End of Xi'an

Thursday, 7/5: Can't remember what happened on Thursday. My bridge is going to be a swinging bridge.

Friday, 7/6: Today was the last day of classes at Xi'an Gaoxin No. 1 High School. We tested out the bridges (mine came in last, falling under the weight of three smallish books). The best held 25 books (including some heavy English-Chinese dictionaries), a ream of paper, and a student's workbook, and still didn't fall. At that point we'd run out of things to stack on it. We didn't have time to do step dancing. What a shame! At the end we took pictures with our class, including jumping pictures - we'll see how those turn out. We gave Wendy and Jane their presents, which were each two apples and two oranges (both are really expensive in China).

Then we went to lunch with the principal. We were expecting to just sit down with her alone in the cafeteria for twenty minutes, but while we were waiting for her this bus full of middle-aged white people pulled up at the school. They were principals and administrators from American school systems, come to China on a teaching exchange program. Turned out the lunch was a full-out banquet with these visitors and the school's principal and vice principal and Jane. One of the people at our table was the Jerry Weast of Baltimore County (the director of the school board? what's the word?). He mentioned that he was good friends with Weast. The food was really fancy. There were little pastries shaped like birdies filled with red bean paste, and clam shells with some sort of seafood dish served inside them, and veggie spring roll-ish things, and all sorts of meats, and little appetizers, and fried rice brought out for the vegetarians (with little pieces of ham in it), and some sort of sweet fried stick filled with condensed milk. the lunch lasted a really long time, and then everyone presented gifts at the end. we'd already given Jane our gift, and all we had for the principal and vice principal were MIT key chains, so we held back while everyone else presented T-shirts, hats, etc, and just slipped them the keychains at the end.

Then we went to the train station to find a bus to Hua Shan. Once we got on the bus around 3 pm, we sat in the heat for an hour and a half waiting for the bus to fill up with passengers. once they had fit in as many passengers as they possibly could, we left and arrived at Hua Shan two and a half hours later at 7 pm. We ate dinner and then paid 45Y for a room with three beds where we took a nap until 11 pm hours before starting up the moutain. Every single building in the town had a convenience store or a restaurant and dubious rooms in the back that they tried to get us to stay in by coming up to us and gesturing with their hands to show "sleep." We also each bought a small LED flashlight.

At 11 pm, we started up the mountain. For a little while, it was a sloping paved stone path, but after about 45 minutes it turned into stone steps going up the mountain. For the next three or four hours it took to get to the East Peak, it was steps. Steep steps, shallow steps, wide steps, and incredibly narrow steps where you had to put your foot sideways onto the step, hang onto the chain along the side of the stairs, and not look down. There were also a couple of stone ladders. Hua Shan, which is considered one of the five most important mountains in China, has five peaks - four named for the four cardinal directions, and Central Peak. The first one you reach on the way up is North Peak, the lowest, which also has a gondola going to it. From there we went to Central Peak then East Peak, arriving at East Peak sometime before 4:30 am. From the very beginning, I had a cramp in my right leg, which briefly went away when I got warmed up, then came back worse. I realized I'm really out of shape. I started breathing so hard on my way up the steps that I felt like the air was ripping through my throat. We were lucky to be doing it at night because it was cool and comfortable, rather than boiling hot and sunny. It was gorgeous looking out over the glittering lights of the path below and the town below that, and the shadowy, white faces of the surrounding mountain peaks. It was also exciting to sometimes be going up a staircase, and then realize that on either side of the chain railing there was a 200 m drop off.

Saturday, 7/7: Once we stopped at the top of East Peak, I was sweat soaked and the mountain breeze made me freezing cold. But an hour later the sun rose, and that was beautiful. When we tried to go down the mountain, my legs turned to jelly and it took forever to get back to North Peak, so from there we took the gondola down instead of walking back down all those stairs, which would've left me with a decent probability of my legs giving out and me falling off the mountain. When we reached the bottom we ate breakfast and caught a bus back to Xi'an.

We had naps and packed (goodbye, my beautiful room) and then Alice picked us up to take us to the train station. She gave us each a bracelet as a present, and we gave her one of the two bottles of Burberry perfume that I brought (or eau de toilette or fragrance or whatever).

This was the first time we'd taken the train without Christopher. The four of us had played spades a lot. Turns out three-person card games aren't nearly so interesting - we played a whole lot of Big 2 (a variation on Scum, or President).