Ni hao (hello) to our family and friends.
We are thoroughly enjoying our China adventure and are catching our breath
this weekend to send you this summary of our activities starting with May 4,
the day of our arrival in Xi’an.
Some of you did not receive our first letter because our email address
book was not complete. If you missed the
first letter, you can access it via Tyler’s website
(http://home/earthlink.net/~tylerfolsom)
Tuesday,
May 4
After
lunch, Gao Yuan took us on a walking tour of
campus. There is a little store close to our hotel that sells food and
supplies. We bought a 240/120 volt adaptor and some bottled water.
Over the next few days we would go back to buy extra hangers, a dish towel and
detergent, laundry soap, a shaving mirror (there is no electricity in the
bathroom, which has a nice big mirror), tissue, chopsticks, juice, fruit and milk.
The campus
is quiet, since there is a one week holiday following May 1. The campus
has two gates and a fence that separates it from the surrounding
neighborhoods. There are grass, trees, flowers, and a fountain (which reminds us of the Drumheller fountain on the University of Washington campus). Many of the
buildings are high rise, typically to 7 stories or so. The layout is more
like an American campus than a European one. Beyond the student dormitories are
sports facilities – concrete ping pong tables, basketball courts, a track and soccer field. They have a large outdoor
swimming pool which will be filled with water at the end of this month. We look forward to swimming there. Campus rules are .reminiscent of American
college campuses in the 1950s and early 1960s; there are separate dormitories
for men and women and a curfew of 11:30 PM.
Electricity is shut off in the dorms at that time.
In our
hotel (which fortunately does not shut off the electricity), we have a small,
but clean and comfortable suite with a bedroom and a living-room. The
latter has a couch, bookshelves, a desk, low table, and a chair. Off the living-room
is a small kitchen with refrigerator, sink, microwave, hotplate and cabinets.
There is a small bathroom on the bedroom side. The only glitch is
that we were promised a double bed but have two twin beds. The room with
the big bed was not available and we may move to another room in a few
days. Thus we only partially unpacked.
Because our apartment is in a hotel, there is maid service every
day. Not needing to cook, clean, or
commute to work will free up time for us to do our work and experience the new
culture in which we are living.
We had a
buffet dinner in the cafeteria serving the hotel and were surprised to find out
that the university is paying for our meals during the first week of our
stay. Afterwards, we pay five yuan (0.60) each for breakfast and 10 yuan
($1.20) each for lunch and dinner. We
also plan to sample Xi’an’s many wonderful restaurants. Northwest University is paying for our housing,
transportation expenses between Seattle and Xi’an, and one trip within China as well as Chinese-scale
salaries. We are very pleased with our
work arrangements.
In the
evening we went over to the Computer Science building where Tyler has work space. We were not
able to connect to our own e-mail, but sent our first installment using one of
the grad student’s accounts (that explains the unfamiliar email address in the
message). We went to bed early tonight
due to some jet lag from the 15 hour time difference, but are getting onto
local time reasonably quickly.
Wednesday,
May 5
We have our
folding bikes put together. We went by bike with Gao
Yuan and her cousin to the Big Goose Pagoda. The traffic took some
getting used to. We followed wide boulevards that have bike lanes at the
edges. The only problem is that the bike lanes get used by pedestrians,
bikes (both directions), motor scooters, pedaled tricycle trucks, taxis, cars
and buses. The traffic was heavy in places and we were often traveling at
4 mph.
We had
visited the Little Goose Pagoda when we were in Xi’an 20 years ago. It did not have
much besides the tower that we climbed to get a view of the city. At that
time, farmland started at the pagoda.
The Big
Goose Pagoda is a bit farther out of town, but now all the land is urban, with
lots of high rise hotels, office buildings and apartments. The Big Goose
is much more extensive than the Little Goose. There is a large temple complex
with many buildings and attractive landscaping. One of the temple
buildings had a gift shop and Tyler bought two VCDs
of Buddhist chants from a monk. They cost 8 RMB
each (a bit less than a dollar), The Video
Compact Disk is a Chinese format, and I (Tyler) wasn’t sure if I could play
it. Back at the hotel, I loaded it in my computer and found that it
includes a program for playing it. It is something of a cross between a
DVD and an audio CD. It basically does a slide show while it plays the
music. I am pleased with them.
We climbed
to the top of the pagoda, which was fairly crowded. There were nice views
from the top, but no sign of farm land. This temple complex was built to
hold hundreds of Buddhist sutras that were brought here from India by a monk who made a 12 year
journey. After he returned, he spent the next decade translating them to
Chinese. The emperor had the temple built as a library for the sutras.
After we
finished visiting the pagoda, Gao Yuan took us to
lunch at a hot pot restaurant (Northwest University is also paying for our local
sightseeing and accompanying restaurant meals this week.). She used her
cell phone to arrange for her husband to join us for lunch. In 1984, few
people in China had telephones. Now many people have cell phones and walk
down the street talking on them, just like at home. Gao Yuan’s husband is a law student at Northwest University and plays on their basketball
team. He is the tallest Chinese person
we have met thus far (about 5’10”). In
general, Chinese people are shorter and smaller-boned than Caucasian
Americans. At 5’6”, Fran is taller than
most of the women and is the same height as the average Chinese man. She feels very large-boned here. Of course Tyler is REALLY tall here.
Back to our
hotpot lunch (which Gao Yuan said was a local
specialty): Each table has a central soup pot where vegetables and broth are
cooked. Meat is added to the mix. The meat was fatty cuts of pork,
plus some spam-like stuff. It wasn’t real appetizing and did not appear
to be thoroughly cooked. They did add some beef, which was somewhat
better. Fran got a noodle dish instead.
We returned
to campus and had dinner in the cafeteria. There is a good variety of
well-cooked dishes at each meal – meats, tofu, seafood, vegetables, rice,
noodles, and breads. The cafeteria food
is not as good as our welcoming lunch yesterday, but is much better quality
than the dorm food from our college days.
We met at 7:00 PM with Dr. Cao
Mingming, the chair of the Environmental Science
Department where Fran will teach. Dr. Cao was accompanied by the Vice-Chair of the department and
Dr. Fang, a young professor. We were
surprised that they came to our suite rather than meeting us at the
Environmental Science building, but meetings in hotel suites seem to be common
in China.
Our suite has separate doors to the bedroom and living-room, so we were
able to just admit them to the living-room.
The three men were very cordial and welcoming. Dr. Fang is the only one who speaks English,
so he functioned as the interpreter between Fran and Dr. Cao. This meeting clarified Fran’s teaching
assignment, which is one class titled “Environmental Ecology, Urban
Environment, and Environmental Evaluation.”
Fran showed her draft syllabus to her new colleagues. Since no one seemed to object and the title
is broad, she figured that she can go ahead with teaching what she wants to
(lake ecology and impacts of water pollution on fish, aquatic ecosystems, and human
health).
After the
meeting, we enjoyed an evening stroll in the neighborhood. There was a department store across from the
southwest corner of the old city walls. We went inside and were amazed at
the abundance of consumer goods. Very different from 20 years
ago! The store felt like the Bon Marche in downtown Seattle!
There were lots of fashionable clothes, cosmetics, electronic gadgets,
reclining chairs, toys, dishes and house wares, with a food supermarket on the
top floor. We bought some bowls, yogurt and juice.
Thursday,
May 6
Today was a
work day. We spent most of the day pulling together material for our
classes. Our colleagues in the Computer
Science and Environmental Science departments refer to us as the “foreign
experts.” This is both validating and
scary; we definitely want to be well-prepared for our classes next week.
Most other
residents of our hotel are foreign students from Japan, Korea, and the Philippines.
Some are traditional undergraduate age, while others are adults who are
here to study Chinese. There are also
two other Visiting Professors from the U.S. – Maureen from New York City who
has taught English in China for the past 18 years including 13 years at
Northwest University and Toni from Wichita, Kansas who is teaching geology and
English for three months at Northwest University. She arrived here one month before us. Both Maureen and Toni are politically
simpatico, fellow adventurers and travelers; Toni
spent seven years working with Jane Goodall in
Africa.
This
evening, we took a long walk in the old walled city. The walls were originally built in 1370 and
have been recently restored. We strolled
through a night fruit and vegetable market and through some narrow residential
streets. We look forward to biking on
the walls.
Friday, May
7
We worked
in the morning. We both need a computer and our lap-top is in constant
use. There are quite a few computers at the Computer Science department
(actually it is Visualization Technology) that run Windows, but they all use
the Chinese version of Windows. They took a brand new computer out of the
box for Tyler and set it up in English. It’s a nice machine:
Pentium 4 at 2.5 GHz with 74 GB hard drive. It puts his DigiPen office
computer to shame.
In the
afternoon, we biked with Gao Yuan (she has been very
kind and helpful to us) and a friend of hers to the History Museum.
We stayed there all afternoon until it closed at 6:30. It was fascinating! It
is devoted to items from this region. It starts with a skull of “Lantian man” found near Xi’an and dating back to 1,150,000 years
ago, and Paleolithic stone tools from about 100,000 years ago. Next comes Neolithic pottery, about 5,000 years old. The
tools and pottery are amazingly well-preserved!
The main collection is from the period when Xi’an was the capital of the empire,
about 200 BCE to 800 CE. There are some incredible ceramics and
bronzes. Gao Yuan and her friend shared
information about Chinese history that enhanced our appreciation for the objects
that we were seeing.
After the
museum, we biked into the center of the old city and parked our bikes in a lot
near the Bell Tower. Bicycle theft has become a
problem in China, so it is advisable to pay an
attendant to watch your locked bike. The
old city sure looks different than it did in 1984! The Bell Tower and Drum Tower, which are the landmarks of Xi’an dating back to the 14th
century, look incongruous alongside modern shopping malls and upscale
hotels. The simple hotel where we stayed
in 1984 has long since been replaced by a glitzy descendant. An underground passageway enables pedestrians
to cross safely from one side of the main, car-clogged arterial to the
other. The four of us had a good dinner
at a dumpling restaurant and then took a walk in the Muslim district of the old
city. There is a lively night market
here, with some snacks that look and smell delectable (e.g. lamb kebabs and
freshly baked flat bread) and others that are less appealing (e.g. sheep brains
that are scooped up in a paper cup and given to you with a spoon). We are adventurous eaters, but the latter
crosses the line for us.
We biked
back to Northwest University after dark. We do not have lights on our bikes; neither
does anyone else in Xi’an. Gao Yuan
selected a well-lit route, but we still had to be very attentive to the volume
and variety of traffic in the “bike lanes.”
Fran would NEVER bicycle in these traffic conditions at home, but when
in Rome…..
Saturday,
May 8
Things are
back in full swing on campus today. The holiday has ended. Classes
at the university run Monday through Saturday. The twin beds were taken
from our room and replaced by a nice double bed. That provides a little
more space in the bedroom and a convenient place to park Fran’s bike. Tyler’s fits nicely in the kitchen.
We got our
teaching schedules today. Tyler teaches Computer Graphics and
Machine Vision. They each meet twice a week. Each class is a double
period, with 50 minutes of teaching, a 10 minute break, and then another 50
minutes. Thus Tyler is in class 8 hours per week. Computer
Graphics is a class of 240 students that meets Tuesday and Thursday
afternoons. The Machine Vision class has 78 students and meets Wednesday
afternoon and Friday morning. It is located on the new campus, which is
3.2 miles from here. Those students are part of the Software Institute,
which is housed on the new campus.
Tyler continued with getting his computer set up, getting
Microsoft Windows and Office installed.
Fran’s
class meets for two hours on Tuesday evening, Thursday morning, and Friday
afternoon. Fran met another young
professor, Dr. Wang, in her classroom and reviewed the use of the audiovisual
equipment. There is a Power Point projector.
Fran has intended to learn how to prepare Power Point slides for
years. This is a good opportunity to
become more computer-literate! Her class
has 60 students, half environmental science majors and half environmental
engineering majors. The students are
undergraduate juniors; about 10 graduate students will audit the class as well.
Both of us
worked hard today on preparing our first lectures. We are glad to have arrived in Xi’an one week before starting to
teach. Instead of using one textbook,
Fran is pulling relevant material from about 15 different books, reports, and
journal articles. Dr. Wang will assign a
graduate student to photocopy the reading assignments each week.
Sunday.
May 9
Tyler did a 40 mile bike ride this morning while Fran
worked. He was eager to get out of the city and move at a faster
pace. At about 6 miles to the south, there is a motorway
interchange. South from there becomes suburban, with occasional high rise
upscale condo towers. About 10 miles out is rural land. After
biking south for 16 miles, a left turn led through a village, then rejoined a
main road that paralleled the mountains to the south, now much closer.
Visibility tends to be quite limited here. There is lots of dust in the
air in addition to effluent from factories.
There were new, multi-lane highways with light traffic. The East-West
road ended at the point that another main road to the north began.
Following this back to town led to the Xingji temple
that few tourists visit.
Meanwhile,
back at Northwest University, Fran was preparing her first
lecture. Dr. Wang stopped by at 10 AM to pick up the reading assignments
for the first week and returned them in one hour, assuring Fran that the
students would receive copies of these materials before Tuesday. We are both impressed with the quick followup on our requests.
Tonight, we
went to dinner at the same restaurant where we had our delicious welcoming
lunch on Tuesday. The waiters and
waitresses did not speak English, but kindly assisted us in selecting a
delicious lamb with eggplant dish and a string bean dish. We used our Chinese phrase book and menus
that we brought from Chinese restaurants in Seattle, and pointed to various characters
in both to find out which dishes were available.
Monday, May
10
This was a
full work day for both of us. We are
excited about starting to teach tomorrow.
A group of professors from Mary Grove College in Detroit is staying at our hotel for four
days. The group leader is originally
from Chengdu (one of the cities that we might
visit) and is giving us advice on what to expect in Chinese university classes.
Miscellaneous
Observations
It is
fascinating to be back in this ancient cradle of civilization (and emerging
world power) and see the many changes that have taken place during the past 20
years. China is more modern, affluent,
capitalistic (private enterprise has trumped the Communist economic system), and outward-looking. In 1984, most people rode bicycles. Now the streets are full of taxis and cars,
although there are still many bicyclists.
It is still common to see girls and women walk arm-in-arm or holding
hands with their female friends – likewise with boys and men. What has changed is that couples are publicly
affectionate with each
other. Chinese children are still
adorable and well cared for by doting parents and extended family; fathers are
still very actively involved in the care of their children.
The weather
in Xian has been pleasant thus far – sunny and in the 70s or low 80s most days
(like July in Seattle).
However, Xi’an has a very dry climate and is an inland city, so the
weather pattern resembles that of eastern Washington rather than the Puget Sound region. Summers here are very hot; we have been
warned to expect temperatures in the 90s or even over 100 in July. Our apartment and classrooms are
air-conditioned, so it should be tolerable.
The swimming pool will help too.
The sky is
often hazy due to the poor air quality from automobile exhaust, factory
emissions and dust. There is a lot of
new construction in Xi’an and many uncovered piles of fugitive dust. I am sure that the particulate concentrations
in the air significantly exceed U.S. air quality standards! Neither Tyler nor I are feeling any ill
effects from the air pollution, but someone who is allergic to dust could be
really uncomfortable here. There have
been a few brief periods of rain; the air is cleaner and the sky is bluer
afterwards. People do wash and sweep the
steets and floors frequently.
We will
sign off for now so we can send this email letter. Stay tuned for our next installment, which
will describe our first week of teaching and our further explorations in Xi’an.
Zai jian (goodbye for now)!
Fran and
Tyler