June 2nd - Taian Middle School and the Pedestrian Street (Anja's Analysis)

We were in the hospital in the morning observing Changying with her patients. It was interesting but it was also a bit hard to sit through because most of it was Chinese conversation. It also didn’t help that we were unsure of what exactly she we looking for. Essentially when she assesses a patient she feels their pulse and looks at their tongue. From there she writes a prescription and that’s it. We were all very intrigued.

Afterwards, as usual when working on the hospital, we had lunch in the hospital cafeteria. Today I had some lotus root, quickly a favorite for us, a large amount of rice and some broccoli with cauliflower and some sort of meat. We’ve noticed that almost anytime there are vegetables served there, a little meat is added. It would make being a vegetarian very difficult in China. After relaxing a bit we went to the second middle school, called Taian Middle School. We’re just doing teaching intervention with them, at their request, so they are now the control school. They were so gracious when we came. The headmaster and other administrative people had water and big bowls of grapes, apples and bananas waiting for us. There was even a photographer taking pictures of our whole meeting. This is something we have slowly started to get used to, being photographed and stared at frequently. The class was very well behaved while Cathy was teaching them, unlike our classes at Jinan sometimes. We used the same powerpoint to be consistent. Afterwards we were free for the day.

That night we met with Juyan and he took us, minus Cathy who stayed in to work, to the pedestrian walking street via the metro. The metro is air conditioned so that was very nice surprised. After having been down there it makes sense, I think people would probably die down there if it wasn’t air conditioned. The metro system in Guangzhou is similar to other large cities and makes getting around much more convenient. Without Juyan or someone to help us it would have been nearly impossible as like everything else there is no English anywhere. The pedestrian street is huge! We didn’t even make it all the way because we were tired out. A little over halfway there was a decently sized square with all neon lighted signs. It reminded me of a smaller version of Time Square in New York City. We all were able to find some things to buy for ourselves or for friends back home on our trip there. We also treated ourselves to some delicious gelato and in the heat it was exactly what we needed