Japan or China?

(Dareus)

The morning started like you would expect it to with the three of us in a room. We woke up late, kinda showered, ran to breakfast and then realized the time we had set was a half hour earlier than we thought it was. Other than the crazed start to the day the rest of it was relatively relaxed and calm. After a drive that I didn’t see because I was asleep, we arrived at Hong Cun village. If any of you have been to the Peabody Essex Museum you’ve probably seen the old Chinese house that was rebuilt inside of the museum. That house was disassembled in this village and reassembled at the Peabody Essex Museum. The good majority of the houses look like that one. 

These old houses all had one thing in common which you see in oriental houses and that is a relatively large skylight at the center of each house or building. Below each skylight is a trough cut into the ground that exactly matches the border of the skylight. This trough is to collect the water that drips down from the skylight as they are open and have no glass. Supposedly back in the day the trough collecting water was the Feng Shui symbol for collecting wealth in the house, which of course everybody wants to happen. Phillip explained to us how the entire village was built on the principles of Feng Shui which focuses on having everything oriented according to the nature around us. The entire village was built facing water and backed up to the mountains which is apparently excellent Feng Shui. Walking around it was really apparent that water was a big part because every alley and street had a small stream running with it. After seeing more houses we hopped in the van and moved to the bonsai and rock garden.

China has had a general disdain towards the Japanese because of their complicated history and current interactions. Since the Chinese generally dislike Japanese people I was surprised when Phillip our tour guide brought us to an amazing bonsai rock garden. We asked Phillip why this was so big since Japan and China don’t have the best views of each other. He responded simply saying he didn’t know who used bonsais first. After that clarification we strolled around looking at an endless variety of bonsais that were trimmed to look like scaled down trees from other climates. Phillip then told us we were going somewhere else so we hopped in the van but ended up only driving for about 20 seconds before we arrived at the next location. We probably could have rolled there in 1 minute. The houses were about the same in this village but the staple of the village were the 7 arches that covered the town entrance. They were built with the permission of the emperor to commemorate the rich family that lived in that town. After that we got back in the van and I passed out again and now here I am writing this blog post. We're probably going to have dinner later but you don’t want to hear about that. Tomorrow morning we’ll be off to Hangzhou to finally settle down in one place for more than 3 days. I’ll be happy to see and end to all the traveling we’ve done but also sad that were back to school.