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One of my jobs on this trip is to keep a pretty close eye on the expenses. It isn’t a hard job and if I don’t crash anything or lose anything, it isn’t particularly painful either. I am trying to keep track so that we understand what the average cost for 6 people is in the different countries and cities we visit. Australia and New Zealand were about what we expected, China has been cheaper than we planned. We’ve had the occasional splurge, primarily one set of plane tickets, but for the most part we have lived comfortably without spending much money. Yangshou ended up being our cheapest city. For the 5 days we were there we lived on less than $75 dollars a day. I thought this was pretty good, I doubt the family has ever lived on $75 dollars a day since there has been more than 3 of us. We were also doing it fairly painlessly. As I took pride in our artificial penury, I was smacked in the face with a figure that quickly humbled me. Laurie and I were talking about the life of the locals and he commented, “The daily wage for a laborer is 30-40 yuan, or about $3.80-$5.00. Our $75 a day became less a metric to be proud of and more yet another example of our plenty.

Let me point out labor in China is not like labor in America. It is not like labor in Japan, Korea, Europe or any other part of the developed world. It is back breaking, put-you-in-an-early-grave, sorry-we-have no-machines-to-help-you, you-must-do-it-all-by-hand labor. Watch people dig holes by hand, move mountains of rock on their backs, or repair the Great Wall with donkeys and you get a deep appreciation for the amount of work these people have to do just to stay alive.

You also become thankful for even your worst day at the office. In the few instances where I could ask working people about their lives, I was amazed by their answers. There was the taxi driver in Beijjing. I asked him if he worked 5 or 6 days a week. He said 7. I asked him his hours and he said 10 to 10 everyday. He had a daughter who was going to university and this was the only way he could pay. There was the girl who ran the restaurant at the hostel in Xian. We were amazed that we would see her at 7am and 1am every day. She opened and closed it. At least she only worked 6 days a week. Then there are all the people I couldn’t ask. The old people who appear to be all that are left in the villages, who are working in the fields or are hunched over from the various burdens they carry on their backs. China is a harsh place for them. I think of what they’ve been through, from the failed communist blunders, like the famines after the Great Leap Forward and the bloody Red Guard of the Cultural Revolution. Even before the communists, China has existed only on the backs and through the energy of its peasants. I was intellectually aware of this but was surprised it was quite so blatant still today. For younger people there is good news. The last 15 years have brought about great change. There is a burgeoning middle class, there are more opportunities for the youth, and if China can avoid an ecological disaster from the pollution and falling water table, this place should grow for years to come raising the living standards of future generations. However, this generation of older peasants will be left behind. They will go on and figure out how to continue to live on less than $5 a day. They will deliver the food, remove the rubbish, and clean the streets, and new China will pass them by.

For us it means we are a little less critical when the taxi driver charges us an extra $.25 or the orange vendor charges us a foreigner surcharge of $.12. Sure it all adds up and in the end we might spend $80 a day. $5 for us isn’t going to make a difference, but for the lower class Chinese, it is the same as 12 hours of hard labor. That’s a price we can afford to pay.

Technorati Tags: China, labor, Round the world, RTW, work

Yangshou, the center of backpackers and foreigners in general throughout the whole of China. A city where Chinese are a minority compared to the large number of tourists. A place where you can get western food as good as at home. Or so Lonely Planet had told us. We entered Yangshao to find out that none of these things were true. I must agree with some other bloggers who called their Lonely Planet, Lying Planet. Yangshao for the most part was a quiet city, not a rowdy backpackers’ town as I had heard. There were at least fifteen Chinese to every foreigner, and they were still obsessed with grabbing Asher for pictures, a skill which it seemed no Chinese could master since Asher would bolt away and hide every time anyone got remotely close to her. Definitley not a place where foreigners are as commonplace as Chinese. Aside from the tours on the Li River, the Yangshou Mud Caves, and so forth, all that there was in the quiet town of 300,000 was a single street packed with restaurants and discos. As I would soon find out, this is where we would be spending most of our time. On our first night we walked down the long street, awe struck by how many discos could be packed into such a small space. We checked out a few restaurants and then decided on the China Cafe, which looked as if it could be quite good, since it was stuffed with people. We ordered a good deal of food, and found that at least the guide books were right on one thing, the food was amazing.

The China Cafe had somehow managed to master the art of Italian cooking, since the pasta, lasagna, and pizza were the kids’ favorites. Kieran for the first time ate a decent amount of food, well maybe a bit more than a decent amount, he stuffed in the pizza and lasagna. Despite their Italian food, they still needed to work on the traditional hamburger; my mom ordered one and got a frozen meat patty on a bun with maybe ten fries to accompany it. For the rest of us we found that the China Cafe offered good fried rice, sweet and sour pork, and staged the best sizzling beef plate we have yet to taste. We managed to buy two fried rice plates, sizzling beef, sweet and sour pork, three cheese pizzas, a plate of pasta, garlic spare ribs, roast goose and beef noodles for under twenty dollars, finally cutting down on food costs after insanely priced Australia and New Zealand, I mean three bucks for a candy bar? Come on Aussie! All around us were other restaurants with live music. To my disappointment not a single drum set was to be found. All the bands used tambourines and keyboard beats. Their ability to play was alright, but as for the singing, um, let’s just say that half the time I thought some drunks were doing karaoke. We also noticed that every band at some time played a collection of American 60’s through 80’s hits, a fact that made me want to jump off a bridge again. The discos were hopping, people packed into them to show off their dancing skills. The problem is that in a country where the only indigenous instruments are flutes and a single string instrument, you don’t build a good rhythm base among most people, and so most end up dancing like McKane, Kieran and Asher, a lot of jumping around with no real connection to the beat. But for the younger kids this proved to be the most fun thing of all. At the first disco we passed we saw a very fashionable man outside bouncing to the music in an interesting fashion and yelling at people to come to his disco. We decided to have some fun. Mac and I hopped up. I started doing various odd moves while Mac jumped around of course! The man didn’t like it at all so we left him. The kids continued to dance in the front of this disco EVERY night and drew in huge crowds. Every time they came the man would go inside get a beer and come back out, while his female colleague loved the kids and told them to come dance any time they wanted. Aside from eating at the China Cafe every night (we only ate at another restaurant for dinner once and it paled in comparison, even the director of the Yangshao English school had told us China Cafe was some of the best food in town)

The other main attraction was an arcade like area dedicated solely to a game called ‘Street Ball.’ It’s basically one of those basketball games like at Chuck E. Cheese’s where you try and score as many baskets as possible in a given time limit, and if you do well enough you move on to the next round. We spent hours playing constantly challenging each other to see who could get the high score, our dad basically owning our faces in every time. But even the great Tom couldn’t stand up to the Asian women who consistently made 15 or 16 baskets in a row with little to no effort. We finished up in Yangshao with one last night out. We ate to our heart’s content in the China Cafe, danced and created a giant crowd at the disco, and took the little kids to get lollipops. We bid farewell to Yangshao with a good impression made inside us. If one ever goes to China and is searching for a place to relax or have a good time, come to Yangshao. There you should find something for everyone.

Technorati Tags: Dance, food, puppy, Round-the-world, RTW, Travel, Travel Writing, Yangshou