Tourism and Water Buffalo

I'm finally updating. Sorry for the long wait, things have been a bit hectic here, what with classes, illness, and the Chinese government's propensity to rearrange the weekends however they please. I will try to be more consistent in my posting from now on.
 Yesterday , on our way to the Sanxingdui museum, we discovered that the city here does not transition slowly from skyscrapers to countryside. There is no suburban buffer to separate the city folk from country life. So, as we came around a bend, past a line of gigantic skyrises, we found ourselves suddenly in the midst of rice paddies and melon farms. We could see families working the land by hand, their small homes just off the side of the freeway. Some live in dilapidated old houses whose enclosed courtyards and tile roofs evoked in my mind all of the stereotypes about classical Chinese architecture, though more often then not the tile roofs have been replaced with sheets of corrugated metal.  Other families live in ramshackle huts made primarily of trash and discarded construction materials. The visibility out there is much better than it is in the city, where the smog (or is it fog?) cuts your view off at about four blocks, and in the clear air skyrise apartments were still visible in the distance. What truly surprised me about these farms was how small they were. The land is divided into tiny wedges, few of which are any bigger than the hobby garden that Vanessa's father kept back in Kansas.  I was told that these farms used to be bigger, but that the expanding city was squeezing the nearby farmers together into smaller and smaller plots of land.  Just as suddenly as we had left the city, we were back in it again. Buildings rose in the distance and it became apparent that what we had experienced was a small bubble of countryside surrounded by urban sprawl. I desperately wanted to get a video of it, but the camera refused to turn on.

The museum itself was fantastic, though my class set a pace through it that barely allowed for enough time to take a look at everything, and I also feel that the 200 times life size reproductions of certain artifacts are a bit misleading. The museum is a showcase for the archaeological discovery of an ancient city in the Sichuan basin. The collection consists mostly of a large number of bronze pieces and jade ceremonial objects.   I think that I can best share the museum through photographs, so, here you go.

also, on the way home, we saw several water buffalo, strolling about casually or standing in the muck by the river.