Monthly Archives: August 2010
Hunan Fireworks and Firearms
The village we were at in Hunan was pretty (and pretty small, for that matter). There wasn’t much to do except play with fireworks and firearms.
Some of the students bought the fireworks (from the Mahjong lady’s store) to celebrate the end of the program. Not sure why they decided to set them off over the school buildings and trees. The school administrators seemed to be ok with it because I heard they were watching. I was too lazy to walk down from the dorms, so I took some hand-held shots from the balcony. That “stick” in the middle of the picture is the school’s flag pole.
Here are some kids playing with plastic bb guns that shoot plastic bb bullets. The guns look pretty real, no?
One of my students thought it’d be a good idea to bring them back to Beijing. On our second and last day of debriefing, I got a call saying the cleaning ladies found a gun in one of my students’ dorm rooms. The police came and interrogated us. Just in case you want to buy one for yourselves, please note they’re illegal in Beijing, even though we did pass through train security and all to get back to the city. What good is train security then?
Video: Red Army “Beat It”
Not sure why one of my former students sent this to me. She said she thought of me when she saw it. So random.
Playing Mahjong
I’m starting week 2 of 2 in a town called Nijiangping, in Hunan, China. The people in this town are REALLY nice. Whenever we stop to buy drinks or popsicles, they always invite us to sit with them. We played Mahjong with some storekeepers: grandma (lady in black), grandpa (older man with glasses, and their grandson (boy with glasses). The boy helps with the store while his parents work in the city. I think it’s funny that we played right in the front of their store. Notice the red packages in the right of the photo? They’re firecrackers/fireworks. The packages wrapped in brown paper to the left of the red ones are HUGE boxes. I’m tempted to get one cuz they’re quite inexpensive.
Random note #1: the mahjong tiles here in Hunan are HUGE. They call them Man Tao‘s.
Random note #2: I think the guy in the left of the photo looks like a Chinese Orlando Bloom.