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20. A trip to Nanyue
The weekend before my birthday I was hosted to a trip to Nanyue. It's one of the "famous mountains" of China a few hours south of here. The three American faculty traveled with Chinese faculty from the Foreign Affairs Office. Also on the trip was the Chinese-American brother of a faculty member. He was visiting from New Jersey. He had not been in China for eight years and he shared many insights about the changes. It was a time of walking up mountains, burning of incense, eating and drinking of toasts, and much laughter.
The scenery was magnificent. As we climbed to the top of the mountain we encountered frigid air, strong cold winds, and a heavy fog which created the most beautiful hoarfrost I've ever seen. The photos on my web page do not do justice to the mystical beauty of this mountain, but they do convey a little of its majesty.
The Mountain is a spiritual gathering place of Buddhists and Taoists. I have been told that the Chinese are not religious, but that has not been my experience. There was steady stream of Chinese climbing the mountain, burning incense, and praying to their Gods.
The Monday night dinner was wonderful. Full of western food, a birthday cake delivered by singing employees of the hotel, and laughter and fun. An American student here shared my birthday. He was 24 and he joined us for a joint celebration. After dinner we went to a friends house to view a video of an American movie on VCD.
We'd gone on a shopping expedition a week earlier to buy some movies for a special birthday showing. I'd selected U157 and X-Men. Two movies I had not seen that sounded like fun. When Adam started up U157 it seemed, at first, that there was something wrong with the CD. After a few moments we realized that this was the worst type of pirated VCD. It was a copy of a video that had been taken in a movie theater.
The heads of people interrupted the first few minutes of the movie as they took their seats late. Both sides of the movie were cut off because the video camera could not capture the entire screen and people's heads kept popping into the picture. Also, the German dialogue in the movie was captioned in English, which was covered up by the captioning in Chinese that they had added to the movie. After several minutes of laughter as we understood what had happened, we switched to X-Men which a good VCD.
Pirated movies are easily available in China. I see VCD's of movies here before they are released in the States. The packaging is done so expertly that you cannot tell which ones are pirated and which ones are authentic.
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