2 Years!

August marks our 2nd year in Washington. What a fun trip it has been so far!

I put this video together as a thank you to our kids for putting up with me and all my adventures.

Boom Goes the Mountain!

We went to Mt St Helens this weekend.  It was an incredible place to visit.  I have seen lots of volcanic evidence in my life but to be on a volcano that erupted so recently was cool.  We got to the mountain just in time for a ranger talk and she was full of excellent information that we all found interesting.  As always a picture tells a thousand words so here are some pictures from the trip.

The whole crew in front of the Volcano.  Except for me of course who took the picture!

 

Meta Lake.  This lake was iced over when the mountain erupted.  It is only 8 miles from the mountain but because of the ice over the lake the fish, frogs and Crawdads survived and are thriving.  We had fun catching the crawdads.

 

If you look closely you can see the tsunami line around spirit lake.  When the mountain erupted it unleashed a huge landslide that splashed into spirit lake.  This caused a tsunami that went 800 feet up the mountain, pulling thousands of huge trees back into the lake.  Over time 70 percent of the trees have sunk, but a bunch of the lake is still tree covered.

Seeing the way the trees blew down was cool.  The closer we got to the blast zone the more downed trees we saw.  Chas is sitting on this downed Douglas Fir that was probably 200 feet tall and 500 years old when the mountain erupted.  There were thousands of trees laying down in the direction away from the blast.  Seeing just how big these trees are and how they snapped was amazing.  In this case the tree was on a north facing slope that was covered by snow when the mountain erupted.  That preserved the topsoil and has allowed new growth.

A stunningly beautiful waterfall.  This was 14 miles from the volcano and you couldn’t tell the mountain had ever erupted here.

MOM! I found the thinker

He's in the Baltimore Museum of Art .. I walked around the corner and saw him (huge!) and said, "oh my heck that's my mom's thinker" (he really belongs to Rodin I suppose).

Next time you're in Charm City we'll go see him together. He is magnificent.

Magnificent Rainier

Sanmenxia - 3 door gorge - 三门峽

Sanmenxia is the city where we worked in the orphanage. We were very delighted to find that it is a less humid, less hot, and less polluted city than much of China. When asked at the end of the trip by my Chinese colleague who had invited me on the trip which city was my favorite I told her that I enjoyed each city for different reasons. I enjoyed Sanmenxia because I felt like I got to get to know people there, see what normal (not tourist) life was like, and the people were so friendly and nice to each other and to us. Sanmenxia had a small town feel where people still felt connected to each other. At 6,000 people it is considered a small city by Chinese standards.

As I've stated before, the orphanage work was very intense. Intense because of the long hours and intense because of the wide range of strong emotions. The orphanage has requested confidentiality standards not dissimilar to what my employers in the States require so I can't show any pictures of our work there. Our work consisted of a needs assessment, training through treatment, and formal trainings. Our main focus was to bring more activities into the daily routines of the kids in order to foster development (cognitive, motor, etc).

We also had a bit of time to tour in Sanmenxia.

One morning I needed to go to the store before we went to the orphanage but found that it was not open so I took a walk up to a pagoda park not far from our hotel.

View of the pagoda from below

Detail of dragon at the gate

Looking back at the city from the pagoda

Marching drum group at Grand Opening celebration. I was talking to someone in broken Chinese & English while I was watching the drummers. He kept asking me, “What is this"?” and then he would say “beautiful”. I finally realized that he was asking me if I thought the music was beautiful. I was glad to finally be able to answer his question in the affirmative. He also kept saying “Kung Fu” and Chinese Boxing. I never could figure out why he was telling me that other than that he did Kung Fu =).

Sanmenxia has a city square that seems to be more in a downtown area. It was much busier than the area of town we were in. It was a lot of fun and I took several videos of the people doing group dancing and of a man doing Chinese calligraphy with water.

Just after I took this video one of the dance groups finished and a HUGE mass of people came toward me. I was about 15 feet from the rest of my group but it took a great effort to maneuver through all those people walking between us!

I loved this mural. It was right by one of the grocery stores that I frequented. I love the motorcycles parked beneath it, the Great Wall at the base, and the cuteness of it because the Chinese people love cute =).

One of the blue sky days in China. They were more common in Sanmenxia but uncommon in general.

We often drew a crowd wherever we went. In Sanmenxia Westerners are uncommon so the people were often interested to check out what we were like. The therapist from Taiwan shared a story with me of her American friend who taught English in Taiwan for seven years and a big part of why she enjoyed it there was because she was treated so special. I have to admit the attention was fun most of the time. It was the closest I will get to being famous =)

This is a radish sliced and formed into a flower. The food was always presented very decoratively. It is my understanding that this is more true in Henan province than in all of China in general.

Another unique feature of the area around Sanmenxia is that the land is made of a very fine mud. Because of this it is very easy to dig into the earth and build structures. The orphanage director took us to a tourist spot outside of town where there were many houses/rooms built underground.

The stairway into the underground houses.

Looking down into the underground houses from ground level.

Detail of a window at the underground houses.

The Yellow River also runs through Sanmenxia. There are two major rivers in China, the Yellow River being one of these. The Yellow River is of significance to Chinese people because it is a place from which their ancestors come from. They made the an analogy of these people being similar to an ancient native culture such as the Mayans. So being able to go to the Yellow River is like being able to go back to your roots.

We were trying to capture ourselves mid jump but never managed. It was funny all the same.

I was being posed for this picture by the office manager at the orphanage. She didn’t speak any English but told me through a blend of pantomime and translation to hug the Yellow River, so I did.

This was another pose I was told to do. Again, I have no idea why but it was fun =)

This is at the Dragon Boat celebration we did with the orphanage. I am making a sticky rice wrap with a date in it. There was a man who jumped in the river because he loved his country and it had been taken over by someone. The people made these sticky rice treats and threw them into the river so that the fish would not eat this man. So now as part of the Dragon Boat festival they make these treats. The necklaces around my neck are also part of the festival. They have sage inside which is believed to keep away demons and people that turn into animals. Another part of the Dragon Boat festival has something to do with a woman who turned into a White Snake. I never understood this part but we made these necklaces too. In the last part of the celebration, we made origami type lanterns that we then took down to the Yellow River canal (along with many of the kids from the orphanage) and put in the river and watched them float down. It was really fun. I got to walk down with one of the kids that I had worked quite a bit with and I loved seeing his face light up as he enjoyed all of the sights and sounds. One of my last memories of working with the orphanage was standing at the bridge over the river, watching the lanterns float down and seeing one of the kids point up to the stars. I said the word for “stars” in English and then one of the orphanage workers said the word in Chinese. It was a poetic moment of simple cultural exchange, respect, and enjoyment of life.

The Great Wall

“A Chinese saying goes that ‘he who has not climbed the Great Wall is not a true man’” (Badaling Great Wall museum)

As you can see from the picture, we were not the only ones to become “true men” that day.  We arrived early to the wall and there were many many people when we arrived but by the time we left there were so many people that I literally had to squeeze through the towers!  The crowd however was far from a nuisance, the energy of every person’s excitement to be at the Great Wall just made it that much more special to be there.

 

Many times while I was in China I wished that I had a time line of the dynasties and emperors (you probably will too after reading the quotes from the museum in the following paragraph!)  Chinese history is vast and complex.  It was amazing to be there and to grasp even small pieces of it.

“The Great Wall started to be built in the Spring and Autumn period over 2,500 years ago, and continued to be built in many dynasties afterwards it was constructed by various peoples.” “The Qin Great Wall was built by the first unified multi-ethnic feudal state in Chinese history.  The Han Great Wall was the longest in length in Chinese history” “From the Wei and Jin Dynasty to the Song and Yuan dynasties, northern nomadic peoples established regimes in the Central Plains.  Among these, the Northern Wei, the Eastern Wei, the Northern Qi, the Northern Zhou, and the Liaojin all built Great Walls” “After it was founded, the Ming Dynasty built the Great Wall to reinforce its reign.  The Great Wall was built almost incessantly during the 200-odd years of the dynasty, when its length reached more than 8,800 kilometers.  The Ming Great Wall surpassed the Great Wall in any other dynasty in the time and extent of construction and the completeness of defense system and structure.  (Badaling Great Wall Museum).

 

One of the most fascinating things that I learned about the Great Wall was that not only did it serve as defense against Northern tribes, it allowed for “political, economic, and cultural development” because it allowed for a safe communication East to West across the dynasty.

(A Ming Calvaryman delivering official documents)

 

I was able to learn a little bit about the construction of the Great Wall.  Our Chinese hostess told us that they used sticky rice in the mortar of the wall.  I’ve never heard of any grain being used in mortar but I told her that I would tell my family because they work in concrete.

It goes without saying that they Great Wall was built by man power.  As you look at the pictures and all of the individual stones that make up the Great Wall remember this and it will give you even more perspective on the wonder of the amazing construction.

The sign below this sculpture in the museum says, “During construction, working people accumulated much valuable experience.  The most important was ‘building forts suited to terrain.”  I don’t know why they chose the path they did for the wall, it certainly wasn’t the most convenient path.  I would imagine that they looked at the landscape and chose the places where nature and wall put together would provide the best defense.

As you can see in this picture, this tower is larger, both in footprint and in height, than the other towers.  I read that some of the towers were used for houses for the higher ranking officers and this tower is perhaps one of these.

 

Detail looking into a tower

 

 

Detail of stairs on the Great Wall

 

 

 

Far across the landscape you continue to see the Great Wall

Forbidden City

On our first day in China our flight to near Sanmenxia (the city where we worked at the orphanage) was cancelled and rebooked to later in the day so we had some time to go into Beijing center.

We walked through a beautiful park and then into Tian’anmen Square of which the Forbidden city is a part.

The Forbidden City is the former palace of the Ming and Qing dynasties (the Qing was the last dynasty in China).  The emperor who had it built had a Buddhist advisor who had a dream that the emperor should build a palace in a northern capital.  The Chinese characters for Beijing, 北京, mean “Northern Capital”.  In the times of the dynasties the people paid taxes to the emperors and would have never been allowed into a palace.  For this reason the Forbidden City is a symbolism of the benefits of Communism because it is now the people’s palace rather than being excluded from it (per the movie “China and the Forbidden City” made in the 70’s).

The sculpted ramp in the middle of the picture is a dragon sculpture.  It was believed that the emperor was descended from the dragon and that the emperor had direct communication with deity.  No one was allowed to step on this sculpture and the emperor was carried over it by people walking on the steps on either side.  Even now the area is gated off but perhaps more for preservation than the area being sacred.

The yellow roofs are the emperor’s colors and the design of the roof line was repeated in the the other imperial palaces.  The two pictures below show detail of the roof.  There were always dragons on the corner of the roofs.

Detail of dragons on Forbidden City gate

This is the footpath in the gardens of the palace.  I saw intricate “mosaics” like these all over the other palaces that I visited as well.