homestay impressions

Hello everyone! On Thursday we settled in with our enthusiastic host family made up of a kind math professor, his teacher wife, their 25-year old daughter (on weekends), their nice housekeeper, and the family chihuahua. They are very generous, especially with food.

For breakfast we have fried eggs, oatmeal (w/ boiled milk), some wheat bread with jam, coffee (2 + 1 Nescafe mix), and sometimes meat. When I say fried eggs, I mean fried to a crisp. You can barely cut them with a fork, let alone chopsticks. We are becoming experts with chopsticks, though our host father is the master. He can spread jam with them and then eat the bread with them as well. For lunch and dinner we have a variety of dishes; The Chinese like for each person to have a bowl of rice, then there are many dishes (~5-6) in the center of the table for everyone to take from. They are usually awesome, from pickled cucumber to pork and green beans, many squash/zucchini veggies, ribs, and eggs with tomatoes. We are never hungry. One thing to avoid is taking the serving chopsticks and accidentally using them to eat your food while your own chopsticks sit off to the side. It was quite funny when the family realized that I realized what I was doing :)

We have been to play tennis where I made a fool of myself and the professor beat Nick soundly. For the most part, we talk, study, read, watch TV, play with the dog, and do laundry.

Today was very fun, as our host sister and the professor took us to "Folk Road" in Chengdu, which is an old section where the buildings are all black, and have beautiful wood inlay on all the walls and shutters. We had a nice lunch there, then walked around. They sell cute little teapots, and some other touristy things. When we were about to leave, I realized that we didn't see the advertised local monastery, so I asked, and we walked back to where it was. Before I could stop him, the professor was already buying us tickets, and we went in.

The Wenshu monastery contains one of the four major temples of Zen Buddhism, and is very large and beautiful. Its campus has a bookstore, library, teahouse, restaurant, and many shrines. It is enclosed by a red smooth wall, and all doorways have a big board across them that you have to step over. The stone is grooved from all of the footsteps from a couple of thousand years of people stopping to step over the threshold. There is incense to light at most shrines, whether they are statues of the buddha, towers, or bell houses. Most people there were tourists, but some were there to worship, methodically bowing before a temple or shrine. I am ashamed to say that I do not know the purpose of that, but I was impressed by a young girl in tennis shoes, bowing in reverence. Our host family is clearly a-religious, or possibly even anti-religious, as they did not even suggest seeing the monastery, though it is clearly the oldest and most beautiful place around. I was glad to see a young person seeking something beyond herself and her city, which is more than most here.

This week will be hard, with our nice language teacher who is sometimes more like a drill sergeant. Last week we learned how to bargain in a market, so it is useful. Also we had some cultural homework from a Volunteer Facilitator, a guy whose tenure with Peace Corps China is almost up; we had to take a picture with our host family, print it out, and bring it in. This was quite the assignment since it involves interaction, communication, and buying something. Also it involved money since there are no cheap photo places. We went to a photo shop which consisted of a guy behind a desk with a computer and Adobe Photoshop, as well as an individual photo printer. He took our flash disk and printed out two pictures, which ended up costing 16 yuan, or about $2.13. That is the cost of about 3 lunches out!

I put up some pictures on our picasa site listed in the link on the left, and here is a video of the courtyard where we ate lunch (my apologies if it didn't work!):