10-1-2009

I believe that traveling from place to place has provided proof of
the technological differences between America and China. It seems as
though every time I travel somewhere new I am left without internet
access for at least a few days. At least it’s better than the
situation a few of the students in our group find themselves in.
Because they are too lazy to figure out how to set up the internet in
their apartments, they still don’t have internet access at home. I
don’t know how people used to live without the internet.

I’ll start with the train ride. Of course I hate traveling, it
always stresses me out, and so we left an hour and a half early for
the train station. It was a good thing that we did, because we sat on
the streets for over 30 minutes trying to find a taxi. It was the
first day off of work for the national holiday, and so everyone was
hailing taxis trying to get to the train station or the airport to get
out of town. We made it to the train station just in time, and got on
without having any problems.

There isn’t much to do on trains, so after getting on I took a nap.
When I got down off my bed (I was the top of 3 bunks in the ‘room’) I
started reading the book that I bought at the bookstore, Mao Zedong’s
autobiography. A Chinese person started staring at me. I don’t think
that he believed that I could be reading a book in Chinese. So the
next time I got to a word that I didn’t understand, instead of writing
it down to look up in my dictionary later, I asked him what it meant.
The guy didn’t even tell me what it meant, he just asked, “Can you
understand that?” I told him I could and he started talking to me.

Within half an hour literally 1/3 of the train car was pushing their
way to be within earshot, probably 30 people were sitting on beds,
standing in the aisles, or standing in the hallway listening to me and
asking questions, mainly about American politics. It was quite
interesting. A doctor wanted to know what it took to be a doctor in
America, why doctors made so much money. When I explained how many
years it takes to get a degree in medicine he understood, and told me
that in China you only have to get your undergraduate degree in
medicine to practice medicine.

For the next three hours I was answering questions and learning quite
a bit about China at the same time. Why doesn’t America have
socialized health care? What is authentically ‘American’ food? What
type of attitudes to most Americans have towards Chinese people? When
people in America think of China what do they think of? What is the
educational system in America like? Etc.

I went to bed tired, but had learned a lot of vocabulary that I didn’t
know before.

I woke up in the morning, got down off my bed, and ate some breakfast.
Then I climbed back on my bed and slept. I woke up around noon,
climbed down and ate lunch, then climbed back up and slept. I woke up
for the last time around 4 PM, and stayed awake until we arrived at
the train station at around 5:30.

Guilin is an extremely beautiful place. It reminds me a lot of
Taidong in Taiwan. It is in one of the furthest southern provinces in
China, and borders Vietnam. As we were riding in for miles and miles
there is terraced rice farm land. As I looked out the windows I could
see farmers driving their water buffalo to work their farms. There
were duck farms and herds of cattle. It is amazing here.

Of course that isn’t all. As soon as we got off the train we were
greeted by my roommates’ future in-laws. They are giving us a place
to stay for the next week, and are so extremely nice. When we got in
and thanked them for everything that they were doing they said, “It’s
no problem, having you come and stay in our home is like having
children come home from college for the holiday.”

The first thing they insisted on was taking us out to a steak dinner.
“You’ve been on a train for the past 27 hours, you didn’t eat well.
We insist you come with us.” After dinner they took us for a walk
around a park with a lake. In the middle of the lake are two famous
pagodas, the Bronze Pagoda and the Silver Pagoda. After walking
around the park for a little while we went home, and they made a very
good bamboo leaf and flower tea and we watched the National Day Parade
on TV.

I am very excited for tomorrow. We are taking a boat and floating
down the Li River. It is the most beautiful place in all of China,
and some say in all of Asia. I’m sure that this trip is going to be a
great experience.