Tomorrow I’m taking off for a five-day history class trip to Hangzhou and Nanjing. My students seem reasonably enthusiastic about the overnight train trip (some of them have already had train adventures traveling over the break) but then most have never had to sleep in the middle bunk with five Chinese businessmen getting drunk and playing cards by flashlight until three in the morning.
(On the other hand, I’ve seen more than a few haggard and weary Chinese business-types eagerly switch out of a berth containing five energetic liuxuesheng playing Uno…although the students are not usually doing so after hours and not (so far as I know) drunk.
We don’t really get to spend that much time in Hangzhou. It’s an “arrive on Thursday morning/leave on Friday afternoon” situation, but this is the shorter of two Mobile Classrooms (as we call these trips.) The longer ones will happen in April when one group will study the affects of China’s economic development on habitat preservation, air/water quality, and bio-diversity in Yunnan and a second group will travel to Zhongdian (Shangri-La) and then into the mountains of Southwest Sichuan for a two-week class on Tibetan culture. Those are the epic hauls, this