Since my trip to Guoliangcun, I've spent most of my time going to class, studying, and going to various places around Beijing during the weekends. My home stay period ended a couple weeks ago, after which I moved back into one of the dormitories for foreign students. Our dorm building is situated directly across from a Chinese student dormitory and every weeknight at 11 o'clock we can watch their lights-out policy take effect. Though campus can be eerily quiet at night, it is bustling during the daytime. From around 8 in the morning to 8 at night, the tennis courts and basketball courts are packed with students; people are coming and going from the public showers; students are having their bikes repaired by the guy who pedals over to the library and sets up his portable bike repair shop for the day. The crowds can make getting around campus treacherous on a bike, especially since mine lacks a bell to alert people with. My front brake does, however, make a nice, loud squeak so I use that instead.
On the weekends, some students leave campus to eat dinner and sing karaoke afterward. The university performance hall also frequently hosts ballets, concerts, lectures, movies, and the like, which many students and Beijing residents attend. And then of course there was one Friday or Saturday night at about 10:30 when as I was returning to my home stay, I happened to pass by a group of 20 or 30 students, male and female, practicing swinging baseball bats outside one of the academic buildings in the dark. To summarize, campus life here is quite different from campus life at Davidson.
Whereas Davidson has an innumerable population of squirrels, Peking University is heavily occupied by cats. I see people on campus frequently attempting (unsuccessfully) to befriend them. There is a lady, however, who has succeeded through feeding them. Every day she sets out food for them at 4:30 and every day at 4:30 they show up.

The architecture on campus is also worth noting. A good number of the buildings have Chinese-style architecture like this one:

Others are more outdated-Western-style:

And then there are a few Western-Chinese hybrids. This is the gigantic library:

On a different note, this past weekend I went to the Cultural Palace of Minorities. The museum typically showcases exhibits for the 56 different ethnic groups in China. This month, however, marks the 50th anniversary of Serf Emancipation Day (the day when the Tibetan Autonomous Region was initially established) and so the museum's halls currently feature exhibits solely dedicated to the history and current affairs of Tibet. I would rather not say much about the museum simply because talk about Tibet is somewhat tense right now. I will say, though, that going to the museum has made me want to learn more about the region.
Lastly, this is something that I've been meaning to post for a while and doesn't have anything to do with the rest of this post; it's just something that I think is funny. In the center of Beijing is Tiananmen Square. And in the southern part of the square is Mao Zedong's mausoleum.

And next to the maosoleum, what else but a basketball court.

This past weekend my friend, Red, and I traveled to Guoliangcun, a village in Henan province. We took an overnight train from Beijing on Friday night and arrived in a city near Guoliangcun called Xinxiang. After getting on the bus for Guoliangcun we were approached by several locals who attempted to convince us that the bus, in fact, did not go to Guoliangcun and that he or she was nice enough to take us there for only 300 yuan (the bus fare was 10 yuan). We rejected their offers and were dropped off a couple hours later on the road leading up to Guoliangcun. Until the mid 70's, the only way in and out of the village was by hiking up a steep set of stone stairs built during the Ming dynasty. Now there's a road that goes through the mountain and straight into the village.

As we hiked up the road to the village, we ran into a couple Chinese college students. The four of us hiked up the rest of the way with one of the students running ahead every few minutes to take pictures of us. Not long after we arrived in the village a family offered a room for us to rent for the night.

The woman standing next to a sink is the grandmother in the family. The room we stayed in was in the building on the right hand side of the picture. Here's a direct view of it:

After eating a meal prepared by the owners we walked around town for a while. The old part of town remains intact. Tourism, however, is on the rise in Guoliangcun and a row of new, near identical inns have been built recently at the base of the village. There's even a (terrible-looking) mini ski run across the street from the newly constructed businesses. Still, the old part of town was fascinating. Homes were made of stone and although the town had electricity none of the buildings had heating. Farming is still an important business here and the area is full of terraces for growing different crops.


After walking around town we headed up further into the mountains. Here are a couple views of the area.


Everywhere we went Chinese tourists would yell "hello" to us and some had us take pictures with them. This was only a preview of the kind of treatment we would receive the following day. That night we wore a couple layers of clothing, scavenged for some extra blankets, and went to sleep at around 9. After eating breakfast the next morning we were soon greeted by the manager of the mountain along with his assistant, who gave us a bag full of pamphlets that he wanted us to give to our classmates back at school. We took the pamphlets and then asked him if he knew when the last bus left for Xinxiang. He made a phone call and then told us his friend would drive us straight to the train station free of charge. We shook hands and he left with his assistant. We soon found out that he had also paid our room fee and the cost of the meal we had eaten with the family the day before. It was strange but we were nonetheless happy to have a few extra hours to explore since our ride wouldn't be leaving until late in the afternoon. We set off from the village and followed a path that wound through some terraces atop the mountains. About an hour's walk from the village were what looked to be some abandoned farm buildings and a small stone altar.

(The small gray object in the center of the picture is the altar)

We returned to town a while later, packed our bags and rode back out to the train station. When we arrived at the station we still had a couple hours to kill so we got some dinner at a small restaurant nearby. We got to talking with a couple older men and by the end of our conversation we had rejected their cigarettes at least three times and they had decided to pay for our meal. The two left a little while later and as we sat around the waiters offered us a lesson on how to make a dish that translates as "pulled noodles". They led us to the back of the restaurant, slapped a big piece of dough in our hands, and gave us a quick tutorial, which I will try and fail to describe here. First you have to smooth the dough out on a table with your hands. You then grab both ends, fling it up and down making it look like a dough jump rope, twist it around and slap it back on the table. Finally, you grab both ends in one hand, put your finger in the loop at the other hand, pull both ends and then repeat. With each pull you multiply the number of individual noodles by two so after 5 or 6 pulls you have a batch of noodles that you throw into a vat of boiling something. Basically, it's a lot of fun to make the stuff. Afterward, we rinsed our hands and got on the train a couple hours later.
The hospitality we received this past weekend is, I think, an example of what traveling in China can be like if you get out of the major cities and into places less frequently visited by foreigners, which I intend on doing a lot more in the coming months.