Huang Long Xi field trip

I just realized that it had been a little while since I posted....  The school part is kinda the same all the time - go to class, do a couple of hours of homework, repeat.  My language skills are getting a tiny bit better, mostly because my vocabulary is increasing.

The more interesting happenings are outside of the classroom.  Last weekend (June 14) we went on a group field trip to Huang Long Xi (Yellow Dragon Town) for part of the day.  It's partially an old river town, partially new stuff, and a lot touristy.  It won't be my favorite side trip in China, but others seemed to enjoy it.

The kids were all getting squirt guns to play with.  Apparently all of the dresses in the background shop were to play 'dress up' and have your glamour picture taken.

One of the quieter spots I saw.  Most of the area was jam-packed with people.

You can pick out your fish (or turtle) for lunch.

And they'll cook that fish right here.  The big woks have tofu in them.

Or if you'd prefer, you can have a fried insect or crab as a snack.

There was some weird amusement park-type fun house stuff too.

Later people were getting glamour photos here.

The little cages under the tent had live birds and bunnies in them that people were buying.  I don't know if their fate would be as pets or dinner....

 Fun playing in the water!

Boats lined up along the river next to the town.

One of the narrow alleys filled with little shops

A nice stream runs down the middle of the shopping street.

I spent most of my time sitting on a bench watching the people.  The kids were playing in the stream and having fun.  I also watched for entertaining t-shirt sayings.  My favorites of the day:

Pink Flayd

Happily fruits

Belvin Kline jeans

Field trip to Xichang

Last weekend we took a 3 day field trip to the area in and around a city called Xichang.  It's about 300 miles to the south of Chengdu and takes about 6 hours to drive to.  Once you leave the city of Chengdu, it gets pretty mountainous (mostly tree-covered rolling ones) and we went though about 22 tunnels along the way.  The city itself wasn't anything special.  We visited a museum about one of the Chinese minority people - the Yi people - who live in this area.  After a banquet-type dinner, we watched some ethnic dancers and performers.  We also visited Qionghai lake, which is supposed to be the second largest freshwater lake in the Sichuan Province.

A sculpture at the museum.  I think it was supposed to be saying that Communism gets rid of the chains of slavery?  Or you could view it as pulling the chains tight so that you can't get away....  Either way, the roses were pretty.

A view of the lake

Some interesting words of wisdom....

More interesting translations

No striding?

Dancers after dinner

A little fire breathing

This sign was in my hotel room.  I'm not totally sure what they're telling us we're supposed to do with our cash and valuables. 

How thoughtful of them!  How many times have you been to a hotel and said 'oh no - I've forgotten my underwear and I need to buy some new ones right now.  And I'd rather not leave my hotel room to do it!'  Also available for purchase in this handy selection was a disposable toilet seat cover and a towel that expanded to full size when you got it wet (super useful idea there).

The restaurant where we had breakfast both days.  It was a very Chinese breakfast - some rice gruel a little like watery oatmeal (it's called congee and I think it's kinda gross), some steamed buns with random shredded meat inside, and a hard boiled egg.  I had an egg....  And yes, that's part of the kitchen in the background.

The local children attempting to get us to buy random souvenirs at the base of LuoJi mountain on Saturday.  We're getting ready to climb to the top (well, sort of).  From here we rode a much shorter bus up a bunch of switchbacks, then got on a cable car, then did our hiking.

The kids selling things were everywhere!

View from the bottom of the cable car

Another view from the bottom of the cable car

If you look carefully, just to the left of the cell tower is the cable car going up.  That's where we're headed.  It looks like you'd be at the top of the mountain up there, but trust me, you're not.

The view from the top of the cable car looking back down.

A map of the trails up there.  I followed the biggest loop all the way around.  The highest point on the hike is at the top of the map.

A Chinese hiking trail.  No way you're going to accidentally lose the trail here!  And they love their steps....

They want to make sure we remember that we're in nature now.  I'll let you guess what they mean by dog ends....

Another great sign to remind us about nature

A view along the hike.  The rhododendrons were blooming.

Looking down at the big lake that was near the beginning of the hike.

Hi Mom (and Dad)!  I'm really here....  It was raining a bit while we were there, hence the raincoat.

Remember my comment about steps?  Here's where we had to go up, and up, and up, and up some more.  There were about 12 switchbacks here with nothing but stairs.

The highest point on the hike - 3820 meters (12,533 feet)

The view at the highest point

Time to go back down.  Lots more stairs await us - we have to get down past that lake to get to the top of the cable car.

My daily life here

Sorry I haven't posted anything in a week.  Last week was pretty busy with homework and then we left on a 3 day field trip and I'm only just feeling caught up.  The field trip will be in a separate post.

The school aspect of this adventure is going well overall.  My Chinese is getting a tiny bit better, although I don't know how much of it will stick with me very long.  I spend 3 hours every morning in language class and then I've been spending a couple of hours every day doing homework - either reading/writing work or learning new characters for a quiz. Our teacher has gotten into a habit of giving us a quiz on characters pretty much every day, so that means learning 15-30 new characters or words per night.  Might not sound too bad, but we have to be able to write them from memory.  Some of the ones from the quiz this morning:
地图 = map
红路灯 = traffic light
Can you tell that the chapter was on giving/getting directions?

In the afternoons, I get lunch and then sometimes I do homework, sometimes I do some shopping errands.  Today I took the bus to a big store to do some grocery shopping.  I felt a huge sense of accomplishment that I was able to do that successfully without any disasters along the way, especially since I hadn't ridden that particular bus route before.  You never realize how much your life revolves around being able to read things (signs, packages of food,...) until you can't really do it.  And since I can only minimally communicate with people, I can't really ask them for help either (well, I can probably ask, but won't understand anything they say back!!).  Pictures and landmarks become really important in daily life.

An area close to campus where there are lots of restaurants in a row.  Most of the seating is outside.  I took this photo while waiting for my dumplings to be ready at the yummy dumpling shop.

A more upscale part of the city with fancier shops and restaurants.  The green cars are taxis and they're everywhere.

I didn't take any pictures of the grocery store items today (mostly because I already get stared at enough - why add to it with my camera out at the store), but some of it is really entertaining, especially when there are little snippets of English.  For example, the potato chip flavors are much different from the US.  This one is tomato ketchup flavor.  Today I saw cucumber flavor and a bunch of others that are a tad weird for my tastes.

Other interesting things at the Chinese grocery store:

• there was an entire aisle (both sides) of rice - everything from fill your own bag, to what had to be 50 lb + bags
• you can buy live fish there for dinner
• milk seems like it only comes in single serve juice boxes that are not refrigerated and there was most of an aisle of choices.  I couldn't read the packages there, so I don't know why there was so much
• there were lots of junkfood aisles, though most of it was not anything you would see in the US - lots of things that looked a bit like beef jerky, but had words like 'rabbit' and 'duck liver' and other assorted odd choices.  Plus a lot of sugary sweets too. 
• you have to ask for, and pay for a bag to put your groceries in.  I suppose that's probably a good thing overall, but different from what I'm used to.
• this store was two levels and had ramp-like moving sidewalks to go between floors.  The wheels on the cart were weird and it wasn't until I went between floors that I figured out why - they were magnetic and stuck to the moving sidewalk when you were on it, so that your cart wouldn't roll.  Pretty cool!

Traffic

This will be a short post, but hopefully I've successfully attached a video link to it.

The traffic here is crazy and the horn honking is driving me a little nuts.  I'm hoping that soon it will just become background noise and that I won't even notice it.  So far I've been here 11 days and it still bugs me!  Because it's difficult to describe what the driving habits are really like, I took a short video from the window of my room.  I overlook a corner that is the intersection between a main road and a small street.  As you are watching the video, imagine trying to cross even the small street as a pedestrian.  It's an adventure!!

Pandas!

Yesterday (Saturday) we took a field trip to the Panda Breeding and Research Center.  Check out www.panda.org.cn/english for detailed info about the park.  They have giant pandas and red pandas.  We got to see both.  It was very crowded and very hot!  Here are some pictures.

The front entrance

Some of our group

A map of the park

Panda!

Red panda!

And, for something different, a peacock in a tree.... It's the dark blob in the middle of the picture.

I survived the first week!

I've made it through the first week.  There have been some ups and downs along the way, but it's definitely been an adventure.

My classes are challenging.  The intermediate Chinese class would probably be easier if I hadn't shown up 3 chapters behind everyone else.  I'm narrowing the gap (with a lot of work in my free time), but I've still got a bit of catching up to do.  The conversation class might actually be a bit easier.  I need to work on my vocabulary, but it seems like it will complement the other class nicely.  Tai chi will be interesting, but I'm not sure if I'll ultimately like it or not.  There are 3 of us in the class, but this week there were only two of us because the other student was ill.  Our teacher doesn't speak much English and our Chinese is pretty terrible (but might actually be better than his English), so it makes for some odd instruction sometimes.  I'm getting the hang of some of the poses, but am pretty clueless when it comes to going from one to the next....

The weather this week was pretty nice.  Mostly in the 80's during the day, but definitely more humid than Boise.  It seems to be overcast most of the time here which I think would make it a rather dreary place to live all the time.  For a couple of weeks, I think it will be ok though.

Food is the biggest daily adventure.  I can't read a menu, other than a few characters here and there (imagine looking at an English menu and only recognizing the letters P and L and you'll get the idea of what I'm facing), and I don't know very many words in general, so ordering food is quite challenging.  A few places have an English menu or picture menu, but even then you don't really know what you're ordering.  Places where you can actually see the food are the easiest.  I've been frequenting a local bakery down the street and basically saying (in Chinese) "two of those," accompanied by a finger point.  Here's what I got this morning:

I have no clue what any of them are called, but they taste good.  They're similar in taste to pound cake or coffee cake.  These cost me about $0.50 today.

I had a huge win on Friday at lunchtime when I was able to successfully order some vegetarian dumplings for lunch.  Next time, instead of the boiled ones, I'm going to try for fried ones.  At that shop, the guy speaks a little bit of English, which helps, but I probably know more Chinese than he knows English (seems to be a common theme here).  I didn't understand the amount aspect of my purchase though.  I was told that I could order one or two 两 liǎng (that word means pair), but one liǎng was six dumplings and they wouldn't make just six, and I had to order two liǎng (12 dumplings).  Confused?  So am I.  But I successfully got 12 dumplings and promptly ate them all.

I've started taking pictures of things that I like so that I can buy them again and know that I'm getting the same thing the next time.  Here's a drink I've discovered:

Again, I don't really know what it is, but it tastes sort of like Tang.

Here are a few pictures near the bakery down the street.  Sorry they're a little blurry.  I was trying not to be too obvious taking the pictures.

A view out of our dorm toward the stadium on campus:

A sign near the dorm.  Maybe you can figure out what they mean in the section below Administrative Building?  My best guess is Cafeteria and Park, but I don't know most of the Chinese characters there.