A Lovely Last Day

I'm back in America but I'm lagging about a week behind in blogging.  If only for my own satisfaction, I plan to do a couple last posts about my time in Haiyuan and then close out the year with a big Chinglish finale.  (Stay tuned.)

Here we have my last full day in Haiyuan in all of its glorious glory.

First, a few local friends.  This was not my last day, but these ladies become important later.  They ran a dumpling shop just down the street from my hotel.  The first time I went there, we took a bunch of pictures and had a good time chatting, especially the 14-year-old working there.  I kept going back whenever I had time.  Here they are:

My last day in Haiyuan started with a closing ceremony with all of the teachers and officials.  We handed out the graduation certificates and said goodbye to our trainees.

After our closing ceremony, some of the teachers in my class invited me and my teammate to go hiking in the mountains.  I'd been praying for an opportunity like this!

It was so, so fun.  The air was delightfully fresh and scented with sage, the sky was blue, and the clouds were pleasantly plump.

Driving into the mountains

A trail we followed for awhile before going up the mountain

The climb begins.  Please note the watermelon.

Going higher.  Watermelon still in tow.

We hiked for an hour or two to reach a rock with a great view.  Watermelon-eating in progress.

Six of my trainees came out.  It was so fun to spend my last day with them!

This girl climbed in high-heeled sandals.

At our request, they took us on a long drive to see more countryside and stop in some villages.  Here is an old walled yard on a hill.

Riding some villager's tractor

Village school

Village school -- English class!  When we walked into this rural primary school in TheMiddleOfNowhere, Ningxia and saw the words, "Uncle," "Niece," and "Nephew" on the board, that's when I realized that English is truly an international language.

We stopped for a roadside picnic.  Here's the view.

Roadside picnic -- eating delicious fermented oats

Roadside picnic -- with noodles!

Village mosque

Village street

Village man

After our delightful day in the mountains, we rushed back for us foreign teachers to have a banquet with the officials.  Then I kicked my feet up in my hotel room after a very tiring month of work.

At 11:00 p.m., I heard knocking and giggling at my door.  I had no idea who it could be... someone drunk or confused, maybe?  The knocking continued and I opened the door to find...

The dumpling ladies!

The ladies from the dumpling shop heard we were leaving the next day and came after work to send me off with gifts and giggles.  I was so surprised.  I cleared a space for them on my messy bed and we hung out for awhile and took a bunch more photos.

I never told them where I was staying, but I'm sure everyone in town knew the foreigners were at the Haiyuan Hotel.  They came up to the third floor and just started knocking on doors (they woke up my teammates) until they found me.  Haha!  They brought bread for us to eat on the bus the next day (see above) and the gifts below:

Hand-embroidered insoles

Handmade pillow

And pantyhose!  Why?  Who knows!

All in all, it was a long and lovely day to end my stay in Haiyuan.

An Outing to Mount Xu Mi

This past weekend, the officials in charge of us planned an outing to a Buddhist mountain a couple hours away.

It was an altogether delightful chance to see some of the countryside here in Ningxia.  Enjoy the photos!

Sunflowers from the van window.  We also saw corn and goji berries growing.  The drive was the best part!

We sometimes passed caves in the mountains.  Apparently people lived in them in the past but mostly use them now for storage or animals, if they haven't been closed up altogether.

Baby sunflower with a mosque in the distance

Here is Xu Mi Mountain.  The left part has a giant carved Buddha and the part on the far right has stairs, caves, and little temples.

We walked through this pretty little valley to get across to the Buddha

There he is.  There was a museum at the site that told us about how Buddhism spread through China along the Silk Road, which went through this area somewhere.

Then we climbed up the right side.  Here's a little side trail to see Cave #15.  These small caves had small doors or windows but we couldn't go inside.

The climb and one of the little Buddha huts built into a cave.

Nearing the top

Beautiful Ningxia

Me with teammates Meggi and Larry -- the only ones on our team to go all the way up.

Our Chinese leaders all made the climb.

Meggi with Mr. Li, a leader we see every day at school, and Jack, a Chinese teacher who has been given the daunting task of taking care of the foreigners.

Time for the drive back!  Here are some goji berries drying with the goji bushes behind them.

Let's pause for a second to learn something interesting.  Several years ago, the government wanted to move Haiyuan (the town I'm in now) to a different location where there would be more water.  So they built a nice new town.  But then people didn't move there.

We drove through the new city before knowing what it was, and we couldn't believe how beautiful and wide the roads were.  There were half-finished and fully-finished-but-empty shopping centers, there were traffic lights that hadn't been turned on (and weren't needed), and everything was clean and empty.  We saw only a few vehicles.  It really seems like a ghost city, but it was never inhabited in the first place.  Very strange.

(Our Chinese friends tell us there are plans to bring in some factories and that the town will probably fill up as people come to take the factory jobs.)

Empty city hall; empty plaza

Down the main road of the new city

We called the new town "Mannequin City" because we saw a few mannequins (but no people) in some of the store windows.  Here I am impersonating a mannequin while standing in no danger in the middle of the road.. 

The drive continues.  Love that blue sky!

More sunflowers

There were lots of homes like these in the villages we passed.

That's it!  It was a fun day and I hope there's another outing in my future before I leave Haiyuan next Thursday.

Amber Waves of Grain

It's harvest time!  Lisa's boyfriend is here from Canada, so we took him biking to see the wheat harvest outside Qufu.

Will I ever get tired of biking through the countryside and taking pictures?  Probably not.  Will you ever get tired of looking at those pictures on my blog?  Probably.  But maybe my more agriculturally minded friends will appreciate seeing some of this work done the way it's been done for centuries -- with many hands and lots of manual labor.  A few families use machinery, but many seem to do most of their work by hand.

When we started our ride at 7 am, there were already tons of people out in the fields:

This machine pulled up and a dozen people crowded around to empty the wheat onto the road:

My teammates Lisa and Tarah decided to lend a hand bagging the wheat:

("Help" would be a strong word for what the foreigners were doing there.)  I saw these cute girls looking on:

Here's how you harvest by hand:  Grab a bunch, cut, grab another bunch, cut... until your hand is full, and then you set it on top of the unharvested wheat:

Now I will reveal my farming ignorance.  The farmers put the stalks of wheat on the ground for people to walk and drive over them, thus shaking out the wheat.  Is this "threshing"?

This guy seemed to be skimming the chaff off the top with his broom:

And this guy was winnowing ("winnowing"?) his grain by hand:

A man spreads out a fresh batch of wheat (which is surprisingly easy and fun to bike through):

Another glorious day in the countryside.