凤凰

**This post is my first slap in the face of the Great Firewall.  Brought to you in part by Sammie and friends.

I've had my fair share of sitting on a train all night with my earplugs stuffed in my ears.  It's definitely not my favorite activity.  But usually the end result makes it worth enduring the pain.  This particular time I got lucky and was able to stretch out across a seat for three in a semi-dark compartment and sleep for about half the night.  It's a rare train that has so much empty space and I'm thanking heaven for it.  I only got woken up three times by security guards who wanted to talk to me with the pretense of telling me to take care of my *dongxi and watch for thieves.

At 7am as we descended from our cozy train we were greeted by a strange burning orb in the sky that seemed to emanate heat and hurt my eyes.  Legend has it it's called 太阳 and the ancients saw it quite often.  It was accompanied by a lack of wetness in the air and seemed to turn the sky from grey to blue.  No one can remember the last time it appeared from behind the protection of clouds.  (Seriously the locals did tell us it had been a solid month since they had seen the sun)  The next thing to assail my senses was a middle-aged gentleman who yelled "I LOVE YOU!!" repeatedly after me in an attempt to get me to take his taxi the rest of the way to FengHuang.  I'm relatively certain it was the only English he knew.

FengHuang means Phoenix when translated and is the site of a novel written by a famous Chinese author, and so has recently become a popular place to travel, but is not yet so touristy as to be annoying.  Everything was still moderately authentic and absurdly cheap.  Our hotel was not the cheapest in town and only cost me $3 (American) per night.  I went with two friends who I've been studying with and we had a delightfully relaxing time wandering around the old-style town and shopping.  In the afternoon when my Chinese buddies were taking their siesta I sat by the river to enjoy the sunshine and wrote.  Naturally I aroused the curiosity of the fishermen nearby.  A few bent over my shoulder trying in vain to read the strange characters I wrote before giving up to ask me instead.

My two friends decided to speak with me only in Chinese for the weekend which gave us quite a few laughs as they had to speak idiot speed and I made a number of ridiculous mistakes.  We went boating on the river, and our guide made up a song for me as we paddled around.  The only part I understood was, "Welcome foreign friend" but I video-ed the whole thing for later study.  He had such an obviously joy-filled life and it's small wonder with such a job.  All day every day he boats down a beautiful river singing at the top of his lungs.  I can think of many worse ways to make a living.

Traveling is inevitably adventure-filled but I think I'll keep the stories to a minimum so that I have time to tell you about our return.  We took the train from 3am to 9:30am back to YiChang and I taught class with a pretty substantial headache which was alleviated that night when one of the girls I traveled with made the decision to give her life to our Dad and take the plunge.  We actually had two new births in the same night, so be praising his name!

"The less routine the more life."

-Amos Alcott

*stuff