The Beautiful People

I stayed my first night in Xi’an in a beautiful, air-conditioned dorm room for 6 USD per night.   It was my second choice due to the price and after a few hours looking around I marked it down as further evidence in favor of my continuing theory: The number of Friendly Travelers in a guesthouse is inversely proportional to the price.  The guests were mainly couples and I found little in the way of conversation so in the morning I moved on, lugging my pack 5 blocks to the low-budget option up the street: Shuyuan Youth Hostel; 4.50 USD for bed, a marginally functional A/C unit, and a free beer with each night’s stay.  I stayed at SYH for five days.  Everyone was going in the opposite direction as me, coming from where I’m headed and going to where I’ve been, and few stayed longer than 2 nights.  For some reason, this situation created a smooth, steady flow of interesting company.  

Meeting people is beginning to be one of the primary joys of travel for me.  I’m not naturally outgoing and I have often found it awkward to get beyond the superficial with someone I’ve just met, but when everyone has travel in common it suddenly seems so simple.  “Where are you from and where are you going?” often seems to be all it takes to start to acquire a new friend.   In my experience this has been strikingly true in China, perhaps because everyone feels a little lost occasionally, more so than anywhere else I’ve been so far.  There is a prevailing sense that we must stick together, that no one should be alone.  At SYH this inclusiveness was taken to another level.  Without warning strangers became close friends, confidants, mentors.   Over five days I rotated through dozens of relationships, some shallow, some embarrassingly deep; groups of companions overlapping and recombining as new arrivals joined the madness and another forty-eight hour friend said goodbye.     

Bouncing along in these swirling connections, I paused one day and found myself hopelessly spellbound by a pair of confident, enthusiastic, achingly beautiful, ultimately untouchable French-Canadians.  I said hello to them, and then let myself float in the wake of a collection of strangers - some hopeful suitors, most just friendly - that the girls pulled gently behind them; a group that contained men and women from a handful of nations and grew from four to six to ten, none of us particularly sober by the time the sun set.  The group solidified and each of us in turn performed the familiar rites of introduction, then drank beer and rice liquor, and finally set out to roam the early morning streets.  We were denied entrance at a posh nightclub for our inappropriate attire and moped momentarily on the sidewalk before finding a perfectly raucous working class establishment where the crowd danced in a weird, tentative, Chinese-style frenzy and our flip-flops were not an issue.  The lovely Quebecois drifted in and out of our midst while we reveled in our cheaply-bought celebrity status and tried without success to hold conversations, or failing that, a couple of dance steps with the few locals bold and curious enough to approach us.  As the standard dictates in Chinese clubs, by virtue of our Westernness, an unseen benefactor purchased all of our drinks.  By the time we tumbled out of the club with the sky beginning to show signs of the approaching morning, I felt a love for my new friends that is perhaps only possible when one knows that they’ll be gone tomorrow.   And perhaps it helps when one has been drinking a little. 

I’m in Pingyao now; a town of 40,000 souls.  It’s quiet and crumbling and beautiful and expensive and I’m the only Westerner in my guesthouse.