Canuck's visit with Jenny16
Hi Forum Family!
That is how I think of most of you. You actually are more friends than family,
but, "what the heck!"
I had been away for 3 days. Our 3 Pans and Jenny16 knew this but no others here
. I was visiting our Jenny16 in her home as a guest of her family in the capital city of Xinjiang Autonomous Region, Urumqi or Wulumuqi, as it is know by most
Chinese. They live in a spacious second floor apartment, a 10 minute walk from the Westside Railway Station. So, we always take the 6 hour train from Kuitun which is a 15 minute taxi ride from my home in Dushanzi. Trains here seem now to be always crowded and our return trip was no exception. We stood alongside the railcar washbasin for the first 3 hours of the trip before finding a place to sit
down after many passengers disembarked at my former residence of 4 years past,
Shihezi.
It has been two years since my last visit to Jenny and her family and two years
makes for lots of change in young humans even if not in places and things. My last visit with Jenny was with a gangling teen-like person, unusually nervous and
easily excited. This Jenny has put on more pounds and her face and figure are filling out. She had asked me to help her with very large English numbers and after only a half hour I was no longer able to stump her with any of my efforts to
produce long strange numbers and currency figures. She is one quick learner!
A high-lite of my visit is something she would not recognize as such: it was watching her do stretching exercises on high parallel bars in their nearby exercise park. Jenny has clearly improved her upper arm and body strength with these exercises and her persistence and effort are paying off.
Congratulations Jenny, you are a fine example for all of us.
Jenny has written here already about our hike into the farming area in the foothills surrounding Urumqi. I had always thought this area was only dry brown hilly desert but this hike proved it to be otherwise. Sweet grapes growing in lush
vineyards, yellow-headed sunflowers in vast fields, large areas of wolf-berry, a
sweet red nutritious berry that grows on low bushes and is dried to be used in
soups and rice-porridge dishes, sweet corn, tomatoes, peach orchards, fields of
a red-flower Chinese medicine plant, watermelons; where water can be brought for irrigation the desert booms.
We hiked for about six hours. I can remember a time when I and my wife went out
for a walk with Jenny on the street near her home and that walk was the first time in her life she had ever been out without her parents accompanying her. Times sure have changed! She was still going strong when I was tiring out.
We met the 4 little “mice”.
These were school-uniformed little kids who were helping out on the farm. They
were cute and shy but all my efforts to get an oral response was to no avail, only silence but for some Chinese sentences with my wife. Of course when it was time to say goodbye they were so pleased to see me go! This is actually quite a
common experience for me, the pleasure shown when I finally say, “Bye bye!”.
What it really shows is their relief “to be off the hook.”; no more being put
on the spot to try their English.
Their sweet corn, as Jenny mentioned, was the best I may have ever eaten, sweet,
tender and very fresh. It was boiled in an old black pot sitting upon three stones over a tree-bark-fed fire. Warm-hearted hospitality at its best!
There was quite a serious conversation as they tried to guess my age. I do look
a bit younger for my age but the grey beard throws everyone off. I did not reveal the truth, preferring to bask in the compliments …
As for the blooming of the desert, I am always amazed at the irrigation methods
I see. To spread water smoothly throughout great fields of fruit and vegetables
is a very difficult task. The west accomplished this with a wasteful system of
pressurized nozzles spraying water far out over fields wand much of it evaporates before reaching the ground and off the ground and plants. Here viaducts carry
water from the mountains, distribute it through gate-valves and channel it down
the plant rows. It is very efficient but labour intensive.
Jenny’s father pushed his picnic laden bike all the way and we did enjoy a respite from hunger and sun overlooking a fine grape-vineyard with sweet grapes similar to the kind we get in Canada imported from California, another irrigated desert. I was offered “cheese” too, from the picnic basket, but it is not the kind of cheese Mary and Ben would recognize. It is rock-hard and slowly melts, and
I really do mean “slowly”, in the mouth along with grinding away with the teeth to shave away smaller pieces. It is more like a hard-dried yoghurt, is sour
and good. A few pieces go a long way!
That evening after her mother’s tasty mutton and rice dish we watched what may
be my all-time favourite movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” This movie is about
how the world might have been changed by the fact that you were born into it; how your life touches upon so many other lives and its effect on them. It always
helps me to think about how best to live that time we spend here in this mortal
world.
When I read here the thoughts of Jenny and 3 Pans I can feel that at least my life touched and somewhat changed a few others. It is a comforting thought.
I hope this posting has added something to Jenny’s memories.
Until next time …
David
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轻松英语