Donkey Wine

OK, Im going to tell this story way out of order - as if there is any order at all to the way I've been posting things. Since my last posting I've blown through Vienna and Budapest, and am now in Bratislava, and am flying out early in the morning for Barcelona. Still, I've been trying to follow a chronological path, even if it's a parallel one - one from where I am now, and then from my path through China, and then another one from where I am now, but I've just given up. This trip has lasted so long I've lost all track of time, so I'm just going to post what I'm thinking about at the moment, and try and sort if out later.

So, let me try and briefly tell the, what is becoming infamous, donkey wine story. It occured in Dunhuang, China, which is an oasis town that played an important role in the Silk Road (which was the focus of my China CIEE faculty development tour anyway). You fly in over just absolutely desolute territory and drop down into the oasis that gave rise to the town of Dunhuang in the first place. I'll say more about the town later, but, with the exception of Kasgar, it was my favorite stop along the CIEE tour. We stayed at a hotel right next to these impressive sand mountains, and I'll always remember sitting on the rooftop restaurant both having a beer and watching the sun go down, and well as having breakfast there, for a long time -just watching the sand mountains in the distance was rather awe-inspiring.

At a certain point we went into town to eat their specialty, which is donkey meat. It sounds pretty horrible, but with the right spicey sauce it was really OK. Now, their really super famous local "delicacy" was what is sometimes called coin meat, which is sliced up donkey penis. It is called coin meat because if you cut the penis into slim sections it sort of looks like an ancient Chinese coin (which always had a hole in the middle, which, by definition, a sliced up donkey penis would have). I tried, repeatedly, to convince the other professors, or our Chinese leader, Dr. Yanfeng Li, to order this rare meal, but no one would go for it. And, since it cost around $40 - a fabulous treasure in that part of the world - I certainly wouldn't order it myself. So, humbled by this bad experience, as I was leaving the restaurant I heard about donkey wine, which is supposed to be an aphrodesiac. Essentially, it is just hard liquor - not really wine at all - which the donkey appendage - marinates in - they just pour a cup out of the glass container - and it only cost around 10 yuan, which is only around $1.50. Again, no one would participate in this extravaganza. So, I spent the next hour generally berating them and the donkeys they rode in on, or at least mocking them and their universities - and you know how persistent I can be when I get my mind around something. No one can take that much Scudderian abuse, so Yanfeng, and my friends Marcie and Randy caved and agreed to go back to the bar - assuming that their only purpose there was to take pictures to record my bizarre behavior, that is, until their glasses of donkey wine showed up as well. Naturally, the donkey wine was completely odious, made even more so by the fact that I'm not much of a drinker. Randy and Marcie gave it the old college try and finished about half their glasses, while Yanfeng and I tossed ours down completely - including a big flourish at the end (Yanfeng laughed, but later told me that since we had both finished our donkey wine completely we would be friends forever - and at the final drunken going away dinner one of his toasts was to "Gary, my donkey wine brother"). I don't think I'm any worse for wear for the experience, although I did come to my senses three nights later on a high sand dune braying at the moon.