To Chang Chun

Everyone, not literally, but many people from the academy went to Chang chun over the weekend to celebrate three birthdays and to get away from our little world here. Most people came to Si Ping on friday and bought train tickets for saturday morning and some just took the train to Chang Chun on friday night. I waited till saturday morning to try to buy my ticket and there wasn't anything until 3pm that day. So i went outside and asked some of the bus drivers if they were going to chang chun. they kept pointing me in the same direction but after the third bus I realized they were pointing towards the bus station. I went to the ticket office and asked what times they had for buses to Chang Chun and found a 10:15 or an 11:00. I asked for the 10:15 and the woman told me to come back later and get my ticket. I went to KFC and then went shopping at the Zhong Xin. Around 9:45 I see if anyone was at the internet cafe and headed to the bus station. i bought my ticket and by 9:55 i was sitting in the station, eating a banana, and reading "Time's Arrow". I opened a soda bottle for two old women with a tiny girl and spent some time making faces at her and the little boy sitting next to me. I had stepped outside to smoke, the bus and train stations being two of the few places it is not permissible to smoke but spitting is still allowed, and cabbies come up to try to convince me to take their service to Changchun. they try to suggest that I would be much more comfortable in a car with music and room to stretch out. They are faster than the bus, they say. For a mere 200 yuan i could ride to Changchun in style (my words, not theirs). I merely point out that the bus only costs 25 yuan and the price drops to 160. When I point out that I have already bought tickets they turn away. At the bus station i go to buy a bottle of water and pack of Baishas for my little trip. I choose a nice looking old woman to buy from and she is keen to sell me. I point out the Baishas and ask for a bottle of water. She bags them and tells me 6 yuan. I tell her 4 and she starts to tell me no, that the things I want are more, the cigarrettes 4 and the water 2. I tell her i know the smokes are 3 and i take out the expensive water and choose the brand that i know costs 1. She gives me a rueful chuckle and wags a finger at me. i am learning here.

I spent the three hour bus ride reading and sleeping and watching rural china out of my window. Here, in China, they farm every scrap of land possible. In the US i am used to flat stretches of farmland stretching off into the distance, but here, the land is whatever shape it is and the farming is done against the natural contours of the land. They plant up and down the side of hills. They plant to the very edge of the arable land. If there are sections of a field that are not plowed and sown, or ready for sewing, then they can be assumed to be unplantable. All the work is done by hand. Donkeys or mules draw the plow in front of the men working. Crops are seeded one at a time by people, usually old men, using these strange pogo stick-esque devices. I have yet to see any harvesting but I imagine it is all accomplished through china's greatest resource: Labor. Farmer's appropriate, annex, sections of highway to dry their corn. It is spread over the road and then walked through, forming rows, mirroring the land they have pulled it from. Furrowed like the fields. When it is dry it is swept and scooped into sacks, weighed, and the sack is sewn up. The sacks, which must weigh around 100lbs., are then hand loaded to overflowing onto trucks.