Shanxi, Part the Second

We began our second full day in Shanxi by waking up bright and early (this would become a pattern - and they call it a break?!) to ride the bus for several hours to 孝义市 (Xiaoyi City), to visit a 煤矿 (coal mine) to talk to the 矿工 (miners). It was quite a long ride, and it was around 12:00 by the time we arrived, after having passed by many miles of coal mine dominated landscape (my pictures are a little blurry, since they were taken from a moving bus).
Once there, we began with the standard formalities of listening to the mine boss talk for 15-20 minutes about the mine and giving them a Harvard Summer School plaque (apparently considered quite a wonderful gift in China - or, at least 冯老师, the head of HBA, thinks so). We then were given the opportunity to talk to a miner for about half an hour, though, since the bosses were in the same room, I'm not sure if the conversations can be called frank and open. That said, I did learn some interesting things. Miners only work about 25 hours per week in the mine itself, at least at that particular mine, far less than I had previously expected. Safety had undergone massive improvement in the mine, it was now, as the miner somewhat unenthusiastically put it "还可以" (O.K.), which, according to what the boss would later tell me, meant wonderful and terrific. For all my sarcasm though, conditions were better than I expected, certainly better than those of the American coal miners of the 20s and 30s who form such an important part of the consciousness of the American labor movement (and who have movies made about them). Overall in China, though, a lot of problems remain. About 6,000 workers die in accidents every year - in the city of the mine we visited there had been an accident just the previous month, killing 34. Plus, there are an obvious host of environmental problems.
After talking to the miners, we had the opportunity to visit some of the apartments where miners lived to talk to their families. The two women I talked to there were far more talkative than the miner I had spoken to earlier. The miners' apartments weren't terrible, but neither were they particularly luxurious, small probably being the most accurate descriptor. The buildings were none too beautiful from the outside, but inside they were clean and generally of decent appearance. The women we talked to weren't particularly useful from the social study project perspective - their successes and problems were really unique to them, rather than being standard tales of the mine - but it was interesting to see the places miners actually lived.

We were then treated by the mine managers to a sumptuous lunch, complete with large quantities of strong alcohol, with which we were encouraged to 干杯 (drink a toast). I handled it fine (and intentionally limited my consumption), 苏老师 didn't do so well - partly because he was forced to toast far more than the rest of us as the teacher heading up the group - and ended up with one of the worst cases of Asian flush that I've seen (pictures really don't do it justice).

After lunch, we took the bus onward to 王家大院, the Wang Family Grand Courtyard - a massive Qing Dynasty era building that had housed successive generations of a very wealthy family. It was certainly large, ornate, and impressive.
It was also a reminder of how massively wealthy Shanxi (or, at least the rich people in Shanxi) was during the days of its status as the banking capital of China, in contrast to its present relative backwardness and poverty.

After leaving the Wang family courtyard, we continued on to the city of 灵石 (Lingshi), a depressing dingy city with absolutely nothing to recommend it, including the hotel we stayed at, which was dirty and poorly maintained. That night, we were put under strict orders by 苏老师 to prepare a large number of questions to ask the entrepreneurs we were to meet with the next day. The topics we were told to prepare questions on made no sense to many of us, despite repeated attempts at clarification, so most of us simply came up with questions that interested us.

The next morning, after visiting Lingshi's one attraction - a meteorite that fell several hundred years ago (prompting the emperor to order the city constructed around it) and then dug out of the ground, yeah, the city was that boring - we went to the place where we were supposed to meet the entrepreneurs. Arriving there, we discovered we would have to wait 2 hours, through a long speech by some person about whose identity I was never quite clear (and who's speech entirely lacked interest) and that it turned out that many of these people were students, not entrepreneurs. By the time we actually got to talk to them, however, it turned out that they were, without exception, tour guides in training, with no relation to the sort of people for whom we had been told to prepare questions, leaving us all angry, frustrated and confused.

Luckily, we soon left Lingshi (which had been nothing but trouble) to head to the next stop on the itinerary, 平遥古城 - the old city of Pingyao. In Pingyao, our hotel was a traditional building with the traditional Chinese bed, and rooms surrounding very pretty small courtyards, a striking contrast to Lingshi's dinginess. Beginning our visit, we first went to a Qing-era bank, one of the world's first to issue checks, where we saw their instruments of banking, living conditions, and, yes, a very old check.
We then headed to an old security agency, previously used, logically enough, to protect the money found in such vast quantities in Pingyao's many banks (Pingyao was the banking capital of Shanxi, the banking capital of China, making it the most important banking city in the country). We next went up onto the city walls where there was some interaction with the funny looking statues that had been placed on top, for no particular reason, to the best of my knowledge.

That night, we explored the tourist/shopping district of the city. 韩国哥哥,日本朋友, 小梁, and I decided to perform an experiment to determine how much the price offered to an obvious American would differ from that offered to a Chinese person when asking for the same object. Sadly, the experiment went awry, probably because, using my Chinese, I failed to adequately describe the object I had asked for to my co-conspirators. That said, given the price I was offered, I know they were ripping me off. I also sampled some of the street food of Pingyao, purchased a small, Pingyao-related gift for my father (which I won't describe in case he stumbles upon this blog, though it's a fairly insignificant gift) and then returned to our hotel.

That night in the hotel proved quite interesting, as nearly everyone, including the teachers, gathered in my room (I ended up in a very large one), for what turned into a session of ghost story-telling. Surprisingly to me, most of my fellow travelers legitimately seemed to believe in ghosts, with 严老师 having a particularly great fear of them. So, as we went off to bed, 严老师, who as a teacher had her own room, insisted on one of the female students spending the night with her. 华裔朋友did, but that left another, mildly ghost-phobic student, 泰国朋友 alone, so 越南朋友 and 山谷女孩 had to be called in to spend the night with her, completing the round of musical beds. I found it all quite amusing, as well as how easy it was to frighten 严老师, by going behind her, throwing a sheet over my head, and then tapping her on the shoulder. That fear of ghosts was real. Though, probably partly because of that, 泰国朋友 still hasn't given up calling me白鬼, white ghost.

Anyhow, it's past my bedtime, so that will be all for now. Look for another installment next week (and perhaps another the following week, since this seems to be going slowly.