And the Band Played On...

The band had broken out in the strains of "Nearer, My God, to Thee." Moody saw all this in a vision that filled his brain, while his ears drank in the tragic strain of the beautiful hymn that the band played as their own dirge, even to the moment when the waters sucked them down.

Sinking of the Titanic by Logan Marshall

This was a looong week! We began teaching “model school” with real-live Chinese students in real-live sweltering classrooms with 6 fans pushing the heat (and all of my teaching materials) around the room. The students were great though. They think that I am very enthusiastic and seem to enjoy the change from the traditional Chinese teaching style.

On Thursday a student died from heat exhaustion at another university here in Chengdu. They say that this is the hottest it has been in 30 years in the city, so the powers that be decided that students could go home for the rest of the summer if they wanted to. We heard rumors about it on Friday. Today our classes were wiped out. Many teachers have few or no students remaining. Naturally, we wanted to know what to do. We were told to keep on going as best as we could. Much like the band on the Titanic, we keep going amidst the chaos. Whenever we encounter something here that we don’t understand we have jokingly taken to saying “Hey, that’s China!” One of the lessons we are all learning early is to roll with the punches and work through the problems. Getting upset doesn’t help.

I was stuck in the middle of the biggest rainstorm that I have ever seen. Torrents of rain caused a flowing river down the middle of the road and lightning and thunder were simultaneous. It was so loud that every time thunder sounded all of the alarms on the little cars around here produced a symphony of beeps and squawks. Angie (another volunteer) and I waited for awhile and made a dash for it. I sprinted 200 yards and looked like I had been dunked underwater. The good side was that I was finally cooled off for once and the rest of the day was pretty cool too.

On Saturday it was field trip day. We hopped on the bus and went to the train station and pretended to buy a ticket out of the city. Then we went to the bus station and did the same thing. It was an interesting experience. After that we went to barter at a market. My watch broke so I went to buy another one. I have discovered that everyone likes to watch the laowai try to deal with people, so we ended up being traveling entertainment. At one store a man popped his head in, saw what was going on and said “You are very handsome,” to me and then walked out. Strange…..but...

Hey, that’s China.

P.S. Some of you asked about the song "Mouse Loves Rice." Here is the song and a copy of the lyrics (in pinyin, and in English.) Now you too can sing Chinese love songs to complete strangers!