Over Christmas, I was asked an interesting question:  What’s the single biggest change that you’ve seen in China since you’ve been there? I like these sorts of questions because they ask for a pithy response outright.  My answer:  “It’s more civilized.”  I reckon I have to stick to that answer.  Shenzhen has changed a ton since I’ve been here.  It’s certainly more civilized:  The middle class is rising and they’re behaving more and more like typical middle class citizens in other countries:  from dress to activities to manners.  Even the wild shopping places have been tamed a bit:  there are barriers along crowded hallways to direct traffic and policemen now patrol around.  It’s still wild, but it doesn’t seem to be as much of a madhouse as it was two years ago.  Now, don’t be misled; China is still the craziest, most nutty place that I’ve been to in Asia, and for that matter, the rest of the world.  So, you can still come here and enjoy some wild adventure.

I reckon this increase in civilized behavior is a good thing overall.  However, with it comes things like inflation and big new fancy shopping malls.  There are so many shopping malls here now – high end ones at that.  There’s a new one underneath a brand new tower in Luohu, the heart of Shenzhen.  This tower appears to be taller than the Di Wang building, formerly the 8th tallest building in the world.  It’s known as “KK100″.  No idea what the KK stands for.  Underneath and beside it is another of these five-storied luxurious malls.  On top of that, around a huge glass dome are situated several new apartment towers, all part of the KK complex.  I wonder how much a studio runs in that place.  For sure, a foolish price.  I keep wondering, “Who is buying all this stuff at these malls?”  I guess it’s those who are living in the apartment buildings.

This is the biggest snow that I think I’ve ever seen in Georgia.  The storm was due to hit Sunday evening and it seemed that it was all anyone could do was to talk about the coming storm.  I even started to think that this was just the weathermen talking up the storm.  After all, how many times had they done this sort of thing before only to be wrong.  Well, Pat and I returned fairly late in the evening from a really fun basketball game.  A mere thirty minutes later, the snow started coming down hard and fast.  Big wet flakes piled up a couple of inches high in under an hour, and it just kept coming down.  By the following morning, I estimated the damage to be around five inches.  And it wasn’t going anywhere; nothing but freezing weather was forecasted through the week.  Being work days, I’d originally planned to crank through some work during my last two days in Marietta.  But, even I was happy to see that the snow had slammed the door on that idea.  We were all stuck at home and had nothing to do but go for walks, make scary looking snowmen, try our hand and sledding with makeshift sleds on the icy roads, staying warm with chai tea and hot chocolate, cooking and eating, watching the BCS championship game, playing guitar and singing the “Happy Song”, having tea parties, and on and on.  All in all, it was one of those great storms and experiences that one remembers for a long time.

Finally got a chance to join my dad and his friend on an outing of their interesting hobby of huntin’ down graves.  See, there’s this site called findagrave.com which brings together parties who need to hunt down a long lost ancestor’s grave and those who are willing to do the hunting.  It’s 100% a volunteer effort.  As a grave hunter, you basically sign up for the site, register for a particular region, then “claim” requests to hunt down graves whenever one comes in.  You then have two weeks to find the grave, photograph it, and provide the uncovered information to the interested party.

To me, this sounds like a really fun excuse to get out, do some amateur exploring, enlist the help of locals, help folks hunt down their relatives, and so on.  When I heard the story of hunting for an old graveyard and finally discovering by stumbling across a tombstone long-covered by brush and leaves, I was hooked.  And, on top of that, one of the tombstones uncovered and cleaned off had but a single word carved on it:  “Indian”.  Awesome.  Many of the graves go back into the 1800′s.  Real Indiana Jones material, right?

Well, I joined for an outing that promised to be simple – and was.  But, the day’s setting was perfect – a bit misty and foggy with a light rain falling.  We were hunting for the Bethel Methodist Church, somewhere out near Buena Vista, Georgia (pronounced by the locals as “Byoona Vista”). Finding it wasn’t anything special, we had to ask around a bit, but I didn’t realize how many dirt roads that Georgia still had.  We finally found the church, a classic small white church, far down a sandy dirt road, basically out in the middle of nowhere.  The only recent evidence of anyone passing by in the neighborhood were prominent deer tracks crossing across the small and sandy parking area of the church.  The graveyard in the back was sparsely populated and hunting down the graves was a piece of cake.  We got our pictures and called it a day and headed for the reward for the morning’s work: lunch at Aunt Mary’s Country Kitchen in downtown Buena Vista, Georgia.

Satellite view of Bethel Methodist Church: