July 19th
Well, the camp at Inner Mongolia has officially opened, and as a coordinator, I have already inadvertently violated Chinese law once. You see, yesterday's activity was supposed to be a photo scavenger hunt, where the classes all go out and take photos around campus, but half an hour before it was supposed to start, the rain started. I scrambled to find something to do, and then I got an idea: “Well, if they're going to be making movies later, we can just show them a movie to get them thinking about movies!” The plan was great, except I had nothing subtitled in Chinese. I talked to Niona, the CSETC employee that came with us on this trip, and she had a copy of Disney's Meet the Robinsons with Chinese subtitles. Awesome, problem solved. Well, problem solved until halfway through the film, when time travel happens. You see, in an attempt to stave off historical revisionism, China banned all time travel movies a couple of weeks back, and here we were watching time travel. Whoops! But nobody raised the issue, and I haven't been arrested yet, so I'm hopeful that I'll get away with this one. If I don't I'll plead ignorance about the content of the film, which I was ignorant of.
Other than that, things are pretty good here. The food is great, I get a hot shower every morning, and Miles and I have taken up drinking tea whenever we are in our hotel room. I gave a speech to everyone yesterday, and successfully guided us through the opening ceremony without incident. Well, there was one, but it wasn't anything I had to do with. Most of our opening ceremony involves a guitar. Melissa sings Our Song by Taylor Swift, Miles does Everybody's Talkin', I do El Paso, and Logan finishes it off with I'm Good Now, and everyone is impressed. But before the opening ceremony, the TAs borrowed the guitar, and broke the G string, so we wound up with a very hollow sounding guitar. We're going to get new strings when we get back to Beijing.
It feels like we're all foreign dignitaries here in a way. We stay in a hotel, isolated from everyone else, we're driven to and from the school by three vans twice a day (We've taken up waving to the locals from the van windows, they seem to like it), people crowd around us whenever we go outside of the hotel, and we seem to get special treatment wherever we go. It's pretty neat, but I can't help but feel slightly guilty about it.
As camp director, I'm running a fashion show today, and camp is in session for the next five days. I'm really afraid I'm going to run out of things to do. I've already worked out the schedule for the entire camp, and if I'm productive today, I think I can get all of the activities done by the end of the day, leaving me with nothing to do at all, except wander around the halls and hope someone somewhere needs help with something. If they get the Internet working for us, I'll probably be on it quite a bit. Maybe we can Skype, although that seems unlikely.
-Cooper
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