An Airport Is Still Around Me

The Richest Snake

By Rachel

Hi! I am realizing that because I switched with my sister, I haven’t written for a while now.

Now that we are in China, my life has fallen into a more ordinary sort of pattern. In the morning I read, do math, and play games with my siblings, then we do something relatively local in the afternoon. I’m amazed at how quickly some things can begin to seem ordinary. Such as: I am in China. Everyone speaks Mandarin. I can’t read anything or really speak to most people. Google and anything affiliated with it (Gmail, this blog, etc.) is blocked. Facebook and Shutterfly are also blocked. I can’t drink tap water. We don’t have a dryer and instead lay our clothes in the windowsills to dry. Random strangers take pictures with me. I eat most of my meals in the institute’s cafeteria. Everything is Chinese food. I am getting better with chopsticks. Things in the distance are hard to see because of pollution. Public bathrooms are gross and often cost money and don’t have toilet paper – and sometimes no toilets actually either. They are “squatters” – holes in the ground.

Sometimes, China feels almost normal to me. I can almost forget that I am on the other side of the world. Then there are times when I remember how far away from home I really am.

Today, Thursday, July 9, we went to Lushun. We hired a tour guide since we it’s pretty hard to get around when you don’t speak the language – at all. Also, Teddy came with us. It was super fascinating to learn about all the history of the city. I think I’m learning as much about history on this trip as I learn in school. The only difference is I’m learning about some different parts of history from different regions than what we study in school.

Lushun is a port that is the only accessible entrance to northern China. Therefore, it is a very key position for countries to occupy. As a result, it has been occupied by the Japanese and the Russians for long amounts of time, and the Russians didn’t leave until 1955. The Japanese occupied it first (from 1905-1945), before the Russians fought for it back.

 

The port of Lushun is behind us

In the morning, we visited an outlook of the port, then two different museums. One of the museums had mummies that were unwrapped, so I could see the skull and bones. It was kind of terrifying. The other museum was a snake museum with a bunch of live snakes from Snake Island, an island not far off the coast that has tons of different types of snake living on it. People in China like snakes for the most part, even the poisonous ones. In fact, some of the snakes’ cages had stacks of money in them that people had thrown in there to show respect to the snakes. At one cage, I saw a snake crawling through a bunch of money in his cage. It was a rather strange sight. Although multiple snakes had money, the white snake was the richest snake by far. A Chinese legend says that the white snake lives for a thousand years and then comes back as a doctor to help people. As a result, people paid this snake a lot of respect. A huge area was covered in money for the snake, so thick that I couldn’t see the ground in that area. Some of the bills were the roughly equivalent to twenty dollars. I think that is the richest snake in the world!

                               The white snake with all the money people threw in to it

For lunch, we decided to be American and eat at McDonald’s. Afterwards, we visited the prisons where Chinese were kept during the Japanese occupation. The conditions were awful. We even saw the gallows where they would hang some of the prisoners. Tons of people died at the prison (I don’t know the number), and it was sad to see.

The boys, Teddy and our guide at the guard lookout inside the prison

 

I learned a lot of history today and while the days have a kind of pattern to them now, each is still a new adventure!