chinawood. unabridged.

chinawood. christmas party finished on a monday evening. had to deal with over 200 chinese men, women and children in a room with an extensive buffet (including a whole table of gummy treats). golden corral it wasn't.

in my chinese lonely planet, it actually mentions the fact that the whole concept of waiting in line really only made it's way to china about 10 years ago. mayhaps that seems ridiculous to people who've never been to china, but once you're here, the reality of that sets in. and it's still consistently shocking. so a room full of people who just paid a crap-ton of money for a christmas party, replete with buffet, has the very real potential for absolute chaos. but things went relatively smoothly. at any rate it eventually came to an end, which is all anyone wanted anyway. no more stupid dancing in lieu of actual work, no more logistics to become gross oversights.

ok, the party wasn't that bad, especially now that that was a full two weeks ago. makes complaining about the past tense shitty road trip that followed it seem sort of pointless, but i don't really care. the only way i'll feel better about my worst christmas ever is to complain about it. funny how that works...plus, i already alluded to it, so i have forced my own hand.

met bright and early monday morning at the school where there was a bus waiting to take the teachers and the sales staff of the school on a trip together. that immediately sounds like a good idea, particularly when it's been rocky with these chicks since the get go. thinly-veiled contempt and an ever-so-faux comraderie from both sides, based on gross conflicts of interest and delusions of grandeur ("i'm a chinese sales rep now, BUT.... i used to be a teacher.").

so after leaving later than planned, with some of the chicks missing the bus, the 3 hour bus ride to hengdian, aka chinawood, commenced. there was even a tour guide for us! there was even ktv/karaoke on the bus! and neither of these things were in english. so it was immediately apparent that this trip that had been "awarded" to us all for doing such a good job actually only served to alienate those peeps who were actually deserving of the sentiment behind the trip. it's always fun to realize early on in any endeavor that your role is that of pretense alone. cool! and then you spend the whole time being the person with the never-fun responsibility of "doing the right thing." i hate that role. where does that skewed sense of obligation come from? anyhoo...

after 3 hours of overt bus segregation, we arrived in hengdian. en route to the hotel i saw a whole, skinned dog hanging by its ankles (do dogs have ankles? what about cankles?) in front of a restaurant. just like in the real hollywood!!! i'm not easily shocked, and i've even been to restaurants that serve dog, but i've never actually seen something that graphic with my own eyes. and during my christmas vacation. that's the worst part. on any other day, seeing a skinned dog would have been cool, but during my christmas vacation it just seemed like a sacrilege. ted neeley wouldn't skin a dog! but teg nugent...different story.

the rest of the city was, metaphorically speaking, bombed out and depleted. and we were stuck here for the next 24 hours. the comic irony of all of this made itself known far far too early in the trip. which can only mean one thing: beer. lots and lots of beer.

so we arrive at the hotel and there's some issue with the fact that none of the foreigners have their passports. in china if you're a foreigner and you plan on staying in a hotel, bring your passport. however, as the trip had been arranged by our school (with the foreign staff in mind?), we assumed that accomodations had been covered. nope. so there was a glimmer of hope that we wouldn't be able to get a hotel because we were 8 foreigners with no passports, but no luck. damn.

eventually things worked out, so we checked into our room and took a brief breather. when we entered the hotel's adjacent restaurant about 15 minutes later, all the chinese staff had already started eating. we waited around for them to actually show up to begin the trip, but they couldn't wait for us to begin eating. so what did we do? we acted like complete children and sat at another table, pounding beers, making the gap between staff (and culture) even more obvious. so then it was the chinese staff's turn to pretend like it upset them. again with that pretense thing. great. hey, let's go to some tourist traps 'cause we're in fucking chinawood!

i guess chinawood is what the city's actually affectionately called. but the movie 'hero' was shot in some big reconstructed palace type thing there, along with some other movies featuring chinese actors that are sort of famous. forgive my apathy, but in order to get to all the arguably cool shit, we first had to go to this ghost town place that was just a copy of all the cool stuff that we could have seen in "real" china. the best part was the haunted house they use for some tv show. i don't even know how to describe it, but the lights were turned out and we were sprinkled with water. but it was scary water. i guess it's hard to be impressed or even startled by things nowadays, considering how advanced special effects have become. so this haunted house sort of felt like it had been created by a 15-year old. granted, a 15-year old who had a lot of free time on his/her hands...

i should put in a note about the face of tourism in china. it's that of a group. usually it involves some sort of prop to signify membership in this elite tourist bunch. we had little pins, but i saw many a bright orange hat floating around some of these places. so you wear your pins and you are herded like cattle to different stops along the same tourist route. and you don't get very much time to do anything. not only do i not want to be here, but i am constantly being told to hurry up. why even get off the bus?

after that we headed to some acrobats show. which was actually pretty cool. i'll attempt to upload video somewhere at some point. and that's something resembling a promise.

after drinking beers atop the fake great wall, hopped back on the bus and headed to the 'hero' movie set place. the scope was actually quite impressive. it looks like the real deal--sizewize and everything. where 'everything' includes a goat-drawn carriage ambling and bleating around the grounds. i think that's what gladiators used back in the day. you could also be lead around on a horse, bang on a drum (but they made the mistake of charging a foreigner in our group double. our tour guide chewed the drummaster a new asshole for that. also video footage of that that i will probably never manage to upload) and take pictures in old timey chinese clothes. just like at the lake of the ozarks!

we watched some strange 3-d movie thing and then hopped back on the bus to go back to the hotel and eat dinner. dinner meant the free meal that came with the hotel. same place we had lunch. no thanks. lunch was fine, but if you're in a city you'll probably never ever go to again in some remote chinese locale, do you really want to eat at the same restaurant twice? we didn't. it just seemed like a waste of valuable time we could have been exploring the city en route to some other restaurant. so we opted for hot pot and wandered around a bit getting there. played some drinking games at dinner which displayed some short and/or frayed tempers. just a frustrating day of being treated like children and thus acting the part.

after dinner we stumbled into a ktv place. it took a while to get set up, so we drank a lot. after some time waiting, rory declared: "I have to dance." rory dancing is always funny. i don't know how, but there are times when i manage to forget the early days of he and jules' courtship--80s night at shattered. and yeah, dancing machine. anyhoo, rory heads out into the main bar area where there's some sorry excuse for a dance floor (a little larger than a twister game mat) and starts sexing up the dude singing there. the guy gets off the floor and rory starts rolling around on the floor, losing his glasses for a second and ultimately making the entire day seem a lot better. that was some funny shit (*in shanghai, rory got up on the bar of some ex-pat drinkery and started dancing with one of the bartenders. it's just what he does...).

after that, made our way back to the hotel. then decided to do more ktv. i bailed out on that because we had to get up at the crack of dawn again the next day for another excruciating day of tourism.

so this brings us to christmas eve. if it doesn't really sound like a horrible christmas, just try to imagine spending 2 days with people you loathe and having no way to get out of it, add a freezing hotel in a dirt mcgirt town and that's what i was working with. dysfunctional families and associated psychodramas aside, this was the exact antithesis of christmas.

anyhoo, woke up early. some of the other, smarter foreigners (including jules and roar) had tried to get out of going to some village. two reasons for that: raining and late night ktv. so i went downstairs for my free breakfast at the hotel restaurant, but i didn't have some little piece of chinese paper that i apparently needed to get the meal. yet another oversight. i like free shit. one free breakfast could have potentially changed my entire attitude about the trip (which was also free, i should graciously note...). but no. that was also never mentioned to me. so no free breakfast. fuck me!

eventually the gang all congregated, because it was mandatory that we leave the hotel. so all the foreigners went to a "western style coffee house" while the chinese staff traveled on in the rain. the best part of this is that it's christmas eve, on our christmas trip (a christmas present), 2 days after our christmas party. again, christmas, a decidedly non-chinese holiday. so what does our tour bus do? it drops us off in front of the coffee shop that didn't open for another 15-20 minutes. in the rain. at 8 something in the morning. i guess the alternative was equally bad: sit and wait on a heated bus. with all those women. gross.

played pool in the rain (duh, there was a pool table set up on the sidewalk) until the coffee shop opened. the coffee shop proved to be the highlight of the trip. confined quarters with people who actually usually like each other, combined with copious amounts of food (sunny side up eggs, spam, bread came free with the coffee) and coffee. we stayed there for about 3 hours. i took a nap in a nice heated room and drank a beer with my coffee. because that's something i would do on christmas. and at least i had the luxury of 2 of my family members being there. anyhoo. this private room also happened to have a computer. at some point we were all mesmerized by a youtube clip of 2 midget kickboxers in thailand or cambodia or something. anyhoo, it was amazing. 9 people huddled around a computer at a coffee shop in some remote city in china, on christmas eve, united in midget kickboxing.

but the good times had to end at some point. and they did when the bus came to pick us up a few hours later. on to yiwu for shopping. i like the idea of shopping, but i don't necessarily like the reality so much. particularly being a larger chick in china. big feet. big body. doesn't bode well in the shopping realm. so we travel for about an hour and spend the majority of our allotted shopping time trying to find shit that doesn't suck. and we never found it. i could dwell on this more, but it was pretty similar to all shopping trips that suck, but this was just on a much bigger scale. they had shuttle buses to take people to different sections of this ginormo shopping compound.

that's all. my first christmas in china was colored by midgets and rage. both firmly planted in my memory.