Today is the last day of my teaching in Baoding, at least for now. One more class this afternoon for the teachers and that will be it...done!
My parents left on tuesday morning from Beijing, and I came back to Baoding to give an exam to the postgraduates and teach the last week of the teachers' class.
Looking back (as I guess you are supposed to do whenever you reach an 'end' of something), my time here in Baoding has gone really quickly. But I don't really feel like making any big conclusion or summaries of the past months as even though I'm leaving this city, my life here in China goes on and I have a feeling there is still an interesting road for me to walk in this country. So, the adventure continues...

This afternoon I'm off to Henan, which is the province south from Hebei ('nan' meaning south and 'bei' meaning north). I'll be gone for a week and then come back to Baoding for a final couple of days of meeting people, saying goodbyes, cleaning up the flat and packing my things. But I'm leaving some stuff here with friends, so I will be coming back at some point so no final goodbyes, I hope. And even without that reason, I know I will come back, after all this is the first place where I made my home in China and somehow it feels like it's my hometown in China. Later, when travelling in different parts of the country, I'll be proud to say that I come from Baoding ;)

Next time in a week...

Yesterday we had an amazing day, from morning until the evening. We set of at 7:30 from Baoding, in a car I managed to rent from Jade's dad's friend who is a taxi driver. Naturally the man came with the car, so we had a driver for the whole day, too. And besides us three, Wang Zhi Yong (or Alan) came along.

We drove through various counties in the Baoding area, and after about 2 1/2 hours arrived at our destination, which was the area of the Western Imperial tombs from the Qing dynasty (Qing Xi Ling). I'd already been there briefly with Olli in December (you can see some photos in the album from that trip), but at that time we only visited the largest tomb. This time the plan was to go around the different tombs and explore the area around them a little.

And so we did, visiting different tomb complexes built for emperors, empresses and their children, which all consist of various buildings. There is only one place where you can actually enter the tomb itself, in the others you can just see the hill on top of it. But the main attraction are the magnificent buildings around the tomb.

And just like the time before, what I enjoyed the best was just being out there, away from the noise and the hustle and bustle of the city. And as this place really isn't near any major cities or isn't probably very well known by tourists, we mostly had all these amazing places all to ourselves. And the open spaces, green hills, fresh air - silence. I really miss all that, and being there yesterday made me realise once again that though there are many good sides to living in a city, I would much more prefer living in the countryside.

We had lunch in a little restaurant, where we had to wake up the hosts on our arrival to get up and fix lunch for us. And the ingredients were definitely fresh, as they had a little garden behind the building, where they went to get the vegetables just for our meal.

As the last stop in Xi Ling we went to the buddhist temple of the area, where we met with three Tibetan monks who had just arrived there a couple of weeks before and were now staying there, studying the scriptures and praying. Two of them spoke some English, and it was truly interesting to talk to them, especially to this 25-year-old monk - it's strange to compare the lives of us two who are the same age but living such different lives.

From Xi Ling we headed to the home village of Alan, the name of which i forget... Dong something...humm... A little village in the middle of huge fields, where they now were harvesting wheat and planting corn for the next harvest in the autumn. The village has narrow little dirt streets and alleys between brick and concrete buildings.

In Alan's home, we were received by his mum and aunt, who once again showed us the meaning of Chinese hospitality. In the building they have a small classroom, where the mother is teaching pre-school kids, who were in the middle of the lesson when we arrived a little before 6 p.m. While the mum was fixing us dinner from the ingredients Alan brought along from the restaurant where we had lunch and from a market in Yi County where we stopped on the way, Alan took us for a walk around the village. We went to visit the primary school (where children were first scared stiff on seeing us and then screaming like crazy) and a little later his grandmother house. The grandmother is a sweet old lady, who was trying to convince us to stay overnight, offering tea and telling how much she misses her children and grandchildren, almost breaking into tears. And she was also the first woman who I have met with tiny little bound feet...

Being in the village with the people felt so good, they are so sincerely friendly and welcoming - it's amazing. I wish we had had more time, but we really had to go in the end, despite heartfelt wishes from the people for us to spend the night. But maybe I will have a chance to go visit them again after my time in Shandong... I hope, anyway.

Today we spent the day at Dr Li's hospital, looking around the place and also being examined. For lunch, we went to his home, where we all prepared some dumplings together, trying to learn how to make them look less like something the cat dragged in... And afterwards back to the hospital for some wicked treatments of foot baths and foot massage. Somehow they managed to find all the spots, which are connected to different parts of the body, some of it even hurt as they were pressing and pinching the nerves, but I suppose it was good for us. At least afterwards it did feel real good. And back tomorrow to pick up some herbs for more footbaths for my parents when they get back to Finland.

There are too many things to write about now, we have seen and done so much in the past couple of days so this entry has just turned into a list of our activities - there would be too much for a better description and analysis. But pictures maybe tell more than my words, so take a look!

My parents are here! So, instead of writing myself, I'll post an e-mail written by my mum, which I’ve now translated - with her permission, of course. I’m not too good at translating so I apologise for the clumsy text, I just have to say that the fault is in the translation and not in the original. I’ll also link some pictures from the text. But anyway, I’ll let my mum tell you what Baoding looks like in her eyes:

At the airport, Elina met us with a man [Mr. Kou] who works at the university’s International Office, and with them was also a driver for the car. Immediately after our arrival at the airport we were struck by the scale of everything: huge halls, lots and lots of people, wide roads with multiple lanes... No problem of fitting in a couple of Finns here!

The whole time we’ve been here in Baoding we haven’t seen any other Europeans. People turn to look at us in the streets and every now and then someone gathers up the courage to shout ‘Hello!’ or ‘Laowai!’ at us – so there’s no lack of attention for us here. At the university, lots of people want to come say hi to us and everyone is really friendly.

On Sunday morning, Elina had a 10-year old girl, Wei Lan, come over to her place for a private English lesson with her mother. We all participated in the lesson, which meant just having a conversation in English. The parents want their daughter to have the best possible education and that their daughter will be the best. The girl herself is very talented and also wants to be the best in everything she does and wants to study as much as possible. The parents have clear plans for their daughter’s future studies all the way up to university level, and even wishes for her choice of a job after that.

After the lesson the parents took us to one of the finest restaurants in town, which was in a pretty new hotel. [Elina’s comment: the hotel also has a classic Chinglish sign outside: right next to the front door is a shiny, polished brass plate that proudly proclaims: “HOTEL FOR ALIENS”- a suitable place for us to have lunch, I reckon!!] The father had borrowed a bigger car from his friend for the occasion. The hotel was fancy with staff everywhere bowing their heads as we walked by. In the lobby they had a grand piano and the parents asked the staff whether Wei Lan could play for us. And so we heard a piece from Haydn and another one by a Chinese composer, both of which she performed by heart and extremely skillfully. [EC: She’s been playing since she was 4 and practising for an hour every single day, if I understand correctly. And she really is awfully good!!] Afterwards in a private room, we had a lunch of about 13 different dishes, being of course served by a number of waitresses and waiters. And of course we were then brought back by car all the way to the front door of Elina’s home.

On Monday morning we went along to Elina’s class for the 26 Master’s students she has been teaching this term. Before the class, we were wondering whether everyone would be showing up as the lesson had been moved to 8 a.m. on Monday morning from the previous Friday. However, the students surprised us by 29 of them showing up, as everyone wanted to see us and on top of that a couple of extra people came, too! They were asking us a lot of questions and towards the end someone asked us to perform some Finnish dances, songs or something like that. So, right there on the spot we came up with a couple of performances. Matti [my dad] recited a verse of the Finnish national anthem as a poem, and Elina and I sang ‘Maa on niin kaunis’ [a Christmas song] (we couldn’t think of anything else to which we could sing in harmony). Of course they gave us an enthusiastic applause (regardless of the quality of the performances). Afterwards, some students also performed some songs and poems. It was quite fun, really!

On Tuesday evening we went along to another group’s lesson. This group contains of university teachers, who have been chose from different colleges, two lucky ones from each. Again we were faced with a number of questions, and it wasn’t always that easy to try and answer in English questions such as ‘how to best raise your child’, ‘what is a good student/teacher like’, ‘how have we brought up Elina’, ‘what should a teacher do in some given situation’ and so on. But we talked about what first came to mind and of course we would give them some sort of an answer to whatever was asked.

Moreover, we’ve met with some students who have wanted to show us around the different campuses (we’ve visited two different campuses of the university) and we’ve also had the chance to take a look at the female students' dorms on both campuses - really interesting. [EC: My dad gave one of the girls living in one of the dormitories a terrible fright, she practically nearly had a heart attack on seeing a man when she came out from the bathroom!] The campus areas themselves are very beautiful with wide streets, beautiful flowerbeds and parks with little ponds, statues and well-taken care of lawns and so on. But a contrast to the beautiful and well-kept overall look of the place was offered by the bleak, cramped and what to us looked pretty primitive dorms, which seemed distressing. I’m sure it wouldn’t be easy to get a Finnish student to live in such conditions!

Once you step out into the street from the campus area, which is surrounded by walls and guarded gates, you face a totally different view. Thousands of people on their bikes, cars, bicycle- and motorbike taxis, the milkman blowing his whistle letting people know that he has arrived and pouring out the milk with the aid of a funnel into little plastic bags for the customers, and watermelons being sold from a cart pulled by a donkey. Along the sides of the streets people spread out their various merchandise and hundreds of little street kitchens are preparing pies, bread and other treats. In the streets everyone is weaving their way trough all the traffic in an apparently organised manner, with cars and other vehicles constantly sounding their horns.

We’ve already seen and experienced a lot, this morning we were supposed to head out at 7:30 to explore the countryside and some historical sites about 100 km from here. But as it’s raining non-stop, Elina rang the taxi driver and postponed our trip until tomorrow (Elina has learned quite a bit of spoken Chinese and can handle everything in Chinese when we’re shopping for things, and has even learned the local way to bargain). So tomorrow we’ll head out come rain or shine, as we don’t have all that much time and we’ve already got some other things lined up for the rest of the days.

As for the weather, on Saturday it was close to 40 degrees, which felt way too hot for us (and it seems to have been the same for the locals, as well). Until this morning it’s been really warm but now that it’s raining the temperature is probably just barely above 20 C. However, inside the flat we’ve got effective heaters and air-conditioners in the living room and in both of the bedrooms, so we can comfortably adjust the temperature ourselves.

The Chinese food is very good, we’ve been trying out lots of different dishes as well as practicing our chopstick skills, and somehow we’ve managed to eat with them. And so far no big problems, such us stomach aches, either. However the beds are hard after the Chinese fashion: being used to a waterbed it’s not easy to find a comfortable position on stone-hard mattress on a wooden bed. Elina tells us she was bruised black and blue for the first couple of weeks sleeping in her bed but that she then got used to it and is no longer bothered by the hardness of it.

Chinese people love to pose for pictures. At every tourist site, you'll see people one after another posing in front of the same statues and signs and so on. Today, Jade, Sonya and Lila asked me if I could bring my camera along when we were meeting for lunch so that we could take some pictures around the campus. And so we did, indeed. I've posted a few shots at the website so you can take a look:
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Just something I came across on the web...

China-teachers.com - Info for Teaching in China - The Care and Feeding of Foreign Teachers

Yesterday, as some of you may know, was the international Children's Day. This day is observed in China much more widely than I've seen in any other country. There are lots of activities for kids and fun things like free movie tickets, some children get a day off school (like in some schools in Baoding) but others have to work twice as hard as usually to put together performances at school for their parents.

To celebrate the day, I was invited to join a group of students from our university who were going to a local school for children who are hard of hearing. This school is in the outskirts of the city, in surroundings that could be anywhere in the countryside. The children who go to this school are the lucky ones whose parents can afford to send them to a special school. And true enough, the school, although in no way luxurious, had computers and some special software etc for teaching the children. And best of all, the athmosphere was just great and the teachers seemed really dedicated to what they were doing.

The kids had put together some performances (like a puppet show, some dances, a fashion show and a magic show) for each other, their parents and us. After that, we just hung out with the students at the school, I showed them some pictures from Finland and of course had to pose for a picture for just about every student. Communication wasn't that easy, as I needed one of the Chinese university students always to write down in Chinese what I wanted to say and then translate the written answer from the kids into English. But at least I got good practise of writing my Chinese name (Ai Lina), as many of the children asked me to write it down for them (about the only thing I *can* write). I bet they got a good laugh out of my pathetic attempt to write in Chinese, my handwriting totally looks like a hesitant child's!

All in all it was a great experience to see the school and especially to meet the children. I wish I had known of this university group before, apparently they visit the school regularly. But at least I did get to go there this time. Of course the batteries of my camera died right in the beginning but the leader of our group has a camera so if he mails me some photos, I'll put them up on the web when I get them.