A most peculiar village.

The houses in the village were adorable with courtyards and greenery all over. Er, the greenery was all over, the courtyards were appropriately placed. The houses were all fairly new, though, probably following the increase in tourism.

This is a rather daunting post to begin because the past week was so full of, well, things. As a disclaimer, I hope I don't come off as too negative; I'm going more for honest. As I mentioned, for my social study project I decided to go to a village outside of Beijing. Because I like farming and villages a lot. A lot a lot.

I also like goats. And goats that walk in the street. And goatherds that wear straw hats. Actually, anyone who wears a straw hat is okay in my book.

Going in to it, I wasn't expecting it to be the time of my life. Most of my teachers were baffled that anyone actually wanted to go a village (the trend in China seems to be to get away from them). I considered going to Shanghai or Qingdao where I knew I'd have a good time exploring another city, but ultimately because agriculture and environmental issues are what I'm most interested in, I signed myself up for the village trip and found myself living in a farmer's house for 5 days in Simatai village. Yeah, "Great Wall at Simatai" Simatai.

The stretch we climbed was under renovation at parts. The renovated parts looked pretty fake, and I sometimes had the surreal feeling of being on a theme park attraction as it was being built. Maybe because it really felt like Mario Kart at times.

While I'm glad I went, and I had a lot of fun at times, there was a lot of room for improvement on HBA's part. For one, the village we went to neighbors a popular section of the Great Wall. This means it's far from what I imagine an average Chinese village is like. Almost everyone there had some job involving tourism, such as driving people (no taxis here), running a restaurant or selling souvenirs on or around the Wall. Not much farming was going on. Furthermore because the area provides water for Beijing, the Beijing government actually pays them not to plant certain crops for fear of water contamination (sadly, no one found the idea of keeping Beijing's water clean as ironic as I did). The whole situation about government compensation was kind of shady--we never got a straight answer, but point being most people had tiny plots of land that they farmed for their own consumption, not to sell.

You can tell that baby is thinking, "嗯？外国人？"Actually he was more interested in my camera than my nationality.

As far as what we actually did, there was a lot of chatting with locals, which was probably the best aspect of the trip. Though my comprehension skills were a limiting factor, I feel like I got a much better sense of rural life, values, etc. People were very willing to talk to foreigners, though sometimes it was hard to move the conversation past superficial things. They loved to discuss Blessing's hair, for instance. We ourselves often fell back on the Great Wall as a convenient topic. "Did you climb the wall?" seemed to be the equivalent of "what's up?" in Simatai village. At least when addressing foreigners.

We did a trivial amount of "farm work", which was disappointing, though in that heat no one was too eager to weed. Moreover, any work we did was clearly for our own benefit. There was no front of actually helping the villagers in the fields. I'm not sure if that was because they thought we'd be of no help or if they thought it would be rude to make us work or what.

One day we visited a village in the neighboring province of Hebei (Simatai is still in Beijing), which seemed to be more of what I imagined a Chinese village to be, namely less clean and more run down. We also stopped by an elementary school and a shrine or two. We also saw these great PSAs about gender equality and the merits of fewer children, which were all over the streets. I wonder how seriously they're taken.

"Caring for girls is caring for the the future of the nation." This village was big on the PSAs.

Another day we went to the market, which was a great opportunity to talk with people. Though generally after you've had a conversation with someone it feels rude not to buy anything, so we ended up with more stuff than necessary. Blessing got some pretty classy Gucci socks, and Pim bought a bubble gun that promised to be most exciting until we discovered it didn't come with batteries. Childish fun foiled.

What else...We went fishing one day, which was amusingly unsuccessful. Oh, and we made dumplings and noodles. All the food was delicious and very vegetarian friendly.

Our host was very demanding about the wrapping method. I'm glad I caught on quickly and escaped his censure. Chen laoshi kept reassuring us that there were many ways to wrap dumplings, but he wouldn't hear of it. That's all I'll say about that...

So that was my social study week. It was a good time for resting, getting out of the city (my lungs sang with happiness), and experiencing something I wouldn't have the opportunity to otherwise. And I was with good friends, so the fun times were great and even the less-than-great parts were okay. I'm happy with my decision to go. Now it's time for semester two of Chinese. I'm pretty pumped. If we've already improved this much in a month, I can't wait to see us at the end. (Oh so cheesy, but I really am that excited about language-learning...).