hut one, hut two...

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

hello everyone. kate has gone to beijing this weekend to drop off her indian visa application at the 'Visa Hut' outside the indian embassy. this is actually what their website calls the place where you drop off and pick up visas. you'd think that the two most populous countries in the world would have enough visa requests that they couldn't use a 'hut', but they don't.

anyway, i'd thought i'd take the opportunity to talk about another 'hut' on our campus. this year, a pizza hut has opened here. not the international chain restaurant, but an actual hut that sells pizza. not only does it sell pizza, you can make photocopies, print, and use the long-distance phone center. this restaurant, and others like it, are probably the best feature of living at the campus. there are an amazing amount of boiled, fried, and steamed dumpling stands, noodles, boiled and fried, fried rice, large pieces of steamed dough, a rice-stuffed, egg-wrapped food called a dou pi, and a lot of different deep-fried pieces of dough all for less than a quarter. there are a lot of places in wuhan that are nicer to eat, but very few campuses have the variety that this campus does. our chinese friends who visit from other campuses have commented on how great the food prices and selection are for us. sadly, many of the small food vendors are being forced to move as the campus expands. those construction cranes in the background are a few of about 15 on our campus. however, the vendors are very clever. as soon as one area is turned into a 15 story building, another food area springs up. now that it's summer, there are also a lot of night markets opening, but more about them another time.

*unfortunately, our pizza hut doesn't deliver, or have cheese.

introducing.....our chinese names

our chinese teacher, amy, gave duff and me chinese names a few weeks ago. aren't they beautiful? at the top is my name, below it is duff's. most chinese names have two or three characters. the surname, or family name, comes first.

my chinese name is BAI YA LI. the first character, BAI, means pure or white. amy picked it because my name in english (katharine) also means pure. bai is a really common surname. the most common surnames in china are li, wang, long, zhang, and chen. sound familiar? the second character YA means elegant, and the third is LI, beautiful. everyone i have told it to has praised it as a very beautiful name. i think the elegant part is amy's wishful thinking. i have a very complicated name, according to amy.

duff's name in chinese is JIAN DA FEI. his surname, JIAN, means simple. DA means arrive or achieve, and FEI is fly or high. together these mean something like duff will achieve great heights and accomplishments through simple means. amy chose DA FEI because it sounds like duffy, which she thinks is his given name. people here are floored when they discover duffy is his surname. people don't really go by their surnames here. the surnames are so common, we'd be calling 10 out of 40 students in a class by wang.

committed

i bought a ticket back to america! unlike last year this was no last minute operation. no panic. i will be arriving in cincinnati on 19 august 2006 from....new delhi. yes, i am going back to india. i am committed. my great friend sean owens is going to meet me there at the end of july. i have known sean since high school and i am looking forward to traveling with him. the last time we traveled he drove with me from seattle to cincinnati, delivering all my stuff to my parent's house before i came to china a year and a half ago.

i have an ambitious summer trip planned. duff and i are going to start out in far western china. we want to see parts of the old silk road and the uigur people (china's muslims). then tibet. duff is heading back to america at that point. his cousin ben is getting married in san diego and he is a groomsman. then, the real adventure starts. we are coordinating with other teachers from wuhan for the trip (lindsey jackson, jennifer paradise, and jessica lester) but i don't yet know their plans or route. i may well be crossing the himalayas solo (although i don't think that will end up being the case). it is an 8 day overland trip from lhasa to kathmandu. i hear it is amazing. then, i'd like to fly from nepal to delhi, i'm told the bus ride between the two capitol cities is more stressful that it is worth.

sean and i have a month in india. i will use some of that time to learn more about my opa's sister, lilly swords. she lived most of her life in india and ran a school in the punjab for the methodist church. i have written to the school, and a woman in germany who knew aunt lilly, but i haven't heard anything back yet. katie and lindsay report the indian mail system to be wildly unreliable, so even if i don't hear back, sean and i will go to batala and see what we can find.

it is a beautiful day and duff and i are done with class. as soon as i am done with a load of laundry (there are no dryers in china and washing must be done on nice days to hang in the sun) we'll go fly kites in the park near my apartmnet. happy friday.

a problem in america too....

below duff and i have copied an article that was in this morning's new york times. timely, eh? i think duff, who teaches reading and writing, may have his students read the article as part of the class. sadly, he's conflicted. he doesn't want the kids to read it and get any new ideas.

i had no idea that cheating was such an issue at home.

May 18, 2006

Colleges Chase as Cheats Shift to Higher Tech

By JONATHAN D. GLATER

LOS ANGELES — At the University of California at Los Angeles, a student loaded his class notes into a handheld e-mail device and tried to read them during an exam; a classmate turned him in. At the journalism school at San Jose State University, students were caught using spell check on their laptops when part of the exam was designed to test their ability to spell.

And at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, after students photographed test questions with their cellphone cameras, transmitted them to classmates outside the exam room and got the answers back in text messages, the university put in place a new proctoring system.

"If they'd spend as much time studying," said an exasperated Ron Yasbin, dean of the College of Sciences at U.N.L.V., "they'd all be A students."

With their arsenal of electronic gadgets, students these days find it easier to cheat. And so, faced with an array of inventive techniques in recent years, college officials find themselves in a new game of cat and mouse, trying to outwit would-be cheats this exam season with a range of strategies — cutting off Internet access from laptops, demanding the surrender of cellphones before tests or simply requiring that exams be taken the old-fashioned way, with pens and paper.

"It is kind of a hassle," said Ryan M. Dapremont, 21, who just finished his third year at Pepperdine University, and has had to take his exams on paper.

"My handwriting is so bad," he said. "Whenever I find myself having to write in a bluebook, I find my hand cramps up more, and I can't write as quickly."

Mr. Dapremont said technology had made cheating easier, but added that plagiarism in writing papers was probably a bigger problem because students can easily lift other people's writings off the Internet without attributing them.

Still, some students said they thought cheating these days was more a product of the mind-set, not the tools at hand.

"Some people put a premium on where they're going to go in the future, and all they're thinking about is graduate school and the next step," said Lindsay Nicholas, a third-year student at U.C.L.A. She added that pressure to succeed "sometimes clouds everything and makes people do things that they shouldn't do."

In a survey of nearly 62,000 undergraduates on 96 campuses over the past four years, two-thirds of the students admitted to cheating. The survey was conducted by Don McCabe, a Rutgers professor who has studied academic misconduct and helped found the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke.

David Callahan, author of "The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead" (Harcourt, 2004), suggested that students today feel more pressure to do well in order to get into graduate or professional school and secure a job.

"The rational incentives to cheat for college students have grown dramatically, even as the strength of character needed to resist those temptations has weakened somewhat," Mr. Callahan said.

Whatever the reasons for cheating, college officials say the battle against it is wearing them out.

Though Brian Carlisle, associate dean of students at U.C.L.A., said most students did not cheat, he spoke wearily about cases of academic dishonesty.

He told of the student who loaded his notes onto the Sidekick portable e-mail device last fall; students who have sought help from friends with such devices; students who have preprogrammed calculators with formulas. Some students have even deigned to use the traditional cheat sheet, he said.

"One of the things that we're going to be paying close attention to as time goes on is the use of iPods," Professor Carlisle added, pointing out that with a wireless earpiece, these would be hard to detect.

The telltale iPod headphone wire proved the downfall of a Pepperdine student a couple of years ago, after he had dictated his notes into the portable music player and tried to listen to them during an exam.

"I have taught for 30 years and each year something new comes on the scene," Sonia Sorrell, the professor who caught the student, said in an e-mail message.

At the Anderson School of Management at U.C.L.A., the building's wireless Internet hotspot is turned off during finals to thwart Internet access.

Richard Craig, a professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San Jose State, who caught students using spell check last year, said that for tests, he arranged the classroom desks so that the students faced away from him but he could see their desktop screens.

"It was just a devilishly simple way to handle it," Professor Craig said.

At the University of Nevada, Professor Yasbin, the dean, was not the only one upset by the camera phone cheating episode there, which occurred in 2003; honest students were appalled, too. They suggested that they police one another, by being exam proctors.

"The students walk around the classroom, and if they see something suspicious, they report it," Professor Yasbin said.

Amanda M. Souza, a third-year undergraduate who heads the proctor program, said her classmates had decidedly mixed reactions to the student monitors.

"The ones that aren't cheating think it's a great idea, " she said. "You always see students who are really well prepared covering their papers. But the ones that aren't prepared, probably don't like us."

At Mercer County Community College in West Windsor, N.J., students must clear their calculators' memory and sometimes relinquish their cellphones before tests. At Brigham Young University, exams are given in a testing center, where electronic devices are generally banned.

In some classes at Butler University in Indianapolis, professors use software that allows them to observe the programs running on computers students are taking tests on. And some institutions even install cameras in rooms where tests are administered.

To take a final exam last week, Alyssa Soares, a third-year law student at U.C.L.A., had to switch on software that cut her laptop's Internet access, wireless capability and even the ability to read her own saved files. Her computer, effectively, became a glorified typewriter. Ms. Soares, 28, said she did not mind. "This is making sure everyone is on a level playing field," she said.

Several professors said they tried to write exams on which it was hard to cheat, posing questions that outside resources would not help answer. And at many institutions, officials said that they rely on campus honor codes.

Several professors said the most important thing was to teach students not to cheat in the first place.

Timothy Dodd, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity, said creating a "nuclear deterrent" to cheating in class, and perhaps implying that it is acceptable elsewhere, "is antithetical to what we should be doing as educators."

www.nytimes.com

just how stupid do they think i am?

my students must think i am an idiot. sadly for them, i'm not. chinese students cheat a lot, and we have our midterm exams this week. it is basically a very easy quiz. for the past three weeks we have worked on a set of vocabulary words to describe emotions. there are only 36 words!! and we have worked on them in class for three weeks!! and they still think they need to cheat!! ugh.

the student's grades are based largely on attendance and participation. we also give a midterm exam and a final. last semester i gave a lot more quizzes, but it was so frustrating i decided to give less this semester. the students still don't take them seriously, although it is pretty clear that failing either the midterm or final would bode very poorly for passing the class. i still have had less then half the students in each class show up for the midterm.

yesterday i gave the quiz three times and failed 14 kids for cheating. one kid had the answers taped to his arm. others used cheat sheets, or tried to trade papers with their friends, text each other the answers with their cell phones, or talk. i wrote 8 different quizzes this time for all the classes i have. in the afternoon, i got a kid who didn't even take the quiz, he just turned in the answers to the version of the quiz i had given that morning. i had another kid, who i hadn't managed to catch cheating during the test, accidentally turn in his cheat sheet with his test! zero.

the students in the class i had earlier today aren't close. in a lot of the classes, the students are great friends and sit close together. in this class, they spread out. they never sit in the front two rows. today i get to class and the 15 out of 40 that have showed up are crammed, side by side, in the first three rows. when it came time for the quiz, i told them to bring everything to the front of the room. this is my standard rule. no paper. no notebooks. no cellphones. no glasses cases. nothing. they all sat in the first three rows and would not relinquish single sheets of paper. i told them to spread out, and i would give them paper. still no one moved. ah ha. i looked under their papers and they all had the answers written on the desks. bad kids! i finally get them spread out, and i think i have all of their stuff at the front. still, before i start the quiz, i did one more check. i caught 3 more cheat sheets under test papers before the quiz, and another during the quiz. in my class, if you cheat, you get a 0. the kids know this, i am very clear on this point. and yet, the don't learn. there are a number of kids who have, by midterm, assured they have no way to pass the class.

on the bright side, duff and i have made some spunky new friends. yesterday, as i was walking home from my last class, i was charged by three little girls from 9 to 11. they accompanied me all the way home and we practiced their english and my chinese. we sang 'xiao yan zi'...a song amy taught me about at swallow. it was so much fun to be skipping along with three little girls singing chinese children's songs. they are sharp kids and quick learners, and by the time we got to my apartment had mastered a number of new vocabulary words.

this afternoon, duff and i saw them again in our school's dirty alley (a food street with small restaurants and vendors and a lot of trash). they ran up again, and asked me my name. i told them and then i realized they didn't recognize me. they were saying, "you aren't kate." my hair was tied back. i took it down. instant recognition. we talked to them for 15 minutes, and in the process, halted activity on the street. everybody stopped and watched these three brave little girls talking to the foreigners. linda, sue, and mary are the little girl's english names. yesterday, mary's name was yuki.

no chinese lesson for us tonight. amy is putting in long hours at her office. she was at work until 3 a.m. last night, and plans to do the same thing tonight. i haven't any idea what she is preparing for.

mulan lake

***This is Duffy writing, not Kate***

The weekend before Kate and I went to Phoenix, our students told us, on Sunday night, that there were no classes Tuesday and wondered if we could go with them on a spring outing to Mulan Lake, which is about 2 hours from Wuhan. After confirming that this was a school event and not just a way to play hookey, we agree and Tuesday morning, instead of preparing to teach for 8 hours, we were both getting on a bus at 730 am.

Mulan Lake is near Mulan Mountain, both of which are in Hubei, near Mulan’s hometown. For those of you who haven’t seen the Disney movie, Mulan is the story of a girl who steals her father’s armor and pretends to be him after the emperor drafts one man from each family into the army. The girl’s parents don’t discover the truth until it is too late, and Mulan serves bravely for 10 years in the army, without it being discovered that she is a woman. She rises to the rank of general, and as a reward for her service, the emperor says he will give her anything she wants. She chooses to go home to Hubei, where she takes off her armor and returns to the life of a traditional Chinese woman. Later, her comrades are shocked to discover that their hero is a woman.

The first thing we saw when we got to Mulan Lake was . . . rain. It had started to rain about 5 minutes before we got there and would continue to rain off and on all day. Somehow, it seemed we were the only ones who didn’t bring a disposable poncho. It took us about ten minutes to locate the man who was selling them and we bought 2 for 4 RMB each. About 10 seconds later, one of the students came running over and asked how much we had paid. We told him, and he quickly turned and demanded that the salesman give us back 2 RMB, since we had apparently been taken for all of 25 cents. However, the salesman quickly agreed and, despite our objections, refunded us 2 RMB. It was nice that the students protected us, but a little embarrassing.

Immediately after entering the park, there is a large pond at the bottom of a hill with a statue of the famous cross-dressing general. Right behind this pond is a series of trails, bridges, paths and small waterfalls that go up into the hills. There is a path to the top that follows a small river that flows over large rocks most of the way. It was really fun to be there on a rainy day. The mist added a kind of mystery to the place. The weather made the landscape seem very much like a set from a medieval movie. Much like in Phoenix, it was nice to see the beautiful, natural scenery that you see so much in Chinese artwork.

There was also a distinctly manmade feel to the area. The paths were laid out, the wilderness looked trimmed and well kept, there were steps carved into the rocks, and even the thorns on the plants had been dulled. The influence of people became most apparent at the top of the hill. There was a reservoir at the top of the trails that was held in place by an earthen damn. There was a food court, walking paths, pavilions, a newly constructed but not yet flooded riverbed, boats for rent, and a zip line. The students had warned us not to take a boat ride because we would be taken to the other side of the lake and forced to buy an expensive lunch there before we were brought back, so Kate and I decided to explore the dry riverbed and rest on a pavilion near the end of the zip line while some of the students went to get in line to go across the lake on it. The riverbed was fascinating. It was at least 20 feet wide and about 7 feet deep and was made of stone tiles. There was a worker putting up a net, so I guess there must have been fish in the lake that they wanted to keep there. This reservoir was not very large, and it looked like the river would drain it relatively quickly, so maybe Mulan Lake is about to become Mulan Puddle. Yet another item on the list of things that don’t make sense here. The students had a lot of fun on the zip line. They went for about 100 yards over the water before being caught by a workman at the other end. There was only one minor injury, a boy hit his shin on one of the poles holding the end of the line, but he was kicking and showing off, so he kind of earned it.

The walk to the top of the mountain took about 3 hours, and the hike down took about half an hour, so you can imagine how steep it was. The steps were about half as wide as my foot was long, so it was a little tense, especially since it was literally a half-hour-long walk down a staircase. I don’t know if you’ve ever gone down stairs that long, but it is tough.

Once we were down the hill and back on the bus, we thought we would be back pretty quickly. Until our bus ran into a 1 hour and 30 minute, dead-stop traffic jam. There were about 80 dump trucks that had all stopped at this toll booth for some reason and they were not moving and no one but foot traffic and three-wheel carts could get through. Finally the police came and cleared some lanes and we were back on our way to Wuhan to end a cold, wet day with a nice warm meal of hot pot.

the kids in southern california

for your enjoyment: new pictures of my niece, jazmine, and new nephew, shawn. alison sent them a week ago. cute.

and the whole neighborhood turns out for a game of flying plate....

last night our friend lindsey came over. she brought ground beef and cheese. this is a huge treat for us. these items are sold at a huge german supermarket (the german version of walmart. the french version is carrefour, and we have walmart here, too). this german supermarket is almost a 2 hour bus ride away from us, so we rarely make it there. lindsey lives very close to the market.

we made mexican food.

it was amazing. duff brought taco seasoning from home. we made tortillas, and attempted chips. we made pico de gallo and salsa. and margaritas. it was lovely, and it made me really ready to come home and descend upon a grocery store and buy hundreds of avocados. i am ready.

before we ate, and after we had done a lot of the prep, we went outside to play frisbee for a little bit before it got too dark. i live right across the street from a little park where people play all day. there are babies, and little kids, teenagers and college students sitting under the trees, elderly people on the exercise equipment, and parents riding by on motorscooters and bicycles to call their kids home for dinner. because it was saturday, there were a lot of people out. many had bags from the market, and would stop and talk to friends and neighbors before continuing to their apartments.

normally, when duff and i play frisbee we attract a small cloud. three weeks ago, i threw the fribee through a fence, and immediately a man ran up with a long stick and helped us get it back. we are foreigners, everyone is watching us. never has anyone played with us. they just watch and smile.

yesterday, was different. three little girls asked lindsey if they could play, at first they were hesitant, but with a mixture of chinese and english, we got a game going. once these three were in, our circle quickly grew. at one point we had 13 kids playing with us. 3 boys (and duff), the rest girls. it was so much fun to watch the kids interact with each other. there was one really bossy girl who had a little boy following her around. she said 不要 bu yao (don't want) every time someone tried to throw them the frisbee. the little boy wanted to play, but she wasn't having it. every time i spoke to her, she responded with 我听不懂外国话 wo ting bu dong wai guo hua, which amounts to 'i don't understand your foreign speaking.' she was so dismissive.

most of the kids were probably about 7 or 8 years old. the oldest was 12 or so. parents and grandparents surrounded us, watching, cheering the kids, and constantly laughing at my frisbee fumbles. in chinese, fribee is 飞盘 fei pan, which means 'flying plate.'

tonight, for dinner, we will either make chicken noodle soup, or attempt gyros. my kitchen sink doesn't have hot water. now that it is warmer, i will cook a lot more. the water is no longer ice cold, and i can wash the dishes. this winter i dreaded dirtying a dish because the water to wash it was so cold.

bouncing along the roads of yunnan

**this is a post written during our trip, it just never made it to the blog**

thank you, amy, for working so hard with us on our chinese!!

we have just spent a few amazing days in a part of china very few foreigners get to experience. it would have been impossible without being able to speak the little chinese that we do. mostly, we can thank duff and lindsey jackson's excellent listening skills. i have no idea how they do it. i am still having trouble with english listening.

we left lijiang after katie, duff, and i went trekking looking for bus tickets back to kunming. lijiang and kunming are both amazing cities. they feel, if at all possible, like cities in the western u.s. they are newer and beautiful, surrounded by mountains, and the streets are wide and clean, offering good views of the hills. the six of us caravaned to the bus station and attempted to get tickets to shi gu. we wanted to go to a small town north or west of lijiang, where we were certain to climb in elevation and experience more dramatic scenery. i tried to get tickets, but as far as i could tell, the woman was telling me they hadn't any more. i sent duff back into the line to ask, as his listening is better, and he confirmed. we pulled the book out, looked at the map, and picked some other likely destinations. no tickets. it seemed like we should hire a car. duff and i traveled in a car hired by our friend carol in hunan province. she hid us while she was bargaining, hiring a car for foreigners would cost loads more than doing it for chinese. we expected to pay a bunch. i asked the woman at the information desk and she said if i went around the corner i could find small vans to hire to take us to shi gu. this is my crowning moment of chinese listening to date. i cannot believe i understood her! yes!

we hired a car, and went to this beautiful small town nestled in the hills. the trip wasn't long, and the roads were good. we were comfortable as we wound our way along the mountains. the air was so fresh and clean, and at our elevation, it seemed to sparkle. we stopped to see the first bend of the yangtze, it's a lovely spot with a temple nearby.

we got to shi gu and easily found a hotel. i was shocked at the price. we paid 15 kuai a night for the most beautiful rooms. the hotel had a rooftop area where we hung out later that night and looked at the stars. what? is this still china? air so clear we can see the stars?! it was late afternoon by the time we got settled, and we set out for a short walk before dinner. the walk we ended up taking i hope to remember for the rest of my life. the town is built up a hill from a valley where the chang jiang flows. all around the town, the surrounding hills are terraced into fields. they don't grow rice, there isn't really enough water in the area, but they grow a lot of wheat and millet, i think. grains. we were walking through the town, and along the dividers of the terraces with golden afternoon sunlight. i could spend hours describing this, but i'll just add some pictures. i hope they do it justice.

we saw people living their lives. they town had rarely, if ever, seen foreigners before, and it was a sight to have 6 of us trekking through, grinning. the people who lived in the town were obviously not han chinese, a fact very apparent to me, duff, lindsey and meghan. we were traveling in an area with a lot of tibetans and ethnic minorities. people in the town were wearing traditional dress. especially, as always, the very old and the very young. old women sat on stoops of houses chatting, old men crouched against walls peacefully smoking their pipes.

the next morning we attempted to get an early start, but with 6 people, that can be a bit of a challenge. i think we were all a little groggy from the altitude. i never thought that i would get any form of altitude sickness, but i believe i was suffering from it just a bit. i need to do some cardio-vascular prep before i got to tibet this summer. lindsey and i went out to try and buy a map, a task which proved to be impossible. we did get cookies and mulberries. yum.

we decided to go to a town called weixi. it is mentioned in my guide book with the words 'for the more adventurous.' warning: if you are reading a 4 year old copy of the rough guide, and it says 'for the more adventurous' proceed with caution. the rough guide is notorious for having incorrect distances and travel times, and this was no exception. we expected a trip of 80-100 km, on a paved road. we figured that was a good length for a day trip. what we got was a 5 hour drive there (amazing!!!) and a six hour drive back to shi gu (stressful!). we hired a driver, who, while he was good at driving, had absolutely no idea what he was doing. we weren't far out before we realized he hadn't ever been to weixi before. we were in a pretty remote area, and they signs weren't good. i think a lot of the additional hours we spent in the car were due to the driver's total lack of knowledge and navigational skills.

the scenery on the way to weixi was breathtaking. all the hills were terraced, and there were people bent over working in the fields. behind the hills were snow covered mountains breaking through fluffy white clouds and we could see glimpses of brilliantly blue sky. small villages sat on hills with the houses crowded together. the fields were in rotation. some showed brown and other light green and dark green. some were yellow. the road was lined with wildflowers, we followed clear streams with monks washing. we passed groups of young monks in saffron robes, holding hands, walking in this beautiful environment. we saw children playing and old men and women herding goats on the street. we saw water buffalo and donkeys pulling carts. every time we rounded a bend we would gasp and exclaim with the wonder of what we saw. the five hour drive was amazing, the best money i have paid while in china.

at one point we stopped at the edge of a tiny little town to use the restroom. the driver told katie and lindsay to go into a school. after about a minute, the rest of us realized that we should go too, at least to see the inside of the school. the children were wild about the foreigners. they were, as all children in china seem to be, fascinated by us. they screamed 'hello' and crowded around to take pictures. the kids are from the surrounding towns and villages, the school had dorms for them to stay when their homes are too far away. these children were young, but it made me think of how many of my students went to a boarding school for high school. some of my students have never lived with their parents. they were raised by their grandparents and then went to boarding schools for high school, and sometimes junior high. early on in my teaching career, i realized it was useless to ask about the student's parents. i would get much further asking about their grandparents.

when we finally got to weixi, we were shocked. from the guidebook we had all been expecting a sleepy little backwater town. rather, we burst into a metropolis of 200,000 or so. and it was so developed! there were beautiful shops, and nice stores. also, there was a few outfitters. i think it is a stop for chinese tourists before they head up into the mountains or into tibet. it was getting late, and i was nervous about the driver getting tired and being on the bumpy roads at night. we had an amazing lunch of vegetable dishes and hit the road again.

the trip back was far less pleasant than the trip out, so i'll not elaborate. the driver led us to believe that he had driven the scenic route to weixi, but he'd take the direct route back. in the end, it took longer. the road, if you could call it that, was terrible, and the sitting in the back of the van was truly a challenge. i still have bruises from all the bouncing. the driver had to ask for directions a number of times and when we turned around on the narrow roads, i was sure our back tires would drop off the end of the cliff. we returned to shi gu exhausted and rattled after midnight, but with fond memories of the early part of the day.

whirling around yunnan

duff and i are now back in wuhan. we have been back for almost a week, we are sorry to have been out of touch.

i'd like to recount some of our adventures from the may break trip. we went to yunnan province in southwestern china. all the teachers we know who have been there have marked it as one of their favorite spots in china. the guide books tell readers if they cannot go to tibet, they should go to yunnan. everyone is right. yunnan is a fascinating place.

when duff last wrote, we were in lijiang. lijiang is a city a lot like phoenix, in hunan. there is a really well preserved 'old town' surrounded by the modern city. like in phoenix, a lot of lijiang's city has been rebuilt, so the 'old' really refers to the architectural style and not the actual age of the structures. in lijiang, i believe, a lot of the rebuilding has taken place because an earthquake destroyed a good portion of the town a number of years ago. and it is a unesco site. surprise. china has so many of these. i think italy has more, but that's about it.

lijiang was a tourist paradise, for foreigners and chinese alike. we were only there for a day, but it was plenty long enough for me to get the feel of the place. there were six of us traveling together, and i honestly think we could have stayed and relaxed for the rest of the week, but we were ready for some adventure.

luckily, through amy's efforts, our chinese is getting functional. because of this, we are able to attempt more ambitions traveling. it is amazing to me, especially after having lindsay and katie here, how much english there is in india, and the very different traveling skills one needs to develop to explore these places. the six of us decided to get a bus to a town called shi gu, which in chinese means stone drum. it is in a fascinating area, and very important to china. it was while driving to shi gu that we saw the first bend of the chang jiang (yangtze river). this bend is so important because it is what keeps the river in china, rather than having it flow to south east asia. imagine what a different place china would be without the chang jiang. it would be like taking the mississippi away from the u.s.. without the chang jiang, central china would be without hydrologic distinction, and dry, maybe like mongolia. living along the river, we feel how everything in the area, and central china, depends on it, and is effected by it (in some ways now much less, though, since the flooding has largely been controlled by the three gorges dam). the first bend of the chang jiang is a hairpin turn, a very picturesque site. the chang jiang at this point is still muddy and brown. it is so much narrower than in wuhan, and you can see how quickly it flows as it winds it's way through the mountains. by the time the river reaches wuhan, it has even more silt suspended in it, and the water seems thick and heavy.

the other important historical site in the area is past shi gu, where the red army crossed the chang jiang in 1935 as part of the long march. we didn't make it to the actual site, but being in the area was enough to make an impression. it is a huge site for chinese tourists. the surrounding mountains are high and snow capped, and the valleys are deep, with streams along the bottom. these streams are diverted to flood terraced rice paddies, and irrigate other terraced fields that climb the hills, as they have done for 5000 years. the long march was very difficult for the communist party, and it was difficult terrain upon which to fight of the guomingtang. after crossing the yangtze, the long march only got more difficult as the soldiers passed through snowy mountains at high elevation, and trekked across the tibetan plateau, and the the area between the chang jiang and yellow rivers. the long march ended in yan'an, in shanxi province, a year after in began.

i have another post describing shi gu and environs that i wrote while we were there, i will get that up next.

from shi gu we returned to lijiang very briefly, and headed back to kunming. from kunming we caught the train to wuhan (thank you thank you lindsey and meghan for getting us tickets!). the trains in china are a luxury experience. this train to wuhan wasn't as nice as most, but it was still comfortable. while on the train, i started to learn to knit socks. katie, duff, lindsay and i had gone to a market the day before and bought some beautiful (and cheap!) yarn. i have never knitted anything more complicated than a scarf before (one time my grandma helped me add tassels to the end, but that is the pinnacle of my knitting career). i must have looked troubled because one of the train employees sat down next to me and asked me what i was making. i told her i was going to knit a sock. no. she grabbed my knitting from me and ripped out my work and informed me i was not making a sock, but i would make a scarf. she started me on a scarf, and spent the next 45 minutes directing me. luckily i hadn't gotten very far on my scarf, or i would have been really frustrated. the train employee, and another young lady passenger, monitored me as i knit the scarf. when the train employee left, i heard her tell the young woman to watch me, and make sure i didn't screw up (one of the benefits (?) of knowing a little chinese. i can catch what people say about me, but it isn't always good. sometimes i'd rather not know). the girl looked over my shoulder. sometimes she would look at me in reverse and loose it because she thought i was doing a stitch wrong. sometimes i could prove to her that she was looking from the wrong angle, but sometimes she'd take it from me and knit it again, or make me go back and do it over. it was a neat experience, and someday i will finish a scarf that two chinese woman instructed me to make on a train. when the young woman went to the dining car, however, to get lunch, i'd had enough. katie was going to be with us for a very short time and i was determined to make socks. i knit my communally-created scarf from the needles onto a chopstick. the young woman was shocked to see me finishing this when she got back lunch. at first i think she thought i was stupid and just grabbed a chopstick, rather than a knitting needle, by mistake. a language barrier can be difficult sometimes. when you don't speak the same language, occasionally it can be hard to remember that just because the person speaks stupid chinese (or english, we go through this with the students), they are not stupid. i was monitored for a while longer, but eventually the woman lost interest in my sock. they train lady never came back.

and so we are back in wuhan, and looking ahead. with the may break over, we are winding down our second (and my last) year in china. my mind is occupied with classes, seeing friends, studying chinese, and preparing for my ambitious summer travels.

happy may day

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

hello everyone. kate and i are in lijiang, in yunnan province, in the p.r.c. right now. our may day vacation has seen a lot of time on the move.

we picked up katie and lindsay in macau, and managed to meet up with our friend nicole in guangzhou, pick up train tickets, meet up with meghan and another lindsey in kunming, yunnan, and catch an overnight bus to lijiang. thanks to a large amount of prep work by kate, this has all gone really well. if geography doesn't work out, she can always be a great travel agent.

kate and i have been travelling since april 26th, when we left wuhan for guangzhou, then went to macau to pick up katie and lindsay who were coming in from bangkok after being in india for 8 months. after a small amount of trouble trying to decipher the bus schedules in macau (they use traditional chinese characters, not simplified), we got back to the guest house and had some of the best dumplings i've ever eaten.

since it rains a lot in macau, we spent most of the next day indoors, drinking coffee and eating baked goods. this doesn't sound very exciting, but since mainland china doesn't offer these things many places, it was a nice treat. dinner was nice, too. blending portuguese wine making, southern european spices, and seafood from china is a great combination.

the next day, kate, katie, lindsay and i met with nicole (a woman who worked in my office last year), and picked up train tickets to kunming. the train was 25 hours and was one of my most memorable train rides. a group of chinese people in their mid 20s shared our cabin and spoke excellent english and managed to teach me a chinese card game called catch the king. while i was playing cards, a girl from two cabins down came with her mother and began to practice her english with kate. soon her father came over too, to take some pictures. it was a lot of fun.

after arriving in kunming, which is a lot larger than we expected, we met up with lindsay and meghan. the next day, we left on an overnight bus to lijiang. we arrived at about 5:30 am and wandered around, a little tired and a little in awe, until we found a noodle and dumpling stand that opened early. lijiang is a beautiful city in the mountains that has a remarkable old town that is really well preserved and not as touristy as other places like it in china.

that's all for now. today we are going to the village of shigu (stone drum) in an attempt to see more scenery and get into a really rural environment. kate or i will try to post again soon, hopefully with some pictures.