The Liu Xiaobo Project

Tuesday

The only notable thing about the morning was climbing a mountain. By steps, but still. I did get up early again for the Tai Chi class before breakfast, interestingly considerably lengthened and with added movements, as if he felt those not that interested had been weeded out. Rusty from utter neglect of this beneficial routine (plus being thrown into a non-modified version with an instructor who was blithely stretching out nearly touching the floor), in the excessively hot lounge I was soon seriously perspiring.

All those already physically compromised, with backs out, who’d come on the trip with already-pulled ligaments, etc., opted to stay at the bottom once they saw the escalator was not working this day (technically through no fault of its own, but because an upper level was being resurfaced). Except for Tessa, the English lady with two knee replacements (a palm tree fell on her some years ago in Palm Springs, too, breaking her back and both legs, of which she commented with an airy stiff upper lip, “I’ve never been quite the same since”), who to everyone’s amazement persevered to the very top.

IMHO, the reward awaiting us did not really deserve such exertion nor devotion, though goodness knows we needed the exercise after days on the boat eating and only minimally exercising: a series of Tao temples, the cautionary “ghost city” depicting the hell that awaits the naughty, etc. After so much “wow” in China, this was really only “meh.” The park area is apparently about to be greatly expanded. Employment opportunities have to be created for the displaced, such as the former farmer who works at the present one and seems to be the only person who’s also mastered the trick—and prowess—of lifting a massive iron dome-shaped thing, to rest atop another iron dome. For tips.

Our final dinner was a banquet rather than buffet, with toasts drunk and various Chinese dishes. Afterward, I watched part of the elaborate—in costume, at least—cabaret show in the lounge. Most of the ship’s staff is very young, still in their teens, many of them, who are recruited in the towns along the river and trained right after high school. One girl bartending in the lounge is seventeen. The same multitude of girls who were lately serving us dinner appeared now in a series of costumes to do little dances and acts. (The Katarina’s activity director is a slightly older “local boy” who gets to see his one-year-old daughter one day a week (he whips out photos of her at the tiniest provocation). The cruise director is Bulgarian; her nine-year-old daughter lives with her sister, the girl’s aunt, most of the time.)