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On May 21, we left Fubang and set off for Xuelin, for a total distance of 47 kilometers. After the experience of the night before, we wanted to make sure we got in to the next village nice and early, while it was still light out, and while we still had a chance of actually eating dinner (which we didn’t get to do the night before). The ride today was sooo much better, and we even got on some paved road, which was miraculous! Although we spent a lot of time going uphill, the view was spectacular. SPECTACULAR! It was so very beautiful, which hopefully you can see for yourself if I can actually gets some VLOGS uploaded (I have a ton, but the internet is too slow to load them and send them, so you may just have to wait until I get to Shanghai before they get posted).

We got into Xuelin around 4 pm, which gave us plenty of time to bargain for a hotel and explore the area. Adjacent to Xuelin was a small village populated by the Wa minority. We decided to walk around and take pictures, and came across a wedding under way. While we didn’t get invited, we did run into a number of inebriated wedding guests, all old men, stumbling around drunkenly through the village. The wedding didn’t look like much, there was no music, nor food, nor much of anything that resembled celebrating. Who knows if that is just the Wa way, or whether the family was too poor to have any accouterments. It may have been the latter, but I guess we won’t know.

We decided to have dinner at the nicest place in Xuelin, a small restaurant just next to our hotel. 10 seconds after we sat down, a group of people who had been dining in the next “room” comes over to us and immediately starts speaking to us in really bad (but good for being in a small village in Southwest China) English. A woman begins introductions with a “Hello! I am the Middle School English teacher.” And then reverts to Chinese to apologize for her bad English saying she has already had a lot to drink. The group were all teachers at the local school, and they were all drunk. They immediately asked us if we would “give them the opportunity to go to the school with them to ‘play.’”

Who knows what that meant. We explained that we had come for dinner, and we needed to eat. They immediately said they could wait for “half an hour” for us to eat. We told them that was not nearly enough time, and we would like to eat at our own pace. They then left us, and we had a nice dinner in peace. But, like clockwork, as soon as we had finished eating they came back over, this time without the woman teacher. There were three men, Mr. Aiga, Mr. Chen and Mr. He, all members of the Wa minority. They immediately ordered beers, and thus began a night of shenanigans.

After initially trying to persuade us to go sing karaoke with them at the neighborhood KTV, to which we firmly resisted, the men finally gave in and let us stay where we were to have a few beers. Toasting when drinking is a typical Chinese thing to do, but in traditional Wa culture, toasts aren’t merely offered with words, but with song. Also, you don’t have your own glass to toast and drink as a group, but a single cup is used to toast people individually, and that one cup is passed around among the group and we each drink one by one from the same cup. Following tradition, as we understood it, the host, our Mr. Aiga, started by toasting the oldest of his guests (us), which happened to be Andy. Facing Andy, Mr. Aiga broke into song, with Mr. Chen and Mr. He clapping and dancing along to the beat. The one being toasted (Andy) is supposed to face the singer with his right palm facing up with his thumb and forefinger pointed out, as if pretending to hold a gun. The left hand is placed palm face up under the right wrist. This is supposed to signal respect for the person giving the toast. After Mr. Aiga finished his song, he gan bei’ed (chugged) the glass of beer, and then refilled the cup and handed it off to Andy. Now, it was Andy’s turn to pick a person to toast, sing a song himself, chug the beer, refill it, and hand it off to the person he toasted. The drinking, toasting, and singing is continued like this indefinitely. The only downside to this type of social drinking means that you have to be a good singer, and have a song to sing. Andy, Evan and I quickly had to think of songs to sing, which is really rather difficult when you’re suddenly put on the spot. Evan was the first to get musical inspiration and prevented the USA from losing face with his rendition of “16 tons,” a coal mining song. Andy followed up with some Proclaimers, “I would walk 500 miles,” and I followed with “You are my sunshine.” Loosening up after this first round of songs, we all got a little more creative, and delved into some songs in French, some Aretha Franklin, and Shaboom. We have this all on video, and it will certainly be put up as a VLOG. Hopefully the one of me singing Aretha Franklin’s “I will survive” will be accidentally deleted, or else I will have no dignity for the rest of my life.