A Late Follow-Up / Another Week

Well, this is an incredibly late follow-up to last weeks post about the birthday trip. I'll try to do Sunday justice, but I may have forgotten some of the nitty gritty details. We woke up to a phone call from our F.A.O David, who was calling to tell us that we weren't going to Moon Cave because it was too rainy. That was fine by us - we didn't really want to go that much anyway. So we called home on Skype and talked to the family, we had a nice conversation, and then we started doing stuff around the house. A little while later we got another phone call from David in which he told us that we were going to Moon Cave because the school had loaned us the car (and driver) for the day. This may require a side-note: I can't remember if I already mentioned that being the driver of a car is a profession in itself. In any case, it is a job in China, and Mr. Tam (or Tang, I don't really know how to say it or transcribe it), is the school's on-call driver. So we went to lunch at Grand Fortune Hotel with David, his son Eric, and Mr. Tam/Tang. The food was very good.

After lunch we had a "rest," because apparently China has an equivalent to the siesta (at least for the schools and teachers. I don't think the rest of the country takes two hours after lunch, but all the students do.) We went back up after our rest and met up with David and Mr. Tang/Tam, and then we drove out to Moon Cave. It was another great driving experience in the city, but once we got out into the country everything calmed down. The landscape was beautiful. I'm going to put up some pictures of the cave, countryside, etc. in a while, so check the pictures later.

We arrived at Moon Cave, which isn't much of a cave, and wandered around. It was a very beautiful part of the world. We found out that Dao Xian is the hometown of an ancient philosopher (lived about a thousand years ago), whose name I can't remember. Anyway, apparently we were close to where he had grown up, so we drove over to see the place. On the way, though, we stopped at another cave.

This cave doesn't have a name that I can recall, but it's famous locally because during World War II the Chinese villagers took refuge from 3 Japanese soldiers inside of it. I don't think they knew that there were only three soldiers because the soldiers ended up smoking the cave and killing over 500 of the villagers. David (who uses the phrase "too many" to mean "lots") told us that "If the villagers had fought back, there would have been too many survivors." I had to take a moment to myself to keep from laughing when he said that.

The cave itself, though, was amazing. It had the most beautiful rock formations and stalactites - really an incredible place. They had great names for everything. Apparently the Chinese don't think that we Americans have much imagination, because David kept quizzing me on what I thought the rocks looked like before he would tell me the actual name. I would usually get it wrong (for example, I thought the phoenix rock looked like a dragon, which turned out to be a very stupid mistake). However, I did guess the turtle rock correctly, and David was very happy for me.

The cave was mostly vertical, and we climbed up on brick stairs with rusted iron handrails (not a reassuring thing to see when we were so high up). The story is that the villagers who had been trapped by the Japanese climbed up out of the cave on their own, and we saw the opening at the top where they escaped. I don't think I could have done it without the aid of those poorly-designed stairs.

Ok, this post is getting long. After the cave we went and saw a shrine to the philosopher, built where he had originally founded his college (over a thousand years ago.) It was very cool, but I didn't take pictures because I didn't know how appropriate that would be.

We went back to town and headed straight for dinner. A lot of Chinese English teachers were there, and the food was good. Among the more interesting dishes that I tasted (and liked) were - mutton, moss, and bamboo shoots. There was also tofu that looked like the most delicious flan, and I was incredibly disappointed when I ate it (even though I already knew it wasn't flan.) Oh, and I tried goose, but I wasn't crazy about it. I had had a bad headache throughout the day, though, and by the end of dinner I was ready to die, mostly because we were in a private dining room and every man in China smokes like a chimney, and the cigarettes smell about 10 times worse than they do in America. It was like my own miniature version of Hell (for some reason with a Chinese theme). It was very kind of the teachers to take us out to eat, though, and so I shouldn't complain.

And that concludes the birthday extravaganza. Last week passed pretty uneventfully. I learned how to cook some good food finally, so that means we can start eating at home, and we successfully navigated the open-air market where they sell pig-tails as a specific "cut" of meat. Pork is by far the cheapest meat (well, for Americans at least, since we don't usually eat dog, etc.) and beef is the most expensive. English Corner continues to be like a scene from Jaws - the students crowd around us like sharks smelling fresh blood. They're so friendly, though. On Thursday a girl brought English / Chinese copies of Robinson Crusoe and Anna Karenina. I haven't met that many people in America who have read Anna Karenina, and here I find a Chinese girl in a small town who has an English-Chinese copy of a Russian classic. Sort of strange.

Well, that's enough for now. I'll try to think of something fun to tell you about next time.

Oh, a quick side-story. My lesson last week was on civil rights, and I asked the students to come up with a list of civil rights they had in China. One girl's answer was very specific:

"In China, no one has the right to shoot a panda."