day 6: site visit, presentations, expatriates

day 6: site visit, presentations, mike and ashley

In the morning, we visited the municipal networking center that is responsible for providing network access to the public schools in the greater metropolitan area (as I recall, that's on the order of a thousand schools, and over the next few years they'll have networked a few hundredof them).

Lunch was simply splendid, at yet another restaurant specializing in local fare. In the afternoon, we went to Taiyuan University of Technology so that the folks in our workgroup could make their presentations to each other.

Then Laurel invited me to come with her to meet some of her American friends who living in town--Mike and Ashley, who are missionaries with Evergreen, a really interesting group founded to work specifically in Shanxi Province--and their three excellent (and brilliantly bilingual) kids, Drew, Cora, and Colin. We met them at a remarkably European-feeling coffeehouse, then they took us to restaurant one of their friends recommended--in fact, when we got to the restaurant, they called their friend, and he ordered for us over the phone. And he did well. After dinner, they invited us back to their apartment, which was spacious, comfortable, and broadband-equipped. And provided the universal and excellent spectacle of three wound-up kids resisting going to bed.