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Yangshuo Fun Run 2016
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Mid-Autumn Festival Vagabond in Yangshuo
This year’s China trip began with the Mid-Autumn Festi-val, just days after my arrival in Yangshuo to spend two months learning Chinese. The timing couldn’t have been better. Not only did I get to experience the second most important Chinese holiday (after New Years), but I got to join my school mates for a free barbecue provided by the local fire department.
Firecrackers had been ex-ploding all day long to im-pressive effect, so I’m sur-prised the fire department staff did not have to rush out to fight a fire. Instead they graciously hosted a rag-tag group of foreigners learning Chinese and Chinese students learning English. We were outdoors in the comfortably humid night air, where we gazed at the moon, sang to a karaoke machine, and listened to a talented local saxophone musician play nostalgic tunes for our enjoyment.
At school, the cafeteria even gave us a Mooncake, the traditional holiday sweet for the Mid-Autumn Festival. It is round like the moon and about the size and shape of a hockey puck.
The festival fell on September 19th, which is the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar, but the festivities lasted a few days longer. My enthusiastic language partner from the associated English school department suggested that we climb a nearby radio tower mountain to get the best view of the moon. We started out on our “30-minute” hike before 6 PM and arrived back after 8 PM in the dark. Many of our struggling party did not make it to the top, and I only made it back down thanks to a schoolmate with a cellphone flashlight.
Chinese School
On Saturday some teachers and students from the Chinese and English language schools took a bike ride into the area around Yangshuo. We were surrounded by spectacular karst mountains and fertile fields. Rice was being harvested and dried in the sun. Farmers were out tending their fruits and vegetables. Tourists like us were riding their bikes and taking rides on the popular bamboo rafts on the Yulong River.
The language school I am attend-ing is called Omeida. It is situat-ed in a secton of Yangshuo with three language schools, each run by one of three brothers. The Omeida English language school is the largest, and our Chinese section is part of that school. The Chinese section has 12 stu-dents and 5 or 6 teachers. The students range in age from their 20’s to 60’s. The 20’s contingent makes up about half of the school, but the 60’s contingent is a close second. The 30’s to 50’s group is in the minority. About half of the students are from the United States, and the other half are from Europe. Most of the students are far more advanced in Chinese than I am, so the first and second weeks, I had my own teacher. This next week, there will be three students in my beginning class. I am still not very comfortable with the Chi-nese Romanization. The Chi-nese characters look familiar, but they don’t sound like their Japanese counterparts. I’m only taking one session of classes a day, because I can’t absorb more than that at once. An alternate interpretation might be that I am lazy. However, I am enjoy-ing all the other offerings of the school: a daily language partner from the English school, lunch in the school cafeteria, housing at the owner’s dormitory/ residence, and school social events. One day this week, my instructor accommodated my coffee addiction by holding class in a coffee shop. We reviewed the history of coffee from books in the shop. Coffee has a rela-tively short history in China and has only become popular in the last 5 years or so. The only place coffee is grown in China is Yun-nan Province.
