It has been a couple of weeks since the last post, but we have made it through our first weeks of classes. It is different being back and spring has many new things to experience and see. The weather is much warmer than in Minnesota, so fields and trees are beginning to bloom. One of my students took me with a group of bachelors to Long Gong (The Dragon Palace) for the canola oil festival. The fields were completely yellow with beautiful flowers and it was very interesting to see the longest underground river cave and some fascinating cave features. One of the highlights was taking a zip-line down a mountain. It was quite the view and quite the experience, but I am not so sure Patty would say the same if she came. Since it was a festival, the place was packed primarily with minorities and villagers and some tourists. Yet another opportunity to stick out, but also a fun time to share with others. I made a man’s day by giving him a quarter from America—he was willing to give me a lot of Chinese money for it. That was after he asked why Americans have so many guns if they are only going to shoot people. Needless to say, there are many pictures of this time (we will see when we can get them up as the internet is very slow lately).

As some people may know, Thursday was our 4th wedding anniversary. We have a little bit more free time, so to celebrate we made a trip to Kunming, a city in the Yunnan province about 11 hours away by train. Kunming is nicknamed the “Spring City” because of its constant warm weather and it definitely lived up to that being in the 70’s and 80’s. Two of our friends also came, Kris and Brianna. Some of our highlights were going to Shilin (The Stone Forest) and The Minority Village on Dianchi Lake. When I envisioned the Stone Forest, I was thinking along the lines of The Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, but boy was it an amazing, breathtaking display of the majesty of creation. It was miles of limestone pillars and hills formed by the area being underwater. There were many of these creations that resembled animals or people and the weather was gorgeous. It was fun looking at the pictures and trying to find more things in the rocks. Patty now understands a little more my “unhealthy” fascination with rocks, even though that was actually the first “date” we had in the rock lab at Winona State, her quizzing me on rocks.

The next day we went to the Minority Village, which is a park with recreations of 26 of the minority groups found in the Yunnan province. I was super excited to see this park, as I have a love for the minorities of China. The experience was both good and bad I would have to say though. Each minority had representations of their traditional houses and some people dressed up and usually an activity or something that represents their culture. Some of the houses, temples, and other buildings were breath-taking and the dances and activities were fun, but it was a lot of walking and some of the workers were very lax (I thought it was like workers at Valleyfair). Some of the favorite things were seeing the water splashing festival, seeing some of the dances, and the Miao who actually had a church in their village and shared the gospel at the gate. We left after about 5 hours of walking in the park, not knowing that we would actually be walking another 4 hours before we stopped. We ended up walking almost the whole town looking for a reasonable hotel before actually getting to our supper destination, and later had a fiasco trying to get a taxi to get us to where our friends were staying. It was really nice to eat at a fancy Italian restaurant though (Pizza da Rocca). I had a pizza while Patty had a huge calazone. The next day we did some shopping to replace presents lost during our trip home and then we headed home on another tiring train ride (it is quite the experience). You have babies crying at high decibals, children running up and down the aisle screaming, and the super comfortable seating options. Let’s just say 12 hours (it was longer this time) did not come soon enough. It was good to be back in Anshun again. On that night, we had 13 students over for our first Open House and we played Uno and talked. And in the end we look back at the time and say, “it was very good.” Many blessings!!