Cherry picking

              The markets are full of cherries this time of year.  Yesterday, they took us to an orchard where we picked box after box of cherries.  Not sure what we’ll do with all of them.

Martial Arts

              Jinan has a martial arts team, and yesterday we were treated to a lesson/demonstration. The opening moves promote flexibility, similar to Tai Chi, but I was afraid I’d hit myself in the face with the nunchucks—weighted metal sticks, held together with chains, and I retreated to the role of photographer.

The feminine ideal

                    In the children’s bookstore at the Jinan Art Museum, I saw a book obviously intended for little Chinese girls. Even in China, one cannot escape from Barbie,  with her infinitesmal waist and gargantuan chest.  No Western woman I know is actually shaped this way, and Chinese women have way smaller breasts than we.  Besides, the Chinese have very dark hair.  Shouldn’t a doll look more like the child who plays with it?

Climbing Mt. Tai

                Mt. Tai rises nearly a mile above sea level in Shandong Province. Confucius came here to think, and emperors made the ascent to prepare for their reigns.  Taoist temples and ancient inscriptions flank the ancient stone steps. The climb is considered very difficult—far more so than the Great Wall—and several people cautioned me not to attempt it.

            The Chinese take special care with the elderly, and I’m afraid I now qualify. As we proceeded to climb, a 45 year old colleague appeared at elbow and began to divert my attention to the historical aspects of Mt. Tai.  The man kept encouraging me to rest and take pictures— clearly he thought I should focus on something other than arriving at the top. 

                  He carried my backpack-- a great help-- but when he continually grabbed me by the elbow, I found it annoying; however I didn't want to offend this erudite gentleman.  He kept telling me to slow down-- claiming we weren't far from the top and there'd be adequate time to meet up with the others before they descended. He was lying.  As we neared the peak, we ran into my young female students, who are very pretty. They’d already been to the top. Our party was descending. The girls distracted him briefly, and I made my getaway. 

                When my guide caught up with me, he tried to make me take pictures of Taoist shrines and historic inscriptions, but I grabbed my hiking pole and persevered.         

                The day was foggy, but the view from the top was magnificent. We took a cable car down.

Who takes a passport to the doctor’s office?

               Shelley and I had our checkups in Johnson City, but Zane, John, Gabriela and Brittany still needed theirs.  We drove by university van about forty minutes to a clinic in downtown Jinan.  Here, an officious white coated receptionist told my students they had to have passports.  Brittany and Gabriela had brought theirs; Zane and John had not.  Was the excursion wasted for them? Couldn’t they have their exams anyway if the school agreed to bring the documentation later?

             The receptionist said it was out of the question.  John dug in his portfolio and brought out Xeroxed copies.  These, we were told, were not acceptable.  Wang Ping persisted and asked to speak to the gatekeeper’s “Leader.”  Evidently, this person was far more reasonable.  The exams proceeded.

             My students were afforded a reasonable amount of privacy for their exams—a great improvement on the way these things were conducted in 2006.   Afterwards, we had ice cream.

Comfort food

             We were given a lesson in making jaozi. These are Chinese dumplings, resembling ravioli.  They are formed from circles of dough which are filled with vegetables or meat and then fried or boiled. Jaozi have a characteristic shape resembling a half moon. Their production is time consuming, but they are delicious.

Penmanship lesson (or shall I say brushmanship?)

             We were given a lesson in writing Chinese.  Rather than representing speech sounds with letters, the system represents concepts using stylized symbols.

For instance, ren, is represented like this:

人

         Think of a person walking.

         This is the way the Chinese write ‘da,’ their word for big.

大

         To form the word for sky, ‘tian,’  we draw an extra line above the man figure:

天

         Tiananmen as in Tiananmen Square means ‘Gate of Heaven.’

天安门

         Notice that the third character in this place name looks a bit like a gate.

         Today, the Chinese use pens and pencils as we do.  But the system was designed for ink and a brush.  In some ways, it’s easier to write Chinese with this ancient equipment.