The first week of October is National Week. This is like their fourth version of 4th
of July except students do not have to go to school and some businesses shut
down for the entire week. In my personal
opinion, this week came a little too soon in the semester but it was a very
nice break either way.
The first day of our break woke up and tried to go to Long
Qing gorge. This didn’t end up going
through because the line was so long that we decided to just do something
else. Instead we went and ate at the
Crow’s Nest for the first time (See explanation in “By small and little
things…”). After this we did a little
shopping where I got my traditional Chinese outfit (later on I would complete
the outfit with some traditional shoes from Ho Hai where I also bought my
Chinese Lanterns) and some t-shirts.
We had decided to make the trip to the gorge on Monday, so
we woke up early and sat in line for the bus that would take us to the
Gorge. The line only took us about 45
minutes to get through, but the bus ride took us nearly 3 hours to get to the
gorge. One thing about National Week is
that since most people have the week off, they like to travel back home or go
see some other part of China. This makes
driving nearly impossible and definitely makes it extremely slow. When we finally reached the bus stop where we
were to get off (we had no idea which one it was when we first got on the bus
but found out by asking some students), we negotiated some taxi drivers to take
us over to the gorge, in which we took another taxi to the front gate. After buying our tickets we went inside and
took the boat to get into the gorge itself.
The gorge is beautiful. The river
that runs inside winds back and forth like a serpent and the walls are
massively tall with the occasional few faded characters painted up their faces
in red. Im not sure what they say but it
was pretty high up and they were pretty large, which makes me wonder who
painted them, why, how long ago were they painted, what was their significance,
and of course what they meant.
In the gorge there is a bungee jumping platform. It is not too high but it is still over a
100ft at least. I have always wanted to
go bungee jumping. I don’t know why, I
just have always wanted to try it. It
seems kind of frightening to hurl yourself off a bridge and let yourself fall face
first towards the ground. As we made
around the last bend, out popped the bridge.
We watched people fall off from the river below and at this point I was
getting really excited. I would finally
get to bungee jump, something I never thought I would do, especially not in
China.
After being let off the boat, our group made its way up to
the bridge. Some of our friends had made
it before we did and we watched as they took their jumps. At this point I was really, really
excited. I gave my stuff and camera to
Jessica who wasn’t able to jump for medical reasons and got my ticket to
jump. It cost me only 150kuai ($25) and
I didn’t have to sign any forms. I just
read a sign explaining the rules, and responsibility of each jumper, got
weighed and from there I was walking up the stairs to the bridge to wait in
line behind everyone else.
As soon as I hit that bridge I was suddenly starting to get nervous. I was thinking to myself, im really doing
this, ive never thrown myself off anything higher than 15 feet, and on top of
it having my feet strapped to a rope at the ankles. However, when I sat down and was getting strapped
in (the straps were just Velcro ankle braces that wrapped around a few time) I
was super pumped that I was about to jump.
I told the man that I want to jump myself and he said ok. When I got on the platform however, that
excitement changed. I stood there
looking down thinking to myself “What am I doing??? I don’t want to do this
anymore!!” and it was at this point that the man told me to raise my arms as if
I was doing a dive (“NO, I don’t want to raise my arms! You can’t make… me… do
it! Ok fine”). I stood there for a few
seconds looking down at the river below, and I felt a sharp nudge on my back
from the man intended to send me off the platform. Well that set my upper body forward in motion
so as I leaned into it with my lower body and as soon as I became parallel with
the bridge I jumped off like a swimmer.
It was a pretty good dive actually, but boy was it freaky.
The wind rushing in your face created a
vortex that blocked out any sound outside of it. Im not going to lie, I screamed as I was
falling, but as soon as I hit the bottom and was shooting back up towards the
sky, my screams of fear turned in laughter and screams of enjoyment. After a while the straps, that I previously
had been concerned about coming off, were digging so hard into my ankles that
it was starting to hurt (I actually was cut and bruised by them for about a
week after the jump) and was happy when the boat below came with its stick to
guide me into the boat to sit while they took them off. After everyone had jumped, we explored for a
few minutes, got something to eat and it was back to the bus to get back to
Beijing. It was a fantastic day and it
was not over yet. When we arrived in
Beijing, Jessica and I took a taxi to San Li Tun for Kieran’s Birthday (See “By
small and little things…” for explanation).
Later that week we decided to go to an Acrobat performance. I thought it was going to be like gymnastics but, no, it was not. It was really interesting actually and im amazed at all the things that these people could do. There was a man that balanced himself up on chairs, hanging off and supporting himself with only an arm or hanging half of his body off the chair, which looked extremely unstable. Later a woman spun cloths and umbrellas on her feet and at one point was juggling them. Another man and woman were doing balancing tricks and the most impressive one was when she was standing on his head with one foot and the other one was up in the air. 5 women later would contort their bodies on top of each other doing back bends and then using their mouths to support their bodies on a post while do a back bend in the air. A few men did some tricks through hoops, the hoops were stacked 5 high too! It was amazing. The final one was a motorcycle cage. They had kept adding motorcycles until they got to 5 and they were circling and doing patterns in there. I had never seen this before so to me this was a really cool act.
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