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