One Drum Beat

CET organized a trip to Henan province a few weeks ago. The first place we went was Kaifeng, a former capital and major commercial hub. The magic of Wikipedia tells me that “it is believed that Kaifeng was the largest city in the world from 1013 to 1127.” Far out. Nowadays it’s a ‘prefecture-level city’ of almost five million people. For China, that’s, like… Greensboro. I’m only slightly exaggerating.

The first stop was Kaifengfu, the former administrative headquarters of the city. It’s famous for having been headed by Lord Bao, who was renowned for being an honest official and a fair judge. This was all over a thousand years ago. Now the place is a tourist destination. It reminded me of Old Salem- it’s the same sort of idealized concept of history. Just a lot older.

There’s an opening ceremony every day, where they bring out all the guys with flags and spears and the imperial enunchs and all that. (One of the guys carrying a flag turned to us and said “hello!” with a huge grin on his face, apparently excited to see some white people and use the one English word he knew. Kinda ruined the immersion but whatever.)

On the night of the Moon Festival, we went for a walk in a nearby park. That tower is the CCTV tower.

Sorry I haven’t updated recently but I have a super good reason- a week of midterms followed by a week of travel to places without easy access to computers. But now I’m back, so prepare to be hit with like three trips’ worth of photos in the next, like, day. And from now on, I’ll try not to suck quite so hard.

First of all, day three of the Service Learning trip, which took place approximately one hundred years ago.

On the last day of the trip, we visited various religious sites, the first of which was a Catholic church. I know, right?

So a certain guy, who’s in jail in a certain country, won a certain award granted by another, colder country. And the government here does NOT want people talking about it.

In fact, if in this blog I used his name, or the name of the award, or possibly even the name of the country that issues the award… there’s a good chance my blog would be blocked. It’s an automatic process- the government has computers which scan all information coming into and out of the country, and automatically block anything with certain key words, which can change from day to day.

As of yesterday, you literally could not send a text message with that guy’s name in it. The message would just fail to send. How crazy is that, for that to even be possible?