Earthquake and Cherries

Yesterday was certainly exciting. At 7:30 in the morning I was picked to go and teach at a university - one I hadn't been to before. Like all the universities, it seems, it was way South of Xi'an, which is why I had to get picked up at 7:30 to go to a 9:00 class. I thought I was going to be teaching three classes, but it turns out that by "three classes" what they meant was "the same class, but three times as long". There was a break in the middle so the extended periods of talking weren't a problem, but it meant that I didn't have as much material as I needed.

However, it turned out really well. I taught the students Kiwi slang, so now there's a class full of Chinese students running around saying "g'day" and "sweet as". Some of it was hard to grasp ("you can't talk" needed the Chinese teacher's help to explain), but they picked up on it really well. Maybe they won't use it much, but at least they should understand it when it's used with them, which is the real goal. Now I need to plan for next week.

After the class I went to go and pick cherries with the teachers from my regular job. As it turned out, the cherry-picking was in roughly the same direction as the one I'd just come from, but further. We spent a long time in a bus, until the land stopped being so flat; then we spent more time in a "mian bao che" (bread car - the Chinese name for a van) until we got to the top of the hills; and then we walked halfway back down the hills until we got to the cherries themselves.

The cherry-picking was a lot of fun, and afterwards we sat in the shade of the trees and ate our haul. The crazy old lady who ran the plot we were on sold us a few bags of the ones she had picked (they were deeper and redder than our own), and we left. There are many plots in this area, each of them with a small garden of cherry trees, and a person or two to take care of it and charge for the cherries.

After picking the cherries we walked back up the hill again, and started to hear more about the earthquake. We'd found out about it earlier, when we were on the bus there - an earthquake had struck, and various people had called to make sure others were ok. We didn't even know until all the phone calls, because the bus was driving over rough road at the time. Earthquake, potholes, all the same to me. More about that later - first, we had dinner.

We found a little restaurant a short way from the top of the hill, and we all rather gratefully sat down, and the Chinese speakers ordered food. This was the closest I've come to a Chinese back-country restaurant - while we were eating the entrée, they killed and plucked the chicken we were to have for dinner - and I know this because I could see it, we were eating outside. Dinner was delicious, though. Now, on to the earthquake:

The earthquake had struck in Sichuan province, and there are many casualties there - some 8,000 dead. At ground zero it was 7.8 on the Richter scale, I'm told! Over here, we just got the ripples. When I got home I found the air conditioner on the ground, and two particularly silly light fittings hanging from the ceiling had broken by swinging into each other. There were reports that a building had cracked in half, but we couldn't see it when we came home.

We were also told that we'd get an aftershock - first we were told at 6pm, then somewhere between 11pm and 1am. The dorms at all the universities had turned all their students out when the first earthquake struck, and now they weren't letting them back in for fear of the aftershock. At 1am, I got a message from a friend in a university, saying people had given up hope of their beds and were just sleeping outside.

When I got to my apartment I discovered the elevator was down, so I walked up 30 flights of stairs, to discover that I hadn't looked closely enough - only the first elevator was down, the two next to it seemed to be working fine. At any rate, I'd quite tired myself out, so I crashed and slept perfectly soundly.

This morning, after a few concerned phone calls, it turns out there was an aftershock, at about 4am. It wasn't as strong as the first earthquake, and I slept right through it without feeling a thing.