Weekend Trip to Xunyang: Friday
As of Thursday I hadn’t planned on anything exciting for the weekend; maybe go downtown, have a beer, watch a movie, whatever, a relaxing weekend. Well that all changed Thursday evening when my Chinese father texted me asking me if I wanted to go with them to visit ?? or “laolao”. After a couple messages back and forth I gathered that we were going to visit my mother’s mother (apparently that’s what laolao means, as ?? or “nainai” is father’s mother, who lives here in Xi’an) since we we’re going to be gone from Friday to Sunday, we must be going far away.
Either way, I was rather unclear as to what was going on, but I had wanted to meet my other grandmother since I got here, so now was a good opportunity. I wasn’t sure what to expect, I wasn’t really told why we we’re going to visit, just that we were. So I prepared, threw a couple videos and an audiobook on my iPod in case I needed to kill some time, fortunately that time never came.
My father came to pick me up on Friday afternoon at about 4PM and we headed to my mother’s office to pick her up. I wanted to ask him why we were going to visit laolao this weekend without sounding like I was complaining; I just figured there must be another reason. So I asked. Then he tells me, Tianyu’s ??, or “3rd sister” (read: cousin) was getting married! Heck yes, another wedding! And this time it was a family wedding, I was pretty excited.
Arriving at the Xi’an Le Garden Hotel where my mother works, I discovered that we’d have a full car, Yang Fei, my mother’s oldest niece, and the second oldest niece’s boyfriend were riding along with us. Being the tallest amongst them I always get to ride shotgun, though I do feel guilty about it sometimes. For the first 150 km or so, we were on the highway. The highways in China are an interesting concept, they’re pretty much all toll roads, so there aren’t many big construction trucks, no motorcycles, no motorscooters, nothing to slow down traffic. Not to mention, it cost nearly 100 yuan to drive this route, so the highway wasn’t exactly busy. Yet the speed limit is still 80 KPH, or 50 MPH, which is super slow for an empty highway! We may have been speeding some of the time, but not by much as there are many speed cameras along the highway as well. What would take us two hours to drive in the US was going to take about 5.
For the first couple hours, the drive was rather uneventful. It took about an hour to get out of traffic to the actual highway. By then it was dark so there was nothing to see on the drive. That is, until we got to the tunnels, there were sooo may tunnels through the mountains, there must have been 20 small tunnels, and what I was told is one of the longest tunnels in Asia, an 18.3 km monster tunnel! Granted, the inside of a tunnel looks like the inside of a tunnel, it was cool how it just kept going. Finally after turning off the highway we’d have to take a county road another 76 km, I thought it’d be quick like the highway, but I now understand why it’s not. The road is wide enough for 2 cars, but there’s small villages and building clusters lininig the road every few kilometers, along with construction trucks parked on the side of the road, people walking along the road,along with rubble and building materials piled on the shoulder. Not to mention this road was quite windy as it followed the Xun river all the way to Xunyang. With all the turning, speeding up, and slowing doww; there was no sleeping now. It’s a good thing I didn’t, because I would’ve been woken up by the next part. It’s totally normal here to have to drive through the middle of a construction site, but since they’ve been building the hydro-electric dam on the Xun river, there’s now a 6 km construction site where the road is simply terrible. The ruts are deep, there’s deep water, we’re constantly scraping the bottom of the car, wouldn’t have been so bad in an SUV, but we’re in a Buick sedan here. Eventually all of us end up getting out of the car and walking along the road, in order to identify the best path for my father following in the car. It wasn’t impassable, but it wasn’t easy, and definitely took some maneuvering to get through the crappy road, the whole time while being hassled by huge construction trucks wanting us to get out of their way. It took an hour to go 6 km. Think about that for a second, it’s a little under 4 miles. One. Hour.
Finally after escaping the 6 km from hell, we quickly arrived in Xunyang where we went to Yang Fei’s house, which is also where laolao happens to live, and had some dinner. After dinner, it was late and my father and I headed to the hotel where we would be staying, while my mother stayed at her families home. Already an interesting trip, and there’s still
As of Thursday I hadn’t planned on anything exciting for the weekend; maybe
Navigating the 6 km from hell
go downtown, have a beer, watch a movie, whatever, a relaxing weekend. Well that all changed Thursday evening when my Chinese father texted me asking me if I wanted to go with them to visit 姥姥 or “laolao”. After a couple messages back and forth I gathered that we were going to visit my mother’s mother (apparently that’s what laolao means, as 奶奶 or “nainai” is father’s mother, who lives here in Xi’an) since we we’re going to be gone from Friday to Sunday, we must be going far away.
Either way, I was rather unclear as to what was going on, but I had wanted to meet my other grandmother since I got here, so now was a good opportunity. I wasn’t sure what to expect, I wasn’t really told why we we’re going to visit, just that we were. So I prepared, threw a couple videos and an audiobook on my iPod in case I needed to kill some time, fortunately that time never came.
My father came to pick me up on Friday afternoon at about 4PM and we headed to my mother’s office to pick her up. I wanted to ask him why we were going to visit laolao this weekend without sounding like I was complaining; I just figured there must be another reason. So I asked. Then he tells me, Tianyu’s 三姐, or “3rd sister” (read: cousin) was getting married! Heck yes, another wedding! And this time it was a family wedding, I was pretty excited.
Arriving at the Xi’an Le Garden Hotel where my mother works, I discovered that we’d have a full car, Yang Fei, my mother’s oldest niece, and the second oldest niece’s boyfriend were riding along with us. Being the tallest amongst them I always get to ride shotgun, though I do feel guilty about it sometimes. For the first 150 km or so, we were on the highway. The highways in China are an interesting concept, they’re pretty much all toll roads, so there aren’t many big construction trucks, no motorcycles, no motorscooters, nothing to slow down traffic. Not to mention, it cost nearly 100 yuan to drive this route, so the highway wasn’t exactly busy. Yet the speed limit is still 80 KPH, or 50 MPH, which is super slow for an empty highway! We may have been speeding some of the time, but not by much as there are many speed cameras along the highway as well. What would take us two hours to drive in the US was going to take about 5.
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