Ganbei!

At around 9.30am we arrived in Tai'an where we were met by a local guide and taken to a farming village. Buyang is a typical Chinese village. In pairs we were each assigned to a local family where we would spend the evening. At lunchtime our host family and another host family (with Adie and Steve from our group) met up to have lunch. The language barrier was a bit of an issue but after about an hour and a combination of phrasebook and pictures of my family, we established that the 2 men were brothers. We had beer at lunch time and plates of food just kept arriving; the 2 host men, literally every minute were topping up our glasses and calling a toast, occasionally challenging us to down in one, which Adie and Steve quite happily accepted. There were 3 dishes which didn't contain meat and the dumplings had what can only be described as salty grass in them. It was all pretty good though.

In the afternoon the whole group met up and we were taken first of all to meet the vice mayor where we learnt some stuff. The policy on babies is a little different for villagers; in the cities you are allowed one child, end of story. If you have more than one I think there are financial penalties. In the villages if your first child is a girl you can have a second baby with no implications. If this is a girl, that's it, no more tries. Quite bizarrely the same applies if you have a disabled boy, you can have a second child. If, for whatever reason, you get pregnant for a 3rd time, I've been told that abortion is encouraged otherwise there are quite severe financial penalties which often result in families losing their homes.

We were then taken to the local nursery where about 150 children under the age of 5 greeted us with 'Haro, haro.' They did 6 short dances for us; the first one being to 'Jingle Bells' - class! Then we were told we had to do a game for them; a little advance notice would have been useful but Jean, the older lady in our group led them in a running game. I wandered around the rest of the fidgeting children and at one point felt that there was something not quite right about the whole experience. This is probably just my conscience kicking in and I usually find that few people other than Matt get me on this kind of thing, but it felt a little patronising that we were going in there looking at Chinese children (they were strictly speaking on holiday but had gone in 'because they wanted to meet us'), taking photographs of them and having photos with them on our knees (I hasten to add I didn't do this and one of the girls who did this actually got peed on ). Then we wandered around the classrooms; I stopped taking photographs at this point as I really did feel as though this was a little akin to visiting a zoo. As I said, not many people may share this view and that's fair enough but that's how I feel so the few pictures on the site of this are carefully chosen. After this and even more bizarre we visited an old people's home. I didn't take any pictures of old / less able people as this also would have pricked my conscience (would I go into a home in the UK to take pictures - nope, so why would I in China?). Anyway I'll get down off my high horse now. Just a point of interest; if I understand correctly, old people automatically get to live with their son and his family when they get older and less able, so the people who inhabit the old people's homes are either disabled or men and women who have no sons.

We returned to our respective families and this time Adie and Steve and their family came round to ours for dinner. Our family seem to have the local beer shop in front of their house, Adie and Steve's family had pigs, the 2 Gemma's house had rabbits (I'm assuming not for pets) and so on. The bedroom is basic; concrete floor, mattress and pillow. The instructions we received for the use of the toilet (squat of course, as they are predominantly in China) were, front round hole of the toilet is for number 1, back square hole is for number 2 and no flush. Our evening meal started with lots of potent rice wine stuff and several toasts then we switched to beer. Again, numerous plates of food emerged and as with lunch time, the ladies of the household didn't join us; instead they ate after we finished (although we still had to continue toasting them). Matt and Steve played poker as the man of the house looked on (I did ask all of their names but wouldn't be able to tell you them now) and we all headed to bed soon after.