China!

This is the big roundabout at the center of downtown. The streets aren’t laid out in any predictable way whatsoever. There is a big mountain in the middle of town and the major streets go all the way around it in a ring, but not over it. There are 7 streets that come together here. Traffic lights, crosswalks and lanes don’t mean anything in China. Lay on the horn, hit the gas and pray.

This is the museum of the revolution. Mao Zedong stopped here and had an important meeting at the beginning of the revolution so it’s a famous historic site. I haven’t been in yet.







This is the gate to the mountain. I’ve never been up the mountain, but they tell me there are ghosts at the top. I’m also told there are monkeys on the mountain. People feed them so now they are basically tame enough to shake hands with.



This is a Catholic church across the street from the school. It’s the only church in ZunYi. It’s a famous historic site as well. I’ve never seen them have any services; it’s more like a tourist attraction.

Da Yang School

I have school on Saturday and Sunday. I have these little ones in the mornings. They can go pretty crazy on me. They have regular school Sunday night, then Monday to Friday from 7:30am to 9:00pm with 2 hours off at lunch and dinner in classes of 80 kids. They learn English at regular school and they’re not impressed to have extra school on the weekend. Some are here because the parents think they’re too brilliant for regular school, some are here because the parents think they need extra help. They’re all only children and they get a lot of attention at home, and a lot of pressure to get good grades. If they misbehave really badly, all I have to do is say “I go phone Mama” and they scream and start crying. They don’t believe learning disabilities exist here. Some parents of the slower kids think if they just yell at the kids enough they’ll learn more.



If the kid’s parents are waiting outside, the dunce cap works to make them behave. If the kid’s parents aren’t waiting outside, they go “Look at me! I’m the center of attention!” and it makes things worse.



This is my smart class of good kids.



I have teenagers at night. They’re basically fluent and we just have conversations and I teach them slang.



This is XieJiang (River), my translator, who does all the grading and discipline, and Angel, the other foreign teacher from L.A.



This is Angel’s translator, ChingDongMai.



This is Angel doing what he does best…trying to pick up the hostess at the karaoke bar. In China, there are Christmas trees and pictures of Santa Claus up in every bar, all year long, and they have no idea what it means, but it's fashionable because it's American.

Natural Scenery

This river will fill up during the monsoons. In the background are some typical looking mountains outside of town. They are terraced down the side and farmers grow peas and lettuce.



There are lots of palm trees lining the street, and banana trees in the parks.



Orchids



There are lots of cranes living at the bottom of the river.

Day to Day Life

This is a toilet in China (a fancy one that flushes). I’m lucky to have a European toilet at my apartment. If I were just passing through China, I wouldn’t drink any liquids the entire time.



This cage of chickens is sitting outside a restaurant, along with a cage of rabbits and a big aquarium full of carp. It’s how you know the food will be fresh. Cages like this, or wicker baskets full of live chickens are everywhere. It’s not uncommon to see people walking down the street with live chickens on leashes.



There isn’t very much heavy machinery in China for construction. Most of the construction on this canal is done by 50 guys with shovels. Whenever there is a bulldozer or a backhoe running, 100 people drop whatever they’re doing and stop to watch it for half an hour.



Until recently, everyone was assigned a job when they finished school. Many people with no special skills are given jobs sweeping dust off the sidewalk. China has some serious environmental problems, but the city is actually very clean (except for the air), even with so much crowding.



This is how farmers get their goods to market. Bamboo rods over the shoulder with wicker baskets are everywhere. Construction workers move piles of bricks this way. Street vendors sling 2 lit coal stoves over their shoulder and cook roasted tofu squares and pork shish kabobs while they’re walking down the street.



Tomb Sweeping Festival was on April 5th. These coloured paper hangers were sold all over town for a couple weeks before hand. Old people buy them and hang them over their ancestors’ graves on the mountain in the center of town to wash away ghosts. Younger people tell me they don’t participate in this.





There are 2 rapper homeboys in ZunYi. Here they are. Only select American music (elevator music) is officially allowed in. Rock and roll and rap makes people too aggressive? It’s common to see 18 year old boys with headphones bopping their heads to Michael Bolton cranked up to full volume. When I play real rock and roll for people, they’re a little surprised and they don’t like it. Chinese music mostly sounds like elevator music too. Whenever I walk into a store or restaurant, they immediately take off the Chinese music and put on “My Heart Will Go On” or “Everything I Do, I Do It For You”. It’s getting on my nerves.



This is outside the school downtown. It’s a high fashion area. In Canada, being good looking helps, but in China, good looking people get paid more for doing the same job as unattractive people, at least in the service industry. It’s not even discreet. Good looking employees attract more customers. Along the same line, I think the demand for high fashion and cosmetics is stronger here, even in this poor rural village, than it is in Canada and the USA.



I’m the center of attention wherever I go. Curious people follow me around. If I go in a store or restaurant and I buy just something small, I try to pay and they won’t take my money because I’ve brought 20 other customers in for them behind me.
I saw these people playing music and doing traditional dance in the park. A few hundred people were watching them. I stopped to see what was going on and they had to stop the show because everyone turned around to look at me instead. I opened my bag and a hush fell over the crowd, I pulled out my camera and everyone went “Wooooooooo” and took a step back. They put their costumes on me and made me dance with them so they could get the crowd’s attention back on their show.
VIDEO!!!

The Countryside

Angel and I took a bus trip into the countryside to see some small towns. These are mountains out the window of the bus and some farms.





We wandered around some farms. There are a lot of farms up the side of the mountain with oxen and chickens running around. I wish it had been a clearer day. The mountains were covered in mist this day.





The village we went to is called HaiLong. It has about 2000 people, but it's just one street. It's very National Geographic.





The village has a small teacher's college. We wandered into an aprtment building and some students took us upstairs to show us around. The student housing is poor, but not entirely different from some student housing I've had. There is a kitchen on the third floor and single bedrooms on the first and second floor. The construction looks a lot like the inside of old barns in Canada.



There is very little to do in this town. Most people play this game with dominoes for money, or another gambling game with Chinese cards. It's also popular in Zunyi amung the older people.

The Quirks of China

China has an odour like "low-tide diesel sewage foot coal” but I'm in the poorest area of the country. I see high fashion people, but I also see dirty dirty farmers pulling rickshaws and smoking and horking all over the place. I've seen rats, lizards, horses that dropped dead on the side of the road, people with meat cleavers chasing dogs down the street, people with leprosy and land mine victims begging in the street. I hear it's a little more upscale in the big city. No matter who they are, they all stare at me. I've even caused a few car accidents this way. They stare partly because I'm white, and partly because I'm the only one wearing just a T-shirt when it's 28 degrees outside (and sadly, they don't sell sunscreen here. I tried to explain what it was to my translator and tried to explain what a sunburn is and he had no idea what I was talking about). I actually had the police stop me because they thought someone had stolen my coat. Little kids follow me around. They want to touch my hair and look at my blue eyes and poke me on the bridge of the nose. Chinese people's noses are almost flat right between the eyes and I'd never really noticed before. I get called big nose.

The only time I really hate being stared at is in the bathroom. Most bathrooms are a squatting over a long trough with no doors (bring your own toilet paper) or right on the side of the road. Chinese women squat down with a cup of tea a cigarette and a magazine and no one cares, but when I’m there, 10 people are staring at me and I can’t go.

I have a lot of boyfriends here. I walk down the street and I hear in Chinese, "Foreigner...I love you!" and sometimes "Sex! How much?" (I am not a prostitute was one of the very first things I learned how to say after, I want a beer...which is cheaper than water and comes in very large bottle here), but mostly in English I hear "HELLO!!!...OK!!...” and that's the best conversation I can have with most people, so I find I'm picking up Chinese quickly. It's hard to learn to read and write, but not so hard to pick up phonetically. There are no irregular verb tenses and it follows a clear pattern.

Everything in China is for sale and all prices are negotiable. In the small towns I’ve been to that are so poor they don’t have a hotel or restaurant, the thing to do is just knock on a farmer’s door and ask them to cook you something or ask to stay the night and negotiate a price. If they think you like something in their house, they offer to sell it to you. In the city, you can negotiate prices at hotels, restaurants, vegetable markets, anyone in the street selling any knick knacks on a cart, even when the price is posted (which it usually isn’t.) Chinese people are really friendly. They like to talk a lot. When I ask me translator to ask a question for me, it takes a ten minute conversation to arrive at an answer. It’s perfectly OK to walk into people’s houses and look around if the front is open, and they usually give you a cup of tea and tell you sit down for a chat. It’s perfectly OK to walk into the kitchen of a restaurant and have a chat with the cook and look through the cupboards to find what you want them to cook. Everyone tries to talk to me and take me out for lunch and buy me things and take a picture of me. I’m apparently in some ads on the side of the bus in ZunYi.

I get by just fine with language most of the time, most communication is non-verbal. I know a little Chinese...I don't understand ...I don’t know… how much does this cost...I'll have another beer...sit down and be quiet...where's you're book...don't fight...don't cry kids (I make a lot of kids cry).... I like/don't like...I want that/don't want that.... I am not a prostitute.... etc. but what I find bizarre is that when people realize I don't understand what they're saying, they write it down for me...in Chinese characters, as if that will make it much clearer for me? They've never come in contact with someone my age that can't read and write before. That is the single most difficult thing about living here is not being able read signs and labels. Shampoo and toilet bowl cleaner come in the same bottle with the writing being the only difference. You just have to remember which is which.

I’m getting used to little kids. The big difference here is that in Canada, kids fight over the red crayon, in China, they fight over the yellow crayon. I find playing with them on break and being friends goes a long way getting them to listen to me. (except one kid that probably has some form of turret’s syndrome) The bosses don't believe the teachers that kids respond to foreigners differently than they respond to Chinese people. If I speak Chinese to them in the classroom, it immediately gets their full attention. I say "I'm Chinese and you're foreigners." and that gets them REALLY excited jumping up and down going “No! No! No you’re not!” Getting them a little bit angry motivates them to speak in class and pay attention.

May Labour Day

Guiyang

I took a trip all around the province with Angel, Fu, Ben and his sister Shaowawa, who are all English teachers. We took the train from ZunYi to Guiyang, the capital and stayed in a really cheap hotel. The bus is more expensive than the train, and the road is pretty rough. Fu does all the bargaining and translating for us. This hotel cost about $2.50 Canadian. It had a communal bathroom with no showers or hot water. We went to Qian Ling Park up the mountain. This park has wild monkeys that eat out of your hand, so I fed some monkeys. One didn’t like the muffin I gave him and he punched me and climbed up a tree and threw peanut shells at me. We went up the mountain and there is a big ancient temple at the top. On the way up the mountain, there are many people selling incense and fortunetellers and palm readers and more monkeys at the top. We went to the mountain lake and through some buildings with master calligraphers. After the park, we went to the oldest pavilion in the city. Translated into English, it’s called the “number one excellent pavilion” It’s about 1000 years old. We had some dinner and went window shopping and looking around the city. We went to see the giant statue of Mao Zedong. After that, everyone went back to the hotel and Angel and I went searching for the nightlife. We met another foreigner on the street who took us out to a bar that had 6 more foreigners in China for a wedding that weren’t very friendly. That didn’t seem to realize it’s a big deal to see another foreigner. In ZunYi in 2 and half months, I’ve only seen one other foreigner that isn’t an English teacher, and 2 that are English teachers that live in ZunYi and teach at other schools. After Guiyang, we went to HuaXi, a small town 30 minutes south of Guiyang and got and even cheaper hotel, but it had a shower (one for the whole hotel). From there, we took a short bus trip to “Blue Stone Ancient Village” which is an old traditional village with stone wall around it. It’s dressed up for tourists from Guiyang to spend the day in the country, but we went off the beaten path with Fu as our guide and went into some houses. Fu is 60 something years old, but he comes out to discos with Angel and me. He says he never plays Mahjong (people hate having their picture taken playing Mahjong) but he rode his bike across the country and stopped in all the small towns. He’s up for anything. Some kids are really curious about me and Angel, and some cry and run screaming for their mother when they see us. College students always like to talk to us. The village is mostly old wooden houses with terracotta tiles on the roof, or renovated with brick. The houses are usually just a few rooms with the kitchen in the front with a coal stove and big wok, and the bedroom in the back. We talked to a 95 year old women in the village that grew up there her whole life in the house across the street from where she lives now. She said she only gets 30 Yuan per month pension, which is about $5.00, but her children look after her. I’ve seen some very very poor people in China, but I’ve never seen anyone starving. It seems like the whole day is one long meal. The top of the mountain in the village has a huge temple, but also a Catholic church beside it. On this holiday, the village was full of tourists from Hong Kong, so it was almost like a carnival atmosphere in the main market. We bought some of the local rice herb medicine wine, and, I ate my first pig foot. They have a lot of water buffalo for farming because the mountains aren’t practical for tractors. Apart from the tourism on the holiday, it’s really a farming town. On the holiday, they paint the buffalos’ horns and fight them for sport.

This is Fu and Angel on the train.



Ben and his sister Shaowawa



The train ride from ZunYi to Guiyang.









A typical store in China. The big jug on the counter is yaojiu (medicine wine). It’s usually fruit flavoured, but sometimes it has snakes and lizards floating in it. It’s very very cheap and it has usually 20-40% alcohol.



This is me at the giant statue of Mao Zedong in Guiyang.



Guiyang has a big mountain park with temples all the way up. This is a pagoda at the top and the master caligrapher.






The park is not a zoo. These are wild monkeys that come to the visitors and beg for food, just like feeding chipmunks. I got in a fight with one of the monkeys. I gave him a muffin and he didn’t like it. He punched me and climbed up a tree and threw peanut shells at me.






At the very top of the mountain there is another pavilion. This monkey jumped off the roof and surprised everyone.



This is a farmer working with a buffalo and another farmer posing with the buffalo that won the fight.




Outside Guiyang is Blue Stone Ancient Town. This is the wall and gate to the old city.






This is the gate into the market






This is the really old woman we talked to.



This is making tofu.



This is the temple at the top of the blue stone town.






Kaili

The next day we took the train to Kaili in the East, which is the jumping off point to the Miao and Dong minority villages. The Miao people wear very colourful clothing and headdress and the women stretch their ears. They speak a little Chinese, but they have their own language as well. Kaili is smaller than ZunYi, but it’s much more developed and modern. However, I did see groups of kids picking food out of the garbage and sharing it. Here we ran into an Englishman, Rod who shared a hotel with us (another cheap place). There’s not much to see to in the city, but I did run into some Miao people getting prepared for a festival. In the morning, Fu took us to Langde village, which I don’t think sees too many foreigners, because everyone was running away from me and screaming and hiding. I showed some people my stretched ears and they warmed up a little. This is by far the poorest village I went to. Miao are mountain people and farmers. Most of the houses are one room wooden houses attached to the barn. The bathrooms are in the pig sty and they save it all for fertilizer. This village is really, really poor. It was hard to find a bus to this town, once there, it was hard to find transportation out. We hired a tractor to take us to the next village and sat in the back. This machine starts with a crank on the front. Not too surprising, it broke down on the way and we were stuck on the side of the mountain. We picked up another passenger on the way with a cell phone and we called for some oil. The guy we picked up’s name was Csuan and he spoke quite a bit of English. Fu had to go back to work, so Csuan became our new translator. We went to another Miao village called Nanhua and spent the night. This village is geared to tourists with souvenirs and restaurants, still, the hotel had no running water with the bathroom in the pig sty and the little kids were terrified of me. The brave ones sneak up, touch me and run away. There’s no drinking age in China and some of the 7 year old kids stole my beer and chugged it. We had some local barbeque and hung around the beach with Csuan. I went of the beaten path through the village and it’s just as poor as the first village. Because they’re used to tourists, they expect money if you take their picture and try to charge twice as much to foreigners, this is where bargaining come in handy, and having a Chinese person to do the bargaining at the hotel. Many hotels don’t allow foreigners at all, or have different prices posted. At this hotel, they said they would make another bed to put in the room, and they got out a hammer and nails and literally, made another bed for us. In the morning, we had to catch the train back to Guiyang and Csuan had to go to work, so Angel and I were on our own, but we did get Csuan pretty drunk on the train. Angel decided to go back to ZunYi, so I went on alone to Anshun.

This is gambling with mahjong in Kaili. This is China’s favourite activity.



These are some Miao people getting ready for some night dancing in Kaili.















We went to Longde Miao village first, which doesn’t see too many tourists, let alone foreigners. Most of the pictures I got have terrified kids in them running away from me. This is on the way there. It was hard to find a bus to go there, and impossible to find one that would stop to take us out.



Longde Miao Village.



Inside a house.



Miao folk art.



This tractor tried to take us to Nanhua village, but it broke down.



Nanhua is on the other side of the river, also a Miao village, but they have a cleaned up area to attract tourists from Guiyang and Hong Kong and put on traditional dancing shows and sell souvenirs and wax cloth dying wallhangings.















Rice



This is the local specialty. It’s a pan of coal with beef barbequed on top then dipped in chilie peppers.



I walked into someone’s house and they dressed me up.



This is Csuan leaving for work with me and Angel at the train station in Giuyang after we got him drunk on the train.




Anshun

Anshun is a few hours west of Guiyang in waterfall country. Anshun was easy to navigate alone because the things to see are all in a national park so transportation was easy. I almost didn’t get off the train because there were too many people trying to get on and off at the same time. When I’m alone, I have 100 babysitters. As soon as I got off the train, a worker at the train station grabbed me and took me across the street to a hostel and checked me in. I bargained with the manager for the price and ended up paying $10.00 for a single with private shower with hot water. In the morning, I took a trip to the Dragon Palace Caves national park. I saw some of the Bouyei villages on the shores of the river. These are waterfall people that are an ethnic minority group from Thailand. They build everything out of stone with no mortar and slate roofs. They are poor like the Miao people. Most of the houses are just part of the barn with the pigs and the water buffalo (but everyone seems to have a DVD player, I was told later they steal them off trains). I went with a small group in a long boat down a river with more villages to one of the caves that has a big temple inside, where I met some monks. Then, we drove to another Bouyei village that was having a festival and we watched some dancing. This area is fairly touristy on account of being inside the park. We took another long boat into the biggest cave, which is half underwater and has all kinds of formations on the roof. Most of the pictures don’t do it justice an account of the cave being really dark, but the boat went in about a kilometer into the cave. They also had a bunch of dinosaur fossils, but I wasn’t allowed to take pictures. After that, we went to see the biggest waterfall in China. It’s a lot like Niagara Falls so I wasn’t too impressed, but it’s a pretty big tourist attraction. We went back to Anshun and the guys from the bus wanted to take me out for dinner. They speak less English than I speak Chinese, but somehow we had a conversation over China Moutai (58% alcohol). They are all police officers on May holiday. Like most people, I say anything in English or Chinese and they all giggle. This province is home of China’s “Famous Liquors” After that I took a look around Anshun. It’s a little smaller than ZunYi and very similar style, except it has Bouyei minority people instead of Miao minority people. The night market was more exotic. Anshun is on a big lake, so they have a lot of seafood. In the night market, I saw the usual chicken feet, tofu, shish kabobs etc, but also buckets of live snakes, crabs, snails, frogs, crawfish and restaurants advertising dog meat. Eat first and ask questions later. After that, I went back to ZunYi in the morning.

This is what the Bouyei houses are like. Inside is very similar to the Miao villages and other poor rural houses.



These are Bouyei people selling tea and dancing. Most of the older people and about half of the young people wear the day to day traditional clothing. The bright outfits are just for special occasions. The same is true for the Miao people. Many of the minority people move to the cities and even in ZunYi there a quite a lot doing dirty jobs. China recycles, but not by sorting the garbage at your house. Poor people carry big wicker baskets on their back and long tongs and pick up garbage off the street and sort through the garbage cans for plastic and glass and sell it to a warehouse recycler. Most of the people doing this are minorities. Even if they’re not wearing the traditional costumes, you can still tell by their facial features that they’re not Han Chinese.






This is in the national park on the way down the river to a Bouyei village.









From the village, it’s a short walk to one cave with a big temple inside. You always know when you’re near a temple because there will be people selling incense. People selling things on the street assume I have a lot of money. Sometimes they’re very persistent. People sell newspapers on the street and I explain that I can’t read, but that doesn’t stop them following me down the street trying to make a sale.









This is taking a boat into the main Dragon Palace caves. The “dragons” are the biggest formations coming off the ceiling. Inside there are all sorts of smaller hanging formations and crystal formations. Once inside, the cave has a lot of rooms where the ceiling is over 100 feet high that come down to narrow entrances into more rooms. The cave goes through 20 mountains but only a small part is open to tourists because the boats only go in so far and there is a big waterfall inside the cave.









This is the Huanguoshu waterfall. It’s pretty similar to Niagara Falls. There are caves in behind the falls you can go through, but I just didn’t feel like being wet.

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