Blog Post #7

Wuhan, China

No school today, so it was a day to explore the area. First stop was the fabric market at the first floor of our hotel building.  As I have said before, there is stall after stall after stall of vendors selling beautiful fabrics for about 1/6 of the cost of fabric in the States. On of our translator friends met us there and helped Jim negotiate the purchase of material for a suit coat and then the sewing and tailoring of it. They were very professional, we found some lovely wool material and the coat will be ready next Friday, the day before we leave. The man from whom we bought recognized me from walking through the market several times to go to Thanksgiving Church to tutor the pastor in English.

Next stop was lunch with our dear friend the translator and negotiator. She is a fourth year seminarian from the south of China, bordering Vietnam, she said, where they have spicy food.  Perhaps people have been protecting us from it, because we haven’t had much that is very spicy here, though we love spice, so she ordered some for us that more than met our standards.  We had a fish, cut in chunks and cooked in a wok with green onions, a few red peppers and some little spices that looked like peppercorns, but she said were not. They are the basis for Szechuan cooking she said. Also cooked cabbage and a dish of glass noodles. It was all wonderful. She is translating Jim’s sermon tomorrow, so they talked about it some to help set her up.

We left her and walked down to the bank of the Yangtze River. It is very wide as it flows through the city, probably 1 ½ to 2 miles, with an island between two channels, and the boat traffic is constant, from barges to small fishing boats to tugboats and tourist barges. There is a greenway along the water with lots of places to watch the river, fly a kite, picnic or whatever. There was a group of about 80 school children and their parents at one spot. The kids had all been given red ball caps and white kites to fly, and they were all trying. Strings were tangling here and there, but most mastered the art very quickly and kites were high in the sky all around us.  We also watched an older man walk by with several long bamboo poles. He went down to the water’s edge, assembled a square net attached to the four poles which he had put together into a square, set that all on a bamboo pole which rested on a fork in the river, and we saw him pull in fish. We wondered how many hundreds, or even thousands, of years that has been done on this river. We walked by an alley of museums: Mao Tse Tung’s home, a Revolution Museum and a Room where one of the first Communist Congress’ was held. We didn’t go inside them, enjoying the nice day of sunshine and warm weather too much.

We walked through a famous Street Food Alley on the way back. I could not tell you all the types of food we saw, much of it on a stick, after being roasted on an open fire, though there was also pineapple, watermelon and other fruits on sticks. Several kinds of little sea critters were BBQ’d, but I don’t know if they were crayfish, little squid or shrimp. The kids were going for the cotton candy, the garbage cans were overflowing, and you could barely walk through the crowds. The cacophony of sounds was matched by the variety of smells, some more pleasant than others!

We ate supper at the seminary this evening with one of Jim’s students, a fine young man from the very south of China as well. He felt bad that he couldn’t speak English, but we managed sign language together and had a good time. It is fun to walk around and start to recognize students. There is a freshness, openness and lack of cynicism to the people we have met here that is wonderful.

It is also so interesting to be in such a minority. Day after day we see no other Caucasian people. Today we saw a family with brown hair in the sea of black, and they were French. But we don’t get many stares; people go their own way. However, parents of babies and toddlers tell their children to wave at us or say “Nihau” to us, and at the museum a couple of days ago, a young woman who was having her picture taken asked me to be in the photo with her. So we are an oddity, but not a hostile one.

It’s a small world. I got an email from my friend, Dixie, attaching a link to a recent Wall Street Journal article on Retirees Dancing in the Streets of Wuhan, China, explaining all of the benefits and problems arising from the practice. Where people live so closely together, those boom boxes on every corner interrupt other people’s quiet. Yet it is a cheap way to get exercise and have social interaction. Fascinating that I can read about this local problem from half a world away!

As we sit in our hotel, we hear horns beeping constantly, either cars or, more likely motor scooters. We wonder if we will miss all those beeps when we get home. I guess it will be a sign that we aren’t in China any more!