Adventures in Guangzhou!

Getting home is a completely separate story. First off, I should note that when I got my ticket before vacation, it was only one way. Apparently they don't really do round trip tickets in China so I knew I'd have to figure it out once I got there. Unfortunately, I was arriving in Hangzhou but departing from Shanghai and you can't buy tickets for different cities so I was in a bit of trouble. Much like traveling on the way up, everyone was going to be trying to get home at the exact same time as me. Great. Luckily, I took advantage of some serious guanxi one last time and had Phillip book my ticket when he got Mal and Tyler's tickets. Brilliant! He managed to secure me a top bunk hard sleeper which is exactly what I wanted. Gotta love the kid. Now you might be wondering, why was I leaving on Friday, putting me back in GZ on Saturday? Well it turns out that the Chinese vacation is exactly 7 days long--Saturday to Saturday. The weekend turns into normal weekdays and everyone starts working again as usual. I have to say that I am diametrically opposed to this policy. The weekend is for not working! Regardless, I absolutely had to be back in Guangzhou to teach at 2:50pm on Saturday. I wanted a ticket that would put me back around noon, giving me enough time to shower and get ready for class. Unfortunately the only thing available put me back at 2pm so I decided to chance it, rather than leave a day earlier. Given how long my train was delayed on the way up, I knew this was a pretty serious gamble but there's no way I was going to leave Shanghai early.

Given the craziness of the train station on the way up, I gave myself an extra buffer of time to make sure I found my way to the right room within the station. Silly me--I was expecting the madness of Guangzhou Central but I encountered a model of efficiency in the Shanghai Railway Station. It was modern, well-lit, had food shops, and most importantly sported an enormous electronic billboard showing where to go for each train. So it turns out I woke up early for no good reason. Oh well. Anyhow, I got on the train and was disappointed that I was not next to another attractive dancer. However, I did immediately make some basic conversation with the kid next to me who is a 26 year-old working in GZ. After a solid nap, I climbed back down and found a bunch of dudes from the compartment to the left all staring at me. Weird. It turns out though that they were all simply dying to talk to me and to practice their English. For the next 8 hours or so we talked about anything and everything: politics, traveling, history, sports, education, shopping, and international relations. It was really nice and I truly enjoyed getting their perspectives on the multitude of issues. They even helped me a bit with my awful Chinese which I appreciated. One thing about being a westerner in China is that everyone here greatly exaggerates language abilities. They kept saying that their English was terrible when we were obviously able to converse, whereas they kept complimenting me on my crude Chinese even though I know it's awful. I know all of about 15 words and do not have the ability to go more than one sentence at a time yet they think I'm a genius for saying "ni hao." This has been consistent everywhere I've been. I say "I speak a little mandarin but not very well" and they are absolutely wowed beyond belief. I think it's a cultural thing.

As 10pm neared (lights out time) I decided to leave my bag on the overhanging shelf instead of in the bed with me. I rationalized that everyone around me was far too friendly to steal my stuff. Just in case though, I used my mini bike lock to secure the pack to the rail. Needless to say, I slept *much* better that night with all the room to spread out. I woke up bright and early the next morning (with all my possessions still intact) and read for a few hours from the Kristoff/Wudunn book "China Wakes." It really is fascinating to read about the evolution (revolution?) of modern China while actually being here and seeing it first hand. Anyhow, I asked one of my new friends what time we were expected to arrive in GZ and they told me 11:30am! I have absolutely no idea how we got that far ahead of schedule but I was elated. My pants and collared shirt were all ready for me to go directly from the train into the classroom but I was lucky enough to have enough time to even shower. Plus I got into Guangzhou East Station which is infinitely better than Central.

Sure I threw together a lesson at the last second but that's okay--it's actually been just fine. However since we were on a Thursday schedule, Steven and I had to hold conversation corner during the last period of the day. I really wanted to just go to bed, but alas, I needed to fulfill my duties as teacher. One of the senior 3 students actually showed up to talk which was a first. This girl had Melissa and Sonja last year (the two PiA-ers from last year) and fell in love with them. I was happy to talk with her, but she put me on the spot with a question about Tiananmen. She wanted to know what I knew about the events from 1989 and what I thought about it. This is obviously dangerous territory so I stuck to the basics- some students were protesting that they wanted more representation and that the government used some violence in response. She went on to explain that the "incident," as it's referred to, is not even in her history book and that the only reason she knows about it is because her politics teacher told them about it. However, she told me that the teacher went into detail about how the western world greatly exaggerated the events and that they made a very big deal out of nothing. Wow. Especially after reading the section in "China Wakes" about those few days I was dumbfounded. Kristoff was there in the thick of things and saw troops fire and kill people right in front of him. It's really tough for me to think that this could have been a gross miscalculation by western media, especially given the history of media control by the Communist Party. What could I say though? I did my best to steer the conversation away from this and to something more mundane like Chinese food, but several other students wanted to put their two cents in as well. Oy. I basically backed down and didn't say much of anything. It was frustrating but I also don't want to ruffle any feathers here. So there you have it! A week's vacation and right back into the thick of teaching...

Just in case you didn't see my pictures linked from a previous post, here they are one last time. They are sort of in reverse chronological order (minus the first 6 or so) but it's all there. Enjoy!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/96703995@N00/