Yang Vibes

I didn’t really plan on sleeping in Guilin my first night in China.

When the Qatar Airways agent in Boston asked me my final destination, I knew it was either Guilin or Guangzhou – definitely one of the two. Surprise, it was Guangzhou. The trip from Guilin Airport to Yangshuo, where I was eventually headed, would have been a short bus ride. The journey from Guangzhou was a bit more complicated. If I hadn’t been studying Chinese for a few years, I’m really not sure what I would have done. After two days on planes and in airports, a bus ride, and a few hours on a train, I got to Guilin at 10:10pm, ten minutes after the last bus to Yangshuo left. I got out of the train station, approached the first guy with a moto helmet I saw, and asked (in my very best Chinese) if he could take me somewhere nearby and inexpensive to spend the night. He did, and I fell asleep almost immediately on probably the only real mattress I’ll experience in my month here.

I woke up early the next morning and got directions to the bus station from the kid working the front desk of the tiny hotel I’d ended up staying at. After a fairly confusing trip on a local bus from one station to another, a woman who spent ten minutes trying to convince me to buy a cruise down the Li River to Yangshuo helped me intercept a bus headed there. The bus was still moving when we jumped on, and the driver didn’t look particularly pleased to see me, but I was more than happy to finally be on my way.

The town of Yangshuo is fairly small, surrounded by beautiful green karst peaks. I’ve only been here two days, and already it’s one of the most magical places I’ve ever been. Zhuoyue English College, the school at which I will be volunteering for the next month, is actually in Chaoyang, an even smaller town (if you can call it that – it’s more like a couple of streets nestled together amid the hills) in Yulong River National Park. The students are Chinese teenagers and adults, most of them from different regions of China, who are here to study for as long as they want. That’s kind of the Yangshuo vibe – no dramas.

Teaching only happens Monday through Thursday, and I arrived on Friday afternoon, so my first couple days were a great look into how fun life is can be. I met most of the students on Friday night, when some of the other volunteers and I went out to a bar called the Bad Panda. I learned how to play dice, taught the bartender how to make a Mai Tai, took a nap (I was still super jet-lagged, it happens), and made a bunch of new friends.

The next morning, we all headed out early for some rock-climbing. It was my first time climbing outdoors, and it was so much fun! After a few hours, we headed down to the river, where we spent a few more hours swimming, sunbathing, and jumping out of trees into the water. The rest of the day flew by; slacklining in Yangshuo Park, dinner on West Street, a trip to the supermarket so that I could buy all of the daily necessities that I neglected to bring with me, and a bike ride home in complete darkness. Despite the fact that I’m now sleeping on a piece of wood covered by a thin blanket, the sleep I got last night was one of the best I’ve had in a long while.

Climb, swim, eat, party; that seems to be the weekend routine. We’ll see what the school week is like. I still haven’t fully realized that this is my life for the next month. For now, I’m just trying to take my grandma’s advice: “Soak it all in, every last drop of it, and remember it forever.”