Day 9

One thing I haven’t mentioned are comments about our daily routine. Every morning we have a Western breakfast, and then a traditional Chinese lunch and dinner. Breakfast is a gamble that depends upon the hotel’s interpretation of what “Western” means, but usually the only scrambled eggs available are the bits I find in the fried rice. Basically, we’re eating Chinese food 3 times a day, and some of our participants are not happy. (I’ll have to admit that I like bok choy and tofu, but not necessarily for breakfast.) We eat lunch and dinner at big round tables with a giant Lazy Susan in the middle. The servers usually bring out 8-10 different dishes, plus rice, soup, and watermelon (always the dessert). The food is always cut into bite-size pieces so that you can just pluck it off the plates with your chopsticks as the Lazy Susan spins around. (I’m losing weight, because I’m still not that adept with chopsticks.)


One inconvenience is the water – you can’t drink it. We get 2 bottles of water a day (one in the hotel and one on the bus) and a glass of warm coke or beer with meals. The biggest problem for me is remembering not to drink the water from the faucet when I’m brushing my teeth.


Another treat is the toilets. Chinese toilets are called “squatters,” because that’s how you use them. Public toilets are readily available, but they don’t provide toilet paper and soap so we all carry around little baggies with our own.


We started this day with a ride down the Yellow River in a hovercraft. You can’t take a traditional boat down this section of the river, because it is so muddy and shallow (literally, there were times when we were traveling across the mud flats). This river is about 15 feet above the city, so every time the river floods, the town floods as well. We went a ways down the river, and then stopped for a quick break. Several locals rode up on their horses and gave people rides.


We took a quick tour through the Zhengzhou Yellow River National Park. There were 9 large urns on the central plaza (3-legged urns are used for holding water and 4-legged urns hold meat). There was a big gong that some of the students rang by banging a big log against it (it cost 1 yuan per bang). There were 2 beautifully carved heads high on top of the mountain (kind of like a Chinese Mount Rushmore). We could have climbed up to them if we would have had more time (and energy!).


After lunch we headed to the train station for a 4½ hour trip to Nanjing. This wasn’t a bullet train, but it still ran on a tight schedule (only about 8 minutes to get everybody on and off).