There and Back Again: A Travelers Tale: China and Chuck

Xiamen Campus (a little distorted...)

As previously mentioned China has just entered the new lunar year and the 14 day spring festival. There are certain things everyone does on different days of Spring Festival and the first thing is to go to the temple. There is a Buddhist temple just a couple blocks down from the university which I chose to visit. This wasn’t originally my plan, I was simply going to pick up some groceries but even walking through the campus, it was flooded by locals who chose to spend their day off visiting “China’s most beautiful campus”. Once out into the street there seemed to be cars and busses absolutely everywhere and once I broke free from the stream of people going into the university I got caught up in the flood heading to the temple. I had been the temple quickly before but it was a much different experience when it is crowded with people and the smoke from the incense can be seen a mile away. It was also really neat to see the religious practices here. There was a lot of bowing at statues as well as trying to land money on rocks or inside certain things. Even though I stood out like a sore thumb and didn’t bow to anything, I never got any looks or even second glances.

Buddhist Temple on Chinese New Year

Following this we decided to host our own cultural event, we watched Mulan. It seemed like a logical thing to do on Chinese New Year! It was actually interesting to see certain elements of the movie now that I am better culturally informed. I wish I could remember an example for you but it was actually a few days ago now. After the movie we headed out to watch the fireworks. I know, you’re probably confused considering I said there were fireworks in the last post, well, it’s China and they like their fireworks. I few of us found a prime location sitting on a boulder on the beach watching them on both our side of the river and across. I’ve seen some good firework shows in my day but nothing quite like this, there were hearts and smiley faces! My favourite were the ones that exploded white and then hung in one spot for about 10 seconds!

I don’t know how much else of what we did is that interesting to you, but I’ll save some stories when I get home. We’ve started our classes pretty much which is a bit of a drag. Chinese starts bright and early at 8 in the morning! I didn’t even know classes did start that early! If you’re confused by the ‘pretty much’, the reason is classes haven’t started for the rest of the university so we have a prof teaching us Mandarin this week and a different one next week and we’re still waiting for one more class to begin. So far the classes are maybe a little easier than Trinity, there are no papers to write but quizzes on the readings every day.

Random pond on my way back from class

I know this doesn’t really relate to China it is something I’ve been thinking about recently. One of my favourite shows, Chuck, has recently come to its end. While this is slightly sad it had reached its limit and finished on, in my books, a good note. But, the finally for the show was somewhat of a flashback episode showing clips and snapshots of the last four and a half years. The one thing I enjoyed about chuck was the character development and the characters now are nothing like they were then, they barely even look the same (except for the Baldwin). This really got me thinking about how much I’ve changed in the last five years. I remember watching the very first episode of Chuck, I looked it up and it was in September of 2007. That means I was 17 years old, just starting grade 12 (about the same age as my sister is now). This is taking me back pre-university and even pre-ywam. During this episode Chuck, for a very logical and realistic reason, has to describe the last four years to Sara who has forgotten it all. If I forgot my last four years, how would people remind me of it? Who was I only four years ago and what made me change so much? How similar or different would I be? I know I am a much different person now then I was back then and hopefully mostly for the better. It’s amazing the experiences I’ve had to chance into the person I am today including this semester in China. If someone told 17 year old me the things I have done, places I’ve been, and friendships I have made, I don’t think I would believe them. This last episode really made it evident the changes that we as people go through over time and when we live it we hardly recognize it. Even in the show I forgot how much the characters have changed and developed over time. Anyway, that’s my thought for the post. Hopefully I’ll post more often as I have several topics I’m thinking through at the moment. As always,

Thanks for stopping by!