marjorieinchina | Outdoor sports

My first week at the school has been a little unorthodox, because the school is having its week-long sports meeting. On Monday there was an opening ceremony. It started at something like 8 a.m. I'd been up since 6--ah, those morning bells!--and saw the commotion from my window, so I decided to go out and have a look. I loitered next to the ping-pong tables for a little while, watching the huge crowd of students congregating and sorting themselves into groups on the field, and then Maggie found me and took me into the athletic area.

This was when I discovered that everyone wants their picture taken with me:

--EVERYONE--

--except the band, they were kind of busy, and then they put their instruments away.

Each grade did a dance for the opening ceremony. I think everyone did the same dance, though the junior school students may have done something a little different.

After that, all the teachers did two laps around the track while the students cheered. I joined in, and all along the track students shouted "hello!" as I went by. Then there was a tug-o-war tournament, but I didn't see much of that because a bunch more students wanted to have their pictures taken with me. Then the races began, and they continued, more or less, for the next three days.

I watched a good bit of the athletics, but since I have a pathological inability to stay interested in sports for very long, and because I was sitting right in front of hundreds of students, I spent most of that time accepting kids' offerings of candy, giving out autographs (no kidding), and answering questions about my favorite singer/favorite actor/hairstyle (several students have asked me if my hair is naturally curly, which is confusing to me because from my perspective it isn't curly at all). I had lunch with one group of students, and dinner with another, and they all acted completely enchanted to see me. All this specialness could go to my head if I'm not careful.

On Wednesday, after two days of watching other people be physically active, I climbed a mountain!

The mountain is called Jiu Hua, which apparently means "Nine ___." I think "hua" means "flower," at least sometimes, because the same word is what they call jasmine tea here, but that may not be relevant.

The walk up was longer than I expected, especially when the teacher and her friends who took me hiking all seemed to be in ordinary town clothes. Turns out it was rather a strenuous hike, just one that people mostly take on in clothes they could easily wear to go out to lunch. On our way up, we passed a group of women in sharp-looking jackets, dress shorts, tights, and platform shoes. I say we passed them, but actually their group and ours took turns overtaking each other on the way up, and they had lunch at the summit at the same time we did.

It was hard to take pictures on the trail, because there weren't many open spaces with a good view even at the top. But it was so beautiful I had to try:

Passing houses near the bottom of the mountain

The view from partway up

Bamboo. The writing on the trees is just a "property of" marker, but it sure is pretty.

Gods at the halfway point.

A dog at the summit. (This summer I did some reading about the domestication of dogs. A lot of the dogs I've seen here fit the profile of the original village dog, adapted to hang around people and get food where it can, belonging to no specialized breed. Most of them do seem to belong to people, though.)

Chinese graffiti?

This is the temple at the top of the mountain. I asked Emma, the teacher who'd brought me, whether it was okay to take pictures inside. "Usually not," she said. So I'll just have to tell you that there were three distinct buildings in the temple, that you walked through each one to get to the next, that each one had a large Buddha in the middle, and along the sides were huge, brightly painted statues of Daoist gods. They were amazing, not so much for the craft that went into them as for the powerful, frightening expressions on their faces. These gods were serious. I wish I could show you.

The second chamber/builing of the temple is still under construction, after a landslide seven years ago destroyed a lot of the buildings on the mountain. There were stacks of timber lying around and unpainted statues I couldn't interpret: old men holding books, or walking sticks, and one with long, long eyebrow hairs that hung down over his face. There's so much here that I don't know anything about.