“I get it, a lot of sh!t got messed up…”

*posted by Amy*

8-July

We started out today eating breakfast at our restaurant/cafeteria at 6:30 and then off to catch our buses and go up the valley to Ganbao, then further up to the county seat, Lixiang, and then back down the valley to see a few other villages. The idea was to originally visit about two or three villages, but it turned out to be more. I don’t know if I have explained this or not, but when we got to Taoping, our group size more than quadrupled. We are now roughly sixty people. The whole feeling of the trip has changed. It is impossible to keep track of where we are visiting, and where we are going to go next, and the historical significance of the sites we are visiting. This is very frustrating in the long run, and is taking its toll on troop morale. People are restless, and we feel as if we don’t we don’t have time to process what we are seeing. We visit village after village and the more we see, the more destruction we see, and the more jaded we become to the situation, which I CANNOT stress how awful and impressive the damage has been. Every village has buildings that still look as if the earthquake hit yesterday. Then again, the Central Government has also proclaimed several buildings uninhabitable, and then started to demolish them, so some of the destruction is indirectly from the earthquake.

Today turned into a marathon. Left at seven, and we didn’t get back to the guest house until six-ish. IT was a long day on a ridiculously under maintained road, on a bus that the driver, when the bus is empty, cranks the radio, and doesn’t turn it down until the bus is full and someone asks for less volume. This makes for some deafening situations. The grumbling among the UW students has started. People feel as if they are paying a lot of money for this studio, and so far there has been one project, which involved minimal preparation, and was underwhelming in the response and feedback we got from the faculty. Since this presentation, we have had one day to do research on our new group assignment, and the amount of actual analysis being done is rather informal. Don’t get me wrong, interviews are the best way to get personal feelings on a certain aspect of daily life, but there is no other data we can really get a hold of, except from the information that Mr. Pu provides us, and he is singing the central government’s song.

Tomorrow it sounds like we might actually get some time to do some work on our project topics, but then again, we’ll see how that all shakes down tomorrow.