The little bus that didn't want to

*posted by Amy*

7-July Taoping

We started today by waking up early to get breakfast, and catch a bus to go to Ganbao, and then to Xuecheng, two ancient villages in the same valley as Taoping. We finished up breakfast and headed to bus pick up location. When we got there, we piled on to our two buses, and one of which decided to break down. We waited for about ten or fifteen minutes, and the bus wouldn’t start, so we got out and had an impromptu meeting with one of the Taoping development company’s representatives. Lip service. We hear the things that they think we want to hear, and there is a constant blame game about responsibility for all the damage in the new village area. Government deserves the blame for shoddy plans, while the villagers deserve blame for hiring unskilled laborers and changing the plans. This goes back and forth ad nauseum.

After this, we had a lecture by Professor Li Wei, and then followed up by Mr. Pu about the cultural history of Taoping. The two provided a pretty intense and relatively all encompassing view of the region. I’ll get into more of it later, and if you have specific questions, email me, and we’ll chat.

We had lunch, and after broke into our groups that are focusing on different topics in Taoping for the studio project. Jason, Nathan and I along with six Sichuanese students are looking at hazard prevention in historic preservation and restoration. The topics of our group are landslides and earthquake hazards, architectural safety, and flooding hazards. I am in the flooding group, and we are going to look at the connections between the town and the Zuganao river. We looked around town and watched a front end loader rip trees out of the river banks, and then further downstream watched a crew of thirty or so building big armored river banks. So much for restoring ecological function to the region.

We hiked back into the old town, and had dinner, then broke off for our nightly meeting. We were informed that the bus’ mechanical issues have been resolved, and we’ll try to do our visits to the other towns tomorrow. No guarantees on how well that is gonna work, but we’ll see.