Schedule tinkering?

By Kevin

Sometime earlier this week, rumors began swirling that the school might try to end the semester a little early. “I think the school wants to save money,” said one student. “They won't have to pay for heat if there are no classes.”

But naturally, that doesn't mean fewer classes, it just means they'll be clumped closer together for awhile. Word is, they want to make up a week of classes on the weekends so that students and teachers can go home early and have a long Spring Festival holiday.

“We will finish classes before Christmas,” another student said, excitedly.

So it might be an adaptation of what they'll do sometimes before a holiday, when we make up Thursday's classes on Saturday and Friday's classes on Sunday, resulting in the famed Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Thursday, Friday schedule.

Another student asked Christina: “Will we have class this Saturday? Our instructor said we would.”

Naturally we don't know. We are generally the last to know anything like this. But seeing as how it is now Thursday night, I'm hoping they don't wait much longer to make a decision.

Not sure just yet if this means they'll want us to have classes basically every day for three weeks straight, without a break or if they plan to shift things around so we just make up one day of classes each Saturday for several weeks in a row.

But, all said, it probably all amounts to nothing for us: our contract says we get two day weekends, so probably our organization will insist on the school holding us to that. I have a feeling everybody else is gonna be staggering by Christmastime.

Some Random Comments

by Ruth

Families

Last week in my Oral English lesson on family, I discovered that one student has six siblings and that another has a grandmother who is 105 years old!

Book

Someone sent Kevin and I a surprise book package, which is really one of the best kind of packages we could ask for. I have started reading my beautiful new book which is called There Is No Me Without You. It is the story of the AIDS epidemic in Ethiopia and one Ethiopian woman who started taking in some of the thousands of resulting orphans. It is really interesting and one of those convicting books that makes you think, "Why the crap do we always ignore what's going on in the world?" It is also pretty long, which makes me happy because it will last for a long time.

Heat

This weekend, the heat was turned on! Having never had heat in China before, I was a tiny bit skeptical of it actually happening, but here it is! The apartment is almost too warm now, and I even cracked open a window. I love it…

Party

Last night I went to a party held for several departments. Parties in China usually mean lots of performances. All the foreign teachers were separately urged to come to the party, usually several times, so we felt like we’d better make an appearance. When we arrived, they said, “Oh, you will give a performance, right?” I can’t say this was completely unexpected. We can rarely get away without giving a performance, whether we volunteer to or not. We sang a song (God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen…Christina and I have established a tradition of singing one Christmas song every Sunday because it seems like a shame to wait until December. So that song was fresh on our minds.) After we sang our song, we prepared to slip out (I still had to finish my big huge research paper and was starting to feel bad from a cold). It was not to be. “Stay for a game! We need you to take part in a game!” So we took part in a game. Then we sprinted for the door before anyone else could stop us. Sometimes it feels like people are just so…demanding.

Rat

Today there was a rat in my class. Anyway, I’m pretty sure that’s what it was. Either that or the worlds biggest roach and I would definitely prefer the latter. There was a pile of papers and trash in the corner by the doorway (why, I’m not sure). Just as I started teaching, as the students got all quiet during a listening activity, I started to hear loud scurrying sounds. I looked over and the papers were shaking and moving around. Outwardly I was expressionless. Inwardly I was flipping out a little bit. Sounds of chomping and scurrying kept emanating loudly from the shaking pile. Which, I might add, was only a few feet away from me. I walked to the other side of the classroom and stayed there during the entire rest of class. The rat never came out (thankfully, although that could have made for a very interesting uproar). After a little bit it got quiet. Maybe it fell asleep, maybe it found a hole to retreat into. The students never noticed anything, unless they wondered at my nervous glances toward the corner.

To end on a more pleasant note, there are no rats in our heat filled apartment. That is always good news.

Part 2: Yangzhou to Nanjing to Weinan

by Ruth
As we rode from the train station through the new part of town, I exclaimed, “I don’t recognize any of this!” That’s what happens when you leave a Chinese city for a few years. New buildings crop up all the time in the endless process of construction and modernization. I had sent a message to Candace, one of the students I was closest with in Yangzhou, so when we got to the campus she came running to meet us. She helped us check into our hotel and then we went to see some other students. That’s when the haggling began.

There were two classes of students that I became closest with during the two years I taught them, and they both wanted time with me. “We are fighting over you,” Candace said. After a few minutes of back and forth arguments in Chinese, the other students said, “We won!” Candace agreed to meet up with us later. We stood around outside for a while as more students were summoned from their studies and joined the group. When it got too cold, the students lead us into the empty cafeteria where we sat around to talk. The students were strangely subdued, considering that in my class, they would usually get so loud and rowdy I was afraid we were disturbing the whole buildings. They hadn’t been speaking English much lately though, and perhaps they were feeling shy. On the other hand, they all told me, “You are more talkative than before!” Several of the students wanted to take us to lunch, and after various discussions and negotiations, all the others begrudgingly excused themselves. After lunch, the students headed back for their daily rest and Kevin and I collapsed in our hotel room. Even a good night’s sleep on a train doesn’t turn out to be quite adequate.

We were able to see a lot of students during the weekend, and even ran into some I wasn’t expecting. Several students from the Guang Ling campus happened to be on the main campus for a class and walked by as I was standing outside. I saw several younger students I taught as well. Some of them were very surprised to see me, but others said, “We heard you would be in town.” News travels fast when foreigners are involved.

That evening, we met Candace and her classmate Sabrina for dinner. We walked to the restaurant because it was a pleasant evening and only about thirty minutes away. In China, anything less than an hour is totally walkable. As we walked, Sabrina told us about all her recent accomplishments and all the foreigners she had been meeting. She does have the best English of any student I know. She reprimanded us for spending too much money on a hotel. “Next time, you can get me to find a hotel for you and I will find one for much less.” I was reprimanded a lot this weekend, which was a strangely good sign. In China, advice and rebukes are used to show care for another person. It takes some getting used to, since our automatic American response is “it’s none of your business!” I have been learning instead to dish it out with the best of them, and am starting to realize how much I enjoy giving unsolicited advice. I told Sabrina she needed to be more humble. I gave another student relationship advice. I told many students to wear more layers and buy some gloves. And they loved it.

The restaurant we went to was one of our favorites. Candace and Sabrina proceeded to order seven dishes for the four of us, showing us how much they valued us. Even though many of the dishes in Weinan are the same, the flavors are rather different – spicier instead of sweet. My taste-buds were happy to return to the sweet flavors they had come to love. We ate and ate and when we couldn’t eat anymore, we walked back to the school.
All the students from Candace and Sabrina’s class were waiting for us in a classroom. When we entered the room, they all clapped delightedly. They had drawn a colorful sign on the board to welcome us and prepared a song to sing for us. It was some kind of song about friendship and was really beautiful when they all joined together singing. I could tell they had spent time practicing, and it made me feel so special to see how they had worked to prepare. They gave us a “wishes” bottle filled with tiny paper stars they had folded themselves and a good wish for us. It still gets to me how deep the bond of friendship is. It takes a long time for people to enter into that level of trust, but once you become friends with people here, they would do anything for you.

The students asked Kevin and I to tell them some things about our wedding, our time in America, and our life in Weinan. They poured over the book of our wedding pictures, even though they said they had looked at most of them online “many, many times” and are probably more familiar with them than I am. They asked us questions about our wedding and honeymoon and when we came back to China and why we didn’t come back to Yangzhou and who wins when we have disagreements. One student started her question by saying, “Ruth, I know you can’t cook.” I was a little offended and asked why she would say that. “Well, last year Corrine cooked cookies for us when we came to visit and you never did that for us.”

The students told some funny stories from the internships they just completed. Most of them were working in high schools, and many of them were confused as students, sometimes even by their supervising teacher. They talked about how old they felt now that they were seniors and their worries about either getting into graduate school or finding jobs next year. I probed the students to find out who had boyfriends (they were all girls), and they were embarrassed when their classmates ratted them out. Toward the end of our time, one student said, “Ruth, I know when I look back this will be one of my most terrible memories.” All the students began to laugh and correct her. She looked confused then embarrassed. “No, no. I mean cherible. Uh, cherishable. I will cherish this memory forever.”

The next day when we saw Candace, she said, “I was so excited I couldn’t sleep last night.” She said her classmates had stayed up late talking about Kevin and I: what we had said, how Kevin looked at me and how happy I was, how tall Kevin was and how talkative I had become. Candace was bringing us to meet her boyfriend. I had just learned about him and was quite curious to check him out and make sure he was good enough to date one of my students. He is a PE major, and Candace said he was nervous to meet us because his English was not so good. “He has been practicing his English all weekend.” He turned out to be really cute and funny. He was shy because of the English, but his natural confidence kept taking over. By the end of our lunch together, he was feeling more comfortable and speaking a lot more. I teased him about Candace and told him he’d better take good care of her and realize how lucky he was to get her. He said Kevin was lucky too. He wanted to take us back to the campus so he could show Kevin some kungfu moves.

We spent the rest of the afternoon with them, and then another student, Amanda, joined up with us for some milk tea. We were taking a train from Nanjing (about an 1.5 hours from Yangzhou) and we decided to head to the bus station so we could be sure to get on a bus. It was a good thing we went a little early because the line of people waiting for a Nanjing bus wrapped all the way around the station. Fortunately, buses arrived every five or ten minutes, and within half an hour, we were at the front of the line. Candace and Amanda came to see us off and insisted on carrying some of our heavy bags. They hugged us goodbye and we settled in for the next to last leg of the journey.

Our train from Nanjing didn’t leave until 11pm, so we went to visit some teachers who live in the city. We had a good time talking to them for a while (most of us were from the South, so that’s always kinda fun :). I was pretty alert and energetic until we left them, but by the time we got to the train station, I was in a crabby, semi-stupor. I was getting tired of all the lines and people and buses and taxis and subways and trains and carrying heavy bags. We didn’t have to wait too long in the crowded train station before we were able to board the train and crawl into our bunks. We arrived back in Weinan 15 hours later, only an hour behind schedule, and rushed to get to our classes. We are quite tired and not really seeing straight anymore, but it was a good trip. It was encouraging to see how much those students liked me, and I feel warmed by their generous friendship. It reminded me how lucky I am to be here in China. It will be a “cherishable” memory for me as well.

Part 1: Weinan to Beijing to Yangzhou

By Ruth

After a long day of classes I watched the English department girls win the basketball championship, then rushed back to grab my things to catch our 12 hour overnight train to Beijing. Kevin, Christina, and I were all going to Beijing. Christina was visiting a friend and we were stopping by “on the way” to Yangzhou. It’s actually about eight hours out of the way, but we needed to the embassy for Kevin to get more passport pages. We decided to combine it with a trip to visit my past students rather than making two separate trips. It did make for a long weekend, though.

Train travel isn’t too bad so long as you have a sleeper, but the bed seemed to be harder and smaller than I remembered. Unfortunately the movement of trains makes me a little dizzy. Fortunately, being dizzy makes me feel tired, so I was able to sleep okay until the woman on the bunk below me started yelling on her cell phone at about 6am. Apparently the early cell phones had very bad connections so people had to yell to be heard. Now they connect just fine, but people still yell. And I do mean yell.

Our train was supposed to arrive at 6:45am which would have given us enough time to get across town for our 9am embassy appointment. Unfortunately, at 8:30am, we were still on the train. We called the embassy and they didn’t seem too concerned. They just started this whole appointment system, and they must realize you can’t expect too much from that in China. When our train finally arrived, we grabbed a bus to the nearest subway which was the most crowded subway I have ever been on. You haven't seen crowded until you've been to China. Or maybe India. But believe me - malls at Christmastime look practically deserted compared to a Beijing subway. We had to ram ourselves into a car that was so full the door wouldn’t even close on the first try. In China there are no personal space issues, though, so the three people around me didn’t mind the full body contact in the 2ft space we were sharing. The advantage of having literally no room to move was that you couldn’t fall over when the train shifted speeds.

We arrived at the embassy about an hour late, but the appointment didn’t take long. Soon we were off on our way to IKEA, which was supposedly close by. Half an hour later, though, we were still in a taxi driving back and forth down the same road and looping around in frustration. The map from the IKEA website was surprisingly bad and the taxi driver kept thinking we wanted to be on a different road. We were frustrated and he was frustrated and it just wasn’t working out. Finally his face lit up as he thought of a plan, “Maybe you want to buy some stuff!” He took us to a big shopping mall area. It wasn’t where we wanted to go, but this was clearly the end of the line for us. He deposited us on the sidewalk and sped away.

We did eventually get to the IKEA, which was not that far away. I adore IKEA, despite or because of its massiveness. We were starting to wilt pretty quickly though, so we headed back to the far other side of town to shower and rest at our organization’s guesthouse. Two taxis, two subway lines, and an hour and a half later we were happily washing away the travel dirt. We collapsed on the couch for a short nap, then headed back across town once again (and by “town,” I mean the city of 17 million people), this time to our favorite Mexican restaurant in China: Pete’s TexMex. In addition to some of the only Mexican food in China, they have the best milkshakes I have ever had in my entire life. Topping my list-of-all-time-favorites good. Then off to the train station for our 10 hour overnight train to Yangzhou.

The Yangzhou train is pretty nice since it is newer and smoother and goes straight between cities with no stops. The bedding even gives the illusion of being clean, except for the random black hairs which remind me I’m definitely not the first person to be sleeping here since the last wash. Between the nicer train and our greater exhaustion, we slept better than the first night. Even the guy snoring underneath me couldn’t keep me awake for long. At 6am the curtains were opened and the lights went on and the night was officially over. We groggily munched our Pete’s cinnamon rolls as we rolled closer to Yangzhou.

Firecrackers

by Ruth
This morning we listened to firecrackers going off in the distance. And listened and listened as they kept going on and on. This is a normal occurrence, as firecrackers hail the building or opening of a new building. They are supposed to scare of any spirits lurking around, and for that reason are also set off before a wedding. The idea of spirits and ghosts is not just relegated to Halloween (and that’s only partly because they don’t have Halloween in China). Though not nearly as prominent as in Southeast Asia, we do see evidences of “the spirits” around here as well. As I listened to the fireworks this morning, I was thinking about all the superstitions/traditions/beliefs I have heard about recently.
It can be hard to tell what is just tradition, what is more superstition, and what is actually belief. I’m not attempting to make those distinctions right now. A lot of these ideas have to do with the way words sound. For example, 4 is an unlucky number because the word for it sounds like death.
Numbers and dates are also very important. A good wedding date is chosen based on the birthday of the bride and the birthday of the groom and how the stars will be aligned and probably some other stuff that doesn’t make sense to me. Time of a person’s birth determines their fortunes for the rest of their life. One of Kevin’s student said she always gets sick because she was born at an inauspicious time.
Last night some friends were talking about appropriate and inappropriate gifts. You should never give a pear to a friend because the word for pear sounds similar to separation, and it gives the idea you want to end your friendship. Apples are good, however, because they sound like peace. In the past, you should not give someone a knife, because it would mean slicing the relationship. Now, they said, it would be okay. It still seems like a little bit of a strange gift to me. Clocks are bad birthday or wedding gifts because they symbolize death (the phrase for giving a clock is similar to attending a funeral).
Red brings luck, which is why it is such a popular color in China, but white is the color of death and mourning.
Some old houses have high thresholds in the doors to keep the wealth in and the spirits out. You should not step on the threshold because they are considered sacred.
You should not step on manhole covers because you may never marry. If you see someone step on a manhole cover, you should hit them (according to the number of days of the week: once for Monday, seven times for Sunday). Hitting them is supposed to do something to chase away the spirits.
You should not leave your chopsticks sticking up in your bowl, because that is inviting the spirits to come and eat from it. This is how they will leave the food at the graves for their ancestors. In several restaurants we eat at, we also see food placed in front of small alters with Buddha or spirits like the frog spirit, who is supposed to bring wealth.
When babies are born, sometimes they are not given names at first, so the spirits will not know who they are. Sometimes baby boys are called by girls names because the spirits would not be as interested in a girl…which is just sad on several levels. Parents will sometimes insult their children as well, calling them ugly or stupid, to trick the spirits.
Whether our students actually believe these things, or say they believe these things, a lot of times they will practice them just to be safe. Because no matter how much they say “I believe in myself; I decide my own fate,” they know that a lot of things in life are beyond their control.

What Happens Before Sunrise

Thursdays are my longest day because I teach three classes (6 hours) plus sometimes have a culture lecture in the evenings. Terrible, I know. It’s almost like working a full American workday. Today I decided to make the day even longer by waking up at 4am.

There was a period if time in Yangzhou when I was unintentionally doing this all the time. My teammate told me, “I can always tell when you haven’t been sleeping because you get super productive.” Which is true. This is the first time I’ve had trouble sleeping in a while, but lately my mind has been too active.

It was still dark when I woke up, so I knew it must be early. After tossing and turning for a while, I looked at the clock. 4:30am. This is unacceptable, I thought. I must try to sleep more. So I lay there and thought about the elections and my friend Ashley who is coming tomorrow and how I needed to clean before she came and what I wanted to look at in IKEA (we are going in a few weeks) and what I thought about the new foam pad we had bought for the bed (my thought: we got ripped off) and about money (It’s something I rarely think much about in China. We haven’t really had any kind of budget in China, because we just don’t spend much money. But suddenly this troubled me, and I started doing some mental arithmetic. You know something is not right when I am doing math instead of sleeping.) Right about the part where I started doing math, I realized I was never going back to sleep, so I might as well take advantage of that super-productivity.

I started on the guest bedroom, getting things all put together for Ashley. This will be it’s first use. Once the bed was made up and some of the extra storage boxes were hauled out, it was a little after 5am. I looked out the window and marveled at the fact that all the windows in the two buildings next door were dark. It’s 5am people! What are you all sleeping for? In Yangzhou, when I would wake up at 4am, generally by about 4:30am a few people would start coming by outside.

Next I headed to the kitchen. I cleaned out the fridge, took out the trash, cleaned the counters, washed dishes, swept the floor, and even scrubbed the little strip of counter behind the sink. I noticed that we have about 15 magnets but no pictures on the fridge. I need to fix that. 5:30am, time to move on to the living room. I dusted the dining room table, cleaned up/threw away all the random things sitting around, washed some more dishes I found. By 6:30am I heard the loudspeakers start blaring music. They worked their way from peaceful blaring music to energetic march tunes, and I looked out the window to see the freshmen doing their required morning jog around campus. Poor little freshmen.

By about 7am, my normal wake-up time, the crazy-manic-cleaning, insomnia-induced buzz was starting to fade to more normal alertness. This gradually faded into a tired confusion. This 4am thing is good for my productivity, but it doesn’t work out too well in the long run. This would be evidenced by the really cool forehead bruise I am now sporting after bending over into the edge of a table a little later this morning. But the house sure looks better. My students would say, “No pains, no gains.” Incidentally, it drives me nuts when they say that…

The man in the suit

By Kevin

The man stood in the hallway knocking at the door, wearing a suit and holding a briefcase in his hand. But nobody was answering. When we turned on the hallway light, he seemed stunned for a moment. Then he shouted. “Nice to meet you.”

As we waited for Wes to answer his door, you could hear the man's mind racing.

As we walked in, the man followed behind. “May I come in?” he asked me, in the hallway, in broken English. “It's not my house...” I looked to Wes, but the man had already slid past the threshold and into the door. Wes, shocked, motioned him in and pointed toward the seat.

For the next 10 minutes, Ruth and I said little. Wes began talking with the strange man in Chinese, subtly trying to figure out why he came in. “May I practice speaking English with you?”

“Yes, but only for a few minutes,” Wes said. “We have plans.”

He only managed a handful more English words in the next several minutes.

Apparently the man was a former student who now teaches political science at a local school. He'd come to visit a friend of his, Wes' neighbor. He was excited to learn that we were Americans and that we were planning to watch a movie together. His eyes shifted, nervously back and forth between us. He grinned from ear-to-ear. We began to worry that our plans to relax and watch a movie might be falling apart. Then it came:

“May I watch with you?” the man asked in English.

Wes answered in Chinese. Something to the extent of: “I don't think you would understand because it is American culture.”

“I would really like to see an American film.”

Wes paused and tried another tactic: “I don't even know your name. If a strange man just walked in your door and started asking questions, then invited himself to watch a movie what would you say?”

Then he stood up and walked him to the door. After pulling the door shut, Wes breathed a sigh of relief. “What just happened?”

We shook our heads. “That was strange,” we agreed.

“You have to remember, they don't see us as people,” Wes reminded us as we recounted one of the strangest 10-minute episodes we've been a part of.

“Time to start looking through the peephole before we open the door.”

The bird in our wall

By Ruth
So we have this plastic drinking bottle that is filling a hole in our office wall. It sounds strange, I know, but it works well. There is a round hole that would have an A/C cord going into it, if we had an A/C unit. But since we don't, we thought we'd fill the hole in the wall so fewer mosquitoes and spiders could get in.
Today Kevin heard a noise in the wall, and when he looked, he saw a bird sitting on the outside part of the bottle and a little brown spotted egg on the inside. It's crazy. It must be a pretty small bird because water bottle openings aren't that big. The egg is almost as big as the opening. We have a little bird growing in our wall, with only a clear plastic layer layer separating it from us. I hope it hatches and we get to see that. I wonder what kind of birds lay eggs in October? I thought that was more of a spring activity. And there is no nest - just an egg. In a plastic bottle. In our wall. How cool (and weird) is that?

October 1 Guitar shopping

By Kevin
(yes, Oct. 1 was two weeks ago, but I just realized that I wrote this and never posted it, so since we haven't posted anything in awhile, here you go)

I'd made up my mind: “I need a guitar.”

So, a few days ago, I explored the two little music shops in WeiNan. Unfortunately, the prices were a bit on the high end: 550-750 RMB for a halfway decent guitar ($80-$110).

So when we made plans to go into Xi'an for some shopping on Oct. 1 (needed some cereal, BBQ sauce and DVDs), a guitar was at the top of my list.

After fighting the crowds downtown (it is one of China's biggest shopping holidays), I sauntered into the guitar shop and started inspecting the large group of guitars. Epiphones, Fenders, Washburns...all sorts of good brands, but undoubtedly out of my price range.

“Do you play guitar?” a young man asked me in English.

“Yeah,” I replied. “I want to buy one that isn't too expensive.”

Ok, he said. He pointed me to a Epiphone Talent, made in China. Hadn't heard of this semi-Gibson offshoot before, but it was worth a look. “This one is 450 RMB,” he said.

“Not bad,” I thought to myself, picking it up. It sounded good, but no better than the 400 RMB guitar I'd owned in Tonghua.

“Or, this brand,” he said, picking up another, labeled AAA. “In China 'A' means very good. This is the best of the cheaper guitars.”

Sure enough, it played better than the others.

“How much?”

“300” he said. “It includes a soft bag, strings, a strap and picks.”

“Nice," I thought to myself.

After trying a couple more expensive models that sounded no better, and learning that the man tutored several foreigners on guitar, I made another offer.

“How about 250?”

“Oh, you shouldn't ever offer someone a price of 250,” he replied, with a smile.

Wes chimed in, “It means that you're saying the seller is stupid. It's an insult.”

I'd completely forgotten. I backtracked. “I'm sorry. 260.”

He laughed. “How about 280. That's a very good deal.”

I tried 270, but wasn't going to haggle too much over another $1.50. “OK. I'll buy it.”

Bike breakdown, bike repair, repeat

So, maybe we should have known from the start that it was going to be a rough ride.

When I went to adjust Ruth's bike seat before we set off to meet students on our ride to the Wei River, the bolt wouldn't tighten. After a few minutes of attempting to tighten and re-tighten it, I struggled to get it loose. The blot finally fell on the floor, threads were completely stripped. The nut seemed to be the wrong size. “This isn't going to go back on,” I said. I guess this is what you get when you buy a used bike in China.

So I hurried back into the apartment and scrounged through a jar of old nuts and bolts until I found something that would make due. It was a little smallish, but with a washer, it did the trick.

A bit late, we met Wes, Christina and eight students at the front gate on campus. We were off. I was chatting with a senior from Guizhou named Edward. As he shared about his minority, THUNK, my foot hit the ground. The entire left pedal, rod and all clanked along the ground as I slammed on my brakes. Blood dripped into my sock from a three-inch gash that sliced my calf (it really wasn't too bad, just bled a lot at first).

I attempted to hammer the pedal back onto my bike, but it didn't seem like it was going to stay on very long. Besides, the pedal itself was falling apart as well. I guess this is what you get with a used bike in China.

So Edward, Wes, Tim (another student) and I hurried back to a bicycle repairman, who nonchalantly attached a new pedal, tightened the rod, filled the air in my tires and sold me a bolt for Ruth's seat for 4 RMB (about 60 cents). After a quick stop by the pharmacy (thankfully, it seems like there's one every other block in this city), we set off again. After about 10 minutes of riding, we caught up with the girls, who had ridden ahead.

I learned that Edward was an avid cyclist. In fact, two years ago, he went on a 2-week bike trip to Henan province, covering more than 1,500 km and that he and some buddies from the campus bike club have been thinking about riding from here to Tibet. Insane.

Just as we set off after our reunion, CRACK, my pedal fell off again. Mind you, the rod stayed in place. The plastic pedal, however, proved that sometimes you get what you pay for. I decided to continue riding without the pedal, since I seemed to be able to do so just fine.

We rode through a toll booth on the road, admiring freshly shucked corn laid out to dry, filling half the lane on the low-traffic road, then turned into a village because the road ahead was being repaired.

Just as we started to climb a slight incline, CA-CHUNG. Ruth's chain broke. Unfortunately, we were far from the city and the bicycle repairmen who set up shop every few blocks. We put the chain into a small bag and started walking toward the village, where we asked around and found out that there was indeed a repairman in the village not far ahead.

We approached a man at the roadside with a little truck, hoping that he might be able to bring us with the bike to the repairman, who was apparently 5-10 minutes away. Instead, he said he could explain how to fix it, though. He inspected the chain, and said that a piece was missing, though.

So Edward and I hurried back to the place Ruth's chain broke, a little bit worried that finding the tiny missing part might be like finding a needle in a haystack. But within about a minute, he pointed and declared, “here it is. I found it.”

Edward then set about fixing the chain, with the help of the man we met on the road. Thankfully, I'd brought a crescent wrench and vice grip in case Ruth's seat didn't hold together. Edward, hands covered in bike grease, used the vice to fasten the chain back together.

Unfortunately, it didn't last.

“I'm trying not to pedal too hard,” Ruth said with a grimmace.

“Well, if you make it up this hill, we might be good to go,” I replied. Within seconds, CLANG, her chain fell off again. Only this time, it broke into a few pieces.

After a brief discussion, Edward and Tim decided that they'd bring the bike to the repairman while we waited.

As we waited, Wes struck up a conversation with a family that was out in their yard shucking corn. He asked if he could join them. “Why not?” I thought to myself. I join them as well. Soon, Ruth and Christina joined in, along with a couple students. The others looked at us skeptically, seeming to wonder why we would do something like this. But eventually, they too joined us. Wes explained the parables about the son gathering people like gathering crops. By the time Edward and Tim returned with the fixed bike, all of us and all of the students who were waiting were helping these farmers to shuck corn, which they said was used by both people and animals (they don't have two separate varieties of corn in China like in America – just one).

It was a great “Real China” moment.

Overhead in the village, workers clanged and hammered away, building the raised platform for the high-speed railroad that is being built from Xi'an to Zhengzhou onto Beijing. Supposedly it will go about 300 km per hour and cut the trip to Beijing from about 12 hours to 5 hours.

As we rode to the river, we followed a dirt path between cornfields that ran underneath sections of seemingly completed railway track. Unfortunately, the soil at times was a little unforgiving. It was thin loess soil (I believe we live on China's famed Loess Plateau) that poofed up as we rode through it, almost like silty volcanic ash.

Needless to say, it was tough to keep riding through it, but it was thinner than beach sand, so as long as we were moving fast enough, we seemed to be able to keep our balance and avoid most of the plumes of silt that rose into the air whenever a mini-truck loaded with freshly harvested corn or a tractor passed us by.

After about 15 minutes, we reached the river. It was a bit disappointing after all the obstacles that had to be overcome before we made it. “It's not an adventure if nothing goes wrong along the way,” I told a couple of students. “It is unforgettable,” one replied.

"Anyone ready for a swim," I joked, after pointing to the floating pieces of styrofoam, which floated down the river in a constant stream like tiny iceburgs. Apparently we were downriver from some sort of factory.

A couple girls laughed nervously, wondering if I was serious. "Ok, I might come out looking brown, maybe I won't swim."

Unfortunately, by the time we'd made it home, my pedal-less bike rod had worn a hole in my shoe.

By the time we made it back to our apartments, we'd been gone for more than four hours. We were grimy and drained. But, in spite of the obstacles, it was worthwhile. Another good bonding experience.