Travel, Culture, Food

The story takes place in the wonderful, exciting and fast changing setting of the Yangtze river in the heart of mainland China. Me and my “just met travel mate” decided to go on a river cruise for a three days trip which would bring us from the biggest city in the world – Chongqing - to Wuhan. I already got the feeling that this could be quite an experience on the day we booked the trip in our hostel in Chengdu where we were informed that while on the river, we would be living on a ship for “Chinese tourists” and furthermore, that this ship in particular wouldn’t be as “clean and convenient” as we might expect a cruise ship to be. Among the estimated number of two hundred passengers there only had been a handful of non-Chinese travelers. It’s easy to guess that sooner or later those few would gather to together. So happened on the last night of the cruise. Our group that consisted of Backpackers from Malaysia, Italy, England and Germany was soon joined by a group of roughly ten Chinese men from Beijing. The awkwardness of not being able to communicate without any barriers never really occurred and the growing pile of empty beer bottles did the rest. And so it didn’t take a long time and we found ourselves in a descent international piss-up. The beers were soon swapped for baijiu (Chinese strong liquor which in that case was served in a single bottle from which everyone took a sip) and the party was on the go. At some point the Chinese start to pack out some snacks which they previously bought at the small shop on board. Among the very boring and worldwide to find snacks they also threw a dried fish in a vacuum sealed plastic bag on the table. This poor ocean inhabitant with his best before date being due in several years didn’t look too yummy to me. Not long and not to my surprise the fish was passed from person to person and everyone had a good bite of it. I, being the foreigner with the first try, had to struggle a lot with only getting my face (my nose in particular) closer to the freshly opened plastic bag. It was probably my face impression after I swallowed that made the rest of the group break out in loud laughter. From this moment on I felt even more accepted and respected inside their group. Sharing food, drinking from the same bottle and lighting up each others cigarette were considered as gestures of friendship. And during this night friendship was easy to find.