My guilt about Cano in the last post looks dramatic. He thought I had a crush on him? Really, Jaimie? That’s going to start a credibility war between you? No, no. It’s because I chickened out. You didn’t hear everything.
It ventures into gossip territory; but then again, none of you know him. This isn’t the stuff I told my grandmother. She was upset at the insinuation that I found him annoying and I might have said he was sleazy, sans details. But it’s true. Cano is sleazy.
Here we go
He told one story at his girlfriend’s expense — I’ll spare you — and laughed so hard he repeated the punchline twice. Jesse and Jane laughed too. I polite-laughed.
[Editor’s note: I have cut this story out because I think it’s a little too revealing of his sexuality.]
And how crass, really. He didn’t talk about women with much respect either. It was the kind of stuff that would be fine around Jesse, but dude, there are women present; stop objectifying my gender to my face.
[Editor’s note: Redacted the rest of this because it’s too speculative.]
Red leaves valley
Back to China, huh?
This part was giving me writer’s block last week. Our excursion to Red Leaves Valley was a full day affair, and memorable, but boring to recount detail by detail. Even the park was boring. Quirky, but boring.
That feels very China to me. Sometimes in China I would see something weird, like a mother holding her baby’s hands so he could squat-poop into a bush through the hole in the back of his onesie. You see that and you think, OMG, people will die when they hear about this! But you tell them, and they’re too confused to laugh. It doesn’t work. The weirdness doesn’t play well back in the States, but while in China, it’s kind of amazing.
Red Leaves Valley was a mish-mash of things. Even getting there was odd.
I found the park on Trip Advisor. Upon my instigation, we all decided we would go. After catching a bus out of Jinan and riding for about 2 hours, you got dumped out in the middle of nowhere. It was just shanty houses lining the road. We did find 1 sign pointing towards the park, but you had to pay someone to drive you to the park entrance, after finding them first, wherever they were, and whoever. We were fortunate that (1) Jesse used his GPS to make sure we were dumped off in the right area and most importantly (2) Cano spoke pretty decent Chinese and could deal with the locals.
Cano was always annoyed that people assumed he couldn’t speak good Chinese, or when he did speak good Chinese, they sometimes pretended they didn’t understand him. Maybe they didn’t understand him. If you never expect to hear Chinese from a white person, could you even process it when it’s happening? Almost every time he spoke to someone, he would come back and tell us why the person he spoke to was dumb, or interesting, or sometimes impressed with Cano’s Chinese.
I ate that shit up. When Cano spoke Chinese to someone, I did not wander off. I prepared myself for the blessed airing of grievances, which were communicated to us with an easy confidence, a raised chin, a level volume, eyes scanning the locale, though never contacting mine. The church of Cano’s experience. The membership requirement: English. At last I was partaking in what Korean people enjoyed when they did my nails, and it was wonderful.
Two clarifications
- We didn’t need Cano in order to be judgmental in English and not be understood. We could do that ourselves, and we did, often. But, since he could understand Chinese, he gave us more fuel. “Those people are talking about us and this is what they are saying” stuff.
- It’s not like he never looked me in the eyes. Maybe four times?
A picture tour
I have a lot of pictures of this, but I’ll spare you. I’ve selected only the essentials. Towards the end of this 2 mile hike into the park, there was a tower (I’ll point it out) that I took about 100 pictures of, but no. Those aren’t here. No one cares about your time at the tower, Jaimie.
The entrance to the park.
Buying snacks at the bottom of those steps. Miles out of the city, still smog.
Owning a car in Jinan means you’re rich, or so I was told. Some of those cars are taxis to take you to the main road. Incidentally, the taxi that took us there and back overcharged us by 3–4x, but we didn’t care, because it was still very cheap.
We didn’t hit the right season for all the leaves in Red Leaves Valley to be red.
Walking down the hill, this was on the side of the path. No explanation given.
And then you came to the Greek part of the park.
I don’t understand the purpose of this space. There wasn’t seating anywhere, so that’s not it.
There was a bride in a purple dress taking pictures in front of this.
A swing-set on the path. I think they were waiting around for me to stop taking pictures of the Greek stuff, and also Jesse, who was taking longer with the Greek stuff, who had just picked up photography and kept declaring how bad he was and having us look for ourselves.
Another story about Cano: Jesse kept talking to me about photography, which I know a little about, and I was using words like aperture, shutter speed, bokeh, the rule of thirds — you know, the words you have to use when you’re talking about photography — and Cano started saying loudly, as though talking to Jane, “Oh yeah, the aperture has to be 3 clicks, and the compartment needs to be set right”… I can’t even do it. You know the kind it was. He was mimicking us with his technobabble, making a joke about how we were incomprehensible to him, which is a way of expressing that you find it annoying. It’s a great way of handling it, but he handled it very early. We had only been talking 5 minutes or so, as we were walking on the trail, not even right beside them.
Ass.
And Jesse laughed at Cano and stopped talking about it.
In the distance is the 100-picture tower. There were some ducks and swans in the lake below the group. On the other side of this lake (to the right) there was a temple where they overcharged you to write three wishes on a red ribbon and tie it to the temple, or to one of the trees. The guy kept asking for more money and I was so confused! Just tell me the price upfront, loser monk.
Does anyone ever eat here?
So color-corrected.
An example of the ribbons on the trees.
We ate dumplings outside of the park, where all of the cars were parked. (If you scroll up you’ll notice the same corrugated door material.) They were cheap and not good. I think we pushed through because it was “authentic.” Halfway through Cano decided to get Ramen, which Jesse had started with. Or was it the other way around?
This is the bus stop on the main road. Old couches. Trash everywhere. Someone was selling dried fruit there, arranged on some cloth on the ground, and Jane was very excited to buy some. I was like, I am not eating that, I don’t want to die. Poor person was possibly just trying to survive…
Next time I’ll tell you about the celebrity phenomenon. In China, you don’t just get stared at. Sometimes you get asked for pictures. Or, they’ll just take a picture of you on the sly.