Dead End

This weekend was my first trip with the cycling club. The plan was simple: bike out to a rustic and beautiful suburb of Jinan, park our bikes and spend a leisurely afternoon in a scenic park, have a picnic lunch, then head home. Sounded good to me. Ha. Here's what really happened:

The leisurely bike ride to the country was anything but. Jinan is a HUGE city - 9 million people - and you know how people are always talking about how crowded and polluted China is? Yeah, well, they're not kidding. The roads were often six or eight lanes across, and clogged with cars, which, by the way, obey no traffic laws and yield to no one. Many of the cars exhaled dark clouds of what looked like a gaseous form of dirt. Add to this the yellow dust that covered everything, and would occasionally blow in large gusts across the road, and you have some idea of what I was biking in.

We biked for about an hour in these conditions in the city, and then transitioned onto country roads, which just meant more dust and less exhaust. By the time we made it to our destination, I was splattered with mud, my butt hurt from sitting on the hard seat for so long, and I was thirsty for the sight of anything green.

Imagine the sheer joy I must have felt, then, upon being informed that - surprise! - the "park" is actually a military training zone, and only Chinese nationals are permitted to enter. That's right: No Foreigners Allowed. Revenge for the opium years? A underlying belief in racial supremacy? Paranoia that I would somehow actually discover and abscond with state secrets? Whatever the reason, I began to consider my options. "Shall I sit here alone in the dusty street with just the chickens and mangy dogs for company? Should I test my navigational skills by biking back to campus on my own? Should I select some lucky member of the biking club to come with me?" I was just beginning to regret not having brought my book along, when I was informed that in fact, a few seasoned members of the club would accompany me to another scenic destination of my choice. Since I had no idea where I was, I decided to do the gracious thing and let the others decide where we should go. And then we were back on our bikes, back on the dusty roads, and headed off to who-knows-where.

At first, it was somewhat awkward, because they all knew each other pretty well, and I was like the annoying freshman tagging along and trying desperately to fit in and be cool. But the thing about biking lonely, dusty country roads is that you have nothing to do but talk to each other. So the awkwardness wore off quickly. And the thing about hanging out with seniors instead of freshmen is that they actually know what they're doing. I don't know how, but we somehow ended up on top of a beautiful mountain overlooking Jinan. And we were so comfortable there, perched on a rock with our various snacks and goodies, that we ended up hanging out there for several hours. By the time we descended the mountain, we were all chummy, and hungry again (typical), so we biked back into Jinan for a ridiculously early dinner.

I'll quickly sum up the rest of the evening, because it went by pretty fast: biking through narrow Jinan alleyways trying to find a restaurant, emerging quite suddenly upon a natural swimming hole filled with elderly Chinese men in Speedos, more narrow alleyways, dinner seated on mini stools no more than one foot off the ground, joking, laughing, getting lost on the way back to campus, a quick shower, and, to cap things off, paying 25 cents to see Angelina Jolie dubbed in Chinese.

A perfect day? Indeed.