Back from the Wilderness

With a New Year comes many changes, usually for the better and on the order of keeping up old commitments while picking up some new ones. Well the new year has certainly seen some changes. I decided to drop the Shakespeare villain facial hair I had been fostering for too long now, as well as the hair which had become simply too long. The pictures above are all me, though I have trouble seeing the resemblance from time to time. The darker photo in your upper left hand corder is of me in Chengdu las October getting ready to hike up a mountain. In the middle was a photo taken today on my camera in LuoYang's National Peony Park and on the upper right is a picture taken this last February at Pu To Mountain near Ningbo. Like wine, aging seems to improve the face the camera finds.

I'd like to talk about all the amazing adventures I've been having in the time I've not been updating, but really I've been sort of lazy lately. I traveled in January and February, but with my workload maintaining a very hectic schedule I've simply been content to crash early and watch the odd DVD here and there for my entertainment.

So to start with lets get some pictures of China's real source of wealth, the actual land and what it has to offer. Nothing about noisy cities or interesting people, but the reasons people should have to travel here.
Sichuan Province, a land of Spicy food, attractive people, Panda's, and Mist. I visited only a few of the scenic places outside of the city of Chengdu, but it remains one of the most amazing locations I have ever seen in my life.
The very landscape seems to be alive with fantasy and myth even into days which have long forgotten how to believe in such things. These majestic mountains are virtually always cloaked in thick folds of mist though on the day I chanced to visit a light peppering rain also frequented them. Rain is no stranger to these lands and is more often about the province than sunshine in some areas.I visited Sichuan Province October of last year with a friend. At the time I was there I still spoke next to no Chinese and was mostly at the mercy of good friends to show me the ropes of being in China, let alone in this wonderful city and area. Chengdu and Sichuan province are my top choices for locations to move to for the next year I intend to spend teaching in China.

Following my October exploits I settled down to my normal work teaching some of the most adorable students I have ever had the opportunity to meet. These two, Brandon and Judy (Who has changed her name to Lettie because she made a friend who had the same English name) were in my KK class (the 9th (K) Kindergarten level class (K) which my school had held. They are both now in SF class (S is the next level up , I'll let you work out what the F is for). Brandon likes to play in various ways which test not only his strength by my own, he also is one of the few children I know who still pretends to be Superman. Judy/Lettie is a darling little girl who can be very shy or endearingly affectionate with everyone she meets. She recently celebrated her 6th birthday.

While I was handling business as usual, the seasons changed. For a California boy that is a big deal as it simply doesn't happen back home. The weather went from very humid and hot... to well, something else entirely.
The snow fell heavier this year than it has in several past years, or so I am told. Many of my coworkers credited and/or blamed me for this depending on their feelings regarding snow as it very much did seem to be for my benefit after I admitted to never having lived anywhere which had Snow and to have been looking forward to trying this out. As you might guess, it makes it hard to ride that bike when I go places.

Still, with the change of the season, my students didn't change too much. Oh they advanced in the ciriculum, their studies improved, and many things went forward positively, but children remain children; and I am certainly still one of them at heart.

I took several of my breaks off to go have snowball fights with my older students, something they thought was a lot of fun (mostly because they got to peg me more than I got to peg them... but they've had practice). While I didn't participate in making snowmen this year I did see many amazing ones in the city.

The snow blanketed a usually somewhat dirty city in a clean sheet of white making everything stunningly beautiful in a strangely quiet sort of way. The cold did eventually start to seep in through the excess I carry on my person, but I had lost enough weight that I was able to double up on clothing. I made it through the cold of the winter a fair deal easier than I expect to get through the heat of summer.

In January I visited the Shaolin Temple, but the day I went up I was under the weather and the pictures I took were not very good to begin with. January is not a good time to take in Chinese Temples because all of the natural plant life is dead at that time of year. I plan to go back soon to get some proper photographs. Febuary was my next big adventure into the metropolitan jungle of Shanghai. Shanghai has more of a lanscape than a skyline as it is one of the largest cities in the world (easily making Los Angelas look rather small when you realize that nearly the entire expanse of Shanghai is more like a city center than a suburb).

Shanghai is a strange mixture of old Chinese architecture, modern Chinese architecture, Gothic western architecture, and modern western architecture. I stayed rather close to The Bund which is a district of Shanghai known for the Gothic western buildings and for shopping. Like New York City, many of the impressivee old buildings are banks.

Closer to the city center the image begins to look very different to the point where it becomes hard to believe that all three of these pictures are taken within the same city and even harder to beleive that they were all taken within a thirty minute walk of each other. In fact the first two pictures are literally opposite each other. The upper right is of the Pearl TV tower, the third tallest TV tower in the world, on the right is one of the many banks on the street opposite the view of the river taken above. The other picture of the city center was taken after a 30 minute walk through the shopping district, or roughly 20 minutes walking if you don't dawdle. In yet another place in the city, in between the two, there was a display for the Chinese New Year which was being celebrated at the time I was in Shanghai. The area is a recently rebuilt old city center which serves as a tourist attraction and a place for local shopping. This area also houses the noteworthy Jade Gardens.

Many displays were set throughout the artificial lake at the center of this old city replica. Each display is suppose to represent a scene from a famous chinese story, though I have no idea what any of the stories actually are.

After muscling through the crowd with a new friend I had met durring my stay in Shanghai I actually went to the Jade Gardens which in true chinese fashion containted neither jade nor gardens. Instead the Jade Gardens are famous for unique rock formations created through a process which my language ability doesn't begin to let me follow.

The Gardens are actually a Toaist Temple which have been maintained due to the beauty, fragility, and rarity of these stones. As I could understand very little of the signs which were not in English, and couldn't always follow the ones which were in English, I don't have too much more to say on that account.

My favorite picture from the Temple however is something which had no caption. The chinese people I saw there and I nicknamed it the Dragon Chicken.

After Shanghai I went to Ningbo and do to spending time about the city with friends I simply didn't think to take pictures of it. It was a pleasant enough location but nothing really called for a picture the way things like the Dragon Chicken or the Temple in the Jade Gardens did.

But eventually I took a day trip to Pu To mountain, a location which had a sign that would forever explain this country to me.The sign doesn't actually explain China in most respects as I find it to be a wonderful country full of wonderful people, but I hear stories from people here and occasionally meet people who make me think that the English on this sign is more accurate than anyone wants to admit.

Pu To Shan is one of the four holy mountains of Bhuddism and as such features some breathtaking monuments like the one I took a picture infront of. To get an idea of its real size you can see this picture well.

Pu To Mountain is known as the Sea Gate and is actually a sizeable island with a multitude of Temples and holy sites scattered about it. There are hotels and resturants scattered about these shores since whatever belief made them sacred has sense left the Nation.

And then after my trip I went home and have not been up to much. The remainder of winter was mostly a little brown and not very eventful. That is, nothing eventful until now that Spring is upon us.

Spring sees the drab coat of late winter shrugged off in brilliant displays of vitality, especially here. Luo Yang is famous in China and much of the world for these majestic flowers. The Peony as well call them in the west or Mu Dong as they are called here are huge, multiple petaled flowers. They can often reach the size of a salad plate in diamater and are nominally half spherical at several stages of blooming.













These giant flowers bloom for a handful of days before wilting making them a brief but marvelous phenomenon and the entire city is full of them while they are in bloom. The pictures of the flowers have all been taken in the last couple of days.