On a Lovely Weekend and The Wonders of Technology

I forget sometimes how lucky I am to be here in the year 2010, with all the modern amenities that accompany it. My parents went to visit some family friends in Maryland a few days after I left the States, and apparently one of them lived in England for awhile when he was about my age. That was 30 years ago, and it took a month for him to send a letter home and receive a reply. It might be that if I were to communicate only through letter writing, I would have similar issues now. However, I haven’t sent a single letter since I got here. (I do intend to! I’ve written one to my grandpa, but I haven’t gotten to a post office yet.)

Anyway, with the year 2010 comes the ability to skype. Instantaneous video chatting, for free, from China to the States. Sure, it sometimes gets blurry or cuts off, but the fact is that I have the ability to feel as though I’m almost in the same room as the people I’m talking to. This morning (Saturday night in Minneapolis), I “skyped in” to a BBQ with five of my dearest friends. I felt like I was hanging out in my old backyard. It was awesome. The world is so much smaller than it used to be.

This weekend was marked by much more than a lovely skype conversation though. Friday was crazy, but in a good way. We had a “mandatory fun” scavenger hunt after classes, which meant running around the city in our school groups of four, completing mostly ridiculous tasks and trying to rack up more points than the other teams. What’s ridiculous, you might want to know? Well, I will tell you. Ridiculous means posing for a picture next to somebody welding, making somebody in your group eat a chicken foot (a very popular snack food in China—kinda the equivalent to jerky in the states), making somebody in your group eat something scarier than a chicken’s foot (we found a pig’s tail, which my Chinese co-worker said was “very nice.” I will take his word for it), finding a giant abacus, and climbing into the back of a motorized wagon (we call them truck-wagons, or “tragons”) to have our picture snapped holding pitchforks. I have these pictures and will post them shortly. Our team didn’t win, but we had a really awesome time running and cabbing around like mad, asking locals for really strange favors.

On Saturday I went for a long exploratory walk with Kristin and Yanmei. We strolled around our neighborhood, checked out a huge supermarket, and then passed by a bunch of fruit and veggie stands and the like. I think we were far away enough from the areas of town CEI fellows frequent that the presence of Westerners was harder to cloak (not that it’s easy anywhere). Case in point: when Kristin tried on a watch, we had not one, not two, but at least five people who entirely stopped what they were doing to watch the exchange. That night, we went out to dinner with some other fellows, and I got to have ice cream! (The restaurant was the one place in Lincang we’ve discovered so far that has coffee and legit ice cream).

Today I skyped with my friends first thing, and then I went for a walk up into the hills next to the school. It’s pretty amazing how you can have a perfectly paved street in China that turns, in less than one minute’s walk, to a muddy mass. All of a sudden the roads and construction sites end and fields and ponds take their place. We didn’t leave sight of the school at any moment during our walk, but it was already a very different sort of feeling.

The line between city and country is so easily blurred here. Water buffalo graze right outside the school gates, across the street from the cranes putting together upscale condos. Goats and the boys who heard them compete for road space with shiny new cars. When you walk five minutes from the school in one direction, you feel as though you’re in an urban area. When you walk the other way, you’re in farmland. It’s easy to imagine what this place looked like before this school and all of the other modern amenities surrounding it, and it’s sort of sad to see it now—lost in its lack of identity, torn between two times and two worlds.