36 Hours in Billings, MT
25 Oct 2009 1 Comment
in Traveling Tags: Beartooth Mountains, Billings, health care, medicine, Montana, physician assistant, Red Lodge, Rocky Mountain College
While all of China took to the road and celebrated its 60th anniversary with a week long celebration I ducked out of the country for a quick trip to Billings, Montana. The Rocky Mountain College Physician Assistant program had invited me for interview. Though I was already missing teaching English literature and drama to my Chinese students at Xiangnan University in southern Hunan province, I was eager to purify myself with a sojourn to Big Sky Country. That meant exploring the city and its environs, re-supplying, and doing things I couldn’t ordinarily do Chenzhou, Hunan: like enjoy some fine wine and American microbrew.
Chenzhou was a sprawling city that sprang out of the rice terraces of southern Hunan. It continuously spilled out of itself as it metastasized at a frenetic pace ever expanding from Lake Baihu. Now Billings offered a pleasant counterpoint to balance out my experience in China. Here, this neat, self-contained city with cleancut borders arose out of the high plains and was defined by the Rimrock to the north and the Yellowstone River to the south. It was here in Magic City that I would meet and explore the land and her people, and hoped to one day call home.
