Rice planting

planting the rice

Lisa planting rice

Libby (Wang Ying and Duan's daughter

)

Well, the seasons are changing and this year, Mark and I got to partake in some different sorts of spring activities.  Recently, we had the opportunity to help our friend Duan's family in planting their rice crops for the season.  Duan's father, who has been farming his whole life, showed us how to uproot the young rice plants from the place where they had been sprouted.  Then we separated the plants into small clumps and planted them in rows pushing the roots into the mud.  It was fun squishing around barefoot in the mud with water almost up to my knees.  Duan and his family put us to shame by the speed and quality of their work.  Between me, Mark and the two Nates, we figured the total of our work equaled about the same as one of our Chinese friends.  They were thankful for our help, in spite of our slowness and we appreciated the chance to experience such an important part of Chinese culture.  Rice planting has been done this way for thousands of years and I'm sure it will continue for many more.  I'm sure I'll never look at a grain of rice the same way again.  I'm reminded of a famous Tang Dynasty poem we learned in our Mandarin class.  The English translation goes something like this...

Mark, Nate and Duan uprooting the baby rice

The peasants are weeding at noon,
Sweat falls down to the earth.
Who knew rice,
Doesn't come easily. 


- Lisa

moving day

Our wonderful host family.

Our street at night.

Well, it's been a busy week for us. Mark and I recently decided that we would like to move out of our host family and try living on our own in China for our last few months here.  Mr. Zhang (the head of the foreign affairs office at the college where we teach) offered us an apartment near campus that they reserve for teachers.  Free of charge I might add.  It was not in use this year.  We took his offer, and yesterday, we moved in.  The apartment is a little old and and musty as it hasn't been used in quite a while.  Mark and I spent a few days cleaning mold patches off the walls (with the humidity in Nanchong, everything gets mildewy very quickly) and throwing away junk from the previous occupants.  I think we now have it in livable condition and we will be quite comfortable here.  We are in a very good location; close to downtown, the market streets, our school, the bus stop, Sea Turtle, and Holly's Bakery (our western haven when we need one!).  All along our street there are little delightful little hole-in-the-wall restaurants and carts where people sell fried rice, steamed buns, sweet potatoes and various other tasty foods.  All of these things are very cheap, which is excellent as Mark and I have yet to master Sichuan cooking.  Yesterday for supper I had a big plate of fried rice with egg, vegetables and meat in it, and a piece of flat bread all for the cost of six Kuai (less than one dollar) Some of my students are planning on coming over some weekend to teach us how to make some of their favourite dishes.  Also, Mark and Nate S. and I have started going to a restaurant owned by a friend of Nate's host family on Wednesday around lunch time.  We helped them prepare some meat and vegetables and we watched them cook several dishes.  It's difficult to know how to make dishes taste like they do, as no one uses recipes.  Everyone has just grown up here knowing which spices go together with which foods. Hopefully we will pick up some Sichuan cooking techniques by the time we leave.

 Lisa

Our winter travels

So, as second semester gets underway, it dawns on me that I haven't updated the blog in well, forever and as I wonder if anyone even checks this thing any more I realize wow time has truly been flying!  I can hardly believe that my year in China is over half done.  It seems like I'm only scratching the surface of understanding anything here from cultural and linguistics to daily life.  I made a comment about my struggles with the Chinese language to a friend who has been living in China much longer than I who reaffirmed there is no way easy way to learn the language.  As she put it "you'll sweat blood and tears for every word you learn."  The language and world here is just that different.  I was pondering this and couldn't help but feel for the millions and millions of Chinese who are currently struggling to learn English so they can have a foot up in this world.  I never realized how big a blessing my language was until I started traveling and found out, you can travel all over the world with English and only with English.  Even international business is most often done in English even if there isn't a native English speaker around.  It makes me thankful for the blessing I've been given and inspires me to do my best while I'm here to share the blessing with others.  Actually, I feel rather inadequate as a teacher.  I may speak the language well but teaching that to someone else isn't exactly easy.  So you can pray that Lisa and I will have God's grace and wisdom as we teach.

At this point I realize I have been rambling without actually letting anyone know what I've been up to in the weeks even months since I last updated the old blog.  For all those of you who have been wondering "but Mark, what did you do during your break between semesters?"  I will now enlighten.  Lisa and I finished our last teaching assignment for the semester in mid January.  We were scheduled to attend PIC (a professional improvement conference with Mennonite Partners in China) for a week in mid February.  This took place in Thailand.  So we had about three weeks to travel before ending up in Thailand for our conference.  And here's what we did...

Hong Kong Skyline.

Lisa and I began our journey by heading off to Hong Kong.  There we met up with our friends (and teammates) Nate and Nate who traveled with us for the rest of our vacation.  Wow! What a difference just over thousand kilometers can make.  I went from being one of the few foreigners around to seeing foreigners and even hearing English everywhere.  I can now understand a little bit better why people stare at us in Nanchong.  At first I found myself staring at every white person I saw and thinking "they look so familiar" only to realize they didn't actually resemble any one I had ever met.  Honk Kong is a beautiful city and we very much enjoyed taking in the sites and eating the North American style food it had to offer.

I bungee jumped of this!

Next we moved on to Macau.  Macau I found out is  "the Las Vegas of the Orient".  Actually, the amount of people who visit Casinos daily in Macau puts Las Vegas to shame.  Turns out that the billions of people who live in this part of the world like to gamble too.  While Macau is also a beautiful city our main purpose in visiting Macau was to visit some friends from home, George and Tobia.  They have lived in Macau, working with Mennonite Church Canada, for many years now and Lisa and I got to know them through a small group at our Church during a time when they were on furlough and living in Winnipeg.  It was real nice to connect with them again and really neat to visit with someone we had met on our side of the world.  My highlight in Macau which I must mention was bungee jumping.  I jumped from the AJ Hackett Macau Tower on my birthday.  Turns out it's the worlds highest bungee jump.  What a rush!

Lisa on the beach in Singapore.

Our next stop was Singapore.  We were drawn to Singapore for it's beautiful views, warm weather and the beach.  After shivering for several months in our home, which was generally around 4 degrees Celsius in the winter, the beach was a wonderfully warm and relaxing break.  We saw lots of neat sites including wild monkey's, palm trees and aquariums where we got to pet stingrays and feed a variety of tropical fish.

We got to pet tigers.

Next on our tour, we went to Thailand where we had a few days of free time before our PIC conference with Mennonite Partners in China.  Thailand is also filled with beautiful sights, warm weather, and lot's of things to see and do.  We met up with some other friends from Mennonite Partners in China and stayed with them for a few days near a beautiful beach.  We rode Elephants, zip-lined in the rain forest, petted tigers, relaxed on the beach, ate excellent food and more.  I also really appreciated the PIC conference.  It was really nice to have fellowship with other believers as well as the informative presentations on teaching.  It was a good balance between learning and relaxing during our time off.  We are really glad to be a part of Mennonite Partners in China.  We love the people involved, as well as what they stand for!

After that we were back to Nanchong.  We spent our first week preparing for another semester of classes.  And we are now getting back into the full swing of teaching.  The teaching load this semester isn't quite as heavy as last and I'm hoping this will leave more time for studying Chinese and continuing to develop relationships with the people we know here.  We appreciate all your prayers very much.  I hope you have enjoyed this rather brief overview of our holiday!

God Bless
Mark

Emei Shan

The view from the top of Emei Shan

Lisa at the top of Emei Shan

We saw monkeys

Back at the van after a long hike.

Well, classes are done for the semester, grades are handed in, and Mark and I are enjoying the winter break.  Last week, Wang Ying and Duan took us and the Nates and our friend Dong Bo (he works at Sea Turtle and Nate Kelly lives with his family) on a trip for a few days.  We went to Emei Shan which is a very famous mountain and very important to Buddhists.  It's about 4000 meters high.  The first day, we drove about half way up the mountain in Duan's van.  We stayed the night in a hotel on the mountain that was very near some hot springs, so we enjoyed the evening soaking in the warmth with snow all around us.  In the morning, Mark was unfortunately ill (he always has such bad timing) so he stayed at the hotel with Wang Ying while the rest of us took a van and then a cable car up the rest of the mountain.  It was so beautiful!  We were above the clouds so there was no snow on the very top and it was quite warm and sunny.  It was a sea of clouds with other mountain tops and cliffs poking out in the distance.  I wish we had a better camera.  Ours really didn't do the scenery justice.  At about 11:00am we started hiking down the mountain.  The plan was to hike a portion of the way down the mountain where Mark and Wang Ying would meet us with the van and drive us to the hotel.  We were told that it would be a 44 kilometer hike!  After some discussion Nate and Nate and I had convinced ourselves that there must be some mistake.  Perhaps it was only 4 kilometers and something got lost in translation.  But no, after about 4 hours going up and down stone steps we realized it was actually 44 kilometers.  And once you've committed to the steps, there's no alternate way down.  It was definitely the most physically demanding day I've ever had, but it was some extremely beautiful scenery.The first portion was very difficult as the stone steps were covered in snow and ice.  It probably would have been a lot easier if I had a crazy carpet or something.  Then once we got lower, the snow melted into some soft rain, the forest was lovely and green and we saw waterfalls.  We even ran into a vicious looking family of monkeys who stole our food (fortunately we had eaten most of it already).  I heard that some people train the monkeys to pick travelers pockets, so we were glad they were just after our food.  Finally when I didn't think I could make it any further (Dong Bo had been telling us "Oh, it will only be about one more hour" for about 3 hours) we rounded the corner and saw Mark and Wang Ying.  They had gotten tired of waiting for us at the bottom and Mark was feeling much better, so they started hiking up to meet us.  It gave us all a well-needed burst of motivation to see them!  We walked back down with them and in about an hour and a half, reached the bottom.  It was dark by that point.  The whole hike down took us about 8 hours.  What a beautiful and exhausting day!  God's creation really is wonderful!

Lisa