We are in our last couple hours of our train to Anhui! :) Sadly I have been losing badly in Chinese "asshole," a card game that Zoe taught me. We are all super excited to get to Anhui and meet the people of the village and after the 10 hour trip from Beijing to Nanjing this one seems like a breeze. The view out the window is a bit different this time, we have passed by hundreds of acres being burned to prepare the land for planting once again. This definitely affects our visibility and shows once again the amount of air pollution that exists in China. It also shows how difficult it can be to try and control the amount of pollution the country has, since this is a long used tradition for farming. We are able to see huge constructions on the way, half done sky scrapers with dozens of cranes working on them and also many factories such as car manufacturers like Chery. It creates a very interesting view between rapidly changing agriculture, buildings, and factories over and over again.
Our trip to Anhui symbolizes the mid part of the dialogue and I already feel sad that time is going by too fast :( but that just means we are having a super awesome time. Before hopping on the train, we had our midterm which I feel we all did well, I realized I have a little problem in listening and will work on this more on the rest of the trip, luckily next week we will start working with our language partners again.
We also said goodbye to our host family! :( The Liu family was the best host family experience I have had in my whole life. In the week living with them I was able to learn about their experiences and everything they have been through to arrive where they are. Liu Shu Shu is an engineer and he migrated from Chongqing after graduating from college. Yesterday he took us to eat hot pot which comes from his city and once again I was amazed by how good Chinese food can be. Moon is 17, he is the nicest Chinese kid I have met and a very smart student. As a souvenir he gave me a wooden Chinese chess board in which I also lost badly. The best though was Yu A Yi. She picked me up a week ago and also dropped me off today :(! She is from Wuxi and has been an English teacher for 23 years. She has seen the big effect of reform and opening all over Nanjing and on her school too. When she started working, the school had only half a building, and it now has 5 beautiful buildings. I will miss them a lot. Thanks to them I had an awesome Chinese culture immersion, and feel I have a Chinese family I will always be able to go back to.
- Juan P.S.
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