Awesome Travels Part Two - Jinan

Nǐ hǎo, and welcome to the next instalment of my epic travels of 2014. We arrived to Ji Nan in the evening on May 2nd. The city looked like any other Chinese city really, but with its wide roads it reminded me somewhat of Nan Jing. It was built up in the centre, with shopping malls and big brand names everywhere.

We stayed at a Home Inn, which was in an excellent location. After dumping our bags in the room we walked down the street to get some food on a road we’d spotted from the taxi. It was a whole road of XiaoCao (BBQ) stalls, some just a little stand and others with a whole restaurant and a bustling outdoor seating area. The air was thick with smoke.

The next morning we went to the Five Dragons Spring, which was just a few minutes’ walk from our hotel. 5 Yuan entry was a complete bargain – it was busy because many people were on their May Day holidays, but for once it didn’t annoy me – it added to the experience and atmosphere, and it was great that the gardens were filled with laugher and the sounds of people enjoying themselves. Chinese workers get so few holidays – you get a sense of how much they really treasure those days where they’re given time to relax.

The gardens were stuffed full of pungent flowers, small roses on bushes in a variety of pinks, so every breath tasted sweet. There were lots of little ponds filled with the clearest, bluest waters (with, of course, the occasional bit of filth floating around, but for the most part it seemed clean and well kept.) There were a few splash pools and flat terraces of water that had been flooded in puddles for the children to play in, many of whom had bought bicycle pump style water guns and were shrieking as the soaked each other. It was a glorious place to have a short walk – so peaceful even in the centre of town, and wonderfully green.

After lunch at a Muslim Noodles we went in search of a local spring. This part of Shan Dong is known for its springs and bathing areas. We walked down a tourist street known as the ‘food street’ in our Rough Guide. It did indeed sell food – milk tea, things-on-a-stick, cakes, noodles, BBQ pig’s trotters…all kinds of snack foods and meals. It was heaving; absolutely mad with people. As soon as we could, we escaped down a little Hutong alley to get away from the crush.

We decided on this attraction (the Hutongs and Wang Fu Chi Zi bathing area) and the 5 Dragons Spring instead of going to the larger, more commercial and expensive one (Bao Tu Quan). No great loss as, with the great location of our hotel, they were all in the same sort of area and really easy to get to.

So yes, as I said we escaped down this little alleyway into the Hutongs. What a labyrinth! We went down ‘the most narrow alley in Jinan’ – enlightened by the information sings all over the place that pointed out places of interest. The lanes were dazzling in the light – all whitewashed and grey concrete and dusty underfoot. We walked for quite a while, taking a plethora of twists and turns before we found the pool.

It wasn’t quite what I’d expected. It was surrounded by houses on all sides and, apart from a sort of skirting board ledge that you could perch on, there were only one or two points of entry to the pool. The bathers were all male – mostly older Chinese men taking their daily exercise. Some were doing laps, others in various stages of scrubbing themselves using the bars of soap that they’d wedged into nooks and crannies or hung from hooks on the wall.

The water was deep and clear, with seaweed everywhere. It looked fairly clean with not too much rubbish floating in it, but there were occasional films and tracks on the surface like a shiny streak of petrol, coming from where the woman were squatting in the shallows and washing baskets of clothes. Away from the heaving crowds, just a few streets apart, it was quite serene and peaceful there. Buried by the low rise buildings you couldn’t see the upper floors of the shopping malls that were just a stone’s throw away. The lapping of the waters as they slapped against the stone walls was gentle and calming. Sasha contemplated going for a swim but decided against it for lack of a changing room. As there were no female patrons I didn’t fancy it either – particularly given the small crowd gathered at the terraced restaurant, who were already quite taken with the teenage boy diving from the wall, and who would no doubt whip out the camera phones at the sight of a white, female swimmer.

As we walked back up the tourist street (which was even busier than before) Sasha tried a BBQ pig’s foot, and I had an iced lemon drink from Coco. Our destination was the Black Tiger Spring, about a 20 minute walk away. We found another public pool, this one more like an outdoor swimming pool made of tiles and with lifeguards at the poolside. We tried to go and investigate but the guard wouldn’t let us pass, for reasons we never quite understood. We couldn’t figure out why we weren’t allowed in but also weren’t in the mood for an argument so we left it.

At the foot of the pool, divided by a fence, was a little splash pool for children that had a bed of sand at one edge, like a makeshift beach. The water was filthy, and the combination of sand and mud made the water a cloudy, mustard brown colour. I saw at least one cigarette butt floating in the shallows. We sat for a while in the shade and watched the children playing to out left, and the river floating by to our right.

It was a glorious afternoon sat in the sun, followed by a walk back to the hotel along the riverside. We had planned to take one of the little boats that chugs the circuit around the central part of the city, but they weren’t running that day because of the wind. It was pretty windy (all day I had been rubbing dust and dirt from my eyes and scrabbling to get my hair under my hat) but it didn’t seem that dangerous to me.

After a rest at the hotel we went back to the BBQ street for a Jinan style dinner. Sasha treated us to a fresh coconut with a straw punctured in the top, which we sipped as we walked the street and decided where to eat. First we went to a lady with a little stall selling seafood. It was quite early so some stalls weren’t open yet, but she was ready next to the flaming BBQ coals and beckoned us to look at her wares. All she had was oysters and scallops, all moist and fresh and waiting for a generous helping of garlic for seasoning. At 5 Yuan a piece we both tried one of each. They were delicious to say the least, absolutely scrumptious. It made a very good starter.

After that we walked the length of the street in search of our main eatery. We were looking for somewhere small – the bigger BBQ places had over 100 customers and our request for NON spicy food would no doubt be forgotten, so we aimed for somewhere a bit more personal. Places that were very quiet or without customers indicated a lack of popularity or bad food, so we steered clear of those. We found a place with indoor seating that looked good and had a glance at the menu.

We ordered fried bread, quality lamb ‘steak’, chicken wings, whole fish, small pieces of meat (0.8 RMB per stick! – 8p a stick) and…lambs eyes. All served on a stick, cooked on a BBQ. The eyes were…interesting. A bit like chewy eggs. Not something I’d be in a rush to try again! I liked the small sticks of meat best, which are so small they have to be ordered 10 at a time. After that we made a final stop we’d eaten at on our first night, ran by two old ladies. We got more mini meat sticks, mushrooms and green veg – what a wonderful pick’n’mix feast!

And another of my sketches - Sasha and I looking for food, with the MASSIVE cat that was also on the prowl.

So that was Jinan in a nutshell. It was a nice city – lots going on but not too busy. Jinan was a pleasant place to spend a day or two. A modern Chinese metropolis interwoven with ancient Chinese culture.

Awesome Travels Part One - Yan Tai and train to Ji Nan

The day we left Nanshan (where we spent a month volunteering) the school provided a driver to take us back to Yantai. Simone came with us as she wasn’t working that week. We were met by Jack, as you’ll remember as the contact who picked us up from the airport, and who arranged our time working as volunteers.

What a guy. He’s just so… rude and annoying. We don’t trust him because he lied to us (by telling us we’d be based in Yan tai city (not Nanshan) and that we’d have a full induction at the school (which definitely didn’t happen) and other things besides.)
So when we arrived Jack was there, and we asked him to take us to our hotel. We had booked it on Elong which is a trustworthy website – we’ve used it before. But he told us we needed to cancel our reservation because the hotel was in a bad location and it was too expensive (remembering that we were paying for it anyway so it made no difference to him.) It was a motel 168 which is a little more expensive than a Home Inn or Hastings, but for two people sharing a room its pretty good value. So, we pretty much told him to push off and that we’d be keeping our reservation.

We think that he was so keen to get us to stay at one of his crappy hotels because he has some deal there where he makes money out of it. So yeah, his hotels are cheaper, but they’re also disgusting and crawling with bugs and have nasty stains on the bed sheets – thanks but… no thanks! So we checked into our hotel, and Simone booked a room there too, which Jack was quietly furious about. He kept bringing it up and again and again, pointing out other hotels where the room would have been cheaper, and saying how bad the location of our hotel was (which was a total lie – the location was excellent, only a 15 minute walk from the beach, museums, bars…)

He was quite helpful with getting the train tickets we needed – we could have done it ourselves but it was nice of him to help. However, he did that thing where he didn’t ask us anything, just decided for us and treated us like children. For example, he took us to the Yantai museum and he didn’t even ask if we wanted to go there. I thought he was driving us from the train station to the hotel, that’s all we asked him to do, but on the way he made us get out at the museum. Once there, he didn’t show us around or anything, he just left us there while he read a book. Later, we had plans for dinner, but Jack insisted on driving us all the way out of town to the University where he has some deal, and bought us dinner. He made a big thing out of it but it was just like a school cafeteria, nothing special. The food was quite nice, better than the food in Nanshan by at least a hundred times, but still, it was all a bit weird. As soon as he finished eating, he ran out to wait for us in the car while we ate, then he had us pose for photos around the university.

Eventually we managed to get him to take us back to the hotel and we got rid of him. He indicated that he wanted to continue the ‘fun tour’ and also take us out the next day. We were quite blunt with him in the end and said we didn’t want to see him the next day – we were absolutely sick of the sight of him and so happy we’d never see him again!

So after Jack had finally left us we escaped to ‘bar street’ and had a few drinks. We spent quite a long time in ‘Raffels’ bar, where the landlord Eric was very pleased to see us and we played darts and foosball and chatted to two Norwegian Oil rig workers until almost midnight. After that late night we didn’t get up early the next day, but we still packed a lot in.

We walked down to the seafront with Simone, which was bustling and busy with people, it being May 1st and so lots of people had the day off work. There were people on roller skates and skateboards, kids flying kites, people fishing and families meeting up… a really nice atmosphere.

It was also boiling hot and sunny. We strolled along the seafront and met up with Lily, a Chinese friend of Simone’s who just moved to Yantai to work at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. We took a walk through some of the back streets there that were steeped in history – old colonial style buildings standing out against the modern Chinese structures.

We tried one of the snack stalls at the end of bar street – Taiwan friend yoghurt. She had little cubes of set yoghurt (which was actually more like milk with flour in to make it set) in a variety of flavours. Each stick had four or five cubes on, which were then dipped in batter and deep friend. After that she painted a layer of condensed milk on top. They were lush – the inside was all creamy and delicious, a great snack. For lunch Sasha, Simone and Lily had Mala Tang from a street-side stall and I got a few sticks of BBQ – a circle of sweetcorn bread, a large squid and some fish which were flat, chewy and sweet. Not sure what kind of fish but I always think that they taste a bit like mackerel. After that I had a stick of fresh pineapple which was very sweet and fresh.

In the afternoon we went to the Chang Yu Wine museum. 50 Yuan entry but that included a free taste of red and white wine down in the wine cellars, plus a 110 ml bottle of Chang Yu brandy.

The wine museum was quite interesting. Most of it had English captions. The wine cellar was the best – it stank of wine, a fruity, intoxicating, heavy scent of sweet red wine. There were barrels of all sizes and walls lined with dusty bottles. Most of all it was nice to escape to the cool of the cellar and get out of the midday heat.

We went back to the hotel then for a rest and then in the evening went for the long dreamed of outing to Pizza Hut. I don’t even like Pizza Hut very much, but the whole time I was in Nanshan, with the terrible food, I dreamt of Pizza Hut. We ordered entirely too much food and I felt pretty sick afterwards, and my stomach was certainly paying the price afterwards. Don’t think I’ll eat Pizza Hut again for years now – not until I’m stuck somewhere else where the food is hellish and I’m driven to it!

We took a walk along the seafront by Number 2 Beach to walk off some of the food, and then back to the hotel. So that’s Yantai in a nutshell. It seems like quite an interesting place. A lot of history there. I think it was the first port to open to the West, and at one time I had all the trade with foreign counties. But then Shanghai opened up and developed and eventually took over. The British Embassy moved from Yantai to Shanghai and the little seaside town went back to being nothing really. It has some old churches that were the first in China, and a hospital that was set up by French missionaries. It’s still in use, though I don’t think there’s much of a French influence these days.

After our short break in Yan Tai we took the train to Ji Nan, an 8 hour journey and our first major train travel experience. The tickets were great value – 80 RMB for a seat so it works out about £1 an hour for travel. The train was a K train, which is one of the old style trains so it went quite slowly and was all clunky and rattling. There were four or six seats to a table, not much leg room but the windows were nice and big. The seats were a little uncomfortable and the toilets on board were… pretty primitive! Just a squat toilet with the hole opening out onto the track.

On the journey the landscape was really interesting – it changed as we went along too. Lots of farmland – at first it was all apple orchards (Yan Tai is famous for its apples, as is Shan Dong province in general) but those soon gave way to other crops. It was a very windy day, and occasionally there would be all sorts of rubbish flying by the train windows, caught on the breeze. There was rubbish all over the place really – gathered in clumps in the streams and creeks, and piled in lumps at the edges of fields. The low, tumble down buildings gave way to small farms and built up areas, with machines at work. I saw magpies everywhere – lined up on telephone wires or groups of 8 or more sitting amongst the crops.

Some of my sketches from the journey (I'm no artist so, be warned! haha)

By the end of the journey I had a sore back and a sore arse, but even after 8 hours on the train I wasn’t bored once. I took up a lot of time writing about and sketching what I saw out the window, doing cross stitch, reading, and of course just staring out the window and watching the world go by. We spent a good while chomping our way through the prodigious amount of snacks we brought with us, and chatting to the Chinese people sitting nearby, who were all very interested in us. Pulling into the last leg of the journey, the scene out the window was dramatically altered from what it was at the beginning. Much more built up, dozens of motorways, high rise buildings and tower blocks. A few years ago, I guess that none of this was here. In another 10 years things will have changed even more, with the last of these tumble-down houses crumbled to dust, and old farmland converted into cities of skyscrapers, probably just as empty and unoccupied as those buildings are these days.

So there’s a short introduction to Yan Tai, next on the list of travel diaries to write up – our visit to Jinan. Zàijiàn xxx

Nanshan - Volunteering at a School in Nanshan

Nǐ hǎo, and what a lot of catching up I have to do. We’ve been travelling since April and this is the first chance I’ve had to sit down and type up it all up. So first, about the month we spent volunteering in Nanshan. We found the position on www.workaway.info/ and were looking forward to teaching in a local school, with all the challenges that it entails. Anyway, I’ll hand over now to my travel diary, which I have taken out of sequence and arranged by topic…

Nanshan and nearby

The thing about our volunteering in Nanshan is that we didn’t have any idea that was where we would be. In our correspondence with Jack Liu he had always said that we would be in Yan Tai, one of the bigger cities in Shandong province. I guess he thought that if he told us we’d be going to this tiny little village with next to nothing to do that we wouldn’t want to go – which isn’t true, we probably would have still accepted the position. So, basically he lied to us. Even on the day of driving us to the school he lied about it.

We arrived to Yan Tai city in the evening, and it seemed like a nice place – all up in building works, a fast developing city that’s being brought up to date. There were several points of interest that we were hoping to visit – the Wine Museum, a stylish opera house and (apparently) the first Catholic Church built in China, in the 1800’s. Yan Tai is a seaside town, though I couldn’t see much of the sea when we arrived. I was hoping to catch a glimpse of it in the daytime but no such luck. The hostel Jack put us in was pretty basic…. bugs everywhere!

Anyway, the day after we arrived we were up bright and early for the driver who was taking us to the school. I thought it would be near the centre of town (and the seaside, and the museums…) but where we were taken was out in the middle of no-where, over an hour away from Yan Tai proper. The day before I’d even asked Jack if the school was near the centre of Yan Tai, and he replied that “the city has many centres”. What a fraudster! I just don’t understand why that man felt he had to lie to us about where we were going; driving us to some far out place we’d never heard of. Anyway… where we ended up was Nanshan, which is so small it basically doesn’t exist – you can’t even find it on Google Maps.

To begin with it was quite nice being somewhere quiet and secluded. I’ve never been much of a city girl; even in Suzhou where we were out of the centre it still felt a bit much at times, so being somewhere more relaxing was nice to begin with. In the village there was a small shopping mall with a KFC, which I have to admit I was relieved to see – when I realised we’d be in this tiny little place, it was nice to know that if I needed something ever so slightly more familiar, there would be a ‘Western restaurant’ to go to.

Our first weekend in Shandong (at which time we were still recovering from food poisoning…) we decided to get out of Nanshan (we were sick of it already!) and explore. Not many choices in terms of outings; in the end we got the bus to Huang Cheng, a bigger village not too far away. I think we got off the bus too early, because where we ended up was like… no man’s land. There was nothing there. All these empty apartment buildings, and massive shops fronts and walking streets that were deserted, entirely. We went in the hope of something to do… anything. Surely anything was better than Nanshan, but Huang Cheng was spookily similar. We found a few little shops and restaurants, but nothing much of interest. It was like a ghost town. We had lunch at a place called ‘Happy Little Dumplings’ which was ok, but the people in there were so nice it made up for any short fallings in the food. After that we looked in vain for something to amuse ourselves with, and eventually trekked back up where the bus had come from to find the coffee shop we’d seen out the window – it was terribly grand, all very OTT, and there was next to no-one in there.

On the Sunday we went for another outing, hoping to find something a bit more interesting if we took the bus in the other direction. We went to Dong Hai, not expecting much, but being pleasantly surprised. We found the sea! How wonderful to stand on a beach and look out to the ocean, even if the beach was a bit grimy and that. The bus there was about 25 minutes and went past the Nanshan University – who would have thought that such a small place could have a University?

Other than the beach, Dong Hai was devoid of charm. The second time we visited, there was a mist, thick as smoke, cloaking the ocean so that we couldn’t even see the waves. Nearby there was a dilapidated mall with a miniature roller skating ring, with some coin-slot rides for kids that were made of cloth: all dog-eared and flea-ridden and grotesque. The toilets upstairs were ridiculous – squat holes, naturally, but no doors or walls or even low barriers, there were just… there, so you could sit next to and opposite three other people and watch them doing their business! And I had to pay for the privilege of using it! But… I shouldn’t complain – after the dreary prison-like atmosphere of Nanshan, our outing to Dong Hai was a little slice of paradise!

On our last weekend we visited the Nanshan scenic spot, which is the only ‘fun’ thing to do in the area. If the school hadn’t given us free tickets we probably wouldn’t even have gone – 120 RMB entrance fee, crazy! I wouldn’t pay that much for a lifetime membership! That day it was chucking it down – the second rainstorm we experienced in Nanshan, the city where ‘it never rains’. We got to the park, walked to the giant golden Buddha, and then… left. It looks like there are some nice pathways in that area and you can walk around the gardens and mountains etc… but it was raining so heavily, and we were both exhausted from our draining month in Nanshan, so we couldn’t be bothered.

People

On arriving to Yan Tai airport (one hour late, of course) we were met by Jack Liu, our contact at the school. By the way he’d been talking in the emails, we were expecting someone very professional, and quite a bit younger. He was interesting, had great English, but was exceptionally rude – just in that ‘Chinese man of a certain age’ way where they will ignore women entirely and only talk to other males. I’ve met a lot of openly sexist people in China, but nothing quite compared to how openly Jack ignored me – so much so that Sasha almost had words with him, but in the end we didn’t bother – he wouldn’t have understood. Anyway, after our travelling I was tired and didn’t feel much like talking anyway!

The people in Nanshan drove me nuts. They were some of the most frustrating people I met in China, hands down. They acted like they’d never seen a Westerner before. Even the adults would point and laugh and snigger, saying “Foreigner! Foreigner!” when we walked past.

Throughout China, people from Nanshan are regarded as being not very good looking. As well as being quite stocky, some of the women are rather on the hairy side. So I can confirm that this seems to be the norm here. People here also seem to be a bit… weird. Or, for want of a better word… stupid. You just see people walking round, or talk to people, and notice a general trend that they seem to have been scraping the bottom of the gene pool!

Two scenes to illustrate this: the first with one of the teachers at school. She gave me a piece of paper and asked me to first review the vocabulary on one side of the paper, then turn the sheet over and do the dialogues on the other side. Easy. Side A… side B. Nothing too difficult, I grasped the concept immediately, as you might imagine.

So, I practiced the vocabulary with the students, and then turned the paper over, preparing to do the dialogues. The teacher then ran to the front of the room, snatched the paper from my hands, turned it back to the vocabulary side and said “now do the dialogues.” I took the paper back, turned it back to side two and said “yes, I know, I already turned it.” She then took it from me again and turned it back to side one. “No, this one now.” I took it back again and the whole thing went on like some bizarre comedy sketch for several more rounds before she saw that she was wrong. I was like… are you kidding me? Do you not have eyes or something?
The second scene that illustrates this happened at the little confectionary stall at the end of the road. They have tubs of jelly candy tubes for sale that I quite like, in different flavours. Now, here are the facts. Fact 1: they had the strawberry flavoured ones on the counter. Fact 2: the shop also sells cola flavour ones, which were not displayed on the counter. Those were the facts. I wanted cola, I couldn’t see them, so I asked. (With an illustration from my travel diary)

Me: Do you have any cola flavour?
Man: Yes, here they are (points to the strawberry flavour)
Me: No, these are strawberry. Do you have cola?
Man: Here they are (points to the strawberry flavour)
Me: These are strawberry.
Man: We don’t have any strawberry flavour, we have these (points to the strawberry flavour)
Me: ok…

I swear, there must be something in the water in Nanshan, because that kind of thing happened all the time! Oh yeah, another amusing little scene: one Monday I went to school for my afternoon class and waited in the office for about 15 minutes. Normally the teacher will take you to the right classroom or send one of the students to fetch you (saying “come with me” or “follow me” accompanied by a combination of jazz hands and spirit fingers.) The bell went for class and start but no-one came to get me. As I had been ill and still wasn’t feeling great that day I thought I’d just sit and wait rather than running around trying to find the right class myself.

Also in the office was Betty (the manager) and the old school teacher, who was sitting right next to me and had been for 20 minutes. After a while, Betty said to the old teacher, in Chinese (probably forgetting I speak Chinese) “why is the foreign teacher here?” to which she replied “Is she? I thought she was off ill today.” I was like… hello? I’ve been sitting right next to you for 20 minutes. I’m one of the only white people you’ve seen all year, you can’t exactly miss me!

Teaching

On our first day in Nanshan we observed a class taught by Simone, the other foreign teacher, who is from Australia. Well, we didn’t really observe a class because we spent the whole lesson (40 minutes) being asked questions by the students. It’s pretty relaxed here! No lesson plans or anything. Simone is 17 with no TEFL, degree, etc, but like I said, we were out in the wilderness a bit so the school is desperate for teachers, in any capacity.

There are about 60 kids in a class (anything from 40 to 70 with the older kids having more in a class than the younger ones) and all the students were pretty well behaved. It’s a boarding school, though not all the kids stay over, and as volunteers we are also living ‘on campus’ and eating meals with the staff in the canteen. The school building itself is pretty nice – basic, but functional.
A later class we watched had younger students, and their ability was very low indeed, no communicative ability at all. There was a girl who was the ‘teachers helper’, except it seemed that the power had gone to her head a bit – she marched around the classroom with a long stick, and beat the hands of anyone who was misbehaving, palms up. The Chinese teacher in this class was a bit more involved and helped discipline the students – the youngest were about six years old.

After our first day of teaching we discovered that, as we expected, the whole volunteer teaching thing is very chaotic and disorganised. When we first arrived, Betty (who is the head of the English department) insisted that we spend the next day resting after our travelling and that we didn’t need to teach until Wednesday. We said we could rest in the morning and perhaps observe a class or two in the afternoon – we hadn’t travelled so far really, and we were keen to get stuck in. So Tuesday morning we were expecting to go into school after lunch, but at 9 o’clock Betty called to ask if we could come to the school straight away to pick up our schedules, and would it be alright if Sasha taught a class that afternoon. We were annoyed that the plans were being changed at short notice, but as the apartment was just 2 minutes from school we went down immediately.

So we went down, and when we got there, the plans had changed again – could I also teach a class in the afternoon, and would Sasha be able to teach a class that morning with only an hour or so’s notice. Well, we were really quite angry, but it’s all you can expect from a voluntary position in China – I had similar experiences when I was volunteering in Shanghai in 2012. To top it all off, I was going to head back to the apartment, but in the confusion of Sasha being rushed off to his class, I forgot to ask the key (helpfully, just one key for the two of us) so I was stuck in the office all morning.

My first classes were… interesting. I taught level 2 classes 6 and 7, so the kids were about 9/10 years old. I didn’t get more than 20 minutes’ notice as to what the topics of the lessons would be (thankfully the same topic for both classes – school subjects, classroom objects, etc) but as I would find out later, 20 minutes’ would soon be classed as ‘advance’ notice! So yeah, I just walked in and winged it. No flashcards or anything, just a copy of the student book that has the vocab and a couple of lines of obscure and unrelated dialogue. I tried to teach a little outside of the book (big mistake!) For example, the dialogue had “what are these?”, “they are…” but it didn’t have the singular version of “what is this?”, “It’s a…” So I introduced that grammar point, but the Chinese teacher was not impressed.

Basically, what you have to do is teach just what’s in the book, nothing more, nothing less. As the Chinese teacher so eloquently put it: “words are words, dialogue is dialogue.” So, trying to teach language in context for fluency purposes… no such luck. It seems like the teachers are all unqualified, but I think it’s just the Chinese way of teaching in public schools like this. No imagination, just drilling and memorizing, and then the kids being totally unable to actually use the language…
I spent a lot of my teaching time feeling quite unwell – a very sore throat and ears, due equally to the chalk dust constantly making my throat dry, and from having to shout my lessons so that all 50 students would be able to hear me.

A lot of the lessons I ‘taught’ were test lessons, where all I was required to do was read from a script and have the students answer the questions in their work books, then sit back and watch while they completed the writing test. My presence was completely redundant anyway because the script that I read out was also available on tape, so they could have just played the CD. But I guess they ‘wanted to make use of me’ though I’m not sure exactly how much use I was!

The absolute highlight of my teaching time in Nanshan was Suzie. She’s in class 3.10 and is about 11 years old. She has a pale face full of freckles, big dark eyes and dark bobbed hair. Unlike most of the students I encountered, she was friendly and outgoing and willing to speak English for fun, not just because she’s told to. She is one of those simply pure souls that you meet from time to time, someone who is utterly devoted to being friendly and helpful. In her class, I gave stickers to the good students, and at the end of the class she tried to gift her sticker back to me. In spite of the appalling text books and the quality of the teaching in Nanshan, Suzie has a natural communicative ability, and she would use language creatively to get her meaning across, always filling the air with chatter rather than just looking at me like I’m a fascinating breed of dog. What a darling.

The Teachers

I’d asked Jack Liu before we came if there was a dress code for teachers at the school. He said there wasn’t. As we knew we’d be travelling after our month volunteering, we didn’t bring much with us - I didn’t want to be bringing smart clothes unless I needed them. I brought suitable things, but nothing fancy. Well, all the Chinese teachers were smartly dressed – black suit jackets with smart trousers. But I guess they don’t think the foreign teachers need to be dressed smartly because they don’t view us as teachers – we’re just white clowns that the school gets to come so that they look good. If we did anything in class that was unfamiliar to them, they would tell us not to do it because the kids wouldn’t be able to understand. As with a great many things in China, it’s all about showing off. They don’t care about the teaching at all.

The Chinese teachers were, on the whole, pretty rude to us. I felt entirely isolated in the office, and by the end of my time there, I didn’t even bother going in early as there was no way for me to prepare for my classes – they wouldn’t give us advance warning about the topic or what pages in the book needed to be reviewed, so we couldn’t plan. Every class we just walked in and made it up on the spot.

The local teachers weren’t pleasant to be around at all. Mostly they ignored us entirely – no-one showed any interest in us at all, they didn’t ask about where we’d come from, nothing. After about a week, we discovered one of the reasons why the teachers dislike the foreigners. Apparently, before we arrive, the local staff have to clean our apartment for us (though judging by the state of ours I don’t know what they actually do…) So there you are, you have a job as a teacher, no cleaning duties listed in your job description, but your boss says you need to go and clean this white persons house, so you have to do it. I’d say no wonder they’re offhand with us, but then it’s not exactly our faults that they live in an authoritarian state where you have to just shut up and do what your told – if they don’t like it they should complain to the boss about it, but that’s not really the Chinese way. They just nod their heads and say “yes boss” and then do a really poor job of it.

The worst thing about teaching in a public school, as opposed to a private school that regularly hires foreign teachers, is that the Chinese staff often hit the kids. Not just ‘a slap on the wrist’ either; I’d seen that before in China, even in the private schools, and it’s something that you just have to learn to deal with. But the way the teachers in Nanshan treated the students… it was insane.

In the second week I was at the school, I had a class with the ‘old school’ teacher who is a bit older than the others. She is really strict with her kids. The class was a particularly naughty one, with one boy singled out as the worst. Rather than letting me handle the discipline of the class, given that it was me teaching, the Chinese teacher kept butting in and taking charge of the naughty kids. So first she had this boy (about eight or nine years old) stand in the corner, where he took to beating the pot plants with a ruler. After a while she moved him to the corner by the door, where he started kicking the mops and brooms. He really was a terror, but that’s beside the point. The teacher then went and took the broom from him, and beat him repeatedly across the back and neck with the broom until it broke – shards of plastic flying through the air.

Another boy - who I didn’t even see doing anything wrong, he just wasn’t following the dialogue properly I guess – she beat him and jabbed him in the back with her elbow, then slapped him around the face. Another boy she pinched viciously.

I felt physically sick and unable to continue the lesson; I just stood mortified at the front of the class. Luckily, the worst of these attacks happened at the end of the class, so just as I was thinking that I would be completely unable to continue the class with her in the room, the class ended anyway, and I walked straight out without a word.

I thought that, in China, teachers beating kids in class was finally becoming a thing of the past, but I guess not. I mean, this is a less developed area than other big cities, and the main attacker is an older, more traditional teacher… but still.

They just have no idea about discipline. Naughty kids are seated alone at the front of the class, or up on the stage with the teacher, which makes their behaviour a spectacle for all to see. Weak kids are sent to the back row where they can fall asleep and be ignored and become even bigger academic failures.

On the whole, this issue of beating the students is worst with the little kids. I haven’t seen any of the grade 3 teachers acting in that way, and Sasha said that he hasn’t seen it at all in the teen classes – probably because Chinese teenagers are so big these days, the teachers are scared they’ll smack them back! So often you see Chinese children with scars on their faces, and it’s just normal here, no one thinks anything of it.

I thought about saying something, maybe to an individual teacher or to the manager, but there’s no point. They’d just get offended and then not change their behaviour anyway. It’s part of the culture, and in places like China, traditions and ways of behaviour are not changed overnight – particularly if it’s because their culture is being criticized by a foreigner. It’s a very helpless feeling – standing in a classroom and watching little boys and girls be pinched, pushed or outright beaten – and not being able to do anything about it. Even controlling my reactions is hard – if the teacher were to look up at me in her moment of rage, she would see a face full of disgust, and frankly, let her see. Truly, that behaviour is animalistic, it’s repulsive, and I’m more than happy to let a few people know by my facial expressions exactly what I think of them.

Food

Our first day in Nanshan we were taken out for a lavish lunch with the ‘leaders’ of the school, but in the evening we took our food card to the canteen – you can eat in with the kids and local staff or take it away in a doggy bag (BYOB – bring your own bag!) We had a dish of potato and aubergine, a cauliflower dish and some meatballs that were slightly undercooked. The food was not terrible quality, certainly better than in some canteens I’ve eaten in, and of course the price was right (free for volunteers!)
After dinner (at the early time of 5:30) there wasn’t much to do really. We went to the supermarket to buy some plates and bin bags etc, and when we got home that was about it. There are no coffee shops, cinemas, KTV’s… nothing to do at all really!

Our first dinner from the school canteen wasn’t too bad. But on the Tuesday (our second day in Nanshan) we had our second free dinner from the school… and it gave us food poisoning. We think it was the popcorn-style chicken/pork, although the aubergine drenched in garlic probably didn’t help. We were fine until about 4 am on the Wednesday morning, then started the longest day of my life – up at 4 and awake for almost 24 hours with only short naps in between, and all the while vomiting and ‘pissing out my arse’, shivering and sweating… yeah, fun.

On the Wednesday all I managed was to watch a few episodes of Fraiser – I couldn’t even read my book I felt so ill. I drank water and rehydration sachets and a yoghurt drink (which after having seen twice in one day I haven’t had since) and all I ate was two crumbs of cake/bread and a few mouthfuls of rice, and even that was too much as I spent the next three and a half hours thinking I would be seeing it again.

Thursday was better – Sasha was already feeling almost OK that that point but I was still very nauseous and unable to eat. I did manage half a bowl of Sasha’s lovely vegetable soup for dinner.

On the Friday Sasha went to school but I was still feeling very weak and shaky, still not passing solids (I’ve never had food poisoning before in my life and I had no idea how long it would last.) We decided not to get the meat options from the school canteen again, a decision that would very much limit our options in the weeks to come, but worth it not to get sick again.
The whole thing was made all the worse because we were completely stranded. The first morning when we woke up feeling terrible we had basically no food or water in the house – we’d just arrived and were expecting to eat school food all week. No-one at school had given us their phone numbers, so we couldn’t call anyone for help, nor could we leave the house to go find someone. We were supposed to teach classes that morning but had no way to tell them we couldn’t come to school. At about six in the morning I crawled (crawled!) up the two flights of stairs to Simone’s apartment and pushed a desperate message under her door, begging her to phone someone for help when she woke up (as I would later find out, she too was sick that day!)

So we didn’t turn up to our classes and still no-one came looking for us. It was terrifying, actually. We had no idea where we were, what with Jack having lied to us about the location of the school. No food or water, no contact numbers or friends nearby. We were horrifically sick but the medicine we had wasn’t working. The whole morning passed, ever so slowly, without anyone contacting us. In the afternoon Betty called and I begged her to please please help us, we had no food, no water… it was all rather dramatic! It wasn’t until the early evening that some teachers came around with some things for us.

On the 6th we went out for lunch at a ShaXian Delicacies place near our house (one of my first full meals after being so ill.) We found a road with a couple of little places on it and that was one of them. I was pleased to have found it because, when you find it difficult to eat unusual foods (for me, because of spice) it’s nice to have favourite chains you can rely on. Sadly, like all the ‘safe’ foods I ate in Nanshan, I ordered my usual dish and what came was too spicy for me to eat. The old guy who ran the place noticed that I was struggling (and naturally, after having been so ill recently, I was feeling very delicate and was almost in tears that I couldn’t even order things I had previously known to be fine) and he brought me some soup to have with it. He also apologised, and said that next time we came for a meal he wouldn’t add the spicy sauce to the food. It was very nice of him to notice and he seemed genuinely upset about it – one of the nicest people we met in Nanshan by far!

In the evening we went out for dinner with Franny. She used to be a teacher at the school and whenever there is a new foreign teacher she wants to make friends with them so she can practice her English, and also sneakily employ them to work at her school on the weekends. Simone is giving her English lessons so that’s how we met her. Honestly, the whole situation is a bit weird. She arranged that we would go out for dinner on the Saturday with Simone, but Simone’s phone ran out of credit and Franny didn’t get the message that she wouldn’t be there until the Sunday evening. So on Saturday night, Franny turned up at our house (and, remember that we’ve never met her before) and she was really angry that Simone didn’t answer her call. Then she asks if we want to go out for dinner with her anyway. We were like… uhh, no thanks, crazy lady! She was very pushy and rude, and acted like we did something wrong. So we said we couldn’t go out that night but suggested she come back on Sunday when Simone would be home.

So Sunday night approached, and we expected her to come pick us up in her car, as she had planned to do the day before, but she called and told us to get the bus with basically no notice. By this point the bus service had actually pretty much finished, and we didn’t have a clue where we were going (we’d only been in Nanshan for a week!) I wasn’t that keen on going by that point, but Simone (who wasn’t able to come that night either) had said that Franny likes to flash her cash and treat her to dinner, and as we were trying to save money in Nanshan I thought that, well, if a well-off Chinese person wants to buy me dinner in exchange for a free English lesson, then that’s fine by me! So, we were a bit stuck as to what we should do, when Franny called and said she’d arranged a taxi to pick us up.

So we went out for dinner, which was very nice, with Franny and her husband, her mother and her young son. But come the end of the meal, Franny leans across the table and says ‘let’s go Dutch.’ I was pretty annoyed – I didn’t even know this person, but she invited us out to dinner, entirely at her own gain because she then got to practice speaking English to us, and then we still had to pay for dinner. The meal, as I said, was nice. But if we’d known that we’d be paying for dinner, we would have asked to go somewhere cheaper as we weren’t earning money during our time volunteering. As well as that, we had to pay for a taxi to and from the restaurant. Weirdest of all, after dinner we thought she would drive us home as she offered us a lift in the car, but instead took us to meet a friend of hers! We met in the bike shop that he owns, and we sat and drank tea with him while she wasn’t even there – she went off with another of her friends to the back of the shop. It was beyond bizarre. I was like… Hello? I just met you… who the hell is this guy?? And then the next morning she calls us up, bright and early, and asks if we want to go for lunch! I struggled to stop myself from admitting that, actually, I would really rather never see her again, ever!

So, in the interest of saving money, we mostly ate the school food. At first I thought it wasn’t too bad, but by the end of the month we spent volunteering there, it was the worst thing about it! After getting food poisoning we wouldn’t eat any of the meat, so we were pretty limited. The main dish was, without fail, every day, cucumber. I never want to see another cucumber as long as I live. There would be cucumber and meat, cucumber and mushroom, cucumber and slime… so many varieties of lukewarm cucumber! Some days we’d go pick up our lunch and, so limited were the options that we’d come home with two types of cucumber. A lunch of cucumber with cucumber, and then in the evening, the only edible thing available for dinner would be cucumber. There is only so much cucumber a person can eat in one day, and three servings is, for your reference, about three servings too many. Man cannot live on cucumbers alone!

The best restaurant we found was a Dong Bei restaurant that we took Simone to on one of our last night’s there. We tried the silkworms (which were crunchy on the outside and soft in the middle, didn’t taste of anything much but lots of protein I guess.) Our favourite was the lemon chicken dish, and we also had a dish of sweet potatoes cooked in syrup that quickly hardened like caramel to the plate. The dumplings were also not bad.

The Apartment

The flat the school put is up in was ok. We weren’t expecting to have our own place – we thought we’d have to share with another teacher. As it turns out, the school has a whole block of apartments, optimistically built for the foreign staff, but which most of the time is completely empty. The bedroom had two single beds which we pushed together, although one was higher than the other so that wasn’t very comfortable. The house was pretty dirty – the plughole in the bathroom floor was clogged up entirely with hair, and I’m certain that the sheets on the bed had not been cleaned. There was even a bird’s nest on the wall in the indoor clothes drying balcony.

Worst of all was the kitchen. There weren’t really any cooking or eating implements, not even a set of chopsticks and bowls for each of us. And the fridge… urgh. I shudder just thinking about it. The teachers before us, who’d left a few weeks previously (or maybe even the teachers before them…) had left a plate of food in the fridge, which had been turned off at the wall and sitting there since. You can imagine. I’ve never seen so much mould in my entire life. The smell was like nothing I can describe. I’m not a squeamish type, but I tripped over myself trying to scrabble out of the kitchen and escape the stench. The whole room stank for hours. It was horrific.

After the food poisoning fiasco at school we wanted to try and cook at least some of our meals, but without a fridge to store anything in, it was impossible. We asked Betty if there was a cleaner who could sort it out for us (we’re not snobs, but that mess was horrific and a complete health hazard, and nothing to do with us – we were there voluntarily, we shouldn’t have to be there cleaning up after someone else’s filth.) Betty was really unhelpful – about that and everything else really. To begin with she just ignored us about it, then when we insisted and said that we would pay ourselves for someone to do it if she could just find us a cleaner, she said that there weren’t any cleaners in Nanshan.

Basically, she’d ‘lost face’ because we were complaining about something, so she was just completely childish and refused to help us. Later we spoke to one of Franny who said she’d help us find a cleaner, and the cleaner she found said she’d do it for 100RMB. What a joke – in Hangzhou I had a cleaner who would do my whole house for a third of that price, and I wasn’t even getting a very good rate! In a crappy little place like Nanshan it would barely be worth 10RMB of someone’s time to clean one fridge, let alone ten times that! In the end we just gave up – we kept the fridge door firmly shut and left it to continue rotting away for someone else to clean up.

Overall impression

I won’t be remembering Nanshan too fondly, that’s for sure! In exchange for our time and work, we were given free housing (which was filthy and full of mould) and free food (which gave us food poisoning) and most of the teachers viewed our ‘helpful, L1 native classes’ as a disruptive nuisance. Well, after Nanshan I was sure ready to get the hell out of China! I was so glad we decided to travel after our volunteering so I would have some time to find things about the country to love again. The main thing is just that it’s a waste of time volunteering in China – they don’t understand it and no one appreciates it. They think (like in most schools, not just volunteering positions) that if a white person is in the room with the students, that they will magically just absorb the ability to speak English. There is no understanding for how teaching a language is different to regular teaching, no understanding of how you need to practice verbally and learn within context – not just memorize lists of vocabulary and pick a correct answer in a test.

I was hoping the position would be challenging, but not too much hard work. After a year at EF I was ready to relax. Well, I shouldn’t have worried – in my month there I barely worked at all. In my first week I only taught two or three classes on the Tuesday afternoon, and then the rest of the week I was so sick from food poisoning that I could only get out of bed to crawl to the toilet and back. The next week started with the National Tomb Sweeping festival, so I only worked four days then. The third week I was sick again with a cold – on the Monday I cancelled my classes, and on Tuesday morning I went in to teach but felt so bad I only got through one class before I felt awful again (I’d felt alright in the morning, but after 40 minutes in a boiling hot classroom full of screaming kids, I felt terrible.) Then on Wednesday, feeling better, I went in to school and found out it was an exam day and all classes were cancelled. On the Thursday I only had one lesson on my timetable. So, the third week in Nanshan was a doddle! The fourth week went as normal – the only full week I taught – and then in the final week, we offered to work on Monday and Tuesday before we left on Wednesday. But on the Saturday before, Betty text me and said that the whole school would be having a ‘sports meeting’ (which turned out to be a sports day) and we didn’t need to teach again!

If anyone one told me they were thinking of doing voluntary teaching in China, my advice would be: don’t do it. Just… no. But I guess it depends on your situation. Like Simone, the other teacher at the school (17 years old, no degree, no teaching qualification) she wanted experience to help her get a proper teaching job in the future. For her, the experience would have been bearable. But for anyone who is actually qualified, who knows about teaching methodology and cares about delivering quality lessons, for anyone who likes to be respected and listened to and taken seriously… China is not the place to volunteer as a teacher! You’re just a performer, a foreign clown who entertains and gets in the way of the Chinese teachers. I’d never teach voluntarily in China again. But as with all things, it was an experience. I learnt a great many valuable lessons, and I saw a side to Chinese culture that I never would have seen if I’d only taught in private language schools. Well, live and learn, eh?

The Last of Suzhou

Nǐ hǎo and welcome to the last post about Suzhou, my home for the past year and a bit. We started working in March 2013 and our contracts officially ended on March 1st 2014. However, because our school is dreadfully disorganised, even with us giving them more than 2 months official notice that we would be leaving, they were still unable to hire replacement teachers in time for our departure. This means that, had we left on March 1st, our classes would be without teachers and either have to be cancelled, or dumped onto the already busy schedules of our co-workers. As it happened, we had already paid our rent for part of the month and decided to stay in Suzhou until the end of March to get the most out of our money. By that point we’d decided to do some volunteering and had a position set up in April, so we had time to kill until then. In the end, Sasha extended his contract for a few weeks at full time, and I carried on a couple of my classes on a part time basis (I was so sick of that place there was no way I’d extend full time!) This helped out our co-workers because it bought the managers a bit more time to find a replacement or two, and it also meant that we had a bit of money coming in for those few weeks while we were waiting to go travelling.
Our last week in Suzhou was a mad flurry of social occasions, packing and cleaning. I found it much harder leaving Suzhou than Hangzhou – this year I’ve made more friends and, though work has been a bit of a pain at times, I’ve got on with most of my colleagues and enjoyed my working life. I’ve also had a gorgeous apartment and enjoyed living with Sasha so, all in all, it’s been a pretty nice life this year and not easy to walk away from. Much of the month where I was just working part time I spent visiting friends and saying goodbye.
We made time in our last week for a final ‘garden day’. There were a few more gardens on the Suzhou list that we hadn’t ticked off yet (there are so many gardens in Suzhou you’d need a long time to see them all) so we had one last outing and squeezed in as many gardens as we could. We started our day by going to see ‘the man’ by the Master of Nets garden – we’d promised him one last visit to buy all those things we’ve been wanting all year, like the massive scroll painting that will make an entire wall feature. From there it was a short walk along Shi Quan Jie and down Ren Min Lu to the Surging Waves Pavilion.
This was a lovely little garden, cheap entrance and very quiet within. There were some rockeries that you could clamber over and a picturesque pond filled with fish. One room at the back of the garden housed a collection of antique furniture, all made of dark, glossy wood that was bent and gnarled as if the tree had grown into that shape naturally. Some of the doorframes through different parts of the garden were cut into ornamental shapes like curved vases that a more portly person would need to slip through sideways.

From there we caught a bus straight up Ren Min Lu to the Joyous Garden. This tranquil paradise is right in the middle of the city. One minute we were walking along a bustling main road, with diggers and workmen pulling up the tarmac and barriers blocking off construction next to the busy subway entrance, then one turn to the left, not even down an alley, just right there at the road side, was the garden. The welcoming courtyard was adorned in glass lanterns boasting bright red tassels, framing the circular doorway into the garden.
The garden itself was quite big, with a large pond in the middle and rockeries all around it. Blossoms in light pink were shedding petals that gathered and swirled together on the surface of the glassy waters. The ‘Facing Wall Pavilion’ was of particular interest as it had a large, outdoor mirror (which I’ve seen before in other gardens). The inscription read ‘On the north of (the) pavilion is a mirror inlaid in the wall, reflecting a wide view of the landscape. It carries deep connotations of the Zen Buddhism because it is associated with Dharma meditating for 10 years facing the wall.’ I thought that having a mirror on the wall would kinda defeat the object of staring at a wall for 10 years, but apparently not.

Leaving the Joyous Garden we walked along East Gan Jiang Road to the Twin Pagodas. These identical towers were built by some students in honour of their favourite teacher, and are still in good condition, despite leaning quite noticeably due to collapsed foundations. They were mustard yellow with details done in a sort of puce colour, with the roof edges at each level flung out and pointing towards the sky. This place wasn’t really a garden as such – aside from the pagodas there was little else to see there. I saw a few glass display cases holding some carved stones, like decorative tiles and parts of pillars. By this point in the day I was quite glad there was little to see – three gardens in one day are more than enough!

Suzhou – what a city. My favourite place in China, without a doubt. It is modern enough to buy cheese in the supermarket and go out to Starbucks and Pizza Hut (if you’re so inclined) but also old enough to enjoy protected areas like Ping Jiang Lu and visit gardens and pagodas that have been around since when Suzhou was little more than a village. It’s a big place (with a population of about 6 million in the city) but it never feels stifling – I think that’s due to the different areas: the centre of town (where you find shopping malls but also gardens and older areas), SND – Suzhou New District (my neck of the woods – the buildings are older and it feels like a ‘lived in’ area) and SIP – Suzhou Industrial Park (the new part of the city, stuffed full of sky-scrapers and expensive restaurants and foreigners). There is always somewhere to go and something to see in Suzhou, you never get bored. The climate there is also good – not too cold in the winter, not too warm in the summer, just right. I was sad to leave it and look forward to returning, in many years’ time, to see what parts of the city survive as it keeps expanding and growing.
So where am I now? Well, as I said, we set up a position to do some volunteering for a few weeks before our grand travels start. We had planned to work at a hostel in the same area of China we had been living in – the notice for it on Workaway (a volunteering website) sounded quite good, but when we actually spoke to the person who ran it, we weren’t so keen! Workaway has strict rules about how much work a volunteer can be made to do each day, and the hotel easily broke those rules, asking volunteers to contribute working hours of 8 or more hours a day, and work for 6 days a week. So, quite sensibly, we declined that offer.
Where we ended up is Shan Dong Province, which is higher than Suzhou but lower than Beijing. The weather is a little cooler up there – it had just started warming up in Suzhou when we left so we were disappointed to return to the temperatures of early Spring – and we were based near Yan Tai, which is a city on the sea. Actually, we thought we’d be in Yan Tai, not near it (we were actually in this tiny little town called Nan Shan which is so small it basically doesn’t exist) but I’ll save that story for my next post! We were there for a month volunteering and are now travelling in Western China. I’ve been almost 2 months trying to get onto Blogger to post this, but soon I’ll have time to catch up and update you as to my voluntary work and travelling. So until next time, zàijiàn!
P.S. to finish off, some pictures of my lovely Suzhou students :D