III

Wow, it’s been a while since my last update! I apologize! (Except now I realize that I’m probably going to start every update with this feeling, so I’ll try not to say it every time).

There’s been a lot that’s happened. Last week (week of October 1st) was national week, which you may already know if you’ve been following the GC blog. The national holiday is a pretty big deal in China — everyone gets a week (7 days) off work, there are flags everywhere (literally everywhere. You thought people liked flags in the US), and many people become tourists of their own nation. We were warned that it would be very difficult to get anywhere during the week, and there were definitely a lot of people out and about (which happens when you give 6 million people in the city the week off). (Some stores were still open, though, so presumably not literally everyone had off? I’m not sure how that works).

This year, the holiday actually lasted for 8 days, as it overlapped with the Mid-Autumn Festival, or 中秋节. Of course, that’s a net loss, since there’s normally a 4-day break for 中秋节, but it seemed to work out.

The week was split, more or less, into two parts: time with my family and time with my class. I spent two of the days during the first part in day trips to nearby cities; on National Day itself (Sunday the 1st) my host parents, brother, and I explored Peng’An, a nearby city with a few historic sites (among many were a Buddhist temple, a tree marking a stop/battle of the Red Army, and in general an older city that looked a little more traditional – somewhat similar to our trip to Langzhong).

That afternoon, we went to a puppet show, as the government was giving out free tickets in honor of national day. Not what you think of when I say ‘puppet show’ — rather than hand-puppets, these were full-body puppets, attached to poles that actors carried around (with sticks connected to their hands). Each actor held the body-pole with one hand, and controlled both the puppet’s hands with their other hand, quite an impressive feat in my opinion (the puppets seemed very expressive, with fairly natural hand/arm postures and movements, and they were painted to be quite life-like). The dialogue and songs (it was a musical) were all pre-recorded, so their timing was pretty impeccable, and the music was quite good. It was basically like watching a musical — but without live action. Really an interesting experience. Oh and they had the dialogue printed (with English translation, which was well done) on TVs to the right and left; this was both helpful and annoying, because I could understand what was going on but couldn’t read at the same time as watch the actual play. The subtitles problem, but the subtitles were a good 20 feet to each side of the stage.

Anyway, a few days later we went to Guang’An, the birthplace of Deng Xiaoping. Deng is one of the China’s modern heroes who instituted massive reforms in the 70s and 80s after the terrifying Cultural Revolution. We visited a museum dedicated to him that was pretty interesting, though it was raining heavily and we didn’t stay as long as we’d planned. Some of my host mom’s family had come to Nanchong, so they joined us for the trip.

My classmates and I then travelled to the western part of our province and visited a school devastated by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (which killed up to 200,000 people and injured nearly twice that, as well as destroying most buildings in a large area, many of which were schools) as well as a panda reserve. We also got a chance to ‘hike’ in a national park close to the ‘4 Sisters Mountains,’ 4 massive peaks around 6000 meters in height (the highest, the youngest sister, is at 6500ish). We weren’t that high (only 11,000ish feet), but it was amazing to see and walk around the park — just the chance to walk around in such beautiful creation was incredibly refreshing. The only downside was that the Chinese apparently don’t see hiking as we do — the ‘hiking’ we did was walking on planked paths beside the road, and we weren’t supposed to leave the path or wander around at all. On our way out, our bus stopped at a nice scenic spot, closer to the peaks themselves, where we got out and walked around for a little — at 16000 feet! About twice as high as I’ve ever been in my life, and with gorgeous scenery.

We finished with a stay at a Tibetan family’s house/inn (?); a night filled with dancing, singing, and eating. A lot of fun, and a wonderful way to end an incredible trip. (Well, the 8 hour bus ride the next way was the true end, but that was fun too 🙂 ). I got to see the first stars I’ve seen since arriving in China, which seemed a bigger deal for me than most of the rest of my class. The next morning we got to go on something a little closer to a hike as we picked a path out towards some ruins we could see in the distance — we didn’t make it there, but it was fun to walk around in the wilderness anyhow, and I got to run off to do some rock climbing for part of it. You can see more about all these adventures at the blog post for that week, https://www.goshen.edu/china/2017/10/08/think-high-low/.

Amidst all this travel was some more information about the upcoming second half of SST, generally known as Service. In China, the government has cracked down on ‘service,’ particularly NGOs doing service work, so we refer to this part of our semester as our ‘teaching internship.’ Regardless, our group will be spread across three nearby cities teaching English to middle (and a few high) school students. Most of us will be in teaching pairs, working with a classmate to manage 60-80 students in each classroom. Each of us will have a new host family as well.

My group will relocate to Guang’An, the city I visited early last week. There are 5 of us — for those of you familiar with these people, I’m working with Lexus Garces, Mia Graber Miller, Andrew Nussbaum, and Christi Sessa. I’m definitely looking forward to it :). We are the only group with a chance to teach high school students, though we won’t know details (about teaching or host families, or much of anything) until we arrive.

There will be another update shortly with more specific information regarding my travels (and lack thereof) to Guang’An; stay tuned!