I'm Sorry Sacajawea

It was a dark and stormy night. I had just sat down at the computer to update my blog. I had found my pictures and placed them on my desktop and I was collecting my thoughts when the storm hit. They come here with a certain ferocity that you don't really expect. In the distance lightning is constantly flashing and it just gets closer and closer until it is right on top of you. The power went out for about 20 minutes (a short time for Cheng Xian power outages) and when it came back on the internet wouldn't work. It took three days of wrangling, but we are back in business!

After our first week in school we decided to hop on the bus to Tianshui (literal translation "Sky Water") to get a few odds and ends from there, the closest large city to us. During the two-hour trip one has quite a bit of time to look out the window at the scenery. I was looking for something in particular on this trip though. A couple of nights before our trip, I was having dinner with the other foreign teachers here when one of them told me something that I couldn't believe. I had to check it out for myself.

She was right.

It is legal to grow marijuana in China to use for hemp. According to what I have been told, a person can grow one plant to use for hemp and the people are also allowed to chew the seeds as well, but smoking it is forbidden. On my bus ride I began to see all of these enormous plants lining the road. I was surprised to see this, but it was everywhere, just growing out in the middle of corn fields and in front of the village homes. I was definitely caught off guard by this revelation.

Along the road there are various small villages with people that line the main street selling food, clothing, and other items. Apparently our bus driver suddenly had a craving for walnuts and decided to pull off in one town, park the bus for about 5 minutes and buy some. This is a fairly common practice here. Bus drivers will stop to make purchases, pick up friends, drop off packages and sometimes just talk to people. While this is all going on, the bus is full of passengers who just hang out and wait for the bus to get going again. Nobody gets angry and it is sort of taken as a given here. Like doing many other things in China, it takes patience to get tasks accomplished.

The school here has purchased bikes for us as well! Mine is silver with a small luggage-type rack on the back and a basket on the front for carrying groceries. It doesn't look particularly masculine, not that there's anything wrong with that. I have named it Killer, in the hopes that my bike will feel tougher and scarier. Killer's basket will carry groceries, tools, and sports equipment. Killer will never carry flowers, dolls, or anything pink. I don't have a photo of Killer yet, but stay tuned.

In other news, I have been drafted to join the English Dept. basketball team. We play other departments and clubs on campus in a big competition. There are now six of us on the team and guess who the giant laowai playing center is! We had our first game today and we won, 87-62. It is a rather strange experience to play here because students line up to watch whatever basketball game I am playing in. They ignore the other games in progress for the most part. But that isn't the strange part. They applaud whenever I score or do anything well, and they don't really applaud for anyone else. It is unnerving to say the least.

Finally, I'll relay a funny conversation I had today with Mr. Pu. He was looking through a photo book of Idaho that I brought with me. On one page there was a photograph of a statue of Sacajawea, the Shoshone woman from Idaho who helped lead the Lewis and Clark expedition safely through the journey west and back. The following conversation transpired:

Mr. Pu: Who is this person?
Me: That is Sacajawea, a famous woman in American history.
Mr. Pu: Oh, I see. What is her name again?
Me (pointing out the spelling in the book): Sacajawea
Mr. Pu (slowly): Skank-a-ja-we-a
Me: No, no it is pronounced SAC-a-ja-we-a
Mr. Pu: SKANKajawea
Me: SACajawea
Mr. Pu: SKANKajawea
Me (giving up): Okay, good. Look at the next picture!

Oh well. You win some and you lose some.

Photos:

Photo 1: This is a large mural that is painted on the outside of one of the buildings in the market here in Cheng Xian. It is a clothing store and from what I could tell, other than the mural, it really didn't have anything to do with Smurfs (or Smurfs's) at all.

Photo 2: This is what happens when best friends cross the street together in China! (Taken in Tianshui.)

Photo 3: I saw these kids sitting on the bike and it was just too fun to resist taking a picture.

Photo 4: This is my teacher, Wang Quanyi, and I at the host family banquet. We are thinking together.

Photo 5: This one is just for Emily. It is the Hello Kitty mobile! I have seen many cars decorated on a theme like this. There was a Snoopy car, fried egg car (pictures of fried eggs all over it) and others that I can't think of now. Hello Kitty is very popular here.