JISHOU, HUNAN — I find it amusing that this video is available on YouTube, which is not accessible from China. Parts 2 and 3 are also available at this link.
The video opens with scenes of the campus, including the main academic building, a computer room and exterior shots of the library. Here’s a rundown of what comes next.
About 2:00: Whitewater boating on the MengDong River, Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, Qianzhou ancient city
3:45: More scenes of Qianzhou, which is immediately south of Jishou
4:00-about 6:00: artist Huang YongYu, a native of FengHuang, a city about an hour from here. The university has a museum devoted to Huang’s works.
6:00: a steam locomotive (long retired) passing through the hills
6:15: scenes of rural life in XiangXi (western Hunan) prefecture, of which Jishou is the seat
7:00: Jishou and its history, the early university circa 1958
7:36: the original university building, now the home of the medical college at the old campus
7:50: construction of the new campus
9:00: one of the language labs (the instructor is Miss Liu, now director of the Public English Education department)
9:56: a shot of FengYu Lake, with the music building designed by Huang YongYu in the background; my college building is to the left, but not visible in this view
10:28: scenes of an Oral English class, led by a foreign teacher who predates me
JISHOU, HUNAN — Imagine the Beijing Olympics … on a much smaller scale. This is our college’s opening performance. Look for me among the faculty, behind the teachers in the long magenta (fuschia?) dresses.
JISHOU, HUNAN — Recently, we’ve had a lot of rain here, which is typical for this time of the year. When it rains heavily, some parts of campus get flooded. It happened once last year, and twice this year (so far).
Basically, the storm drains can’t seem to handle the runoff, and the area around the dorms and the stadium ends up with knee-deep water. Someone took a video of the flooding last week, and uploaded it to www.youku.com, one of China’s answers to Youtube.
The title, “吉首大学校园再次被淹” (Jishou Daxue Xiao Yuan Zai Ci Bei Yan), means “Jishou University Campus Flooded Once Again.” You can see the street between the stadium and the dorms, where a bus is parked, the greens near the dorms, people walking along the sidewalks, some stores, and workers setting up temporary “bridges” so the students can get out of their dorms to go eat or take their exams.
My dorm is on the top of a hill, so we send all our rainwater down to the student dorms. So thoughtful we are.
Incidentally, Youku is one of the best sites to watch TV and movies online. There are English language movies, too. If you visit that link, the quick navigation menu is along the top of the page. This is the link for TV: 电视剧; and this is for movies: 电影.
JISHOU, HUNAN — If you’ve ever seen the movie “Lost in Translation,” you’ll recall the scene in which Bill Murray’s character has to shoot a liquor commercial for his Japanese employers.
Those images played in my head today as I assisted a communications student with her homework assignment, by being her model for a mock juice commercial.
The student, Denise, was one of the two finalists in the university’s English-speaking contest a couple of weeks ago, which I helped judge. (The other finalist, by the way, won the local contest, went on to provincial contest and took first place.) Denise asked me to be her model because my appearance suited the concept she had for her commercial.
Her concept: A philosopher type is lost in thought, frustrated because he cannot overcome some mental block. While anguishing over his task, he suddenly spies a bottle of Baige juice drink. He takes a swig, loves the taste and lo! his mental block is gone.
Denise said my white hair and beard reminded her of philosophers like Marx and Hegel, so she asked me if I would help her shoot the video. (Well, it trumps being called Jerry Garcia …)
We used a vacant lecture hall. I was to sit in the front row, anguishing over some composition or another. We agreed that I would struggle with some idea until I drank the juice, then proclaim, “In course of human history, it is better to be carried away by the flow of water of the running river than to be the sand at the bottom.”
This clip from Ben Stein’s interview on Trinity Broadcast Network includes his amazingly stupid, misinformed crackpot idea that scientists murdered Jews during World War II.
I had always assumed it was Nazi soldiers “following orders.” My bad.
Watch it and weep. Someone took Ben Stein’s brain.
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