May Day in Meizhou

Tomorrow begins May, my last month in China. Since tomorrow is May Day, the students have a 3-day weekend. We're taking advantage of the day off tomorrow to travel to Meizhou with the English teacher Kevin and his wife. Instead of taking the bus as normal, we are taking a taxi this time which the school is paying for - and should be much faster than the bus.

May Day as you should know is the 'real' Labor day, an international holiday where we honor the labor movement throughout the world and the men and women who fought and died for the freedom and privileges we have today. We working class Americans enjoy such things as weekends and 40 hour workweeks with overtime pay thanks to the American labor movement. It's a pretty big holiday here in China, not so much in America as I can recall.

Today was Rebecca's turn to visit the Da Jin school in Da Tian village, so I had the whole day off. I decided to take a short bike ride down the river south of town a couple of miles until I reached another bridge near a small village town. I sat at a gazebo thing near the bridge to eat my sandwich and many young elementary aged kids gathered 'round to look at me. I pulled out my camera to take photos of them but when I did so they all screamed and ran away from the camera. I outsmarted them by switching to my camera's video function, turning it on and then pointing at them as they ran away - it makes for a pretty funny little video clip.

I visited a calligraphy artist's shop today to pick up a couple of items for gifts back home. Rebecca and I stopped in last night to ask for prices of certain things, and I returned by myself this afternoon to purchase the stuff. When I entered they served me tea so we sat and drank tea for awhile, communicating what little I could with the shop owners. Then a very old man came to sit with us, who was the shop owner's father. I was surprised he knew a little bit of English so we had a fairly limited conversation. One thing I've noticed living here is that you don't really need to know a language to communicate with someone, as body language and gestures act as universals - but it helps that I know a little bit of Mandarin. The man said he was 92 years old and was fairly excited to see and talk to me, and I shook his hand as I left.

The weather here has been amazing for the past few days - mild temperatures with no rain and lots of sunshine. In May as we draw closer to the rainy season we'll probably get frequent rain, so I'm enjoying this pleasant weather while I can. I'm I'll have more stories and pictures to post after tomorrow's trip to Meizhou.