Breakfast was egg and noodles... Katherine can elaborate on that. Having noodles for breakfast is something I'm still getting used to, but it was good.
Class today was about Herbal Medicine in traditional Chinese medicine; mostly about how you can apply a nature (cold, cool, warm or hot), and taste (sour, bitter, sweet, pungent or salty), meridian (like for which organs), and direction (ascending, descending, floating or sinking) to most foods and all herbs. They use those properties to distinguish what the herb (or food) is or can be used for like to treat an acute injury, sprain, fracture, burns, abdominal pain, to prevent the possibility of abortion, reduce lower back pain... yada yada yada.
Our professor said he had one woman who fractured her arm and didn't want to have surgery or a cast so he put this stuff called Zhi Tong Qing Cao Gao on it for about 3 months and now she's fine and has full range of motion. We made some paste out of one of the most widely used powders (Ru Yi Jin Huang San), which is commonly used to treat acute injuries. Frankly I think it looks like infant feces, but it smells like curry (its main ingredient). You spread it on gauze, put a thin layer over it and then place it on the injured area. Can't really attest to it's effectiveness because I didn't have any pain/acute injury that needed healing. But we saved all the leftovers for my buddy (Paul) who recently sprained his wrist. I'll have to ask him if it helped.
Next we packed and loaded up to go to the hot springs. First? The hot springs museum. The "tour" (if you can call it that) lasted about 15 minutes, and the tour guide kept adding s's to words like "the peoples in the areas from a long time agos..". It was cute.
We had an hour to kill which basically just meant going to this playground and sitting down. They had some pretty steep, marble slides that were amusing for a while. Also discovered an abandoned playground behind this tin wall, which Pat and I promptly explored. There was an old swing set and some weird looking concrete slides. Everything was completely overgrown.. but it was neat. It also helped pass the huge amount of useless time we spent there.
Next we went to the National Park and were told (at the beginning) we had 2 hours to explore. Katherine, Katie, Pat and I saw a waterfall on the map and decided to head for that. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. Once we found the waterfall there were countless very old and moss-ridden concrete steps that lead EVERYWHERE. Most of which were very steep. We spent a good amount of time just seeing where random steps led before we decided to see where "up" led (the decision at that point was to see what was up and then go see what was down... we never got that far). The "up" was endless and the steps continued to get steeper and less safe. Curiosity as well as a hope of seeing monkeys drew us up the mountain.
We came across some that were almost vertical (and that had clearly not been used in a LONG time) that came complete with rope to help you up. Pat took that way as I continued up hoping the top was close (and that there was treasure?). Pat was painfully disappointed to find out his more adventurous route lead to the same place mine did. By this point we'd been climbing about 45 minutes. A bit later Pat goes "we've reached the top!" as we turn the corner and see steps leading to a shack. Disappointment at it's peak.. no monkeys, no gold, no temple.. just a freaking SHACK.
But then we walked around it and found some village with these cool gardens and a BEAUTIFUL view. Turns out we made it to the very tip top of the mountain and could see miles off. No amount of picture taking could do that view justice. It was breathtaking. When we left the park we saw the hotels that looked TINY and far far away from our view very much large. We wandered around the village for a bit, finding a bamboo forest with plastic bags around them (weird?), more gardens as well as more paths that were all too tempting to take. We had to make it back in less than an hour though so after a few more pictures, we headed back down the way we came and decided to count steps..
How many? 600 steps counting down. 1200 steps total. Which doesn't include the straight platforms or the steps we took randomly before deciding on one path. Approximated about 1500 steps total. And one long trip up a mountain. Stopped for a refreshing beer at the end of the 600 steps and headed back to the bus.. thinking we'd be early (supposed to meet at 5:30, it was about 5:15)...
False. Shortly after we'd left they'd decided to change the time to 4:30. Apparently they'd done 3 calls for us over the loud speakers and had been waiting for us the whole time. Yikes! Felt kinda bad... but we honestly didn't hear ANYTHING and thought we were making pretty good time for the original instructions. Ahh well... it was probably one of my favorite things we've done so far.
Hot springs next... which after some long conversation the majority of us had decided to go with the public, naked hot springs rather than the private 2-to-a-room hot springs... purely for the experience and stories. As luck would have it the women's public hot spring was under construction and we had to do the private baths. Nothing special about that... really just felt like a hot tub that smelled a bit like sulfur. Ahh well.. it was an experience. We ate dinner afterward at a restaurant there with a beautiful view of the mountains... save for the men's public spring (with an open ceiling) that was all too easily viewable from said restaurant. Nothing like wanting to take pictures of the view and being rudely interrupted by naked asian man. Ew.
After dinner we headed back home and are currently chillin in the lobby with a few of our students (Paul, Viola, Mae, Jin Jin, Fish Ball and Yama). They'd planned for us to drink with them but a couple of our students got sick (Hannah and Jena :( ) so that's been postponed. But it was funny having Dr. Huang come in and be like "why aren't you guys drinking yet? I wanted to join you!" and then offered for us to go to his house to drink since people were sick here. Ahh well... tomorrow's another adventure.
-R
No comments:
Post a Comment