National Aviation Museum

After our Saturday trip to Cuandixia we got up early on Sunday (out the door by 7) on our way to the National Aviation Museum.  This is a former air force base about 30 miles north of downtown Beijing.  This is what necessitated our early departure.  We walked the kilometer to the bus stop just in time to watch the good bus pull away and waited for the slow bus to take us to Wu-mart and our breakfast date at McDonalds. Then hopped onto the express bus to the subway station.  Made two subway transfers onto another bus and in a short three hours we'd gotten breakfast and we walking the kilometer from the bus stop to the museum.   

A line of F-6 and variants greeted us as we walked towards the former hanger that is buried in a mountain and now serves as a museum.

F-6 (China's first 'homemade' supersonic aircraft)

This a model of the plane designed by Chinese national Feng Ru 馮如 who was living in California when he raised some money and designed his own plane kickstarting the Chinese dive into aviation.

 Unfortunately the museum was too dark for many good pictures, but it was a great exhibit containing planes that chronicled the history of aviation in China and included a plane used to scatter Zhou Enlai's ashes.  Not sure why I found that so interesting.  They also had a huge exhibit on engines which Julie just didn't enjoy as much as I did, weird?

Here is the exit from the museum.

Walking away from the museum was this line of aircraft.

Which led to this line of planes.

All told there were well over 300 aircraft strewn around the grounds and this one was one of my favorite.

Chairman Mao's plane.

What is he so happy about?

Yeah, I'm not sure either.

Cuandixia

On Saturday we visited the mountain village of Cuandixia (爨底下).  As Julie and my time is wrapping up our school has been more eager to show off a few of the cultural treasure in our part of China and on Monday informed us they would send us out to this village on the weekend if we were interested.  Julie and I jump at any opportunity to travel without the use of a bus and made plans to visit on Saturday along with a couple of our fellow teachers. 

This a symbolic character for the village of Cuandixia

Here is a pictoral breakdown of the character

This is what a dog house looked like in China, 500 years ago.  Other than the plant it doesn't seem that bad.

However, the cat got to live inside.  We talk about doggie doors but this was the cats door and went straight through the wall into the living room.

Can you guess what animals the two mountain tops are said to resemble?

There is one additional animal mountain top (on the right), what do you think?

For lunch the restauranteur let us eat in one of the hotel rooms.  This was the bed.  Yes it was huge but you may be sharing it with five of your new best friends.  It does only cost 20RMB (a little over $3/spot) so that's something.

Mmmhh, lunch time.  I thought there was plenty of good food but Julie just didn't seem to enjoy it as much as I did.  We have found that the Chinese just don't have the same need for their food to be aesthetically pleasing to the eyes or sometimes the nose either.  Julie was asked why we didn't eat the fish and said it was because we didn't like too because picking out all the bones was too difficult.  This confused our friend who quickly informed us that we could just eat the bones because the fish had been cooked long enough that the bones were now so soft they were edible.  We decided to agree to disagree.

Nap time.

Julie's favorite part of the day was after we finished touring the village we were take to see some mountains just up the road from the village.  This turned out to be the mountains.  We have no idea how this was formed all we are told is that it's Chinese name is a saying that is translated into "one line sky."

Sleeping dragon and tree hugging

As you may have heard there was bit of a disturbance in Beijing this past week that was kicked off by the possible assault of a young woman from the Anhui province - to the southeast of Beijing - in a shopping center in Beijing.  The young woman fell to her death and it was reported by the authorities that she had committed suicide and nothing else was said. 

The twitter of China - Weibo (way bwoh) - quickly disseminated the story and a report that she had been raped by security guards at the mall and then been thrown (or possible jumped out of shame) by her attackers and the local police were covering up the story.  A large scale protest materialized and the authorities called out the riot police in mass.  The mouthpiece of the government reported that 100 individuals had gathered and they were mainly from the young woman's hometown.  The pictures on Weibo clearly showed that 100 wasn't even close.  The riot police had amassed and were preventing the crowed from moving out the area outside the shopping center where the incident took place.  Reports stated that it had been place to march to Tian'anmen Square but this was successfully blocked.

After reading about all this activity on Thursday Julie and I decided it seemed like a good weekend to stay in Mentougou.  Of the many attractions in Mentougou there are two famous Buddhist temples that are just a short bus ride away from our home.  In spite of the projected high temps (95 on Saturday) I decided we should take advantage of our close proximity and visit a temple on Saturday.  Adding to our plans, while I was at kindergarten on Friday morning the teacher - she referred to herself as Snow in her email as she doesn't have an English name and that is the literal translation of her given name - there that speaks the best English asked if Julie and I would like to play basketball with her and her boyfriend on Saturday.

It had been well over a month since I made it to play basketball on the weekends and we planned to meet Snow and her boyfriend at 8:30, so I decided to go warm-up with the guys at 7.  After an hour with the guys I went back to the room to get some breakfast and see if Julie was ready.  We made it back down to the school gate to meet Snow and Sharon (her boyfriend's English name) and we headed into the gym for some HORSE and a Chinese version of around the world.  The highlight was probably when I popped one of the rubber basketballs while attempting a trick shot over the back of the backboard.  I really am special.

After basketball time we got cleaned up and relaxed for a bit before we headed out to the bus stop to make our way up the mountain to a temple.  We hadn't decided which temple just yet.  The road made me feel like I was back in the WNC mountains and the bus driver didn't want to waste any brakes on silly things like curves.  The ride wasn't long and we had reached the Jietai temple; that's how we picked, the one we came to first.  This temple has some of the oldest known pine trees in northern China and well who doesn't like old oddly shaped pine trees?

This is the pagoda hugging pine.  The pine is over a thousand years old and while only a couple of the main limbs have survived the centuries that's still pretty impressive.  It is hugging the tomb pagoda which I'm sure has an interesting story but I was much more interested in the tree.

 

At the bottom of the picture you can see a row of umbrellas.  Unfortunately our old camera couldn't really show off the details but Julie was a big fan.  You can also see the massive flower candles.

A common feature at parks, garden's and temples throughout china are stone steles.  The one in front of you has a tortoise for the base, which was very common of man of the steles at Jietai, and dragons tangled at the top.  On the face of the stele are carved writings, poems and stories.

Here is another one.  More dragons.

Speaking of dragons.  This is the sleeping dragon pine.  I don't really see it but behind Julie the tree is growing out of the bank and the trunk appears to be dropping towards the ground. I've never seen a trunk in quite that disposition.

Speaking of unique trees here's one that couldn't be denied to reach for the sky.

I couldn't pass up this photo op.  How often do you see a 'dragish' or should it be called a 'figon'?

 Julie found a few flowers:

 And then she had a visitor.  Can you spot it?

Well after all that talk about staying out of the city we hadn't heard much news of any other issues and well we hadn't had Italian food it quite sometime so on Sunday we followed our cravings into the city.  While I haven't had lasagna in a long time and might not be the best judge, but it was really good.  We've made it back to Mentougou and are settling in for the night before we head back to work in the AM.

Hope this finds you well.
Ryan

Wednesday is Thursday and other random musings

It is currently lunch break at my branch school (Shimenying) on a Wednesday.  This is being mentioned because as those who've followed us over the past eight months are aware, I shouldn't be here until tomorrow.  Julie and I have therefore declared that Wednesday is Thursday and we are still trying to figure out just why this came to pass.

To get to the bottom of this mystery I ask one of my fellow English teachers if she knew the reason and what I was told was that there maybe a meeting that necessitates the schedule change (this is clearly my paraphrase, which includes some guesswork).  What makes this theory seem possible is that school ends early on Wednesdays. The students only have six class as opposed to seven or eight (depending on grade).  Theoretically there could be a meeting that the leaders want all the teachers to attend on a Thursday but the Wednesday schedule is needed to ensure everyone can be there without cancelling class.  If this is at all confusing, please know, I sincerely empathize.

After eight months of trial and error Julie and I are starting to feel a little more confident about our abilities in the classroom or we have lowered our expectations.  The jury's still out and may remain so indefinitely.  This week and in the past several it seems we haven't had those classes where everything blows up and you get that feeling similar to herding cats.  Although we are now under two months until our contract is up it's better late than never right?  (I'll advise if that was premature.)

-Ryan

Back from QingDao (Ching Dow)

Hello All,

Hope all is well in the states.

Last Sunday morning was the sports meet at school.  Each grade of students preformed a dance or show. It was very interesting to see all of them perform.  As soon as the performance was over, Ryan and I headed out for our May Day vacation.  Since May Day was on a Wednesday, we worked Saturday and Sunday and had Monday - Wednesday off of work. 

We had a driver take us to the train station and then we took a high speed train to QingDao.  It took us over 4 hours by high speed train to get there.  Once we got off the train, we found our hotel with little trouble.  It was across the street.  We walked through a tunnel underground to find out it doesn't come out across the street.  The street was a round about so we had to cross the street multiple times to actually get across the street.

Highlights from the trip:

There is a beer, wine and liquor street.  We went to the wine street and beer street.

At the wine street, we found a wine museum, which was very nice and had most things translated into English.   We did found NC wineries on one map but the USA is mostly known for the wineries in CA.  In the middle of the tour, we had a wine tasting.  The most interesting part were the "crackers." The crackers came in a little bag with a hamburger on it.  I think they were supposed to taste like hamburgers.  The did not taste like hamburgers but they were pretty tasty.

After the wine museum, we needed to eat lunch.  We walked toward beer street.  We found many restaurants but no picture menus.  They all had seafood (still alive)  in glass containers and you just would point at what you wanted.  This made me pretty nervous about orders/eating.  I have standards about eating.  We found a place with nice looking table clothes (one of my standards) and a guy who spoke pretty good English.  Ryan order clams and "squid."  Ryan says it was "squid." I say it was octopus.  There were octopi heads on the plate! Ryan would say they were squid heads... If anyone is an underwater food expert, please help Ryan and I settle our dispute. 

Next we were off to the beer museum.  I'm pretty sure this is the reason we decided to go to QingDao.  They are famous for their beer making.  The beer has been around since 1903.  The beer they served there was actually cold! This was a nice since we often drink room temperature beer because refrigerators aren't very common around here.   

Ryan found map of QingDao that shows the bus routes.  We took the buses several times.  They are building a subway system in the city and are expected the finish it in 2014.  We think it will be easier to get around once the subway opens.

To get a view of the city, we took a ride on chair lifts. 

My favorite part of the the trip was taking a ride on the traveling beer bar.  There was a bar set up on the back of the truck and we sat on bicycle seats and could pedal.   I don't think the bicycle pedals actually helped the truck move any faster.  It was nice to have a seat and a drink in my hand as we got a tour of the shopping street.  Much better than shopping. 

If a teacher goes on a trip, it is common for her to bring back a treat or little gift for the other teachers.  Ryan and I had much discussion about what should buy them.  Sometimes they bring me things like a little mirror for my purse or a bracelet.  But more often they bring us food.  Things like vacuumed sealed meat packages or candy made with donkey hide.  One idea was to find the thing we thought was a grossest and buy them that because they would probably love it.  We just couldn't bring ourselves to do that.  At the beer tasting they gave us peanuts and we thought they were good so we decided to buy them peanuts.  They teachers liked them so much, they ordered themselves more on the internet.  And we got to use a coupon.  When I was sitting at the table waiting for Ryan, an old man came and sat in his seat.  He kept talking to me in Chinese as if I understood.  He had a tour guide that helped translate a little.  I believe he was from outside the city and had not seen many foreigners before so he was excited to see me.  He forced me to eat some of his peanuts and gave me a coupon. 

When it was time to leave, we took 3 buses, a train, 2 subway lines, 3 more buses (it was 2 bus lines but we stopped to eat dinner) and a walk back to the school.  Nothing like traveling in China. 


Well, that's all for now.  Better get back to lesson planning or job hunting.

Julie