The Country

This weekend I hung out with a couple of my students – cousins that live about 45 minutes out into the country.

I was super excited as I’ve wanted to see what the country life of China is like. Not that I know a whole lot about country life in Canada. But still.

Before going to their house we went to Dalin Temple to do some praying. I was given a bundle of incense sticks labelled with “happiness” in Chinese. After lighting the entire bundle I held it in both hands, raised it to my head and lowered it down to about my waist, and repeated that movement twice, followed by three short jerky shakes before sticking the whole bundle into a pile of previously lit sticks that had disintegrated to ashes.

After roaming around and checking out some more of the temple, we climbed a mountain.

It’s not really a mountain but a big hill that’s been given the name of a mountain. At the top of the mountain was a pagoda about 5 stories tall. We climbed this too and were rewarded with a magnificent view. And this time, my camera worked.

On the way back down I found a cemetery. The others weren’t as interested in it as I was so we didn’t get to explore, unfortunately.

We stopped at their place for some lunch. In parts of Canada, living in the country means driving up to twenty minutes (or more) to visit your next door neighbours. It’s not as drastic in China, but given the population that’s really not surprising. There were a lot of fields surrounding the area with various plants, veggies and fruits growing.

And they had dogs! I was too busy petting them and playing with them to take pictures. Apparently I was well-liked with these dogs. The family seemed genuinely surprised that the dogs took to me as quickly as they did. Made me miss my pups back home though.

After eating a delicious meal – in which they seriously over-fed me with everything they could think of because they didn’t know what I liked - we headed down the block to a farm park

The park had playgrounds with climbing equipment; a pond where we played our own version of bumper boat; an obstacle course in water (which I was reluctant to join but glad when I did); and a small museum chronicling the use and growth of farm equipment.

On the way back to the school, we stopped at a fruit market where I was completely spoiled with various kinds of fruit and I can now officially say the infamous jar of fruit in my fridge now has company.

*Will add pictures when my internet stops being an ass. You can expect a sudden, dramatic overload of posts (most likely without pictures) as I get frustrated with the accumulation of unpublished but completed ones gathering in the edit posts folder.*