Today I had no classes, as my PhD group organised a field trip to the neighbouring counties. They had hired a minibus, and so 15 of us headed out at 7:30 from Baoding. The first stop, after driving for about an hour an a half, was at a duck processing plant, which was any vegetarian's nightmare. After listening to an introduction, we put on white coats and protective masks and entered the plant itself. I have no idea how anyone could ever eat duck after what we saw: basically it was a horrid death camp where thousands of ducks where killed and then step by step cut into pieces. Duck corpses travelled in line through endless halls, hanging from their necks, first having their feathers pluckeD, then their guts cleaned out, tongues, feet and wings cut off, and so on, all the way to a neat plastic packaging. And we had to walk through the halls, between, around an under these endless lines of corpses staring at us. Uggghhh.

But after that, the trip got better. Our next stop was at a flower farm, where we visited a few greenhouses full of hundreds of differents flowers and plants, which are being sold to the Beijing area. And from there we continued to a cotton processing plant. The owner of this plant has a network of farms, to which he first sells the cotton seeds and then he buys the cotton from the farmers, and sells it to various parts of China.

And then, most importantly, lunch. I sat down at the women's table, with the intention of just eating and drinking some tea to warm me up. But they would have none of that, and I had to move over to the men's table, where our hosts were also sitting. And out came the Bai Jiu, the local alcohol. And those endless toasts... Bottoms up! So once again I had the chance to impress the people with my drinking abilities, although I did try to put up a brave resistance at first. But somehow I made it through lunch, and countless glasses of Bai Jiu, and was still standing by the end of it. Our hosts knew no English, but a couple of them had studied Russian at school, but the only thing they seemed to be able to say was 'Ochin harasho' (=very good) and 'Russkiy yazik' (=the Russian language). But it was enough so that we ended up declaring our everlasting friendship, which was sealed many times over with toasts of bai jiu.

After lunch, our last stop was at a fruit orchard, one of the biggest agricultural export companies in the Hebei province. Here, the products are various types of apples and pears, and I have to say that I enjoyed this visit a million times more than the walk among the dead ducks. The smell inside the packaging halls was just sweeeet...

All in all it was a nice day, and I'm glad I had the chance to go along with the group. I really do love these people, I couldn't be happier that I ended up teaching just this class. I wasn't even annoyed by the Chinese karaoke videos we were watching on the bus, on the contrary, I had a good laugh as they were translating all the lyrics for me. My absolute favourite was a song which says "I'm very ugly, but gentle, and as I still have lots of beer, I'm happy." Good thing I liked it, too, as it was the first song and the guys were having some trouble using the remote control and we ended up listening to the same song over and over again. Yesterday in class I was telling about my experiences in Senegal, and so today on the bus we had some extra entertainment as Gu Jin Tao, one of the men, was trying to dance the Senegalese bum-shaking dance, bigilibum... :) Quite funny, actually, on a shaky minibus.

Coming back to Baoding, we got off at our university and went inside the students' activity centre, which is just next to the main gate. In this building, they have a dance hall, where some music is played every evening, and a few people go to dance. So we went in, and had a laugh for a few songs, dancing walze and various other dances, I don't even know what they were, but I had a go anyway.

And then, dinner, of course, although we all were still stuffed from lunch. But hey, it's china, and eating is what matters. So after another ten courses of yummy food, I have somehow made it home. It's almost weekend again, just one more class to go tomorrow. Life isn't bad :)