Welcome! Biajani and Piper here giving you the lowdown about halfway through our trip! We are loving it!
June 4th, we left Hebi and spent the rest of the day in Zhoukou. On the way out of Hebi, we toured a “ghost city,” a group of tall buildings at the edge of the city which are not occupied yet. The photo below is a few of us at a convention center type of structure in the “ghost city.” Posters on the building indicate they actually had an event in 2013! So, it’s been unused for four years.
It was raining when we got to Zhoukou, REALLY raining, so that made our fieldwork and exploring ten times more exciting to navigate as we jumped over massive puddles. After we completed our fieldwork for the day, most of the team met up at the Guandi Temple and it was quite impressive! And they had a student discount which was great 😀 The photo below features HUGE statues, which were very impressive!
The photo below is a shot of the temple, you can kind of see the concrete glisten as the rain poured down! Oh taking this photo is where I found a nice pile of mud, my shoes really liked that!
And finally, the most important photo is us posing like a Korean Boy Band!
June 5 in Zhoukou
Professor Sheehan took us to another popular shopping area where we got to do some more fieldwork. Katie and I, the soybeans, were finally extremely successful in finding both Chinese and western food chain brands in this area. We also almost got run over by two buses while trying to cross the street. There are absolutely zero traffic laws or regulations in Zhoukou! After everyone’s fieldwork and a little shopping, we found our own way back to the hotel and all napped before our class presentations. Everyone has made so much progress on their research and has begun formulating formal theses. Then we had arguably the best group dinner yet! The Piranhas below certainly would agree.
Ursula, Katie, and Edith attacking the best fish we had in China.
June 6
Today we piled on the bus to head for Zhengzhou. But before our final city in the Henan Province, Papa Sheehan showed us the side of China that no tourist has ever seen. We visited a small village where all the people waiting for the fields to dry came out to greet (and take pictures of course) with the foreigners. Some of them were kind enough to let us into their homes. Just like Papa Sheehan acknowledged, their lifestyle was by no means a simple one, and their living conditions validated this truth. After a long-ish drive, we did a lot of fieldwork and walked around the shopping areas. Zhengzhou is interesting because it used to have one of China’s most famous ghost cities with hundreds of unoccupied sky scrapers! Now, though, it is starting to fill up! We had two major examples of globalization today as our whole team ate dinner at McDonalds (and enjoyed it) and I had my usual at Starbucks, a chocolate croissant heated up with a grande whole milk latte (which I loved of course)! You honestly can’t even tell I am in China just by this photo, even the picture on the wall behind me is in English!
GEA China Students with Village Residents
After a great day of fieldwork, exploration,and shopping we went home and packed to get ready for our journey to Shanghai! Woo hoo!