Words Fail Me

I arrived at the Jiayuguan Hotel an hour before checkin, so I decided to have a drink at the bar and read my book in the lobby.

I wasn’t their usual clientele so, as has happened before, they had to crack open a new bottle just for the foreigner.  (It was Johnny Walker Black.)

Some kids were running around, playing in the lobby.  I got stared at a lot, per usual.  Eventually, one girl came over and said, “Hello!”  Her (Western) name was Katie.  She was seven and her friend was eight.  We started talking, a mix of my rudimentary Mandarin and their elementary school English.  They kept running away and then running back to ask my name, again.  Ask my age, again.  Tell me their names, again.  Tell me their ages, again.  I asked them why they were at the hotel and it turns out that there was a wedding reception in the mezzanine above and all the kids were bored.

Apparently, some of the adults were bored, too.  One by one, each of the girls’ dads came down, then another friend of there, then an older man (who may have been a grandfather or something.)  We all started talking.  The younger men asked me about Obama and Hillary.  I got to use tons of vocabulary I had just learned like “vote” and “Republican” and “Democrat.”  (This was interrupted by a lot of “This is your school bag” pointing to my backpack and more “What is your name?”  It was also interrupted by the older man offering me cigarettes and coffee.)

After, like, the fifth time the girls had asked me how old I was, I told them my birthday was next week.  Their fathers’ encouraged them to sing “Happy Birthday” to me, which was very sweet.

Eventually, the older man declared, “drink-uh!”  This is usually where my introversion kicks in, but in the spirit of making new mistakes, I went along with it.  All the men led me upstairs to the mezzanine, where the wedding reception was clearly winding down.

Then it got awkward.

I held back as the older man approached another older man (the bride’s father, perhaps?) sitting at a table.  There was lots of gesturing toward me and then the seated older man got up and shooed me and the older man away!

I did not come to Jiayuguan to crash a Chinese wedding, so I was ready to get the hell out of there, but the older man insisted “drink-uh, drink-uh” and led me to another table were I was offered a shot of biajiu.  I drank it and thanked them all profusely.  The bride’s father came to shoo us off again and I thanked the older man, the children’s father, the children and scurried off to the reception desk to check in to my room.

(The next day, I ran into the older man on the street near the hotel.  He wanted to have a drink, but I lied and said I had to work.  We shook hands and that was that.)

Coming back from Qinghai Lake, we were running low on gas.  And by “gas” I mean actual gas, because the driver’s car ran on natural gas.  Or so I thought.

At the start of our journey in Xining, we had filled up his car at a natural gas pumping station.  When I asked about it, my driver told me that most of the business vehicles in Xining run on natural gas.

Out in the middle of nowhere, we got off the highway and pulled behind a long line of cars at the filling station.  I mean really long.  1970s Carter-era oil embargo long.  There were two pumps and I clocked the speed of fill-ups at about five minutes per car.  We were going to be here forever.

My driver parked the car and got out to smoke & chat with the other drivers.  We were still in the middle of nowhere, so I didn’t have an internet connection, so I just tried to rest my eyes.  Every five minutes, my driver would pull the car up another car length.

We did this for about half an hour.

I heard raised voices.  My driver was arguing with someone but I couldn’t tell who.  Abruptly, he got into the car and we sped off.  I tried to suss out what was wrong but all I picked up something about 压力 (yālì) which means “pressure” or “stress.”  Was he stressed out?  Did he have an argument?

We pulled into another filling station, but this one was for gasoline, not natural gas.  We pulled in the wrong direction.  There was arguing.  We pulled around the other way and got stuck behind a long line of cars.  (Even longer since the pumps alternated between filling cars and filling walkup customer’s gas canisters.)  Finally — about an hour after we had pulled off the highway — we had a full tank and got back on the road.

I had some questions for my driver.

“Your car can use natural gas or gasoline?”  “Yes.”
“The first place had low gas pressure?”  “Yes.”
“So it was taking too long for each car to fill up?”  “Yes.”
“So you decided to get gasoline instead?”  “Yes.”

Mystery solved.