Leaving Zhengzhou

Here we are in Wuxi, (that's like "Woo-shee") on our way to Shanghai, on our way home to Oz for a bit of a holiday.

Of course these things are never as simple as they could be! Not the least of our problems being, when we were finally installed on the sleeper bus with our 26 pieces of luggage safely stowed in the luggage hold underneath - not the kind of bus we had asked them to buy a ticket for, we wanted one with 20 wide beds and one aisle and they had bought us tickets for one of these horrible ones with 30 skinny beds and 2 aisles and no toilet ... but we were ready to cope with that anyway ... well the engine was running and we were just about to farewell our minder who had seen us onto the bus when she informs us casually that this bus doesn't actually go to Wuxi as such. It was a bus to Shanghai and we would be dropped by the roadside somewhere out of Wuxi!! In the early hours, with our luggage.

"Just tell the driver when you want to get off," she said brightly. They seem to forget so readily that we are deaf, dumb and illiterate in these situations.

So anyway, after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing on mobile phones we managed to get a Chinese friend of our Australian friends in Wuxi to talk to the driver and arrangements were made ...

Then they drove to a bus garage, and we sat in the (hot!) bus for an hour while they put it over the pit, presumably for a service. Then they went to a petrol station and we once again waited while they filled up ...

We stopped a couple of times during the night so everyone could go to the toilet. Around midnight we drove down an alley beside a shop into a backyard full of tall grass. The bus turned around and then parked in the alley. Everyone was woken up and told to get off and move around, and they locked the bus. There was hot food available, and an outdoor sink where everyone went to freshen up. Out the back through the tall grass I headed for the toilet – a small roofless brick building. Most of the men from the bus were standing around in the tall grass, all facing different directions; only ladies need a building!

And finally they did drop us somewhere out of town ... the bus driver was great, he stayed with us to make sure we were ok - after a few anxious moments our friends turned up with a minivan.

Thunderstorm

I am sitting in a huge office chair in a room full of about 150 computers - a brand new internet cafe/bar/whatever in our area. This is a new experience for us ... after the huge thunderstorm last weekend. We did the right thing, unplugged everything and watched the show from our bedroom windows in two directions - it was really spectacular and right overhead for ages. The power was off, not surprisingly, maybe a local substation was hit. Our "her upstairs" was with us because she is terrified of the dark - comes down whenever the power is off - as well as of thunder. She switched off her computer at the power-board ... and it ended up getting "fried" anyway. She spent 1100 yuan yesterday buying a new motherboard and other parts - which have turned out to be complete duds ... good old China! But our problem is that the school computer room was not switched off or unplugged, and we've lost the server. The poor computer guy, says its never happened before since he bought it in '99.

So then he replaced the main board on the server computer (special, expensive computer), and got the college computers running, and was all set to get our apartments linked up again ... and China Telecom contacted him to ask how come so many computers are running off one server! Apparently there is only license for one computer! So now the college has no internet at all.

There are a great many little internet bars, tiny little hot-boxes where you book a cubicle for an hour at a time. But this place has just opened, and I’s air-conditioned, all brand new gear. Only 1.5 yuan for an hour. Last time we came it was only half full - but at that stage they only had fans and no air conditioning. Today it’s packed, but they still found us two computers next to each other.

The college is really struggling. Only 14 students have come to summer camp, instead of the 60 they hoped for. So, 14 students and 6 teachers! We do two lessons a day each. I have finished for the day at 10.15 am.

I have the "elementary" class - an experience I am finding fascinating. They really have no English. I have a Chinese teacher who sits in with me, and the first day she wanted to translate everything I said - very wearing, and not terribly useful educationally. Forewarned, the second day I told her not to translate, this is an "English only" classroom.

Its really nice teaching a little class (7 students!) of young people who are keen to learn and not full of teenage habits like my college class - who had been at college together for over 12 months and knew the ropes and ways to push the envelope. Their ages vary from "Sunny", a bright little 12 year-old girl who wants to be an actor when she grows up and certainly has a "presence" about her, to an 18 year-old girl called "Julie" who wouldn't speak at all during the interview when I was trying to assess her skill level! Another thing that is rather fun is giving them names. We listen to their Chinese name and try to give them something that sounds a little similar. Some of them pick names for themselves, after someone famous or often an object. One girl called herself "Sheep" because she is quiet and shy - we encouraged her to change that! We get names like "Apple" and "Dew" and "Jet" ... one girl called "Bi" something now proudly bears the name "Beatrice"!

Peter has the higher class - and they are all much more capable than my crew. Its amazing the gap between the two. They are all nice kids too - all 9 of them!

I am so looking forward to Western food again! Especially bread. Plain un-anything-bread. No brown bean-paste in the middle, no funny sweet taste, no walnuts sprinkled though. Bread, and toast. And roast meat. They never roast meat here - except the "meat-on-a-stick" they roast over a little fire before they hand it to you. Almost everything is boiled. With chilies.

Happy the fat hamster (!) will wait for us in Wuxi. I was going to either giver her to a gentle student if I could find a suitable one or let her free in the wild down by Long Hu (the lake) - don't know how long she'd last either way. But our friends in Wuxi who will mind our stuff while we are away are keen to hamster-sit. They are really pleased because this way they get a pet for free no strings attached.

The bit I am dreading is the trip from here to there and getting our stuff to their place. We are hoping to go by sleeper bus, on of the big ones like Beatrice went on to Beijing. They have quite a big luggage hold, and most people bring only a small bag - they often seem to carry extra cargo for people. We know that going on the train with extra baggage is possible but a real nightmare ... hopefully on a bus with only 20 passengers and a couple of drivers we would be looked after better. Then in Wuxi the bus station is only two bus stops by city bus from our friends' apartment, so we could take a taxi (or two). We don't have heaps of stuff, about 5 suitcases and maybe 5 boxes of stuff.

Well, I must get on and answer my emails before my hour runs out. The chap next to me is smoking, which is really irritating!

Birthday

So I had a lovely birthday.

We went into town, wandered around a bit - bought a couple of shirts at the market, decided against frogs and snakey things for tea!

Then we went to the Crowne Plaza - 5-star hotel, bit like stepping back into our western world. Beautiful air conditioning, delightful food, huge bed and beautiful room - nothing like other Chinese hotels we have been in!
And a swimming pool!

Peter mentioned to the lady showing us to our room that it was my birthday. Next thing we knew a bunch of them showed up at the door with a cake. They came in and sang to me and took Polaroid pictures, and gave me a birthday card with my name printed on it by computer ... and later they called again with a complementary fruit basket.

It was all very pleasant and mentally refreshing.

Now we are back "home" and getting ready to teach holiday camp - not that we feel we have much getting ready to do. Its hard to prepare when you don't know how many kids and their abilities or ages. All we know is that Peter has the top group - oldest and/or best English - I have the bottom group - youngest and/ or least English. A challenge, as they say.

Computer is being cantankerous today, I have had several goes at attaching files ... once I almost got there and my whole email thing just disappeared and it went back to the desktop. Periodically it just freezes and/or turns off - despite the pedestal fan at my feet blowing full blast onto the processor.

Hot weather

You know, you'd love it here. The little people are so ... I don't even know why I think of them as "little" people. A lot of them are very slight, but there are lots of big ones too! I think it’s because they are so poor and their lives are so small. They live in this tiny little world in this massive country. There are still many who plant their feet, drop their jaw, and just stare at us. Some will even come from down the street to stand by and stare. When we walk through a market place, if we see a stall that looks like it could use some custom - all deserted, no interest shown - we just go stand near it and in a few seconds the whole world gathers.

Hot! You have no idea! We are so shocked by the extremes, we were not expecting this. This is supposed to be when they get all their rain, and it hasn't shown up yet. Peter has just gone on his bike into Xiao Qiao, the local village to try to get us some veges, or at least potatoes and onions ... I hope he doesn't expire on the way. I just couldn't face it. There is a little shop quite close to the college where we buy eggs. (Actually we often buy them on the way home from our evening walk, the family is all sitting around outside on the pavement watching TV and we stop by to buy eggs...) We buy them by weight. We select them and put them into the flimsiest of gossamer plastic bags. About 15 makes a pound, and costs 6 Yuan ($1). Then they put the bag inside another and you carry them home ... carefully. We are glad its close by, because it’s quite tricky.

We find we eat a lot of eggs because there is often not much other (acceptable) protein available around here. We can buy very cheap very lean pork - really yummy - in the big shops in Zhengzhou, but it has to then be brought home via the stinking hot bus for an hour. They do sell meat in the village but it’s either killed in front of you - chickens - or sitting around as anonymous lumps out in the open on a chopping board...

We used to buy them (eggs) in the village and bring them home on the bike, but never managed to get them all home safely, even when we tried packing them into a plastic container and stuff. But the people travel around with 2, 3, 4 or more milk-crates full of eggs on the back of a bike - eggs just piled up loose in a milk-crate. We have no idea how they do it, on these bumpy roads too. So when we noticed this little shop close by with their crate of eggs sitting outside the front door ... remarkably, we have never had a bad one!

This morning Peter got up and turned on the pedestal fan that we have lying next to the computer, and the computer, and got the BSOD (blue screen of death). Oh no! Computer's "dead as a maggot" ... don't know why people say that because maggots aren't necessarily dead until you squash them ... but anyway. We turned the fan up to FULL speed and waited a while, and it all seems to be working again. Every moment is a victory!

Ok, so now Peter has just come home ... with hot bananas, hot tomatoes, hot apricots, hot potatoes, hot onions ... all of them raw! These things are so cheap, it’s just the hassle of getting them home.

Hot Summer Evenings

It’s done. I've had my last lesson with this crowd ... now we wait for summer camp.

The people came from the college in S.A., where my kiddies are preparing to go. The deal is that in order to get a student visa to enter Australia they have to pass an English test. Normally they have to get a score of '5' in an IELTS test (International English Language Testing System) - quite a difficult achievement, Peter teaches 'IELTS' classes and is familiar with what it takes. But for some reason the Oz government allows this college to set its own little test, and they can get a visa if they get 75% in that. My class last semester apparently all passed, despite many of them not having enough English to hold a conversation with me. So obviously there is more to it than that! So the other day when they had the test with this class I fully expected to find out what goes on and work out how it all happens. But something has obviously changed between last year's crowd and this year's. Of the 18 in the class, only 6 passed. And we had tears and stuff to deal with. I am not surprised about the ones that failed - I would have failed them too. Just curious about what can have happened last time!

So, college is about to shut down for another year. The kids are still writing internal exams today though, and tomorrow I have to mark them. I can't fathom that - those that have passed get to go regardless, and those that have failed should be off home with their tails between their legs re-thinking what they will do with their lives because they don't get a second bite at this particular bikkie. So why are they sitting there writing these exams? Just to give me something to mark?

We worked out what's wrong with our computer. It has no fan! Our computer in Oz would come on with a whirr, and we sometimes used to put a little fan up next to it as well in very hot weather because it was in that corner of the office with very little circulation. The temperature here has been over 40deg by day and over 35deg by night for at least a couple of weeks - and this promises to continue until September or so (yes, this place really goes to extremes weather-wise!!) Even with our air-conditioner working its little heart out, the old Chinese computer wasn't coping. It kept giving us all sorts of weird messages, and sometimes it would even start typing in random words all by itself.

When George left, he left behind a pedestal fan. So we now have that lying on its side at my feet blasting air into the computer. We have it tied to the computer desk with a bit of wire - it's a very Chinese solution ... only the sticky tape is missing! We turn on the computer, and turn on the fan. Occasionally, if you try asking the computer to do too many things in quick succession - like working with a large file - we still get the BSOD (blue screen of death) and it shuts down. But mostly it’s usable at least for the next few weeks.

Ooh, I remember the beach! Looking forward to seeing the big blue wobbly again soon - we get to really missing it here! Every day on the weather forecast (we get on the net) along with the 40 - 46deg temperature forecasts, we read that we are going to have "T-storms" or "severe T-storms" ... and it doesn't happen. I know that Beijing had a lot of hailstorms that ruined crops and cars. And north of here a lot of people drowned including, a school-full of little kids when there was a mud-slide (bet you didn't get that in Australian news), and in the south the usual few hundred have died so far due to flooding. But we only had a bit of a sprinkle a couple of days ago, a bit of a downpour once last week, and some dry thunder rumbling in the distance. It is SO hot here.

Most evenings we go for a walk down to "ShengDa", the area around the nearby big university - there are about 15 000 students there. The local restaurants have all their tables and chairs out on the pavement, and everyone is there. There are fruit stalls, and "meat-on-a-stick", and various other disgusting delicacies available. The little kids are dressed in the front-only type clothing - naked except for an aprony thing covering their chest. The men all have their shirts off, and many of them wear long trousers but roll up one or both legs to the knee or thigh. It’s all very culturey, if you know what I mean. Very relaxed, no sense of crime or danger - not like it would be in Australia.

There are lots of little fridges or freezers out on the pavement, with the most amazing drinks and ice-creams. We haven't seen any rice-pudding ones for a while, but there is a pea one that Peter is particularly fond of. I like the one that goes all bendy as it thaws, its like frozen Turkish delight. Everything is so cheap too. About 20c for an icecream. And there are crowds of people all over the road. And buses and motor-bike-taxis trying to honk their way through the crowds. Its quite weird, with so many young people - 15 000 of them, and its dark and hot and everyone is just meandering and chatting quietly.

There is a park with really fancy poles that have lights inside them, changing colours up and down all the time. People set up blow-up swimming pools with magnetic fish, and kids pay to have a go at catching them on little fishing lines - no prize, just fun. And some people blow up lots of little coloured balloons and stick them on a board, and you can pay to have a shot at them with a little air-rifle that makes a little "pop" noise. Again, no prize, just the pop. And sometimes people have their TVs out on the pavement, and the family sits there on tiny little wooden stools, eating noodles out of a bowl and yelling "Hello!" as we pass.

Kung Fu Fighting

I gather Peter is on a bus on the way back from PuYang where he has been doing "promotions" - like deputation, drumming up support for the college. They don't have any foreign teachers there, so they wanted to use him as much as possible, made him do lots of lessons. As far as I can tell from his short phone text messages his first class was a mere 1400 students, and they wanted him to sing a song! So he chose "Incy Wincy", that being the only one he is confident of! I suggested various others, but no, he wanted something really short! Then he found his 'act' was sandwiched into an all-costumed all-singing all-dancing extravaganza. I think he might have put China-Australia relations back a couple of hundred years!!

Anyway, they then had him doing 6 lessons a day, all big classes, and even this morning as he was due to be returning they managed to slot him into a 2-hour primary school presentation teaching classes of 100 ...

Meanwhile, back at the ranch here, the school has been experiencing a bit of a problem. Some boys in my class offended a girl in the high school class. Then they or her (I still can't work out who) called friends (parents, relatives, older people). Someone stole the front gate key (they've been locking the students in at all times lately) opened the gate and let in a mob of about 20. They fought - "Kung Fu" fighting, I'm told, and trashed my classroom - knocked over the TV, broke windows, chucked stuff about, beat some of the boys in my class...

Two of the boys in my class walked away, wanted no trouble, and apparently the other boys are still sore at them and threatening them...

None of this really affected me - I was alone in our apartment, Peter was away the first night - I only heard some rowdiness outside and was glad to be on the third floor.

But then the students all disappeared - catching up on sleep, nursing injuries, talking to the police, or just scared and went home. I have had a class of 3 for the last three days - which is actually very difficult to teach when it’s not your regular class! The principal who was traveling with Peter's promotional team had to return to help sort things, so now Peter and our minder are on the bus home because he took the car and the driver.

Spring

Spring is here and pretty much gone, and we are still here. The weather changes very quickly here. After the longest coldest 4-5month winter the locals can remember in ten years or so ... all of a sudden one day it was spring. The trees all burst into frantic blossoms that lasted for about two weeks - the tired dusty city was a little more presentable for a while. Then a wind blew it all instantly away. We had about a week of what looked like snow, but was in fact some kind of wind-born grass seeds everywhere. They collected outside our building in flurries, and even floated through my classroom. Now everything is green. And the seed-snow is replaced by cabbage-white-butterfly-snow. Never seen so many!!

Typical of here. Everything small but in such huge quantities. We have had one wet day. We thought May was supposed to be wet - well, not this year. Mind you, the drains here are not built for wet, we are going to be paddling and swimming when it rains again.
The fruit is getting good. Mind you, the bananas and watermelon went all through winter - they must truck them in from southern China. They sell them by the roadside - but we found watermelon is not too special on a freezing day when the melon is frozen inside! Strawberries have been in for a while, huge ones remarkably, but the delicious tiny grape tomatoes seem to have come and gone. Cherries are everywhere - although for a while we were convinced they were red-currants (they are sooo tiny!) until we tasted them. Mangoes are in - no fun for Peter - and apricots, but they are like bouncy balls and very tart. Pineapples and melons are great now too - they sell you a quarter or half on a stick, all cut, peeled, ready to gnaw ...

Peter is away for a few days, helping the college out with "promotions". They go to towns and schools and try to drum up trade. Obviously it hasn't been working lately because the college numbers are less than 50, from a previous 300 and they have sacked most of their Chinese staff. Peter thinks it will be rather fun, something different! But it means being apart for about 5 days. They have taken him to PuYang to a school that has never seen foreign teachers ... we both figure "Poo" anything is a bit suss!

Anyway, today is Saturday of course - though here (at this school) it is Monday - or "Day 1" on the timetable. Regardless of that, Peter was listening to the footy - streaming radio - before he left. (I had hoped that was ONE thing I would leave behind when we came here!!) He hadn't heard the end, and I hadn't bothered... I had an excuse because our computer is sick and every couple of hours it suddenly makes a warning sound and shuts down. Which it did as soon as he left ... and then when it started it committed a "fatal error" and made all sorts of fuss. So when Peter messaged me from the car on the way to PuYang to ask whether the Dockers won ... I had to dig around on the net and find out!

And now I am enjoying a Chinese icy-pole - this one is like frozen Turkish delight. The ice-creams here are amazing! There is such a huge variety and they are so, so cheap. All sort of things which look like a "Peter's trumpet", cone-things with all sorts of other things inside, and various arrangements of layers of chocolate and caramel, and sometimes a cone layer somewhere, and fruit swirled through ... and then there is the one that looks like corn-on-the-cob but its cone on the outside and ice-cream inside which tastes like corn! And then there are things like frozen rice pudding, and occasionally a savoury one. And they vary from 20 - 25c! The only problem is always being presented with this huge variety and trying to remember which one you have already tried...