The last post about camp...

I promise.  Then on to the travelogue.

On the last day of camp, we split the kids up into three teams.  We had them perform an "Amazing Race" kind of competition, where they went from station to station and performed tasks.  They had a camp volunteer with them who took pictures as they performed the tasks.  The pictures were then put onto a computer and shown at a rally.
Each task had something to do with the 10 days at camp.  It may have been a English class vocabulary word or something from a rally.  It was a super fun, super successful activity designed by the camp volunteers.

Pyramid by the Camp sign.  

Making words from the nature curriculum vocabulary.  Getting these kids to lie on the grass was a feat!

"Flower"

Spoon Race

 

One of the songs we had in the rallies was "Moose"  The kids were supposed to make this volunteer's hair stand up like moose antlers.  He was a totally great sport about it.

Finding bugs.

Nature beauty queen.

Dressing up and posing like a nativity scene.

Through the tire

Muscle men and women.

The kids were tired, hot and thirsty at the end but it was a fun way to end our time there.

                                      

Why we don't drive in China.

He came straight at us.

The Talent Show

On the last night of camp, we graduated our students and they did a talent show.  Talent shows are a big thing in Chinese culture and there is no talent too small to be showcased.  Everyone enthusiastically participated and it was a fun (but very long night).

First we graduated our students.

Noomin, a Mongolian woman who works at the camp was the MC.  She was fun and enthusiastic.

The sulky girls sang.

"Alice" played her morin khuur.  It was lovely.

"Bob" and "Tom" did martial arts.  These two boys are best friends and were total crack-ups in their dimness.  They loved Paul and told me that he was "very clever."

Aren, the herdsman's daughter sang for us. She lives at the camp in the summer and spends her days and sometimes her nights with the campers.  She played our daughter when we did a  play and was really sweet and fun to be around.  She had a beautiful singing voice.

 

Singing in Chinese                                                                Singing in Mongolian.

                        

There was a short play.

Mongolian Rap- who knew?

Mongolian dancing.

A presentation in English on the Mongolian grasslands.

Afterwards, Elisabeth tried on the Mongolian dress.  Beautiful!

The train and the bus.

We don't have a car in China.  Sometimes I miss driving but I don't miss the insurance and repair costs.  Or gas prices.
People in China do have cars but for long distances, most take buses or trains.  They are cheap, efficient and pretty comfortable.
For our trip to Inner Mongolia, we took a hard sleeper train.  Hard sleeper doesn't mean that you sit on wood!  It has to do with number of bunks in the compartments and a few other things.  Hard sleepers are actually pretty comfortable and very cheap.  We went from one side of the country to the other for less than $30.00 each.
On our trip up, we shared a cabin with our friend and her daughter.  That made our cabin Americans 5 and Chinese person !  We shared with a very nice, very pleasant student who was going home to his town near Hai La Er.  He had studied in Japan, just did an internship in ShenYang and was headed home for the summer.  He was a little nervous around us and spent most of his time with his friends in another compartment.  He turned down our offer of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
The trains become kind of mini-communities.  You have  a communal sink near the squatty potty.  There people bathe, brush teeth and so on.  The squatty potties are kept pretty clean but you do drop your tp directly through the hole onto the track.  You are not allowed to use the toilets when the train stops in a station. Best advice I can give- never walk on train tracks!
In your cabin, there is a large thermos of hot water that is regularly replaced.  There is a dining car but most people bring their own food.  Workers walk up and down the narrow aisle selling noodles and water.
In a hard sleeper, each cabin has six bunks.  They range in price, depending on location.  The bottom bunk  usually has people sitting on it but the person who has bought the bottom bunk can ask people not to sit there.  That can be a problem as you can not sit up in the middle or top bunks.  That is why it is good to travel with friends. There are some seats in the aisle that are okay.
Our train wasn't air conditioned which is pretty unusual.  On the trip up, we left at 1:30 in the afternoon and gradually rode into coolness.  On the trip back, we left at 7:30 at night and rode all night in heat and then had a warm and sticky ride until 2:30 in the afternoon.  That was miserable.  At night, they turn the fans off and close the windows.  It gets hot.
So, basically, you get on the train and read, knit or play games. We spent a lot of time just looking out the window at this endlessly fascinating country.  Around 10:00, the lights go out and everyone goes to bed. On the way up, we didn't sleep.  On the way back, we slept.
The trip us was fun and relaxing because we were with friends.  The trip back was not as fun as our friends weren't with us and we shared a cabin with other people.  They were nice and friendly but it feels awkward to sleep with total strangers!

Train station in ShenYang.

Getting on the train.

The hallway.  There are seats next the windows and small tables. You can see how narrow the hallway is and get a sense of the layout of the cabins.

Middle bunk- actually pretty comfortable.

Train station - Hai La Er

Train station Man Zhou Li

The Bus

When we left the camp, we took a long distance bus to Man Zhou Li.  In Chinese culture, the community sends people off, so many of the camp workers came and stood by us on the side of the road to wait for the bus.  When the bus came, they told us that there were no seats to Man Zhou Li but that seats would open up in about 45 minutes.  Still very American in our thinking, we said we didn't mind waiting for another bus.  No other bus, they said!  You just sit in the middle!  So we sat on camp seats in the aisle until enough seats opened up for us to sit.  This rotation went on for the whole ride as people went on and off the bus.

The bus route goes along the China/Russia border and goes through beautiful grasslands.  I was thrilled to see bird after bird flying around.  Living in a big city leads to nature deprivation!

A very nice woman sat next to me and offered me a cucumber.  I really didn't want it but it was rude to refuse.  She thoughtfully bit the top off for me!  I bit around the top so that I could take the top off and hid that piece of the cucumber between the seat and the wall of the bus.  After a few bites, I gave it back.  Then she gave me sunflower seeds and we ate together.  It was very warm and hospitable!

I love hot pot ...

but I am uncertain about eating here.

If I ate here, would I be eating whale meat?  

Or, if I ate here would I look like a whale?

The character's accurately portray the English.

I'm not sure I want to know!

Let's talk about spitting.

I interrupt the long line of posts about our fabulous two weeks at the camp to talk about something more controversial.  Let's talk about spitting.
People in our part of China spit.  A lot.  We noticed that in Beijing there is less spitting.  But more nose picking. (These observations are based on a completely non-scientific method of my personal observations).
There is a strong belief here that phlegm is unhealthy and needs to get out of the body.  So people hack and spit up their phlegm.  Men and women of every age.  We wake up to the sound of people spitting.  People spit when they are on bikes.  When they are walking.  When they are smoking.  On bus floors.  On the train.  They also blow their noses through their fingers onto the ground.
Do I hate it?  Honestly, yes.  It's dirty.  There is active TB in China that can be spread by spit.  Spitting is gross to me.  The only spitters that I know of in the US are baseball players and farmers.
However, did I come to China to teach people that spitting is gross?  Not at all.  So whose problem is it?  Actually, aside from being a serious health issue, the problem is mine.  I have to choose to ignore, to not hear, to not react.  It gets easier with time, but it can still be a struggle for me.
There is a different cultural issue that I have no problem opposing.  I have no problem with telling people that they can not take pictures of our daughter.  Yes, I know that I put pictures of her on the blog.  But that is with permission.

When we first came to China in 2007, we were surprised to be stopped by people asking to take her picture.  We said yes to the girls and no to the boys.  We weren't really sure why they wanted the pictures.  Since then we have learned that it's not an uncommon thing to take pictures of complete strangers.  Especially foreigners.  Now that we live in a less touristy place, the picture issue is less common.  But last week on a bus, a boy took a picture of Elisabeth without permission.  At the train station, a girl trained her camera on her.  As our daughter turned away, we told the girl that she didn't want her picture taken.  She kept trying and we kept telling her no.  She finally stopped and then her father picked up the camera and tried to take a picture.  This really enraged me.  We do believe that our daughter has the right to say no to pictures.

One final cultural thing-a kind of neutral issue for me.  Babies here rarely wear diapers.  It's something that crosses socio-economic lines.  They usually wear split pants.  You often see babies in this position.

This mother is holding her baby in the position to urinate.  You can see the puddle.  We see this all the time.  A mother even held her baby like this on the train to let it urinate on the floor of the train.  It's apparently not considered unclean as the two men and boy in the picture walked right through the urine afterwards and so did the mother.  

Surprisingly, this doesn't bother me all that much.  Maybe because it is baby peepee.  I am not sure it's all that worse than the western tendency to be so afraid that our children will be psychologically damaged by toilet training at an early age.  Is it less gross than three or four year olds in diapers?  I'm not sure.

More language viewings.

Language continues to be an endless source of fascination for us.  Some of it is poorly translated or semantically incorrect.  Even more fascinating are the different languages represented here.  Here a  couple of examples from our time in Inner Mongolia.

The bus station in Hai La Er in Mongolian, Chinese and English.

Hotel near the camp (road goes to Russia) in Mongolian, Chinese, Russian and English.

Store with multi-lingual signs.

Bus station in Man Zhou Li on the Russian/Chinese border.

In our hotel in Man Zhou Li.  Chinese, English of a sort and Russian.

This name cracked us up.

Chinese,Mongolian, Korean and Russian in Man Zhou Li.

We ate at this Korean restaurant in Man Zhou Li.  In spite of the pictures of Korean food and the woman in the Han bok, in the upper left hand corner it says "Japanese" in English.

Didn't buy this.

After all the rice we ate the last two weeks, this might not have been a bad thing to buy.

Does this hotel sign look familiar to anyone used to staying in low cost hotels in the USA?

We confess- we ate there.