Journal Entry - February 25, 2007
We’re back. We’ve finally returned from our long winter vacation. We spent six weeks traveling through China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and India. It was a wonderful and exhausting trip, and we are very happy to be back “home” in Ya’an. Among the many things that we learned, one is that we aren’t very good at being tourists. We like to feel a little more settled wherever we are. I won’t go into the details of our trip. Instead, I’ll post a travelogue with pictures soon in the main section of our blog.
We arrived back in Ya’an from Rishikesh, India after two full days of travel, and were met at the entrance to the Foreign Guest House by Pierre, Dai Ou, and Lawrence, inviting us to go out to dinner. As tired as we were, we needed to eat and there was nothing in the house, so off we went. We dropped right back into our Ya’an life style.
Late the next morning we got a call from the chief of our police officer students. We and all the other foreigners in town were invited to a New Year's banquet for lunch that day with the staff of the passport and visa office. Luckily we were in and did’t have other plans. We were picked up fifteen minutes later and driven to a fancy restaurant in an upscale hotel. Beside the police officers and the university teachers, there was a Nigerian named Monday who teaches English at a high school in Ya’an, and an American named Tony who had taught at the high some years ago and now teaches in Chengdu. He was in town with his girl friend who is from Ya’an. As usual, the wine flowed and the food kept coming.
Many Chinese travel for the New Year’s holiday, especially those who don’t live with their families. That is especially true of students, almost all of whom go home for New Year’s. This year New Year’s day is February 18, so almost all of the students were gone by the time we got back from our trip. Because the students are gone, most of the businesses around campus are closed. This is especially the case with restaurants, so we’ve had a little trouble finding places to eat. All of our regular haunts have been closed, so we’ve been branching out and have discovered a few new places. We’ve also had one disaster, a place where they just didn’t seem to get the vegetarian thing. We asked for tofu and they brought us a dish of tofu and cow stomach. It looked tasty, but all we got that night was green beans and potatoes.
We had two invitations from students to spend time with over the New Year holiday, and they both called to firm them up. On Saturday the seventeenth we got on a bus to Chen Xi’s home town of Qingbiajiang near Chengdu, where we spent an afternoon and a night at her grandparent’s house and the next day in the town. Then we caught a bus into Chengdu and another out to another suburb, Shuangliu, where we spent the afternoon at She Hongxia’s uncle’s house and the night and next day at her parent’s house. Afterwards we went into Chengdu with She Hongxia to spend the night before heading back to Ya’an. Both visits were wonderful. We had the opportunity to experience real, rural Chinese hospitality. Gina will post a regular blog entry about our New Year holiday soon.
Since then we have spent most of our time hanging around home. The contingent of foreigners is low because Pierre and Dai Ou are in Shimian, Dai Ou’s home town, where they are visiting her family for New Year’ after having spent Christmas with Pierre’s family in Toulouse. The only excitement we’ve had is the appearance of the new foreign teacher. John and Chandra have been replaced by another American, a woman named Aki. She is a retired nurse who has been teaching English in China for two years and has a Chinese husband named Tian.
We had Aki, Tian, Lawrence, and Chen Qiong, our Foreign Affairs Office liaison over for dinner two nights ago. The hottest topic of conversation was our academic schedules for the upcoming semester. Of course, we don’t know what they are yet. Chen Qiong told us the the Foreign Affairs Office has been pressuring the English Department to figure out the schedule a little in advance of the first day of classes this semester, but so far no news. Mostly we just complained about that fact and compared notes with Aki about her similar experiences at the other schools where she has taught. It looks like our lives will soon be back into just about the same groove they were in last fall. We’ll let you know.