my teeming brain: It takes a village

I spent the last five (5) days in various villages throughout southern China. This means that I have been subsisting on village food, a cuisine to which I have adapted, but one that is still not my favorite. My appetite has shrunk, as has my stomach, which should help continue the trend set in motion by my Chinese diet. A full workweek in the villages has also meant I have neither showered nor washed my hair for as long. (The people here do bath and wash their hair in local rivers and steams, but I'm not hardy enough to endure those frigid waters at this time of year.)

The first stop in my tour of the hinterlands was the hometown of a former student, Daisy. The drive over provided some great views of the countryside [see photo, right. Doesn't it look like something out of The Sound of Music? The hills are alive, I tell you!]. But don't fall under the impression that all of these scenes subscribe to some bucolic ideal, because they don't. There are plenty of unattractive images too; I just didn't feel they were worth taking pictures of.

My chaperon and I alighted from the bus, and witnessed the pink parade [see photo, left]. The day of my visit was actually some sort of gettogether of two villages. To welcome the visiting village, the women of the host town (in pink) lined up with a drum song. The women of the guest town (in red, not shown) did a little number of their own with their drums. The pink and red ladies marched towards each other, then the host women flanked both sides of the road to let the guests pass between them. The guests marched on to the festival, followed by their hosts, pretty in pink.

The "highlight" of this first trip, however, was definitely that I was forced to sing (karaoke style) for this festival. My hosts and chaperon insisted that I go up onstage, in front of both villages of people to sing a song *that I didn't even know*. A Chinese song. That's right: an unfamiliar Chinese song. Does it get any worse than this folks? Here's a photo I took while waiting onstage:

Actually, I was vaguely familiar with the tune of the song I was asked to sing, because I had heard it a few times while living in Beijing. The lyrics were completely foreign, however, so it's a good thing I could read the Chinese at the bottom of the screen. [See photo, left. Notice how I'm totally looking at the monitor (not shown): Normally I like to make eye contact with my audience, but I didn't know the words to the song.] Actually, I sort of didn't want to look into the faces of the people whose festival I felt I was ruining. See that other person on stage with me in the photo? I was accompanied by two others who were supposed to "help" me sing, by virtue of the fact that they were ostensibly more familiar with "童话," the pop tune selected to torment both me and my listeners. They may have known the melody and lyrics really well, but neither of them could find the downbeat, and both were pretty tone deaf, so trying to be both in-time and in-tune proved remarkable challenging for me. All in all, on a scale of 0 to disastrous, I'd have to give my performance a rating of "disaster-and-a-half."

[Pictured above: another of the acts for the two-village party. Unlike mine, however, this one was successful.]

As for the other two places I visited, there isn't much to report, other than I had a really good time and interacted with alot of livestock.

[Me on the aqueduct. This photo took Danny about 15 minutes to get, because I became petrified when trying to walk along the length of the aqueduct. I look casual, cool, calm, and collected, but on the inside I was about to cry.]

[Danny, Ken, Ken's brother, and me on a rusted slide at an abandoned amusement park. It's hard to believe, but this slide leads into a swimming pool. Why would anyone make build an outdoor waterslide (in a place with year-round high humidity) that wasn't rust resistant?]