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.smugmug.com/gallery/5590333_GK9wS#342965359_rS4fk">http://saundersag.smugmug.com/gallery/5590333_GK9wS#342965359_rS4fk
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:

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...

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.

after our 10 hours in a wangba, we caught a train to the tropical island paradise of...

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.

bad chinese pop.

ni hao! how are you all? im faaaaaaaaaaaaaaantastic!
i have been terribly busy though!

first, let us begin with some gossip...
as some of you would know there were two other gap students, lauren and caitlin, placed about an hour and a half away from us in the provincial capital of nanning. they were lovely girls, and we had already gone up to nanning to visit them. but alas, they are leaving!!! there placement turned out to be horrible. the students were uncontrollable, didnt want to learn english, abused them, refused to listen, and only wanted to play games like the other gappers had. the school was very unhelpful, and the teachers had very poor english, whcih made it hard to communicate their problems - one of the english teachers didnt even understand the basic question "where do you live?". on top of all these problems with their classes, caitlin was tricked by one of the university students they were friends with into going into a room full of drunken men who tried to grope her, and then nearly had her drivers license stolen whilst being questioned about the state of her parents finances. when the girl finally let her go, caitlin went to the school and asked them to take her to the police station to report it, the school said there was nothing to report, and that the girl hadnt done anything wrong, simply tried to show her foreign friend off. so caitlin and lauren complained to gap who are having them moved to another school in qingdao, on the east coast near shanghai. as they were the only other gappers in our province, we our now officially the most isolated gappers =D

so onto less depressing things:
classes:
we started teaching last week, and oh my gosh, ITS SO MUCH FUN! my first few lessons sucked, but now its great fun! the kids are really well behaved, a bit rowdy at times, but other wise fine. in one of my introductory lessons i asked the students is they had any questions for me and one boy asked "what do think of the human rights in australia?" what?!?!?!?! it was so weird! so i said i didnt know much about it, except that it was a bit different from australia, and quickly changed the topic of conversation.
i teach senior 2 students (yr 11), so their english is quite good. they're very nice and very amusing. they always arrive for class at least ten minutes early and hang around for ages at the end. they always ask for permission to come into classes if their late, which would be very quaint and all, except that they're 10 MINUTES EARLY!
we just finished a lesson on describing people, and all my classes thought it was hilarious to yell out the word sexy when we were brainstorming vocab... theyre very enthusiastic. everytime i pull out stickers or other prizes, they start screaming and begging for one, its great!
i did have to field an awkward question in one of my first lessons. one of the boys asked me what i thought of the human rights in china and i dribbled out something about how i dont know much about it but i hear its very different from australia and then quickly changed the subject. was a bit scary.
amusing story - one of the students was trying to tell us which country his brother was studying, and we were listing some, and carina said taiwan, and he just stared at her and said "taiwan is a province of china." carina had to do some major backpeddling...

tai chi:
i cant remember if i told you this, but i now do tai chi =]
my link teacher betty took me to the park, where an old man gives free tai chi classes. carina feels she is above itm so she goes for runs instead. its sooo good. i fail at it, and can only do the first 6 moves (theres something like a hundred), but its fun, and relaxing, and the park is beautiful. its really green, and has traditional architecture every where, and there were peach blossoms last week so it was tre romantic.
the funniest bit about doing tai chi in the park is the poeple who stare. they seem to think its hilarious. after i had finished the other day i sat down and some middle aged man walked up, smiled, took a photo of me and ran away! it was great.

womens day:
international womens day in china is pretty big. its on the eigth of march for all those who dont know, and basically they just celebrate women, its great! we went on a march with a huge group of female teachers, it was hilarious! lily got us tracksuits to wear - all the teachers had pink matching tracksuits, and carina had blue and i had red. mine was an xxl, and was rather tight, it ao amusing. clearly i am not built for china sizes, which is fine by me, i shall save my pennys! anyway, lily chucked us right up the front, it was great! we marched along the streets and through the park with all these other women representing group - one was representing an electricity company, one was the local badminton club, and there was about 4 groups sporting olymipc themes.
towards the end of the march a reporter and her camera man approached lily and asked if we could do an interview, so we got to answer questions about womens day and what we thought of chinese women. all in all a morning well spent!
that night two of my students brought me red carnantions - turns out the thing to give to your teachers on womens day, so i was happy!


celebrity satus:
the stares as we walk down the street have taken on a new meaning lately. turns out carina and i have been on tv twice since we arrived here. one was our interview from womens day, and one was from us teaching. we werent even aware of the second time - we just remember some ladies walking into our classes with a video camera, but we just ignored them. turns out it was for the local news and since then lily has been getting comments on "the two beautiful foreign teachers!". then today they came to film the teachers english corner and students english corner. (english corner is a voluntary thing twice a week where the students get to "freely use their english". basically means more work for me). we had to do a mock students english corner because they reporters didnt want to hang around for the real one. so i got to talk to a group of my senior two students about a whole heap amusing things, was great fun! then they interviewed me, and waske me the stock standard "why did you come to china?", "what do you think of the students?" and "have you adapted to life here?", was great, and i had to do it alone because carina was teaching. fun fun fun!

sport:
since i've been here i've been doing alot of this thing called "sport". it takes alot of energy, but its actually rather rewarding! i've been playing badminton, volleyball, basketball and pingpong, its awesome! the kids here are obsessed with sport, they do it all the time! it took me a while to find some students who didnt. the students are really busy, so its the best way to get to know them and hang out. i feel bad though, because i suck at it. reeeaaally suck. especially basketball. but its fun! and know im playing with the teachers. thats bad.

bikes:
carina and i finally got our bikes, theyre awsome! mines blue and carina's is silver. mine is called mike ^_^ its not that scary rising on the roads here, theyre not that busy, and no one follows the rules so i dont have to worry about breaking them. its a great way to see the town, although it only takes 20 minutes to ride from one end to the other. im quiet good at finding my way around, but carina is band from ever choosing the direction, after she tried to lead us in the opposite direction to the school down a road we had never seen when we were trying to get back one day. so, as of yet, no amusing near death experiences to relate to you!


hope your all having fun, i am!!!!!!
dont miss me too much now!
love from claire xo.