside, and then went to the city mosque. Amazing, and I believe it was build around 1089 or something, so it was probably the oldest structure I've been around after some of the classroom buildings at UNC. We bargained with a Muslim man for some glamourized birdseed, lost, but Chloe won when she bargained since she's ruthless...kind of a pitbull when it comes to negotiating.

We went to dinner, and then the hotel. At this point, seeing the rich history of the place along with urbanization had changed my opinion of Quanzhou drastically. Our hotel, the 明发酒店 was luxious, and put our hotel/dorm at Xiamen University to shame. Luke and I went swinging, so I stayed with Jon and he stayed with Paul. Jon and I as roommates--good times. In our search for coffee and also ways to pre-game for an eventual night out, we went in search of a convenience store. The one the hotel provided was whack, and the dead-eyed 14 year old girl behind the register, and her absolute fear of a bunch of foreigners speaking Chinese, made us search for another. We took a series of stinky underground stairwells to the main street near our hotel and Jon stopped for bao-zi. We went from there, went to a super market, and then bought some shit. Phebe, Megan, and Claire all hung out in our room, and we enjoyed coffee, 四特酒 (Four-specialities liquor), orange juice, and green tea. We ate mochi, and later on Phebe and I went shopping for fruit to get for Grace's official birthday on Sunday.

Our hotel had a dance club, karaoke rooms, and suspicious women all on the 3rd floor. We could hear the bass deep into the night, although Jon and I didn't sleep much since we were talking about everything under the sun. I'm glad I'm not his roommate because I'd never get any sleep, but our time together really helped me understand what sort of person he is. His intentions are good, almost admirable, even if he is a heathen. I don't think he reads this, although if he did, he should know I think fondly of him, even although I missed my roomie terribly.

tbc