The ralnables deposies place

Jouzhaighou 3-July

After a good day and a half of feeling like complete garbage, J and I were actually feeling well enough to be a part of activities. On our agenda for today was another visit to the park, a meeting with the management bureau, and then a musical performance of Tibetan music and culture. Breakfast started at 7:30, and we finished up and were to the park by 8:45. We had a park staff member guide us to various villages inside the park. We toured several of the Tibetan areas, and had a chance to interview some of the village officials, and elders. They would give us a little insight into their lived, but being a group of westerners, it is hard to get them to fully open up.

After a couple of visits to villages, we broke for lunch. We were invited to lunch at the park cafeteria, which was one of the worst meals I’ve had in China. I don’t know how you ruin corn on the cob, but somehow they managed to do it. Most of the food was just above room temperature, not very comforting after the past two days of sickness, and the rest was so full of MSG, it became intolerable. Fortunately, we weren’t paying for it, so that made it almost tolerable. I was joking to one of the professors, “This is like a Chinese Old Country Buffet.” He disagreed and said he would have been able to stomach the OCB.

After Lunch, we headed to another village to look at new versus old construction techniques, and then visit a with bureau officials about their plans for expanding the number of tourist the park sees yearly. It was an informative meeting, and these officials were the most open to listening to our ideas, and have actually invited us back in the morning to look at helping redevelop and reconstruct their visitors’ center. The center as it is now sits near the front gate with very little signage and seems closed of the public, not the best idea for guest relations. To help with the redesign is a huge compliment to our group, and I feel like we can provide a lot of solid ideas to help improve visibility, improve on green building techniques, and make the visitors’ center useful to the daily users. After the meeting, the leader of the Chinese delegation invited us to dinner, which was just around the corner, in one of the park facilities.

Dinner with delegates hosting has turned into an interesting event. This time the air in the room was more lively, and less of a strategic affair then our dinner with the Lijiang officials. Our hosts kept the wine flowing and kept toasting gam bai (bottoms up). The food was delicious, and I was finally happy to have had an appetite. It has felt good to get back on our feet as far as the whole gut issue is concerned. I knew it was going to take a few days to feel better, and sure enough, today was the day. By the time dinner rolled around, I was up for trying anything that rolled out on to the table. The festivities would have gone long into the night if we hadn’t had to head off to a performance in town.

When we arrived, we were a few minutes late, and the performance, which I can best describe as a blend of one part Tibetan dance and song show, one part River Dance, and one part Britney Spears concert. I say all this, not to be disrespectful, but to give the show the scale of the show, and effect the dancers had. Most of the pieces were large choreographed pieces with no fewer than 20 dancers on stage at a time. The interesting component was how large an influence religion was on the performance. The fact that China is a secular state, the heavy religious component was allowed to be such a large part of a state sponsored something not to be trivialized. At the end of the performance, which, for as much as I may sound critical of it, was quite good, we headed back to the hotel and hit the sack for the next morning.