By Andy
Apologies: I posted this yesterday, but something happened to it when I made my latest photo post. Not the first time WordPress has been buggy and destroyed things.
Today I see moss for the first time I can remember in China. Lush, green moss.
For the most part, despite its oft-noted 5,000 years of history, most things in China aren’t old enough to have moss on them. Up north, where I’ve spent most of my time, it’s too dry for moss anyway, or for anything else very green for that matter. We are delayed this morning on our way out of Nanchang by our usual grogginess, a trip to an outdoor store to pick up new gloves for Alexis and a fruitless search for a new bungee chord for Evan after his snaps. In the meantime, the battery for my odometer dies (why I let the bike shop in Maryland talk me into a wireless odometer for a year-long ride in no-where land is beyond me). Of course, it’s some specialty battery that I won’t be able to find until we hit another big city, if ever.
The first part of our ride is uneventful – another trek out of a city, through the requisite industrial zone and finally back out into the countryside. After a late lunch, we finally escape the horn-blaring cacophony of the national highway and move onto a country rode – our favorite kind. We pass through a small town as the sun begins to hang low in the sky, on the outskirts of which we finally come across some of the traditional architecture that’s been absent since we first came into Jiangxi. It is here that I find the moss covering the top of a compound wall.
The most striking of the traditional buildings a pink-walled temple and school with a large, white, stone entrance façade. The outside wall is painted with the slogan, “The ‘Two Bases’ Open the Road to Wealth for the Family” (发家致富, ’两基’ 开路). If I remember correctly, the “Two Bases” is a campaign to teach Mandarin Chinese in addition to the local dialect in primary school before switching over to pure-Mandarin education thereafter, but I will have to look it up again when we have Internet. The only other time I recall seeing ‘Two Bases’ slogans is in Xinjiang, where the native language is Uighur, which unlike the Gan dialect prevalent in this area is a Turkic language unrelated to Mandarin Chinese. The fact that a campaign is necessary here is intriguing.
Indeed, when we arrive in the town of Zhangxiang just a few minutes down the road, Mandarin speakers are few and far between. The hotel we find is across the street from the local middle school, and even the children in the mob that immediately surrounds us are difficult to comprehend. Young people are usually a slam-dunk for Mandarin ability as a result of compulsory Mandarin education. We have some difficulty communicating with our hotel proprietor, but eventually secure an unheated, three-person room for 45 kuai.
After a late bedtime last night and an early rise this morning, we are hitting the sack early for a big day tomorrow.
