Mrs. Mao's house for Lunch, Chinese Games, and Wal-Mart!

June 25, 2008- Wednesday

After getting up early enough for our morning run/workout and showers, we headed to Mrs. Mao’s class. She discussed Tibetan culture with us pretty extensively. Tibet is an area with low air pressure, and therefore not a pleasant place for people to live because they get arthritis. It is so severe that pregnant women have to go to the inner areas to give birth, because of the climate. It is in South West China- 4000 km high. She said that there is heavy snow in the winter, one should only go in the summer. Local people in Tibet made sacrifices to heaven of animals, and the alters are found near many of the lakes now. This was before they believed in Buddhism.
In Tibet, people think that people’s spirits exist forever. They think that after a period of time a person’s spirit will be reborn in an other person. When someone dies, they cut up the dead family member and take to a certain place in the mountains for the eagles to take to heaven. If the eagles do not come, that means his spirit will go down the hill. Another way to is to put it on a float down the river and someday it will sink in to the river which they think is sacred. They say hello by putting their tongue on each other’s nose or touching their ears because it is too cold to open their mouths. In Ancient times, they would only take a bath when they are born, married, and after death because a bath will wash away good luck. Mrs. Mao told us about Lamaism which is a branch of Buddhism- it is known as Tibetan Buddhism. She also mentioned two familiar words “dalai” means vast sea in Mongolian and “lama” means teacher. She informed us of many Tibetan customs such as their costumes of color of ornaments and jewelries. Tibet women have a head gear decoration and they dress kind of like Eskimos.

Mrs. Mao has been taking students to her home for lunch everyday this week. Today it was my group’s turn to go. Juan, Deryck, Johanna, Greg and I walked with her home from class and up the stairs to the fifth floor of her apartment building. Mrs. Mao did a fine job making it up those stairs. She told us that she has lived there for twenty years (so she’s been in good shape for quite some time) and that her complex was really nice when she started living there. Now, her actual apartment is really nice, but the outside and the stairs to it look pretty worn. Her apartment consisted of a small, small encased by glass balcony area, a small living room/office, a small dining room, a small kitchen, a small storage/pantry area, a small bathroom, a bedroom for her and her husband, and a bedroom for her son. We sat and talked with her son in the living room while Mrs. Mao made lunch. Her house was neat and tidy; she had no room for clutter. She made us some delicious sandwich type things made out of a pita type bread with your choice of beef, tofu, or sausage inside. She served sides of cucumber salad, red sweet corn (it didn’t taste too good), cucumber salad and pepper and onion salad, and chicken. It was all really good and really hit the spot. She also cut up a “Thousand Year Egg” for us to try. Thousand year eggs are the eggs placed in some sort of chemical for two weeks that last in a greenish black “hard boiled” state for up to a year. After eating, we thanked her for everything and headed back to class.

On Wednesday and Thursday of this week we are spending the afternoon class time conducting activities with the Chinese students. On Wednesday the Chinese students are in charge of the events and on Thursday we are in charge. Upon arrival to class, the Chinese students gave us a few presentations on China. They talked to us about how China is one of the oldest nations in the world and there were nearly 600 emperors in China’s history. They reminded us that China has the largest population it he world at 1.3 billion in 2007. Chairman Mao once said, “More people. More power.” I guess they took that to heart. They talked to us about the famous basketball player, “Yao Ming.” They hit on the fact that each woman is only allowed to have one child and that the children have 9 years compulsory education. They told us about many famous places in Beijing that we will be visiting and the history of the school we are staying at.

After their presentations we played a game somewhat like, “Hot Potato.” One of the students had a water bottle with rocks inside that she would turn around from the group and shake. We passed a stuffed bunny around until she stopped. Whoever had the bunny was required to do something like tell a joke, sing a song, show a dance move, or anything you can imagine. As you might have guessed, passing the bunny got pretty violent as people tried to quickly get it out of their hands. Many of ours students showed different types of sports actions while others sang songs or told jokes. Some of their students showed Tia Chi moves, sang songs, and just acted down right shy. We have noticed here that many of their students are very young acting. They giggle a lot act really dependent of each other. I have asked a few how old they are and they are anywhere from 23-25 years old. They are in graduate school, but for some reason their culture acts differently at this age. It could be that we are just reading them differently because they are speaking their second language and they might sound childlike, but they definitely have some youngster actions.

It is becoming harder and harder to make plans to do something here. Someone comes up with an idea and people fiddle around before deciding if they are going to go or not. It is difficult to make sure everyone is included and happy. Tonight we just decided to split up for our outing. Paige, Ashley, Jessica, Juan, and I had asked a Chinese student to write down, “Wal-Mart” on a piece of paper in Chinese so that we could show it to the taxi driver. We all walked out of the hotel and there was already a taxi there. We showed him the paper and all piled in, but he wouldn’t leave because he motioned that we had five passengers and we could only have four. After trying for a while to get him to take us anyway and no avail, Paige and I jumped out and told the others we would meet them there. We were skeptical to do this because the last time we split up to go somewhere we ended up in different places and we had heard that there was more than one Wal-Mart, but there was nothing we could do. After walking about ½ mile to the main street to get a taxi, we found one. He looked at the paper and pointed in a direction to ask I think if that was the Wal-Mart we wanted. The other girls had already been by there, but Paige and I had no idea where we were going so we just guessed that he was right and agreed. He drove us a short distance, clearly a distance we could have walked, and we saw Jessica and Juan waiting out in front of the building before we saw the big, “Wal-Mart” sign. Ashley was waiting on the other side incase the taxi driver took us that way. After reconvening all together, we took a picture in front of the big “Super Wal-Mart” sign and headed in.

I know you are probably thinking, “You can go to Wal-Mart right there or here in Mercer County.” The reason we wanted to go was to see the main differences and similarities with the store. Let me tell you, you could definitely tell it was a Wal-Mart, but there were things there I have never seen before. On the way in the store there was a display of some pictures of Sam Walton and some history for one’s reading pleasure. In the electronics section they were playing, “Backstreet Boys,” a 90’s American pop group rather loudly. The place had three floors with big sidewalk-style sloped escalators leading customers from one level to the next. They had the big white signs with changeable black numbers that had the man with the smiley face on top. I assume that in Chinese it said, “Always Low Prices, Always Wal-Mart.” Wal mart- and supper there. They had books, but they were all written in Chinese. They had a bakery section where they were displaying a big cake with Olympic characters and other Olympic stuff on. They sold weird stuff like “1000 year old eggs.” They had normal snacks like crackers and chips, but weird stuff like dried eel meat. They had whole chickens hanging from a rope and they were chopping up red meat out from behind a counter with a big cleaver. They had live turtles, crabs, and fish for sale near big elaborate displays of frozen fish. They were selling all kinds of clothes, including Beijing Olympic items as well as all of the normal American toiletries. The girls looked through a big pile of tee shirts that would have cost $1.00 that had English words on it. Most of the sayings did not make any sense, but they were real funny to read.

There was a Nike store within the Wal-Mart also, but the prices were just like they would be in the United States. Most everything we bought was similar in price or lower to how it would be in the United States. I bought several items for about five dollars. We bought gummie bears, iced coffee drinks since they do not sell coffee at the restaurants on campus and we do not take the time to go get it outside before, potato chips, cookies, dried fruit, nuts, almonds and juice drinks. Of course, nothing too healthy was in our carts. When we finished milling around, we got in line to pay. You know, everywhere we go there are TONS of people working with little responsibility. For example, at the grocery store one time we saw about six people working on a small display of cereal. Nevertheless, at Wal-Mart, they seemingly have not adopted the practice of hiring way to many people. There was a big line for people to check out, but maybe that was a result of not enough computers.

We ate at the restaurant that was right there in Wal-Mart, which was a type of Chinese fast food. We looked at a picture menu on the wall and then told the manager, who spoke good English what we wanted. She then conveyed that to the cashier, who rung us up. We sat down and when the food was finished they brought it to our table. I had some garlic rice that was yellow and a pork chop. It was pretty good, but the pork chop was pretty small and had a lot of bone to it. The others got a spaghetti type stuff that they really didn’t like.

Right when we walked out of Wal Mart, there were plenty of taxis waiting to take people home. We got in the taxi and showed the driver our business cards that had in Chinese where we were to go. She drove us right home and it cost about $1.50 total for the while ride for all of us to split. It shouldn’t have, but that whole excursion really wore us out, so we worked on our journals for a while and worked on our power point presentations we are to show about ourselves tomorrow and then went to bed.