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Here are some pictures from a day at the market. The market was a 45-minute walk and a half-hour bus ride away. It happened every five days and you had to get everything you needed for those five days and then cram it on the bus for the return trip then haul it on your back from the bus stop to home. I took this picture of rice paddies as we walked along the road that day. There were rice paddies like that everywhere. Every family had been allotted a plot of land by the government years ago and it was from these rice paddies that the families got most of their rice for the year. It got confusing as generations split up the plots but made for some good conversation as it was explained to us. That's Yuqian on the right with Tianshu, my teaching partner (I'm happy to say that Yuqian has just arrived in New York and is getting her Master's degree at my alma mater, NYU).

Get a good look at the meat table and the rest of the big market streaming below and behind it.

We, being the rich and delicate people from the city, took a "taxi" most of the way back. Here's the view from the back of the taxi, which was actually a motorcyle with two wheels in the back and a box with shelter above it where the passengers would ride. The woman on the left is our beloved "Saozi", which actually means 'elder brother's wife' but is what we called Teacher Zhang's wife. Saozi could carry more on her back than I could on mine.


And here I am shaving. Sort of had to have a picture of this. The kids were fascinated with my shaving. Many Chinese people were also curious about the hair on my arms. More than once, people I had just met would satisfy this curiosity by reaching over without even asking and tugging at the hair on my arm. I think I had actually just finished shaving at this point and was only pretending to shave for the photo op.



The kids could come up with stuff to do with just about anything hanging around (like the message in leaves you'll see later). The flowers that you see above were made from palm leaves and then bunched together using more palm leaves. The final product looks complicated but it was actually easy to make and a nice way to kill time. They even taught me how to do it. They were always giving things like this to us. One of the kids hung this 'bouquet' in the curtains of my window and it stayed there until we left. I don't know how to fit these expressions of a vibrant imagination into the larger story of the Chinese education system... So, uh, how about another picture?



This is where we ate our meals, in Zhang Laoshi's home across the schoolyard from our rooms. These pictures were taken quickly on one of the last days of our stay there. I realized that for all the filming that had been going on I hadn't taken many pictures of a lot of the interesting things there. For instance, there is no picture of me wearing a conical hat and carrying two pails of water from the well on a pole across my shoulder and nudging big water buffalos out of my way on a narrow path between two flooded rice paddies. The photo with the big blur is of the place where our meals were cooked, and on the left side of that photo you can see the chunks of cured pork hanging on hooks - really more like fat hanging on hooks - that was the special stuff, but I couldn't eat it. One of the few things that I couldn't eat there. Or anywhere, come to think of it.