Rural Farm and misc.

Hello again, so I have three things I want to get through this evening. We’ll start with what everyone probably wants to know, how was the farm??!?! Then move to pictures and finally heat. Basic itinerary: We left by plane to Qingdao – yes, where the beer Tsingdao is made; unfortunately we didn’t have time to sample any – at 7:30am (way too early) in the morning on October 22^nd; then took a four hour van-ride in a much too small van out into the countryside to be greeted like the circus came to town; finally leaving and heading home around 9pm on Sunday. A great excuse for not doing any homework that weekend!

So what did we do?...well what is there to do but work? Not much, so work was what entertained throughout the weekend – how sad for a birthday weekend I know. Putting that aside, we did three different activities: gathering sweet potatoes; digging up the roots of corn stalks; and peeling off the pieces of the corn on the cob. After a few minutes of trying to get the sweet potatoes out of the ground, we found out that we pretty bad at it. This is because sweet potatoes are quite fragile and sticking a pitchfork like tool into the ground slices the potatoes when wielded by inexperienced hands – which is bad. After we finally got the potatoes out of the ground, we separated them into the good piles which consisted of large potatoes that had very little damage and the bad piles which well had everything else.

After we killed enough potatoes they figured making fuel for fires would be better suited for us. We then moved to their corn field where we spent our effort digging up corn stalk roots and then beating them with sticks to get the dirt out. Thus, we didn’t have to worry about destroying it.

But what did for the better part of the weekend was pick off corn kettles from the cob. This type was for animals so it had to be de-cobbed? It is kinda hard to explain, so you’ll just the before and after pictures.

Talking about pictures…I think I found a way to get pictures up on the blog so hopefully you’ll see some soon! And the farm pictures have some interesting pictures of the local cuisine…

EDIT: Uploading pictures to the blog would have taken forever with a 8mb limit per post, but I have uploaded the first batch of photos on Facebook.

I don’t want to spoil it too much, but if you have to know we ate…hah, you’ll have to scroll down to the bottom of this blog.

Now on to the last subject, heat. So yeah, it is really cold in China and really really windy. It’s kinda horrible actually. But I’ve survived so far…I’ll let you know when we reach the coldest month: January. The interesting though is we have no heat. Yes, NO HEAT. That’s what I would have been saying, but national turn on the heat day was actually today! So the heaters all over China have started to turn on. Unfortunately it isn’t very warm yet still. But yeah, the heat in China is governed by the government. And no has heat until the government decides to turn on heat. This is called National Turn on the Heat Day – unofficially. Supposedly it doesn’t turn on until November 15^th, but it is especially cold this winter (China doesn’t have fall L) and so they turned it on. What was especially interesting though was that every class sent two representatives to meet with government officials and voice their concerns.

So the interesting we ate were: grasshoppers, rabbit, and chicken – we got to see them kill the chicken. Enjoy the pictures when they go up.