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Published: September 29th 2009
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I’ve been training for the Beijing marathon and my running buddy and coworker, Halim, had penciled in a long run for the day. We ran from the far east side of town, straight through the mayhem of Yangzhou, and finished at the train station on the far west side of town. We hopped into a taxi and three dollars and 12 miles later, hopped out of the car and strolled through the School gates. It was officially my first taxi-assisted run. I think there are more of these such runs for me in the future…
Later that day Elizabeth and I hopped on our bicycles and visited the Yangzhou Museum of Block Prints. The Museum was housed in an ultra modern building and contained multiple exhibits about the process of Chinese paper making, block printing, calligraphy, and the ultimate introduction of the printing press. Turns out the Chinese were printing books a full 800 years before Gutenberg printed much of anything.
As we strolled into the museum, so did a couple hundred students from a nearby college campus. There were so many interesting exhibits… but how could anyone possibly pay attention to such things as trivial as the birth
of modern communication when they could talk with and take pictures of English speaking foreigners!? Hell, we were the exhibit as far as they were concerned. We posed for more pictures than we could count and dished out our email address a few times as well. Here is one of the emails we received later that afternoon:
HELLO,I am the student you met yesterday(the boy).My name is Liu Qiang(刘强).I was so excited when my friend took photos for us,because this was the first time I took a photo with a foreign friend.So I felt nervous when I had a talk with you.You know ,I exactly want to make friends with you ,just for everthing I can remember now.I will patiently wait for your answer.
Your future friend
Liu Attached was this picture:
Sunday
Sunday was a great day to sleep in. And that worked just fine and dandy. At least it did until 7:30 am. Soon thereafter we were out for a second day of bicycle riding.
Directly outside of the School walls, we rode past a man wearing little more than a pair of slacks with his pant legs tucked into a
pair of rubber boots. He was working the soil with an ox. The multiple levels of economy and scale here in China seem to defy any reason. Here I am, sitting at my laptop surfing the world’s web of information and chatting online with my family nine thousand miles away… all while no more than 10 meters on the other side of the campus wall is a man tilling soil in the same manner as has been done for 2,500 years, using the same technique as used 2,500 years ago.
Yangzhou is located in the middle of multiple pieces of moving water, and between here and JiangDu (another small town of 2 million, ten miles away) we rode our bicycles over seven bridges. Every time we headed over a bridge we would pass multiple men working multiple king-sized fishing rods. Judging from the size of fish they were pulling out of the water, I’d guess their poles were a bit oversized. After taking one photo of the men pulling back on the rods, I was excitedly invited to give it a try. The thought crossed my mind more than once, pulling on the rod, to act like I
had caught a big one… but I couldn’t remember the word for “just kidding.” Nor “big” or “fish”. Perhaps next time.
Riding along the road we passed multiple road-side bee keepers. Between here and JiangDu we passed at least half a dozen of these operations. The men live in tents right on the road and tend to their twenty or thirty wooden hives. Sitting directly in front of their little green tents, usually on a card table or an old bench, are a few old Coca-bottles, glass jars, or juice bottles, cleaned out and then filled with honey. For a 6-10 yuan, we could have rolled away with honey harvested earlier that morning.
In the 80’s travelers apparently had trouble finding easy, quick food along the way - a product of the then Chinese tradition of 2-3 hour lunch breaks to go home and prepare their own food. In the late 80’s however, the long lunch break was officially shortened to one hour, thus creating a need for fast and easy food - and food vendors came in throngs. No exception to the standard, JiangDu has countless options for lunch. We chose Chiang Tsing a soup with boiled
pot stickers. For a little less than one dollar, we enjoyed two bowls of the stuff and then felt the craving for a beer. The word for cold beer is
Bing da.
Bing meaning ice and
da making the noun a describer - literally “like ice”. The label, oddly, said “Sunday Beer” and we thought it was perhaps just the brand. But nope, it was made by the same brewing company as usual. Apparently on Sundays, at least at this stand, we drink beer with a 2.1%!a(MISSING)lcohol content. Eitherway, it was hot outside and we had a cold beer in our hands. Oh well…
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Sue
non-member comment
Fun
Hi you two, Apparently we don't rate as high as the other 150 people on your email list. Peter has been forwarding them to us and we've really enjoyed hearing your stories. So glad you are doing well and learning so much. For our part, we had a fabulous weekend in Yellowstone last weekend...found a private geyser that goes off every five minutes which even your Dad didn't know about..it was a hike, though. There's a major fire around Lake Hotel which we've been worried about but snow is forecast there tongiht. SO SO sorry to hear about Max, I miss him, too. Hugs, Sue