The rain wasn’t bad enough to keep my rain jacket off, so I stepped
off the trail and pulled it off. Wadding up and sticking it between my pack and
my back, I kept hiking. It seemed odd to me that if this was the way down,
there was no one else around…and also no one coming up. I wondered if I was
lost, and decided to turn back.
As I did, I saw three teenage boys walking towards me. Showing them my
map, I pointed to the Chinese characters next to “Fairy Bridge.”
“You want to go here?” the one boy asked. I said. I did. “So do we,” he said. Awesome! I decided to follow
them.
I nicknamed them (in my head) after the colors of the their
jackets. They all were actually a lot older than they looked. Silver was 23,
and the other two (Red and Blue) were my age. They were all university students
studying in Shanghai for the summer, although I didn’t catch where they lived
other than they are not from Shanghai.
We took a lot of pictures as we walked along. Red and Silver both
spoke pretty good English, but Blue never really talked. At one point Red
attempted to translate some Chinese characters that were painted on a rock for
me. Silver interrupted him and corrected him to say that they meant, “the rock
that is covered by clouds.”
“He did not mess up the translation because his English is bad,”
Silver explained. “He messed it up because his Chinese sucks!”
This part of the hike was a lot more intense than the other portions
had been. The trail totally disappeared and we were walking across open and
exposed cliff faces. Some of them were curved and easily could have been very slippery
if you weren’t paying attention. For the most part, the trail kept leading
down, but there was a bit of bit of bouldering that kept it interesting.
Segments of granite steps would come and go, but this was turning into more of
an adventure by the minute. It seemed like we’d climbed a long way down but
apparently there was more to go.
Turning a corner, we ran into a police officer who was guarding a
post. Red something to him and then translated that we just had, “500 more
meters to go!”
The stairs along the cliffs looked like something out of a castle.
They guard rails were royal and intricate in design and stone archways hung
over each turn. The stairs also seemed to look more and more grand as we
descended.
Eventually, we were able to see the bridge. Reaching the bottom of the
stairs, we walked through a cave and over to the outcropping the bridge stood
on. It was only about 5 feet long, and arched unnaturally high for a bridge,
but it was very pretty, as was the view off in the distance.
As we were taking photos, another group came down the Cliffside to the
bridge. There were two Asian kids and a Caucasian man who looked to be about
30. I’ve noticed that white people make really lingering eye contact when we
see one another here. In Shanghai, you see a couple white people every day, but
even there they look really out of place.
This particular white guy looked a bit clumsy. He was carrying all of
his gear in an over the shoulder satchel. His shoes were more dress shoes than
hiking boots, and rather than wearing a pancho, he was attempting to carry an
umbrella with one hand while lowering himself down the cliff.
And the rain was certainly picking up. I decided to put my camera away
and get my rain jacket back on. Silver helped me pull it over my pack, while
Red and I helped him wiggle into his. I pointed the way down the mountain and
started walking.
Red stopped me and told me I was going the wrong way. I pulled out my
map and pointed that we had to keep going to get to the cable car. The other two
Asians came over and all of them started talking in Chinese. As they pointed at
my map and gesticulated, I suddenly started to realize something…I had read the
map wrong. The label for “Fairy Bridge” was between two dots; one was on the
trial down, and one was 2km off the trail. I had assumed the label was for the
one on the trail, but I could see now from their pointing…I was 2km off course.
“They are going to the cable car too,” Silver said. “You should go
with them.”
I thanked them and we parted company. Red, Silver, and Blue headed off
up one trail, while the Asians, the white guy, and I climbed back up the cliffs
to get back to the main trail down.
I would have felt like an idiot for screwing up, but the storm was
getting bad quickly, and I needed to focus on climbing back up. It wasn’t technical
climbing by any means, but the rocks and boulders were slick with the pelting
rain. Coupled with the mist that was rolling in and the blowing rain drops, the
visibility was becoming awful. It was almost like a sideways monsoon, or
something out of a disaster/end-of-the-world movie. It was a little scary, but
I also found myself laughing at how awesome and unreal it was. There was never
a moment when I thought I would die, but as the rocks got slipperier and the
visibility got worse, broken bones didn’t seem out of the question.
Injuries seemed especially likely for the white guy, who was still
attempting to use his flimsy umbrella in the gale force wind. It was
practically bent apart already, but he continued to raise it above his head
while balancing with just one hand. He kind of looked like a few of the Asian
kids I’d seen on the hike up. When Elder had told them about me being an
American, they would take this “Statue of Liberty” pose in their photos and ask
me if I knew what they were.
Eventually, we were back up under the cover of the jungle like trees.
It was still raining, pretty hard, but there was enough shelter from the wind
to keep us out of the worst of it. As the white guy stowed his umbrella, he
asked me in a heavy accent, “So where are you from?”
“The US,” I said. “And you?” His accent had given him away, but I
asked to be polite.
“Germany,” he said.
“I could tell,” I said.
“Do I sound German?” He asked.
“You do,” I said. “Do you I sound American?”
“I suppose so,” he said. “Although you do not quite act American?”
As we walked along sharing stories, he really was pretty fascinating.
He grew up outside of Dresden on the border with the Czech Republic. After High
School, he took a few years off to travel and went around South East Asia and
South America. He was fluent in Spanish after dating a girl for several months
in Paraguay. When he returned to Germany, he went to school and got his degree
in Electrical Engineering. Now, he works for a hydraulics company, building
equipment for testing automobiles.
Currently—and this is the interesting part—he was in Shanghai on a
business trip to install a hydraulic rig at a car factory. The rig had been
shipped over a month ago, but when he arrived in Shanghai to install it, he
found that it had not yet been cleared by the customs office. This was because
the customs office had not received their handling fee yet.
“We do not have these customs fees in Germany?” He said.
I smirked, thinking back to my business ethics class. “I don’t think
those kind of feels are very popular in the Western world.”
In the process of trying to get his company to authorize the payment,
he has been stuck in China. He had made a few observations though from working
with this Chinese company.
“Chinese people do not tell you when they don’t understand something,”
he said. “I give them directions on how a piece of equipment works and they
tell me ‘oh yes, oh yes, we can do it!’ but then I come back and it isn’t done.
So I explain it two or three more times and they never ask questions, they just
don’t do it.”
I thought back to what Helen had told me about the concept of “face.”
I could totally see this fitting in!
“They also only know one way of doing things,” he continued. “Like
this form that has to be signed to send with the payment. We had to mail it to
an office, which takes 2 days, and then it takes 3 days to process, and 2 days
to send it back to us. I asked if I could just take it there in a taxi and make
an appointment to get it signed and they looked at me like I was crazy.”
It was actually really interesting talking to him. Even if these
observations were just his opinion, they did reveal some of the difficulties
that come when cultures try to do business together.
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