Life at the Carnival

Today was like a carnival, just like all the other days of this national holiday week. This morning our school driver picked our team up and a few other foreign teachers to see all the Nanchang "sights."

First we managed to get through downtown and parked near a temple. Several of the tree-lined streets surrounding the temple were like a make-shift festival. It reminded me of an old movie. Long streets were packed with vendors selling everything from fried squid on a stick to miniature bunnies in cages. Our team leader ended up with a gold fish. People were packed so tightly on the streets that I just focused on breathing. Men with microphones stood on little stages hawking their wares to little crowds gathered before them. Kids walked around with cotton candy and beggars sat in the middle of the river of people asking for change. The constant blaring microphones and music, in addition to thick smoke from the cooking food, and all the thousands of people, started to overwhelm me after the first hour. We just walked from one street to another without a destination in sight.

After that outing we headed to Nanchang's ritzy department store, "Rainbow." It is 8 stories tall and is filled with fancy clothes and very expensive shoes. A couple of girls on my team even ate cheescake there. We ate lunch there at a Chinese-style food court. I had spicy chicken on bones, green beans, and tomatoes with egg.

For the grand finale of the day they took us to the outskirts of town to Nanchang's ferris wheel. This is not an ordinary ferris wheel. This ferris wheel was the tallest in the world until last year. It puts the London Eye to shame. A few of my teammates and I paid the 50 yuan fare and rode on it for 45 minutes. It moved so slowly that a few times I thought for sure we were stuck. It was sort of crazy. We were all pretty fine and then one teammate basically started to hyperventilate because we were moving the car so much. Anyway, I tried not to freak out. We had a good view of the hazy Nanchang skyline, which is pretty impressive for this average sized inland city. We were also perched nearly above the big brown river. Countless barges the same color as the muddy river slowly moved along.

It was a pretty good day, but I think I'm ready for the holiday to be over. I don't feel productive at all, but still tired because we go on these wild excursions nearly every day. It has been great to see more of the city and the people. I would also like to see my students again!

Speaking of students, we met up with four Chinese students last night who are sisters in him. It was very nice getting to know them. We ate dinner, went to a karaoke place, and then taught them to play baseball at the old campus. We started playing baseball at about 8:30 p.m. It was so fun. We had a consistent crowd of about 50 students and the occasional police man watching. We managed to engage quite a few of them in the game. They thought it was extremely exciting and we had a great time. We played nearly until curfew under the Nanchang sky lit up with national day fireworks. It was a fitting end to the day.