Packing Awaits

I just got back from my teammate Lisa's book club farewell, which was probably my last hang-out with Chinese friends before I leave Qufu tomorrow.  The book club is a group of about 15 junior students, and I'm close with most of them after teaching them for a year and studying the Word with a few of them. 

The students are very sweet and funny.  For example, I was cleaning my apartment today, so I showed up wearing a baggy red T-shirt and a high ponytail.  I looked like I had been scrubbing toilets, which I had.  Apparently I should rock the cleaning lady look more often -- the students kept saying I looked younger and prettier.

Lisa's boyfriend, Merle, is visiting from China.  He is a music professor and gave the students a little living room violin concert (which they loved) and then taught them to sing a round (which they also loved, although their rendition was a little hard on the ears). 

The students went around and shared their memories of Lisa, who taught them for two years.  Lisa is a fun teacher with a big heart, and the students love her.  I enjoyed listening to them talk about making enchiladas with her in culture class, having a "wedding" in their classroom, playing baseball, going biking, and talking on banana "telephones" in class.  Lisa, you're great!  I'll miss you next year!

My train to Beijing leaves at 4:30 tomorrow, so all that's left to do here is clean and pack.  See you soon!

It's 9:00 on a Wednesday evening...

...and I'm tired.  I stayed up late last night to finish some grading and then woke up to a morning thunderstorm so powerful it had car alarms going off.  We rarely get storms in Qufu, so I was delighted.

Today I gave back some exams and turned in my grades, thus ending my teaching duties for the year.  I've been saying some small goodbyes here and there, but no big parties or celebrations.

Tonight the school had a banquet for the foreign teachers.  There were many dishes, as usual.  The Japanese teacher got drunk and made several loud and entertaining toasts, as usual.  I sat there trying to think of things to say to the people next to me and feeling sort of awkward, as usual.

Sometime in the next day and a half, I need to pack for America and clean my apartment.  Maybe I'm just tired, but the word that best describes my feelings about finishing the teaching year and heading home is "anticlimactic."

I'll let you know if I feel any differently after a good night's sleep.

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.

We be Grillin'

A few of our Chinese colleagues in the English department had long been making plans for a barbecue by the river.  Last Saturday, the plan finally came to fruition, and they were kind enough to invite me along.  I've gotten to know a couple of my fellow teachers better this spring, which is a big answer to prayer, since I hadn't even met most of the other teachers in my department before this semester.

Here's a quick summary:  Nice day, tons of food, good view of the river, teachers having no idea what they were doing, teachers trying to light the charcoal with Kleenex and grass.  Success.  Grilled chicken wings, grilled pork, grilled lamb, grilled eggplant.  I'll let you enjoy the pictures and not interrupt with any boring commentary. 

The Great Wall of China: Great, as Always

This will be my final post on my family's visit to China.

After Qufu, we popped up to Beijing for the weekend, where we saw Tian'anmen Square, the Forbidden City, a Peking Duck, Houhai, the Olympic Village annnnddddd....

...the Great Wall of China.  It was my fourth visit to the wall, and I am now convinced that it is almost impossible to have a bad time at the Great Wall.  Somehow the combination of scenery, history, and apparent endlessness makes it magical every time.

We went to Jinshanling, a site about 3 hours outside Beijing, and hiked the 10 km stretch to Simatai.  We didn't see any Mongols, but I'm pretty sure they were lurking in the woods somewhere, just waiting invade China as soon as we vacated the wall.

China: Where Saturday is Monday

Chinese universities love:

1)  Waiting until the last minute to decide when and how long their holidays will be, and
2)  Making up vacation days on the weekend.

Therefore, today (Saturday) is Monday, tomorrow is Tuesday, and the following three days are our Dragon Boat holiday.  The first time such scheduling shenanigans happened, I was all, "Whaaaaa?"  Now I've been through it a few times so I can be more, "This is how we do."

I'm sure you'll all have wonderful, relaxing weekends while I'm busy working and giving finals.  But when Monday rolls around and feels like a Saturday, I'll be the one laughing.

Introducing Qufu

Qufu is my town in China.  Qufu is a bit scruffy (other than the tourist sites), but doggone -- I like it.  It's not too big, there are markets outside two of the three school gates, we have a centuries-old city wall, and the countryside is less than 10 minutes away from my door. 

When my brother and sister were here, we all spent three days in Qufu.  If we would have had three weeks, maybe I would have had time to introduce them to all the snacks and students and corners of town I wanted them to experience.  But three days was all we had, and this is how we spent it:

Fielding student questions

 Eating

Touring campus

Buying (and laughing at) couple's T-shirts

Seeing the town

Other activities included renting bicycles, doing laundry, eating street food, hanging out in the East Market, touring the Confucius sites, and getting sick, but I guess I didn't take any pictures of those.

A message to my family:  Please come back to Qufu.  Every day I discover something else that I forgot to show you.  A message to everyone else:  Please come to Qufu.  There are some roasted critters on a stick I want you to try. :)

Yak Meadow with my Family

This is the cable car that took us up to Yak Meadow, an hour outside Lijiang.

This is the precious 78-year-old woman I talked to for awhile after getting off the cable car.

And here we have some Chinglish:  "Please do not around."  But it was too tempting; we wandered off the trail, risking a livestock Wounding.

There were flowers and mountains and yaks:

There was an abandoned cabin which begged for us to explore it.

Bryan and Sachi walked over the crest of a hill, giving me one of my favorite photos of the trip:

And then it was time to leave Yak Meadow.  Spruce Meadow was calling our name, and we hopped another cable car to go visit the spruces.  Trees turned out to be less exciting than yaks, but the cable car was nice.