Day 4 - Mosuo Dinner and Party

Around Lugu Hu is the stomping grounds for the Mosuo people, another minority group in china. They have a unique matriarchal society where the women have the power and are the bosses. They hold the family names and the property and the businesses. The have this "Walking marraige" where the men have to climb in the window of their "partner" by night and walk home in the morning. the women can change their partner as much as they like but most are lifelong and not as promiscuous as it seems to be.

little village. they say they are the only family left there because the others have moved on to other places. a very big extended family though, maybe 30 people.

and look they have a concrete full basketball court. very authentic.

we asked and they say they just dry the corn to store it and then just eat it like this, all hard and stuff. you can see corn hanging from lots of houses to dry.

inside their log cabin. there were some beds almost on the floor, it was freezing down by the floor.

their cross eyed mao statue on this alter like thing.

10 generals from cultural revolution time i think they said.

and then what the heck, the dali lama on the other wall. i asked, aren't mao and the dali lama not down with each other? how can they be into both? they said that the mao statue was just for admiration not for worshipping.

can you guess what these are? they are dried out pigs of course! these have been here for 10 years, they say you can keep them up to 20 years. below you can see where they sliced off some for eating. which we ate, and it tasted 1o years old. i can say that this was gross. these pigs were as hard as wood. there was no meat as far as i could tell, it was just the fat. maybe they somehow sucked all the meat out and just let the skin and fat dry into these piggy pancakes. if you look closely you can see the tail on the top one poking out. they were pretty large pigs. they are just sitting on the floor collecting dust.

mosuo liquor. it was made from a fungus. tasted like about 20 percent alchohol. not bad stuff.

there was this bean curd stuff that tasted like cheese. strong rich cheese. good stuff.

their concrete slab bathroom was 100 billion times better. only a few piles of feces, not a mountain.

after dinner we drove to this mosuo party. its around a fire. dancing singing and such. folksy stuff. they say if you get a little finger rubbing on your palm when you're dancing around then that means the person wants to go to bed with you and have a walk-in marraige type thing. all of the girls in our group said they got it, all the guys said they didn't get it. I don't feel so bad now.

of course we joined in on the dancing hand in hand around the fire and it was fun. i am retarded and it was the simplest little diddy they were doing around the fire but even after 10 minutes of a cycle that lasts 20 seconds i still couldn't get it.

they took a break halfway and let everyone take pics. this is the one that everyone in the place was saying was the prettiest and wanted to take pictures with. she was pretty good. there were a couple others that were pretty good. makes me wonder if they were just han chinese imports and not real mosuo girls. hey you never know lots of the people in Lijiang are not Naxi people, they are han chinese.

look at the one i got to take a pic with! sizzle!

hostel around the lake. it was $5.75 night. it also had no heat, the electric blankets weren't working. the hot water went out after 3 mintues. but still for $5.75 a night that is more than good.