And We're Back

Well, it has been a while ladies and gentleman, but I am back. It looks like we have found a way around the infamous Great Chinese Firewall that will remain available to us at all times. By “us” I mean the foreign teachers at the school that I work at. We are constantly trying to find ways around the firewall so that we can visit are favorite sites. Apparently a couple months before I arrived you were still able to access Facebook and YouTube freely from within China, but that is not the case anymore. The controlling arm of the government has reached out and closed the doors on these and other sites like it, but fortunately we have found a way to get through and find out what is going on in other social circles in the world.
Anyway, enough blabbing about how excited I am to be back on, it’s time to tell the people what I have been up to for the past couple of weeks. It hasn’t actually been all that exciting. The weather over here in China is changing rapidly. A week ago I could run around outside in shorts and a T-shirt and today I woke up to find ice had formed on the ground where puddles had been from the rain a day earlier. Today isn’t one of the chilly November days I remember from back in the states where you could sit outside with a warm cup of tea and a pair of gloves and enjoy the nice sunshine. Today is a cloudless, blue sky day with the wind whipping down from Siberia and let me tell you…IT IS FREEZING. I’m told that it is going to get even colder, but the difference between one day and the next is perhaps the reason why I feel the cold so much today. The buildings have yet to turn on the heating for us—I hope that this sudden burst of cold will be a prompt for them to do that—so getting out of bed this morning was particularly hard. It is quite nice under the comforter when it is warm out, but it is really nice under there when it is cold out. I guess that is one thing that stays constant no matter what country you are in…
Besides the cold weather setting in life goes on here in China. Yesterday was that old favorite holiday of mine where you get to pretend you are something else all day, Halloween. Of course, they do not celebrate such silly things over here in the Communist State, but being an English school we had ourselves a little party. It was actually more of a babysitting job than a party. I think many of the parents took advantage of the opportunity to drop their kids off for someone else to watch on a Saturday night so that they could have some alone time. Oh well, I can’t say that I blame them. I suppose if I had a kid and was given the opportunity to have a free babysitter for a Saturday night I would jump at the chance as well. We did all the silly games that we played when we were younger—wrapping students up as mummies with toilet paper, cutting jack’o’lanterns and giving them candy. I suppose it was fun, but it was also a bit overwhelming.
Luckily before the weather changed too much I was able to get out of the city and see some of the local countryside. I got to climb some of the mountains around the city and that was quite fun. They are very different from the mountains that we are used to in the good old U.S. of A., but that was part of the fun. I remember looking at the classical paintings from China in classes and on my own when I was younger and thinking that the depiction of the mountains was a bit cartoony, but that is not the case. The mountains actually have the rounded off characteristic that you see in the paintings. This was a bit shocking to see from the bottom, but the view from the top was even more astonishing. Hiking up the crest of the mountain was sometimes very dangerous, but it was a lot of fun to do. Often there were points were you would be climbing almost vertically up steps carved into the rock face itself. There were also tight squeezes through narrow passages in caves through the mountain and times where you were walking along the edge of a cliff with barely any support at all. It took us almost five hours to summit the mountain from the bottom, but it only took about an hour and a half to get down. It’s always strange to me the difference between a summit and a descent.
Well, that is the news from afar. It looks like, as I said, this is going to be a reliable source of being able to post to my blog so I hope that I will be able to keep this up a little better. Thanks to anyone who keeps checking in on my through this website. It means a lot to me to get any feedback on the posts.
Always,
Henry (Hank) Young