Climbing Hills

Yesterday, our discussion topic was dating and marriage. In our regular class, Lee and I had used my "Who is the perfect man/woman?" activity from Japan, so pretty much everyone (except the people who skipped and went to extra pronunciation class) was primed to discuss. Strangely, we ended up with 3 classes worth of people in the discussion hour, when we had only started out with 5 people in the morning, so we were dealing with a much bigger group. I put them into smaller groups to counteract the tendency of some people to completely dominate the discussion and assigned each group a question to answer about dating and marriage customs in China. Lee and I had about 1 minute to figure out how to restructure the class, and he said later he was somewhat astounded at my ability to make up discussion questions on the spur of the moment as I was writing them on the board and assigning them to groups. Go, go, instant preparation skills! Thank god we're mostly just recycling stuff I've done before.

One of the questions I asked them was about what people do on a typical date in China, and the most Chinese of the answers was "climb hills." We had heard this before, so we asked these students to clarify why climbing hills is a popular date activity. One of the older (30-ish) women said it was just because climbing stretches out the time so you can get to know the other person better. One of the young, unmarried women, though, astutely noted that really it's an excuse for bodily contact. Can I help you over that rock? Oh, be careful on this spot! You get the idea.

Maybe this is a dating idea that could catch on in other countries.