My next plan is to put my pistols up and imma let my hair down.

On Friday, I took a tour to see the Longji rice terraces just outside of Guilin. Which was beautiful and a lovely hike if you’re into that kind of thing.

One of the stops on the tour was to see the “Long Hair Village” of the Yao ethnic people.

I think I may be a bit burnt out on “culture” because the only thing I could think of was a vulgar rap song by the Last Mr. Bigg called “Long Hair.” If you haven’t heard it, the chorus goes like this… “I got long hair. I gotta pocket full of stones. Them bad ho’s wanna play on my phone…” then proceeds to get more and more explicit.

So there I am, watching a show that celebrates the ancient history of this fascinating minority Chinese people and I’m rapping in my head about being a pimp to a song written by a guy that just got out of prison.

Nice, Julie. Very nice.

The worst part is that there was nobody around me that would know what I was talking about if I started rapping that song, so I had to keep it to myself. Until now. Come to think of it, I probably should continue keeping it to myself instead of broadcasting my insanity it to the whole Internet, but I’m sure someone will find this entertaining so…

Once I got myself to focus, it was actually really cool and interesting. There are about 400 people in this village that is supported by tourism and farming. The average length of the women’s hair is 1.8 meters long, and they are only allowed to cut it once in their lifetime. There are three different ways that they can style their hair based upon whether they are single, married without children, or married with children. There’s probably a lot more that I missed while I was busy being gangsta, but it was pretty cool to see some ancient minority Chinese traditions. (If you’re having trouble imagining minority Chinese, think Navajo in the USA… but Chinese.)

 

After that, I spent the day hiking through the Longji or Dragon’s Backbone Rice Terraces which offered some pretty spectacular views of the mountains and the rice terraces that are cut into the hills. It was beautiful. And an excellent work-out.