Playing the waiting game

Well, we´re all ready to set off on our trip - exams finished, papers marked, stuff organised etc. But our new residence permits have yet to materialise. So we´re just sitting around. Waiting.

Wugong Shan cycle race

Yesterday we got up early and set off at 6am to watch some Chinese people doing a cycle race. It seemed pretty well-organised and there were some super fit people taking part. There was also, as is generally the way, some randomness. For example, we had breakfast in some people's house and I'm sure it was just their breakfast, but they had plenty of it so we joined in. Also, as we were waiting for the cyclists, a man came trotting up the track on a white pony. As you do.

Anyway, it was a good day out and the weather was a bit cooler than in PX, which was a bonus.

Last meals

The other two foreign teachers have left on their travels, prior to going back to the UK. So of course we had a few meals to say bye to them. These are some photos, including a few of food.

I'm determined to post more photos of Chinese food because I'm aware that I haven't posted very many and it really is different from the Chinese food you get back in the UK.

Hope you're not feeling hungry...

Yangshuo (2)

So, I spent a very nice Saturday, drinking coffee, wandering around, taking photos, reading my new book (picked up a second-hand in a cafe), eating a massive burger... It was great. I also had a long rest in the afternoon and watched some cctv9 (the English language channel which we don't get at PXC). To be fair, it was boiling hot outside and I'd had a bad night's sleep the night before...

I finally met up with my friend, Jared, later in the evening (after some very bad directions from me - he had no mobile and had to call me from a phone on the street). I got to choose the food, so we had pizza - yum! Rachelle arrived at about midnight and we all went to bed. Rock and roll. Anyway, the hotel we were staying at was nice - very very clean and also quiet. We were all tired and ready for a good night's sleep.

Next day we took a boat trip on the Li River (see photos). The type of boats that are common on the river are a kind of fake-bamboo raft with a canopy and an outboard engine, driven by one person. There are also seats on them. The river is really very busy with tourists and some of them take the bigger cruise boats all the way from Guilin. We had to take a bus to a nearby village called Xingping and we also spent time wandering round there after our boat trip. It was quite peaceful (despite the hoards passing through, or around, for their trips on the river) and we had a lovely lunch in a quiet restaurant which served both Chinese and western food. We also all bought watercolours of the local landscape.

In the evening I had pizza again and we ended up in a bar by a small river / canal, drinking Chinese red wine. There were a couple of Chinese guys playing the guitar and singing live. It was great - just the right kind of music, relaxing and really quite good. The only thing that detracted from the evening was the local animal-life: huge cockroaches playing nearby and a couple of enormous rats that cantered past. Great.

Next morning we hired bikes and set off to explore the countryside. I didn't get very far before my chain slipped and one of the pedals cut into the back of my leg, which was nice. We eventually got going again and made it into the rice fields which were bright green, the stems quite tall already. Several local women tried to tell us the way, even though we hadn't really decided where we were going!!! We also got really muddy as it had rained the night before.

We went back to Yangshuo at lunchtime so I could get changed and catch a bus to Guilin to get my train back to Pingxiang. I had MacDonalds for lunch (I know!) but mis-ordered somehow and ended up with two burgers!!! Oops. The train waiting room in Guilin was roasting and for some reason I decided not to pay the 5 yuan to sit in the air-conditioned one. Interesting decision.

Anyway, I made it back in one piece and finally arrived home at about 4am. Got a couple of hours' sleep and then up again at 8am for class.

Yangshuo

The weekend before last I visited Yangshuo for the first time.

Part of the reason was to meet up with a couple of people I used to work with when I taught English in Kunming. One is still living in KM, but soon to return to the US, the other is just in China for the summer. None of us had been to Guilin or Yangshuo, it's not too far from where I'm working, and all of us wanted to visit it.

I took an overnight sleeper train from Pingxiang to Guilin. I usually enjoy travelling by train in China. I always go for a an overnight train and get a bed for journeys like this (around 10 hours) and it's really not too bad. I had a bottom bunk in a 'hard sleeper' carriage. This means sections of six bunks, opening directly onto the corridor. You can also choose 'soft sleeper', which is more expensive, but there are only four beds in a compartment and there is a door to give you some privacy. Other people just get a seat. Again, there are two kinds: 'hard' and 'soft'. Finally, there are people who buy a ticket and have to stand unless they are lucky enough to find an empty seat or a kind person who is willing to share their seat. A lot of my students have to do this when they are travelling.

After arriving in Guilin early Saturday morning, I took a bus to Yangshuo. I wasn't sure whether Yangshuo was the final destination or not as some random had steered me on to the bus(!) But the ticket price was right, so I wasn't too worried. I'd read on the internet about some kind of scam where they drop foreigners off at a petrol station on the outskirts of Yangshuo and then locals charge them to take them to right part of the town. Sure enough, we got to a petrol station and they shouted 'Yangshuo'. No-one else was getting off and I was a bit dubious, but decided that as I had a map I could find my way and it didn't really matter. Maybe I should have stood my ground and demanded to be taken to the bus station... who knows?

I got off the bus and a man asked me I had any luggage [I didn't]. He then proceeded to follow me and try and 'help' me. Took me ages to shake him off. Finally I found a nice lady who directed me to one of the local electric buses that ferry tourists around and I took that to the bus station (which wasn't very far away in the end). Phew!

Anyway, here are some photos and I'll write about the rest of my trip in another post.

Hot!

It's got hot and (sadly) quite humid. So I'm mostly spending my days sweating. Niiiiice. We have fans and aircon in the bedroom, but still. Walking anywhere, eating hot food, cleaning the house... they all make me sweat. Roll on getting to the mountains and cooler temperatures.

The photo may remind you of your childhood and home-made ice lollies. Our current favourite is made with a kind of lemon juice drink - so refreshing. Yum.

Mock Crocs

I bought these in the supermarket for not very much money. I don't even know if they're meant to be an imitation of 'Crocs' but I love them! They're sooooo comfy. I know, they've got dodgy 'Hello Kitty' bits on them, but still, I am in the land of 'cute is good'. If you can't beat 'em...

Ah, China. Again.

I had planned to write a post entitled 'Things you might not know about China', but haven't got round to it yet. In any case, I wanted to write about something you probably do know about China, but whose extent is difficult to measure outside China.

This Thursday marks the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Talking to students and other Chinese people here and also reading about it on the internet, it's clear that many Chinese do not know about Tiananmen, or certainly don't find out about until they go to university, for example.

Those of us who live here get used to websites being blocked from time to time. Many people use proxy servers (myself included). But apparently it all gets worse at certain times - the run up to potentially controversial events / anniversaries of such events. Now, in fact.

I tried to use hotmail earlier and the page wouldn't load. Didn't think anything of it until it loaded perfectly using a proxy server and then I read this article on the Times website: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6414510.ece

The government knows best...

Anyway, on a slightly lighter note, I managed to get pizza for my birthday - at Papa John's, in Changsha (see photo). Twice, actually. Yum.

Brave new world

This website is currently blocked in China. It's not the first to receive this treatment, nor will it be the last, but it's somewhat annoying, to say the least. Not because of this, but partly driven by the on-off random(?) blocking of other websites here, we decided to shell out for a proxy server. There are free ones available, but as far as I understand it, they're slower and less reliable. Plus, I particularly wanted one which would give us s UK IP address, thus enabling us to watch British TV. Yippee!!!

In other news this week... Pingixang College has been subject to an inspection by... erm... some inspectors, to decide if it's good enough to become a university. Obviously, this would be a great thing for the college - more money(?), better facilities and certainly higher enrollment figures and probably higher standards among the students enrolled. We've yet to find out whether or not the college was successful, but I can't really see it happening just yet.

Anyway, the curious thing about the whole inspection period was the preparation. All of a sudden, things that had needed doing for weeks, months and even in many cases years, suddenly got done. My multi-media classroom this week was in the best condition I've ever seen it: there was a full compliment of curtains at the windows, the projector screen which had had some writing on it had been cleaned / replaced and the projector was working properly. Fantastic. Many cosmetic changes took place around campus as well - painting and particularly a big clean-up operation. The students were drafted in to clean classrooms instead of their usual evening reading. They were also told to clean their dormitories, which were later inspected by teachers / other students. They were exhausted, poor things... Even the chickens that live on campus seemed to have been hidden away somewhere.

There's a small street out the back of the campus which we have dubbed 'filth street' (for obvious reasons!!) which is usually full of small shops and stalls selling all sorts of things, but particularly food and snacks. This was completely closed last weekend and many of the signs, explaining what was sold in each, were removed. The reasoning behind this was probably partly to reduce rubbish, but I have to wonder if there was something more behind it. Who gets the rent from such shops and stalls? Anyway...

The campus was much cleaner for a couple of days, including the classrooms, which was nice, but it won't last, I'm sure. Excuse my cynicism, but the dirt and the filth is already creeping back, just days later. It would be nice if things were done all the time, not just because there was an inspection about to happen.

Oh, the chickens are back as well...

Exploring in the countryside

It's amazing where you can get to when you have your own transport. Here are some photos from last weekend's adventures.

Me and my moto

So, having gone through the tortuous process of getting a Chinese driving licence, buying a motorbike was relatively easy. (Of course it still took me about ten times as long as anyone else in this city - except my boyfriend!)

I went for a similar one to Rick's, but Haojue, a Chinese brand, rather than a Suzuki. I suspect things might drop off more easily than with his bike. I've taken it out to practise on a couple of weekends now. The first weekend we did two day trips, the second one quite long. I was absolutely exhausted!!! All went well except for dropping the bike a couple of times...

The first was in a small town / village where we'd stopped for lunch. I'd come to a halt behind Rick's bike and he was busy ordering some lunch. I went to put my stand down and thought that I'd been successful, so I let go of the weight of the bike. Sadly, the stand had obviously flipped back up again and so of course the bike started falling over. I hadn't expected this in the slightest and certainly couldn't support the weight of the bike myself!!! Rick was otherwise engaged and didn't realise at first what had happened, so it was actually some random Chinese man that helped me.

I was OK, apart from a developing bruise and lump on one ankle. My strongest feeling was one of embarrassment, but this also quickly gave way to pain and a bit of shock!!! Poor me.

Then, we took a short-cut which involved me doing my first bit of off-roading, something that I hadn't even thought about doing. It was fine, but at one point I had to go through a muddy bit, got a bit scared and suddenly the bike was on its side in the mud. Fortunately I was ready for it that time and got out of the way.

So, after that baptism of fire, I felt a bit more confident as we set off last weekend for Jinggangshan, home of revolutionary action. It was the May 1st holiday, so we took three days for the trip - one to go, one staying there and then another to come back. It was pretty successful, I think, though again I felt very tired. One reason is simply getting used to driving again and also getting used to riding a motorbike. Another is a feature of the roads here. Physically, lots of the roads are in bad repair - potholes etc. In addition, there are always hazards - people and / or animals drifting into the road, other drivers doing crazy and just plain dangerous things. It is certainly not for the faint-hearted.

This time I only dropped my bike once - going through a muddy puddle, skidding out the other side and drifting periliously close to a bushy hillside!! But I did refuse to go on the same short-cut on the way back...

Jinggangshan was nice, though much busier than last time. We didn't do that much while we were there, though we did visit the revolutionary museum, which had some captions in English. We also heard 'laowai' and 'waiguoren' [both words for 'foreigner'] about a million times. Lucky us! Not many foreigners make it to Jinggangshan - though we did spot a couple. Amazement on both sides there.

Last week I took my bike into the garage for its first service and oil-change. The people there were quite curious and (I like to think) impressed by where we'd been.

Teaching

I looked at my class as I tend to do just before I start teaching, and noticed a few faces that shouldn't be there. Not unfamiliar faces, but definitely not in the class they were normally in.

One student piped up, "Oh, we didn't have a class so we came to yours."

Yep, that's right. They voluntarily came to my class when they didn't have to be in class at all! It's things like that make me feel all warm inside...

Now I should really point out that what had happened was that students whot normally come to my Friday class had simply come to the Thursday class instead. They're all part of the same group, but split in half for my classes this semester. But still, they didn't have to come and they know they have a repeat class to look forward to this week (they didn't have class with me on Friday due to National Holiday - more of that later), but they still came.

I'm glad things like that happen. They remind that I do like teaching and that generally the students here are nice to teach. It's easy sometimes to get bogged down in the futility of teying to teach a class of 50-odd students (which some of mine are), dealing with dirty classrooms and faulty equipment and trying to motivate the many that simply don't want to be studying English. But at the same time I'm sure I can see improvement and I'm being asked questions more and more these days, which makes me very happy. So what if they laughed uproariously when I recounted tales of dropping my motorbike? (more of that later too!!) At least they were engaged, interesting and listening.

However, students feeling comfortable enough with me to ask questions also has its downsides. After nearly four years of English, I feel that my grasp of grammar is OK, but it's still often a case of knowing what's right but not knowing why. My students often bring exercises from horrendous multiple-choice grammar books asking why one answer is better than another. Sometimes it's even because they disagree with their other teacher's answer... Oh dear. I do my best, but I'm not sure how helpful I am.

The photos are from a talent contest thingy that some of my first year students held the other weekend.

Chinese driving licence - a simple procedure (!)

Almost there.... after several months, lots of paperwork and many trips to the police station with my patient co-teacher, tomorrow I go to collect my Chinese motorbike driving licence. Phew!

On Monday I took the translation of my UK driving licence and finally got the UK to convert it into a Chinese one (getting to this stage had been far from easy!) So my co-teacher and I filled in some forms, got some special photos taken (with my passport number on them) and had my eyes tested for colour-blindness. There was a guy asleep on the sofa in that office! The man who tested me managed to say 'one, two, three, four, five' in English, so I returned the favour by saying the numbers I could see in Chinese to him. Someone made up my eyesight(!) and my height(1m70 apparently - I must have grown!!) I had to pay money several times for various things and then I got a piece of paper to say I should do the theory test.

We took a taxi out of town to the place they told us to go to, but when we got there everyone seemed to be leaving. A random guy gave us someone's phone number, so we headed off to meet him on a street corner. Turned out that he was a policeman and if I paid more money I wouldn't have to do the theory test. After lots of phone discussions it transpired that as I was a foreigner I wouldn't be allowed to bribe anyone(!) Haha.

Today we managed to find out where to do the test (finally) and I stepped into a corridor full of Chinese men all staring at me. How I hate those moments. We queue-jumped wildly and got into the test room. When the supervisor turned up he looked at my documents and assigned me to a computer to the do the test. My co-teacher and I began.

There were 100 questions, all in Chinese. Some were just road signs, some true / false questions and some multiple choice. Even with her good English, and a handy book that the invigilator gave us (with all the answers in!) it took us ages and we didn't manage to finish in 45 minutes (the allowed time). We only got 59 and needed 90 to pass...

So then we waited a while and another batch of people came in. This time I was re-assigned to a computer at the back of the classroom. We started the test and before long the invigilator came along and did a load of questions for me. After a while he went away so my co-teacher and I tried to do some more (slowly!) Then the invigilator sent over his colleague who finished off the answers for me and checked the previous ones - result. 95!!!

Now if that's not dishonest I don't know what is, but I'm happy. I passed.

Just need a motorbike now....

PS - I didn't post this the other day when I wrote it, but I duly collected my licence the following day and you'll be pleased to know that my nationality is actually Chinese!! Apparently there was no facility to change it..

I've bought a bike and am just waiting for the paperwork to be finished. Photos to follow.

Out of my comfort zone

The title of this post could apply to my life here in China and to be honest, sometimes I am tired of being outside my comfort zone: the constant staring and 'hallloooooo's, the lack of the usual leisure facilities, the lack of other foreigners (nice as my Chinese friends are, it's not the same), the lack of cheese, pizza and other western food, the difficulties of teaching and the poor facilities, missing family.... I could go on, but I don't want this to turn into a complaining post. What I really want to write about is last weekend.

As I write this, the sky has briefly brightened between torrential rain storms, but last week was quite warm and at times sunny.

Last weekend was a long weekend as we had Monday off as well. On Saturday and Sunday we visited Nanchang, the provincial capital of Jiangxi. We don't offen go there, as Changsha is closer and has Carrefour (for Western food!) To be honest, I prefer Changsha anyway. Nanchang still has the feel of a small city and Rick says it hasn't changed much in the last 9 years.

The weather wasn't great, so we spent most of the time in the shops, Pizza Hut and MacDonalds - never mind!

We found - quite by chance - a nice hotel. It was carpeted, which is never a good idea in China, but the carpet hadn't yet become filthy! Generally, it was of a good standard and a bit cheaper than the last one we stayed at in Changsha. We also met a really interesting guy there. He was a young Chinese guy working as a porter in the hotel. He showed us to our room and generally helped us out and his English was really good. Much better than a lot of my students. His accent was clear and his understanding was also good. Amazing. I asked him where he'd learned it, thinking he was maybe a university student with a part-time job, but no, it was just high school English and then practising as much as he could since then. It really makes me think when I meet people like that. Someone who obviously had a talent for English and was really keen. When I compare him to some of the students I teach who have the opportunity to spend time studying and really improve their English, but who just seem to be complete disinterested, it makes me feel a bit despondent.

Then on the Monday we went out all day on the motorbike. We ended up on some tracks that were really just wide footpaths, often quite bumpy and / or muddy and full of puddles. Quite exciting and a bit scary at times. I had to get off and walk sometimes because it was too much with the two of us on the bike. We went right up into the hills and saw lots of children walking down the track. My guess is that they were heading back to school after a weekend at home. They live so far from the school that they probably have to stay there during the week and just make the long trek back at weekends - poor things! Some of them were quite small as well. We got to one village which was completely in the middle of nowhere - only really accessible my motorbikes. It looked as if the road had been prepared so that it could be concreted, but either the money had run out or had been appropriated...

I have never been so glad to reach concrete again. Phew! My whole body was aching the next day from hanging on. Still, it was a good trip. Photos attached.

Spring? Winter? Summer? Who knows?

As you may have guessed from the title of this post, the weather lately has been extremely changeable and unpredictable. Only a week or so ago I was sitting here in a t-shirt, sweating, and now I'm back in my thick jacket and woolly hat. Grrrrr. It's also be raining rather too much and quite hard, which means that our corridor gets flooded. Just another thing that needs fixing. [The toilet that was removed from the other foreign teachers' apartment is still sitting out in the courtyard and I suspect that it will be for some time to come].

Not much of excitement to report this week. Had a nice meeting with my language exchange partner on Wednesday, followed by lunch at her house. Then a meal on Friday evening at another Chinese friend's house which was really good. Delicious food and good company.

The students are quite tired these days, having both morning and evening reading sessions to contend with. Rick took a photo on his phone during the break in one of his morning classes. All but 5 or 6 students out of a class of 50 or so had their heads down on the desks. I'm not convinced of the value of it, but someone's obviously decided it's a good idea.

A couple of photos from our brief exploration this afternoon.