[Note that everything I wrote about in my journal under this day's heading actually happened on the previous day. But what happened on April 7th? Unfortunately, I didn't write a thing in the journal about it, but it was really the most memorable day of the whole trip. I'll try to fill it in after the fact.

First of all, Maryanne was sick on the 7th, so Merf stayed at the hotel with her. So not only did they both miss out on the day's planned events, but we don't have any good pictures of them, because Merf had the camera. (I have some video footage, and some low-resolution still pictures that the video camera is able to take.)

The first activity of the day was a concert at the Xin Xiang Foreign Language School, where the Leonards' boys attend. The school is downtown, so it's not the campus-type setting you would expect in the US (unless maybe you went to school in Manhattan). Instead, it appears to be a single large building of about four stories that sits on a street full of shops and offices. The overall design is -- you guessed it -- a wall surrounding a large courtyard. All (or nearly all) the rooms are built around the outside edge, so that effectively, the perimiter wall forms one wall of each room. The courtyard is encircled by balconies on every floor, so the balconies serve as hallways that connect the classrooms. (I don't know how cold it gets there in the winter, but it seems like that could be a problem.) The wall facing the street is breached by an opening big enough to drive a bus through (at least a couple busses, actually), and that's how we entered.

While enroute to the school, we were informed that part of the ceremony would be a gift exchange between students of the school and the members of the Tour Group. Panic! We had been told back in the US that we would be eating lunch with a family, and that we would need to bring some sort of gift for them, and Merf had bought some bookmarks from the Air Force Museum in Dayton to serve that purpose. But we hadn't counted on any other gift exchanges, so we didn't have anything suitable. Others among us were putting together complete sets of US coins, which seemed like a good idea, but I didn't have enough change with me to come close to that. Daniel finally solved the problem by offering up his copy of a magazine about airliners that Merf had gotten him to read on the plane on the way over. So we decided to use two of the bookmarks in the student gift exchange, and the last bookmark along with the magazine at our lunch family. That was stretching things a little thin, but it was the best we could do.

The spectacle that awaited us was totally unexpected. There were some banners and signs welcoming us, next to the entrance outside. But remember the wall is effectively as thick as the width of a classroom, so it was like entering through a short tunnel. Thus, we couldn't really see what was in there until we arrived. Upon debussing (don't bother to look that word up), we were greeted by the wild cheers of 2000 students. Hundreds of them were sitting in chairs that had been set up facing toward a temporary stage, which was on the opposite side of the courtyard from where we entered. Many more were lining all those balconies around all four sides of the courtyard. There were banners and decorations all over. It was similar to what happened when we came out of the train station, only on a much bigger scale. We felt like rock stars, or returning astronauts (from back when astronauts were famous).

Unfortunately, I've forgotten the exact details of what happened for the rest of the morning, but it was something like this: After unpacking the violins in a big room that opened onto the courtyard, we sat in an area that was reserved for us. There was a long period of speeches by members of the school administration and by Doug Locke (made even longer by the necessity of repeating everything through an interpreter). Then the Tour Group was brought up on stage for the gift exchange we had just found out about. Each member of the Tour Group stood opposite a student of the school, and they exchanged whatever they had brought. After that, a bunch of the school's students flooded into our seating area and gave us each (parents included!) a red kerchief that is symbolic of being a "hero of the People's Republic of China", and which the Chinese children themselves earn for getting good grades, etc.

Then the concert started. As on the previous night, there was a long succession of Chinese performers before the Tour Group took the stage again. This time, though, the performances were not just musical, but included various dance routines and martial arts. One group sang "Jingle Bells" (another of the many times we heard this song in China). A group of women who were introduced as the school's English teachers sang an American song (in English) from the 70's (I think; we recognized it, but I don't remember what it was). During this whole thing, the stage was constantly being criscrossed by men carrying professional-sized (i.e., large) video cameras. I don't know whether they were associated with the school, or were part of the local media.

Before it was the Tour Group's turn to perform, Richard began feeling sick, so he went back to the room where we had left the violin cases to sit in the shade. I went back to check on him a couple times, and he improved, but still ended up not playing in this concert. So the second concert went fine (minus a few sick players), and at the end we retired to the big room where Richard was.

The next order of business was to assign groups of two or three to host families for lunch. I must admit I had a little trepedation about this, because there was no way to know what we were really getting into. But my fears turned out to be unfounded. Unfortunately, I don't know the name of the family we were assigned to, but they were great. They were a mother, her 5th-grade son, and her neice who was a junior in college (majoring in biology, with the intent of being a teacher). At least, I think those were the relationships. The neice was the only one who spoke substantial English, so she did nearly all the talking for the family. The father of the family, I found out later, was away on a business trip. Richard, Daniel, and I piled into their SUV with them, and we took a short drive to their apartment. (A note here: As I've mentioned before, there were a huge number of people riding bicycles in town, so owning a car, much less an SUV, was something I took to be an indication of fairly high status.)

They lived on the fourth floor, and the plain concrete construction and apparent dirt and trash left in the stairwell did not bode well for the living conditions we would find there. However, inside their front door was a change from night to day. The apartment wasn't gigantic, but it didn't seem cramped, either, and it was furnished and decorated to Western middle-class standards (far more upscale than the hutong we had visited in Beijing, for example). They had a big-screen TV tuned to an English-language news channel (which must have been for our benefit).

We sat around and exchanged pleasantries for a while, then had our gift exchange. They gave us a huge (38+ inches long) collapsable fan (one of those that opens up into a semicircle, and is usually of a size to hold in one hand and fan your face) with some scenery from southern China painted on it. I was a little embarassed at having only a magazine and a bookmark to give them in return, but I was also wondering if this fan was going to fit in our luggage (the boys managed to stuff it into their duffle bag later -- just barely). After that, the mother disappeared into the kitchen and spent nearly all the rest of the time either cooking or ferrying food to the table.

She must have spent the whole day in the kitchen, before we got there, too, because she set out so many courses that I can't even remember how many there were. She finished up the cooking by making some dumplings while we were there, and my big regret is that I didn't ask permission to go back in the kitchen and watch her do it. Apparently it's quite an art, because someone in our group had been talking earlier about how he had roomed with a Chinese guy in college who had tried to teach him how to make dumplings on several occasions, and he had never been able to get it right. Anyway, all the food was good, and there was a lot of it. I think they were amused by my relatively clumsy chopstick technique.

While we were there, I got up to admire a set of nicely painted ceramic animals that were lined up on top of the TV. There were half a dozen or so, representing a subset of the animals in the Chinese zodiac. I found out that the son had made them, and in a move that startled me, he offered to give me one. I was honored, but really I thought they looked like he had invested too much time in them to just give them away to strangers, so I said a polite thank you, but that I wouldn't want to take one because they looked so nice. But the more I declined, the more he insisted, so I ended up bringing home a ceramic tiger, which is now proudly on display on a bookshelf in our dining room (aka library).

Before we left, I got the idea to have all of them write something in my journal. Fortunately, they each put the English translation of what they wrote. Too bad I don't have a scanner, so I could put the image of it here on this web site. Then it was time for them to return us to the school, and we said our goodbyes.

When everyone had gotten back to the school, we were taken on a tour of the place. This mostly meant walking around all those balconies we had seen that morning and looking in some of the rooms. They had a pretty big computer lab they had just recently installed. No one was using it, so we got to go in. It looked nice, but it appeared that the kids would be sitting nearly shoulder to shoulder when it was full. We disrupted a lot of classes as we walked by, since all the doors were open.

After the tour, we still had some time to kill before the busses were scheduled to take us back to the hotel. Some of our group fanned out into the immediate neighborhood to take advantage of yet another shopping opportunity. Others of us (me included) stayed in the courtyard, thinking maybe we'd take a short nap on the bus until it was time to leave. We never made it aboard.

While we were standing there, the school bell rang for the change of classes, or recess, or something. In any event, those of us out in the courtyard soon found ourselves increasingly mobbed by students wanting our autographs. At first, it was just a dribble of kids, so it was easy to satisfy all the requests, but within minutes, we were each surrounded by a throng of kids trying to outdo each other in thrusting some paper and a writing utensil into our faces. They were using their schoolbooks, pads, or even just scraps of paper torn from something, and everything from fancy pens to pencil stubs that were barely sharpened enough to write with. It was really quite overwhelming. Before long, I started to see autographs from others in our group on the papers that were being shoved at me, so I know they were circulating around trying to get as many as they could. I felt bad because there were just too many to figure out what order they had come in, so it was impossible to be fair. I'm sure that I disappointed some of them, especially some of the younger ones who were practically getting trampled by the bigger kids. After fifteen or twenty minutes of this, another bell rang and the crowd quickly disipated.