From Longzhou to Hong Kong

In the past three weeks we have continued to plug away at our English lessons and take enjoyable trips during the weekends. Three weeks ago we witnessed a school wide event which pitted department against department in a singing competition. A group of about 60 students from each academic major sang the Chinese National Anthem and then another song of their choosing. Listening to the repetitive Chinese National Anthem 15 times would not have been so painful if not for the fact that it is blared from the loud speakers at lunchtime every single day. Fiona has it memorized word for word. Here, English majors sing Michael Jackson’s “We are the World.” They got second prize behind the music majors.

That weekend we ventured into the nearby countryside on our moto and saw some pretty flowers and some very remote towns.

In Chongzuo city we noticed an endless flight of stairs going up a hill and decided to walk up them. The Chinese really like stairs that go straight up a steep hill. No weaksauce switchbacks in this country!

At the top we found yet another military barrack with some sort of Chinese military tomb. It’s hard to imagine that there was a big war between China and Vietnam in this town less than 60 years ago. There were also nice views of our town (click on the photo for a larger view). We brought a watermelon to eat up there. Every day we have eaten at least one watermelon – they cost about 50 cents but are a little small. We put them in the freezer for an hour or two and then cut them in half and eat them with a spoon. Delicious = “May Way” or “Howzha” in Chinese.

The next weekend we visited Connie, an American English teacher who works at our school’s other campus in the city of Longzhou. We left on a rainy Saturday morning and rode our moto for two hours to the west northwest through the beautiful karst mountain landscape.

We even saw a herd of wild mountain goats.

Connie has been teaching English in China for twenty years and gave us several great tips about teaching. In the background is an amazing bridge that seems a little out of place given the small size of Longzhou.

Longzhou was a French colonial city and you can see evidence of this in the architecture. The French occupied the area mainly for spice production. These days the westerners are long gone and with no rail road or freeway running through town, it is becoming antiquated. We found a woman in a dilapidated building making flat noodles the traditional way.

We walked out of the city and took a little ferryboat across the Zuo Jiang River (The same river that runs through Chongzuo) where we found some cute Chinese children playing in the water.

There are no fat kids and no obese people in China. Sometimes we see a slightly overweight adult, but it is rare.

Connie had a much more cozy house than ours complete with a strange little dog called “Shao Hua” which mean little flower in Chinese. We also saw a pretty funny looking dog hanging out in a hair salon.

Connie said that this part of Guangxi province is probably poorest place she has ever taught. I knew my students were poor but I didn't know they were poor for China. The majority of my students' parents are farmers. I have repeatedly suggested in my lessons that they should travel to Hong Kong if not America but they act like it is only a far fetched fantasy. I hope they think I am optimistic and not arrogant.

After enjoying a thuroughly western breakfast, Fiona and I filled up our tank of gas and hot tailed it back to Chongzuo.

And now for the visa fiasco story:

Fiona and I were instructed by our agency, VIP China, to get a tourist visa when we came to China. Although it is technically illegal, this is what most foreign English teachers do because laws like these are not strictly enforced in China. However, our school preferred that we had legal work visas and a deal was made; VIP China was going do the paperwork and pay for our business visas. So we sent our passports to Beijing expecting to receive them in two or three weeks.

Long story short it took two months for us to get our passports back and VIP China didn’t get us visas. They didn’t even submit our passports for the visa application process. I have a feeling they didn’t want to pay the 7000RMB price and they didn’t want us to pack up and leave the country. It is illegal in China for foreigners to travel without a passport so we had a couple sketchy situations where we were asked for our passports but feigned confusion and the officials had let things slide. Good thing they like Americans so much.

What’s worse, VIP China sent us our passports with only a week left before our tourist visas expired. We could renew them but to do this we had to leave and reenter China. If VIP China had sent us our passports just one week earlier we would have been able to get Vietnamese tourist visas and taken the one hour train ride to the boarder and back. But now we had to go all the way to Hong Kong and they were not going to pay for plane tickets.

We begrudgingly bought train tickets and then next day we found out that VIP China changed their minds and now would be willing to pay for plane tickets. Talk about poor communication skills! In the end, we spent over 44 hours traveling from Chongzuo to Hong Kong and back – 32 hours were spent on a train.

Moral of the story: if you go to China, don’t use VIP China.

But at least we got to travel to Hong Kong. It was very interesting seeing Hong Kong for the second time. The first time we saw Hong Kong we had come straight from San Francisco and it seemed like a very Chinese city but this time it felt like a very western city.

We couldn’t believe how clean and orderly things were and how different the people acted in Hong Kong. People were not so pushy. People were quiet. People actually queued up in lines instead of bum rushing. It sounds like I am saying that Chinese mainlanders are rude and self centered, but they don’t have malice in their hearts, it’s just a different way of doing things. More chaotic, less systematic. Maybe it’s because Hong Kong was built by the British, but I think it’s probably because Hong Kong just has a lot more money than mainland China and so such systems can exist.

Before we left for Hong Kong Fiona happened to be read a Yahoo! article which listed “The Weirdest Festivals in the World.” One of them was “The Steamed Bun Festival” on the small island of Cheung Chau about a 45 minute Ferryboat ride from Hong Kong. The festival could be summed up as an offering to the Steamed Bun Gods – if they do really exist.

There were steamed buns and steam bun themed things everywhere.

There is even a game played at midnight where people scramble up huge towers of steamed buns and collect as many steamed buns in a sack as they can in a set amount of time. Good fun.

And delicious too!

No cars are allowed on the island and it felt more like Venice than China. Even in the heat the scenery was extraordinary.

The next day we went swimming on Stanley Beach on the south side of Hong Kong Island (The city is on the north side). The water was surprisingly clean and pretty warm. We ended up swimming way out to a buoy and back.

Coming back to Chongzuo was a little hard because going to Hong Kong felt like we were heading back home and then we were yanked back into our lives in China. We are now almost 80% done with our stay here in China and are planning many of the things we will do afterwards. Before we leave for America we will stop off in Thailand. Hopefully all will be quiet on the Bangkok front.

-George

Our travels take us to Nanning and Pingxiang

Over the last two weeks we have done a little traveling. The weekend before last we went to Qingxiu Mountain , in Nanning. It was recommended to us by one of our students since we mentioned we liked to go hiking. We had a feeling that it wasn’t the American version of what going hiking on a mountain was, but the Chinese version. And we were right. How can it be that different, you ask? Well, the Chinese don’t seem to appreciate nature, as nature, but would rather add some covered walkways, carved rocks, giant trees, neon lights, and loud music.

The walkways on Qingxiu Mountain

This tree is not natural, but has been moved here to provide for a better park. I have no idea where they get trees this big or how they move them!

We got bombarded by a group of students at the park, who also each took a picture with us individually

The park was packed with tour groups and students going out for a day in the sun. Once we managed to break away from the mainstream groups, we found that the park was actually really big and it took us the better part of the day to walk around most of it. On our journey we came across a dinosaur park, Thai temple, zip-line, boat rides, and areas to feed the fish.

A field where everyone is having picnics

George riding a dinosaur

The fish know where the food is!

We managed to find a “trail”, or paved walk way in the woods that ran parallel to the road. We were the only people on it, because the Chinese people prefer to walk on the road itself.

A view of Nanning from our walk

After our walk, we ate an American meal of Pizza Hut and went to Walmart to stock up on cheese.

This last weekend was Labor Day and we had Monday off from school. Friday night we boarded a train with one of our students, Margret, and headed to Pingxiang, the border town between China and Vietnam. Margret’s friends from high school were coming from other universities to spend the holiday weekend together and we met up with them on the train. Pingxiang has a famous BBQ street and that was the first place we went after arriving at about 10:30 that night. We had our first real Chinese chow mein – I was starting to wonder if that really was a Chinese dish because I hadn’t had it yet! The BBQ was delicious and we were full after all the food, which included some pig snout and chicken fetus. Our friends met a Pingxiang local on the train and she ended up spending the weekend with us and showing us the best places to go. This was helpful for the most part, because none of us had been here before, expect for when it came to finding a hotel. She recommended a hotel for us that would cost about $6 a night. The hotel was probably the worst place I have ever thought about staying in, and after sitting in our room for about 5 minutes George and I decided we were not tough enough for this. There were no towels, no toilet paper, no hot water, one pillow, and the bathroom reeked of urine. The floor was so dirty I didn’t want to take my shoes off and the windows were wide open when we arrived, begging for mosquitoes to come and feast on us all night. We found Margret in his room and told him we were spoiled Americans and really could not stay here. The only other hotel he knew of was the best one in town, so we went to the other end of the scale of Chinese hotel cleanliness. We felt a little silly saying we didn’t want to stay at the first hotel, but the next morning Margret called asking if they could put their bags in our room for the day because they were going to move to our hotel too. This made us feel better about being a little snobby about the first hotel, but it was really bad!

The Pingxiang local we met on the train had a friend who was a security guard at the gate between China and Vietnam. Unfortunately, they couldn’t let us through but our Chinese friends got to go onto Vietnamese soil to take a picture. The Friendship gate was built around the 1950’s when there was a war between China and Vietnam about the location of the boarder.

Our group outside the Friendship Gate

Thousands of people died during the war and China built a big wall to defend the border, straight up the side of a mountain. In the end, the border was set a kilometer further into Vietnam and the wall turned out to be unnecessary. We hiked up many, many steps to get to the top of the mountain and get a good view into Vietnam. It was a little foggy, which didn’t provide for a great view, but if it had been sunny the hike would have been way too hot.

A view of the mountain we climbed

Lots of steps!

Vietnam is behind us in the fog

After climbing back down, we spent the rest of the day eating and shopping. The town has a lot of goods from Vietnam, including snacks, shoes, and street vendors willing to trade your Chinese Yuan for the Vietnamese Dong. The town is also famous for the wood carved furniture. I wish we didn’t have so far to travel to get home, or I would have bought some because it is so beautiful. We did buy a small wooden candle holder as a souvenir to remember the city.

Pingxiang at night

We arrived back at our apartment in Chongzuo to find it being attacked by flying ants. These ants are probably about 1 ½ inches long and they figured out how to fit under our screen doors on the balcony. We spent all night killing the ones that got in to our house and filling the runner under the door with water to prevent more from getting in. The next day there were piles of them everywhere. Luckily, this seems to be a one night swarm and we haven’t seen them since. However, all the ones that died that night have now been rotting in the sun and there is a foul smell in the air when we go outside. George saw a man picking through the piles of ants and putting the live ones in a bag – I guess he is going to eat them?

Dead flying ants on the ground outside our apartment

We have been playing a lot of cards and continuing our motorcycle rides. We have finally seen some blue sky, which is a rare thing in China. It is nice to have a change from the gray, smoggy sky. I was starting to miss my California blue sky a lot! When the sun comes out, all the students take out their umbrellas.

The students walking to class with their umbrellas

They do not want to let their skin get dark because it makes them look like peasant farmers. They think it is very funny when I tell them American’s lie in the sun to get darker!