June 13, 2004
We are both fine and continue to enjoy our China
adventure. This part describes our
fourth and fifth weeks of teaching, and a recent weekend (June 5-7) bike
trip. If you did not receive the first
three group letters that we sent, you can access them on Tyler’s
website ( http://home.earthlink.net/~tylerfolsom/)
Teaching
I (Fran) have now finished half of my 10 week class. Thus far, I have covered lake ecology, sources
of water pollution, and impacts of specific pollutants on fish, aquatic
ecosystems, and human health. The second
half of the class will focus on solutions - preventing pollution, cleaning up
contaminated sites, environmental education, regulations, and assessment. In each lecture, I tell stories of what has
and has not gone well in the United States,
other Western countries, China,
and other developing countries. I try to
be balanced and not point an accusatory finger at any one particular country. I emphasize that pollution problems are
global and solutions will require international cooperation. My students are well aware of the enormous
water and air pollution problems in their country and have expressed a desire
to make a difference. I hope that they
will be able to do so!
Teaching is both fun and hard work. I enjoy doing the background reading (this
sabbatical is giving me the opportunity to delve into topics of interest to
me!), synthesizing the information, and sharing it with the students. Preparing the lectures takes a lot of time –
approximately six hours outside of class for each hour in class. I teach for six hours each week and do need
about 36 hours of prep time. The first
two weeks were especially intense. From
Monday morning until Friday afternoon, I did nothing but prepare my lectures
and deliver them. Since then, I have
been able to free up one or two weekday evenings to enjoy Xi’an
with Tyler and do other things such
as keeping in touch with friends.
For those of you who are fellow Toastmasters, preparing my
lectures is analogous to preparing six one-hour Toastmasters speeches every
week! It is challenging to talk for two
hours straight. The 10 minute break
between the two lectures does not really rest my voice because I answer
individual questions then (as well as after the conclusion of the second
lecture). By the end of each two hour
class period, my voice sounds frog-like.
This was especially true this past Friday. Two of my students gave me a gift of throat lozenges;
they said it is good Chinese medicine and will prevent hoarseness. I will try them during my next class.
I really enjoy my interaction with the students. There continues to be a core group of about
15 students who sit at the front of the room, are very attentive and seem very
engaged in the lectures, and ask good questions that show that they are doing
the assigned reading and understand my English.
Several students continue to hang out after each class asking about various aspects
of life in the U.S. One day, they inquired if there was a lot of
interest in environmental protection in the U.S. I replied that interest is keen in the Seattle
area, but not in the current federal administration. They shared their opinion that Bush cares
only about getting oil from Iraq
and getting re-elected. I was impressed
with their perceptiveness! [The
propaganda system is rather different here than at home – Tyler.]
A graduate student in English translation who calls herself
Sarah (many Chinese students choose English names for themselves) is auditing
my class because she wants to practice her English comprehension and learn more
scientific terminology. Sarah kindly
volunteered to convert the rough Chinese in my bilingual PowerPoint slides
(this translation is done by computer software and thus the context is often
lost) into good Chinese. Having good
translations will be helpful to the students.
However, most of them seem to understand my English. I gave a second 10-question, multiple choice quiz which I believe was more difficult than the first
quiz. Overall, the students performed
better than on the first quiz. The
average grade was 77%, the median grade was 80%, and almost half the students
received a 90% or 100%. Nobody shared
answers with classmates this time!
Bike Trip
We had decided that it would be fun to take an overnight
bike trip. We both have our fancy
folding bikes. Since Xi’an
is in a river valley, we would go either east or west to avoid mountains. West was a logical choice, since there is a
good tourist attraction (Tang imperial tomb of China’s
only female emperor) at the right distance (80 km; 50 miles). Our plan was to leave early on Saturday (June
5) to beat the heat and traffic, stay at a hotel two nights and do sightseeing on
Sunday (June 6), then bike back on Monday (June 7) via a different route.
Our only major question was whether there was any hotel at
our intended destination. Tourists visit
the Qianling tombs, but they do it as a bus trip from
Xi’an and do not spend the
night. We asked some of our contacts at
the University about it and they tried to talk us out of going. We were prepared to go anyway, figuring that
if there was no hotel we could always take a bus back to Xi’an
for the night. On Friday, Tyler
spent some time with Gao Yuan, Dr. Feng in Urbanology and Environmental Science (Fran’s department),
and the Urbanology travel agent. Tyler
talked them into letting us do the trip, and the travel agent called around to
find a hotel. He booked us into the Qianling Hotel, but warned that they could not guarantee
the quality. We will pay 120 yuan (about $15) a night, which is a discount off the 168 yuan standard rate.
However, we got heavy rain on Thursday and Friday and it
looked like we might want to postpone the trip.
The weather report on the web promised no rain for the weekend, so we
packed on Friday night.
Saturday morning was cool and overcast with a hint of mist,
but no rain. We got rolling at 7:30 and the traffic on the way out of town
was not too bad. At about mile 9 we hit
a construction area where the detour route had turned to mud. It was nasty going, but after we had passed
it we were on the outskirts of Xianyang, which had a
wide and lightly traveled boulevard. The
pyramids were interesting. The Chinese
pyramids are not as well known as the Egyptian ones! China
has large gas stations and in this region they have large pyramidal roofs. We stopped at a number of them for bathroom
breaks. Xianyang
is the town that has the airport. We did
not go to the airport, but crossed the (very polluted)
Wei River
into town and found that it is substantial with lots of skyscrapers and
traffic. We didn’t get out of the
built-up area until about mile 20. The
biking was more pleasant once we had some farmland. We stopped at a gas station for a toilet
break and decided to stay for lunch. It
was a truck stop with a substantial restaurant where we got surprisingly good
food. We had completed 25 miles before
lunch.
We continued past roadside fruit vendors. We stopped and bought delicious apricots from
one. Peaches and nectarines were also
available. Fran started to take a photo
of Tyler alongside the road and the
friendly vendor got into the photo with Tyler. The navigation is relatively easy, since we
are following the main highway, national route 312 and know the Chinese
characters for our destination. QianXian appears to be a major town, since it is the
destination shown on all the signs since Xianyang. [Linguistic note: these are three different Xians. The city is
two syllables (each character is a syllable) meaning West Peace. The others are one syllable. In Xianyang, “Xian”
means “all” or “salty”; Yang is the same as in Yin/Yang and is used for a town
on the north bank of a river. In QianXian, “Xian” is a different character meaning county.]
About 10 miles from Qian Xian, we
stopped at the town of LiQuan
and attracted a lot of attention. LiQuan is definitely off the tourist track and the
inhabitants have not seen many foreigners.
We stopped to buy some cold drinks at a grocery store and sat on the
steps to munch. Tyler
was surprised that initially there was no one watching us, but that soon
changed. A crowd of at least 15 men,
women and children of all ages gathered around us and stared at us in
fascination as we first ate cookies, then drank orangeade, and then put on our
strange hats (bicycle helmets) and rode away on our strange bicycles. We felt like monkeys in a zoo and wonder how
they feel when people stand around watching them eat bananas, swing from trees,
and engage in their other ordinary activities of daily life.
We arrived at the town of Qian Xian at 5:30 and were about to ask for the hotel, but Tyler
noticed a large building several blocks away with 5 big characters on the roof
that looked like the name of the hotel.
He was right and we headed straight there, got checked in, got demudded, and went for dinner. We had a pleasant room, one of the nicest we
have had in China. Like most Chinese hotels, it had two single
beds. We asked about getting a room with
one big bed. It turns out that they had
one, but it was an executive suite with a living room and fancy stuffed leather
furniture. We decided we didn’t want to
pay the extra money.
We tried the hotel dining room, which was very nice. We were seated in a private room and had a
great meal. Some of the staff here know a little English, but communicating continues to be
difficult. After dinner, we had a
request to have our photos taken with three men. Two of them were wearing suits and appeared
to be hotel managers or town officials.
We went into a fancy banquet room for a suitable background and they
took some pictures. Maybe we’ll wind up
on the hotel’s VIP display.
The next day was for relaxation. We took it easy in the morning, then went out to see the tombs. We took our bikes and wound up doing 9 miles,
including the steepest climbing that we have done in China. After parking the bikes, there were lots of
steps to climb to the tomb on the top of the hill. There was a monumental approach, flanked by
sculptures of men and animals. We were a
bit surprised that was not any access to the inside of anything.
Back in town, we went out for foot massages, then back to
the dining room at the hotel. The dinner
was not as good as the previous night. Tyler
requested that the waiter suggest something good. We wound up with kidney, which was tasty if
you could get over the cultural bias. Tyler
tried some of it but Fran chose to focus on an eggplant dish instead.
Monday we biked back to LiQuan, then found a back road that would take us south where we
could connect with a different east-west main road. Being off the main road was much more peaceful
than on Saturday. We biked through farms
and small villages. The farmers were
harvesting wheat and we could see different stages: cutting it in the fields,
bundling it and hauling it in small trucks, laying the stalks on the roadway
for threshing (vehicles drive over it and help separate the stalks from the
grain), winnowing and letting the grain dry in the sun on the roadway. We had been surprised to find that large
stretches of pavement were used for drying grain, not only in the countryside,
but also at the tombs, towns and suburbs.
The farmers were also applying pesticides to their fields and plowing
their fields. It was interesting to
observe that each individual piece of fruit on the fruit trees was wrapped in
plastic. Possible functions were
protecting the fruit from insects or retaining moisture in the fruit.
Toward the end of our back road we hit an unpaved area, then
downhill to a city where we stopped for a delicious hotpot lunch in a
restaurant. It wound up being a two hour
meal, which meant that we did not have time to stop at the MaoLing
tombs. We went through the outskirts of XianYang. As we got to the edge of Xi’an,
Tyler used the GPS to navigate a
route home.
The final five miles of bicycling in Xi’an
were definitely an adventure! It was
rush hour (6:00 to 7:00 PM) and
people were not exactly rushing, but were navigating the streets in typical
(i.e. chaotic) fashion. Please allow me
(Fran) to paint a word picture. As we
mentioned in an earlier letter, there are bicycle lanes in Xi’an
but they are also used by pedestrians, motorbikes, pedalled
and motorized tricycle light trucks, taxis, and buses. No one gives anyone the right of way and all
vehicles move in both directions in the same lane and pass each other on the
left and right without signaling. Out on
the car lanes, the driver who honks the loudest has the right of way. (There are “no horn honking” signs in many
Chinese towns, i.e., a picture of a horn with a diagonal red line through it,
but this has got to be the most widely violated law in China)!
Here is what I observed while pedaling my bicycle on ONE
block of the bike lane. A woman on a
bicycle passed me on the right, seeming oblivious to my presence. A man on a bicycle passed me on the left
while talking on his cell phone (many Chinese people own cell phones nowadays);
he was balancing his bicycle with one hand while his child sat on the luggage
rack and held onto him with one hand.
Two motorbikes
approached me head-on; they did change their course about two
inches from me. A taxi decided that this
was a fine place to do a U-turn. A
tricycle carrying about 200 cabbages swayed precariously in front of me. Two men parked another tricycle, jumped down,
and proceeded to carry a table across the street. Just a normal day in the bike lanes of Xi’an! I consider it to be a great accomplishment
that I arrived home alive! Need I
mention that bicycling in Xi’an is not a good way to alleviate stress? Professional massages work much better!
(Tyler) All this
is true, but I just bike with the flow, or a bit faster than it. My favorite technique is to get behind a
motor bike (they have small quiet engines and usually do about 15 mph) and let
him or her find a path through the traffic.
If the bike lanes get too crowded, you can always move over to a vehicle
lane. Cars drive in the bike lanes and
bikes often use the car lanes! It is
chaotic, but we have not yet witnessed an accident. Lots of near misses; drivers seem to have
their stopping distance calibrated to the exact number of inches needed. While vehicles do honk and pass others, the
speeds are not high.
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