3 weeks in one post

Our trip to the Three Gorges Dam was a little disappointing. Not to say that it wasn’t one of the more spectacular things I have seen in my life. It was brought down by the fact that every morning we were woken up by music at 7AM or earlier. So, you might ask. Why not suck it up? Well It was our full week break known as Golden week, or National day (which apparently means 7 national days in a row, I’m not sure) and we would be damned if we didn’t drink every night.

That being said it was a great trip. Every stop was unique and nothing you could ever predict. One was where we were put in these rickety old boats, and pulled down a river by guys with ropes. Oh and the guys were wearing only underwear. Apparently they used to be naked while pulling the boats, but apparently that’s not considered “modern” or “acceptable”. Whatever.

Another stop was into this Buddhist community. I have a video of what it was like walking off the boat. It was pretty crazy. People were offering maps; hands were reaching out to us all over the place. This was real poverty. The temples were pretty cool, and our tour guide was pretty attractive, so I enjoyed myself. The one part that really sticks with me was the torturer chamber. It wasn’t a real one, but just a huge room filled with sculptures depicting what these people considered to be hell. It was just people doing unspeakable things to one another. For example, the best one was these two guys holding this other guy upside down, legs spread, and 2 other guys using a band saw to cut him in half, anus to head. I don’t know about you, but that would have traumatized me if I were young, and this is what people told me would happen if I was bad. (Shudder)

The boat was nice, but there was no gym, nor a small room with weights. I’m not really sure what these people have against being in shape. (Recently I was kicked out of the gym, because the ping pong team needed to lift….yeah I know). The food was great, but in small portions, or in small portions of the things I liked. You can never have too many jouzi (dumplings).

The Dam itself was impressive. It wasn’t as big as I’d thought it would be, but it was still huge. I did a research paper on it 2 years ago, so seeing it in person I was still able to explain a few things to my classmates about how they built it and why it is so important. My Camera broke on the trip, so I don’t have pictures of the latter half.

Back in Shanghai I realized how nice it is to know your way around, and how much you can miss it when your favorite things aren’t around. I’ve got a really good handle on the surrounding area of Fudan, and I’m starting to understand the downtown area. I will never however, understand the highway system.

Last weekend, we went to a Chinese middle school, and sat in on 2 classes and did a Q&A with the kids. Everyone Speaks English. Some better than others, but most have been learning since kindergarten. The first class we sat in on was an English class, and I was impressed by 2 things. First, the amount of control and the behavior of the children. They actually seemed very excited to learn. They stood up to speak every time and they were very well behaved.

Secondly I was surprised by how much English they knew. It made me feel pathetic and worthless for myself and my country to see how hard these people work. After the first class, we took an art class where we strung together fake jewels to make 3 dimensional baubles of sorts. Pretty neat. Then they had a 10 minute recess, where I got to play ping pong with a lot of the kids. I was pretty good (compared with them) but some of them were a lot better than me…They were 10 years old, and I can play a decent game…We were about to leave, when we noticed a turf field with a few kids playing soccer, the ages varied, but we made teams USA verses China. 20 vs. 4. Seemed fitting somehow…(USA won, still fits the model).

I’ve become a bit of a club rat these past few weekends. The spirits are cheap and the atmosphere is fun. However, I’ve been drinking less and focused more on meeting people. I ended up meeting a group of 15 UCalifornia kids celebrating 3 different birthdays. Not only did I meet a whole bunch of new people who go to Fudan, I picked up a couple phone numbers to boot. Cool beans.