well, today was the end of an era, and the beginning of a new...era. the camp officially ended yesterday, and most of the foreign teachers (chris, jd, charlotte, sam, dan, and liuliu) returned to their homelands, leaving just me, duncan, kevin, and danny. today the school felt like a totally new place, since a lot of the new high school students moved into the dorms today, and so many of the teachers were gone. for the next 6 days me and kevin'll be teaching 3-5th graders at this primary school across town, with classes of about 40 kids each. we're teaching them english, as well as the history of american music, that should be interesting.

due to the heat, me and kevin have taken to walking around the house in only our boxers on occasion. this morning, alan, our nerdy liaison, knocked on our door around 9 am, while we were still sleeping. he knocked for about 5 minutes until i finally got up and answered the door in just my boxers and stared at him for about 10 seconds before i remembered to say good morning. later today, around 4:30 pm, he knocked on our door again while i was taking a dump, so he knocked for another few minutes before i went to answer the door, again in just my boxers. when he saw me he made this 'how much lovin do you guys need to do everyday' face before he controlled himself.

yesterday was full of ceremonies. there was one in the morning for a student who got accepted into beijing university; over a thousand people showed up at 7 in the morning to celebrate this kid and they unearthed this humongous vat of baijiu that they had buried on school grounds. about baijiu: it's translated 'white wine' but it's not wine at all, it's disgusting putrid barf that's made of corn, rice, monkey toenails, buttsweat, and other things. the percent alcohol varies between 50% and 56%...for some reason, the miao and tujia minority people love the stuff and drink it at every opportunity. anyways, they broke open the vat and poured cups of baijiu for everyone in the audience, even though half of them were kids from the summer camp. after the ceremony i wandered over to my class where they'd been seated and found them half-drunk and begging me for water, though unfortunately i didn't have any.

return of the mickey mao club: the closing ceremonies were last nite and they included performances by the classes and the foreign teachers. i didn't think we could top the sweater song from our performance last time, but we totally blew it away. we decided to do three songs, basketcase, creep (by radiohead), and the climax of the entire camp, ice, ice baby. kevin rapped the entire song FROM MEMORY, i did beat box on my own mic, jd played the background riff on guitar, and chris and dan danced around the stage. when we walked off we were greeted by 'i love you' shouts and marriage proposals from every schoolgirl in the audience.

a funny thing was that today, me and kevin had dinner with some officials from the primary school we'll be teaching at this week, including the school's two music teachers, one of which is said to be the best chinese fiddle player in baojing county. they told us that they'd been at the ceremony the nite before and could tell we were good musicians from the performance and listed ice ice, baby as their favorite of our three songs.

kevin, henceforth to be known as ice, is hilarious...he has the mentality of a sharp-witted urbanite but he's from south carolina, so everything he says comes out in this slow, measured drawl, even though the actual words always sound like something out of the new yorker.

the day before yesterday the principal of the school took all the teachers on a boat ride down the river. while the boat was still in dock i saw this big old white dude walk up with this guy from the jishou teacher's college, and it turned out to be art simpson, the guy i'd talked to on the phone a couple months ago, who was trying to build a chrch in baojing. we had a long conversation on the boat, but i'm not sure what to make of him. anyways, i asked him if he could tell me how to find the underground chrches in baojing and he couldn't. luckily, duncan seems to be a believer, he went to first bptist chrch in berkeley, the one across the street from first pres...we've talked about our faiths a few times, not in depth yet though.

a few nites ago karen, one of the local english teachers, took a bunch of us to a local karoake place. about halfway through, me and jd snuck out to go see a show put on by midgets from all around baojing county. they sang songs and danced, and at one point during the dancing they dropped all semblance of order and began a full-on brawl; the midgets began tossing each other across the stage and trying to rip off everyone else's clothes, it was the most bizarre thing i've ever seen in my life.

anyways, i need to sleep, tomorrow we're waking up early to teach...word to your mother.

two days ago, the school told us that we were gonna take a two day trip to a nearby scenic spot to do some hiking, which i thought sounded cool. so yesterday this guy alan, who takes care of foreign teachers and is incredibly nerdy and polite, knocks on our door at 6 am to wake us up and drag us to the riverport.

(a bit about alan: one of the guys from hawaii, jd, has taken to saying vulgar things to alan whenever they interact cause we're never sure if he understands our english; i must have laughed for ten minutes straight when alan handed us copies of the new schedule and jd shouted 'sweet beautiful breasts!' in his face...i said it was vulgar =9)

when we got to the riverport we all got on boats with our students and ended up taking a 3 hour boat ride to this gorge, where we climbed for about 4 hours along the craziest hike ever...it was seriously the most dangerous thing i've ever done in my life. about two full hours of it was spent clinging to chains nailed into the side of the gorge while we dangled above the river at the bottom and under random waterfalls, walking on thing 6-inch wide logs, thin metal ladders, or my favorite, metal spikes nailed into the cliff spaced about 2 feet apart...a lot of the time i was climbing more with my arms than my legs. sometimes we climbed straight up the mountain, using tiny footholds carved into the rock, and i cursed my (relatively) large, ungainly feet.

the most amazing thing was that the chinese kids, even (and especially) my students, who're the youngest, flew along the path. i'm telling you, they're made of freaking rock. when we took breaks along the river at the bottom, some of my kids would catch small crabs with their bare hands and eat them raw. i really don't understand why the chinese army hasn't won a significant war in the past 150 years or so.

i took a buttload of pictures, but unfortunately the coolest ones didn't come out, which i was really pissed about, since i defied death to take them, climbing one-handed. so no one will ever believe how dangerous the hike really was, which sucks. i would pay money to ship a busload of 10 year old american kids here and force them to go through the gorge.

afterwards, we stayed in local farmers' houses which had no electricity, so we slept around 9 pm and woke up before the sun. seriously, the kids are more like bedouins from the gobi desert than chinese schoolchildren. on the way back to the school, we stopped at a town with a lot of small shops and markets, where i bought an old set of small bottles with river scenes somehow painted on the inside, a beautiful hand-dyed batik, and a hand-weaved grass hat, for a total of seven bucks. china rules!

for some reason, half the girls in the summer camp have decided to pick me as their summer crush. i can't pass a group of them without hearing them giggle like schoolgirls (...) and the occasional 'peter i love you, marry me' shouts. jd and chris tell me about how their students sing this song that goes 'i like peter, i don't love peter, i like peter, i don't love peter...'. i dunno why i'm writing this, probably cause my ego has outgrown hunan province. it's intriguing though, since chris and jd are both good looking guys, and authentic white foreigners to boot, and jd can even speak chinese. who knows what goes through the minds of these crazy banshees. i hope i use my mojo for the forces of good and not evil.

speaking of which, i still haven't found other believers yet. i've talked about my faith with a few of my chinese co-teachers, i haven't really gone in depth, but they seem pretty interested. us foreign teachers also had a discussion about religion, thanks to the news about the gay episcopalean bishop. i taught the song making melodies to my class, but they had no idea who the 'king of kings' is, and didn't really understand my explanation. one step at a time, i suppose.