News!

We got our site announcements yesterday! I will be spending the next two years at Lanzhou City University in Lanzhou, capital city of Gansu. You can read a little bit about Lanzhou here. I'm excited about my site. The school has 13,000 students and 1100 faculty on three campuses. I'll be living in faculty housing on one of those campuses. Frankly, it's still strange to me that I'm on faculty at a university at all!

On Sunday, I'll leave for a week-long visit to Lanzhou. Unless they're still renovating it, I will stay in my new apartment, so I'll take and post pictures. There are several other volunteers in my city and a couple only a five minute walk away at other schools, so we should be able to all travel together. It's a 20 hour train ride, but hopefully the company will make the time pass quicker.

In other news, we went on a field trip today to the train station. When we saw field trip on the schedule, we assumed field trip. You know, get on a provided bus, be herded around a location, listen to someone point out the important features, the get back on the bus. Easy as pie. Except that's not quite what they meant by field trip. Instead, we were given some questions to ask and info to find out while at the station. (How much for a ticket to Guizhou? etc) When it was time to go, we were loitering waiting for our teachers while they chatted, a most unusual occurrence. We finally said something to the effect of, "Let's get going," and they said, "Bye! See you tomorrow!"

Thus, today was rather sink or swim. Seems we can swim after all. The point of the exercise was to force us to ask for directions, find a new place, and negotiate it independently. Quite a few of us were given similar tasks, but it was the first time we'd really been turned loose on the buses. It was fun and heartening to know that we can do it. The train station itself is enormous, with a separate ticket hall, and a massive terminal with at least three "waiting halls." I was told they have 170 trains a day. The mass of humanity is incredible. Since Chengdu is the "gateway to the west," many of the people are travelers from non-Han parts of China, and the train station has a more diverse feel than most of the city. That aside, the number of people is overwhelming. There were thousands there today, and it wasn't a peak day or time. Travelling this weekend is going to be quite the experience.