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A few weeks ago Chenchen invited me to accompany her to a famous scenic area about 45 minutes from here call Xikou (shee-koe). Chenchen and I are the two people responsible for the new product development here, but of the people I associate with on a day-to-day basis, her English is the worst, we rarely use any at all so it looked like a good opportunity for us to practice some critical vocab. Still she is friendly and patient and we both respect each other’s job function despite each of our limited understanding of each other’s processes and specific duties. Her boyfriend is a guide at Xikou and she, knowing I like to the outdoors, invited me along. That morning we met at the bus stop and another coworker, Weiwei, Chenchen’s roommate showed up to. They’re both known around the office to be very fashionable, but I couldn’t help but crack up a bit when I saw their outfits – I’m taking learning about Chinese tastes seriously so I kept it to myself. I once before made an attempt to ride to Xikou, but couldn’t figure out how to get there w/o getting on an interstate so turned back, turns out I had just missed a small connecting road under the new interstate. Have I mentioned before that it's been difficult finding any decent maps of the area?

As I was hiking back from the historic house I passed one of the man-made ponds and noticed two pigs nervously moving about at the end of a sagging plank over the water. A handler was yelling furiously at them, when one finally slid in, the other jumped in. The pigs then swam the length of the pond to a built-in pathway back to their pen. I was a little sad to see them run from their handler after they got out, but I couldn't resist the photo op of such a strange (even the others agreed) show.

Once we got to the main entrance the two of them went to a barbeque and I went for a hike with three people who we shared our van with along a long winding road to the main tourist area and entrance. The trails weren’t particularly exciting, just sidewalks leading through the forest, but there weren’t many people out and it was clean and cool so was pleasant. My three new friends were all living in Ningbo, one was a banker, the other a lawyer and the other in the clothing business. Their English was okay so they were able to help me with some business vocabulary and answered questions I had about business practices in China, especially hiring etc. At the top of a series of trails was an old large house ChanghaiChek used to live in (the leader who was defeated by Mao and escaped to Taiwan). Again, not to exciting, but pleasant. The most interesting part was his bomb shelter behind the house.

You fill in the caption. “Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff…”

Back with Chenchen and Weiwei on the way back to the town of Xikou we stopped at a Buddhist temple and tourist attraction. Unfortunately we weren’t able to stop at any of the waterfalls or cliffs I’d seen on the tourist guides, but I was in no position to complain being their guest. Here are a couple pictures of the outside the gates.

I didn’t know before, but they both had some devotion to Buddhism. They mostly clowned around with the different sculptures, the 1000+ year old tree, but they did the kneel – bow – routine in front of the big golden Buddha. Since then I’ve been reading up on it more to try to understand the significance of a few common features are, for example most of the temples are pained a pleasant mustard color. So, not without a little smirking and clowning, they lit some incants and put it in ash-filled object (anybody know what it’s called?), did some prayers (another point I don’t understand, isn’t Buddism non-theistic?) and even started to go in to the ceremony. While this is a tourist attraction, it is also an active monastery. There was a ‘church service’ most of the time we were there (not sure what else to call it, my vocabulary reflects my Christian frame of reference) complete with the singing and steady drumming which reminded me of music I’ve heard from Catholic monks. I broke the rules and snuck a picture of the Buddha who was alone in another building, but they didn’t mind us taking pictures as long as it wasn’t disruptive. I didn’t want to be disrespectful of them, but a few still smirked at the camera. We walked around the back of the building and saw this jolly looking wooden carving, the craftsmanship was quite impressive. From there they wanted to go in to the meeting. I didn’t want to go in and in my clamoring for a good explanation, I meant to say “it would be disrespectful for me, not a Buddhist to go in and not participate” but it came as more of an embarrassed refusal, so I unintentionally kept them from going in.

This wooden Buddha statue showed quite a high level of craftsmanship. It was at the back of the main temple where I balked at my invitation to enter.

The layout of many of these compounds, especially the older ones (this one was 1500 years old!!!) is a rectangular wall sometimes with a moat, small rooms around the sides and a couple of large buildings in the middle housing the statues etc. Similar to the forbidden city, though there the god was the emperor. The monks lived in these small rooms and in one with a the windows open, or the top half of the wall open was a long table lined with about a dozen rhythmically practicing reading the old scripts with one tapping a rhythm on a gourd at the end.














Last week, I’m writing this about three weeks after the fact was Weiwei’s last week at Shijia. She’s moving to Shanghai to study English for a year so she can pass the TOFL a pre-req for a fashion/apparel school in Singapore she plans to attend.

(Yes, that is a Nascar hat)