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@laurajaramillo
Playing 1950s housewife with my new toy, courtesy of @robbfitzsimmons (at 2440 39th Street NW)

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Dunhuang: sand, sky, and space
A shadow hello from Dunhuang When we moved to the US in 2001, one of the things that most baffled my family and I was the sudden change of scale. Everything in the States is larger than life, cars, houses, cups of soda and people come in monstrous proportions that had us feeling for a long while like we suddenly shrank. China, too, messes with your conception of size, but in a completely different way. Like in the US, the distances here are unfathomably vast, but China isnât only big, China is thick. Unlike Florida, stretching forever in airy suburbs with houses that never touch each other (God forbid!) China manages to pack twenty million people into a city youâve never heard of. China is huge, enormous, infinite, but when youâre in a city it never seems to feel that way because your own little chunk of it has so many others pushing against it and into it. Dunhuang was a break from that, and that is only one of the reasons that I liked it so much. It took me 26 hours of buses, minibuses, private cars, taxis and a train to get from Xiahe to Dunhuang. The distance that I traveled to get between two towns in the same province would have taken me from Paris to Naples. And it might as well have, because I was in a completely different country. Where Xiahe was a cold town in the mountains, its life revolving around a monastery full of red robed Tibetan monks, Dunhuang was a world apart, an oasis hidden within the sandy dunes of the Gobi desert. On the same day that I arrived, I took a trip to the dunes in a small camel caravan. Riding past fields full of cotton, and fat purple grapes ready to be picked, we slowly made our way through a traditional cemetery and into the sand dunes of the desert. On my way back, long past nightfall, as I rode with guide on a four wheeler, a sky exploding with stars, the Milky Way brighter than the Shanghai skyline, it was hard to believe that I was in the same country where Iâd gotten used to smog so thick you can hardly see the building across the street. The dunes were without a doubt one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited, perhaps especially striking because they were so unlike anything I had seen before. Larger than I can possibly describe (they are the Singing Sand Mountains in Chinese), they reach towards the sky in sensuous curves that look too perfect to be the work of nature. The monotony of the landscape makes it impossible to have any sense of scale; there are no cues to indicate just how far you are from the top. So, as you climb and climb the camels get smaller behind you but the summit looks the same distance as it did when you started. The sand is impossibly soft, and as you step, it slides from under your feet, and sometimes you slide with it, causing you to walk for several steps in the same location. As it slides down the slope, the sand is fluid like water. Playing with it felt as foreign and exciting as playing with the mercury of a broken thermometer when I was a kid (but was hopefully less dangerous). I can understand why people go insane in the desert. In addition to the desert, and the peaches and grapes I stole straight from the trees, Dunhuang had the Mogao caves, a big complex of Buddhist âchapelsâ that silk road travelers built over thousands of years. That, too, was spectacular, and I was very lucky to get the English guide all to myself because no one else showed up (you can only see the cave complex with a guide). Anyway, I could wax poetic about this place for days, but thatâs no fun to anyone, so here are some pictures of this awesome Silk Road post. Me, fearless camel-rider! A very strange cemetery that we crossed to get into the desert He's a good boy
Camel footprints
Our caravan, as we got ready to start climbing the dune This is how small the camels look, and I'm only half way up the dune (and never managed to make it to the top!) The view was spectacular Corn drying Delicious grapes, and the dunes of the desert in the back I really do love the contrast of the fields and the sand in the back. The part of the dunes preferred by Chinese tourists appears to have a very small loop for a camel ride that I can only imagine feels a bit like riding a carousel. Hey, but it's long enough to take a picture! I hope you can see it in the picture. This is the road to leads to my hostel. Almost like a little farm, a place hidden in trees and plants next to the dunes. Trees! can you believe it? I'd never seen peaches on the tree before this Just a love tap, I'm sure
This is the most visible part of the caves (no photography allowed inside). There is a Buddha statue as big as that whole facade in there!
Monk-ey business
âIâve never been to China, and you?â he asked me earnestly by the side of the dusty road as I tried to stuff my jacket into my backpack. I knew better than to point out the fallacy within that statement. âYes,â I replied, âI was in Beijing for six months studying Chinese.â
 We were, of course, both standing in Chinese territory that very moment, in a small town in the mountains of the Gansu province. Xiahe, or Labrang, in Tibetan, is a town that revolves around the largest Lamasery (a monastery for Tibetan monks) outside of Tibet. I had expected some ethnic tension, of course, but not this level of denial. Chodak continued to talk gregariously, as two other monks, a bit younger than him, with the same long deep red robes wrapped diagonally across their bodies and short cropped hair fiddled with the gears and bell of the red mountain bike I had rented minutes earlier. I was on my way to the Sanke Grasslands, 14 km north of town, and had stopped to fix my bag and take off a layer. He had approached me immediately and started to speak to me in English. He had been teaching himself for years, he said, but rarely had the opportunity to practice. His grammar and vocabulary were impressive, but I understood about as much of what he said as I would have if he had been speaking Chinese. I could see the problem with learning a language completely on your own, his pronunciation was atrocious. After a few minutes of small talk, he asked me if I would be willing to get dinner with him when I got back to town. His round face lit up when I said yes and he dug through his robes to pull out a flip phone and take down my number. He warned me that Sangke was not worth a visit, and promised heâd call at five. I put away the bizarre feeling of having just arranged a date with a priest, and got on my way. He was right about Sangke, of course. The way there should have been a pleasant ride through a valley that would take me to what was once pastures used by nomads for their herds of yaks and, according to the Lonely Planet, was today a sort of tourist circus complete with fake nomad tents, Chinese tour buses, and hawkers offering rides on tired old horses. Instead, it was a miserable two hour ordeal on an uncomfortable bike over a dusty road in the process of being paved. Every passing car raised a cloud of dust and asphalt particles that found their way deep into my eyes and lungs. When I finally made it to the âgrasslandsâ there were fake nomad tents for sure, but no tourists and no one to cater to them, and thus no lunch to be had anywhere. There were also no yaks and nothing to do but to ride right back as it was getting quite cold and the emptiness in my stomach was starting to hurt. Although these are not yaks, it looks beautiful and idyllic, right?
Wrong. Wrong when you realize that this is what I was breathing the whole way there.
At four thirty, Chodakâs excitement got the best of him and he called half an hour early. We arranged to meet in the Nomad restaurant. As I looked through the menu, he dismissed everything I showed an interest in until I settled for noodles with yak meat. As we talked over our green tea, I got better at deciphering his bizarre pronunciation and slowly began to understand that he was talking about Chinese leaders, not âlettersâ and justice, not âjuice tease.â He took out a notebook, pushed back the sleeve of his robe, and began to copy a list of words that he had written with pen on his wrist. He pushed it towards me to read out loud so he could finally know how to pronounce them: sympathy, conscience, incredible, spiritual. He took notes in the curly and elegant Tibetan script to remind himself how to say each of them after I was gone. Next to the vocab written on his wrist, he had a small tattoo. It was a black swastika. I know, of course, that that was a Buddhist symbol long before being tarnished by the Nazis, but it has never stopped startling me. I asked him what the tattoo was about, and he told that when he joined the monastery at age sixty (he meant sixteen) he and his friends had seen on television how people wrote on their bodies by injecting themselves with ink, and they decided to try it. âBut we didnât know it would hurt so much!â he laughed. As time passed the conversation got increasingly serious. He talked about self-immolating monks and the way they were ridiculed by the Chinese press as being simply people that had gone crazy, and not people that had become so desperate for freedom they had nothing left to lose. He told me that the police in the town wanted to make it illegal for the monks to use the Internet so they wouldnât get in touch with troublesome foreigners. I shifted on my seat, paranoid, and looked around for Chinese informants that could make sure I never got my visa renewed. He told me that he had once had a foreign friend who tried to help him move to the US, but after a month of bureaucracy, his efforts had been thwarted when a female police officer demanded ÂĽ5000 RMB to process the document with the required seals, even as he saw Han Chinese on the same line getting the documents done for free. He paid the money, and came back two weeks later to find that the passport was not available and never would be. Later, another American woman, Rachel, who really liked to talk to him about Jesus, had asked him for ÂĽ7000 to help get him the passport and eventually disappeared without a trace. He assured me that he didnât have anger in his heart, as he diligently wrote down and tested the pronunciation of the new words I taught him: scam, trick. As we talked, I learned about life in the monastery, and I understood why some monks walked around playing with their iPhones while others seemed destitute. The Chinese government pays them, he said. Upon further probing I discovered that it was not some sort of government subsidy of religion, which would have been very surprising, but individual officials that, needing all the support they can get for their projects, pay the monks to pray for them. This sort of spiritual bribery seemed especially Chinese, but it reminded me of Medellinâs sicarios, the paid assassins that wore Virgin Maryâs face on a chain around their neck as they set out to kill. Chodak paid for dinner, and invited me as we left the restaurant to come to his house. I had toured the grand, lavish halls of the monastery, housing enormous golden statues of Buddha and filled with the smell of burning incense. I was dying to see the human side of this big God enterprise but as I stood in the street I thought of the tea scam I was a victim of in my first week in Beijing and felt afraid of following a man alone through the labyrinthine and quickly darkening streets of this town in the middle of nowhere, red robe or no red robe. I considered leaving my bag at the hotel first so Iâd have nothing worth stealing, but the thought of the missed photo opportunities inside the private quarters of a Tibetan monk changed my mind, and I decided to trust my gut and follow the man with swastika tattoo into a dark alleyway. (doesnât it sound terrifying when I put it that way?) Chodak kept smiling and laughing at everything I said, a slightly flamboyant child of 32. After a few twists and turns through unpaved streets, we entered a garden, then went through a door into a large single room with two beds, two nightstands, and a makeshift kitchen on one end. The room was poorly lit by a single flickering yellow bulb, and the dirty walls were decorated with a strange combination of posters: a hand drawn pencil portrait of the Dalai Lama, a poster of a Chinese teen pop band, a famous Tibetan poem with a picture of the author, a Chinese calendar with a roaring dragon on top. On one of the beds, two young monks sat in their red robes sharing a book, reading aloud a long list of English vocabulary to each other. They kept practicing unconcerned as Chodak and I sat on the other bed. Soon, one of the studying monks left and was replaced by another, a charismatic man with big ears that stuck out of his shaved head like two little satellite dishes. English Vocab monk went to the kitchen to prepare dinner, and he hand stretched long flat noodles as Satellite Dish monk launched Chodak and I into a two-language profound conversation about the meaning of religion. As the night advanced, he explained how all humans are the same regardless of the language that they speak or the color of their skin, and that everyone should investigate and experiment with many religions before choosing the one that truly speaks to them. I struggled with Chodakâs English as Satellite Dish went on poetically in Tibetan, sitting on the bed in with his legs crossed, moving his hands emphatically as I nodded. âThe heart is faster than the body,â âwe must awaken the sensitive mind,â and then, completely oblivious to how this contrasted with all of the previous messages of peace and love and equality in humanity âChinese people have very small hearts. They donât have a sensitive mind.â After my second bowl of delicious noodles of the night, and a good amount of tea and further philosophizing, the three monks walked me all the way to my hotel to bid me farewell. Chodak has no email address and no mailing address where I could send him the photos we took together, and when he asked hopefully when Iâd be back in Labrang, although I couldnât give him a satisfying answer, I promised to tell any friends that came this way to give him a call so they could have some tea together. So whenever you visit Xiahe and you want to have a truly fantastic experience and make a friend, give Chodak a call. Email me for his number. Note: Because I am not sure exactly how intense the Chinese government is about combing the internet for evidence of Tibetans getting a little too close to foreigners, I have changed the monkâs name and did not publish photos of him. For pictures of him and his house, click here. Unfortunately, you will only be able to see them if you are my Facebook friend. To make up for it, more pictures of wonderful Xiahe: The only yaks I saw were on their way somewhere... One of the bad things about traveling with such a small bag is not being able to buy things like fresh Tibetan honey... One of the dozens of temples in Labrang, with their beautiful windows and deep warm colors Hey, monks need to get around too! Cellphones are monks' favorite activity. I didn't get to write about it, but during the main ceremony of the day, when hundreds of not thousands of monks sit on the floor chanting in what was for a few seconds a very spiritual-seeming experience, I caught a few of them texting, which really kind of ruined the moment. I swear, even trash is hilarious in China A woman cleaning a temple. There is a pah around the monastery, the Kora, that Tibetan pilgrims follow, spinning hundreds of prayer wheels and praying as they go. Monks walk the Kora too. In the mountain, the tiny little huts are for some monks to go into meditation and isolation during some specific festivals in the year. They are tiny. Are these girls gorgeous or what? These are the prayer wheels that the pilgrims make spin as they walk around the monastery. There are hundreds and hundreds of them, and when I attempted to go for a few minutes spinning them I got so dizzy I had to stop. Some monks are sent into the monastery at a very very young age. These are playing with a little toy car, as the adult monks congregate for the biggest ceremony of the day, around noon.
The older monks, after the ceremony.
High in the mountain behind the monastery, pilgrims tie prayer flags
Dunhuang: sky, space and sand
When we moved to the US in 2001, one of the things that most baffled my family and I was the sudden change of scale. Everything in the States is larger than life, cars, houses, cups of soda and people come in monstrous proportions that had us feeling for a long while like we suddenly shrank.
China, too, messes with your conception of size, but in a completely different way. Like in the US, the distances here are unfathomably vast, but China isnât only big, China is thick. Unlike Florida, stretching forever in airy suburbs with houses that never touch each other (God forbid!) China manages to pack twenty million people into a city youâve never heard of. China is huge, enormous, infinite, but when youâre in a city it never seems to feel that way because your own little chunk of it has so many others pushing against it and into it. Dunhuang was a break from that, and that is only one of the reasons that I liked it so much.
It took me 26 hours of buses, minibuses, private cars, taxis and a train to get from Xiahe to Dunhuang. The distance that I traveled to get between two towns in the same province would have taken me from Paris to Naples. And it might as well have, because I was in a completely different country.
For the rest of the post, click here.Â
Monk-ey business
âIâve never been to China, and you?â he asked me earnestly by the side of the dusty road as I tried to stuff my jacket into my backpack. I knew better than to point out the fallacy within that statement. âYes,â I replied, âI was in Beijing for six months studying Chinese.â
 We were, of course, both standing in Chinese territory that very moment, in a small town in the mountains of the Gansu province. Xiahe, or Labrang, in Tibetan, is a town that revolves around the largest Lamasery (a monastery for Tibetan monks) outside of Tibet. I had expected some ethnic tension, of course, but not this level of denial.
(For the rest of the post, click here)

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New website!
As you may know, I have now moved away from Beijing and I am traveling a bit around China before settling in a new part of the country. I have also decided that it was time to graduate from Tumblr, and find a new platform to be furious at all the time. In comes Wordpress.Â
I have been working on creating a new website that is now hosted at www.laurajaramillo.com. It's a work in progress right now, and a lot  of the old posts broke during the migration, which I will work on fixing slowly since I have awful hostel internet most of the time these days.
I will try to remember to share new posts here, and I will be using this Tumblr more for things like reposting other content that I find interesting.Â
More adventures in transportation (and by adventures, I mean whining)
I complained earlier about how crowded the Beijing West Railway station when I started my trip. I had seen nothing. I wish I could say there was a long line when I arrived at the Xiâan railway station, but of course, this is China and lines here are for suckers. Instead, a dense human mass was standing outside the station, extending in every direction. Every few minutes the mind of the mass would decide that it was probably time to get going, and despite the fact that the gates were not letting any more people get in, everyone would start moving and slowly making the crowd denser, denser, denser. And I could smell them better. I can smell them all Lying along the sides of shops were men, women, trash, and those cheap plastic âsuitcasesâ that are the staple of migrant workers everywhere. Already sleeping on mattresses, newspapers, or whatever would separate them from the filthy floor, they were ready for the night. I felt like I was part of a great refugee migration. I kept my eyes open for the UN workers handing out grain so I could get there first. Outside the station, ready for the night. People waiting to board the train inside the station. Please notice amount of trash on the floor. As I waited in the chaotic station to get into my train to Lanzhou, all I could think about was the fact that I had not yet been able to buy a ticket for the following leg of my trip, from Lanzhou to Dunhuang. I had tried in Beijing, and it was sold out. The woman at the counter told me to try again later because agents sometimes buy them all up and return them if they are not able to sell them. I tried in Xiâan, and again no luck. There were no sleeper seats left, and since I canât afford to fly I was faced with the unfortunate mental calculus of the cheap young traveler:  to give up comfort, or to give up time. I could take the sleeper bus, which has beds, for â17-24 hoursâ or I could suck it up and take a third class, hard seat ticket for 14 hours. That would mean not only sitting upright all night and part of the day, but also going in the same compartment as everyone with standing tickets, that is, people smoking, spitting, and staring the whole way. I was leaning towards the sitting situation until the âlineâ in Xiâan. The minute I climbed into my little hard sleeper bed, even though someone had clearly been sleeping in my sheets before I got there, my mind was made. I was going to be busing it up for an entire day. I need what little space I can get. When I arrived in Lanzhou I decided to give the ticket-buying one more chance. Imagine my joy when, after fighting my way to the front of the line and being cut half a dozen times, the lady said there was a bed available. I made her repeat it three times, just to make sure my poor Chinese was not deceiving me. That was the happiest Iâve been this trip, better than any terracotta army or Muslim street food. As I fought my way out of the line, clearly the only successful buyer of the day, people attacked me with questions trying to figure out the location of this mythical place that tickets were still available for. Lanzhou seemed deceptively pretty when I got out of the train The line had a good deal of Uighurs, a Chinese minority that lives in the North Western part of the country. They are muslim and from an entirely different ethnic group. They speak their own language, and donât look Han or East Asian at all. They are Turkic, and Iâve been often told I could pass for one of them. They seemed to think so too, because they all talked to me in Uighur as I tried to make my way out of the line, completely confused, and a little frustrated that after six months of studying Chinese, I seemed to be once again at square one. According to the Lonely Planet and what I was able to see during the couple of hours when I was there, Lanzhou is a large, bland, ugly city with little to see. However, it is the home of the famous Lanzhou pulled noodles, and since I had a few hours before my next bus trip to Xiahe, I went to a small noodle restaurant my Chinese friend had recommended. When she described it as being next to a river I idiotically pictured a beautiful boardwalk lined with restaurants, almost Seine-like. She forgot to mention that the river was dry, and the water had been replaced with mounds and mounds of trash, and that the whole place smelled like a Beijing hutong toilet. The restaurant, which closes at noon, was full of people waiting in long lines. For ÂĽ5, less than one dollar, I got a steamy bowl of noodles that had been made by stretching a ball of dough over and over right in front of my eyes. With a big heap of cilantro and green onions, and a ladleful of hot chili oil, the thing was well worth the side trip. And this is how you make fresh Lanzhou beef pulled noodles! (Niu rou la mian) Spiciest breakfast I've ever had. I am NOT complaining. After I made it out of the restaurant, I took for the bus station, where I was thrilled to find out that there was a bus leaving in 15 minutes, at 9:30, and I didnât have to wait another five hours with my huge bag over my back as I had originally anticipated. Second lucky win of the day. As I sat on the bus for the four hours it took to get to Xiahe, I saw a China I hadnât yet seen roll past out my window seat. In small town after small town, signs of religion began to appear. In Beijing, temples are more tourist attractions and historical curiosities, but in the Gansu countryside I saw tall beautiful mosques in small villages, Buddhist monks in deep red robes walking along the side of the road, and Muslim women wearing colorful veils embroidered with stones. People dressed differently and looked differently, and in one of our roadway stops an older woman got on the bus and sat on the empty seat next to me. She was short and stout, with two thick long braids on the sides of her head, a fedora-like hat, and a long black skirt with details in gold and bright colors. She could easily pass for an indigenous Peruvian woman. I tried to tell her how beautiful I found her jewelry, and she just did what Iâve done so many times, nodded and smiled. She couldnât understand a word I said. Unfortunately, I canât speak Tibetan. And from my window seat I spy... religion! And as a bonus: the sit-down toilet of shame! This is a rest stop along the road. All of the stalls have squat toilets, but for people too old or handicapped to use them, they have the one sit down toilet... and it's a special seat, all right, with a great view.
Terracotta Army and borrowed karma
I hate guided tours, I really do. Yet, perhaps because I thought Iâd be able to enjoy one of the worldâs most famous historical finds if I could understand it better, or perhaps because I was feeling a little scared about figuring out the public transportation to get there on my own, I decided to take a tour organized by my hostel to see the Terracotta Army, as well as some nearby mausoleum that sounded interesting and I made the mistake of not investigating beforehand. And thatâs how I ended up with a busload of Germans, an unintelligible and overeager guide, and, strangely enough, a now headless terracotta general of my own to carry around China for the next few months. I wonât go into too much detail about the tour, except to say that the general was a gift from my tour guide, who sneakily held me back behind the tour and handed me a red plastic bag wrapped around something slightly larger than one of my shoes. âItâs a gift for you. But donât tell the others!â As it turns out, when she became a tour guide the first people she ever led were a Colombian family. They were so nice that she has been grateful for years, and since Iâm the only Colombian she has ever seen since that day, I was the lucky receiver of the karmic rewards they accumulated so long ago. Thanks, anonymous Colombian family, for a thoughtful, beautiful, and wholly inconvenient gift that Iâve already managed to decapitate in my bag as I find my way around this country. In addition to my poor General, I was also introduced to what is possibly the biggest tourist trap in the entire world, right next to the famous Terracotta Army. The army was protecting a tomb, and the tomb itself, an underground city with rivers of mercury and jewels, and 3000 buried concubines lies just a few kilometers from the site. I know youâre thinking that that sounds awesome, and it does. Except that, according to my guide, the many traps that the slightly insane emperor that first unified China set up to protect the tomb 23 centuries ago are still considered too dangerous for the currently available technology. Oh, and besides, the Chinese think it would be âbad luckâ to open what sounds like the most awesome archeological site of all of history. Sigh. So when you visit, expect to see a very green hill in the distance, covered in some nice pine trees and totally devoid of rivers of mercury or concubine skeletons or anything worth getting out of bed for, at all. As for the Terracotta Army itself, I really loved it. The site is crazy crowded, as is to be expected, and the absolute majority of the warriors are in tiny pieces that will allegedly take another 70 years to be pieced back together. However, the sheer magnitude of the site, and the insanity of the undertaking of building this underground army was impressive enough to make it worth it for me. I know some of the people I was with were underwhelmed, but such is life. To not do:
Waste time seeing Emperor Qin ShiHuang âs âmausoleumâ
Put a terracotta figurine in your backpack
Get a guided tour to go see the Terracotta Army. Itâs really easy to go on your own.
To eat:
Rou Jia Mo, the Chinese hamburger, a sort of juicy sloppy joe between toasted English muffins. One of my favorite things to have in China
Lamb paomo, a noodle dish with pieces of flatbread in it.
ALL of the street food.
This is the handsome general whose replica I was given as an inconvenient gift Can you believe that after this many centuries you can still see his perfect fingernails? The world's lamest tourist attraction, the emperor's mausoleum, with some accompanying Germans So many tourists! "Warrior statue personalized". Really. Why didn't I get one of these? At least now he's more authentic?
Xiâan: smog and street food
Itâs only the first day and I can already see that a travel blog is a lot less fun than a living somewhere blog. Instead of writing only about things that really catch my attention, I end up writing a fifth grade report of my summer vacation, daily. Iâm sorry about that. Because of logistical issues I ended up going out to explore past noon, but I donât feel that terrible because today was not the greatest for being outside. The smog was unbearable, and the weather alternated between drizzle and actual rain all day. Besides, there seemed to be an even greater amount of e-bikes of death on the sidewalks than in Beijing, and I swear I nearly got to meet my maker several times when theyâd sneak up behind me at full speed. Xiâan is an ancient city, once the political capital of China as well as the beginning (or the end) of the Silk Road. It is also a big, noisy, and unbearably crowded modern Chinese city. That being said, there are a few redeeming factors, like a 14 km wall all around the center of the city that, unlike Beijingâs, is still standing and one can ride a bike on top of. I was too cheap to get the bike, of course, but I walked for a good while until the rain scared me away. There were a few impressive sights, like the Wild Goose Pagoda, and a few very Chinese ones in the non-historical way, like a dinosaur themed mall and a fake apple store, hilariously named the âSmart S oreâ since the T fell off the sign. In general, the attractions seemed too similar to Beijingâs to really shake me, except for the snack market. In the Muslim Quarter, there are several streets full of people and persimmons and chesnuts and bikes and cars and pots and screaming and little restaurants and food stalls and I just walked around eating a bit of everything. The chaos was right up my alley, and the food was exceptionally good.  I tried several things I had never eaten before, including the best lamb kebob Iâve ever had, and Iâve had dozens of them in Beijing. (They are called Chuanâr 串 in Chineseâitâs my favorite character since it looks exactly like what it is. If only they were all so easy!). I also stupidly bought some spices that I now have to carry around for the rest of my trip. Anyway, I am so exhausted I fell asleep on the bus and nearly missed my stop. Here are some pictures. I apologize to all real photographers out there for my infatuation with cheesy filters. I haven't escaped the traffic and smog in Beijing yet, but at least there's the wonderful city wall in the background? The Chinese people I asked to take this picture of me were very confused. Strange foreigners, embarrassing themselves. From the city wall, a Chinese pastime Something's cookin'! Dried dates, delicious Friendliest Chuan'r seller ever!
Stage two begins
After an unfinished blog makeover and with a long list of tasks still uncrossed from my very long to-do list, here I am again. This post is being written from the middle of three bunks in a hard bed (second class sleeping compartment) of a train headed for Xiâan. After a tumultuous but unforgettable affair, I have said goodbye to Beijing, at least for now. I finished my daily Chinese classes, having now reached a very comfortable level of Chinese that lets me accompany my vigorous pointing with grunts that are occasionally understood. I had a small round of goodbye parties with Chinese friends, which included new thrills like eating pig ears and wrapping dumplings. I said goodbye to my wonderful roommates with a heavy heart, and to the smog and traffic with a glad one, and I put all of my stuff in a suitcase I abandoned in my old apartment to be picked up at some undefined point in the future. My house is now on my back, in a very lime green backpack that my yuppie of a boyfriend insists makes me look like a âhomeless pothead.â Like many a lost soul in American literature, I am heading West, at least at first. But unlike California, my west will include terracotta warriors, Tibetan villages, a grape-growing oasis and massive sand dunes where I hope to hitch a camel ride. I will visit the provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu and Xinjiang, in a mini sampling of the ancient Silk Road. From there, I will fly to Shanghai, visit the water town of Suzhou then head to Wuhan to visit my high school friend Erin who just moved to China about a week ago. The trip goes on after that, but I donât want to spoil the surprises all at once. But hereâs the really crazy part: Iâm going alone. Just me and my anxieties and my gross bitten nails and my propensity to forget everything and my awful sense of direction. Just me, one person. Sometimes, fans of going on tours of the flag-chasing variety will tell me how brave and/or stupid I am. I wonât argue with the latter, but Iâll tell you for sure that thereâs not a single thing brave about me right now. I am absolutely petrified. So what do I do to make myself go through with it anyway? Well, itâs easy. The first thing I do is talk to travelers, preferably backpacker types. When women start telling me about their trips solo across South America for six months not speaking a word of Spanish and going on intense hikes in the Andes I start feeling a little silly about freaking out about going to cities that, although the majority of you have possibly never heard of them, which I hope scores me major travel hipster points, are actually huge domestic travel destinations and on the very well-beaten path of Chinese tour buses. If grandma Zhao can do it, why canât I? When that isnât enough, I just read a few travel blogs, those are good for making me feel like a wimp. Besides, Iâm going on the Silk Road for godâs sake. People have been taking that path for thousands of years, before the Lonely Planet, and Hostel World reviews and the Internet. I think of it as something like the process giving birth. It sounds anatomically impossible, much less believable than a stork or any alternative explanation, but, guys, everybodyâs mom has done it! It HAS to be doable, right? The other game I play with myself is a game Iâm calling: âWhatâs the worst thing that can happen? (within reasonable limits).â This means that in an act of effective self-deception, I discount all possibilities of physical aggression, natural disasters, illness and civil unrest as âunreasonableâ. I am left with the not-that-terrifying options of getting my stuff stolen (sucks, but things are things, presumably one day Iâll have a job and Iâll be able to replace them) OR getting into some sort of accident, which I dismiss as the kind of calamity that would happen whether I had ever left Beijing or not, an act of destiny. Besides, Bogota, where Iâd likely be living if my life hadnât taken so many wild turns in the last 11 years, has a higher probability of both the reasonable and unreasonable risks that I just mentioned than any city in China. Perfect logic, right? But anyway, enough of that. Today, I am traveling by train for the second time in my life, and in a sleeping compartment for the first. It rained on the way to the station, and I had to walk well over a mile with my heavier-than expected bags in the rain (itâs hour three and I already want to light my bag on fire. No wonder backpackers smell so bad, they just carry the one shirt theyâre wearing). The station was like a beehive, not that I should ever expect anything different in China. Once on the train,  I sat outside of my compartment, contemplating the six beds arranged in stacks of threes that made me feel more like I was being put in storage than going to sleep. I waited until someone else climbed first so I could figure out how to get up there. This is second class, and the space above the bed is not tall enough to sit up, and the mattress is very hard, but itâs an awesome way to travel. And instead of thinking of the people on the nice soft beds, I think of the ones that got standing room in this 12 hour train, and the tiny stools that they sell in the entrance to the station. What a luxury being able to stretch out in my own little shelf! I wish airplanes had these! The station. Why is everything always this crowded? Here we goooo! This is where Iâm being stored for the night. Earlier, the compartment next door played a loud card game, the old lady in the bunk under mine played an awful radio that produced extremely loud static interspersed with what sounded like Chinese childrenâs songs (old people here donât believe in headphones), and my compartment mates ate vacuum-packed, black, fermented chicken eggs. Now everything is quiet, and I should go to sleep like everybody else, I have a long day ahead tomorrow. I will arrive in Xiâan in the morning, from where I will post this as soon as I have internet access. I hope to update often during the trip. Although I have a completely unreasonable travel itinerary, I plan to replace nightlife with blog-writing, so I hope Iâll have some time. ââ Quick update as I post, now safely arrived in Xiâan
I only put my hostel directions in my phone, which of course, died overnight. I spent the first hour in Xiâan finding an internet cafe. I made the mistake of choosing the âcheap optionâ (never do this in China, for anything) and ended up waiting a half hour for my email to load. When that happened, I realized that, had I booked it a day earlier, the hostel would have provided FREE TRANSPORTATION.
I got to the hostel and my jeans ripped. Yes, the ONLY PAIR of jeans that I brought. So much for frugal packing.
I forgot my toothbrush.
My hostel is awesome.

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Under Construction
I'm working on a brand new design for the page, which hopefully will be ready soon for a big upcoming adventure. Meanwhile, you can check laurajaramillo.tumblr.com for all of the good old posts. Â Â
The Golden Squat
It all starts with a tuxedoed dwarf that welcomes you at the door. Then a throne, hanging red velvet curtains, and a giant portrait of Napoleon at the height of his glory. Then, as you start your descent into the underground atop a long gold escalator, a swirl of Versaillesque paintings with ornate gilded frames floats above you in unexplainable disarray. Itâs only midnight and you already feel like Alice entering Wonderland. You remind yourself youâre not high at all, just in Beijing.
(Read the rest of this post on a this new website I'm blogging for here)
The Golden Squat
It all starts with a tuxedoed dwarf that welcomes you at the door. Then a throne, hanging red velvet curtains, and a giant portrait of Napoleon at the height of his glory. Then, as you start your descent into the underground atop a long gold escalator, a swirl of Versaillesque paintings with ornate gilded frames floats above you in unexplainable disarray. Itâs only midnight and you already feel like Alice entering Wonderland. You remind yourself youâre not high at all, just in Beijing. (Read the rest of this post on a this new website Iâm blogging for here)
This, ladies and gentlemen, is a video of a Chinese man, IN CHINA, saying I just made the best fried rice he's ever had. This seems like such an accomplishment that I had to post some proof.Â
And here, more for my future recollection than for anyone else to try at home, is the recipe that I made up. It is Chinese style, of course, with no measurements at all.Â
Ingredients:Â
Cold cooked rice
Garlic, minced
Ginger, minced
Black mushrooms (mini portobello), diced very finely
Ham, diced very finely
Two eggs
Spring onions, finely chopped
Baby bok choy, finely chopped
Soy sauce
Chinese cooking wine
Vegetable oil
Sesame oil
White pepper
About two tablespoons of chicken stock
1. Pour about a tablespoon of oil in a wok over high heat and swirl it all around until the surface is coated in a light film. Beat the eggs, and add them to the wok, moving it around as if making the world's thinnest pancake. When it's solid enough turn it around and cook the other side. Remove from wok and chop in small pieces.Â
2. Add a bit more oil and add the garlic and ginger. When the oil is fragrant, add the mushrooms and stir for about a minute. Add ham, soy sauce, chicken stock, sesame oil, white pepper and wine. Add spring onions and bok choy last, so they won't over-cook and will stay green. Add a bit of salt.Â
3. Add the rice and egg, and break up the clumps so everything is well mixed. Serve hot.Â
I hate Tumblr
I have spent the past 2 hours trying to upload some photos here. I give up. This is a total time-suck, and I have so many more posts that I have to write and so many half-finished projects of all sorts (how will I ever have time for a job? I have  zero obligations, and I feel like I'm running around from the minute I wake up til I collapse into my bed at midnight)
So, I give up on crappy, awful Tumblr, and will just post a link to a Google album, which is so much more beautiful and collaborative, and so easy to upload directly from Picasa, which I highly recommend for anyone looking for a good way to organize their photos. At this rate, I might change blog platforms soon, maybe it's time for this blog to grow up.Â
Background on the photos: I took my camera out yesterday, and these are all from my walk from school to home. They all have captions, which don't show up if you view them in slideshow mode, FYI.Â

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch ⢠No registration required ⢠HD streaming
I hate Tumblr
I have spent the past 2 hours trying to upload some photos here. I give up. This is a total time-suck, and I have so many more posts that I have to write and so many half-finished projects of all sorts (how will I ever have time for a job? I have  zero obligations, and I feel like Iâm running around from the minute I wake up til I collapse into my bed at midnight)
So, I give up on crappy, awful Tumblr, and will just post a link to a Google album, which is so much more beautiful and collaborative, and so easy to upload directly from Picasa, which I highly recommend for anyone looking for a good way to organize their photos. At this rate, I might change blog platforms soon, maybe itâs time for this blog to grow up.Â
Background on the photos: I took my camera out yesterday, and these are all from my walk from school to home. They all have captions, which donât show up if you view them in slideshow mode, FYI.Â
Not to brag or anything, but I totally just read this.* *(This post dedicated to those of you that don't speak Chinese and can't tell how simple and unimpressive the words in here actually are)