Spring Festival 2008: Anyuan

Some of you might wonder where Anyuan is located. It’s a small town in south Jiangxi province, a mountainous region that served as the starting point of the very famous Long March of the Red Armies. Why should we go there? Because Sufei’s best friend lives in that town. As we were on the point of celebrating her birthday, on February 18, we decided to go there and be a couple more fellows celebrating together. There is not much to be seen there but the purpose of that trip was to visit friends so it didn’t matter. They were very nice people actually. The best friend, Kundong I think it’s her name, came to pick us up at the bus station with her brother-in-law, named Sun, and took us back to their apartment to see the rest of the family. Then, we went for lunch in the best restaurant in town and met a few more of their friends. We ate local spicy dishes, including snake, and drank lot of baijiu again. Mr. Sun treated us with that meal, 400 yuan, and took us to the hotel. Mr. Sun has very good guanxi, social contacts that can help you work things out, so he got a very nice room at the government hotel for us. The best hotel room I ever staid in. A big bed, a living room with three sofas, a work desk, dark curtains, a washroom with the latest technology, and the heater, which isn’t common in South China. All of this for free. Thank you to Sun and thank you to the Chinese government. That night, I treated them to the KTV. KTV is what we call Karaoke, but the difference is that every group has is own private room. Sufei loves to sign so she was very enthusiastic. A bunch of Kundong’s friends joint us and we sang until 1 a.m. The next day was Sufei’s birthday so I invited everyone to a Sichuan restaurant for lunch. We had another good meal, cake, and baijiu once more. Then we headed for the orange yard. Yes, they grow oranges around there. It was amazing; they were orange trees everywhere on the mountain slopes. I never saw so many oranges in my life. We picked up tons of them. We ate some directly in the yard, took some back to eat on the train. We picked up so much that it took me another two days to eat them in Beijing, with the help of my roommates.

Visiting the orange yard was our last activity in Anyuan. Sufei and I took a bus back to Ganzhou, three hours, where we spent a last night in a motel. We got on our train the next morning. As ever, we had problems buying the tickets, only hard seats left. The train started at 10 a.m. Sufei got off at Huangchuan, Henan province to go see her Dad, after 10 hours on the train. I was bounded on the same train but continued my way to Beijing where I arrived at 9:30 a.m. the next morning. So I spent 23 hours on hard seats to finish the trip.

Thank you readers.