A Day in the Life, Parting Thoughts

Traveling makes ordinary errands often extraordinary due to the complexities and intricacies of language and negotiation...One morning we awoke and set out to attempt to renew our visas. Armed with the Lonely Planet for Chinese character translations, we set out to the streets of Pingyao, a tiny (by Chinese standards) town between Xian and Beijing. We made it as far as the Police station, and after asking around, narrowed our search to one building.

As soon as we entered, everyone stopped what they were doing to stare. And stare. We had asked someone in the courtyard for help, and he accompanied us into the office where we showed our homemade sign (courtesy of the hostel staff) stating "We need to extend our visas" (we hope it said that...) in Chinese characters. After a bit of paper shuffling and Chinese murmuring a man surfaced to draw us a map. A woman stated in labored English, "Please wait and then follow him." This seemed to be the cue for everyone around us to throw out whatever English phrases they knew "Good morning," "Good evening," "Sorry" etc. with very large smiles. After a brief wait our leader appeared and we followed him back outside. Ari was very excited, "Hey, they're going to escort us in a police car!" Then quickly realized that our leader was going to retrieve his one speed bicycle to walk us there.

We definitely would not have found it had we not had our volunteer escort. We left the walled city of Pingyao for the outlying village, and after about 15 minutes he stopped, pointed to a sign in Chinese characters and indicated that this was our destination. We promptly displayed our sign to the appropriate office, and they reciprocated by displaying their handmade sign stating in English "I'm sorry we cannot process visa extensions, you must go to ..." Slightly deflated, we thanked them and headed back.

Why we chose this story for the blog is to illustrate yet another example of kindness we met on our journey throughout China. That is what has left the greatest impression on us while traveling here. I lost track of how many times people insisted on giving up their seats to us, or came up to us and wanted to know if they could help at busy intersections, train stations etc. We often wondered to ourselves how they would be treated as travelers in our country, or as immigrants. We know the answer, and hopefully that will make us kinder people upon our return home.