January 24th: Guiyang once more

Day 130

We woke, boarded the bus back to Kaili (cue the LL Cool J) the trip through the mountains this time was faster yet obscured by fog, vanquishing our attempts to get daylight pictures. I had to urinate badly halfway through the ride. In Kaili we ate lunch, got a bus to Guiyang and I had to urinate practically the whole way. I guess it's good exercise for my kegel muscles, but it didn't make for a pleasant ride.

The weather in Guiyang was incredible: sunny, warm, clear. Was this January? I walked around in short sleeves. At the train station, Heather bought her ticket back east, Mike and I got ours for Chengdu in the west, but it was for the day after tomorrow. We checked into a hotel, then got fried dumplings, enjoying having the burden of baggage off our backs.

We walked Heather to the train station, saw her off, waved goodbye. I asked the front desk girl if there was a piano in the hotel (all hotels should have one, dammit!) and she said no, but wrote down a coffee place called "Yesterday Once More" (yeah, no shit) and the name of a club for after, for Mike and I wanted to sample some Guiyang night life.

A cabbie dropped us off and i was expecting something like UBC or Ming Tien: This place was a 180 from those places: ultra-ritzy, crowded, a Haagen-Daz in the lobby. There were no open tables, and the piano was white. I don't play white pianos. We headed immediately to the disco, shrugging off the materialistic ugliness we had just breathed in. It was a nice place, dimly lit, circular bar, a centered dance floor with upper level balcony, tables with alternating red, blue and green lights under the glass surface. We sat at a blue one, too early for anything to be going on. The DJ was spinning some nauseating shite (a crap-dancehall remix of Simon and Garfunkel's "Cecilia" anyone?) We had a few beers, played that dice game. The table behind us housed a couple older suit jacketed chaps and what looked to be 15 or 16 year old female companions. Hardly nieces. The way they laughed too hard spelled out prostitute. Ugliness. But then I'm not a bare branch. How hard is it to get female companionship the old-fashioned way? And how drastically imbalanced is the female population if there are so many prostitutes? Stuff to ponder as we left.

We asked the cabbie to take us to massage and I became nervous as he drove us down some narrow backalleys. My dread was instantly quashed when we arrived. This place was health club nice, receptionist, clean lobby, pamphlets and such. I exhaled. Not a brothel. They gave us a bracelet with affixed key, had us remove our shoes and led us to a changing room. What the..? Perhaps they misunderstood. In our limited Chinese (had my phrasebook handy), we explained we wanted only garden variety vanilla massage, not the shower and robe malarky. The concierge led us to a couple private rooms.

Disclaimer: I have absolutely no qualms about nudity, having been a figure model out in Moab and on the Fudgie and Fufu album cover, Hallie's naked parties, a veteran of Bill Viavant's hot tub, Fisher Towers, as well as both the right hand and left hand of Mill Creek. My objections to showering with Chinese men are thus: There are no manners when it comes to privacy. In the States, a gentleman's eyes stay above the equator, whether at the sports club or at the urinals. It's polite. Here in China, both Mike and I have been privy to stares in the bathroom, and not casual glances, but hardcore junk study. They don't get the chance to examine American equipment (rumor has it Chinese men have certain shortcomings downstairs) so my guess is they try to memorize with an unblinking intensity only found in entymologists. That's just the bathroom. The open shower environment would have been a thousandfold more excrutiating. I came to massage to relax, and that's not the way to do it, to be a bug under glass when you first arrive. Secondly, the Chinese spit everywhere. I don't find dodging a lung oyster minefield relaxing. Thirdly, how much extra was this non-relaxing trauma going to cost us?

The concierge pointed out on a sheet 58 kuai for private room. I was just fine with that. I didn't want to be stared at for an hour in the main crowded area. After a few minutes, a girl came in, started working the knots I had in my limbs from hiking Huangguoshu. I asked her how old she was and she said 15. She didn't look it, but it weirded me out she was the same age as some of my students. She teased me about being ticklish, I told herallof the places we had been on holiday, mostly we just laughed at our mutual "ting bu dong" exchange.

Another guy came in, flipped through my phrasebook, asked if I was happy. I told him yes and he exited. The girl pointed out in the book that he was a "communist party official." He came back a few minutes later and said something like "Chinese miss/niece?" I shrugged and he flipped through the phrasebook, pointed at some characters, the English next to it reading: sex. "No." He left again. Perhaps he asks everyone, or maybe just Americans. Whatever the case, I was glad to contradict the stereotype.

We rode back to the hotel spaghetti-limbed and tingling, retired.