Wuhan, China
Wednesday, July 16, 2008

I have been looking forward to today since I saw it on the schedule last week. Today we visited Wuhan High School. The school is one of the top two schools in the city (not bad for a city of nine million). It was founded in 1921 by Deputy Chairman Dong Biwu. Deputy Chairman Dong was one of the original founders of the Communist revolution in China; he was prominent enough to sign the UN Charter on behalf of China. The school grounds were quite impressive. The place is totally state of the art. It was named one of the “Most Famous Schools in China” in the late 1990’s. It has over 257 faculty and staff and 3,600 students. Those numbers do not reflect the middle school that is also on the campus. Pretty impressive.

Outside Wuhan High School

The formal introductions

The tour guides for my time at Wuhan High School were Rita and Coco. They were both very bright, spoke great English, and asked me a thousand questions. The two of them answered all of my questions about the school but wanted to know about life in American, what we thought of China and its people, was I excited about the Olympic Games, and of course if I liked Angelina Jolie. We had a great conversation.

Coco and Rita, my tour guides

Here are some of the things they told that stuck with me. They go to school from about 7am till 7pm, five days a week. However, they are at school nearly every Saturday to study for local, state, and national exams. They feel a ton of pressure to well in school, by both parents and the school. They have about 4 hours of homework each night and they have very little time to themselves for fun. Hmmmmh, I wonder why the Chinese are scoring better than the United States in math and science. Anyways the two kids were funny and cute, they struck me like typical ninth graders, full of energy and totally scattered. I also learned an interesting cultural fact, when saying good-bye in China you should continue waving until the people you are waving to, are out of sight.

The lunch was awesome as usual. The class today was in Chinese painting. Normally I loath the arts, not because of dislike but because I have not talent in them. However I was looking forward to today’s class because it was being taught by Dr. Hu Zhiyong, the Dean of the School of Arts, who we met the at the welcome lunch. He was a lot of fun. His class was interesting, I suck at painting, but I gave my best effort. If I wanted to lose weight I could definitely be a starving artist because my “work of art” was a piece of crap.

Dr. Hu impressive water color, done in fifteen minutes

These are supposed to be graps on a vine.

My bird turned out a little better, pure luck

We celebrated Deb’s birthday at dinner with some awesome cake. That was the second B-Day party we had so far on this trip. Again, let me say how nice EVERYONE is and how great they are to us.

After dinner, Minnie one of the coordinators of the program from Hubei University arranged for us to watch some of the ladies from the neighborhood performs some fan dancing. They are not professionals but you could have fooled me. All of them were in their late forties and fifties. There were fun to watch and they even let us participate. As you can imagine there were some ridiculous scenes.

More photos and videos