A couple weekends ago we went on our final USAC field trip! It was an overnight excursion to Leshan and Mt. Emei, one that I’d known was coming for a while but still managed to sneak up on me. It came at the perfect time though, because a healthy dose of sadness had also been creeping up on me and let me tell you, it did a fantastic job of letting me think I had things under control until all of a sudden I didn’t. I had put so much energy into remaining (relatively) productive, into going out and getting groceries and exercising, that by the time I woke up on Wednesday morning, completely depleted, it was too late to do anything except realize OH THIS IS REALLY BAD, HUH.
So I wallowed. It was a classic wallow, really—one for the books—and I was careful not to leave out any important steps. These include, but are not limited to:
-Be in The Bed.
Not sleeping in the bed, but still there. In the bed. It’s important that you spend enough time in the bed for it to stop being comforting while coming to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that escape is futile.
-General Clutter, also known as the "That’s Just Trash” Approach.
Example: If you eat a piece of overpriced Fererro Rocher chocolate from the convenience store downstairs, crumple that wrapper into a nice shiny ball and set it down somewhere within 2 feet of your person. For me, this means it goes on the bedside table. It’s a pretty big bedside table, with lots of surface area, but remember: the more space, the greater the challenge! By the time you’re done crumpling things we want that baby jam-packed. Bonus points if your trash-stuff begins to lose purchase and fall off the edges.
-Cry on the phone with your mom
We were leaving bright and early on Friday morning, and so Thursday night I extracted myself from the wallow and joined people for dinner and a movie night down the hall. It was very fun, with lots of snacks and laughter, and I knew that everything was going to be looking up at least marginally the next day. Still, I managed to squeeze in one last mom cry before bed because everybody knows I’m organized as hell.
Bright and Early on Friday Morning
The bus ride to Leshan took about three hours. When we arrived we boarded a boat and donned fluorescent orange life vests before climbing up to the top deck. Our boat was docked just next to one filled with a group of Chinese tourists, so naturally a few of them took the opportunity to photograph the big group of foreigners up close. Naturally, a few of my classmates jokingly got out their phones and took photos of them taking photos of us, which really threw them off, so there we were, two groups of incredibly natural idiots, now in possession of some spectacular images.
It’s important to remember that nobody loses in a situation like this because we all looked sexy in orange.
Our boat finally pulled out from the dock and chugged its way a short distance down and across the river to the Leshan Buddha, which is built into the side of the cliff and is great. According to Us Weekly it’s been dating the statue of liberty long distance for over two years now, and sources say they’re still going strong.
Here’s a photo of me and the big guy himself:
Taken right as Buddha cracked a joke about squirrels and the inevitable passage of time. What a card!
Post-Buddha we had a nice family style lunch where I, true to form, externally ate like a normal person and internally convicted at least 3 people of foul food play/inexcusable commandeering of the lazy susan. It’s sad that my fellow USAC students are so prone to illegal activity, but I’m just thankful for my preternatural vigilance. My friend Nashalia says, “not all heroes wear capes,” and I think that may be relevant here.
We then boarded the bus, drove an hour to somewhere located roughly on-the-mountain, and climbed around a bit to see some temples and a monastery. If I don’t include this it would seem like it never happened, but I also don’t have anything particularly interesting to say about it.
At The Hotel
Half the group split set off to climb the icy peak and stay there for the night while the rest of us drove back to our hotel. It was all girls except for Gabe, and from this set of hard-and-true facts the group name and hashtag—#GirlsAndGabe—was born. There’s something about mountain air that really awakens the creative spirit.
On the bus we had made a lot of big plans. There was talk of going out, eating at a fun restaurant, maybe miraculously finding Mexican food. Even this last one seemed far-fetched at the time but we were too far gone, riding that #GirlsAndGabe high.
Only when the bus began to pull off the road and toward the hotel did it become clear that we, like Icarus, had flown too close to the sun. Earth was calling, and back to her we went.
The hotel was cold and very much of in the middle of nowhere but that didn’t matter because they had beds and rooms, which are the second and third most important features after the humble roof.
Some things that happened at the roofed hotel:
-A few people pointed out that there was a dog curled up on a chair behind a desk bearing an Assistant Manager plaque. I thought this was fantastic and went around pointing it out to people and saying “Look! The Assistant Manager!” until I really wore myself out and it was time for dinner.
Look! The assistant director!
-After dinner (during which we were given neither water nor tea, I’m forced to add), we walked to a convenience store and got some snacks & hydration for the next day’s hike.
-My friend Kelli bought a beer from the convenience store because I said I could open it for her without an actual opening tool. I thought popping the cap off on the marble bureau top would be a safe bet until the “marble" immediately dented and I realized you can’t trust anything anymore.
-I also might have also dented the wallpapered windowsill. It was a really soft hotel.
-Most of the #Girls gathered in the room shared by Frankie and I to play games and eat the pile of cookies we had picked up at the nearby convenience store.
-We played a game called Empire which is a lot of fun but I made one big mistake. The only important thing for you to know is that in the game everybody has to think of a word or phrase that fits a particular category. The category I chose was “the name of the world’s best imaginary horse,” and the name I selected was Lettuce Hopscotch. It was only after somebody else pointed it out that I realized it seemed like a PUN NAME recalling the phrase “Let us hopscotch,” which completely destroyed the integrity of the name and imaginary horse in question.
-While I was at the convenience store my roommate Frankie turned on my heated blanket so it would warm up. I think this was the nicest thing ever.
DAY 2
It didn’t take long for me to realize that when in China, the words “temple,” “mountain,” and “hike” can all be eliminated. We don’t need them anymore because there is a single term so mighty, so descriptive in nature, that all others begin to seem like a bit of a trick.
Unlike a fun trick—which might involve whipped cream or hiding behind a door but in a really delightful costume like a seahorse or a big happy slice of tiramisu, I don’t know, I’m not a trick expert, I’ve never even met a seahorse—this the the kind of trick that leaves one stewing in the lukewarm depths of betrayal.
Since this metaphor seems pretty mangled, allow me to clarify: The trick is a word.
And the word is “stairs.”
If we were in the International Spelling Bee, it would go like this:
Word: Stairs
Can you use it in a sentence please?: “MORE STAIRS?!” (OPTIONAL ADDENDUM: "The absolute nerve.”)
Place of origin: My mouth, multiple times, all up and down that dang mountain.
I said it on the stairs. I said it on a flat expanse while approaching stairs, and when I was sitting down briefly before re-mounting the stairs, and I said it to many a passing dog in exasperation because I felt like that was our closest shot at common ground. According to the handy dandy iPhone health app, I walked 9 miles and ascended the equivalent of 99 floors. My health app did not factor in the heart palpitations induced by every sighting of a dog, chicken, monkey, or small, colorful, marshmallow baby. See? Even Apple has room for improvement.
Thankfully, the hike was absolutely stunning—really truly. So even when I wanted nothing more than a set of brand new legs or rounded a corner to find a fresh flight laying in wait, it was happening on a beautiful mountain in China.
Thanks to my cute little camera I was able to make a video documenting most of the things I’ve written about in this blog post and then some! Check it out if you want to see children decorating Hello Kitty Cakes and the whole cast of Noah's Ark on Day 2! Also included: seductive shots of lunch and some monkeys being rascals
I don’t particularly like the first background song but nothing had a better tempo. How about that tempo?
