I'm finally back in Courtenay, following an 11-hour train trip overnight from Changchun to Beijing, a day spent in 40 degree weather, and a 14 hour plane flight from Beijing to Vancouver. I slept most of the way to Courtenay, and then slept for another 15 hours or so. There is now a tension inside me. I already miss the fact that I am given a lot of attention, mostly because of the fact that I'm a white guy and speak some Chinese. Almost everywhere I went, people would look at me with curiosity.

Yesterday I came back from a three day trip to Inner Mongolia, which is sort of like a province of China. The bus ride there was 10 hours, but that was because at first we went the wrong way. Fang Laoshi thought that there was a short cut, and upon finding a fork in the road, he got out of the bus and asked the way to Inner Mongolia. If you've ever driven a manual car, and cruised down the highway, and instead of changing from third to fourth gear, you mistakenly changed to the second...the reaction of the car was the same reaction as Fang Laoshi. Total astonishment.

This past weekend was very busy. On Saturday, right after my last update, I went with Bonnie and her boyfriend to South Campus, which is about a twenty minute cab ride from the North campus in Changchun. There we met up with Cherie, from our group, and Nasir, a Morocan student Cherie met at school. All of us went to a friend of Nasir's house, where we met Daniel, a French teacher at a private college next to the South campus of Jilin University. We talked mostly in French, and it was really nice.

A lot has happened since the last update, as always. We just got back from Harbin, which is a 4 1/2 hour drive north from Changchun. The first interesting thing wasn't in Harbin, but on the way there and back. I got my first glimpse of the countryside of China, and the small part I saw was vast. I saw rice fields and vegetable fields, and workers toiling all day in the sun. The countryside of China has played an integral part in Chinese history, especially the twentieth century.

Lots to report. In one of my classes, the listening section, we listened to Chinese words and had to write them in pinyin (which is using English letters to spell Chinese words), and the second part was an ask-and-answer section. During that part, the class was asked "ni zhidao shenme" ("what do you know?") and I answered "Wo zhidao Dashan" ("I know Dashan"). Now, most of you don't know who Dashan is, but most Chinese people do. Dashan (which means "big mountain") is a Caucasian, Canadian graduate of Toronto University.