Day 39

Well on Friday morning, the 5^th of August, I traveled home. My flight left at 9 am. I arrived at the airport at 7 am. When I was about half way through the line, they moved some others and me to another line. I was only about three people from the counter. When I got to the counter, they sent me back to the other line. I was getting frustrated by this point, when I got to the counter they told me the plane was over booked and I could not get on. They first wanted to put me on a flight at 5:30. After another 2 hours of waiting, they were able to get me on a flight with another company at noon. This was how I started my 24 hours of travel to make it home. In the end, I managed to get home two hours earlier than planned and can now say I visited California. J It feels very good to back in the states and be able to see my family and friends. Although this was the end of my travels, it is not the end of my journey. This trip will have lifelong affects on my life. I really enjoyed my time there and am very glad I had the opportunity. It has changed my outlook on foreign affairs and different cultures. I thank God for blessing me with this opportunity and Dr. Thaler for helping plan the trip. I am also very grateful for all of the companies and individuals I traveled with in China.

Day 38

Today I was going to a not restored part of the wall but the quickest way using public transit was going to take 5 hours. It only takes an hour by car but we did not have access to a car. So instead, we went to the Beijing Zoo. The zoo itself covered 219 acres. However, I was very disappointed in it as the conditions of the facilities and living arrangements of the animals were very run down and not very accommodating. They had a fairly wide range of animals but often they were labeled wrong for example, they had a cage labeled striped skunk and it had two raccoons in it. Supper was pretty exciting as it was my last meal at CAU. I am very excited to return to my American diet!

Day 37

Today was a slow day. I spent the day packing and talking with kids at the university. It is always interesting to talk with the student and professors here. The “army” dish is my standard diet at MAfic. Although this meat actually had some variety, it had fruit and more than a few slices of meat! Supper was much more delicious as Dr. Cao took me out with his wife and one of his graduate students. We went to a local restaurant that was fairly high class. I had some of the spiciest dishes yet. We had one that was a fish dish it was so good but boy did I sweat while eating it. She was not sure of the name in English but she said it was a carnivore river fish. I enjoyed supper with them as I was getting slightly sick of the food at mafic, there is not much variety, and she had good English so I learned more about Chinese culture. One of the more interesting things she told me was that Chinese woman try to get as fair colored skin as they can. That is why so many woman walk around with umbrellas all the time. They do this so that they won’t tan. They also have makeup and treatments that will lighten their skin color. It is completely different then the western culture! I am now on an hour countdown until my adventure comes to a close. I am excited to be home and prepare for another adventure, Vet School.

Day 36

Today I went to The Great Wall. The part we visited was called Badaling. It was about a 2 hour bus ride there. It is the more touristy part of the wall as a lot of it has been updated for the hikers’ safety and appearance. It was a nice day to hike, as it was cool but the fog/haze that was blocking out the sun also made the distance pictures very hard to take. It was still simply amazing that they could build such a huge and rugged defense system in 5^th century. The wall borders the northern side of China and the south of Mongolia. The entire wall stretches roughly 6300 km (3900 mi). They say that building the wall was such hard and physically demanding work that one person died for every meter of the wall that was built. The terrain that it was built over is insane. At one point, I was standing 5 steps farther along the wall then my friend and my head was level with his feet. It was about a 6 foot drop over 4 feet. It was definitely a tough climb at times. However, some of it was pretty flat of had a small grade. Not all of it was steps but it sure felt like it. I really got a hard work out. One of my thoughts while hiking the wall was I am glad we did not have this near my hometown we surely would have had track or cross country practice on it. I did race a kid to the top of one of the climbs. I had a definite advantage with my longer legs. An interesting fact about the steps of the wall is that they are all different heights and sizes. This was done so that the enemy soldiers would trip trying to climb it but the Chinese soldiers would know the steps from the repetitious climbs they had. This would definitely have worked as I clipped my toe several times. We took a break at one of the towers to eat some bread that we had packed and just as we were leaving one of the names scratched into the wall caught my eye. It had two Chinese characters at the beginning and some English letters after it. When one of the Chinese characters was covered up, it looked exactly like my name. The students I was with could not understand why is said it was my name because they just saw them as Chinese characters. So I covered it up and they just thought that was the coolest thing. It was definitely cool to see but I am worn out from all the hills and the heat.

Day 35

Today I met Geoff’s old research assistant, Lee, as he wanted to say bye before he left for the States. Lee is going to graduate school at Penn State. We went to the silk market again to buy him some shirts before I left and to return a cord that I had bought that did not work. When I tried to return it I had to argue and barging to get my full price back. It was quite frustrating especially since I had just bought it the day before and they remembered selling it to me. I eventually prevailed and was refunded the full amount. Then it was off to buy some shirts for Lee. My previous statements about Chinese being so helpful and generally nice to you have changed some in the last few weeks. I know realize they are nice to me but as several Chinese have told me is that they generally dislike each other. The cast system is definitely in full swing here and they often see themselves better than those cooking the food, or cleaning the rooms. This is often evident when I ask a student to ask the cook how his day or weekend was they are very hard to persuade into doing so.  However, I think part of this dislike is because of how they generally treat each other. I especially saw this when dealing with the sales people when buying the shirts. They were much more willing to deal with Geoff or me, as we were always smiling and not critical. In addition, we always came away with a better price. A funny thing happened when I was dealing on an item I was trying to buy I gave my price and she was determined not to sell it to me for that so I walked away. She called me back 5 times and finally sold it to me. I was walking around with the item and another dealer asked me what I paid for it. He said he would buy it for me for 10 RMB more. I know the people I bought it from still made money but they obviously were close to even with it and often sold them for much more. (I guess I am a good Dutchman). I have often found that you can get it for nearly 10% of the first price they give you. They will start with an outrageous price but immediately knock off 10 or 20 percent to start as “the special price for you!” Then the bargaining is on! I enjoy it but it would get old after a while. I was drug into several clothing shops to look and ended up bargaining and a few I would have to physically force my way out because they were so determined to sell me something I had never wanted. I don’t ever buy from these shops. There are so many shops that you always find some happy polite person to deal with.

They also sell many handcrafts here, which are pretty amazing to watch. The glass jars are painted from the inside and the river and waterfall paintings are made by only using parts of his hands. He often used the fingernail, the side of his palm or his knuckle. These were quite spendy and they would not budge much below a certain level. Usually you would leave and come back they would drop it slightly but we tried this a few times with the pictures and they stayed solid.

Day 34

Sunday, so off to church I went. At church I met several other Americans. There was a group from Pennsylvania teaching English for three weeks at a university down the road from CAU. Several of them have been here before but it was the first time they had been the church. The pastor was very interesting and he was very passionate about delivering the word of God. It is always so impressive how emotional and excited they get about God. He had an interesting slide and break down of John 3:16. I hope the picture is clear enough to read.  I found out that the church has seating for 1000 people and they allow 200 more in to stand. That is not including the “over flow” area. They have 6 services and everyone of them is full. It amazes me how much the spirit is at work here. They had 165 baptism today. They have had over 320 this month! God is so powerful! I really think that the Chinese people really hunger for the word of God as often the common people here have a harder life than we are accustom to the in the states. However, the standard of life here is increasing drastically. Geoff was talking about how some old underground churches he knew about when the government was suppressing them have expanded with the new policy and actually the government has built their buildings for them. The churches here are required to belong to an association but it is not a regulation one like many people believe. It is similar to how the churches in the states are in some association. I am down to 4 day left here in China. I have some tourism plans but this week will be slower, which will be nice after a very fast moving, busy 5 weeks. I am starting to prepare some of my things for the trip home! I am very excited about seeing my family and friends and being back in my normal setting, especially my small town countryside!

Day 33

Today was a slow relaxing day. I caught up on some emails and played some basketball and some catch with some kids at the college. Basketball is huge here because of Yao Ming so you see news stories about him constantly since he decided to retire. Baseball on the other hand is basically nonexistent so playing catch is not very common. Miranda, the English teacher from St Paul, bought the gloves and ball and she is teaching the kids how to play. It still amazes me how many opportunities we have in the country side in the states. For supper Miranda cook some chicken for me. She said she had a bunch of it because she helped butcher some of the experimental ones and she got to take a bunch home. Don’t worry it was only a feed gain study. :P Although it was weird knowing it was from a trial. This did give me a few more firsts; I tried a chicken foot, tongue and head. The tongue was not worth eating, the foot was alright, it was like eating cartilage or a very chewy tough piece of meat. The head was an adventure; it took a lot of work for the meat, although the brain was decent, once again small though. The chickens are not nearly as big as the ones in the states though. The university actually spent 15 years trying to breed a smaller chicken so that it would fit in a pot easier.