In The Meantime...

Taking a break from holiday stories and pictures, I need to recap what's been going on in the intervening two weeks since I came back to Lanshan. I was back roughly a week before school was due to begin, and seeing as the school canteen was not open, I was invited to eat with our foreign affairs officer, Susan.

Every day.

Twice a day.

For a week.

It was intense. When not eating at her house I was taken along to visit her family and eat with them. I think I must have met a good thirty different family members. One thing the Chinese do well is family. No matter how distant the relationship, they were still family and I met and drank with them all. I have no real idea who most of them were, as the Chinese also use terms like brother and sister pretty loosely and the words for aunts and uncles on the mother's side are different to those on the father's, but one fact I was certain of was that I would always have a good time as long as Susan's niece was invited.

She's the little girl I'm holding in the picture above, with her mother on the right, Susan on the left and random relations inbetween. She is one of the sweetest little girls I've ever met, and we've become firm friends. She always runs out to hug me if I walk by her mother's shop. It's so cool. She doesn't make me drink rice wine, she cracks open seeds for me and I actually understand almost everything she says as she speaks so deliberately and simply.

So, I'm hanging out with a five year old, is that so strange?!?

I did find some friends my own age there though, with some of Susan's cousins, who took me up a nearby hill one day to visit a tiny temple (ie. wooden shack with a couple of incense holders and a picture of Chairman Mao) where we had an amazing view of Lanshan. The three pictures above are taken panning from left to right. It all looks bigger in the picture than it actually is in real life, but most of the peripheral areas are pretty spaced out. I found out that the whole county of Lanshan has just 350 000 inhabitants, so the town's population can't be huge. The tall building under construction is a new hotel and to it's left is the town square. So far there are only
buildings on one side of the square, but the town is expanding rapidly, so will soon catch up I'm sure. You can also see just how easy it is to get out into the surrounding countryside.

There were two shows put on over the past fortnight. One was in celebration of a new supermarket that just opened and featured some of my students dancing, while the other was in honour of Women's Day and featured us! Both were kinda strange. It seemed like everyone in the supermarket show had been made to walk through a glitter shower before coming onstage and had a massive advertising sketch with girls


dancing around carrying baskets and saying 'I bought meat!' while 6 men in make-up and high-waisted trousers marched around them in a circle out of time to the music. Bit odd. It did have some cool kung-fu kids and a dragon though.

For the Women's Day show it was originally planned for Anthony and Seven to read a Chinese love poem together onstage. I had no part to play. When we came back though, we were told that they'd had a better idea. Our roles as propaganda material for the school are starting to become more and more pronounced.

Anthony and I were to write two sentences in Chinese in gold paint on big red boards behind two of my students as they read out a poem. Anthony had to write 'I love great women', while I had to write 'I love Lanshan county No. 1 middle school'. After doing this we were interviewed onstage by two non-English speakers, which was a complete farce,
but everyone laughed so I think it went down well.


The rest of the show was pretty boring and consisted of many women reading poems dressed up either in flouncy dresses like princesses or butch suits like militant feminists. Chinese poems are something else. I don't think the words 'rhyme' or 'rhythm' are in modern poets' vocabularies. I can barely begin to describe how awful some of those poems were. They were just spoken prose, which is ok, except the speakers kept trying to add emotion so artificially that some lines were started with a big sighing 'aaaahhh' and ended with each word getting louder and louder and louder until they literally pierced your ears. You'd have to hear it to understand but I just wouldn't want to have to put anyone through that. By the end of the show the hall was almost empty and this was despite the organisers giving away holidays to people in lucky seats. The final draw had to be made a couple of times over before they picked a seat that was still occupied!



Last weekend our 'group' of teachers got together to go eat and celebrate women's day together at a restaurant nearby. By the time we ate there was only one woman present, but that didn't really seem to matter... We had taken it fairly easy with the rice wine and were quite pleased with ourselves, until Mr Li the principal and Mr Feng the communist party chairman walked in.

Suddenly 3 new kettles of wine appeared on the table. Bit of a worry, but karaoke had been cancelled for the night, so we had reason to celebrate and finished it all fairly easily. Now feeling pretty buzzed, we wanted to go out. So we headed over to Happy Tom for some ice-cream, managing to collect a random crazy girl on the way who now won't stop phoning us. After ice-cream we went to the bar. It was fairly dead. We ordered a beer, and then a bottle of red wine. I don't know why exactly, because it's bad stuff, but Anthony had just learnt the word for it and had it written on his hand so I guess it made sense at the time. We finished it off with a couple of young Chinese people stood by the bar. The girl had the wierdest hair. Perms are big here, and so was hers. All except the fringe that is, or most of it anyway. The edges of her fringe were permed but the middle section wasn't. This way it looked like she had two big tassels hanging either side of her forehead, which shook around every time she moved her head. We were chatting away and mentioned how Lanshan has no clubs or late-night places to go to, or so we believed, but our new friends told us they knew differently. Being pretty drunk now we demanded to be taken. The first place looked the part, but was completely empty, so we left to find somewhere else. We ended up in a karaoke bar. Typical.

We totally gatecrashed a private room but no-one bat an eyelid as we walked in. Wierd-hair-girl went straight away to go dance with the air conditioning unit and Anthony was sick on the floor. I don't think anyone noticed though so it was ok. Not long afterwards the guy took me outside and tried to explain that these people were not just drunk. He did a sniffing motion with his fingers over his nostrils and I knew he didn't mean poppers. We'd just crashed a coke party! Not the first and certainly not the last, but at that point it didn't matter whether these guys were shooting heroin or drinking herbal tea - we were in a ktv room dancing to bad bad music and I had to get out. As the four of us stood outside it became apparent that Anthony and wierd-hair-girl were getting a little close. Not wishing to be a third wheel I left them and went home. Besides, it was getting late. The time as I walked through the school gate? 11.30pm.

Next morning I was woken up at 7.30am by a knocking on my door. 'David...David...'. It was old Mr Li, the driver's father and ex-vice-principal. I turned over and pretended not to hear. Anthony had mentioned he wanted to take us for breakfast, but I was not in the mood for being sociable and was likely to be seeing any breakfast I would eat twice over, so decided to ignore him. 'David...David...'. This time he came round to my bedroom and was banging away on the window. F**k OFF!! I couldn't possibly ignore all this anymore so had to get up and see what he wanted. It was breakfast alright, with some teacher from some school or something. I couldn't really understand what was going on, so without a shower or even having brushed my teeth I was ushered out and into a waiting ma-ma-yo.

Anthony was with me and we recapped the previous night - or rather I recapped it for him. He couldn't remember anything. How he got home, when he got home, if he was alone...or where his coat was. I told him his coat was now most likely concealing a big pile of sick in a random ktv room and that he'd probably best be ready for some angry brothers coming to beat him up for defiling their sister. He had no idea what I was on about.

So we arrived at breakfast - a steaming bowl of mixed internal organs and a few plates of random foodstuffs. Not the toast I so badly needed. I miss toast... While picking through some noodles Mr Li explained to me that I had a new job. A woman who joined us at that point had just opened up an English-language school for children and had asked him to run it. He'd then decided to engage us as advisors, going there every weekend to watch over the classes and give the teachers some feedback and tips. We'd be getting 50 yuan each for our trouble.

What?

This was all a bit sudden. Where was the 'would you like to...'? Did I have a choice? Apparently not. He also revealed that after breakfast we would go to the school for a publicity photo-shoot. Great. Unwashed, unshaved, unable to see properly yet and about to have photos taken. Just perfect.

The school itself was nice though. Brand new and with about 30 kids there that morning. They were in classes of about 10 and their ages ranged from about 5 or 6 to 11 or 12. We had photos taken infront of the school, in the classes and with the students. We found out that we would only be expected to spend 2 hours there each weekend - Anthony on Saturdays and me on Sundays. It didn't sound bad at all. I had perked up by then and even managed a smile for the photos. The kids were nice and I thought, this could be fun. The picture above shows me with a few of the students. See the girl in red on the left? Very cute. Lovely red jacket. What brightened my day most was whenever she turned round and revealed what was written on the back. I didn't know 'Slipknot' merchandise extended to childrenswear?

We managed to stave off calls for us all to eat lunch together as Mr Li likes his rice wine a little too much, but we couldn't disappoint the old man so arranged another date for the next weekend. After all, he was already a little disappointed that Anthony couldn't bring him back the Viagra that he'd asked for. Apparently there's nothing he'd like more right now.

A little more than I needed to know. I can't help thinking that if he drank a little less wine he needn't be asking in the first place...

Ma Ma Yo!! - Lanshan Scenes

I've been dying to get some good photos of this town for ages. Went for a walk today on a warm and sunny January 31st and actually remembered to take my camera.

One of the most characteristic aspects of Lanshan is its transport. If you don't want to walk (which is easy enough in a place this small) you hail down one of these little three-wheel motorbike taxis with a cry of 'Ma ma yo!!!'.

They are everywhere. For a three yuan flat-fare they will take you anywhere you want. You can fit three people inside at a push, just don't ask them to go up any hills... I'd love to have one back in the UK but there's no way in hell they'd be declared road-worthy. They are beautiful little things but a bit too well ventilated in the winter. The name includes a Chinese word for 'slow' - man man (慢慢). No false pretences there.

As I was out and about I took a few more shots. The first is of a main crossroads near a big supermarket (plenty of ma ma yo's in view and about as affluent as it gets here), the next is at the entrance to the market, followed by views of inside the market while the last is of a small street next to the school, showing typical Chinese homes. Nothing spectacular here but this is where I live.

Halloween

Well, seeing as we completely alone in this town for celebrating western holidays ands traditions, we decided to make them go with a bang.

Halloween was the first significant one to come our way, and we decided to buy some sweets and let the kids come trick-or-treating to our house. We bought 3 pumpkins to carve and about 100 yuan's worth of sweets (only about 8 quid, but a big bag nonetheless). We told all our classes about it and what they had to do and after the last class went back to our apartment to see if anyone would turn up.

Demand slightly exceeded expectations...

Withing minutes we were faced with a huge crowd of junior 1s and 2s stampeding towards our door all shouting 'give me!! give me!!'. Some tried to say trick-or-treat and some of the junior 1s had even made masks but it all soon descended into complete chaos. It was all grabbing hands and pushing and shoving and shouting as the kids ripped the bags of sweets from our hands...

I can't say it wasn't enjoyable though. A bit bewildering, yes, but still quite good fun. It was
good to be able to treat our favourite students, as it was only the enthusiastic ones who turned up.

And man were they enthusiastic.

It turned out afterwards that some teachers had been telling their students to go before dinner, and some had said go after dinner. With this in mind, Anthony quickly ran back to the shop and bought another 100 yuan of sweets, just in case.

It was well worth it. We came back from dinner and the yard outside our apartment was full of kids. Whoever had missed out on the first round
had by now heard all about it and were waiting for us. There were upwards of 300 kids all pressing forward to get into our apartment, and we weren't even in there!! We had to literally fight our way in, and fight our way back out again with the sweets. It was a bloodbath, but so much fun.

When I went into my junior 1 class the next day they all shouted 'trick-or-treat' and held out their hands for sweets. I just laughed at them. No way. I for one am glad this festival only comes round once a year!!

The pumpkins we carved were brilliant. Everyone kept stopping outside our apartment to have a look. They had never seen anything like it before. All we could hear from inside was 'hao guai!' (beautiful) and 'nangua' (pumpkin) as people stopped to look. The Chinese are a curious bunch at the best of times, and this really drew a crowd.

We lit them when it got dark and left them outside our apartment while we went to an evening show. This was some kind of talent/variety show, with singing and dancing, all performed by students from various schools.

There were prizes to be won and a good deal of them were won by students from our school, Yizhong (yi means one, zhong means middle - No. 1 middle school).

Our good friend Li zhe came second with a great dance. Most were traditional folk dances, so we got to see some culture that night too.



















The majority of the performers were Anthony's students, the senior 3s, but one or two were mine, and we speak to all of them anyway, so we had a laugh. There was one act that was absolutely brilliant. This little girl who must have been about 4 years old got up on stage in traditional Indian costume and danced along perfectly for 3 minutes, belly-dancing and bobbing her chin like you see all those Bollywood dancers do. It was amazingly cute.




It all went on rather late though and when we came back we found our pumpkins had quite literally had their lights put out. I think this was the most scary image of Halloween, with the blackened eyes and what looks like blood coming from the back of my little pumpkin... Brilliant.








But we weren't finished with the visitors. These two guys actually managed to make me jump when I opened the door, believe it or not. We eat with these guys every day in the teacher's canteen. Anyone who has the vaguest relationship to a teacher can eat in there. It's an improvement on the students' dining hall as at least here you can sit down and don't have everything slopped into one bowl to eat from. These lads got the meaning of Halloween and helped make it one of the best I've ever had.

yi, er, san, si.

Towards the end of October, I had just finished class and on my way back to my apartment noticed that a load of students were parading on the playground below. They were senior 1 and junior 1 students - the junior 1s being mine, and my favourites, so I ran back to get my camera and watched the rest of the parades. Each class came forward and had to do a routine in front of a panel of judges.

You won't find this in UK schools and it was a little reminder of the fact we are in a slightly restrictive communist country. Most of the time, we are completely unaware of this. The place is
as everyday as you could imagine. It hits you unexpectedly, like when I tried to send a CD of pictures home to my family but was refused at the post office because they couldn't check what was on it first (This is also a sharp reminder of the poverty - the main town post office doesn't even have a computer).

From the general shittiness of some of the parading, it seems clear that most of the people here don't take it too seriously either. The top classes were good, and it was really interesting to watch, but it all seemed a little forced and out of place.

After the parading, some of my junior 1s asked me to go play ping pong with them. Cos I had a camera with me, it meant that many photos had to be taken. I don't mind, I like these kids.

The photos give you a little glimpse at the school campus, which I haven't gotten round to photographing properly for you all yet. The top two parading pictures show firstly the animal sheds which substitute as the students' dining halls, and secondly the junior 1 classrooms on the top floor of the two-storey building facing the playground, with department offices underneath.

The next two show the main teaching building in the background. All the classrooms are accessed via outside walkways and there are about 6-7 classrooms per level.

This photo also shows standing in front of me, second from the left, a kid who is ping pong mad.
And ever since I played with the junior 1s and spoke some Chinese with them, he always races up to me with his ping pong bat and shouts 'fa ping pong qiu!! fa ping pong qiu!!' (don't check up on that spelling there, it's probably wrong) basically, 'play ping pong ball!! play ping pong
ball!!'. He's a persistant little bugger. He even comes to find me when I'm eating lunch. It's cool though. He's a good kid, and the 11-year olds are only a little bit better than me at ping pong, so I prefer to play with them anyway!!

Down-time in Lanshan 2

From the tower we had great views across Lanshan; the temple complex....









............aah, pretty....


Then you get a view in the other direction and see what a typical small chinese town looks like. A bit austere...











And in the other direction, the slow expansion of the town across farmland and the local river. This is the only place in Lanshan to go swimming...not sure I'll risk it though! Note how near the mountains are. It really doesn't take long til you're in them. Fantastic.

Down-time in Lanshan

Escaping from all the drinking and revelry, Anthony and I fled our hotel on the first weekend and went to explore Lanshan a bit.

Our peace didn't last long. A teacher was soon dispatched to come and chaperone us, but it wasn't bad at all. We went to look at Lanshan's only real historical feature, a tower with adjoining temple on the edge of town.

I'm afraid I have no real information about it - there were no signs to give any - not that I'd have been able to read them, and judging by the trees growing out the side of the tower, conservation and tourism is not too important here.

We had a great time climbing it though, praying to the buddhas at each level. In the temple below we shook a can of sticks, and whichever one fell out had a particular meaning. Mine told me I was very lucky. Guess I am.

Rather bizarrely there was an elephant-shaped slide outside the tower. Don't ask why. I though it was cool though, so took a photo. Views from the tower will follow this post...

KTV 'fun'

On one of the first days in Lanshan we met most of the english teachers we would be working with. Here is (l-r) Susan (our foreign affairs officer - she looks after us here), Mr Lei (of rice wine drinking infamy), a lady teacher, another lady teacher (who can't really speak any english. She says 'nice to meet you' every time we pass..), another lady teacher, one more, Mr Huang with the square head, a male teacher, Anthony and Mr Sui (one of the nicest guys we work with). As you may tell by now, chinese names are not easy to remember... But there do seem to be only 3 surnames in this town, Lei, Li and Huang, so I've
got a fighting chance...

One of the more bizarre pastimes the chinese here have is that of going to KTV and singing karaoke. These two shots are of our first night in Lanshan. After a boozy meal, we were all fired up for what Lanshan nightlife had to offer us.

It had to offer...a tiny room, just for us, where we drank tea, attempted to sing the one or two english language songs which weren't from the 60s or 70s and listened to everyone else belt out chinese hits of yesteryear. Then, to really get the night kicking (once we'd completely sobered up) they turned off all the lights and turned the karaoke machine into a mini disco, pounding out some of the worst techno music I have heard since the late 80s, to which the six of us 'danced'. It really does seem that the chinese are about two decades behind us musically... You can see how much fun it was below. Guess I won't be going clubbing for another year...

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!