For the record, the water came on again just after I wrote the last blog post. It is still on as of now. However, they are in the process of replacing all the pipes in the dorm (there are pipes lying around EVERYWHERE in the hallways), so who knows how reliable the water will be in the next few weeks. I was woken up this morning by what sounded like sledgehammers attempting to pound through cement on the floor above me... it's a bit of an adventure. From looking at the condition of the pipes they're replacing, though, it's obvious why they're ripping them all out. For now, I'm just going to try and get a run and a shower in this afternoon before the water goes off again!
Yesterday morning we had a CET "language practicum" where we all piled into a bus and headed out to a local ethnic Korean village. The story behind the village, from what I understood, is despite the fact that the forebears of the current residents arrived in China several hundred years ago (though some arrived later), due to cultural differences between the Koreans and Chinese, they were never able to fully integrate into the surrounding rural area, and so were allocated their own village to live in. They have preserved their heritage, customs, and language, which meant that it was difficult to talk to the older residents (the local school teaches classes in Chinese, so the little kids were actually the easiest to talk to - that is, if you could get them to stand still!) It wasn't the best organized trip - we wound up just wandering around the village looking for people to talk to, and there just weren't that many people around. There were grandparents and small children, but everyone from age 15-45 seemed to have left to either go to Korea or bigger cities in China to look for work. The money they send home is funding the major renovations going on in the village - it's very obvious that a major portion of the town has been newly rebuilt within the last ten years.
As a language practicum, it was pretty much a failure, at least for me (though some other students found people willing to talk to them) - there was one guy who took some time out from renovating his house to talk to us about his life, and also how the Chinese government policies vary with respect to ethnic minorities - the people in this village are exempt from the one-child policy, and are allowed to have two children, four years apart. I learned that in other parts of rural China, the one-child policy has been revised to allow couples to have two children, eight years apart -- but only if the first child is a girl. If the first child is a boy, the one-child policy remains in force.
After patting some dogs, chasing some kids around, and getting some lunch at the local restaurant, we headed to the village community center for an afternoon of skits and games. It was kind of a long afternoon, but the skits were fun to watch, and my combined "special class" won an prize for using the most vocabulary words... none of them spoken by me, I don't think. (I always tell people to just give me a few, very simple lines, because I get horrible stage fright and tend to forget everything I'm supposed to say immediately after the skit starts.) All in all, it was an OK day, but I would have way rather have gone to Shanghai (my original plan for this weekend, until our language practicum got rescheduled). Shanghai will have to wait... I am currently thinking about going to Inner Mongolia two weekends from now -- one of my friends from here wants to go and ride horses and live in a yurt on the grasslands... it's kind of a feasible weekend trip from Harbin, but I'm still debating it in my head... we'll see!
