Chinese Acrobatics

When a student told Jean that her hometown was the birthplace of Chinese acrobatics, we began talking about making a trip there. It took a year to arrange the trip but April 18 we joined the student to board the train for the 6 hour trip to Wuqiao in Hebei province, the province to the north of where we live.  We had a great trip, including a visit to Acrobatics World park, visits with the student's family, a nice hotel, a walk in the park where we became the attraction at a Dating Day activity, and various weird events like the passerby who unexplainedly opened the taxi door and threw 2 yuan (about 30 cents) onto Jean's lap, or the woman in the Ladies Room who offered her a cigarette. And of course there was the train ride with standing only tickets!  Best of all was an informal Easter service in our hotel room with our student friend.

The theme that runs through most of these stories is that Wuqiao is a small city (maybe 200,000-- small by Chinese standards) that rarely has foreign guests.  Therefore foreigners attract attention.  In two of the acrobatic shows, the performer stopped his act when he spotted us to ask where we were from, and did we like the show.  Many passersby wanted us to take a photo with them or with their children.   Undoubtedly our foreign faces motivated the bizarre gift of 2 yuan or a cigarette.

On Sunday morning we went for a walk in the city park.  We were embarrassed when the organizer of the Dating Day event (a local event to match young men and women) spotted two foreigners in the crowd and ran out to grab us.  We assumed she just wanted her photo with us, but she brought us to the stage where the group of women doing a traditional dance forced us to dance with them and then posed for photos with us, Then we were interviewed by the MC (our student friend served as interpreter for the interview). And they gave us each a gift, a boxed set of matching Dating Day mugs as a momento of our 15 minutes of fame.

See the attached photos for a glimpse of the acrobatics shows.  They were also magic, horse, and animal shows.

The family of our student friend were wonderful hosts.  Typical of Chinese hospitality they overfed us with delicious meals.  The first night they took us out to eat.  We were stuffed from eating the 9 dishes of foods, when the main dishes arrived: two kinds of dumplings and noodles prepared in a way we had not had before.  We wish we had gone a little slower on the first part.  We learned our lesson when for Sunday lunch we ate in their home-- a total of 13 homecooked dishes. The mother, grandmother, and next door neighbor had been cooking all morning to prepare the meal!  (We were the first foreigners the 80 year olf grandmother had ever met.  She was nervous and shy and wouldn't eat anything until Jean insisted she had to eat.)

After lunch the three of us went for a walk in her neighborhood.  We saw a large Catholic church, but it was closed so we couldn't see inside.

Our 6 hour trip there was by train.  What made it unique was we had no seats.  We had purchased our tickets five days earlier-- too late to get seats.  It is common in China that many people have to stand for long train rides.  We had always thought these seatless tickets would be discounted, but they are not!  It cost us the same 81 yuan (about $13) as the tickets with seats cost.  Our Chinese friends agreed with us that this is very unfair.  We brought one stool on the train, and we were almost always able to find a vacant seat or a kind traveler would offer their seat to these elderly foreigners, so we actually got to sit for most of the journey.  For our return journey we had seats.

It was a great experience.  One extra blessing was that our hotel room had a working bathtub-- a rarity in China!  It was great to end a day for which we had been on our feet a lot to settle into a tub of soothing hot water-- sigh!