on the road again....

we're off! next week is the week-long may break in china. we get the week off school, which is excellent, because we need a break! in two hours we are getting an overnight train to guangzhou. hopefully we can meet up with our friend nicole for a little bit before heading to macau. thursday evening we'll pick up katie lennard and lindsay theo at the airport. they are coming off 8 months traveling in india. we are excited to show them what little we know of the most populous country in the world. it's a good geographic superlative: we'll all have been to the two countries in the world with over 1 billion people.

we will get two days in macau with lindsay and katie. i love macau and i am excited to go back. it is an old portuguese colony, and people still speak portuguese there. we have been studying our mandarin hard, but it won't help at all in macau. the island is peaceful and has great architecture. it feels like europe. a vacation from china while still in china!

on saturday we hop on a 25 hour train to kunming, the capital of yunnan province. we are going to be on the southeastern side of the tibetan plateau. all the travelers we have met say that yunnan is the next best thing to tibet. if you cannot get to tibet, get to yunnan. we are meeting up with two other teachers from wuhan, lindsey jackson and meghan pigott. so we'll travel for a week with two lindsa(e)y's, a katie, a kate, a meghan...and one boy. i hear a rumor of mexican food at one of the hotels in kunming. yum.

yunnan, 云南, by the way, has a beautiful name in chinese. it is the southern cloud province. 云, yun, means cloud and 南, nan, is south. very picturesque.

i am so glad to be done with classes this week! since i am missing thursday and friday i had to make all of those hours up with the students. in three days i have taught what normally takes a week. i have all but one of my classes made up. the students are really excited about the may break, so excited, in fact, they have already left. attendance has been wretched. seven kids out of forty show up. today i taught a class that was observed by the department. i have 6 observers and 4 students. and none of the students brought paper to class (their homework wasn't done either).

so, here we go. we've got to catch the bus to the train station. we'll be posting, i hope, as we travel this week. we'll be back in wuhan late on may 7th. if anyone wants to call katie and lindsay then, try our cell phone, 86-27-6137-8517. we are 12 hours ahead of est.

phoenix; china, not arizona

***this is duffy writing, not kate***

hi, everyone, i know it's been a while since kate or i has posted about anything really fun or interesting, but we've been really busy. we've realized that we don't have too much time left in china, so we've started really trying to soak up everything we can. expect a deluge of posts over the next few days as we try to catch up.

about 3 weeks ago, kate and i ran into one of our chinese friends at dinner. she said she was putting together a trip that was leaving in a few days and that she and 3 of her friends would be going to hunan province and asked if we'd like to come. we said sure, we'd love to, but forgot to ask where we'd be going. carol got all the plans together and a few days later, we met at the train station to go to the town of 'phoenix', feng huang in chinese. the group was kate and i, three students, and a german history student that they knew.

since the details of the trip had been vague thus far, we didn't know that we were in for a 13-hour train ride followed by a 3-hour bus ride into the mountains. the train was fine, like it always is if you have a sleeper, but the bus ride was chaotic. the bus was so full that people were sitting on plastic stools in the aisle for all 3 hours. also, it left at 7 am and this particular bus was outfitted with karaoke equipment, which the driver enjoyed at full volume. the ride was through beautiful hills and steep, terraced farmland, but the roads were also very curvy. by the end there were 2 kinds of people on the bus: those who were asleep, and those who were motion sick.

the town of feng huang itself is in the middle of a gorge and most of the town is next to a river that, while beautiful and lined with ancient looking buildings, doesn't seem to move. when we arrived, the first things we saw and heard were dozens of students drawing and painting the scenery, a drummer and dancer on a pavilion in the middle of the river, and a large number of gondola-like boats on the water. it was very beautiful and gave a great first impression.

after winding our way through narrow, tourist-shop-lined streets, carol and her friends found a great guest house for all of us. the place was a steal at $2.50 a night. it was a newly built hotel, but had walls, doors and windows that were frosted plastic in carved wooden frames. the interior was all wood and all the walls were windows, making the place really airy, which was nice, since there were amazing thunderstorms every night. the thunder and lightning felt like they were coming from in the building.

feng huang is in western hunan province, an area with a large population of the miao minority group. for those not familiar with chinese minorities, about 93 percent of chinese people are 'han' chinese. the other 7 belong to one of 56 'minority nationalities.' the miao are one of the largest groups, with a population of about 9 million, and they are found all over southern and western china. the miao have turned feng huang into a large-scale exhibition of their 'traditional' culture. the entire city is built with traditional chinese houses with the corners of the roofs turned up and thick clay tiles for roofing. our daytime activities in feng huang were hiring a driver and going into the countryside to visit miao villages and see traditional dancing and singing. there were women in traditional costume, and the show was interesting and colorful. the scenery was beautiful and it was a lot of fun to just get out into the country, whether driving or walking.

there's more to talk about with regards to phoenix, but that's enough for now.

keep checking the next few days. we're going to be writing a lot.

busy busy bees

i am so sorry it has taken me almost three weeks to post again. i have been so busy. china is like that. activity comes in waves. i think i am again, easing my way off the crest, and into a trough, but i can see the next rise. i have been occupying my time with classes and students, learning chinese, spring cleaning, learning to cook chinese food, travel, and trying to plan a week long trip for the labor week break.

chinese class recently has been challenging. i am really getting a handle on the reading and writing, but my listening and speaking isn't very good. the biggest problem i have is that i don't need to say a whole lot. i have been dealing with the same people for two years now. i have my favorite food stands, stores, and restaurants on the campus, and i have been going to them since the very beginning. i didn't speak any chinese in the first few weeks so we worked out a system of communicating and nothing has changed. i could say more, but since i am a little shy, i am content to leave things as they are. but not really. amy is really having to force me to do listening and speaking. i'd like to think i am not as reluctant and difficult as my students, but i am resisting some. duff's listening comprehension and speaking is coming along very well. i think we should strike a deal where i do all the reading and writing and he does all the listening and speaking.

amy has started teaching 1/2 the class in chinese and 1/2 the class in english. i can tell i am getting a lot better. my brain hurts when i leave lesson. she is a really fantastic teacher and i will miss her and her instruction terribly when we leave.

in the next few days i will provide an account of our trip to phoenix city in hunan province. we had an amazing time, and relaxing travel thanks to carol, our friend who took us.

we have one more week of classes and then we start the may break. the may break is a national week-long holiday in china. it is their week-long version of labor day. i am always getting frustrated with my students because they haven't a very good concept of the individual, they always think of themselves within a group. this is great in many ways, but when it comes to tests and copying homework.....

china has a very uniform society. we can see this every day. everyone does the same thing at the same time. this makes traffic easy, and the high hours at restaurants. everyone gets a two hour break at the university in the middle of the day. from 12:00 to 1:00 the restaurants are packed. everyone is eating. from 1:00 to 2:00 they are deserted. everyone is taking a nap. everyone goes to work and comes home at the same time. this makes traffic a nightmare, but the timing of traffic jams is very predictable. the whole country is on the same time zone. everyone goes on vacation at the same time. this makes planning a trip a horror.

katie and lindsay are stopping through china at the end of their india trip. we are going to spend the may break together. our plan is to go to yunnan province in southwestern china. getting tickets has proved almost impossible. the air tickets seem to go up exponentially in price day by day. we cannot afford them, so we are going to risk getting train tickets. the problem with purchasing train tickets in china is you cannot purchase tickets departing from any city unless you are in that city. we meet katie and lindsay in macao, and we want to take the train from guangzhou to kunming. we cannot buy tickets departing from guangzhou in wuhan, so we are trying to get a chinese friend of ours who lives in guangzhou to buy them for us. the most challenging part is going to be finding tickets back to wuhan. oh, china. you are so complicated! yet so much fun.

the pretty places in wuhan

there is always something interesting to see in wuhan, but it isn't always pretty. over the last two weeks, though, i have seen some of the most beautiful parts of wuhan and hubei. yesterday, duff and i went on the spring outing with our students to mulan lake and mountain. i'll get pictures up of that soon. for the last two saturdays, we have gone with amy to see the spring flowers in wuhan. two weeks ago we went to the cherry blossoms at wuhan university. last week we went to the wuhan botanical garden to see the tulips.

wuhan university is the largest university in wuhan. everyone calls it wu da for short. the full name of our school is hu bei gong ye da xue, but we are known as hu gong. much easier. thousands of people come to wu da in the spring to see the cherry blossoms. university students from all over the city come to stand in front of the trees and get their pictures taken. the cherry trees, amy told, us, were brought to the school when it was young (wu da is over 100 years old) by japanese exchange students. the trees are planted all over the camps. it is a beautiful setting. wu da is on the shores of east lake and the buildings are all in the old, traditional chinese style.

i guess amy's 5 year old son, long long, had a good time with us, he wanted us to come on the next weekend's outing, too. he thinks we look really funny. he will sometimes look at duff and just start laughing. duff often teases him and makes faces, but long long laughs at us without the prompts. he loves to take pictures with amy's digital camera, of the flowers, and especially of duff. he also likes to quiz us on our chinese. he will throw out simple vocabulary and we tell him the word in english. amy, amazingly bilingual, keeps track of the points, and who is correct. long long knows a little english, and we quiz him on his vocabulary.

the wuhan botanical garden in a huge area along east lake. i believe amy said it is 1000 acres. the tulips were in bloom, so we went to see them. the whole place is beautiful, and very well labeled. we saw a knot tree, where lovers tie the new branches into knots as a symbol of their love and commitment. the most interesting was the opium exhibit. opium and drug use is still a big problem in china, and i gather from amy, has become much more serious recently. there was a mini-exhibit with gruesome photos about the effects of using opium. sadly, it was in chinese, and i couldn't read it. the pictures were enough, though. they showed arrests, dead movie stars, deformities, babies with opium related problems....and then the pretty flowers. across from the exhibit there was a cage, inside were opium poppies. they haven't bloomed yet. apparently they are legal if you plant fewer than a certain number. lining the cage on either side were the legal poppies. i want to go back when they bloom later in the year. i love poppies, they are my favorite flower.

this weekend duff and i are going with our friend carol to a city in hunan province known as phoenix. i don't know much about it, other than people say it is largely untouched by western influences and from there we can get a glimpse of old china. we are canceling classes on friday and leave thursday night. and we have a sleeper on the train, yes!

congratulations to mark and helen on their engagement!! mark and helen were part of the big group of foreigners we knew last year, and taught at the neighboring university. they are living in olympia, washington, where mark is working on his master's at evergreen. best wishes to them.