Chinese silk--better than a key to the city!

Thursday night kicked off the start of our long weekend here at school. Every other weekend we have a three-day weekend--most of the students go home or to homestays here in town, and if you are lucky (like one of my Korean students, Natalie) your parents are rich enough to own a second home here in Weihai for you to stay at on the weekends. So Natalie gets to go hang out with basically no supervision, just her and her 18-year-old sister, who is one of Rory's students. Though we don't have anywhere to "escape" to--Weihai is our escape--we did have an out-of-town visitor on Thursday. He's the mayor of Changyi, a county here in our province, relatively close to us (3.5 hours by car). Mayor Ma was one of a group of about 20 visitors to UMC, all government officials from Shandong province, but he was the only mayor. Jamie was his English Conversation Partner back home, but I hung out with him a lot, too; we went to the capitol together, we visited Central Dairy and our folks' home, we would go eat at Uprise when Rory was working, and his entire Shandong delegation invited Jamie and me over to their apartment for a traditional Shandong meal. That's where we ate sea cucumber for the first (and only) time. He was going to be in Weihai on Thursday, leaving Friday morning. We didn't know what to expect when he first mentioned that he might have time to see us. Would we go to his hotel and meet his other government friends from Weifang? Would we meet him out later to go around town? Would he come to our dorm room? What sort of gift should we give him? What should we wear?

After talking with Mayor Ma a little more, it became very clear that he didn't have much time to spend with us, which we understood--he's a freaking mayor--he was here in Weihai on business. He called after his big official dinner, and asked us what time he should meet us at our school. I told him that he didn't need to come all the way out to our school, we could just meet him somewhere. But he insisted on meeting us at the school gate, telling us that he had a car and a driver. Okay, we were sold. So we met him down at the gate. I tried to explain to him that no one was on campus, because it had basically shut down so all the kids could go home. But he wanted to see our room anyway. The gate was closed, so we were trying to explain that you have to get permission to go inside (especially with a car). Mayor Ma and his driver got out and talked to our favorite guards, and you could get the heirarchical muscles flexing. "That's right, I'm the mayor!" The gate opened, we all had a good laugh about the fact that a mayor is friends with two white folks who can't speak any Chinese, and then drove back up to our room. We were really embarrassed, because all we have is a dorm room. With a squatter. For the mayor. Granted, we didn't choose where we're living, but you certainly want to impress the mayor with your pad. It hadn't even occurred to us that he might want to hang out in our room with us, so luckily it was clean. He explained that he couldn't stay long because he had to leave at 8:00 in the morning; we were just impressed that he was there. I mean, he had so little time in Weihai, yet it was important to him to see us. He came in carrying two bags of gifts for us: one bag had a wide array of fruits, and the other bag had two sets of silk pajamas. Rory had already done some research on Changyi, so he knew that this particular county is famous for silk; his reward for learning about Mayor Ma's town was that his pajamas actually fit. Of course I figured they wouldn't fit me. I've got birthing hips. So basically we sat in our room and looked at a big map of China on the computer, while Mayor Ma told us all of the must see destinations--"...if [we] have little time, go here. If [we] have much time, go here..." It was great. He was comparing all of these places in China to places he'd visited (or places he knew about) in the United States. It was a nice frame of reference. We walked him back out to his car, where his "driver" got out and handed us his business card, saying "if you ever need help here in Weihai, let me know." Turns out his driver was the Vice Director of "Weihai Huancui The District Party Committee Office". I'm not necessarily sure what that entails, but we've got one more government dude on our side, should we need it. Part of the reason we wanted to come to Weihai in the first place--besides the sweet locale--is because of the government connections we'd made in the U.S.

Sometime in the near future, either with Jamie or with Gary or with both, we will visit Changyi. It's a smaller county (maybe only 670,000 people), but it's going to be really exciting to see Mayor Ma in his element, schmoozing with all his cronies, telling us how "bad [his] English is...", even though it's a lot better than I remember it being in the US. When I first spoke with him on the phone a few weeks ago, he made sure to end his conversation by saying "you and your sister and your husband are my three best [American] friends..." It seemed like such a nice thing to say. And after his made his pit stop to our shabby little dorm room, bearing gifts of silk and fruit, it really made us feel important here in China, if only for an hour or so. What a great place to be!