To Lengshuijiang

Aug. 23 – I arrived in Lengshuijiang last night. The city has about 200,000 people and the campus of Loudi Foreign Language School is one kilometer from downtown Lengshuijiang.

The apartment is on campus and has more than enough room for one person. There is a living room, office, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and a small back porch where clothes are hung to dry. The building is old but clean. Plus, I have air conditioning, a washing machine and Internet.



The drive from Changsha to Lengshuijiang is only three to four hours but I did not arrive until after 9 p.m. My school liaison and the vice-head master of the school picked me up from Changsha yesterday in the morning. They came with a private driver and took me out to a lunch and then a foot massage.

There is a city called Loudi about one hour’s drive from Lengshuijiang. Both cities are located in the county of Loudi.

We stopped in the city of Loudi for dinner. The roadside restaurant had individual rooms with round tables, rather than one large dining area. We ate a chicken that had been butchered earlier that afternoon, baby shrimp with chopped greens and egg soup.

“Mei you gan,” the vice-head master said, flipping over pieces of chicken with his chopsticks. There is no liver.

He called in the manager, who then flipped over pieces of chicken with chopsticks. It must be chopped up, she said. There’s definitely no liver, the driver said. How do you order a whole chicken with no liver, Mr. Pan said. (I am paraphrasing the conversation because it was all spoken in the local dialect.)

The manager then brought in a small plate with chicken liver, green onion and pepper.

“We just killed a chicken so you could have the liver,” she said.

I ate a piece of the liver that two chickens had to die for.

TOP PHOTO: Apartment building #16 located next to my apartment building. I am in building #15 on the fourth floor.