David's Big Adventure in China

I posted a bunch of pictures that have been taken over the past couple months. To see the pictures click on “Pictures” under “my links” on the right hand side about half way down. Some of them are from Jiuxiang which is about 2 hours from here by car and famous for it’s caves. I also posted a picture of a dam that is near there as it is typical of the many dams in China and typical of the many dams that they are worried about having been damaged by the earthquakes. There is one picture of a candle-light earthquake vigil being held by students near my apartment. There are also some pictures from the May 1 holiday celebration of the Olympics. Also included are typical local sights such as pig carcasses being delivered on bicycle wagons or bicycle and a man walking carrying a large amount of toilet paper. It is also common to see someone carrying 20 or 30 live chickens on a bicycle or motorbike with many of them hanging upside down tied together by the feet. Most goods here are delivered by bicycle, bicycle wagon, donkey or horse drawn wagon, motorcycle or mini van. The other day I saw a front door for a home being delivered on a motorbike. I rarely see trucks being used for deliveries except for Coca-Cola and they use small trucks with one door on the back. I attended a Chinese wedding recently with a friend and there are some pictures of that. The wedding ceremony was held in a hotel ballroom while a banquet was being served. During the part of the ceremony where the wedding vows were being exchanged the guests were being typically Chinese, talking and making noise. At one point the pretty lady serving as the MC that performed the ceremony raised her arms and all could see her hairy armpits (most of the ladies here don’t shave armpits or legs but most of them don’t have much hair on their legs anyway).

In my last post I talked about birth control. When a couple does decide to have a baby they have to get approval from the local government. Without the approval they cannot get a resident card for the child and the child would not be entitled to any government services such as education.

The earthquake has proven to be a tremendous tragedy. The final death toll will likely exceed 70,000 and they say they are 5 million people homeless! That would be like the entire population of Minnesota becoming homeless overnight! There are many small villages that they have had great difficulty getting to because they are in the mountains and all the roads have been destroyed by the quakes or rockslides. There have been hundreds of rescuers buried in rockslides and mudslides from the aftershocks. There have been hundreds of aftershocks with at least 4 of them being 6.0 or more on the Richter scale and more than 20 being 5.0 or more. 5.0 is a strong quake in and of itself. They announced on tv the other day a warning for another strong quake and created panic. The people in the affected area are so frightened and tired from all the quakes and many of them are sleeping outside even if their home was not damaged. There was a 3 day mourning period from Monday through Wednesday and all the bars, movie theatres, internet cafes and all other forms of entertainment were closed. It’s difficult to watch the news because it’s so sad to see so much suffering. So many parents have lost their only child and so many children have become orphans. The media was relatively open about the conditions for several days and even talked about the corruption that likely contributed to shoddy construction at some of the schools that caused the buildings to collapse with hundreds of children killed. I have read that the media is being reined in and I see that most of the coverage now is about all the people that are being helped and the amounts of money that have been donated. They have redirected some of the trains and are using them to take supplies in and injured people out of the area. Unfortunately they don’t have enough helicopters so getting rescuers and supplies to some of the remote areas has been very slow in happening. The Chinese people have experienced so much adversity for so long that they mostly take it in stride and they are really pulling together to do everything possible to help the victims.

I’ve got one topic about the culture here that I’ll talk about this time. With China’s one child policy, birth control is a big deal here. Because for most couples it is unacceptable to have more than one child, abortion is very available and affordable and is used as a backup birth control method. Many ladies here have had the procedure and most often when they were married. I have one friend that told me that she went a couple times to get the procedure and rode her bicycle home afterwards!

I have received quite a few e-mails checking on me to make sure I’m okay after the earthquake. I didn’t even feel it and there was no impact here in Kunming. I haven’t ... [Continue reading this entry]

It’s been about 4 weeks since I’ve written mostly because the last two weeks I’ve been incredibly busy. I have been working on finding a different job, dealing with some issues at my property in ... [Continue reading this entry]