im off! wont be on for a few weeks.
going to mongolia, then russia,
bye! xo
Monday, August 25, 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
china travels: the reacqusistion of my english abilities.
me again! what a surprise!
last time i left you was a month and a half ago, when i was leaving hengxian middle school to explore the world! starting with china. carina and i left our school on a sunny monday, and after a mad dash to the train station in nanning, that involved us narrowly missing a calf that was running down the middle of the road and a mild panic attack when we realised the train left in 20 minutes and we were stuck in traffic, we made it to the train station for our 4:20pm train to kunming! we said farewell to our link teacher lily, who accompanied us, and i tried not cry.
and then we were off! we faced a 13 hour overnight train journey on hard seats (remember the 28 hours i did from shanghai?), and the prospect of glorious adventures!*
(im going to structure this blog by place...)
*the most i spent in any one place for most of this time was 3 days, so if it sounds like i didn't see very much of each town, its probably because i didn't. and i haven't got much time in which to write this.
YUNNAN PROVINCE:
kunming:
our train deposited us in the capital of the southern chinese province of yunnan, kunming, at the lovely time of 5:45 am =D
i was terribly excited by the prospect of meeting up with other gappers, who i hadn't seen for months. you see, i had developed a problem... i had lost the ability to fluently speak english =[ months of having only one other fluent english speaker to practice my native language with had led to serious decline in grasp of the aforementioned language. my vocabulary had regressed at least 5 years, and my grammar approximately 3 years. so i was counting on my gap friends to help me reacquire some of the basic skills of the english language before i met my sister and before i returned to the english speaking world. they're also lovely people, who's company i find highly enjoyable! i was traveling with caitlin, chris, adam, tom, callum and ali. all were australian except for adam, a brit.
so we arrived in kunming and had fun catching up with everyone. kunming isn't a particularly remarkable city - we saw a beautiful park, and a cheap but awesome temple. it had monks and nuns praying, and a small lake/large pond full of turtles and fish =D some of the turtles had had their shells painted with chinese characters and images!! we also visited a restaurant at the temple that was completely vegetarian - a nice change! we had sweet and sour "pork" and "beef stakes". all entirely made of tofu! tofu truly is the worlds best food product!! after a few days in kunming we caught a sleeper bus (shudders) to....
dali:
dali is an interesting little town in yunnan famous for its population of bai people, one of chinas smallest ethnic minorities. it was a quaint little chinese town, but very touristy - the whole town has been redone to reflect an old fashioned chinese town, however it all looks very modern and contrived. it was fun shopping in the side streets for copies of mao's little red book, and bai jewellery, and the town gates gave a spectacular view of the nearby lake and cloud covered mountains.
the best part of dali was the day trip we did to the nearby bai town of xizhou. it was a cute little place, and far more authentic then dali. we went for a horse and cart ride to a small fishing village, which was pure awesome. we rode through fields of rice paddies and had a wonderful view of the mountains. old men and grandmothers with babies loitered out the front of traditional courtyard homes, and small children ran along side us. defiantly an amazing day.
after dali we toddled off to...
lijiang:
another old fashioned chinese village. this one was far nicer, and a lot bigger. still full of tourists and tourists shops, but it was far more charming then dali. lijiang is the capital of the ancient naxi kingdom of yunnan, so much of the food, architecture and souvenirs were naxi. it was all very nice. stayed at a hostel full of cats that looked like they had the plague, but otherwise nice.we hired bikes for a day and rode out to the naxi village of baisha. it was a beautiful little town at the base of a snow capped mountain, which looked rather out of place seeing as how it was ninety million degrees and i was getting horrific sunburn. but pretty all the same.
after our 3 days in lijiang we caught minibus to....
tiger leaping gorge:
TLG is narrow gorge =D apparently it is so narrow in places that tigers would leap over it to catch prey. apparently. i didn't witness this, so i cant tell you if its true or not. that will probably be getting dammed soon, so we decided it was now or never. you hike along it and get spectacular views. we caught a bus to a guest house along the gorge and planned on hiking back to the town at the bottom of the gorge the next day. we left caitlin at the hostel in lijiang as she had a horrible case of food poisoning and was delirious and had to go to hospital and get four drips (going to hospital is like going to the doctors in aus, and drips is virtually the only way chinese doctors administer antibiotics, so this was all very normal)
i was also sick for TLG =D i do believe it was a kidney infection. whatever it was my whole body ached and i was excessively tired, despite sleeping for most of the day. still, i attempted to hike the gorge. i say attempted, because as 10 meters up the first hill my body gave up and i retreated to the safety of a near by hostel and made plans for catching a minibus back to the town to wait for everyone. the kind ladies at the hostel gave me medicine when i told them what was wrong, and as i waited for the bus chris showed up. she started having trouble breathing, which is because she has asthma, as she recently found out, and the altitude and the cold had made it worse. so we traipsed back to town together! there was a man made rock slide on the road town, so we got to scramble across that.
we also got some nice views of the gorge. it wasn't as narrow as expected, and i didn't see any sections a tiger could leap across, but then i didn't see it all. it was quite a deep gorge, and the river below looked pretty vicious, with giant rocks sticking up and whirlpools and what not. it was still pretty damn impressive.
chris and i spent the day loitering in a hostel. i slept and she read. when the others came back from the hike, we said goodbye to chris and ali who were leaving to off on adventures in other countries, and headed on to...
zhongdian:
ie: xiang ge li la, ie: shangri-la. named after the place that guy invented in the book "lost horizons". the chinese government told the world that this town, very similar to tibet and in fact situated on the fringe of the tibetan plateau,was the secret hidden valley from the book. not true but this tiny town suddenly got its named changed and was flooded with tourists. and as we weren't able to make it to tibet (courtesy of the olympics and the chinese government), we decided to go here.
so now we are down to me, caitlin (who we met up with again in shangri-la), carina, tom, adam and callum.
shangri-la was good. first night i went to the hospital, which was all shiny and new. doctor did some tests and apparently there was nothing wrong with me. but he still gave 3 different kinds of tablets... they didn't make me better, but the ones that turned out to be really strong pain killers were awesome =D so i spent a lot of time in shangri-la lolling around the hostel and being generally ill. i did drag myself out one day to go to an amazingly huge buddhist monastery that was home to over 600 monks. it was set on a hill and thus looked very impressive. here are some photos adam took: href="">http://saundersag.
the temples in side of the main temples all had huge buddha statues and photos of the panchen lama. the walls were brightly painted with buddhist images, and the rooves of important buildings were gold =D not real gold. we saw some monks praying and we're accosted by small children in traditional tibet clothing telling us we could take photos with them for 1 yuan.
after two days here we went back to lijing to catch a sleeper bus to...
SICHUAN PROVINCE: (yes, the one that had the earthquake)
chengdu:
capital of the sichuan province and home to the panda breeding center! sleeper bus here was 22 hours of being shoved up against the window and the roof of the bus, attempting to sleep as the bus wound its away and along hilly roads and then horribly bumpy roads. not so much fun.
friends of ours had recently visited chengdu and said that it had not been affected by the earthquake, and as we were all keen to see pandas and adam wanted to try sichuan hot pot, we decided to swing by for a few days.
chengdu is a really nice city, very relaxed. we spent our time going to temples and vegetarian restaurants, and seeing pandas! they really were as cute as everyone says. the older ones really do just sit around eating. the younger ones were far more energetic and playful. the were doing battle, and pushing each other down stairs and falling down hills, and climbing tress. i wonder if the realise they're endangered?
unfortunately we didn't get to see the baby ones =[ no one told us why.
but did you know that the chinese name for the great panda, da xiongmao, means big bear-cat? how awesome!
whilst in chengdu we did a day trip to leshan to see the giant buddha carved into a cliff. it's the biggest carved sitting buddha in the world. we took a public bus to get some of the way there, and a group of chinese children, who appeared to be part of some dancing troupe, and their mothers, started talking to us in chinese and english. the kids were very excited to show off what english they knew, and laughed at our chinese. all in all a very amusing/educational bus ride!
the buddha was very impressive. and rather huge. i think the only way to understand is if you saw it yourself, so im not going to try and explain!
HUNAN PROVINCE:
fenghuang:
we caught an overnight train from chengdu to huihua, then a bus out to fenghuang. a note on trains: if you ever travel on chinese trains, go hard sleeper! quite cheap, and so comfortable! i can't believe i ever did hard seats!!!!!!!
fenghuang is a pretty little riverside village. it was fun meandering through the alley ways and getting horrifically lost and confused because we couldn't understand peoples directions. we spent one day walking about and shopping, and then the next day we climbed a hill to see a pagoda. it was REALLY humid, and we were all puddles of sweat by the end, but the views were cool. went on a boat ride on the river. it was very nice, especially going down the "waterfalls". (the river had concrete bridges with breaks at each end for boats to go through, and it felt like you were going down a small waterfall =D). we had to help the guy paddle back up stream, and get out going back up the waterfalls to help drag the boat. when we had almost made it back, some chiense tourists in another boat came up and declared war upon by splashing us. not so much fun when my dress when see-through...
carina and caitlin both left from fenghuang to see some other parts of china, and then carina went on to finland and england and caitlin went back to australia. i was now an honorary man!
from fenghuang we caught a bus to...
zhangjiajie:
first national park in china. it was full of these huge narrow rock formations. we bought a two day ticket and stayed the night in the park, which is HUGE. like epically huge. we spent two days walking around and only saw about one tenth of it. when you enter, they scan your ticket, then take your thumb print so you cant try and give your ticket to someone else =D
it was all very green and pretty, and the stream running through it had the clearest water i have ever seen. we climbed up a giant hill that almost killed me, and then nearly died trying to cross collapsed wooden bridges =D we also got caught in the rain, which wasn't so bad because it temporarily killed the humidity. the vies from the top were amazing; everything was so green, and they sky was blue, and the valleys were full of mist. and now this sounds like a fairy story...
stayed the night in an overpriced and slightly dodgy hostel. next day we went took an elevator to the top of one of the peaks, which was pretty cool. then we climbed down and wandered through more of the park. we saw monkeys, which were pretty cool. the baby ones were the most adorable, of course. they're fairly used to humans, so they came quite close.
we left that afternoon and caught a train to the capital of the province...
changsha:
home town of the great communist himself, mao! well, not quite, he was born in a town about 125km away, which we didn't have time to see, but we did stay in a hotel in his university! changsha turned out to be not so interesting. we attempted to go see a few things, but they all seemed to have disappeared... we did see a statue of mao though. and then on our second day in changsha we started talking to one of the university students, who offered to take us around for the day. unfortunately everything we wanted to see had been closed down or, in the case of the museum, full. so our new friend, who goes by the english name of eleven, took us to an art exhibition, which was pretty cool, and then took us out for lunch. after that we went to a wangba (internet bar for the uninitiated)for a while until our train left. we decided to take a taxi, because they were ridiculously cheap and there always seemed to be one waiting for us. however, just because we had to be somewhere at a certain time, it took ages (ie:15 minutes) to find a taxi. so adam told him we wanted to go to the hou che zhan (pronounced hor cher jan). so off we go, thinking we would make it in time. and then he pulls up in front of a restraunt named hao chi shang (pronounced how chir shung) and points. turns out we he thought thsi is where we wanted to go... so we start saying no, hou che zhan! and show him our train tickets, so he laughs at his mistake and drives off toward the train station. we spent the rest of the journey alternating between extreme laughter and extreme panic. turns out panic was well founded as we missed our train. by like 15 minutes. so we paid extra to catch the next train. so for 10 hours, overnight, we got stand. on a horribly crowded train. callum and tom were squeezed onto the end of some seats, and a nice guard gave me a tiny plastic seat so i could sit in the aisle, and adam got stuck with the floor. howevre with callum as a head rest, the journey turned out to be not so bad, despite the fact that i didn't sleep at all =D so after this 10 hours cramped fun, we arrived at...
GUANGXI PROVINCE: (my province =D but you already knew that...)
guilin:
guilin:
the boys all wanted to go visit guilin and yangshou, and despite having already been there once, i enjoyed it so much i willing tagged along. i basically just wandered around guilin while the boys went and saw the stuff i had already seen.
next day we went to...
next day we went to...
yangshou:
we went on a cruise up the li river, which was really nice. saw some cormorant fishing birds doing nothing. fishermen tie string around their necks, so when they catch fish in the bills they can't swallow them and the fishermen can take them. they were actually rather ugly birds...
boys went and did stuff i had already done, so i just tagged along, or did boring things like washing =D we headed back to guilin to catch a train to our next destination, and decided it would be a brilliant idea to spend the night in an internet bar. it was cheaper then paying for accommodation, and so much more fun! it was thoroughly amusing, and i would never ever do it again.
HAINAN PROVINCE:
sanya:
hainan island, at the bottom of this great big country, is china's version of haiwaii. we all wanted to go somewhere to relax for a bit and do nothing, and callum wanted to go to the beach, so this was the perfect option! we spent 5 whole days here doing nothing expect sleeping in and going to the beach and eating mangos!
this was also where we all started to split up. tom went back to his school in qingdao to take up a job working at a private english school school, callum was heading back to australia, and adam anad i were going on to hong kong for visas.
so! i left my beloved china with the knowledge i may not be able to return if china didn't give me a new visa i would not be returning hanging over my head....
HONG KONG:
hong kong was fairly crazy - i suffered reverse culture shock. i couldn't handle waiting at the lights to cross the road, and not having to take toilet paper with me everywhere, and always using western toilets! and then there was the food... so much dairy and crazy western foods like pizza!!!
i didn't do much in hong kong, despite spending nine days there... all you really need to know is that i got all my visas =D except for my mongolian one because their consulate in mongolia shut down a few weeks ago. but i got my russian and chinese ones! the typhoon was nothing, just some drizzle and a strong wind =[ i was disappointed, and annoyed because the chiense consulate and heaps of shops shut down for the day =[.
adam and i split up after hong kong - he was going back to his school in qingdao to hang around and do nothing, and i was going on to....
BEIJING:
spent a few days wandering round getting my mongolian visa =D which i now have! then on saturday the 16th of august i went to the airport and picked up a Lauren ^_^ i cried when i saw her, but shhhhhh...
we then spent a few days doing touristy stuff in beijing - forbidden city and summer palace were 10 times better because it was summer, and i had more time to wander around. i now realise just how colossal the forbidden city is.
then it was on to tianjin for 5 days to relax! went back to the great wall which was fun, and just cruise around the city! now we're heading back to beijing to start our trans-mongolian train trip!!
well. that's about it. i hope you managed to read all that with out falling asleep. i'm going to eat breakfast now!
claire xo.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
wow... im alive! [warning, epic post]
HI ladies and gentlemen! I'm sorry i haven't been updating htis thing, I'm horribly lazy!! considering the amount of time I've spent in wang ba's (internet bars) over the last month, you think i could have at least said hello! but i didn't. and then today, i found out i could access my blog all by my lonesome! chinese internet has been blocking it the entire time i've been in china, and suddenly, in a little wangba next to the japanese restaurant in sanya, i can use this thing!!! probably because they government is opening up the internet for the olympics. thats probably the only good thing to have come out of this whole fiasco.
now, from lets rewind a bit (or a lot rather) to where i last left you. then i was in my poky little town in southern china, teaching my students many glorious things about the english language and the elusive yet highly popular Western world...
lets start from holidays:
whilst the senior 3's were doing their huge examinations, all the senior 1and 2 students went home so that the senior 3's had the whole school to themselves. carina and i used this opportunity to see some of our province. we went to guilin and yangshou for two days each, as everyone keeps telling us how beautiful they are.
we arrived in guilin about midday on thursday, and during our 5 minute walk from the bus station to our hostel, witnessed a street fight between two chinese women =D they were screaming at each other and there was this huge crowd of people around them, and they were blocking the road, it was crazy!!
both guilin and yangshou are famous for they karst landscape, which is basically huge limestone peaks, and cool underground caves. that afternoon we visited solitary beauty peak, apparently the most beautiful one in guilin. we paid Y50 to get in, which is hell expensive, only to fond out we could have climbed the peak for just Y15... the extra Y35 got us access to a few buildings which had no english information, so we didn't even know what they were. they were some pretty cool old buildings though. climber to the top, which nearly killed us because it was so hot! but defiantly worth it. slightly smoggy day, but the view was still awesome! the whole city is flayed out before you with all these peaks rising up in between office building and homes and what not, its crazy.
next day we got up early and waited 2 and a half hours to see the.... olympic torch =D not exactly worth the wait, but still a bit of fun. very patriotic - carina and i bought olympic t-shirts to fit in =P not that i could ever fit in, i look a tad different to your average chinese person... that day we also climbed elephant trunk hill - so named because it looks like an elephant dipping its trunk into the Li river. gorgeous views from the top, as expected, and it truly did looking like a elephant.
next day we took a bus out to yangshou, which is described by lonely planet as "less of a town and more of an international backpackers colony". this was soooooo true. it seemed everything there was simply for the convenience of lao wai (foreigners). there was a whole street of pretty much all western food and clubs, and every second shop was either a hostel/hotel or a souvenir shop. twas madness! yangshou is a beautiful area though. the day we arrived we went for a boat cruise along the li river. the lady who poach us offered us a "bamboo boat ride" - turns out bamboo in china is code for PVC piping... still lovely all the same. we got gorgeous views of the peaks in the area. spent the rest of the day cruising around the town and walking through the lovely parks. next day we hired bikes and rode out to the fields around yangshou - it was the most amazingly beautiful thing i have ever seen. beautiful limestones peaks rise up between emerald green rice fields, and this stretches on as far as you can see. it was a nice warm day and we road out to moon hill, which is a peak with a moon shape hole in the top, that goes all the way though. as we were riding though, it started to rain - it currently being wet season in china. we were soaked through in a matter of minutes, it was lovely after the hot sunny morning we had had. so we climbed the hill in the pouring rain, it was wonderful! its a quite an easy climb, as its all stones steps, but its a fair was up. still, this really old chinese lady followed us up the entire way, trying to sell us drinks, it was crazy! by the end of it i was more puffed out then she was! the views from the top were beautiful. the rain had cleared a lot the smog, so we could see for quite a distance, and all it was was beautiful country side, all lovely and green.
By the time we reached the top our old lady was getting angry that we kept refusing to buy her grossly over priced drinks, so to avoid her carina and i ducked up a dirt path that we found out led to the top of the hill. it was narrow and over grown, and as it had been raining, horribly muddy and slippery. fortunately it was quite rocky, so we made it up fairly easily. the views from the top were the most breath taking thing i have seen so far in my life.
the next day we returned to our sleepy little village and our teaching jobs, but i must say, it was defiantly one of the best holidays i have ever had!*
[* gap year not classified as holiday, classified as monumental life changing experience.]
footy:
not somehting you would expect to hear about in a blog written by claire and set in china, but its true, aussie rules football is a valid topic! carinas parents sent her a football, and after about 2 months we finally got it pumped up and taught the kiddes how to play! they were so mystified by the oddly shaped yellow ball and immediatly tried to use it like a soccer ball, or a volleyball... however once we explained to them how to use it they were quite good at it, and very enthusiastic. i taught all my classes how to play. or at least how to handball and kick. they all loved, and suprisingly so did i!!
rain:
as you may have heard there was flooding in parts of southern china, including my province =D but, as with the earthquake, this didnt really effect us and we didnt even really know about it =P however we did get 2 weeks of soild rain. everyday. all day. it would flood the oval and basketball courts. and by flood i mean there was lots of water. not a real flood. but yeah. i loved it! walking in the rain is one of my favourite things about china.
jasmine:
as i may or may not have mentioned, my little town in the jasmine capital of china =D but people still dont know where it is =P
so in our last week lily took us to some jasmine fields, as it was harvest time! it was rezally hot, and the sun was blazing, yet the workers in the fields were completely covered, even their faces, which as you may guess was to protect them selves from the sun. but not out of fear of skin cancer, but because they want to be white. its kind of sad, but everyone here has the same attitude. they all buy whitening cream, and carry umbrellas in summer, all to keep their skin as light as possible. i told many of students that in australia and other westerns countries, people want to have darker skin, and they were shocked.
but back to the jasmine. you pick the flowers a just as they open. its quite hard work because the jasmine bushes are quite low, so your constanly bending over, and the weather is terribly hot. but it smells nice! once the jasmine is picked its taken to the markets and sold. lily took us there and everywhere were huge piles of white jasmine flowers. the smell was intoxicating, and even managed to overpower the stench from the meat market next door. there were people everywhere, hauling sacks of jasmine, weighing it, raking it into piles, bagging it, and then hauling it away to be made into tea. lily said we should buy some jasmine to put in our house, so it would smell pretty. for some reason though no one would sell it too us, until some old lady argreed. we got one jin (500grm), and while she was measuring it out and whatnot, this huge group of people crowded round to watch us. it was really weird... even security came to observe the lao wei buying jasmine. that night we put it on top of our mosquito nets and all through the house. jasmine will forever remind me of hengxian and the my little home there.
last classes:
so! my placement, and thus my life as a teacher, is almost over =[ my last classes with all my students was fun and laid back. i just told them all about where i was going next, which made them all horribly jealous. then we took photos, or played games, or made paper stars and cranes =D all in all lots of fun. i also got LOTS of presents from students... i got four chinese knots, which are for goodluck, two olympic t-shirts, one signed by all the students of that class, a wooden dragon, a chinese scroll, a 3d puzzle of the great wall, some bracelets, paper for and instructions on how to make paper stars and cranes, hair pins, and much more! it made me fell so loved and appreciated! my last classes always made me sad, but it was nice to reflect on how far my students had come and how much fun we had had together.
a gift of tea:
lily told us that the school wanted to buy us a present, but wasnt sure what we would like. so she asked us if we would like a tea set. carina and i both insisted we didnt want anything, so poor lily was left to think of something herself. however a few days later when i asked if she would help me buy a tea pot to go with my two tea cups i had bought ealier, she insisted on buying us both tea sets from the school.
so off we went to the tea shop part of town. its huge. especially considering the population of our town (something between 10,000 and 16,000). there was hundreds of them! i dont undertand how they made any money, there never seemed to be anyone in them. however it was lots of fun. lily decided we needed tea to go with our tea sets, so we spent ages drinking loads of chinese teas. we had green teas, red teas, jasmines teas, and tea from the yunnan province! it wsa lots of fun, and the teas are so tasty ^_^ in the end we got one green tea and one jasmine tea, and then the store gave us some health tea for free =D then we spent a while looking at tea sets and eventually got pretty white ones with blue fish. we got all the things one needs to properly serve chiense tea. now i just have to remember how...
party!:
our school decided to throw us a party with all our students. all 300 of them... lily asked us to organise some english games fir everyone to play, but told us nothing beyond that. we were a little nervouse about organsing games for that many students, and so we left planning it till the last minute =D first lily gave a lovely speech and thanked carina and ion behlaf of the school. then she gave a gift from the principal... Y1000!!!!!!! we were shocked but certianly happy! then we said a thank you to the students, and the school and lily, and then gave lily a present! and one for the school - an australian flag. apparently they loved it. then we played games! first we played simon says, renamed carina says =D problem was it took ages because they were so damned good at it!! but they loved it. then we put them in groups and gave them riddles. they turned out to be harder then we expected, but they still had fun. then we spent ages taking photos and talking and then said goodbye to everyone =[
packing/goodbye/leaving:
so yes. this is the end =[ it all terribly sad. carina and i spent our last weekend with the apartment in completely disarray as we sorted and packed everything and got out parcels ready to send home. i sent home 15kg of stuff... i never thought it was possible! most of it was presents from people and for people, and souvenirs. and photos. so many photos... and so much tea! the school gave us 7 packets each! SEVEN! its crazy!!!
of course while all this crazy sorting and packing was going on we had SO MANY VISITORS! students kept coming to say goodbye and give us presents and just hang out. carina and i have never been so popular though! it was really nice.
on sunday, our last night, our link teachers took us out for a banquet, which the principal, who we have never actually met, was going to attend, but ended being hideously late because he went to a poetry reading to celebrate the Party's' day. our link teachers were very proud, as apparently not everyone gets to go. but he eventually arrived, and i didn't even realise it was him until he left and carina told me... he was very nice though!
the next day was our last day =[ we were leaving on a train to kunming at 4:20pm, and were leaving the school at 2pm. we spent the morning hurriedly tiding our house, which was still a mess, but apparently cleaner then when the other foreign teachers left, and sending our parcels. then we had one last meal with lily and betty, and we were off. the school had offered to drive us to the train station in nanning, and lily came with us, which was lovely. when we said goodbye to her at the station i nearly started crying. she has been wonderful to carina and i and i will always thing of her as my chinese mother!
so its over. i have left! gone! my glorious days as a teacher of english at hengxian middle school are over! its so sad, and i miss it like crazy. i have been keeping in touch with many students, and lily and betty though, so its not too bad. its just sad to think i will never see most of those people again.
the second part of my grand adventure:
so! now i am no longer a teacher! i am simply a traveler. first stop: kunming, yunnan province, china! here is my itinerary for the next 6 months:
- yunnan, sichuan, hunan, guangxi and hainan provinces of china!
- hong kong
- shandong province of china
- 16th of august: i meet laurenin beijing! then we go to tianjin, then back to beijing for the start of the transmongolian! this epic train journey will take us to mongolia (ulaan baatar and a ger camp) and russia (irkuts and lake baikal, moscow then st petersburg, where the trian ends).
- tallin; estonia.
- helsinki; finland.
- stockholm and maybe ystad; sweden.
- south of france; france. here i meet my parents, grand mother, aunty, uncle and cousins.
- poland.
- malta.
- various places; england.
- UNSURE.
- new york; america. for the first week of december with my folks ^_^
- grand prarie, vancouver; canada. here for christmas, again with my folks.
- HOME! sometime maybe early january. depending on various factors.
so. THERE YOU HAVE IT! my life up until the 30th of june. next i shall tell you about my china travels!
so, until next time (which will be soon)!
claire xo.
now, from lets rewind a bit (or a lot rather) to where i last left you. then i was in my poky little town in southern china, teaching my students many glorious things about the english language and the elusive yet highly popular Western world...
lets start from holidays:
whilst the senior 3's were doing their huge examinations, all the senior 1and 2 students went home so that the senior 3's had the whole school to themselves. carina and i used this opportunity to see some of our province. we went to guilin and yangshou for two days each, as everyone keeps telling us how beautiful they are.
we arrived in guilin about midday on thursday, and during our 5 minute walk from the bus station to our hostel, witnessed a street fight between two chinese women =D they were screaming at each other and there was this huge crowd of people around them, and they were blocking the road, it was crazy!!
both guilin and yangshou are famous for they karst landscape, which is basically huge limestone peaks, and cool underground caves. that afternoon we visited solitary beauty peak, apparently the most beautiful one in guilin. we paid Y50 to get in, which is hell expensive, only to fond out we could have climbed the peak for just Y15... the extra Y35 got us access to a few buildings which had no english information, so we didn't even know what they were. they were some pretty cool old buildings though. climber to the top, which nearly killed us because it was so hot! but defiantly worth it. slightly smoggy day, but the view was still awesome! the whole city is flayed out before you with all these peaks rising up in between office building and homes and what not, its crazy.
next day we got up early and waited 2 and a half hours to see the.... olympic torch =D not exactly worth the wait, but still a bit of fun. very patriotic - carina and i bought olympic t-shirts to fit in =P not that i could ever fit in, i look a tad different to your average chinese person... that day we also climbed elephant trunk hill - so named because it looks like an elephant dipping its trunk into the Li river. gorgeous views from the top, as expected, and it truly did looking like a elephant.
next day we took a bus out to yangshou, which is described by lonely planet as "less of a town and more of an international backpackers colony". this was soooooo true. it seemed everything there was simply for the convenience of lao wai (foreigners). there was a whole street of pretty much all western food and clubs, and every second shop was either a hostel/hotel or a souvenir shop. twas madness! yangshou is a beautiful area though. the day we arrived we went for a boat cruise along the li river. the lady who poach us offered us a "bamboo boat ride" - turns out bamboo in china is code for PVC piping... still lovely all the same. we got gorgeous views of the peaks in the area. spent the rest of the day cruising around the town and walking through the lovely parks. next day we hired bikes and rode out to the fields around yangshou - it was the most amazingly beautiful thing i have ever seen. beautiful limestones peaks rise up between emerald green rice fields, and this stretches on as far as you can see. it was a nice warm day and we road out to moon hill, which is a peak with a moon shape hole in the top, that goes all the way though. as we were riding though, it started to rain - it currently being wet season in china. we were soaked through in a matter of minutes, it was lovely after the hot sunny morning we had had. so we climbed the hill in the pouring rain, it was wonderful! its a quite an easy climb, as its all stones steps, but its a fair was up. still, this really old chinese lady followed us up the entire way, trying to sell us drinks, it was crazy! by the end of it i was more puffed out then she was! the views from the top were beautiful. the rain had cleared a lot the smog, so we could see for quite a distance, and all it was was beautiful country side, all lovely and green.
By the time we reached the top our old lady was getting angry that we kept refusing to buy her grossly over priced drinks, so to avoid her carina and i ducked up a dirt path that we found out led to the top of the hill. it was narrow and over grown, and as it had been raining, horribly muddy and slippery. fortunately it was quite rocky, so we made it up fairly easily. the views from the top were the most breath taking thing i have seen so far in my life.
the next day we returned to our sleepy little village and our teaching jobs, but i must say, it was defiantly one of the best holidays i have ever had!*
[* gap year not classified as holiday, classified as monumental life changing experience.]
footy:
not somehting you would expect to hear about in a blog written by claire and set in china, but its true, aussie rules football is a valid topic! carinas parents sent her a football, and after about 2 months we finally got it pumped up and taught the kiddes how to play! they were so mystified by the oddly shaped yellow ball and immediatly tried to use it like a soccer ball, or a volleyball... however once we explained to them how to use it they were quite good at it, and very enthusiastic. i taught all my classes how to play. or at least how to handball and kick. they all loved, and suprisingly so did i!!
rain:
as you may have heard there was flooding in parts of southern china, including my province =D but, as with the earthquake, this didnt really effect us and we didnt even really know about it =P however we did get 2 weeks of soild rain. everyday. all day. it would flood the oval and basketball courts. and by flood i mean there was lots of water. not a real flood. but yeah. i loved it! walking in the rain is one of my favourite things about china.
jasmine:
as i may or may not have mentioned, my little town in the jasmine capital of china =D but people still dont know where it is =P
so in our last week lily took us to some jasmine fields, as it was harvest time! it was rezally hot, and the sun was blazing, yet the workers in the fields were completely covered, even their faces, which as you may guess was to protect them selves from the sun. but not out of fear of skin cancer, but because they want to be white. its kind of sad, but everyone here has the same attitude. they all buy whitening cream, and carry umbrellas in summer, all to keep their skin as light as possible. i told many of students that in australia and other westerns countries, people want to have darker skin, and they were shocked.
but back to the jasmine. you pick the flowers a just as they open. its quite hard work because the jasmine bushes are quite low, so your constanly bending over, and the weather is terribly hot. but it smells nice! once the jasmine is picked its taken to the markets and sold. lily took us there and everywhere were huge piles of white jasmine flowers. the smell was intoxicating, and even managed to overpower the stench from the meat market next door. there were people everywhere, hauling sacks of jasmine, weighing it, raking it into piles, bagging it, and then hauling it away to be made into tea. lily said we should buy some jasmine to put in our house, so it would smell pretty. for some reason though no one would sell it too us, until some old lady argreed. we got one jin (500grm), and while she was measuring it out and whatnot, this huge group of people crowded round to watch us. it was really weird... even security came to observe the lao wei buying jasmine. that night we put it on top of our mosquito nets and all through the house. jasmine will forever remind me of hengxian and the my little home there.
last classes:
so! my placement, and thus my life as a teacher, is almost over =[ my last classes with all my students was fun and laid back. i just told them all about where i was going next, which made them all horribly jealous. then we took photos, or played games, or made paper stars and cranes =D all in all lots of fun. i also got LOTS of presents from students... i got four chinese knots, which are for goodluck, two olympic t-shirts, one signed by all the students of that class, a wooden dragon, a chinese scroll, a 3d puzzle of the great wall, some bracelets, paper for and instructions on how to make paper stars and cranes, hair pins, and much more! it made me fell so loved and appreciated! my last classes always made me sad, but it was nice to reflect on how far my students had come and how much fun we had had together.
a gift of tea:
lily told us that the school wanted to buy us a present, but wasnt sure what we would like. so she asked us if we would like a tea set. carina and i both insisted we didnt want anything, so poor lily was left to think of something herself. however a few days later when i asked if she would help me buy a tea pot to go with my two tea cups i had bought ealier, she insisted on buying us both tea sets from the school.
so off we went to the tea shop part of town. its huge. especially considering the population of our town (something between 10,000 and 16,000). there was hundreds of them! i dont undertand how they made any money, there never seemed to be anyone in them. however it was lots of fun. lily decided we needed tea to go with our tea sets, so we spent ages drinking loads of chinese teas. we had green teas, red teas, jasmines teas, and tea from the yunnan province! it wsa lots of fun, and the teas are so tasty ^_^ in the end we got one green tea and one jasmine tea, and then the store gave us some health tea for free =D then we spent a while looking at tea sets and eventually got pretty white ones with blue fish. we got all the things one needs to properly serve chiense tea. now i just have to remember how...
party!:
our school decided to throw us a party with all our students. all 300 of them... lily asked us to organise some english games fir everyone to play, but told us nothing beyond that. we were a little nervouse about organsing games for that many students, and so we left planning it till the last minute =D first lily gave a lovely speech and thanked carina and ion behlaf of the school. then she gave a gift from the principal... Y1000!!!!!!! we were shocked but certianly happy! then we said a thank you to the students, and the school and lily, and then gave lily a present! and one for the school - an australian flag. apparently they loved it. then we played games! first we played simon says, renamed carina says =D problem was it took ages because they were so damned good at it!! but they loved it. then we put them in groups and gave them riddles. they turned out to be harder then we expected, but they still had fun. then we spent ages taking photos and talking and then said goodbye to everyone =[
packing/goodbye/leaving:
so yes. this is the end =[ it all terribly sad. carina and i spent our last weekend with the apartment in completely disarray as we sorted and packed everything and got out parcels ready to send home. i sent home 15kg of stuff... i never thought it was possible! most of it was presents from people and for people, and souvenirs. and photos. so many photos... and so much tea! the school gave us 7 packets each! SEVEN! its crazy!!!
of course while all this crazy sorting and packing was going on we had SO MANY VISITORS! students kept coming to say goodbye and give us presents and just hang out. carina and i have never been so popular though! it was really nice.
on sunday, our last night, our link teachers took us out for a banquet, which the principal, who we have never actually met, was going to attend, but ended being hideously late because he went to a poetry reading to celebrate the Party's' day. our link teachers were very proud, as apparently not everyone gets to go. but he eventually arrived, and i didn't even realise it was him until he left and carina told me... he was very nice though!
the next day was our last day =[ we were leaving on a train to kunming at 4:20pm, and were leaving the school at 2pm. we spent the morning hurriedly tiding our house, which was still a mess, but apparently cleaner then when the other foreign teachers left, and sending our parcels. then we had one last meal with lily and betty, and we were off. the school had offered to drive us to the train station in nanning, and lily came with us, which was lovely. when we said goodbye to her at the station i nearly started crying. she has been wonderful to carina and i and i will always thing of her as my chinese mother!
so its over. i have left! gone! my glorious days as a teacher of english at hengxian middle school are over! its so sad, and i miss it like crazy. i have been keeping in touch with many students, and lily and betty though, so its not too bad. its just sad to think i will never see most of those people again.
the second part of my grand adventure:
so! now i am no longer a teacher! i am simply a traveler. first stop: kunming, yunnan province, china! here is my itinerary for the next 6 months:
- yunnan, sichuan, hunan, guangxi and hainan provinces of china!
- hong kong
- shandong province of china
- 16th of august: i meet laurenin beijing! then we go to tianjin, then back to beijing for the start of the transmongolian! this epic train journey will take us to mongolia (ulaan baatar and a ger camp) and russia (irkuts and lake baikal, moscow then st petersburg, where the trian ends).
- tallin; estonia.
- helsinki; finland.
- stockholm and maybe ystad; sweden.
- south of france; france. here i meet my parents, grand mother, aunty, uncle and cousins.
- poland.
- malta.
- various places; england.
- UNSURE.
- new york; america. for the first week of december with my folks ^_^
- grand prarie, vancouver; canada. here for christmas, again with my folks.
- HOME! sometime maybe early january. depending on various factors.
so. THERE YOU HAVE IT! my life up until the 30th of june. next i shall tell you about my china travels!
so, until next time (which will be soon)!
claire xo.
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