One Helluva Protest!

Howdy!

So the whole teaching thing has been going very well. I really like all of my students and they are all very friendly - even though there is quite a communication barrier. Matt and I have started our tutoring session and they have been going okay. I will need to get my butt in gear and start to study more on my own.

Hopefully, this coming week will be light for me. The National Day holiday is coming up and I should have the first week off in October for it. The teachers in my department say that I will only have classes on Monday and Tuesday of this week because the students have an exam on Wed - Friday. So, hopefully I will have a nice, long break! Of course, this is China and things could change without notice.

One of the English teachers that I work with has been really helpful and kind to Matt and me. She has been helping us with our trip to Xi'an. She has friends all over! Her friend at the bank got our train tickets for us and her sister in law will be booking our room at the student dorms at the Foreign Language Institute in Xi'an to help up save money. It sounds like her brother will be picking us up at the train station too!

We really haven't been up to too much. We have been keeping busy by watching movies and running around town. The weather here is starting to get pretty cold. I think that the faculty worry about our ability to adapt to the cold. Little do they know about the frozen mid-west winters!

Yesterday, Matt and I decided to check out the new mall that just opened last weekend. It is about four floors of everything anyone could possibly need - and a lot of stuff that no one in his or her right mind would ever want. We were witness to a very interesting protest.

Apparently, there was a bad accident before the mall opened where four people died (we ran into one of Matt's students who was able to explain to us what was going on). The families were very upset with the owner of the building and decided to have a demonstration/sit-in. We didn't really know what was going on or why there were so many people crowded around the entrance and not going into the building. We decided to take a look and were quickly pushed inside by the crowd. I still didn't know what was going on so we went upstairs to get a better view.

When I could see down below we were very surprised to see that the protest included family and friends of the deceased AND the bodies of the people who died (wrapped in cloth). So, to be clear, in the entrance way/rotunda area of the new mall, there was a mass of people and four dead bodies! At that time there were no police or anything around either.

We looked around the mall and bought a Ghostbusters DVD. Then the loudspeaker started to sound off about something. We thought that they were closing for the day. We left with a large crowd of people out of the side entrance. Later, we ran into the same student (his mom is a police officer) and he said that he was happy to see us and was worried about us because of the fight. So, of course, our first questions was , "what fight?" People were flooding out because a fight broke out in the mall and the police had to come. The announcement was to get people out.

Hmmm... I just couldn't help but think what would have happened in the US if some families decided to bring some dead bodies to the mall.