Hangzhou Diaries - II (Willow Talk, anyone?)

Up the stone steps we climbed, with our easels and charcoal pencils and pencils made of willow bark, to the back of the monastery at the top of the hill – which housed a single tea house sitting snugly, as the 8AM sunshine snaked around its many secret corners, and lay to waste the night’s mysteries.  

And from there, it was a clear view of the mountains dense with pine trees and fern on one side, and the bright yellow monastery gates and distant Lonjing tea plantations along the hillside on the other, all of it fingered deliciously by the lazy winter sunshine, the flirting-teasing kind that leaves you wanting more.

And in between setting up my easel, watching Coco set up hers, fumbling as one of my screws fell off the easel, and Eduardo’s big warm genuine smile as he helped set my easel right, something happened. Something rather simple and unexpected.

Happiness struck. That is all. All these months of seeking H A P P I N E S S as THE GOAL and here it was – presenting itself to me, out of nowhere, rather unceremoniously, but without apology – like a child late for class picking up earthworms along the way, but too self-contained to apologise about it.

“What you seek is seeking you.” Rumi’s words. And suddenly they struck home. Here was Happiness – seeking ME and waiting for ME – all the time. Where the fish was I??

Anyway, let us now turn to Bob. Our painting instructor – and all of 17. Well, Ok, not quite 17 but he looked 22 and actually is 27. Unlike the Occidentals, one cannot always tell with the Orientals and the number game, no? So, as Boeb (we shall call him Boeb from now on, as all the French and Italians in the group did!) says - Our first assignment today is sketching an Apple. And Boeb says he is nervous because his English is not where it should be. And I tell him “Hey Boeb, I am nervous too – my apple is not where it should be!”  I don’t think he got the joke.

Why an apple, you may ask? Good question! Apparently, an apple or an egg is the hardest thing to draw! So if you can crack an apple, chances are, you could be giving Monet’s “Water Lilies” a serious run for the money!

Guess what, for the next 2 hours we kept at the APPLE. It had now become venerable as “Her Highness, The Apple”. Mine had too much heart in it. As Boeb said, you need an apple that looks like it is waiting to be eaten, not one that loves you right back! Ok, Boeb I get the picture! My heart is happy today, after months and months of being not-so-happy – are you going to give me grief about my “hearty” apple?

  So we drew and drew the apple with charcoal pencils and willow bark with a 3 o’clock and a 5 o’clock and a whatever clock shadow, until I wanted to beat the shit out of it, and drink up some apple juice. I was going nowhere.

Needless to say, I lay my canvas down and smiled up at the sun and lay down on the grass, as the monks chanted away in the background down below, and the sun made everything strangely techni-colored and over-saturated in the clear mountain air – this was THE MOMENT.

I was HERE. I was NOW. I was HERE NOW. Not thinking of anything but the sun and its warmth on my face and how life had found me at last, or I, it. After that languorous time, my responses to any question were various intonations of “hmmm! Or Mmmm? Or Hmmm-snort-grunt” – I mean, like really, do you guys not know the power of this word! Unleash “Hmm” on the world, I say!

11:30AM and it was time to go down to the local village for lunch – which had PROPER (read non-gluey) food and PROPER Chinese bistros serving Hangzhou cuisine (mostly fresh water fish steamed and then dropped in a big bowl of oil and vinegar and broth, swimming with Sichuan pepper and burnt red chillies, but DIVINE!). But NOT until we made good use of the MODERN loo next to the tea house, complete with a FLUSH. Joy to the world!! J

I have to warn all you folks though, that if you EVER travel in offbeat places in China, please carry your hand-sanitizers or some form of soap AND tissue – most places have neither and just a large tap or two for washing hands.

Walking down to the village along stone paths flanked by coniferous trees, and women roasting Lonjing tea leaves the old fashioned way (in deep iron pans) on the sidewalk, we finally stopped at a bistro which led to a ‘secret’  wooden veranda/deck on the other side facing the clear mountain stream and the distant blue mountains, away from the street – for special “laowai” folks (in other words, foreigners)!

I tell you – when God gives, he opens it all up. An afternoon of perfect sunshine, clear mountain air, the bluest of Spring days, plum blossoms opening up, the company of like-minded people from everywhere in the world (including a lovely French woman from the Reunion Islands – I mean that was a dot on the map for me till now!) all getting to know each other- amidst charcoal drawing misses, picking bones off of the fish from the catch of the day, chants of monks in the background, and much laughter.

Eat, Pray, Love – Indeed.

Thank you, God in the heavens, for my cup runneth over today.

The Hangzhou diaries - Day One

The beauty of life is you never know, literally and metaphorically, what lies ahead of you in the next bend in the road. And that was it for me. One weekend. One weekend was all it took to change my life and its travails, and perspectives about living and traveling in China. Almost as though my life spun about a full circle on its axis, and wiped the entire slate clean as it swept the cobwebs off.

Walking into a large temple courtyard at 11pm at night, lit only by two large square glass flame-holders, with warm orange flames burning in them, throwing strange shadows around, that made the whole thing look like the night scene from The House of Flying Daggers, complete with the sound of swaying bamboo trees in the night sky… and all the gloom from my life suddenly fell away.  Wonderment!! Is that a word? This IS what all those Chinese movies are about! IT EXISTS! These places EXIST!!

So we walked to our quarters – women to the women’s wing and men to the men’s. Eat, Drink, Man, Woman (no Sleep, mind you!). Monastery, chastity and all that!

But wait, more wonderment was speeding down the high-speed train our way! We were going to sleep in a dorm on iron beds with fat mattresses with no heating, and two huge duvets for each bed. Let’s add some more excitement to this, shall we? How about no hot water in the taps (and I am talking early March winter in Hangzhou), and no bathrooms as we know them in the modern world. Attached baths? Umm what does that mean, I wonder!! But then this was a temple monastery (Fa Jin Tse) in the middle of the mountains in Hangzhou, and who cares about modern plumbing, yes? J You want modern plumbing, daily turndown  service for your room, and a towel that is a sitting duck on your bed, make yourself at home at the Four Seasons in Hangzhou. For the rest of us migrant workers, a temple monastery will do just fine, thank you!

All of a sudden, we all began mentally calculating our amount of food and beverage intake that day and for the days to come, how much tissue paper we all had amongst ourselves, if we had any soaps or alcohol hand-wash or hand sanitizers even. However, after the initial horror had settled in, we sat down on our beds and just laughed and decided to make the most of it! I am surprised constantly by the human capacity for tolerance and adjustment. None of us had seen a dorm room in probably over 20 years and here we were in one, in rural China, with no modern plumbing in the loos, no hot water or heating in temps of close to zero degrees at night, and all we cared about, really, was being able to wake up at 6:00am the next morning, and Painting Class 101!

By the time we tossed and turned in our respective creaking beds trying to get warm despite going to bed in our jackets and two layers of socks, it was 2:00 am. And by 4:00am the monks were up, chanting and praying in the monastery below!

6:00am and dawn was breaking. A new day was dawning and well, one has to catch the day while it is still untouched and pure. Can I just say that splashing freezing cold water on your face on a cold winter’s morning until you can’t feel your nose from your forehead or your mouth from your cheeks, is the most wonderful way to be wide awake in under one minute?!

Breakfast was well, glue-y to say the least. Some porridge like thing which neither tasted, nor looked like, nor smelt like porridge – more like glue. Maybe some snotty concoction of something. I thought some sugar would make it better. So I went asking the kitchen staff for “tang” (not tang as in Tang-o, the dance form, but tang with the flat “a” “hung” sound). Of course with the tonal intonations, tang also means heaven or soup or sugar. First I was given a vigorous shake of the head to articulate that “no, you CANNOT have heaven in your porridge!” Then I was asked if I wanted more soup or more porridge. Finally, having exhausted all the “tang” sounds, somebody inferred that Maybe, just MAYBE I wanted some sugar! Voila! My day is made! J

Outside, the temple workers were up, cleaning, ash-sweeping, lighting up the flames for incense burners (more like torch burners – going by the number of incense sticks the pilgrims had in their hands!), and lighting up, themselves! Yeah, like let’s torch it all down all at once! The sun was filtering through after the previous night’s rain and we have a crisp, clear blue Spring day! The Gods are happy indeed, and look, Mama, Buddha is smiling on His birthday! It was the birthday of one of Buddha’s incarnations, we were told. 

My gloom and doom was now going to be a thing of the past, I was convinced! Hereonward, I refuse to be the gin in the gin-soaked boy (girl in my case) anymore.