For the next week or so we will probably be playing a little bit of catch-up. We just finished one round of summer traveling with friends and there are plenty of stories from the last few weeks that need to be told. Our whole trip was restricted to Yunnan (see right), which, as its residents will proudly tell you, is home to more ethnic minorities than any other province of China.
We are currently living in Kunming, the provincial capital. The first leg of our journey took us west to Dali, a small city where marijuana literally grows on the side of the road. It is home to a certain minority known as Bai and we frequently saw women dressed in their traditional garb. More often than not, they were coming up to us at night and asking us if we wanted to 'smokey smokey' and whether or not we would like some 'hasheesh.' As you may have ascertained, hawkers, be they selling 'deeweedees' or illegal substances, often learn one or two key English phrases and shout them on end at anyone who looks remotely Western.
We passed up these tempting offers and found our way to a certain expat bar that is famous for selling joints along with drinks and hookahs. Once upstairs, we saw one of the employees being tattooed in a traditional Chinese method; it entails painstakingly filling in one dot at a time by hammering sharpened, ink-dipped bamboo sticks into the skin. During a break, he began talking quickly and excitedly with us and it soon dawned on everyone that he was undergoing this torturous procedure while heavily under the influence of a certain stimulant that shares its name with a refreshing caffeinated beverage that you can find in your local convenience store. It seemed to me that this would only make him focus on the pain more rather than steady his nerves, but to each his own. He soon pulled out a spliff and added to the delicious mix of drugs in his body before getting back to work. His outbursts and expletives assured us that it was no walk in the park. Several beers and a couple of hookahs later, he had not made much progress. By our calculations he still had seven or eight hours to go by the time we left.
Ouch.
