Tue May 27 – Beer Fish Overload

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It’s inescapable! I only had one day in between and again I’m served beer fish. I know I have no right to complain given that my visit has been sponsored, plus it still is a delicious dish. However it’s always the whole fish in there so you got to watch out for all the bones. Makes it hard to not be just a little annoyed, coming from cleanly prepared fish filet dishes in America. And given that the meal was never the same when including all the other dishes I could have easily avoided the beer fish if I truly felt its continued consumption overwhelming.



Anyway my morning class was spent on the roof of the CLI building at the suggestion of my teacher. Which was great fun given the Guilin Glisten phenomena and the brightest of the sun even through the cloudy skies. Unfortunately I lost my sunglasses (a free pair I earned from simply crossing the VT drillfield years ago, so no significant loss there) so I couldn’t go that route to alleviate the situation as some classmates did. So I just had to bare the harshness of the sun upon my textbook pages. Oh yeah and hearing the emanating sounds from the dog farm again really just makes class fly by in a whirlwind of fun.



On a more positive note I spent the afternoon visiting a local primary school, Sunny School, where we interacted with some Chinese elementary students and watched their rehearsal for, I believe, their 15 year anniversary. The kids here were full of energy and made to wear some ridiculous attire for the show. Really the only oddball getups were the girls as blue bunnies and boys as eggs. Otherwise they were dressed as marching band members, sailors, and a host of other things some I wasn’t even sure of. Students here learn both Chinese and English pretty early on so we were able to communicate with them a little with both languages, the conversations were pretty simply but fun. The ceremony preview was entertaining to watch because each grade I think had a dance/music routine to perform, but they were all such unconnected pieces and inspired by such varying ideas. Overall it seemed such a strange way to me for the school to celebrate the event.



After the school visit it was time to engage in the sightseeing photograph scavenger hunt of craziness of China. Confined within a certain block radius of a center square in downtown Guilin we had 90 minutes to collect photos of numerous things seeable in China, for varying points, some ordinary like a bald man others not so ordinary like a young child going to the bathroom in public. Yes this actually happens, in wide view of anyone just passing by. I’ve already caught glimpses of it more than a handful of times. After you get over how shocking it is you can get a half decent laugh out of it. Others photo opportunities just demonstrated how different Chinese people live their lives. Like scooters with entire families on them. The most I’ve seen yet is four to a single scooter but I’ve been briefed as to how the fabled five person configuration works. Regardless of what I may or may not have witnessed my team came in last largely because two team members, one of which was doing the picture taking, took issue with taking certain pictures which I can't blame. I won't want to be focusing my camera on some of those sights either. Also as a team we didn’t have the “in it to win it” attitude. Whatever in the end we still got served as much beer fish as the winners.

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