Jilin Panorama

¿Remember that movie ¨Wayne´s World¨? Back in the day, a friend of mine made up a song, using the music from Wayne´s world and substitued Wayne for Huang. I think it went like: ¨Huang´s world, Huang´s world, Chinese food...¨ Anyhoo, the following is on my adventures in life.

Monday, March 9, 2009

Its a small glass world afterall

The school has an activity planner, who organizes various outings and activities for the students, which is an added bonus. This past Saturday, we went to Copavie, a place that is known in the area as a recycled glass factory.

Its a great business because its a center of not only recycled glass, but they also recycle newspaper. The workers break up the glass and then melt it in this huge oven. Then they take these long, hollow metal poles and dip it in the vat of liquid glass, which begins the making of glass objects. The process involves blowing the glass a little bit, and then redipping it in the liquid glass and forming it into the shapes desired. Its fascinating to watch them work because they work together without the need to speak to each other. Everyone knows what to do and when to do it. When the glass is ready to be placed in a wooden mold, there is wet newspaper in the casing to cool down the glass. So in a way, they recycle the newspaper, even if it isn´t reusable after. Its wonderful to see a business thriving on recycled products, since there are many things that are not recycled here. To some extent, this is understandable since the funding and infrastructure is not present and the government is preoccupied with more pertinent issues.

While I was perusing the glass goods, two people entered the room and I did a double take! There was a classmate from UVM! It was totally bizarre to be in this random glass factory on a Saturday morning and run into someone who I knew. He has been here for the past 3 weeks, doing a similar program as me. When I recounted the story to my host mom, she commented, ¨what a small world.¨

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