[At left: Sam and me on top of the obelisk pedestal; Joe in the background.]Ok, we're in a closed country, so we can't tell *that* on the mountain. [If you're familiar with the Christmas tune to which the title of this entry alludes, then you know what I'm talking about.]
When I first came to this small town four years ago, I asked the students what we could do for fun. Two answers constituted about 95% of the responses: "We can hike Nanqing Mountain;" and "Let's go to the Teacher's College." In truth, the "mountain" is really just a mid-sized hill. Still, with some very steep sections, ascending Nanqing Mountain provides some serious cardiovascular exercise.
The other principle source of diversion, the Teacher's College, may not sound like anything spectacular, and to many people it wouldn't be. The name isn't an ironic title for a raging club, a trendy bar, or some hidden eatery that only locals know about. The Teacher's College is--or was, rather--(just as its name purported it to be) a place where individuals from Liping County went to be trained in the pedagogical arts. As 'Liping City' grew in importance as the seat of the Liping county government, it saw a rise in the number of students. To accommodate this influx of learners, the school magistrate and other county officials decided to move "Liping Number One Senior Middle School," which provides instruction for the equivalents to tenth, eleventh and twelfth grades in the American educational system, from its old location to the Teacher's College. With it's larger campus and superior facilities, the new Number One Senior Middle School is able to house and teach more pupils than its old counterpart.
Consequently, the "Number Two Senior Middle School" has been moved to the old "Number One" campus; likewise, "Number Three" is now on the grounds of the old "Number Two." In all this shuffling, I believe that the Teacher's College has been abandoned altogether, which has introduced a conundrum of a different sort: there is now no place to train up new educators to provide instruction for all these new students, but there are many things about Communism that defy the understanding of those of us born under the banner of the free market.
[At right: Katie and me with our students at the oblisk on Nanqing Mountain. If you click on the photo to enlarge it, with some scrutinization, you will see that my clothes are completed drenched through from the water fight.]Now that all my students are already at the Teacher's College, (aka "Liping Number One Senior Middle School"), the only recreational activity left is hiking the mountain. Accordingly, this year, as in all years past, the other summer English teachers and I made our requisite pilgrimage up Nanqing Mountain. We began the ascent in the late afternoon, with the worst of the day's heat passed, but with enough daylight hours remaining to guide us both up and down the mountain trails. The hike, though tiring, was enjoyable; nothing of particular interest transpired other than a water fight at the natural spring which bubbles out of the ground midway to the summit.
The energy we exerted was richly rewarded by a vista of the surrounding hills and the buildings of Liping down below. Better than that was a sublime (in an Edmund Burkean sense) sunset. Here's a view from the top [a movie that, by the way, I saw when I lived in Beijing. It falls into the strange genre of silly-but-possibly-life-altering comedies. Gweneth's character is spurred on by Candice Bergen to "fulfill your destiny."]:
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