Nov 12 Our last day in Hefei

For our last day, the ladies decided to go to a park that has small replicas of important places in Anhui province. We don’t know what it is called because it was in a guide book that was all in Chinese. Since there was only 1 entrance, we didn’t
Hefei is a city of 4.5 million even though it is a backwater in a poor province.

The circle shows the park that we were visiting.


We finally found our hotel. It has a giant dome and we were all calling it “The Taj”:


We wandered around this park, climbing the miniature 8 man mountain:


We “made a donation” (bought) a package of incense sticks at the buddist temple planning to divide them up and each light some. It turns out they are done in a clump so we made a joint offering and thanks for a really nice trip. Luckily we had a helper to light the sticks, because it was much harder than it looked.

We left the park and went to the university. Several of us had reasons to be there. I had asked to take a tour (since this may be my home for a month.) Ota’s husband was getting an award and she and Maria wanted to be there, Lucille’s husband was giving a talk later that was for the students and he assured us that it was simplified and the history of the project so that we could understand it too. We all planned to go to that.

Our tour guides’ English was minimal at best. They kept walking at the back of the group and didn’t understand that we needed them in the front. We stopped and had lunch with our husbands and then split up. Only 3 of us were going to do the tour, so I insisted that the students shouldn’t miss any of the important talks and that I was perfectly capable of following the map and finding my way around. I promised to be at the 4:00 talk.

The campus is very pretty. It has many lawns and trees.

Couldn’t this be any campus in the US? Including the couple making out in the foreground?

There were a group of children doing an art project. They were doing pen and ink drawings of the trees. The faculty, and I think their extended families, live on the campus and Chuck says that there is an elementary school there.


This is the guest house with the lotus pond in front of it:

We made it to Art’s talk at 4. It wasn’t a simple as he promised but it had a lot of pictures of the people involved when they were very young, so it was a lot of fun.

After the talk we were going to yet another banquet. This one was smaller and I think we were included because we are going to live there. A bus took us to a hotel in the center of Hefei. While we waited for the bus, we had to stand inside. Thousands of birds roost in the trees just outside the auditorium at sunset. The bird droppings sound like raindrops. Everyone who had to use this street was running fast. The street’s name means Hard Way – but the it is pronounced the same as bird shit.

This dinner was more “westernized”. They had cream of pumpkin soup and a few other things that were a little strange with the mix of Chinese food. There were many, many, many toasts.

We staggered home to bed.