SPRING FESTIVAL 2010

Not to let any grass grow under our feet before we left for Spring Festival we kept busy. One of the English teachers Zhang AnLi who drives me to class on Mondays took us to SongJi. JongJi is an ancient town here in Yongchuan. He and his friend showed us some of the sites and treated us to local foods. Then we went down to the Chang Jiang (Yangtze) to look for stones. This is their favorite activity when they go to SongJi. We have some rocks to show for our time there. We also went to a local art show where we saw local artists of many diferent media exhiibit. Then we were off to our student, David's kindergarten.

It was a fun but cold day. This school is a modern as you can get and is growing quickly. David was hired because they wanted the preschoolers to be introduced to English. We, of course, were guests of honor.
Then off to Guangzhou for the Spring Festival. We were staying with Dr. Wang's family. You may remember back in 1986 four Chinese came and visited us and Marple Newtown High School. Dr. Wang was one of them and although he died a couple of years ago I have been intouch first with him and then his family for over these 20 years. Sam Wang greeted us at the airport and we were off to his mother's. We spent the five days with them.

The Grandmother Guo and her son Wang Liang and his wife and their teenage daughter Aki. Sam and his family live about 15 minutes away. Sam was incharge of us since he drove and had the best English.
We visited a reconstructed village and sampled the food. We made dumplings with the family and were not even laughed at. We visited and ate with various parts of the family over the next days. Somehow they coordinated so that we sampled the vaious Cantonese style foods of Guangzhou. Besides eating our way through Guangzhou we visited Sam's home in a luxury apartment, rode a bicycle built for two through a park, saw the vaious fireworks displays from atop the city, and drove forever through the countryside. Spring Festival was different in Guangzhou. Since it is a huge city fireworks are controlled so there was no World War III like last year. The family was smaller and the extended family was actually located in Shanghai too far to visit. The meals were not punctuated with toasts as last year and drinking was not the sport of the day. It was great to renew our ties to these old friends.
We returned and spent three days in Chongqing. Grace, another English teacher, met us at the airport and got us a hotel with computer in center city. She and her boy friend hosted us for the three days. We spent a day with one of our students John who lives just outside the city. His family was more than gracious to us. The next day we met another student and toured the Three Gorges Museum. It is huge and tells the history of Chongqing and its culture. Grace and Chu HongZe tools us one night for pizza at Papa John's (their choice because they wanted to try) and another night to have Peking Duck.

Her friend has little chance to speak English so he was anxious to spend whatever time he could with us. We think he may even come to visit us in Yongchuan.

DOWN UNDER

As the semester ended, we had a couple of invitations for dinner. One of the invitations was from a teacher and the other from one of my students. The teacher is a horticulture teacher and he is one of my tennis group. We have done a number of things together. It turned out to be a party with three couples and us. It was a good time. The student was a girl from my Business English class. She had been my timer for the midterm and that little responsibility turned around her semester. She and her good friend took us for a tasty meal of duck hotpot. Renee really liked Annie. She wants to introduce her to our student friend David. They may not hit it off though. Annie wants to go help people in Tibet, and David thinks he wants to be a businessman in Chongqing.

We delayed our vacation trip because of a wedding. The wedding was in Jiamgjin where we did our summer project. Mr. Li and Shelly had moved their date up so we would be able to attend. It was a large gathering. Renee and I were in the wedding procession (of cars, not people). I prepared a part of my wedding speech to present. It was another elaborate occasion with over 800 guests. (The Chinese weddings we have attended have all followed the same pattern. They are held in a restaurant. There is usually an arbor through which the couple enters. The bride is dressed in white and maybe even walks to Lohengrin's Wedding March. There is a stage where the couple stands and listens to speeches, pours wine into a configuration of glasses so that somehow you pour into the top glass and all the glasses are filled, and cuts the wedding cake. In one wedding the couple even played some silly games. Then the bride throws her bouquet. Next the bride changes into a red dress and the bride and groom go from table to table toasting. We have learned that they often use water or very weak wine because so much toasting can be "bad for your health" as the Chinese say. Meanwhile the guests are eating from the multitudes of dishes that are gracing their round tables. After about an hour and a half, everyone leaves. There is no minister or any official to "now pronounce them man and wife." Sometimes the wedding occurs months or even years after a couple is "married" legally because the weddings are so expensive.)

During that same weekend we had the second student bemoan to us that his parents had arranged a blind date for him. In this case, the young man found his date to be lovely and hopes that the future communication will lead to better times. (Actually, we had a little laugh at his expensive. He had spent about an hour telling us how upset he was about this action that his parents had taken. Then we happened to see him the next day with the girl, who was so beautiful. The boy was grinning from ear to ear. Maybe parents do have a good idea now and then:)

Then we were off to Australia. We flew to Sydney and stayed with the Gibbons, friends from our travel in Eastern Europe. They have a lovely home on the beach. We enjoyed our days of seeing the surfers, swimming in the sea pool, and touring the sites. The beaches are beautiful, the animals are exotic, the harbor is majestic. We enjoyed our time with the Gibbins and with Yanlin, our friend from Kunming. She has just moved to Sydney with her husband.

Next stop, Melbourne to become spectators at the Australian Open. (Rich had to choose our hotel online and he did a great job. While the location was not in the center of town, the transportation system made it easy to travel to the tournmant and to other sites, and we had a beautiful park right across the street.) The tennis was great, but the site was very crowded. We saw many players -- The Williams sisters, the Bryan Brothers, John Isner, Sam Querry, Robby Ginepri, Ferdinand Gonzales, the Chinese players -- and some good matches. We also saw some of Melbourne -- the night market, docks, gardens, and we went to the theater and saw Jersey Boys. It was a good show. (It was a treat to be in a Western country, to hear English all around, to have people constantly say please and thank you, to have automobile drivers actually be considerate of pedestrians. What wasn't so great was always looking the wrong way when we crossed the street. We could not get used to the reversed driving lanes. We could get used to the great weather, though. Unless we were sitting directly in the sun, we were very comfortable. The only problem was sunburned lips! How did that happen?)
On returning to China, we exchanged our summer clothes for winter ones and went to Chengdu for a week of Peace Corps inservice training and language review. (We enjoyed meeting the China 15s, the new group that came to China in the summer. They seem to have a positive "aura" and three of them are from eastern Pennsylvania!) We spent another evening and a day with former students and now we are back in Yongchuan for a week or so before our next adventure. So far our holiday has been stupendous.