Fall Study Trip Days 1-4

i am providing a map to show you where exactly i have been on my trip. my trip was too long and i took too many pictures for one blog post, so there will be another one following this one. I apologize, the pictures are out of order.

This year, SYA takes us on a couple of trips through rural China, an opportunity few every experience, especially Westerners. For this trip, we went to southeastern China. The weather ws warmer and the people spoke in accents, so a little like the states in that respect. The local food was whatever the local residents could grow or raise. We ate a lot of jou, or rice porridge, for breakfast every single morning. I had a good time, it was nice to take two weeks off with no studying.

First, we took a 32 hour train ride from Beijing to Xiamen, which is located almost directly across from Taiwan. There is not all that much to do on a 32 hour train ride. You can only play cards and sleep for so long. At least the scenery was a pleasant change from Beijing.

The train was relatively narrow. Not too much room to move around. Most of us stayed in each other's bunks for most of the trip. We ate 5 meals on the train, all of which were pretty much the same thing. None of us were too hungry, mainly because we had enough junk food to feed an army.

Once we arrived in Xiamne, we took long hot showers at our hotels and the next day we were off again.

We went to the Coca-Cola factory in Xiamen in the morning and in the afternoon, we were on the road again for a 3 hour bus ride to a tu lou village. The bottling plant was really cool, but the best part was we got to drink Coca-cola from a glass bottle in China. I was pretty excited.

Tu lou's (土楼) are literally 'earth buildings' and are a tradition form of building by the Hakkas, or outsiders, who came from northern China many generations ago and settled. The tu lou's are usually round and people live inside them. Many tu lou villages function the same way now as they did centuries ago, but are quickly becoming tourist attractions. We visited a relatively large tu lou village, with something like 1600 resident, but ony 700 of them live there. This is because, as in most of rural China, any resident between the ages of 18 and 35 or 40 go off to the cities to earn money. The residents of the tu lou village are therefore the very young and old. they do the farming and raise the children.

school we visited near the tu lou village. Most of the school's residents are poor and thier parents are migrant workers in cities. they mostly board at the school.

my room at the tu lou village. I was shocked I had my own room with my own bed, something that quickly changed later in the trip.
A group of children I met in the tu lou village along with another SYA student. We played games with the children in both Chinese and English. We also had a lot of fun giving them English names.
As to be expected, there are no lights in the village after dark, so I spent a lot of time wandering around with a flashlight exploring the village. The residents of the village were really nice and I had a good time sitting down with them drinking tea. Only problem was that they gave me so much tea, I didn't think I would be able to sleep for a week, also, they had a really thick accent, making it even harder to hold a conversation with them.
A tu lou in the village.

the dormitory at the school in town.

sunrise over the tu lou village.