The pace of life has really been quite relaxing lately ever since the Christmas holiday.  I know that is probably in contrast to most of you in America but I have to say I enjoy it. 

 Of course the biggest news to us Boiseans even in China was BSUs upset over Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl.  We had plans to go and view the game at  Bubba’s Texas BBQ, but due to the (super annoying) Internet disturbance that still disturbs us greatly, the game was not broadcast.  Instead, while I was touring the Communist Party Museum and Propaganda Museums, I was getting text messages with score updates from my dad, Andy and Angie Wachter (both Andy and Angie were just getting refreshed web updates).  I was one of those people whose phone is always annoyingly going off for probably the first time in my life.  It was exciting though!  About half way through the propaganda museum, I got a call from my sister who despite her two years at the U of I, has claimed a greater allegiance to BSU, where she graduated from, with a full report of the game.  The complete drama of the last five minutes of the game, the proposal by Ian Johnson to his cheerleader girlfriend at the conclusion of the game and I am guessing at least a moderate amount of alcohol made her description quite melodramatic, yet touching and I almost felt like I had witnessed it all myself.  And Anna and Dad, I greatly appreciate your real-time updates from Boise!  It was fantastic!

As I have already alluded to, I went to a museum where the Communist party in China was founded and held their first meeting.  Following that, I went to an out-of-the-way museum housing many Communist propaganda posters.  Both were quite interesting.  Libby Bagley, Andy’s Boss’ wife, invited me to go with her and Adeline (and Adeline’s boyfriend) and I gladly accepted once I found out I was not going to be able to view the BSU game at Bubba’s.  Come to find out, Libby is quite well read on Chinese history and of course Adeline and her boyfriend know so much because they are Chinese, so I got a tour from pseudo-experts.  Being that I have not spent any time educating myself on Chinese history, I felt very privileged to be getting three-on-one tutoring on the subject.  And I must say that the subject is very interesting. 

 The first museum where the Communist party was founded was at the actual location of the meeting.  It was at a time when the rest of the (western) world had claimed parts of Shanghai and parts of China, after China has lost in the Opium wars and a group of gentleman wanted the foreigners out of China and wanted to “bring power to the people.”  There were a bunch of players and I am not even going to try and recite the history in this blog, but essentially, they met with both a Dutch and a Russian representative from the Communist party and spent six or seven days hammering out what Communism meant for China.  At this time, their thoughts were not even close to being universally accepted and their meeting was in secret.  In fact, the foreigner officials, sought out the location of their meeting and so the group had to close up shop and hold the last of their meetings to finalize the party on a boat.  For a very brief history of China, check out the following link. 

Long story very short, Mao Zedong became the leader, united China and also did some pretty awful things (check out the latest Mao biography entitled MAO).  One of the ways in which he influenced people to do “what was right” in his eyes was through propaganda campaigns.  So the second museum we visited was very out of the way in a basement of an apartment building, but was a museum displaying many of those propaganda posters.  It was quite interesting… especially the posters where these big, mighty Chinese men are squishing these squirmy little, green American men in their hands. It was definitely interesting.

Other than that, things have been pretty calm around here.  I started back to school and have been spending more time trying to print out my reading material from the hyper-slow web, then actually reading it.  Andy has been working on his electronics project to build me an alarm clock.   

I am looking forward to spending a couple of weeks back in Boise and REALLY looking forward to our week-long family vacation in the Mayan Riviera in Mexico.  We cannot wait as we have been anticipating the vacation for over a year now.  Andy will only be in Boise for a couple of days and after the vacation in Mexico, he will fly directly to Japan.  This will probably be the last blog until February, so enjoy the rest of your month!