Trip to Nanjing and Wuxi

We got home from our trip to Nanjing and Wuxi (looking at two possible new jobs for next semester) fairly late last night. Getting train tickets in China is tricky for so many reasons ... and you can't just book in advance - no more than 3 days, we are told - and you can't book a return ticket, you do that when you get there. We have learnt recently that people buy up the whole train and re-sell for profit. Which might explain a few things - like its really difficult for a foreigner to buy tickets, you need a local who knows who to get them off. Anyway, we returned later than intended, and first class - expensive but pleasant. In Wuxi we had two separate parties looking for tickets for us, and after being told there was nothing ended up with two sets of tickets and had to pay a largish penalty (125yuan) to get some of the money back on one set.

We got a taxi in Zhengzhou remarkably easily, and had a good trip back here - having agreed to a price of 60yuan instead of the usual 30 or so (but better than the 100 often asked of foreigners) because of the hour - and climbed the front steps of the building feeling tired but pleased ... as Peter tried to insert his key into the lock (in the dark, never a light there) he found only a large hole, no lock. The next thing we found missing from inside the foyer was our bikes - we were a little surprised because we haven't seen much (any?) evidence of crime here. When we got upstairs we found the big metal door to our Canadian colleague’s side of the building wide open, but ours was locked, and our keys wouldn't work.

Well, we thought, maybe after the break-in, they changed the lock, and maybe our friend has a new key for us or can tell us what is going on. So we tromped up to the top floor on her side to get Happy (she was looking after) and to ask her.

Our friend went into panic mode! She hadn't been out of her apartment (i.e. one room) since Friday, didn't even know her downstairs door was open, (hadn't even had Happy out of her cage in case she lost her) and she "knew nothing".

We phoned our minder, and as usual got some Chinese message that her phone was off or something. Then we tried the principal who has reasonable English, and he promised to ring the fix-it man who can say "hello, hello?" and "tomorrow" and has recently learnt "Peetah!" He eventually came up, but couldn't explain what had happened and seemed quite perplexed about our lock - so obviously he hadn't changed the locks! Then he phoned his little off-sider handyman - but of course we couldn't understand what he was saying on the phone. Meanwhile, Peter was figuring out any other ways to get into our apartment (3rd floor, remember). He finally went upstairs (4th floor!) to the other side, climbed outside on the balcony ledge and across a buttress-thing onto George's old apartment, and came down through the top apartment stairs into the area outside our padlocked plywood door which is inside the big metal door ... and which he then opened from the inside, much to the startlement of Xiao Wong!

As it turns out the Sri Lankan computer guy who lives below us (and who has a wife in Zhengzhou who's just had a baby ... ) decided to hire a little Chinese cleaning lady - since the college has fallen on hard times they sacked the regular cleaning lady here. She (his new cleaner) broke off her key in the front door downstairs - about the fourth person to do that since we've been here, these magnificent-looking four-sided keys just snap. The fix-it chaps were fixing it when it got dark (no lights down there) and decided to leave it - so they put our bikes in the computer teacher’s apartment to be safe for now. ... Apparently/maybe our door had been fiddled with from the inside - easy enough to do, it’s a real dead-latch so you can't even get in with a key, and we are always very careful not to touch that bit! So how our door got dead-latched remains a real mystery - and it had nothing to do with the door downstairs - that was sheer coincidence! So no crime committed, and we panicked the lady upstairs for nothing.

So about the trip:

We hard-sleepered on an overnight train to Nanjing ... had to hang around in Zhengzhou from 6pm to 11pm waiting for the train time, but that was ok. And we had no trouble getting on the train etc, we are old hands at that now. We even slept quite well on the sardine-can train ... six bunks in each tiny open-ended compartment and people pushing up and down the carriage at the end of the beds. We could only get a top and bottom bunk (they vary in price) but at least we were in the same compartment. Peter had a top bunk, hard up against the ceiling - I've slept up there before but couldn't trust my poor legs on those skinny-runged stairs this time. I slept on the bottom - the best place to be but you have to put up with people using it as a step-up to theirs and also sometimes wanting to sit on it.

The Nanjing school was an hour by taxi from the station. We rang the school liaison person when we got there and then handed the phone to the driver who told him where to go and not to try anything - make it a reasonable price! He did a great job - he drove a good kilometre or more along the pavement through pedestrians and cyclists at one stage to avoid spending our money by sitting in a traffic jam! (this is typical China!)

The language school is on one floor in a huge, brand new government school complex. So new that the rest of the world hasn't caught up to it and found it yet! Just what we didn't want, out in the boondocks again! All the same we were feeling quite keen, and the apartments are nice, and we felt we could work through the other things. Then we were talking through the contract with the principal and his Australian off-sider and he said that, off course, even though we would be doing 20 teaching hours, we would be expected to do around 30 office hours altogether ... and we felt less keen. We had a lovely Western-style lunch in Nanjing: real bread, and real salad! Mmm mmm! How we miss those things, and they are there all the time in Nanjing!

Peter had been leaning toward the Nanjing job, but I had been feeling more hopeful about the Jiangyin one. So they got us a bus ticket, and we bussed the same day to visit our friends in Wuxi (near Jiangyin, and where we would meet the lady offering the Jiangyin job.) The bus trip was ok, nice big soft-seated bus (bit different from some of the ones we've been on!) and when we got to Wuxi we managed to follow our friends' instructions on a city bus to just outside their apartment.

They are a lovely young couple we met doing our TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) course. They are the only two foreigners in their school in Wuxi, but they have a wonderful little apartment near the city centre - reminded us how strange and run-down ours at LongHu is! We couldn't see the lady about the job until Saturday (she was away in Shanghai, where she apparently lives...) so we had a good chance to look around Wuxi using our friends' apartment as a base while they were teaching on Friday.

We just fell in love with Wuxi. It’s a beautiful city, clean and modern and with big shops to buy all the stuff we are used to - as well as with the little Chinese people selling street-food and stuff. We even went to an Australian pub with our friends - and that was interesting because we met quite a few other foreigners, but there was a pleasant atmosphere, playing pool and stuff and it didn't seem boozy at all.

We went to look at the school in Wuxi - the one that the Jiangyin job is part of. Anyway, we still haven't seen Jiangyin, it just wasn't possible to get out there in the end. But we are being offered work in Wuxi itself, and later in Jiangyin if it turns out and we want to. The thing is, she is offering us corporate work - teaching groups of adults from business corporations. Hey, no naughty boys and girls - just a different set of problems that we'd like to try our hand at!

Our friends in Wuxi are willing to mind our few boxes of stuff while we return to Oz - including Happy! That makes it even more tempting. Drop off our stuff on the way to Shanghai, and then fly out and return there.

Monthly exams here this Sunday. Then final exams end of June. Then they want us to do "Summer Camp" - a couple of weeks of frenetic activity when Chinese parents get rid of annoying only child, private schools make lots of money, and foreign teachers really earn their keep!!