Chinese Driving 101 and A Trip to a Lake

The first side trip in Nanchung

I had a good rest Saturday evening and slept for close to ten hours.  I felt well rested on Sunday and for the most part was over my jet lag.  Our group met at 7:45 for breakfast.  Our group consists of Fey who is on staff at the University of Georgia Carl Vinson Institute of Government and is a native of Shanghi, Kristy Lindstrom who is the Director of Communications for the office of the Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives, her significant other John David who goes by "Bubba" and Kitzu who is a Chinese student here helping be our host this week.  We also have officials with the Jiangxi Administrative Institute with us.

The breakfast each morning is pretty similar to the day before.  After breakfast we boarded our van and headed to a very large lake.  Driving here is insane.  In the US I would be scared to death, but so far I have not been.  They say pedestrians have the right of way, but I have not witnessed that yet.  If you are near a car you better get out of the way or you will get run over.  Cars drive in the middle of the road, they drive on the left hand side of the road (their laws are the same as the US in terms of you are supposed to be on the right side of the road).  Here, if there is open blacktop you take it.  I cannot begin to say how many close calls we had.  There is no doubt our driver is a true professional.  He also has a horn that sounds like one on a large Mack truck.  He has  a smaller horn too that he just uses for motorcycles.  There must be a million motorcycyles in this city.  They are everywhere. 

We drove two hours to a very large lake that they say has over 1000 islands.  It was very pretty and reminded me of a James Bond movie.  There is a national park on the lake that we walked around in.  We walked on a swinging bridge high over the lake.  They had screened off areas in the lake by the shore to raise fish.  Little fish and very large fish.  Very few birds in China.  It is my understanding that many years ago they were considered unclean so most of them were killed.  It is also my understanding that they got rid of anything pretty, but that thought has changed now and we have seen some very pretty flowers.  The revolution started in Nanchang, which is the City in which I am teaching.  Nanchang is in the Jiangxi Provence, which is the same province that the sister city of Brunswick is located.  In fact we have one student from our sister city.  I think it is Gangzou.  After we left the lake we drove to a nearby resort and had lunch at a restaurant in the village.

These people, for being so skinny, eat a lot.  I do not know where they put it all.  By now, I have forgotten all that we had.  I know we had fresh whole fish from the lake, spicy veggies and a host of other dishes.  On the way back to the city we stopped by locals selling peaches by the roadside.  My guess is we were the first Americans to ever buy fruit from them.  They were all amazed at my height; of course everyone has been.  I expected to get comments, but not to the extent that I have.  It has been fun.  I usually do not stand up straight, but I have tried to stand nice and tall to provide the full effect.  In class today I rested my head on the top of the doorway.  You should have seen that reaction :)  When we returned to our dorm it was about 4:30 pm and we all took a rest.  It was good to have a nap after our lake excursion.  We met at 7:00 pm and took a walk down the street to Wal-Mart.

I can now say that not all Wal-Marts are the same. Wow!  For a Sunday evening I was amazed at how many people were out.  There must have been thousands.  The most interesting thing about Wal-Mart was the food section.  They had a fresh cooked section that to me smelled like a septic tank or worse.  You come down an escalator, turn right and you are hit with this odor.  I will never forget that smell.  I have no idea what they had cooked and what was for sale, but it was not going back home with me.  They also had live turtles, frogs and eels for sale.  I cannot imagine that in the grocery store back home.  We had frog for lunch yesterday bone and all.

Apparently the Chinese consider meat next to the bone good meat.  They put it all in their mouth, process the meat and bones, then spit the bones on the table.  It is totally opposite of everything my mama taught me.  But they say when in Rome do as the Romans do.  I tried it tonight at dinner and it was very odd spitting bones on the table.  It makes me laugh just thinking about it.  The looks I got in Wal-Mart were hysterical.  I think when I retire I will be a greeter at a China Wal-Mart :)  For dinner we went to KFC and got a spicy chicken sandwich.  No diet coke in Nanchang and I am having withdrawals.  However, KFC did have ice cream which was very much a treat.  Yum!  We left KFC and came back to the dorm to get a good nights sleep for our first day of teaching.