In April, we had a short vacation. The students all had their mid-term exams, so we didn't have classes for a week, and we decided to take the opportunity to see some famous Shanxi sights.
We went first to Wutaishan, a holy Buddhist mountainy area. There's a small town in a valley (it costs Y120 or so to enter the valley) with probably 7 temples for every person (I am exaggerating). We were pretty excited about the mountains, which were beautiful, and the first day (a day on which my camera was unfortunately batteryless) we walked up into the hills and had a fantastic view of everything. The hills are criss-crossed with lines of Tibetan prayer flags, some still bright and others faded past the point of color, and they flutter and flap and roar in the wind.
The afternoon of the first day, it started snowing, so we stopped climbing the hills so much and went to see some temples.
Each lock is a wish for peace or love, we've been told (also, most of the locks say are inscribed with either "peace" or "love," which was a pretty good hint). People climb to high or holy places and leave their wishes there.
It kept snowing for a while; we actually got pretty worried that we wouldn't be able to get out of the city (at least not headed north, which is where we wanted to go). In the end, it was no problem; the bus put on chains and we maybe drove a little more slowly than we otherwise might have.
There was a pretty spectacular traffic jam on the way north. Impatient trucks kept switching lanes (on a two-lane highway) to try to maneuver around the line ahead of them, which was… unhelpful.
We went to Datong, famous for coal and pollution and ancient things, where we evaded a too-helpful woman who wanted to help us find a hotel (but tried to walk us past the hotel that we told her we wanted to go to) and booked ourselves on a tour to visit the ancient places that were significantly outside of town.
The Hanging Monastery is pretty much what it sounds like, a monastery hanging on the side of a cliff. According to our tour guide, villagers built it as a temple to the Buddha in the hope that he would stop the floods that periodically ruined the village. The floods continued, and over the years, the villagers added Laozi and Confucius to the temple, figuring that the more god-like people they had on their side, the better. Sometime in the more recent past, the government built a large dam, and now there are no more floods. The tour was actually pretty depressing; in practically every room we visited, the guide would say things like, "And these statues of the Buddha are not original; the originals were stolen during the Cultural Revolution" or "And look at the little Buddhas' heads. They have no faces; this is because soldiers broke the Buddhas' faces during the Cultural Revolution."
On the same tour, we visited Yungang Grottoes, a series of caves with carven Buddhas ranging from very very big to pretty darned small.
After we got back, we did more things, though apparently not things that I really took pictures of (Katrina takes pictures of everything, so I tend to feel like I don't need to as much). We've taught lots of classes and visited some students' homes. We puppysat for a few days and Mr. Ren and Gao-laoshi taught us how to make many many noodles. Lately, things have been winding down-- we're leaving Fenyang on Sunday-- and we've been trying to take everybody out to lunch or dinner to thank them for being so kind to us. This week was the last week, so we took lots of pictures of and with students.
the gentlemen of the games class. I loved this class; it was my favorite. It's an activity class, and it was definitely the lowest-prestige option for an activity class-- the first week, there were only six students sitting together playing Scrabble (everyone wanted to take TOEFL class). We had some fun, though, and in the end there were nine students, which is only a gain of three, but on the other hand, it's a gain of three! That's half again what we were when we started. They were enormously, amazingly, fantastically willing to try very hard at anything I came in and told them was a game. They were always friendly, always smiling, always helping each other. Wheee, them.
And now we're done with teaching. There's a farewell meeting this afternoon, and a party tomorrow with what members of the elementary school classes are able to show up (when Gao-laoshi told them that class would be on Saturday afternoon instead of Sunday morning this week, there was an immediate chorus of "Bu xing!" ("Noooooooooo!").
Katrina and I are going to travel in China for about a month, and then she'll go on to Europe and I'll come for a while. I'll be flying in to Oregon on July 8, where I hope to see many people. Sometime in the middle or end of August, I'll be moving out to Madison, though, so I'll only be home for a little more than a month, I think.
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