Springtime

So! It's been an eventful while since the last time I posted.

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.

A representative few of the pictures-- the students are crammed into the rooms but still mostly friendly (those whole-class pictures are from grade 1, though, and the first-year classes are pretty much all happier and more cheerful than the second- and third-years). I'm not sure what exactly is going on with that cucumber in the third picture; I'd been playing cards with those girls, and they put the cucumber in every picture we took. :)

The games class (one of my activity classes this term) minus one girl who couldn't come on Wednesday, and

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.

Earthquake

Hi guys.
We felt the earthquake - I wanted to dive under a desk like we always practiced in drills at Eastwood - but it wasn't very strong here and we're all fine.

<3,
Joanna

A Selection of Pictures from our Spring Festival Vacation

We had about a month off for Spring Festival, so we used the time to travel. Katrina's cousin Chance, flew out to visit us, and the three of us spent a couple weeks in Beijing, Qingdao, Tai Shan, and Fenyang.

Chatotoro in front of St. Somebody's Cathedral on Wangfujing, a shopping street in Beijing.

Hey! We're in a city!

Katrina doing her photographer thing at an aquarium in Beijing.

She's got a thing for tentacles (see her blog for pictures of the dizzying array of things-on-sticks that we could have eaten (I had lamb)).

Look! China!

We picked up Katrina's cousin, Chance, at the airport and the three of us took a bus to Qingdao (home of Tsingtao beer), known as the Bavaria of China. Our bus left Beijing at 5:30 pm, so we thought that maybe it would arrive around 6:00 am and we would have the whole day to explore the city. Instead, we arrived in Qingdao at around 2:30 am and were it not for a very nice young man sitting next to Chance on the bus, we probably would have found ourselves stuck in the cold and the dark for a few hours before we managed to find our hostel.

Katrina and Chance in the revolving viewing station at the top of a hill.

Katrina on top of the hill practicing the xun, a black clay egg-shaped flutey instrument.

Chance is contemplating the city.

Now Chance is contemplating the fish. The Qingdao aquarium was much more impressive than the one we saw in Beijing.

Sunset on the Qingdao beach. We spent a while walking on the sand collecting shells and worn pieces of glass and leaky old batteries.

The view of the city from behind our hostel. The hostel was almost impossible to find; it was on top of observatory hill (it is the site of the first observatory in China), and even with a map, our taxi drivers usually ended up dropping us off at the bottom of the hill because they didn't know how to drive up. The views were excellent, though.

Katrina at the beginning of our trek up Tai Shan, one of the most famous mountains in China.

The view from part way up. It was a foggy, hazy day, so about halfway up we lost sight of the ground. We did eventually get up above the fog, though, and the top of the mountain was pretty clear.

Strong like ox.

Frozen waterfall and carven poetry.

There aren't many pictures of Chance on the mountain. He had all that youthful energy and he kept running up ahead a few hundred steps.

Whoo! Top of the mountain.

After a few days in Fenyang for Spring Festival, we headed back to Beijing to take Chance to the airport. We briefly visited the Great Wall, but it was freezing and windy and packed with people, so we didn't stay long this time.

Katrina says, "I'm so hot in that picture!" She likes her big hair. (the cousins in Tiananmen Square)

The gate of heavenly peace, glowing.

I'm there, too!

Sunshine! Blue sky! Everything in Beijing was much cleaner than anything we had seen in a million years.

Before the gate.

In the Forbidden City. It looks like a photo of architecture, but really it's all about the pigeons.

We never actually knew what we were looking at; this is the gate to something, and plenty of other tourists were taking their pictures there, so we figured it was a good idea.

Pretty.

Oh noes! Eternal loss of beauty!

Although the self-heating meal seemed like an irresistibly good idea before be bought it, in the end it turned out to be gross. Really, really gross.

I'm warming my hands on the steam from the meal.

The back of the Forbidden City.

Candied pineapple on a stick!

Delicious!

We visited a temple where a Spring Festival carnival was winding down. We bought some slightly oversized coins to throw at...

a bell in the center of a much bigger coin. If we rang the bell, we'd get a wish. I never managed to, but Katrina did once (she's since forgotten what she wished for, so I'm going to assume that it came true).

Thanksgiving and its preparation

Woosh. So. Thanksgiving. We put it off for a week to give ourselves more time to prepare (we're in China; no one noticed). We invited scads of English teachers and also Mr. Ren and Gao-laoshi and Mr. Wang the tai chi instructor. We (where by "we" I mostly mean Katrina and Julie) spent most of the day in the kitchen making wild rice chicken casserole (the only turkeys available were a two-hour bus ride away, cost three hundred kuai, weighed twelve pounds, and probably wouldn't've fit in our oven anyway), broccoli, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, clover-leaf rolls, fruit salad, pumpkin pie, little cupcake-sized apple pies, and stuffing (the pumpkin pie was actually made a couple days earlier). I went out and bought a whole bunch of forks 'cause we only had three or four (we also had to buy about a dozen new plates); when I got to the grocery store that sold forks (kept in a special glass case with the Western-style spoons and the pliers), I couldn't remember how to say "fork" and ended up asking if they had those American things that weren't chopsticks (they didn't quite understand what I meant (I can't imagine why) until I drew a picture). We used every serving dish and every serving utensil and every plate and every fork that we own.

The meal itself was good. The slightly scary teacher who's the head of the English department came and smiled a lot and was completely non-scary (also, Katrina just miraculously made friends with the second year teachers and managed to get Mr. Ren convinced that it would be a good idea to teach them something other than Gao Kao articles, and I am ecstatic). Everyone smiled a lot, and most of them seemed to like the food. Mr. Ren and Gao-laoshi both described it as being very special, which we've decided was probably meant positively. And… yeah. I don't know. It was a nice night. Not quite just like home, but still pretty nice.

More Generosity

So, more generosity.

Often when we're eating at restaurants, other diners talk about us. At Er You Fan Dian, one of the places we go pretty often, there was a guy who came in for dinner when we were eating. He was there with another man - they were business people, and the first man took a phone call before coming back to sit down. He asked the waitress if we could speak Chinese, and then he asked us how much we would charge to help teach English for his company. We said we couldn't (it's in our contract), and he said something about how ah, we must be helping China to improve her language abilities. We sort of shrugged (we didn't really understand exactly what he was talking about) and he went back to eating. Periodically as he ate, though, he would talk to us - he said that if we ever had any trouble, we should call him - he gave us his phone number and email address and QQ number (QQ is a mostly-Chinese instant messaging service). He said he had a company in Guangzhou (I think; I could be completely wrong). He finished eating and paid the waitress. Then he paid the waitress for our dinner, too. Then he gave each of us a mobile phone card worth 100 kuai. We were… speechless, we were overwhelmed, we were unable to effectively decline (we don't even know how to use the cards). We didn't know how to respond, except to fall in love with everything in China for a while.

Generosity and wushu update

Soooo when last I wrote, I think I mentioned that I had talked to the nice folks at the sporting goods store, and they were going to help me find a place to learn wushu. So. They did! It was the first in a series of interactions with people where they were so, so generous and welcoming that I sort of fell in love with all of China for a while.

I went back to the store the next day, and Lei Xiao Ming tried to take me to meet the instructor at the school, but unfortunately, he turned out to be in Taiyuan that day. We did visit the school, though - it's not what I was expecting; it's a real school. A primary school, I think, and they study math and English and Chinese and all those subjects, but also wushu and tae kwon do and tai chi. Anyway, he asked where we've been around Fenyang, and I said we've gone to Pingyao and Taiyuan, but also to Lao Ye Shan. He asked if we'd been to Wen Feng Ta, and when I said we hadn't, he offered to take us right then. I was excited and happy and a little bit dumb, and I accepted without remembering that probably we had to teach one more middle school kid that afternoon (but Julie is awfully nice and she covered for me), and he took Katrina and me to Wen Feng Ta, the tallest pagoda in... well, in the area, at least. Mr. Ren said once that it was the tallest in China, but we are skeptical. It was... I dunno. It was excellent. It was fun. It was a really good experience, but I don't think I can really narrate it interestingly. The tower was dark dark dark (no electricity) and on every floor, he used his cell phone to take a photo of us standing next to a statue of a zodiac animal/god.

The next night, we did make it to the actual school. We were... mmm, when we read other Carleton people's descriptions of coming to Fenyang, they talked about feeling like movie stars, and we've kind of felt some of that, but not to the extent that other people have described. At the Yu Ying Xue Xiao, we felt that. The students stood in crowds on the balconies to look at us, and we could hear people everywhere whispering, "waiguoren!" Song Bing, who might or might not be in charge of the school, met us and introduced us to the English teachers, and also he started to teach us more tai chi. Every morning at 6:00, we wake up, and he picks us up at the gates of the school at 6:30. He teaches tai chi for an hour (it's not just us, though there are only a few others who are just starting; part way through class we split into two groups and the others work on the sword form), and shows us videos of someone who is probably the fifth-generation head of the Yang branch of tai chi (or something like that), who has a school now in Seattle and has instructional videos in English, and they feed us breakfast and take us home to start work. They are welcoming and smiling and kind, and they are so willing to teach us that we almost feel awkward because we don't know how to respond without feeling like we're taking advantage of them. When I wanted to find a school, I thought maybe I would find someplace that would have classes in the evening, but probably I wouldn't be able to make it all the time, so maybe I'd only get to go once or twice a week. Here, they say we should come whenever we have free time - someone will be available to teach us. When we leave in the morning, they ask if we'll come back in the afternoon (sometime, I'll have to make time to actually do that; we really only practice tai chi in the morning, and as much as I love it, I also want to learn something about wushu).

I really love being able to go to the tai chi school. I like our tai chi instructor here, but he doesn't do a lot of instructing in the classes (he doesn't correct our forms or explain what we're doing) so it's nice to have someone who can take time to show us what we really should be doing. The class at the other school is more satisfying and also... it's something outside of FenZhong. It's maybe a chance to become part of a community. The teachers we meet are friendly - I don't even just mean welcoming and smiling this time, I mean they seem like they want to be our friends. They're closer to our age (at least some of them are) than many of the teachers at FenZhong, and at least some of them don't have babies. So… I'm hopeful. I know that probably we'll still be outsiders for a long time, but maybe not entirely.