Wedding. So I was invited to go to a wedding the other day. When I first heard about it, it came off like it was a quick wedding for her brother.
So I made a comment in passing, oh did he get her pregnant, and she said, actually yes how did you know that. We had a good laugh on that one.
It has been a very uncharacteristic cold and foggy, wet week so we weren’t sure if we could make it. She was worried about it being dangerous to ride up there. I had to take a bus two and a half hours into the mountains. It was foggy but I was determined to go anyway.
When we got into the mountains the sun warmed up the area and so therefore we were able to see the mountains and the fog disappeared for the most part. When we finally got to where we need to be a van and our nurse friend was waiting for is to take a 10 minute ride on a bumpy road into the village.
This really is a village on the mountain side near no stores and it has houses that are like all connected and mazey. So you can go up and over and down on the roof on the street etc and there are house entranced.. .you can get very confused.
But it was very fun to be able to walk up on a roof and see people and chicken’s in cage’s and look again and see pigs in a stall…all with this amazing view of the mountains in the distance. When we got there, her side of the family was having lunch so we ate with them.
Pretty standard food but they are YE people so it has an ethnic flavor to it. Beautiful views of the mountains in the distance and right past one of the mountain edges was the actual river that we followed on the road to get there.
I asked if people actually kayak or canoe the river. But they said it has some waterfalls here n there so not safe. It sure seems like they wouldn’t do it anyway. She asked if we wanted to see the primary school so of course we did .
When we got to the entrance of the building complex, there is a concrete wall and there is some blood drops on the floor.
Then someone said look that is the cow skin and there it was literally the skin of the cow drying out in the sun on the wall and it was bloody and everything.
Later on we went to wear the cow was butchered and all that was left was the head and four holves . Two gigantic containers were cooking stew and it looks and smells amazing.
I asked if that was all the cow, didn’t seem like it, and there was a lot of organ and some meat and then another container had a lot of the spine and some of the back muscles. Okay back to the school.
At the school we were able to talk to some of the teachers. Then we went to the classes of the first grade and second grade. The school was two small -two story buildings. They really just have two big classrooms. The rest is for offices and the students and teachers live there during the week.. First grade were so cute & everybody was very smiley and happy and excited to see me.
But the crazy part is they only know the Ye language, they actually don’t know normal Chinese yet. The second graders were all older and seems more than just one year older but they could understand regular Chinese better.
We exchanged a few sentences and made their day. Unfortunately we had to leave early because my translator had to be back for the big event dance and song practice.. the next blog post.
The last bus home is at 230 so we had to leave early. I did get to meet the brother but not the wife and missed the ceremony. But honestly we were both about done at that point so it was kind of good timing and otherwise we would have to spend the night.
The parents would put us up somewhere but it kind of felt like an inconvenience even though they were honored to host me.
Our parting gifts were lots of peanuts, sunflower seeds, and little candies. I noticed that there was a room off the kitchen dining area had a nice red blanket and decorations. It had a gigantic post of two babies and some other random poster with lots of traditional imagery and money on it.
The purpose of it was that’s where they were going to have their honeymoon night as well as the babies signify to have children and the other one was for like health and wealth, money, happiness.. you know, the easy life.
