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Goddesses Meet, Talk, Bond, Fuel Up
When you’re travelling on a budget, you often find yourself staying in places of the more communal sort. Youth hostels (which are not just for the young) are a good example of this kind of accommodation. Dorm rooms are usually sex-segregated (oh jeez, have the effing trannies infiltrated those as well??? Life used to be simpler.) Some places will have a mixed dorm which is slightly cheaper – as in, if you’re a woman, you can pay less for greater access to pervs looking at you and a higher risk of being raped in your bed. Very, very occasionally, you’ll run across a women-only hostel. I stayed in the fabulous Frauenreisehaus in Christchurch, NZ years ago. Sadly, an earthquake got it and it is closed. I’ve heard rumour of a hostel with a separate women’s wing in Perth, Australia. And these are not battered women’s shelters. These are regular budget accommodations with the good sense to recognize that the world isn’t a friendly place for women travellers, especially those without much money and who are travelling solo. (I’ve written a little about the differences between men’s and women’s travel experiences before.) The energy in women-only places is different. Safe. Healthy. Conversation doesn’t revolve around the men staying there, (since there are no men) who are, for the most part just looking for a one-night stand with an anonymous, cute, young traveller. You think I exaggerate? Let me tell ya, honey. I’m an experienced traveller. I’ve seen it all. Hell, I’ve been that anonymous, cute, young traveller and I’ve heard all the lines, all the mesmerizing accents, and seen how easily hostels are mismanaged in such a way to put female travellers in grave danger and to create a fertile hunting ground for males. I’ve fantasized about running a women’s hostel of my own. Women need safe places to sleep and rest and refuel.
I’ve gotten pickier over the years as I’ve gotten older and less tolerant of danger and discomfort. I don’t earn much, but I also don’t travel much anymore, and I live an incredibly spartan lifestyle in China. So when I do travel, and I’m not staying with friends, I no longer put myself in dangerous and uncomfortable situations if I can help it. I strongly dislike sharing rooms with people, I hate bunk beds, and I don’t like being in parts of town centred in the middle of all the clubs and bars. But hostels that allow men (which is most of them), even if you splurge and get yourself a private room, can be infected with the male voice, which can grate on your brain like nails on a blackboard even if you hone your skills in tuning them out. I stayed in one place in China which seemed to have such little discretion that dangerous, woman-hating men were allowed to stay. One psychotic, Middle-Eastern nutjob walked into the common area, and unimpressed with the selection of women travellers present, shouted “Where are all the fucking bitches!?!” In the same place, the desk staff gave my room number to a nasty Australian man who was trying to follow me around and tell his boring stories to. And oh yeah, in the same place, this PUA Indian man who was trying to immigrate to my country (yes please!), after trying to get sex from me and failing, asked me if I wished I could have Asian skin, since they were much more attractive than me…
But if you can avoid the men, you do run into goddesses – and I don’t mean that in any religious or spiritual sense as I’m an atheist and materialist and don’t feel the need to come off as enlightened or to barely suppress a secret smile over having achieved a soulfulness/mindfulness/gratitude tier that those around me obviously haven’t. No, I mean goddesses in the ‘awesome women’ sense. I always meet a few on my travels. They are not always feminists in the way that I am. But that isn’t always the most important thing in the formation of an immediate bond. In my current location, which is infected with doods, I had a Goddess Session. This one, like all of them, happened unexpectedly. And like all of them, it was healing, gynergy-generating, insight-giving, and mutually burden-lightening. My fellow Goddess, to whom I will give credit for this post as she is the one who recognized a kindred spirit and named what was happening in the way that I have here. And while we shared only an hour of talk and emotion and non-judgment, we probably smoothed over hours and hours and even days and weeks of toxic male infiltration of our souls and beings. At the parting, she related something a friend had told her, “the road will be hard, but you will meet angels along the way.” I’m not religious/spiritual in any way, but I got the gist of it. We had just experienced evidence of the truth of the essence of this statement. And we were ready to face the day’s challenges as a result.
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Lunch with Ladies of the Law and New Year’s Shenanigans
It’s officially New Year’s Eve in China – about 8:30 pm. I’ve settled in with a bottle of overpriced red wine from Australia, and I won’t make it to midnight. I’m in a musing frame of mind.
I’m not a traditional person. I don’t have many rituals that I manage to keep for years. I have rituals that serve a purpose, and then when no longer needed, they go away. That’s their function, in my opinion. So the turning of the year isn’t that special to me. I don’t take stock or make resolutions. And if I wanted to, I don’t think I could anyways. I’m comfortably uncomfortable in my unstable life, and the comfortable part of that discomfort means that I haven’t been all that motivated to make big changes in my life. Under all that, I really just don’t know what I want anymore. The few things I know I do want/need are not achievable anyhow.
So what do you do when you’re low-key, unmotivated, feeling a bit lazy, and kinda strangely okay with all that? Well, you organize a huge group of young ladies with whom to go out for lunch and act crazy.
I mentioned in earlier posts that a) most of my students are male, b) I do occasionally go out with the most motivated and least offensive of those, c) I try to nurture female students if they want help, and d) a couple of young, first-year, undergrad law students crashed one of my Masters English classes this year. I’m happy to say, there are a lot of women in the law program, and it is with a group of 8 of them that I went out with today. No testosterone!
It happens so seldom these days. There used to be so many more opportunities to go out with groups of women when I lived in the West. When I was part of the working world then, I would always organize ladies lunches – and called them that too because it we all thought it was funny. And I miss those days so much. Gynergy. I’d like to say, if you could bottle the stuff… but it is definitely something that shouldn’t be sold and to even utter those words is to soil it with typical male non-thinking and greed and devaluation. Gynergy is priceless and should be free to all WOMEN. Not men, women. They get the stuff for free now, and women have to pay to keep the tiniest bit of their own.
So anyhow, to once again get a bunch of nutty girls together, even if they are all less than half my age, was a good thing. Yep, there are generational and culture differences. As soon as we sat down in the restaurant, half of them whipped out their cell phones to log into the free wifi. That is ubiquitous here and among the young world-wide. But there was plenty of talk about life, school, reading, plans, the upcoming Chinese New Year holiday. And then, it was photo time.
When young people tell me they have a hundred thousand photos on some social networking account, I used to disbelieve them. I remember the very first camera I got when I was 12. It was precious, and you had to really consider when you decided to take a photo. You only had one chance and then later you paid to have the roll of film developed. It was a crap shoot, and an expensive one. Cell phones have changed the world in so many ways (most of them not good ways). Photo-taking is constant and definitely not as valued as it once was. If I go out with a group of students, hundreds of photos are taken. When you add a foreigner to the mix, multiply the number of photos by a gazillion. Today, I was the only one without my camera out. That is not always the case, but I can usually have a few of the cooler shots sent to me. Today, things got pretty crazy, and with 8 people taking shots, I can’t even imagine how many photos there are. I wish I could include at least a group shot and a couple of the more charming concoctions, but you know, men ruin absolutely everything about a woman’s online existence, so I’ll remain faceless and anonymous. *Sigh*
Today was so great for everyone, that I’ve invited the crowd over to my place on Sunday for a dumpling-making party.
Dumplings are an important staple snack in China, and a very common thing to get together and do with family and friends. They are easy to make, and a hell of a lot of fun to prepare (especially if you are just learning how to make them). You can buy the little circles of dough (translated from Chinese as ‘dumpling skins’) fresh from the local farmers’ market if you don’t want to make your own. And you can make whatever filling you want. I’m meeting the students beforehand to go to market. This is part of the fun, for me, at least.
I also have a few games planned (which they might not have experienced in China) for after everyone has eaten too much.
I can’t imagine a better way to kick off the new year: cooking, eating, playing fun games, and sharing gynergy – oh, and of course, there will be a butt load of photo taking.
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