Cuandixia 爨低下

It has been a while since I wrote a blog, but my adventure of this weekend is definitely reason to write a blog. Let's see, where to begin....
Originally this weekend Olivia, Jan and I were supposed to go on a trip to NE China to the city Harpin in a province of China that borders with Russia. We paid for our train tickets at the student travel agency only to get a call back on Friday afternoon letting us know that there is no room left on the train. We still wanted to go somewhere for the weekend so we looked in one of the Chinese tour guides someone brought to China and decided to visit the little village of Cuandixia. This village has only 100 people living in it and apparently dates back all the way to the Qing and Ming dynasties. So the deal is, you take the metro (line 1) all the way to the end then a 3 hour bus ride and then from the destination city a taxi to this little village. We decided we would be up for that.
Saturday morning at 8:30 we went with our classmates on the organized trip to the Temple of Heaven (pictures on Flickr) and after visiting the temple we went to the closest metro stop to begin our journey.
After about a 45 minute subway ride we get out at the Pinguoyuan station and quickly realize we are the only westerners within sight. Before even getting out of the metro station there is already a throng of zealous taxi drivers offering us rides to our destination. After much effort to shake off most of them we reached a deal to go with a friendly gentlemen for 120 yuan. So instead of taking the bus we figured a taxi ride all the way to the village will make things easier and it also cuts our travel time from 3 to 2 hours. This is all the more amazing when you realize that all of this is taking place in Chinese. The taxi driver only spoke Chinese, but we conversed a little and he said once we arrive at Cuandixia he would help us find a place to stay for the night.
We were warmly received by a Chinese family and after getting settled in we wasted no time an went for a long walk. We climbed a few mountains and explored the surrounding beautiful scenery.
After our 3 hour long walk we returned to our host family and had supper. This began our saga. We had a few beers for supper and then we proceeded to venture from place to place in the village to have a beer here and one there. One place we went to we thought was another bar or place that served drinks...it ended up being this family's balcony, but they received us warmly and sat and talked with them for over an hour. (again this is all in Chinese, although we do not always understand everything :P )
As most of the people at this 'party' started going to bed we ventured to the next place with lights and people...there we were invited to join a big table with 15 or so people. They were great. They were in the middle of playing a drinking game (spin the bottle type thing) where if it pointed to you, you had to take a drink. This was really fun and funny, as we had no clue who these people are but we fit right in. After some fun we chatted a little and they told us they are all in a Camry Club (Toyota Camry) and this was their group outing. Then one gentlemen and his wife offered to drive us back to Beijing the next day.
We got up at 8:30am to eat breakfast and meet our new friends to drive back home with them. Before this point we had not realized what the significance of them being is this club is. They have beautiful black silver lined Toyota Camrys all spanking new. Turns out there were seven of them and they all got together and we drove back to Beijing in a convoy of Black luxury cars with the 4-way flashers on and the front car had a siren and a horn to make people get out of the way of the convoy. This included oncoming traffic so we could pass slower vehicles in our lane. This was really cool! Still don't know exactly what these fine people do, but they appear to be quite important.
There is so much more to tell about our trip, but the above is it in a nutshell. The amazing thing about the trip is that it was so unexpected that we would have all of these experiences and so it was well worth the mere 100 yuan ($15) the whole trip ended up costing (because of all the luck we had along the way).