I don’t say this lightly, but this trip may have been one of my favorite trips in China. We had good food, good times and good friends…. and also fireworks. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but we were under the impression that China was the land of fireworks. Whenever we learned about China in school or tv it always showed New Years celebrations with lots of fireworks. However, since we moved to China, no fireworks, not any! Our town outlawed fireworks about a year before we moved here. But on our way in to Wuyi, we stopped at a store and bought a big box of fireworks and smaller boxes of sparklers and butterflies and some evil little popper things.
The picture below is Mark and Marco sharing some homemade meiju, a rice based alcohol that is positively lethal! Over a year later and two lockdowns there is still a significant amount of this bottle left. This was the aperitif to go along with a game of Risk.
We can’t remember what day of the three day trip this happened, maybe the first day? But as you walked into the hotel, there was this staircase incased in a fake rock tunnel. None of us got pictures of the offending rock tunnel, but poor Marco, the tallest in the group hit his head on the ceiling of the stupid tunnel. He got a cut that the scar is still visible over a year later- and we all learned new swear words in Italian.
Pre lunch sillies with Alex , Anna and Marco.
I love this picture Rachel took of Alex, he looks like an 80’s model.
The next day we went to Rachel’s village up in the mountains. I am a very (perhaps overly) confident driver with one notable exception- I don’t like curvy mountain roads, especially not with just one tiny metal barrier between me and falling of the side of a mountain. If I can see the drop off or how high we are, I get very nervous and drive very slow. This makes for a slow drive to the village where it is about an hour when you go quickly. And Marco who is familiar and comfortable with the road can drive it very fast.
It is also a very small road with just enough room for two cars if they both move all the way to the edge. Poor Alex was very carsick by the time we got to the village.
Rachel took this picture through the sunroof of their car as we followed them down the mountain.
Along the way to the village is another small village known for it’s chilis, every door had chilis hanging around it. It is a good halfway point through the mountains to the village so we stopped to take a break.
Mark and Marco being good sports about taking chili pictures for me, since the kids wanted nothing to do with it.
This sign just made me laugh, I don’t know what the peppers are saying, but for it to be such a stereotypical picture in the middle of China- I had to take a picture.
The village makes a really big deal about being Chili Town, complete with giant statue of chilis. This spot has become a mental note to me that we are 1/2 way there.
Along the way, we saw several of these beautiful stone carvings and monuments in the hills, we’d never seen anything like that anywhere else in China. These are family tombstones, I don’t know if they are for just one person are more of a mausoleum style. I think they are absolutely beautiful, this one below has the traditional phoenix and dragon at the top.
This is the view from the top, it’s beautiful, but really high up! I asked Mark to take these pictures because I was too afraid to go to the edge.
When we got to the village, Rachel’s dad took us even farther up to go fishing at his local spot. This lake is right next to a large pig farm. Rachel’s dad was so patient with the kids (and the adults) because this was a different style of fishing rod and casting than we were used to.
Alex was getting a little frustrated that he hadn’t caught anything, I managed to catch the first fish. I was not much of a fishing person before this, but I think I enjoy it now (but I also don’t want to clean them).
Alex caught the second fish (we only caught two- Mark caught a bigger one but it managed to escape).
Then for the main event, we were there to celebrate Rachel’s grandma on what would have been her 100th birthday. The whole village came to participate. There was a table set with food and candles, and prayers and paper ingots.
It was a beautiful remembrance and it was clear to see how important she was to the community.
This man is folding (and teaching the kids) how to fold paper ingots to burn with prayers and thoughts written by people attending. The idea being that the person will receive them and have everything they need in the afterlife. There was a man doing prayers that would continue praying until the next day as part of the ceremony.
Also to honor her grandma, the village had fireworks. This is one of the coolest fireworks displays, better than some towns in the US have for 4th of July!
My biggest mistake was standing too close to the first set of fireworks and getting hit by flying crackers.
The boys in the aftermath of the fireworks, all the red bits on the ground are from the crackers. And Mark still has a handful of bottle rockets, butterfly spinners and mini crackers that were set off at random during the trip.
At this point it was getting close to midnight, and while the ceremony would continue through until the morning, our group went back to the hotel.
I can’t ever thank Rachel enough for including us in this special trip- we got to experience traditional practices, kind welcoming people, beautiful scenery and good times with good friends. This night is something I’ll remember forever.
Traveling Expat Family 