YOU ARE SOOOOO BEAUTIFUL!!

... in your shorts and Teva sandals, sweating all over the place while your hair's looking like there’s birds living in it

Chongqing, China, somewhere in the middle of July. The city is one of the 3 places they call ‘the ovens of China’ and I can confirm the name is well chosen. I’ll spare you the disgusting details, but let’s just say the heat and humidity over there made it difficult to simply look human, so trying to look good was nowhere on my list of priorities.

We were making a day trip to Dazu to see the rock carvings and were at the bus station in Chongqing waiting for a bus. There were no other tourists, only (a lot of) Chinese people. From the beginning, I was quite the attraction, being 1m80 tall (5 feet 9 inches) as a woman. During the first days of our trip, people had already been staring at me and had come up to me telling me how huuuuge they thought I was. I’ve actually been this tall since the age of 11, so I’m quite used to being taller than everyone else :)

I’m a little less used to what happened next…

We had to wait a while for the bus to come, so we sat down on one of the benches in the center of the bus station. My boyfriend read a book and I started writing in my travel journal. I wrote for a while and when I finally looked up, I noticed about 1/3 of the people in the bus station were standing in a circle around us, just staring. I started feeling a liiiiitle bit uncomfortable, so I went to check if the bus hadn’t arrived yet. It was a small bus station with no tourists, so of course, none of the employees spoke English. There was however one girl, who was also waiting for a bus, that saw me and came to help. She seemed really nice and I explained to her that we were going to Dazu and showed her our tickets.

She looked at them… looked up to me… held her breath for about 5 seconds… and started screaming…

“Oooooooh, I’m on the same bus, I’m soooooooooooooo happy! Ooooooh you are soooooooooooo beautiful!!! Aaaaaaaaaaaah!!”

So far for trying to be discrete…

I was like: "Beautiful?!? What is she talking about?!?" I had lost 5 liters of sweat in 1 hour, my hair had reached unseen levels of frizzyness (I don't even know if that's a word but I'm guessing you get the picture) because of the humidity and I was wearing khaki shorts and Teva sandals! Very comfortable, of course, but not what I'd qualify as being beautiful...

Anyway, Chinese people obviously have a different definition of beauty, because twenty seconds later most of the people from the circle were standing all around me, still staring! The girl was still screaming, so it was time to get out of there! Luckily the bus arrived a few minutes later, so we got on it and were off to Dazu. The bus ride took about 2 hours and the screaming girl (well she had stopped screaming once we got on the bus but I don’t know her name, so I’ll just keep on calling her ‘screaming girl’) and half of the other people in the bus kept on staring at me during most of the bus ride! Jeeeeej!

Once we arrived in Dazu, it got better. We went our own way, visited the rock carvings and had a great afternoon. The bus ride back to Chongqing was kind of similar, but we were lucky to arrive at the bus stop right on time to get on a bus immediately. So no more screaming girls or people standing around us in circles, only some people staring at us on the bus, but nothing your average local superstar can't handle... :)

#Stories #China #ItineraryChina #Chongqing