Time for the next installment! It might be a bit shorter than I intended, since I was only just now able to tear myself away from the Yale Online Course Information website that just went up today (I've already made my shopping list!). I guess I'll start from the second part of Monday of last week, after we left the elementary school, and maybe after I'm done describing the trip, I'll go into more detail about my impressions.
That afternoon, we visited a very old farming village. It had a brick city wall with large gates, both clearly relics of its ancient days. The streets were charmingly narrow, and everything was sort of the same muddy brown, since the road was made of dirt and the houses were either made of muddy brick or actual mud with straw. Despite the lack of variety in color, however, it was very cute -- certainly better-looking than most of Beijing and other Chinese cities with similarly hideous new architecture. One not-so-appealing feature, though, was the many piles of trash outside the walls.
We explored many of the little streets, and got to look into quite a few houses. Each house is basically a series of rooms constructed around a courtyard that you enter from the street through a main gate or door. In this town, as in some other farming villages we later saw, most families had pretty impressive, if small, vegetable gardens in their courtyards, and almost every courtyard was home to a dog. The houses themselves were extremely simple: they usually only had two rooms plus a storage room per family. In many of these houses, the entrance was into the storage room, which was between the two rooms. It's important to keep in mind, too, that a Chinese family living in one house often consists of more than one generation, so it's not uncommon for a husband and wife and two children to all share one room, while the husband's parents share the other room.
After we explored the houses, we visited the large temple at one end of the village. It was quite beautiful, but most importantly it offered us a chance to see the village from above, since it had a tower. From up high, we could see the village and the neighboring village, as well as many farms. The farms were broken up into much smaller sections than I'm used to seeing in Iowa, and it was also clear that they were a bit behind in farming technology. I didn't see a lot of farming machinery, but I did see quite a few farmers doing manual labor out in the fields, as well as plenty of mules and donkeys. (Side note: this made me especially sad when some of my fellow students ate mule meat for dinner that evening.) We also got a clear view of all the trash piles around the periphery of the village.
Bad news: it's past midnight, and I'm planning on getting up close to six. I'll be able to write more tomorrow, though, because I don't have any afternoon activities. I'm so sorry this is such a broken-up narration!