October Break

Now I have started my October break. The first few weeks of school have been busy. My teaching has gone really well. I feel like I am finally coming through in my teaching. As an oral English teacher I have always done pretty well at getting the students to talk about things in English in a fun environment, but I haven't always done really well at introducing content (such as grammar or vocabulary) followed by appropriate activities to illustrate or to practice the new material. In the past my activities were a little bit random.

My wife is now in her first year of teaching. She is really a natural teacher (unlike me). She has done a great job. The students like her. She and I share some freshman classes, so they were really surprised that their English teacher is married to their oral English teacher.

I promised last post that I would tell you about my Long March. It is appropriate that I tell you about my Long March right before the October first holiday, since that is the national day of China. This summer I decided I wanted to take a long walk with a couple friends along the side of the only river in town. The city has done a great job of building parks on each side of it the whole way through town, so I wanted to explore it. Also, it had been too long since I had just taken a day and walked. Back home in the Blue Ridge I would regularly go backpacking and hiking, but since moving to China three years ago, I have had only one chance to put on my boots and wend through mountain trails. I sorely missed it.

Taking an urban hike, viewing the design of men, is, of course, not the same as taking a hike out in the woods and enjoying the pure design of creation. However, it is not so different as I had thought. After hiking for several hours across town, I really felt that feeling that a hiker gets that cannot really be described but only felt. That feeling is something like freedom, but more than that because it draws one's heart up beyond the world that one is walking through to an attitude of worship. I don't think I'm the only one who gets this feeling, because I often read atheists that very condescendingly say, "When I stand on a mountain and view the stars, I get a feeling of transcendence, so I can understand how theists get off wrong." Though it was an urban hike, there were plenty of trees and grass and there was the sky and, of course, the river. That helped provide a little reprieve from city life.

There was one great benefit of taking an urban hike. After the first half of the hike, my friends and I sauntered into a nice coffee shop and took our beverages in style. When you are doing an urban hike, you don't bring a bunch of little baggies of Kool-aid to pour into your water bottle. No, you bring Starbucks coupons. After that we slurped down some delicious noodles at a restaurant nearby. On this hike, there were no freeze dried meals or cans of sardines. There was no need to light a stove and trim the flame and burn ones fingers. We dined in luxury.

It was interesting to see the whole town from south to north. Most of the area that the river runs through is not highly developed. There is only one place that is a really valuable business district. The weird thing is that one of the nicest parts of the river park was within walking distance of only a big smoke belching factory. (Of course, one could say that the whole city is within walking distance as we proved by our seven hour walk. And after all, how far is a walking distance? Does a distance cease being a walking distance at a particular number of meters? And the next millimeter over would be considered beyond a walking distance?) The park is uniformly nice through most of the city. However it was old and unimproved in the far north of the city. As we walked in the north part, some cleaning ladies tried to tell us that we should turn around and walk south because the park was not very nice in the north, and we tried to tell them that we had already seen the south of the river walk and didn't want to go that way.

A great highlight of the journey was to be able to spend the day with my new friends J and D. We talked about all sorts of things, especially about philosophy, literature and history. D parted from us at the halfway point to do some work at his home, but J continued with me all the way to where the sidewalk ends. To get back home the two of us had to climb over a fence to get onto a dam, cross the river and then climb over another fence to get off of the dam. Then we had to pull out a city map and walk a distance to find a city bus, the only city bus, actually, in that part of the outskirts of town. Before boarding the rusty old bus, we walked into a snack store and bought a couple soft drinks that are so cheap (1 RMB/600 ml) that they are sold only in the countryside. After the bus ride, we boarded the most advanced form of transportation in our city, a subway/elevated train, to go to the south of town again. Standing there on the train, we (or at least I) felt so superior. Those around us had not felt the distance they were traveling. They hadn't made the earth turn under their feet. They had just zipped here and there on buses or taxis. Or actually maybe some of them had travelled there on their own power and seen the world walk by them in all its beauty. Maybe they had felt that freedom and sense of worship that we had felt.

Having hopped off the subway/elevated train, we still had a ten minute walk from the station to our houses. If I remember right, I think we rewarded ourselves with a little ice cream or something before going inside. For such a memorable trip it would have been appropriate to have kept a memento from it. J brought back the soft drink bottle and still has it sitting on his cabinet shelf beside his precious books as a monument to our Long March. But I have nothing. Not even pictures, as I had leant my camera to someone.

That's ok. If I had kept something then I would have had to throw it away someday. But I didn't, and I won't.