And You Thought the Xi'an Entry Was Long...

I'm at an internet cafe in Luoyang near the train station. Helen and I were extreme, hardcore tourists this weekend. We ended a few hours early (the train for Anyang leaves in a few hours), so we had some time to kill and we wanted something that involved chairs and air conditioning. At first we aimed for bubble tea, but ended up here.

So the good news is I have some extended time for updates (and boy, do I have updates). The bad news is that I don't have any pictures or anything to share, as I left the hook-up for my camera in Anyang (I almost wrote "at home"... yikes). So this entry will be all text and in the coming days I'll just add an entry with photos.

There is one random thing I have been meaning to write about and keep forgetting to include. Last week, I taught the words for family (mother, father, aunt, uncle, etc). As a fun break from drilling vocabulary and writing sentences, I made a powerpoint with photos I had of my own family members. Because there is no multimedia in the classroom, I have to bring my computer around to each person, so it takes awhile, but the kids loved seeing them. Anyway, I had a picture of my mom with her two sisters (for "aunt") on the beach outside my Nana's condo in Florida. Mom: almost every single person in the class told me that you looked "young" and "very beautiful." Even the English teacher thought you looked more like my sister than my mother. So that's either really good for you or really, really bad for me. But I thought you'd like that. They thought you were 40. Ha, how's this for a public shoutout?

Ok, on to the daily updates. I'll start with last Thursday, which at this point seems like a lifetime ago. After class on Thursday, I ventured around the Old City by myself. It was the first time I had spent an extended period of time by myself, and it felt completely liberating. I walked around for hours with no particular destinations, just following the winding, narrow streets of the Old City. I didn't talk to anyone. I put on my sunglasses (they are so obnoxious... from the early 1990s and florescent green). In America, everyone would stare at me for wearing them (oh, wait, everyone does), but here they made me fit in. No one could see my big western eyes, and no one stared at me. It was fantastic. I felt like I was undercover. Some people stared at my boot, but I consider that a separate issue. So I got to roam around the Old City blending in more than I ever had before.

On Thursday night, we had to leave our hotel. The police are conducting searches of all the hotels every couple of days as the Olympics draw nearer (and because the torch will be in Anyang tomorrow). Our hotel is not insured to have foriegners, so we leave whenever a check is planned. We went to kind of a late night snack stand, which turned out to be little carts lined up under a big, open area with a roof (like the Ann Arbor or Ithaca Farmer's Markets) with all sorts of traditional Chinese foods and snacks. It was phenomenal. Several people came over to me and Helen, too. A little 8-year-old came over with her dad and sat with us for awhile. She didn't know English, but she chatted with Helen for awhile and then gave me a little Beijing Olympics 2008 flag. It's the stupid things like that that I will treasure when I go home. After the snack stand, we met Rob to get bubble tea just down the road. It was his first time having bubbles, and when he first tasted one he kind of flinched and jumped up and back out of his chair. It was hilarious (yeah... maybe I need to get out more).

Teaching on Friday was fairly uneventful. Maybe I haven't stressed this enough, but the kids this session are at a much higher level than the kids I had in the last session. I have been able to do the activities with them that I had originally wanted to do in China (like use maps of NYC, Ithaca, and Ann Arbor to teach directions, do complicated games with sentences, etc). I have really enjoyed that. There are also two very, very advanced girls in my class--Mary, who is 14, and Helen, who is 17. I write letters with them back and forth so that they can have some extra practice composing their thoughts in English. It isn't as good as spending more time with them conversing, but I think this way is good because it gives them time to think about what they are going to say. They often get nervous speaking with me even though they know a lot about English. Every so often I play a game called the "yes/no" game, where I split the class into teams (3 or 4 teams) and each team takes turns asking me a yes/no question. If I say "yes," then they get 3 points. If I say "no," then they get 1 point. I got the game off the internet. It may seem stupid, but it's great fun. The kids are curious about me and they can ask anything they want, plus they have to practice composing questions and speaking in English in the process. Some of them were funny... Nancy asked if I thought Anyang was beautiful and I said "no." People couldn't stop laughing.

After class on Friday, Rob, Helen, and I went to Helen's house for lunch. It was fantastic. Her family was so welcoming and wonderful and her mom made some of the best food I have had so far in my time here. Rob and I also met Helen's 19-year-old brother who we named Liam. His English is so-so, but he's a really friendly guy. He decided to come with us to Luoyang for the weekend! After we finished lunch, Helen and her brother showed us the books that they use to learn English. I was flipping through one, and found several pages of dialogue and excersizes that focused around the "Michigan Football Game." It was hilarious! The dialogue was like this:
"Betty: I really do hope that Michigan will win the football game!
Pauline: Yes, all they need is one more touchdown.
Joe: Yes, One more touchdown!
Dan: Do we have any apple pie?"
Those kind of cultural stereotypes were all over the book. It was really fun to look at.

Later in the day we left to take the train to Luoyang. We had standing tickets (which, unbelievably, are the same price as sitting tickets). Helen and her brother made friends with the police officials in charge of the station and they helped us out. We sat in their heavily air-conditioned office to wait for our train in cool privacy. When the train arrived, we were escorted out and they tried to find seats for us (we milked my boot for all it was worth). There weren't any seats left, but they gave us a tip of going and sitting in the dining car and ordering something little, which we did. (There was a man sitting across from me and Helen hocking continuous lugies on the ground. Welcome to China.) We got to sit for almost the entire four hour ride there until we were kicked out for the last 20 minutes. Still, it was a good idea, and we have seating tickets for the ride back later tonight so we don't have to worry.

We were welcomed by the Luoyang crew at the Luoyang train station (there was so much English there! Back to tourist land, I guess) and went back to their school,the Luoyang Number One Middle School. It was completely, totally, utterly unbelievable. Palatial, no question. Huge. More like a really nice, manicured University than anything. They even have an observatory on the top of one of the main buildings! Rob and I were astounded. All the dormitories, students and teachers alike, were insane. The facilities were just all around incredible. I'll include a picture of the main building later to show you what I mean.

But here's the thing: I am really, really glad I'm not in Luoyang. The kids are rich and therefore have opportunity. The school is about 15 minutes by taxi outside of the city (6 million) and is really isolated. The kids at Luoyang go everywhere in some kind of group. It's a really different experience from what I'm having. Being in Anyang has forced me out of my comfort zone into really authentic China in a way that I didn't think was possible for one month. I don't think I'd trade my time in Anyang for anything, even the excellent conditions in Luoyang.

So Friday night we hung out at the school. It was just me, Rob, and the four teachers from Nanyang who came on Friday, so we slept in the school. Then, on Saturday, a small group of us set out early to see both the Longmen Grottoes and the Shaolin Temple (which is actually in Dengfeng), which is the birthplace of Kung Fu. We took a taxi to the Grottoes and from there we took a direct bus (more like a large van) to the Shaolin Temple. The admission fees were ridiculous by China standards, but both sites are pretty famous, so it makes sense. The ride from the Grottoes to the Shaolin Temple was about 1.5 hours. Both sites were just incredible, and I think it's better to describe them in photos later than to add even more detail to this entry. It is worth mentioning, though, that we didn't eat any breakfast or lunch because there was no time. Like I said, hardcore.

We weren't sure how to leave the Shaolin Temple and get back to Luoyang. Helen talked to people and they said that there was a bus that would drive by on the way to Luoyang, and we should flag it down to get a ride back. We went out to the street and the bus came immediately! We hopped on and for 20Y were en route back to Louyang (about a 2 hour ride). The route we took was pretty sketchy... we drove through dirt roads in the middle of corn fields, small villages, and really narrow roads with huge drop offs. It was like dangerous off-roading with 50 other people in a tour bus. Fun stuff.

The Grottoes and the Temple occupied our time from 8:30am -- 7:45pm, to give you some idea of the amount to see and the amount of walking involved. When we got back to downtown Luoyang, Helen, her brother and I left the rest of our small group (the others had slept in and went to the Temple after us. Some other teachers from other areas in the province came in to Luoyang for the day, but we didn't get to see them because we were out at the sites) to get our train tickets back to Anyang. After that, even though we hadn't eaten anything all day but a few snacks, we got in a taxi to try to get to the Luoyang water show, which is the biggest water show in Asia. Everything would have been time, but the streets to get there were closed off because the torch was passing through Luoyang the next morning (on the way to Anyang, where it will be tomorrow--we're following the torch). We were bummed. We went and got food at a random place.

Because of the blocked off road, getting a taxi back to the Middle School was really difficult. We got in three different taxis who tried and failed before we got a taxi with a young, hilarious driver who promised that he knew a way to get us back to the school. And, after a very sketchy dirt road, and a long taxi ride, we arrived back at the school.

I was sitting and talking with Emer and Danielle, two friends who teach in Nanyang, and we agreed that we didn't really want to stay at the Middle School again for the night. We had all been looking forward to a nice hotel room as one of the main attractions of the weekend (for them more than me, as their living conditions are worse). Helen made a few calls, and around 11:30pm the four of us left to go stay in a hotel. Getting a taxi back to the city luckily wasn't hard because some of the other teachers were coming back in a taxi just as we neede to leave, so there was one sitting right outside the school.

We didn't get fully situated in our hotel until an hour and a half later, but it was glorious. Completely glorious. Three stars. Breakfast was included, and we all ate as much as we possibly could and then went back to sleep until we had to check out. It was Helen's first time in a hotel, and we took a bunch of fun pictures of her in the room.

After we left the hotel, the four of us went to a Teahouse. It was fun, but not what I was expecting. The private room had a dining room table, a couch, and a TV. The tea wasn't served in China, but in glass--even the cups were glass. The tea was quite good green tea. Helen said it wasn't very traditional, but it also gave me the feeling that a real, traditional Teahouse is hard to find and probably found more in the big, touristy cities farther east.

We said bye to Emer and Danielle (they had to leave for the bus back to Nanyang) and went to Luoyang's Old City. It was fantastic. We climbed the city wall and saw the temples up there. After, we walked all around the Old City. I made friends with a family who owned one of the stores that sold Chinese art (artistic words and pictures). The mother, father, and son were all insanely nice. I bought a personalized piece of art for myself. I'll show you in pictures later. In the Old City we also had baozi. Surprise, surprise. It was in a little hole-in-the-wall shop. It was a lot of fun.

Ok. I actually left out a good bit of detail, but you're probably thankful. I know I tend to be too long winded. I'll add pictures as soon as I get a chance, so that will help to illustrate what I have left out.