“Special for You, Safety and Green”

*posted by Amy*

Dave: I have been avoiding the internet cafes, secondhand smoke and all, there not the most fun places to hang out. As a matter of fact, I'm sitting next to our tour bus driver and he's playing some online version of strip poker with avatars that undress, this country is weird. That, and even facebook is now being blocked, we think because of the unrest in the east of China."

Taoping 9-July

After dinner last night, we decided to buy some beers from the restaurant we eat at, and then sat and drank them after everyone left the restaurant. I should have prefaced all this by saying this restaurant is more a cafeteria, then a restaurant. Anyway, we were sitting there drinking some beers, and the son of the owner came over and started pouring some house made barley wine and giving us cheers for coming to his town. He was pretty lit up, but still coherent and said that we, Chinese and Americans, were all of one family, one town, one planet. Needless to say, we drank to that several times over.

We woke up this morning and went to breakfast, and we were supposed to have an informal meeting about the towns we visited yesterday. The meeting turned into an all day discussion about trends and patterns of development seen throughout the Zagunao river valley. This then rolled into lunch, which turned into an afternoon conclusion of the top ten or eleven points of change in the valley. We discussed things from changing architecture to development regulations, all the way down to culture being lost because of native people of the valley leaving. It was a long but positive session for the students to express all they had seen and heard through the past few days.

Between lunch , dinner, and sessions of discussing what we’ve seen, I was able to go out and do some sketching. I should also have started that yesterday, around three pm, it started raining and didn’t stop until sometime after midnight. The amount of rain has forced the town’s water supply to be turned off, because it is full of silt. We have no running water. So I went to sketch the local fresh water spring around the corner. It is amazing to see how the town adapts to this. I guess I can’t really call it an adaptation, since it seems to be par for the course. But the villagers come out and fetch water, and wash vegetables in the spring. No other activities are allowed, and if people are seen washing clothes, shoes, or feet in the spring, the villagers will let you know this is unacceptable. I even saw the policemen carrying water buckets. It is medieval, but it works for them.

So this, this is where I sketched. I spent an hour or so there, over two visits, and each time, had at one point at least ten people staring over my shoulder, watching me draw. One person said he’d take a photo because it was more lifelike. Not the point of sketching, but funny nonetheless.

Like I said, eat, meeting, eat meeting, eat. After dinner, the plan was actually, well there was no plan. We had the evening to do group work, or not. We opted for not, as did most of the students, okay, all the students. A little game of soccer broke out, and it was fun to kick the ball around, get some exercise. First exercise I’ve had since the sprint trail run down the mountain after horseback riding. It felt good to exert some energy in a non-academic way. Then Professor Bob came back, and mentioned some of the faculty dancing with some locals. We had to check this out. We got to the little shop, and it was about eight of the village’s elder women, teaching some how to dance, and then they asked us to sing for them. We hesitated, and the village women broke out into a folk song in their non-Mandarin dialect, and clapping out the beat. The sun had set and it was the last few moments of dusk in front of a little store front, sitting on the step watching these women sign for us. It was one of those moments in life where you think to yourself, there is no other place I could possibly want to be then right here seeing, experiencing, living in this moment, right now. The women stopped singing, which I never wanted to end, there was such a simplistic, natural beauty in their voices, and we were floored. We came up with the first verse of Amazing Grace, and we felt like they got the short end of the deal. After a few more songs, a few of them left, and we came back to the guesthouse. These are the memories that I will keep of China. Not all the griping, but these timeless memories of two completely different groups of people accepting and welcoming each other, having fun with song and dance.