 So today's topic is my recent trip to China and meeting Esperanto speakers while I was there. So this all happened a couple of months ago during the time when I was not active on YouTube. And what the original plan of the trip was, I say original plan because plans never go according to plan, was to spend a month in China several weeks with family members and then several weeks traveling. But what actually happened is the wife went a week ahead of me due to family reasons and by the time I arrived she started coming down with the symptoms of COVID which meant I had to look after her and naturally I got COVID and then she had to look after me. And funnily enough this was the first time either of us had ever gotten COVID and thank God it was basically like a mild flu for us and nothing really to worry about. So after that we spent some time with family members and then finally we started our travel. So naturally I was like I wonder if there's any Esperanto speakers. And in the city where she lives, Wei Feng which is not like a major international city in any sense, there was a couple that I found on WeChat but I didn't have the opportunity to meet up with them just due to schedules not aligning. After that we went, we started traveling along basically the coastline of China heading downwards and her city to give you an idea actually rather than giving you an idea I'll just open up maps and show you guys. Okay so so her city is zoomed in too far it's too hard to see it's in here somewhere. Anyway we were in this region and then we traveled down along this region and then around here. So basically I ended up reaching out to some Esperanto speakers in a WeChat group and you need to remember the Chinese Esperanto speaking community it doesn't have access to Western social media so it's actually quite distinct in a lot of ways from the like I'm going to say the the Western Esperanto speaking community because they don't see the same stuff that we see every day type of thing in the Esperanto community they don't have access to like Reddit and Facebook and YouTube and pretty much anything you could imagine except for their own internal systems. So I reached out via WeChat and I came in contact with a Esperantist there who actually worked at one of the universities in a city that's called I don't have the Chinese name here because we were speaking in Esperanto but it's called Zhaozhuang. Here's our little chat as you can see we're just chatting in Esperanto here and we've got some like discussions happening. Anyway I just want to make sure I didn't show you guys anything private there no nothing major anyway so I reached out to him and I said hey you know like I'm gonna be passing through your city will there be a chance to meet up and he was like super excited and he said yeah we've got Esperanto courses that are happening at the university here and we actually have an Esperanto museum at the university and I was like oh okay and then also he's like we've got an Esperanto park and I was like okay so apparently there's a park there that was named um Esperanto park or something and then there's also like uh some things about Zamenhof and stuff in that park which I never actually had time to go to that park because I was literally just passing through one day in this city so I reached out to him and then he told me to come on a certain date and when I arrived at the university I came in basically the Chinese version of Uber which is like DD so I came to the university gates um and one thing you guys need to know about with China is if you're a foreigner so you're not Chinese you need to use your passport to do anything okay you want to get a train ticket you need your passport you want to enter a university or a museum or anything like that you need your passport you want to travel to a different city you need your passport you want to buy something that's not like just food and stuff that's a bit more like complex and you need to install that well guess what you need your passport you need to be identified at all times basically and I know there's going to be a lot of comments about that in the the comments below but I don't want to get into the whole politics of it I just wanted to give you guys a holistic view of what was happening so I rocked up at the university with my wife who was there and the guy at the university he like checked my passport and he's like yeah um we've been told to expect you and I was like oh cool and then the the vehicle went up into the university and there's like this ring road in front of the university and there's like a bunch of students I'd say like seven students there and they're like holding up a big Esperanto flag waving around waiting for my rival and I was like oh okay I feel like kind of a celebrity type of thing which was kind of funny and I popped out of the car and I walked over to him and of course I started speaking Esperanto now the group consisted of um basically three different levels of Esperanto speakers because they came from actually the classes that were there so you had a bunch of beginners who whose Esperanto ability was um basically uh like very very low level you could ask some very basic things I actually communicated with them primarily in Chinese then you had a couple of um mid-level Esperanto speakers who they understood a fair bit and they were able to chat but it was like it was quite difficult and then there was like one representative from the top class because apparently when I arrived it was already the holiday period and most of them had left the university uh and this one guy who was there he was a young guy he'd actually already graduated from I think like a three-year course in Esperanto and plus like all these other things and it was actually quite interesting to meet him because his Esperanto level was on par with mine so I could have like a full conversation with this guy it was it was great and I found out that basically he's graduated from university and he's kind of considered the star of his university because what happened was that he managed to get a position in government and getting a government position in china is super high sought after because uh the work hours are good you get really good salary really good benefits and it's really prestigious to work in the government in china and you they literally give you like this um it's like you know when you go to sports teams or like to like a festival and they got like the the bandana that goes across your chest and like has some words written on it I forget the word in english for it anyway he had that basically pointing out that he was you know like this star of the school in a sense um so it's a very different like feeling to what would happen here anyway he was a very cool guy chatted a fair bit with him and he he actually did not speak english very well at all so when I asked him about he's like yeah my english level is like down there don't even try and speak to me in english which was kind of cool because like it's rare that you meet someone who has Esperanto at a much higher level compared to english especially in this very modern world so um he took me up into the museum part where there's basically a very large building like this massive building and it says Esperanto Museum and unfortunately I didn't film any of it at that time primarily because youtube was not in my mind like I wasn't thinking about doing youtube I actually had to be honest guys I had no intention of ever coming back to youtube I felt like that part of my life was over and I'd moved on but I guess I'm back now so yeah anyway I didn't film any of it I did take some photos and stuff which I will randomly pop up on the screen as this story unfolds and I met an old guy there this old Esperanto speaker who was like he was um a verde de papa in a sense so that's like what the translation would be like a green pope he was like idealistic about the language and an amazing guy very modest and everything spoke really really well but he had already retired but he was volunteering at this university and in the classes to just try and keep the lessons going through and what he told me is that uh especially in his area with Esperanto what had happened was that um there there used to be a ton of support from the local government uh for Esperanto communities because a lot of those people within the government uh in some way had interacted with Esperanto or even spoke Esperanto but as time had passed by and as you know the whole world commercialized and stuff and English became a priority for most people those people basically retired out of government positions and the government support of Esperanto in that area in particular had weakened drastically and because he was still considered an authority figure among a lot of the people in that area um he managed to keep the Esperanto courses running at the university and his fear was that when he truly retired that those courses would come to an end uh so that was a bit of a sad part to it but he said besides that he was quite happy especially with um that student that got into government who spoke Esperanto because he saw that as like the uh the flame that would continue on the local thing it was very interesting a lot of ways anyway I saw inside the museum there was lots of uh like relics from the Esperanto uh history books obviously um various like pins and everything you could imagine in some way like collections of all sorts of random stuff but the part for me that was the best was that the unit the museum wasn't designed for foreigners it was designed for Chinese people so it was designed to present Esperanto to Chinese people and I had my wife with me and my mother-in-law now my wife knows about Esperanto obviously because she spent a very long time with me my mother-in-law knows about it but they they have like a external view of Esperanto via English in a sense and here as she was in the museum they had like this great big banners about famous Chinese authors and stuff who wrote in Esperanto but also wrote in Chinese they were famous actually in Chinese as opposed to being an Esperanto but they had done stuff in Esperanto and she was looking at this wall going oh my god these are like some of these are my favorite authors I did not know that they spoke Esperanto so she that opened up so much for her because it became it became more of a thing that was related to her culturally in a way besides just via me anyway they showed me around the museum and afterwards we took some photos together obviously and then I got this book which I think I showed in a previous film very quickly and it's like the concise history of Chinese Esperanto movement and they they were very proud about the fact that uh let me just show this there's a picture in here of okay so here it is so this picture here says so uh so the scribe of Mao Zedong pretty Esperanto and Milnero sent to the dead now so the signature of Mao Zedong which if you know anything about Chinese history he's like one of the most important leaders of the communist revolution and he wrote about Esperanto in 1939 and they've got a translation of it in here I just want to uh read what it says to you guys because I find these things even if you don't speak Esperanto just to be fascinating okay so I'm going to read it in Esperanto first and then I'm going to attempt to translate it so it says so it says basically that if one can take Esperanto as a form for um distributing a truly internationalistic ideal and the idea or a truly internationalistic revolutionary idea then Esperanto can be learned and must be learned so that was just a really interesting thing that he had actually heard about Esperanto in a way I did get another book and if you guys give me a sec I'm going to check if I've got it in one of my boxes here so unfortunately I can't find the book because most of my books are still packed up from the move but that's essentially what happened while I was over there in China I hope that I get to go again sometime soon and explore more aspects of this because it always fascinates me how this language has wormed its way into the most random places in the world okay that's it catch you guys next time