Yangshou

As expected, I come back from vacation and I'm swamped with work. I'm just now getting around to uploading my photos to Flickr [about 1/3 are up as of now]. The basic jist of what we did was take a night bus [fine] to Yangshou for May Holiday, stayed in the town for three nights but prices kept rising because of the massive influx of Chinese tourist, then moved into a village for the last three days. Most of our time was spent relaxing, hiking, and biking around the countryside of the YuLong River valley. I got my groove back with photography :-)


Before I went, I asked a friend who had been whether or not it's "China beautiful or World-class beautiful." My own answer is that nobody who makes a trip out there will be disappointed. It's a stunning and charming land with friendly locals and laid-back visitors.Some memorable points, in no order, as jotted down sitting down in a tea shop before the [worst] night bus [ever] left for Shenzhen:

• Finding our own valley (behind the mountains in the first picture)
  
  
• A strange bird who's ghostly noise was a long, steady single note that rose gradually before breaking into in short birst of chirps. Found higher up in the mountains, I first discovered it...
  
  
• Finding a Taiping Rebellion-era fort built into the side of karst. No maps mentioned it and I only happened to find it while climbing a bit and having...
  
  
• A little girl offering Hera and I unripe pears as she and her friends played on a trail we were hiking up
  
  
• Trying, unsuccessfully, to befriend a peasant's cow.
  
  
• Riding in a (tethered) hot air balloon for ten minutes.
  
  
• "Bamb - oooooo" The other English word, after "hello," that every villager within 100 miles knew. It was lucrative business of sending tourist down the river on bamboo rafts.
  
  
• "Hello, beer?" The business-pitch of a small restaurant owner every time I walked past.
  
  
• Having a local de-mud our bikes the last day. The mud was everywhere and created a significant problem of getting the wheels to, ya know, spin. He cleaned it in a rice patty water-hole with patches of weed and grass he grabbed.
  
  
• Five possible dishes to choose in the village. Five.
  
  
• Noting the almost total absence of people between the ages of 20 to 50 in the villages, mainly skewed towards men. They've all gone to the cities to work in the factories leaving grandparents to do the farming.
  
  
• A foreign kleptomaniac snatching Hera's phone and camera out of her bag
  
  
• Wondering whether caribou have the right-of-way.
  
  
• A cool peasant-dude who wanted to chill and chat by the river with us after I fell into his rice patty
  
  
• Not thinking about work for a week.
  
  
• Meeting a Danish fellow who was towards the end of his
  Denmark-Russia-Kazakhstan-China bicycle journey.

Arrgghhh

Shenzhen is the "bastard child" of my company. I was told that when I first got here. The branch has been open for years, but it seems like it just opened yesterday. I like all my supervisors, but I think it's something about the collective whole that's flawed.

Next week every teacher is off for National Day. A few of us were planning to hit up Guilin, the city famous for the gumdrop mountains and beautiful misty lakes. I was gung ho. I've been working 28 classes weekly [part of why my posting has slowed - I'm tired], which is 13 more than the average Chinese teacher does. I've been racking in the overtime covering for the girls who quit. That's, at minimum, 840 students.

On top of just discovering yesterday I'm supposed to do 32 classes this week, I just found out I need to go to Hong Kong on Tuesday. My visa expires on the third and they've waited - as always - until the very last minute to do anything. I wasn't even working my first two weeks in Shenzhen. I pestered them constantly about doing it then so they wouldn't wait to do during National Day week. There's no one person to blame, of curse, it was a collective failure.

This isn't some barometer of my overall feelings of teaching here, but this particular incident really, really makes me angry. I don't mind putting in the hours, I do mind of being deprived my travel plans because of incompetence.



I leave you with a photo from the side of a preschool in the alleyways around my neighborhood. I think it says something about my mindset teaching those little devils tomorrow and now Saturday too.