First weeks in Lanshan

After all the fun of Yangshuo we were keen to get teaching and finally reach our final destination - 'home' for the next year. When I say 'we', I mean myself and another teacher who I met at Yangshuo on my training session and who has become a good friend. His name is Anthony Drendel, from Wisconsin, USA. As we'd chatted and talked about our reasons for coming to China, and what we wanted from the year, we both realised that we had similar aims and interests so decided to try and get posted in the same school. We were lucky and found a school in a town called Lanshan (means blue mountain) in southern Hunan Province.

We finally left Yangshuo on Tuesday the 29^th of August. We'd finished our training on the Friday before, and had been just hanging around for days as all our other fellow teachers left for their postings, until we were almost the last ones left. We had a 5 hour journey south-east to Lanshan but it was cool, great scenery, lots of mountains and green things. We passed through some pretty remote places – villages with hand-carts instead of cars (just as well as the roads were not all fully passable), lots of little rice paddies and ancient looking farm buildings – before arriving in Lanshan. Our apartments on the school campus weren't ready at that point, so we were put up in a hotel until we could move in. 3 ^rd hotel lucky, we finally found a half-decent place that had any room. You'd have thought it might have occurred to them to pre-book. Nevermind…

Our first few days in Lanshan involved administrative duties (registering with the police etc.) but gave us a chance to make some first impressions of our new home. There's about 360,000 people living here and it is a poor town. In common with much of China, it seems to be on the way up though. Lots of new shops are opening up and much refurbishment is taking place (including in our hotel, with the hammering generally beginning around 7.30am…) but the place still has a relatively poor infrastructure. God help you walking those pavements of a night, you'd break your neck with all the pot-holes and changes in level. Certainly not suited to wheelchairs or buggies, and unsurprisingly, I haven't seen any. There's a man with no legs who I've seen a few times. He gets about by holding 2 wooden blocks in his hands and 'walking' using them. There's a little market near the bottom of our street, and the meat is just laid out all day on wooden tables, flies all round it. This is real food. Nothing packaged or processed beyond recognition, but pieces of pork with the trotters still attached. They have live fish in little bowls of water, and people carry chickens and ducks ready for the pot in crates on the back of their bikes. You've gotta admit, the food here is fresh!

The food….is something else. In Yangshuo we were lucky. It was that westernized that you could get anything that you wanted, anywhere you wanted. Great pizza, burgers, even shepherds pie for less than a quid. They even had a French restaurant for God's sake!! Here though it is a different story. There is one pretty progressive little café where we've made a few friends with the waitresses where they can serve a hamburger and fries, but that is all the western-style food this town has to offer. I have eaten some things here that I would never have touched had I been in England. All the things we prize in the UK as good quality food is turned on it's head here. Almost nothing here is boned. I don't know where the good meat like the breast from chickens goes, but all the chicken we've been served has been small scraps round big hunks of bone. And the best part, according to the Chinese here is the head. I pulled out some meat from one dish that just did not look like anything I had seen before. I thought it might have been some bit of fish until I saw a chicken's foot sticking out from below it and realized it was the crest from the head of a cockerel! Being the guests of honour here, we then duly got offered the rest of the head to 'eat'. I've somehow managed to stay out of the limelight at such meals and it's normally Anthony who gets the 'pleasure' or trying to work out what exactly IS edible, and the task of extracting those eyes and getting at that yummy brain matter. Jealous, I am not…Seriously though, the majority of the food has been great, and I've tried so many new things (the latest was snake – bit rubbery, tastes like chicken…) and things like the leaves and flowers from the actual pumpkin plant, rather than just the pumpkin itself. They're great! Don't know why we just throw such things away back home…

The only thing is that at every meal we are made to drink. At first it was no problem. A couple of beers at lunchtime never hurt anyone, but it became evident that we would not be allowed to eat any meal without having it accompanied by alcohol. Being new in town, our teachers and their acquaintances are unwilling to leave us alone, which we are grateful for, but it became so that we were consuming a not-so-small quantity of beer twice a day as we were taken out for meals by different people. When one day we went out with a female teacher and her sister-in-law, we breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, a meal without the pressure of having to drink! No, the teacher asked us to have a beer with her, then ordered a few bottles and refused to join us! 'There's no atmosphere without beer'. Whatever. We were doing just fine. At least in a big group you are constantly toasting and being toasted, here she just watched as we reluctantly had to down these beers. Killed the atmosphere more than anything else… I swear all our male teachers are alcoholics. Seems to become more prevalent the more important they are. One of them, Mr Lei, is particularly fond of the rice wine – 52% stuff that knocks it out of you a bit. He was hammered today. Too drunk to stand, but sober enough to ride a motorbike for 3km to teach 2 classes this afternoon. Hmm… On the day of the snake eating, we were being entertained by some important local communist party members and the rice wine was flowing freely. I managed ok, but had to have a lie down after. Anthony was sick twice, and this was only lunch! The drinking thing reached a new height yesterday when we ate with some junior teachers in the school canteen. We were settling down to a simple meal when our foreign affairs office rang me and was almost frantic on the phone, 'Oh, I'm worried the food in the school canteen will not be suitable for you. They don't serve any beer either, I will come and bring some for you…'. As if!! Had a job persuading her it would not be necessary for her to go out of her way and come into school just to bring us a beer for our dinner. We were glad to escape for once!!

The hospitality we have been shown here has been amazing. Everything is done for us. Nothing is too much. We are treated like proper celebrities. In fact, here, we are celebrities. We are the first foreigners to spend any time here, if not the very first to visit full stop. We are certainly the first white people that the vast majority of the population have ever seen. Every time we walk down the street people stop what they are doing and stare at us. Some shout out 'hello!' others come and try to talk to us, but the majority just stare.

We are freaks.

It's understandable, and I'm not sure if it will ever change, so I guess we'll just learn to live with it. It isn't a problem, and it's great with the kids at our school. For them the novelty is enough to get them to listen to our lessons. When I walked into my class of 11 year-olds for the first time they all gasped 'wow!!!'. That made me smile. These kids are fantastic, and so clever too. We had a lot of fun together, just doing the ABCs.

Speaking of celebrity and freakishness, on Friday the 1st of September we had our 'introduction' to the school'. Now, we had no idea what that might involve, whether it was anything important or a mere tour of the school campus. We dressed up a bit anyway. So glad we did. As we walked up to the school I could see that all the shop workers in the street had stopped what they were doing and were watching us, and as we turned the corner to go through the gate I just felt astounded. There were a couple of hundred students lining the way into school, all clapping and cheering as we were paraded through, being presented with flowers and serenaded by the school band along the way. It was truly amazing. There was a guy from the local TV station filming us for the news and later on he followed us into a classroom to film us saying hello to the children and introducing ourselves. Later in the week the whole thing was shown on TV, and we watched it in our hotel room. Absolutely crazy! Just a mad, mad thing to have happen to us. Anthony filmed it on his digital camera and might be able to post it on the internet so you can all watch. We cringed a bit but it's great to have a record of that amazing day.

The celebrity can have it's downsides though. When we went to buy bikes in the first few days we attracted a crowd of around 30 bemused onlookers, as we tried to explain to the shopkeeper that his bikes were crap. They look great. Really smart and hi-tech. But then you try to get it into a low gear and…nothing. The chain isn't long enough. WHY???!!!!! Why design a bike with 16 gears if you can't use a third of them!! Bizarre. Anyway, there wasn't much of an alternative and we were feeling harassed by the crowd, so we bought the damn things anyway. It's not like we were paying so what the hell!