Life as a student in China

If you want proof that a Chinese takeover of the world is inevitable,
look no further than their work ethic. They work hard! The day for
most people starts at around 8am and continues well into the evening.
Stores close at 10pm, even on Sunday. Just how many sales does the
neighbourhood bathroom fixture shop makes after dark on a Sunday?
Many families own their own restaurant/store/mahjiang shop so they are
present, without any semblance of a vacation, every day from morning
to night. Even on a Friday night, Leshan is effectively asleep before
midnight so that everyone will be well rested for another morning of
progress.

Yet I can't imagine anyone in Leshan works harder than middle school
students. During my first few weeks I was pissed off when I saw
students sleeping or doing other homework in my class. I would take
away books and shut textbooks to try to get them to focus. I stopped
doing this when I learned exactly what is expected of students at my
school.

Students are crammed into classes of 55. They have to be at school,
in proper uniform, by 7:30, where their first class is silent reading
in English or Chinese. From there, classes of forty-minutes continue
until lunch, interrupted only by a mandatory 800m run complete with
marching music and commands barked from the loudspeaker. Students
have a Phys. Ed. class a few times each week; easy to recognize since
afterwards they look like they've just been pulled out fo the sauna.
The classes have a few noisy fans but no heating in the winter and no
air conditioning in the summer. The really crippling hot days here
are kind of nice, since the students don't have the energy to
misbehave.

Lunch is a 12-2pm siesta when the school is empty and students go back
to their dorms for what I've been told is very awful cafeteria food
followed by what I suspect includes a nap. At 3pm there is a
fifteen-minute break where students are supervised in their classroom
as they perform some sort of eye exercise routine that involves
rubbing their eyelids in a circular motion. Sort of funny to watch,
though I usually just hear the instructive music that repetedly counts
to ten over the loudspeakers (I've since become very good at counting
to ten). Afternoon classes end at around 5.

There is a dinner break and then evening classes run from 7 until
after 9. I've journeyed back to the school at around 9:45 and been
surprised to see students still in the classroom. The electricity to
the dorms is turned off around 11pm and doesn't come back on until the
morning wake-up.

Classes continue on Saturday, though there is no running on the
weekends (a break!). There are no Saturday evening classes so they
often leave the school with their parents until Sunday afternoon when
classes start up again. If there is a special holiday it usually
means that there will be extra classes to make up on Sunday.
It's an incredible amount of work for these kids. Since most students
are the only child, they bear the full brunt of pressure to succeed
from their parents. This is understandable, since parents pay the
school upwards of 20,000 yuan per year which is an obscene amount of
money in China. The school has no qualms with lowering the workload,
since it's reputation is based on test scores. Obviously more work
means better test scores! When I tell people in Leshan where I am
working they say that it is a very good school, the reasoning seems to
be because of the test scores and the high dollar cost.

Imagine how twelve years of school comes down to three simple days of
exams. In a country as big as China, it's all about test scores.
Every grade has very serious tests, culminating in the university
entrance exams in the graduating year. By contrast, university seems
a bit more relaxed.

The result of all this education isn't necessarily smarter students.
I've sat in on several classes and I can confirm that they learn much
more math than we do in high school. And they learn a lot of English.
However, the classes are just lectures with minimal feedback from the
students. The homework is usually fill-in-the-blanks with
memorization of numbers and facts. For example, in history class it
seems more important to know in which dynastry something took place,
not how or why something happened. The English tests focus less on
writing and understanding and more on which word is correct: whom,
who, or which. This may help separate the wheat from the chaff on a
test, but I don't think it really teaches proficiency in a language.

It's into this system that we are thrown. We teach each class of 55
once per week. We have no materials to teach to, no testing of the
students, and really no incentive for them to pay attention (we read
about some ESL teachers who give treats but that seems ridiculous).
Why should they pay attention when they have so much homework and all
this other pressure? The older the students get, the more
disillusioned they become about learning English, and, paradoxically,
the more timid. It's a very common occurance to call on a senior
student and ask a very easy question and have the student stare at me
dumbfounded. There have been some SNL Celebrity Jeopardy moments when
I have basically said "Say anything" and still gotten nothing. They
look to their neighbours for help. Sometimes another student pipes in
"He doesn't speak English" which makes me angry because they study
English every single day at this school, a school that is called the
Foreign Language School.

Where am I going with all this? I don't know, I've just been thinking
about the value of education. For all the hours of learning and the
celebrated successes of this school, I still had a better education in
Canada. Education is much more than a textbook and exam, it's giving
a student all the necessary skills to succeed in the real world. In
Canada we teach independent analysis and how to present ideas in front
of an audience, we discuss and question things and learn problem
solving. We have sports teams and clubs for students to develop their
interests and take on leadership roles. We let students make
decisions about their future and study what they want. We may learn
less, but what we learn we learn smarter. If you want proof that the
Chinese takeover of the world will never happen, look no further than
their education system.

Pretty slow weekend, went to Chengdu to buy some things for the bike
trip and settle some paperwork. Sort of sketchy trying to hide
camping fuel in my pockets while passing my bag through the subway
metal detectors. The end of school is near even though everytime I
ask about our finish date I get an ambiguous response. Even today, my
teacher friends answered: "school is over sometime before July". A
lack of planning? Is that another fault in the education system here?
Don't even get me started.

The many steps of Emei Mountain

Happy Victoria Day, I hope your kickoff to the summer was full of
barbecue and cold beer and some sort of healthy food as well.

After three weeks cooped up in Leshan, Sean and I decided it was time
to pay a visit to Emei Mountain, one of four holy Buddhist mountains
(do all religions have holy mountains? If they don't I'm sure they
could claim a few in China). Unlike many legendary spots in China
that take days to reach by train, Emei is right next to Leshan and
accessible by an easy 30-minute bus ride.

Though the route up Emei is a careful track of stone steps, it is a
little more significant than other places I've been in China, nay, the
world. The peak of Emei is way up in the clouds, and at 3077m is high
enough to cause altitude sickness issues. To trek from the bottom to
top is a 50km walk with an elevation gain of 2500m which is about the
same as walking from Toronto to Burlington while climbing 5 CN Towers.
I was doing the math for 10cm steps and 2500m elevation and that gave
me 25,000 steps and at that point I stopped doing the math. We were
trying to do all of it, save the last two hours, in one day. And in
the rain.

It began Friday afternoon. Just before my last class I returned to
our office, where Sean had been waiting during a free period. I tried
to open the door but it was locked, even when I used my key. I
shouted obscenities through the glass window as Sean walked over to
open the door from the other side. To our suprise, the door would not
open for him either. At this point I threw my hands up in a "Sucks to
be you" gesture since I was not trapped in the office, unable to
teach. We called our supervisor who sent his assistant, a nice enough
girl but, sorry to say, as dumb as a stump. She arrived, tried the
doorknob, and concluded "It's locked". Thanks Cherrie. Eventually I
coaxed Sean to climb up through a window near the ceiling. He jumped
down with a loud thud, amusing the passing students. I mention the
story because history repeated itself the next morning at 6am when our
hostel owner couldn't figure out why the U-bolt locking the front door
was on the outside of the doors (and inaccesible from the inside).
Was Buddha trying to tell us something?

Emei is famous for many things, and one of them is monkeys. Troups of
Tibetan macaques inhabits many areas of the mountain. Accustomed to
worrying about wolves and bears back home, I didn't really read the
monkey information in the guidebook. Or the warning signs as we went
up the mountain. As we started up a narrow river gorge toward "Joking
Monkey Zone" we passed plush monkey souvenir stalls, benches and
handrails adorned with monkey busts, facilities to safely check your
bags, and many more warning signs. We attributed it all to Chinese
exagerration and figured we wouldn't even see a monkey. If only that
had been true.

There was a little group of people gathered at a swinging wooden
bridge that seemed to be the start of monkey territory. I dashed past
them without much hesitation and crossed the bridge. I spied a monkey
to my left. Cool! Well this is a story, we saw monkeys after all! A
big guy was in the middle of the path, so I banged my stick on the
ground to make noise and veered to the left, expecting him to cede the
trail to me. Not the case. The monkey looked at me and bared his
teeth and then I suddenly realized how big monkeys are. Then the
monkey rose up on its hind feet and started to grab at my backpack and
pockets and he was not happy. If you could have seen the look on my
face it would have probably been priceless terror. And I ran. I ran
to a little pavilion with a cluster of Chinese ladies who seemed to
have experience with monkeys. From this place of safety I laughed at
the whole situation. It wasn't until this determined monkey bounded
past my shield of ladies that I realized this might have been a
mistake. Suddenly there seemed to be a lot of unpredictable monkeys
everywhere, so I began a retreat across the swinging bridge. The only
other visitors, two young Chinese girls, were equally terrified but
were not moving fast enough. Some monkey started chasing me and I
pushed past on the bridge, not quite shoving the girls aside but
pretty much casting "women and children first" out the window.

After that we kept our distance from the Joking Monkey Zone, following
a trail on the other side of the river. We had three further monkey
encounters over the course of the day. My favourite was when Sean,
who had lived in India for a time and was no stranger to agressive
apes, interrupted my light-hearted babbling and said nervously "Just
keep walking don't stop". Apparently a huge monkey was beside the
trail and was growling.

Besides monkeys, the hike is pretty epic. The route climbed past
villages and up river valleys and beneath towering waterfalls and onto
high plateaus. There were some immense staircases, and pictures don't
really capture the feeling you get when you see stairs literally
climbing up into the clouds. There were a few little shops here and
there manned by people who live in the hills, but other than that it's
just you and Sean and the mountain and your new Dutch and Danish
hiking friends. One lady has become something of a legend as she
makes superb pancakes. It's a little known fact that a long-term
traveller in China will pay just about anything for pancakes.

Did I mention the rain? Oh yes, the rain. From the moment we stepped
out of the taxi to the moment we got on a bus home, it was raining.
The progression of everything getting wet - first my sweater, then
boots, camera, and eventually even the waterproof pockets of my jacket
- did wear down morale. Our views of surrounding hills became
obscured by clouds. Mist shrouded the Buddhist temples we passed,
raindrops falling loudly in empty courtyards eerily devoid of
visitors. Everything had a cool atmospheric, Resident Evil kind of
appearance. As the entire trek was nearly devoid of Chinese tourists,
I would gladly go back in the rain.

On Sunday morning I woke up at 4am, donned wet boots, and made the
final two-hour hike to the summit in foggy darkness, on high alert for
monkey attacks. The final staircase was flanked by elephant statues,
silent sentinels heralding the approach to the top of a holy mountain.
Out of the mist finally appeared the immense golden four-sided statue
that Emei is known for. I had reached the top in time for sunrise,
another Emei favourite, even though the clouds meant there would be no
sun. I marvelled at the most opulent Buddhist temple I had ever seen.
And then it was time to descend: by bus (Chinese people don't like
hiking holy mountains).

We arrived home to the nicest day we've had in Leshan, a far cry from
the cold and rain just an hour to the west. We found a new steak
place which was incredible and also had a life changing salad bar. It
was right next to the Apple Store. The discoveries in Leshan
continue.

This week my legs are reluctant to climb stairs. We are doing oral
exams with some of our classes which I expected to be a breeze but
thus far I am finding it difficult to be objective and consistent.
This is a surprisingly unenjoyable part of teaching, especially when
you're a big softie like me! With my other classes I'm still teaching
food, along with a word game that is basically the drinking game Kings
without the drinking. And they love it, which suggests that maybe
drinking games are the key to teaching ESL.

Interesting websites in China

Imagine you're looking at a perfectly still lake, and the sky is so
blue that you can see a perfect reflection in the water: the trees,
the hills, even the clouds. That's sort of how I'd describe the
internet here. Everything we have in the English-speaking world
exists as a mirror image in the Chinese-speaking world. (Well, almost
everything)

Here's a good example:http://www.baidu.com/
This is THE Chinese search engine. Take a look, it helps if you have
google translate to help you out. Isn't it amazing how Baidu
resembles almost exactly the Google search page? You'll notice an
image search, map section, and video. If you do a search the first
result is usually a Baike page, the Chinese Wikipedia that has met
some controversy by stealing information from Wikipedia.

The one original thing on Baidu is an MP3 search function. This is
really handy as it allows you to find .mp3 music files on the web
without any sort of complicated file sharing. The entertainment
business has big problems with this function, but then again the
entertainment business probably has a lot of problems with copyright
in China.

But my favourite website for getting into the heart of the Chinese
internet world is here: http://www.chinasmack.com/
This is well worth a visit, it's all in English. Basically the site
finds stories on Chinese websites and then translates the stories and
the comments. What you get is a really insightful look into how some
Chinese people think about certain issues. Now usually the stories
are chosen because they're funny or controversial, but this is
nonetheless an eye-opening site. The first time I found it was just
after the earthquake in Japan. If there was any doubt that Chinese
people hated Japan, comments like "Good" or "Sichuan sends its
regards" soon dispelled those doubts.

This is also a funny post from the site, don't know how they have not
been shut down here:
http://www.chinasmack.com/2010/pictures/funny-rural-chinese-advertising-depressing-propaganda.html

Lastly, the state-run news sites are always an interesting look into
China's view on the world:
http://www.chinaview.cn/
http://english.cntv.cn/01/index.shtml

Lately there's been front-page news over here out of my hometown of
Markham, Ontario. Congratulations Markham on your International Sedan
Chair Race! We can only hope that this event does become the premier
sedan chair race in North America, nay, the world.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/culture/2011-05/15/c_13875463.htm

My apartment

As we wind down toward the summer break, it occurs to me that I have
shared nothing about where I'm living. Sit on the edge of your seats
no longer!

Most buildings in Leshan have six floors. Obviously we're on the
sixth floor. It's debatable if they pay more or less for an apartment
so high up: on one hand every trip home ends with a hundred-step
climb. On the other hand six is a lucky number in China. To sweeten
the deal they threw in access to the roof, which isn't as exciting as
I initially thought it would be. In another world it would have patio
chairs and a little swimming pool but for now there are just some
bricks and weeds and what one might call "the best view in all of
Leshan".

The apartment is a pretty good size, and I think fairly typical for
China. There are two bedrooms with uncomfortable sagging boxsprings.
The windows are very large, since judging by the other apartments
nearby, the kitchen and second bedroom are actually just balconies
that have windows. Everything is furnished as promised, including a
washing machine that makes a little song when it finishes washing, a
crappy computer, a TV, and a few couches. There's something about
China where they have been too busy stealing high-speed train
technology (and planning to build a Beijing-London line, google it!)
to bother stealing a plan for a comfortable and geometrically-correct
couch, and ours are no exception.

The washroom is a squatter and doesn't look too flattering in that
photo. That's partly because it's an ugly bathroom. I spiced it up
with small Chinese and North Korean flags that I accumulated in my
travels. If only I could get Cuba and Burma I'd have the full set.
We have a natural gas 'in-line' water heater that is noisy and finicky
and a strong argument against 'in-line' water heaters for those of you
with younger brothers who vote for the Green Party and think we should
all buy solar panels.

As I mentioned before, there is no central heating here, so at times
it's like indoor camping. In the winter the apartment was as cold as
outside, and like everyone else in China we wore warm jackets all the
time indoors. At night I'd be writing these blog posts under the
orange glow of a small space heater to keep my fingers from going
cold. Those days seem a long way away, and we now make use of the
arsenal of fans as relief from the crippling humidity. Good news is
that both bedrooms have heater/air-conditioner machines, so sleeping
is usually comfortable.

The place is quite clean and seems fairly new. The walls of all
buildings in China are usually this white coated concrete, which is
tidy, if a little utilitarian. I have done a bit of decorating to the
place, adding a poster of Mao here, some Tibetan prayer flags there,
and of course my plant that is very difficult to keep healthy (you
might even say that it is actually slowly dying). The kitchen has two
gas burners and gets the job done. I think the previous teacher took
all the cups with him, and the game of who-will-buy-cups-first chicken
between me and Sean continues.

What's more interesting is our little walled building complex, made up
of maybe ten similar buildings. In terms of area it's the size of
maybe a football field which is impressive considering the number of
people who live here. Most people in our city live in similar
complexes. When you take taxis around town you always tell the driver
the name of the complex you want. I don't know the name of ours but
we're next to the Electricity Garden which sounds like a nice place
but looks run down so as you can imagine we try not to associate with
Electricity Garden people.

Our complext has a gate-keeper who lives with his wife in a small unit
by the gate. He opens the gate at 6am and closes them at midnight.
If you get in after midnight you have to pay an extra yuan (15 cents)
for waking him up. I pay him $3 per month to watch my bike at the
gate and cover it when it rains. There's usually a crowd at the gate
keeper's table, it's like a gathering point for our little community.
That same crowd is an eager audience when I return after grocery
shopping and I pull items out of my bike bag: and this foreigner likes
to eat.....bananas! I do get lots of Chinese practice in these
encounters, and people are very friendly even if their accents are too
strong to follow. I've dabbled in mahjiang a few times with the old
ladies, and that usually cleans me out of one-yuan notes.

And that's that. For all its oddities, this place has been a nice home.

Enter another week. It is Wednesday night here, and now through a few
very long days the week is almost over. It's strange how an 8-4 of
teaching is so much more draining than an 8-4 in any other job I've
had. But then again in those working hours I am jumping around in
front of 55 students, trying to project my voice over the sound of all
the whirling fans (and today, arm-wrestling students). The level of
energy required to be a teacher is very high. Maybe because of the
students sneaking photographs and the primary school kids rushing me
for autographs (not joking), a few times I've thought about
professional musicians on tour, and how those few hours require so
much energy. How difficult it must be to be feeling tired from the
day before but still have to go out on stage and muster up the energy
to give Cinncinati a good show.

Last weekend was a chill weekend sitting around. Well no that doesn't
sound right. On Sunday I set out on the old bike, chose a direction,
and got lost. I went through some really nice rolling farm country,
and was having a good time on the small, quiet roads. That was until
the roads deteriorated to something worse-than-gravel if you can
believe it. And there were trucks. Everything got very, very filthy.
It is time to buy fenders.

Since it rained a lot last week the sky was clear. I could see the
huge mountains of Eastern Tibet like a serrated wall of teeth just off
in the distance. I have a really exciting route planned into those
mountains after school ends in June, but for the moment they remain
distant dreams that I can only trace on the map in our apartment.
While no help to itchy feet, they serve as a rallying call for this
last month of teaching. This week I'm teaching food and I think it's
a crappy lesson but the students seem entertained enough. And lets
face it, we can all eat a little healthier.

The requisite blog post about learning Chinese

Maybe I didn't explain before leaving but one of my goals while living in China is to learn to speak Chinese.  I daresay that I sort of like learning languages.  It is inspiring when the veil of confusion is lifted and you can start communicating again.  Travel is much easier and much more interesting with language skills.  Also it makes for a great party trick.  Other than that, I am learning that knowing another language is actually a pretty useless skill.  

You know that Simpsons episode where Bart is in France and wonders why he can't speak French and then all of a sudden is speaking French perfectly?  That's a great feeling.  And that does not really happen with learning Chinese.

Foreigners learn Chinese through a system called pinyin, which acts as a pronunciation guide using the English alphabet.  For example, the character 书  means 'book' and the pinyin is shū, pronounced "shoe".  That line over the u indicates that the syllable is pronounced with the first (or flat) tone.  Chinese is a tonal language which means the sound your voice makes is part of the meaning.  树 (shù) means 'tree' and 鼠 (shǔ) means 'mouse' and it goes on from there.  Early on someone told me that if you use the wrong tone you may as well be speaking a different language.  This is difficult to believe but it is true, there is no forgiveness in a wrong tone.  Even people who know that I'm a beginner can't figure out what I'm saying if I don't use the correct tone.

I did have a bit of a head start since I took two Mandarin courses during my time in Waterloo.  The teacher was very Chinese and saluted us each morning with "hello comrades".   My memories of those classes were pronunciation repetition, singing song, slow progress, and humiliating oral examinations.  In four months of Chinese classes you basically learn less than you do in one week of Spanish classes.  In retrospect the classes were incredibly beneficial if for nothing else than the pronounciation of the pinyin.  You can't butcher pronunciation in Chinese.

In terms of grammar, Chinese isn't all that difficult.  The killer obstacle is learning characters.  There are some stats like 1500 characters means you have basic literacy, with 3000 you can read the newspaper, 5000 means that you are educated and it goes up from there.  The mind can only soak up so many characters in one day and for each character you need to learn three things: the character, the meaning, and the pinyin.  At any given time here there are words I know how to say but don't know what the character looks like.  Recently there are more and more words I can read but don't know what they mean.  And every food, every sport, every geographical feature has a different character that bears no resemblance to English.  It is like being an archaeologist.

That being said, there is some logic to the whole deal.  I remember seeing for the first time the word for 'train', 火车, pronounced huoche.  Huo (火) means 'fire' and looks a bit like a fire and che (车)  means 'car'.  'Fire-car' makes a lot of sense for 'train' and is easy to remember.  Another interesting one is 'clever', 聪明, pronounced congming.  The character on the left, 聪 (cong), is made up of the symbols for ear, eyes, mouth, and heart.  The character on the right, 明 (ming), is made up of the symbols for sun and the moon.  As someone explained to me, being 'clever' means that we should use out ears, eyes, mouth, and heart through night and day.  Of course none of your computers have the Chinese fonts installed so all of this elegance is probably lost on you.  

Anyway, with my Chinese textbook and the accompanying workbook and audio tapes I am pretty dedicated.  On top of that I have an online learn Chinese show I watch every morning, a weekly tutor, some flashcards, and I sit in on a random middle school class every Thursday.  Some nights I spend quite some time deciphering characters I wrote down from a menu or that were in a text message from a Chinese friend.  All this is finally starting to pay off and in the past month progress has started to happen more quickly.  One day I was just walking through the school and suddenly realized I could read a bunch of signs on the walls that I walk past everyday.  Travelling during weekends used to be a break from studying but are now the opposite since I can have rudimentary conversations with people I meet on the road.  At this point, I have enough Chinese to usually explain myself...eventually.  And they always like when I wish them that all their dreams come true: 万事如意.

The biggest surprise is that people here don't speak Mandarin.  Every region of China has its own dialect, and in Leshan they speak Sichuan dialect, or even worse, Leshan dialect.  You'd think dialect would mean a different accent and a you-say-chips-we-say-fries sort of thing but it is essentially a different langauge.  Sichuan dialect has five tones instead of four and half of the vocabulary is different.  I shudder to even consider learning Leshan dialect, which sounds more like Thai.  There are dialects all over China, the most well known being Cantonese, or Guangdong dialect.  I think it is only for political reasons that the other dialects aren't considered separate languages.  Mandarin is the common speech that everybody learns in school and is used on television, and that's what I am learning.  But I am not immersed in a Mandarin environment, I'm in a Sichuan dialect environment. If a taxi driver switches over to Mandarin we can carry out a conversation.  If he doesn't then he may as well be speaking Swahili.  The best situations are when people from different regions are talking to each other, since they have no choice but to speak in Mandarin.  Actually, let me correct that: the best situations are where someone can speak English.

So travelling during the summer holidays will be substantially easier than my arrival in China a few short months ago, and I am looking forward to it.  And when I leave China eventually I can most likely expect to forget everything I have learned which of course makes me very pleased.

Yesterday marked the end of our nine teaching days gauntlet, and I couldn't be more relieved.  This week we talked about movies, which everyone found pretty interesting.  I also treated them to a few clips from Jurassic Park (as if there was any other film option), and then we discussed what happened.  What a great movie.  Both clips were edge-of-your-seat intense, scary, and still funny at times so there were some good reactions from the students.  I may have distributed quite a few copies of the downloaded file so hopefully Leshan Foreign Language School doesn't run into any copyright lawsuits in the future.

Taking it easy this weekend, maybe I'll write a few more informative and not really entertaining blog posts.  Congratulations on your new government by the way, you all earned it.

The Chinese Boat Cruise

This past long weekend I went on a boat cruise through the Three
Gorges of the Yangtze River. You have probably heard of the Three
Gorges Dam, currently the largest dam in the world and subject to much
controversey. Well the Three Gorges, the impressive part of the river
leading up to the dam, is a national icon. I gorge-d out on pictures.
And took some dam good ones. The scenery was gorge-ous. God I miss
travelling with English speakers!
The launching pad for the cruise was a city called Chongqing, worth a
blog post in its own right. Once upon a time Chongqing was part of
Sichuan and then it got too big - big as in 30 million people - so in
1997 Chongqing was hacked off Sichuan and became its own
city-province. It's sort of a regional rival to Chengdu as the centre
of the West, but I don't think it will ever really take off in
popularity since it's name is so odd to pronounce.
Compared to Chengdu, Chongqing couldn't be more different. The city
is built on a bunch of hills at the confluence of two rivers, so it's
mesmerizing to arrive at night and see lights and bridges and elevated
highways up and down and all over the place. Where Chengdu looks like
a Western city and has an easy layout with wide, spotless avenues,
Chongqing is a mess of narrow streets and stairs. Though it has a
developed downtown, most of the city doesn't feel modern, it looks
more like Leshan but way bigger.
Of course I loved the place. Compared to any other city I've visited,
this felt like a proper Chinese city and had a lot of character.
Stairways zigzag up the mountains and are peppered with little
neighbourhood shops. Around each turn there is another building
courtyard weathered beyond belief that surely dates back to Mao's
days. We'd be walking and all of a sudden there'd be a truck
container's worth of boxed TVs sitting on the sidewalk waiting for
pickup.
I also saw a humongous centipede in the nice part of town; in the
hostel I saw a wasp that could probably take on a dozen other wasps
and win. And so the bugs get bigger.
Anyway, before long I was on a Chinese cruise boat on the river, the
cheapest way to take it all in. I bought a third-class ticket so I
was down at the bottom of the boat in a little cabin with 5 other
Chinese people. "Are they going to seat the lifeboats according to
class?" No need as I didn't see any lifeboats. Good to know that the
Chinese missed the only real moral of Titanic.
Now some say that since the water levels have risen up to 100m with
the building of the dam, the Three Gorges are not worth the trip. And
I say to them nay! The Three Gorges were really impressive, it's
humbling to be puttering through this narrow gorge with very steep
cliffs rising up on either side. And the side trip to the Lesser
Three Gorges, and of course, the Lesser Lesser Three Gorges, only got
better since in the smaller boats we could navigate even narrower
canyons.
Besides all that, a Chinese cruise is worth it as a cultural
experience unto itself. You never really know what's going on since
all the announcements are in Chinese. You just sort of groggily look
up at 6:30am and think WTF are they playing drums right now? Another
highlight was while reading Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth" (very
good) alone in the cabin and I heard a noise and there was an
alarmingly large rat on one of the lower bunks. It scuttled pretty
fast, but embarassingly, I was faster.
Chinese people lineup for things and run to be the first one there.
It must come with living in a country that is so populous, but it sure
is funny to see people push to get onto a plane when there is assigned
seating anyway. Yet at one point I found myself running in this small
town to get to seat on a little golf cart bus. What have I become??
(Subsequently, I was pushed off that little bus by Chinese people when
they noticed my seat was on fire due to a battery explosion. Wow,
this isn't coming off as that enjoyable, but really it was a fun
cruise)
When I bid farewell to my third-class crew on the last day, it was
with a bit of sadness. There was the old guy who chuckled when he
pointed out that I had Bed #4 (the number 4 is bad luck in this
country), the couple from up north who couldn't get tickets in first
class, the room of teachers from Xi'an, the grad students preparing
for a long distance relationship as the girlfriend was accepted at a
prestigious school in....Pittsburgh. I was the only foreigner on
board and usually regarded with curiousity but more often with a lot
of kindness. At every step of the weekend I was taken under the wing
of a group of Chinese people, they invited me to share stories, gave
me beer, bought me noodles, loaned me an umbrella, helped me get a
train ticket home. Sometimes in confusion of flights and tickets and
all those details, I forget that the joy of travel is the people you
meet along the way.
Back at school, after this long break, the students are very
distracted. That's not a good start to 9 days of consecutive teaching
(because in China, a four day holiday means you work weekends before
and after). We're doing storytelling in class, where I show an
interesting picture and ask the students to provide a caption. Then I
draw some stick figures on the board and we try to give the people a
backstory. We ended up having James meet his wife Two-Fat as she was
cleaning toilets in the washroom and then having 100 children. And we
wonder why there aren't more famous movies coming out of China!
I bought groceries for dinner and well they just gave me a free
cabbage that weighed about 5 pounds and even though I don't know what
to do with it I couldn't be happier. Let the week of cabbage begin!