Week Four At the Special Needs Center

On Monday, June 11 (that is how far behind I am on staying updated, but I will catch up, I promise; that's what long layovers are for anyway) I started work with Ziyu, Jingfei and Helen, the three Chinese girls who began work with me at the special needs center when I returned from Wuhan the week before. Just to refresh, Ziyu is studying at Brandeis University in Boston with Jingfei. Ziyu is from Wuhan (and probably was in Wuhan for at least part of the time while I was there as well, which is just weird) and Jingfei is from a town close to Shanghai. Helen attends the University of Toronto and is originally from Shanghai. We arrived on Monday early enough to help the advanced kids walk to the school and then we got ready for the day as they did their morning chores as usual. We gathered in the classroom on the first floor to hear everyone talk about their weekends and followed this with an arts period where the kids colored in pictures of animals we drew for them, continuing their work for the arts competition. When it was time for lunch, we went up to the kitchen to get our lunch which consisted of a soup with egg and some type of greens in broth and a white bun with some vegetables and rice to follow. Helen, Ziyu and Jingfei finally let on, however, that they did not really like the school's food and would rather try some of the local food from the many small restaurants in the surrounding area. We left shortly after lunch to try a local dish even though we had already had lunch. We stopped at a little restaurant and were seated by the waitress. We decided to order a local specialty, lamb. There is so much lamb served here because of the large population of Muslims in the city. The way it is served here (called "rou jia mo" which, as it was explained to me, literally means "meat between the bread"). Ziyu made a mistake, however and ordered "pao mo" instead which was the same chunks of lamb served in a soup cooked with small balls of boiled dough which tasted like noodles, made of the same dough used to make the bread in the sandwich. After we realized this, we ordered both and they were both very good. I really like lamb, especially how it is cooked in Xi'an with the spices. We also had "suan mei tang" which is basically prune juice, but it tasted really good and I continued to get it from the side street vendors in the Muslim Square during the remainder of my time in Xi'an.

When we returned from lunch, we returned back to the school where the three girls took nap time with the other kids and I read. After nap time was over, we continued to work with the kids on coloring pictures. This was pretty much the pattern of our days during this week. I will introduce some special things that happened on each of the days, but pretty much, our schedule followed the same general pattern: Meet at the apartment, walk the kids to the school, artwork time with maybe some other short lessons, lunch usually eaten out at a local restaurant and our break during nap time, and more artwork or lessons before walking the kids whose parents were not coming to pick them up back to the apartment.

Monday was really the first and only day that we ate at both the school and out at a restaurant. After that we started trying different places close by. Often what I mean by restaurant consisted of folding tables placed outside on the sidewalk under huge square umbrellas mixed in with the myriad of fruit vendors selling watermelons, cantaloupes, peaches and cherries on the street. In addition, all the restaurants we went to were extremely cheap. Virtually all food here is cheap. The going price was about 6-7 yuan (1 USD) for the food and maybe 2 yuan (you do the math) for the drink. I had so many different kinds of noodles and dumplings and steamed buns filled with mushroom, pork, pumpkin and spinach. It was amazing. It was so great to be able to go out into the street and eat what everyone else around was eating and to have people with me who knew what to order and knew what was good.

It was on Monday that I got to witness my first Chinese court hearing as well. The special needs center is housed in a sort of government/social services center which provides a lot of local services to the surrounding population. So I guess that is why it served as a good location for a court hearing. On Monday afternoon, the teachers got the kids to gather in the courtyard all of a sudden and started pulling lots of tables and chairs out of the classroom. A long table faced what would become the audience with smaller tables and two chairs on either side for the plaintiff and the defendant. I asked Ziyu what was at stake and she said that the hearing was over a traffic accident. The justices arrived with a few policeman, some assistants and a court reporter with a laptop. Chen Laoshi helped to hang a red banner with the official seal of China on it over the door and the hearing started. It was extremely long as the the small panel of three judges questioned both parties. Then, the hearing was over and the teachers brought out lots of watermelon to serve to the kids and the people involved in the case as a reporter and her cameraman arrived to interview the head judge.

Something else interesting about this week was that this was the week I started teaching the ABC's. I am not really sure how it happened. Zhu Laoshi is the young teacher who conducts most of the kids' lessons, whether it is recitation from the little book of life rules (as we started to call it) or teaching the kids how to dial the right numbers in case of emergencies. He is also the teacher with whom we have the most contact. He came up to me one day and started talking to me and I could understand that he wanted me to do something with the kids. Ziyu clarified that I was supposed to teach them English. I took that to mean ABC's because I didn't know what else to start with and I figured it would be simple. So, I got a marker, erased what was on the white board and just started getting their attention in Chinese. Ziyu had to help because it was pretty crowded. I started with A, saying it a few times, showing them how to write it and telling them the sound that it made, as best as I could explain that concept. They copied and made rows and rows of A's on their notepads as if they were copying down another character. Some of them couldn't write, but the ones who could caught on pretty fast. Wang Jia Hen has a lot of trouble writing and pretty much writes only his name. He tried A, but then just went back to writing the character for "wang." Xia Wei told Ziyu he didn't want to learn English and closed his notebook, but soon was writing again. Patience is an incredible tool in these kinds of situations because what the kids want to do sometimes seems to be changing all the time. Nevertheless they got to it and we pushed through and they succeed. By the time we got to G, Ziyu said that they had probably had enough. So, I told them we would do it again tomorrow. We played some review games and then ended class. I was amazed at how many of them had caught on and remembered the letters during the review games. Just to show you the diversity of needs at this school, Liu De Xia (Jackie Chan) has the entire alphabet memorized and can pretty much point out any character. Some of the other kids, however, sat in the corners and didn't write and didn't speak, just watching. One kid that started visiting every day with his grandmother sat in the corner with a bib on just watching, every now and then making a sound and playing with Chen Laoshi, the older teacher. At any rate, after that day, learning the alphabet became a regular part of the kids' day for this week and in the weeks to come. We attempted about 5-6 letters a day and some days we just took a break.

When we weren't learning the ABC's, the kids were back at reciting the rules of life from their little books, often doing this outside in the mornings in the courtyard shouting every word after either Chen Laoshi or Zhu Laoshi. When they weren't reciting, they were drawing. I was asked to draw everything. Cheeseburgers, pokemon characters, alligators, flamingoes, goldfish and regular fish (there is a difference), pandas, anteaters, lobsters, starfish, ducks, chickens and a small puppy riding a skateboard. I drew the outlines and they colored. And gosh, they colored fast. I was a regular drawing factory pumping out drawings that were colored or half-colored or marked through if the kids disapproved and then I was being asked to draw something else exotic and new. When the drawing got old, usually in the late afternoons, some of the kids (usually Liu De Xia and Wang Zi Hao) got us to play Ma Jiang with them, which is a Chinese board game involving little domino-looking pieces that are used almost like playing cards in Rummy to make matches and sets. It is a huge thing in China and if you walk around Xi'an in basically any place, you will see people of all ages huddle around small tables or blankets on the ground, playing Ma Jiang. Since the special needs center is actually located in a community center which services all the residents of the surrounding area, on some afternoons a huge group of retired people gather in the empty classroom next to us and take up two Ma Jiang tables, taking turns playing or either watching and talking.

Later on during the week, Ziyu, Jingfei and Helen decided they didn't want to walk to the school anymore, which was kind of a bummer for me because I really enjoyed that part of my day. Even with all the craziness around, the honking, the shouting, the loud bartering, the screeching of brakes, and the sizzling of the hot griddles where the street vendors cooked their egg/pancake/hashbrown all-in-one breakfast (more on this later), I could think. I really liked to just walk and think, watching all the busyness around me but not feeling a part of it at all (at least until, on Tuesday, I was almost run over by a bike, though that is just all in the course of a day's work in Xi'an). So we took the overcrowded bus there and back missing our stop a few times because of it. This is where I learned that if I actually did want to ever get off the bus before it left the city, I needed to start shoving the people in front of me out of the way. I am ashamed to say that I eventually got quite comfortable with this, because I had to. Don't worry. I won't do it in America.

On Thursday and Friday, Peter and Lance, who had both stopped work at the sites where they used to work for some reason, started coming with us. With the three girls, it was pretty calm. But when Peter and Lance started coming (if you remember, they are both fifteen years old and go to American prep schools), things got quite crazy. They all became pretty close, but in the process, they just started all talking to each other in Chinese and sticking to themselves. I didn't think much of this at first, but just started spending more time with the kids. I will have more on this in the next post as well, but it was a developing issue that I noticed that got somewhat worse the next week. At one point, the school had apparently asked us to help them with a translation of their mission statement into English and better Chinese in order to attract more donors. I helped in perfecting the English once it was already translated at some points, but since I am definitely not that kind of a Chinese student, the whole job of translating from Chinese to English was up to the three Chinese girls and Peter and Lance. Except, I assumed that it did not require all of them working on it at the same time. However, on Thursday afternoon. I looked around and realized that I was the only one helping the kids with the games and drawing. I went upstairs and found all five of the Chinese volunteers in the office working on the translation. Eventually they moved on to help with the kids, but it was honestly kind of frustrating at first to find them all huddle around the computer when it was only a job for really about two people.

On Friday, Hiskia, Jessica and Mayra had arranged with William and Charles to travel by train to a small, ancient city called Pingyao further north. So I got back to the hotel and packed up. I said final goodbyes to Felix, Andrew, Alyssa and Helene (Felix was the last of the original group of people I had met when I first arrived in Xi'an). The four of us caught Bus 40 headed toward the city center, to the Xi'an train station and were soon off to Pingyao on an overnight train.

Ziyu coloring with Zhun Zhe (her favorite)

Ziyu coloring with Li Jiang

The kids' names which they all wrote on a notebook after class one day.

The court hearing in the school courtyard

Jingfei and Liu De Xia

Helen and Liu De Xia

Cars parked on and blocking the sidewalk. A regular occurrence.

The kids lined up in the courtyard, reciting the rules of life with Liu De Xia (typical) being bossy and acting like the teacher, directing them.

Ding Hui and the other kids reciting the rules of life

The ABC's, over and over and over again

Zhou Ming and a picture he colored for Ziyu

More artwork

Liu De Xia and his perfect ABC's

A new student who arrived this week (and whose name I do not know) and his version of the ABC's (it includes every letter, just not in the traditional order).

More of Downtown Xi'an and the Huashan Hike

I will pick up where I left off, when Helen, Ziyu, Jingfei and I went with the man from the Chinese internal revenue service to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, which, if you haven't guessed by now, is kind of a Xi'an landmark which is why we have been there so many times. We were able to go inside the complex that surrounds the pagoda, part of which is a Buddhist temple. We got right close up to the pagoda which was originally five stories and later expanded to seven. I was really hoping that we could go up to the top and see the view of the city from the tower, but the tour guide told us that that would be not be possible. We walked around the courtyards and saw the sculptures and statues. All of it was really beautiful with traditional Chinese architecture. We learned all about the monk I talked about earlier that brought Buddhism to China and all about the story of why the pagoda is called the wild goose pagoda. We followed the tour guide to the last part of the tour, a museum dedicated to Chinese painting and calligraphy. She demonstrated some calligraphy as well as explaining the differences between the traditional characters and the simplified characters. We walked around for a while looking at the different Chinese paintings, both freehand and traditional. There were paintings of lots of flowers and birds, horses, tigers, landscape scenes, bamboo and even paintings of an emperor and a maiden.

After we were done looking around the pagoda, we met our friend outside the gate. He took us through downtown Xi'an which was covered in sculptures of people in Tang Dynasty traditional garb and many fountains. All up and down a huge boulevard leading to the pagoda, there were red columns and fountains and bronze sculptures and all of the buildings were at least modified to match the traditional Tang Dynasty architectural style. Our friend took us to a park surrounded by some of those expensive apartments and filled with sculptures, some of which were stone and dated to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). We walked out on to a pier with a view of a lake surrounded with willow trees and stone bridges. From the lake we could see some of the city's skyscrapers, many of which are still undergoing construction. We could see that people had rented little paddle boats to ride around the lake for sight seeing. After looking at the lake, we rode to a newer development on the other side of the lake that was supposedly built on the location of some famous caves. Allegedly, a woman from a wealthy family was forbidden to marry the man she wanted to because he was from a poor family. They left the city and hid in these caves for a really long time so that they could be together. When a war started, he left to fight in the war, but she supposedly waited for him to come back for a really long time. There were fountains and restaurants and small ponds with black swans. Eventually we left to head back to the hotel to meet up with the others who were traveling to Huashan.

When I first arrived back from Karen's on Tuesday night, Lance the fifteen year old volunteer who goes to boarding school in America, came up to me without knowing me and asked me if I wanted to accompany them on the trip to Huashan. I had heard Felix and some of the other volunteers talk about it before and it sounded like something that would be really cool to see and a really interesting experience to have. There is kind of a tradition when it comes to hiking up this particular mountain. The hike is made overnight so that one can get to the top in order to see the sunrise. Another reason for this, which I did not know at the time, was so that one could make the climb without being able to see how high and dangerous some of the mountain paths were. At any rate, since we were hiking at night, we needed to leave shortly after getting back from work on Friday. Lance had told us we needed to be back by 5 pm. Since we had been out all afternoon, we did not have much time when we got back to the hotel. We packed and were out the door trying to find a taxi. The only problem was that it was rush hour. All 10 of us waited for about thirty minutes before we saw a taxi that both was not already occupied and was willing to go as far as the bus station where we would be taking the bus to the town at the base of the mountain. Four were able to fit in the taxi, but the rest of us had to wait for at least two more taxis to pick us up. It kept getting later and later. We changed locations several times. So many taxis passed us that already had customers, but many passed us which were completely empty as well. It looked like we definitely were not going to make the time of the last bus out to Huashan. Lance and Peter were trying to think quickly as to what we should do. Someone started suggesting that we just go early the next day, but we were pretty determined to do the overnight hike. Eventually we found a bus to take us to the train station. We didn't even know the train times, but Lance was determined that we would make it. We told the others at the bus station to go ahead and take the bus and we would take the train which was faster, but which left later. The train station was the most crowded place I think I have ever seen in China. It was one wide open courtyard teeming with people. We had to go through all these people to get to the ticket office and wait in a long line to buy our tickets. While we were there, Lance told us that in order to buy train tickets foreigners needed to have their passports. The problem was both Rita and Hiskia did not have their passports. Lance, however, convinced the train officials to let them have tickets anyway. After Lance bought our tickets, we found our way to a long weaving line and eventually into a set of guard rails that cut through the crowds in the train station courtyard. Lance got us past two sets of guards, explaining that we were foreigners and that he had gotten our tickets and eventually onto the train with about five minutes to spare.

The train was very crowded. There were little benches facing each other, each with barely enough room for three people. This was repeated on the other side of the aisle. In between the two benches facing each other was a little table for food and belongings. The aisle was also really narrow. There were crying babies and people selling food and drinks walking up and down the aisle. One army officer kept walking up and down our car yelling and trying to sell belts which he said had been made by the Chinese People's Army. At one point we went to the dining car to eat some of the food they served. It was not great, but it was decent. There was some rule that stipulated that only train staff could sit down and eat at the tables in the dining car, but again Lance came through and convinced them to let us eat in the dining car. Eventually, after an hour and a half, we arrived in the town of Huashan and it was very dark. We got in the back of this dark van with tinted windows, which was our taxi and drove on rural roads past fields of planted crops and to the town. We passed a couple of farmers who were rolling bales of hay right in the middle of the road.

We met up with the others who had taken the bus right outside the park entrance at a restaurant where they were getting dinner. We got some drinks and all went to the restroom at the family's restroom behind the restaurant (restaurants are not required to have bathrooms around here) and there most of us had our first experience with a really awful, Chinese style toilet. I will leave the rest to the imagination, but all I can say is that I am sure what we experienced was not the worst. It had plumbing.

After a while of sorting out how many tickets to buy and either at student or normal prices depending on who had brought their student ID's, with Lance having to continually turn up the charm and do some more convincing, we had our tickets and entered the park. We kept joking about how high it was and how tired we were already. We had no idea. I think Lance and Peter had an idea because I think they had done it before, but they did not let on at all. And I am pretty glad they didn't. At first I thought it was fine, but it didn't take long before we were all breaking out in a full sweat and huffing and puffing. Really, we were pretty much on the easiest part. It was a paved, concrete walkway which just slanted slightly up for the greater part of the first portion. Every now and then there would be resting places with tables and little restaurants with places to sleep in the back. Everywhere we passed sold drinks, including racks and racks of Red Bull, cucumbers and other vegetables, cherries, and little souvenirs. At first everyone was walking together and making conversation. But eventually it became difficult even to talk and walk at the same time and people got separated all up and down the trail. I climbed alone for long portions of it.

After a while, it got to where it was no longer the slanted paved walkways, but instead, was just sets of stairs with really, really, really steep inclines cut directly into the side of the mountain with chains on the side for support. I could still hike without the chains, but as it got higher and higher, even I needed the chains just because my legs hurt so much. After a while of climbing up and up and up, I could tell that whoever built the trail still had a soul, because there would be sections of flat pathway where the trail would plateau in order to give people a rest before going up and up and up. After a while, Lance and Peter asked a woman at a stopping point how much farther the trail went. She told us that distance wise we were half way (we weren't because of where we ended up going), but that we were only one fourth of the way done time wise, because the last half was almost just straight up (I don't even think that time estimate was correct). After leaving this rest stop, I got the point where my legs were hurting so much that I had to take it so slow and fell behind just about everyone, taking little breaks at every plateau. All along the trails people were stopped where they had given out, on random steps and side places on the trail, just wherever they had not been able to make it anymore. At some points I caught up with the rest of the group, but whenever I did they were always just finishing their break and ready to move on and I was always ready to take another one. Finally, we reached the place where I thought we must be really, really close. In reality we weren't, but it was called the Thousand Foot Cliff. I think that it was a thousand steps to the stop of this one particular section of the trail. Here, the crowd bottlenecked, I think because of how high it was. It was built into the cliff and was almost covered by rock overhead. There was only room for basically two people each holding on to a chain built into the cliff wall next to them. The crowd moved slowly as people took their time one step at a time, one person right behind the other. There were lights built around to help guide people up. The stairs were so small that really only the front of my foot could hold on and I had to kind of balance between one leg and the other. It basically seemed to go straight up and way up ahead, I could see some of the others.

When I finished with this portion, I felt like I had made it. I had certainly not. I looked up having to bend my neck just to see above me and way off in the distance, I could see little guide lights in what seemed to be an endless distance up. At one point, one lady from our group decided she didn't want to make it anymore and left to go back down and sleep overnight in a hotel. After about an hour and a half more, I came up to what seemed to be another plateau and realized I had reached a central area that overlooked many of the surrounding peaks. This was the central peak. On top of it was built a small restaurant, a hotel and the cable car service down the other side of the mountain. I saw the others sitting on a bench. We waited for Andrew and Carlos, the only people missing to catch up but never really saw them. So, we all decided to hike to the East Peak. After determining where that was, Lance said he remembered being there before and that it was about a ten minute walk one way to the East Peak, which is where we were headed in order to see the sunrise. Sadly this was pretty much the only thing he was wrong about the whole trip. And he was horribly, horribly wrong. It was at least another three hours up of some of the hardest climbing we had had the whole trip. Some trails swung around the faces of sheer cliffs or were on the tops of tall ridges with the mountain sliding off drastically on either side. Looking back, it seemed like we had an aerial view onto some of the peaks. Sometimes, grabbing onto the guide chains was difficult too, because all throughout the trail on the way up, people had locked small golden locks on to the chains, with pieces of red ribbon around them. Lance said that they did this for good look. At some points, the locks were clamped on in such great numbers, clamped onto each other layer after layer, that you couldn't see the chains anymore.

It got almost funny at a point because we would climb and climb and climb and Jess would say that we were on the home stretch and it really did look like that because we were to a point where all we could see was sky and the very top of the East Peak, which I think is the second highest peak on the mountain. It was not funny however, when we would turn a bend and see a whole new set of guide lights winding further upward. I cannot tell you how many times this happened to us. It was getting frustrating and I was feeling like my legs would just stop moving at any point when we finally reached this little Taoist temple. In order to get up to where the temple was I could see that there were two possible routes. On one side there was a series of small grooves, not stairs, carved into the flat side of a cliff that went up for a significant distance, but not nearly as far as the thousand foot cliff. On the other side, there was a metal frame with I think what were intended to be stairs, but in actuality, it was more like a ladder with really small rungs. On the sides of either route were chains. I took the "ladder" route and then made it to the top....only to find out that there were even more stairs. This went on for a little while longer. I could hear the birds in the trees and it was getting windier. It was definitely starting to get lighter outside and the sky was turning that dark blue it turns right before the sun rises as opposed to the pitch blackness we had seen all night, except for when the bright light of the moon broke through the trees. Finally, finally, finally we reached a part of the mountain where there were no more stairs. We ran up the dirt, holding on to roots to keep our balance and got to the top. Like I imagined, it was crowded with people. It was not a terribly big peak once we made it to the very top but there had been streams of people climbing all night. It was packed all the way from the high ground where there was this obelisk, monument type of thing built to mark the highest point down to where the stone started to give way to dirt and trees again and began to slide off down the mountain face. I got separated from the rest of the group and pushed and shoved my way to a place where I could sit in between these two people. I still had a lot of people blocking my view, but I saw a thin line of white where these sunrise was beginning so I knew I would be able to see the sunrise. I was so exhausted that I started falling asleep in my seat, but woke up every time there was a tiny new development in the sunrise because there would be this loud, excited cry from all the people.

It was amazing. Absolutely amazing. The white line turned into an orange line, which eventually turned the clouds around it a light pink. Eventually, little at a time, the sun itself emerged until it hurt to look at it and I could then turn around and see what we had climbed. Vast expanses of white granite peaks covered with pine trees in places and bare in others, all of which rose and dropped off in drastic heights and cut off into sheer drops in several places. The mountains around us were easy to make out, but I could see that in the distance there were mountains that continued on for miles, with each set that was farther away being a lighter shade than the one before until I couldn't see them anymore. Way, way off, I could see the flat land stretching out beyond the reach of the mountains and could even make out the segmented fields set aside for crops in the surrounding rural region.

I finally met up with the others as it was pretty easy to pick us out since we were the only foreigners on this peak. We found Carlos who had hiked ahead of everyone else and been there since 3:30, but we lost Lance. After waiting a while, we decided he had gone ahead and hiked back down, meeting him back where the restaurant, hotel and cable cars were at the central peak. It was an hour and fifteen down, so I know that it for sure must have been more than double that hiking up although no one kept time. The views climbing down were also impressive where we saw the whole valley in between the gorges which broke up the different peaks. There were little buildings built right into the sides of the mountains everywhere too, either residences of the people who sold things on the mountain or small Buddhist and Taoist temples.

Once we met up with Lance, we brought cable car tickets. That was quite an experience as well, traveling quickly, hanging suspended thousands of feet...actually thousands of kilometers above the ground, traveling in a matter of minutes what it had taken hours to do on the way up. Once out of the cable car we hurried to the bus station to by bus tickets back to Xi'an and hopped on the next bus. We all crashed on the way back and were delirious when we got into the taxi that took us to the hotel. We basically went back to the hotel and fell right asleep from such a long. It was certainly one of the most amazing things I have ever seen and one of the coolest experiences I have ever had.

Just to give you an idea, Huashan's East Peak (which is what we climbed to) has an elevation of 1302.518 miles above sea level and the South Peak, the mountain's highest peak, has an elevation of 1338.992 miles. I am not sure exactly how much of that we climbed.



The Big Wild Goose Pagoda up close.





Courtyard inside the Da Ci'en Temple near the pagoda



Downtown Xi'an near the pagoda, a huge pavilion of sculptures and fountains and surrounded by traditional architecture



A park we went to after the pagoda.



A lake in downtown Xi'an overlooking many of the city's skyscrapers



The Xi'an Train Station (busier than the Xi'an International Airport) where we took the train to the little town of Huashan at the base of the mountain.



It is fo bidden.



One of the many resting places/camps on the long trail up to the East Peak of the mountain.



We arrived on the Mount Hua's East Peak shortly before the sun began to rise.























At times, the hike basically became a climb, and we had to hold on to chains climbing straight up the side of small cliffs, one at a time.



























The cable cars we rode the rest of the way down the mountain to take the bus back to Xi'an.

Pictures of Wuhan

Since I wasn't able to get out and see things very well in Wuhan and certainly wasn't able to take pictures, I was frustrated that you guys would not get to see what I saw but would just have to read that long post. So, instead, I just went on the internet and got some pictures of the places I passed by in the bus. Wuhan is definitely a place I want to go back to sometime, but until then, here are some pictures. None of them are mine, but they each have little captions describing what they are.



Wuhan's famous Yellow Crane Tower (Huang He Lou) on the top of Snake Hill



View of Wuhan and of the First Yangtze River Bridge. The view is from Wuchang looking across to Hanyang with some of Hankou to the right. We took this road across on the bus.



First Yangtze River Bridge, built in 1957 with Soviet help. There is still a military guard on it to this day. The train runs underneath and cars go back and forth above.



Another view of the first bridge.



Yangtze River in Wuhan.



Site of the 1911 Xianhai Rebellion against the Qing Dynasty and first headquarters of the government of the Republic of China.



Memorial to the October 10, 1911 Wuchang Uprising and to Sun Yat Sen, the founder of the Republic of China.



The "third" Yangtze River Bridge in Wuhan, this is the cable suspension bridge built in in 1998 and how I got back and forth from the airport.



Part of Wuhan, probably Hankou, at night with the skyscrapers with their nighttime lights.