Day 4: Finally A Post!

Sorry to be away for so long; the internet here is not what you would call reliable. Anyway, we've been here for several days, and have already made some progress on turning some land into a park.

It is quite hot here, close to 110 during the day. This means a lot of sweating, and the need for lots of water. This is bad, because tap water in China is undrinkable (even by locals), so water must first be boiled before it can be drunk. I was told the food would be mediocre to bad, but in fact it has been pretty good, if eccentric. I tried chicken foot two days ago as well as snail. The former was rather tasteless and the latter quite good.

I am somewhat of a celebrity in Gao Xiang. It is only a town of 500 people, and I am the first white person who has ever set foot in the village. This just means that everyone stares at me. The locals are very friendly, but completely incomprehensible for me, and mostly incomprehensible for my native Chinese friends. I can speak to them, because everyone understands putonghua, but anything coming back that is more complicated than one sentence needs to be translated before I can understand it. However, I have found that I have an easier time understanding children, perhaps because they speak slightly slower. We went to a convenience store last night, and there were children inside, and of course they automatically turned their attention to me. I greeted them, and they pointed at me and said "Foreigner!" and laughed. I said to them, "I am from America," and one of the girls said "America!" and ran around telling the other children in the store. Then, one of the younger boys came up directly behind me and hit me. On the butt. He proceeded to do this four or five times before we could finally leave the store. This was possibly the weirdest experience of my life.

There are usually about 2 or 3 spectators at the worksite at any given moment, and they love to chat. Most of the time they ignore me, as I am a lot of work to talk to, but a woman today made an effort to converse with me. I should interject here and say that in small talk, food is to the Chinese what weather is to us. So of course she asked me about my diet in America. She was particularly interested in how much rice I usually consumed (and here I am eating lots and lots of rice). She also said something that I would roughly translate as, "If I were your mother I would be sad to see you involved in such hard labor." I wasn't sure how to respond to this, and so I didn't.

I apologize if this seems like a rushed post, but it's late and I'm tired, and a lot has happened. I will try to post more regularly, and thus you can get a fuller picture of my experience here. Speaking of pictures, after I post this I will try to upload some, and I don't know how successful I'll be. But in case I am, the shorter Chinese guy is Eric, one of my best friends from high school, the taller Chinese guy is a friend of Eric's from Carnegie Mellon, the taller Chinese girl is also from Carnegie Mellon, and the shorter Chinese girl lives in Hangzhou, and none of us know her that well. She is very nice, although it is difficult to communicate sometimes because here English is not that much better than my Chinese.

I think that's all for now, but I hope to have another post up tomorrow. Good night.