Acupuncture course

May 9-20

The two week veterinary acupuncture course was the reason I was in China. It was ostensibly the reason, anyway. In reality, the acupuncture course presented a fabulous opportunity for me to travel to a country that I might otherwise never visit. I got to see and do amazing things in an amazing country. I was getting elective credit for the class, and hopefully I will get some retroactive funding from a couple of school groups for educational travel expenses. Now I just had to sit through some acupuncture lessons. I’m not extremely interested in so-called alternative medicine but I still thought it would be a kind of cool learning experience.

I don’t have that much to say about the acupuncture class. I didn’t really enjoy it. There were good parts and bad parts. Briefly,

The good

• Interacting with Chinese vet students. They were fun and friendly and as interested in learning things from us as we were from them. (I’ll write some more later about some of the fun things we did together.)

• The food in the university cafeteria was quite good. And cheap.

• The opportunity to go to China and hopefully get some of my expenses back.

• Hey, I was in China! Sleeping in a Chinese bed, eating Chinese breakfast, walking on Chinese streets…. Pretty freakin’ cool!

The bad

• Slow paced instruction.

• Eastern approach to acupuncture. I knew the class would be taught from the eastern perspective. Duh! I just didn’t expect how much it would bother my scientific, I-need-proof mind.

• Physical discomfort. Hard wooden stools that literally bruised your butt. Stuffy, non-air conditioned room. Construction right outside the windows that sent whirls of dust into the classroom and jackhammers that made it impossible to hear our soft-spoken teacher. Some days it felt like we were being punked.

• Not enough hands on stuff. I got to poke one donkey one time with one acupuncture needle.

• Location. The university was far from downtown Beijing. It was a pain to go anywhere fun in the evenings to shop, eat dinner, see the sights, etc. It could be quite the challenge to get back at night since the buses and subway stopped running at 11 and no cabs wanted to take us so far out where they wouldn’t be able to get a fare coming back in.

And that’s all I have to say about the acupuncture class.

It's hard to be too disappointed when you get to have delicious dumplings (for less than a dollar) for breakfast every day.

Adorable patient

I loved this kitty. He just hung outside this window and begged to be petted.

Our donkey, and Alex, one of our new friends

China Agricultural University

Course completion certificate

Our new friend Andi