Teacher, Teacher, do you know Sissi?

Talking to one of my classes about different countries, I mentioned Austria in passing. I don't even remember why it was brought up. But imagine my surprise when one of my students asked me "Teacher, Teacher! Do you know Sissi?"

Sissi being the Empress-Queen Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, wife of Emperor Franz Josef. Sissi was a rebel to royal ways and a fashion icon, very much in the vein of Princess Diana who lived a century later.

Being a fan of Austro-Hungarian history and the Hapsburg Dynasty, I was very much pleased by this. Particularly so when, in many ways, Chinese teenagers are even worse than American teens when it comes to caring about anything more than 15 minutes old. When I asked my student how she knew who Sissi was, she said she had seen the movies about her and liked them very much.

I think I made a new friend.

My Poor Class 145

Class 145 is my favorite class. These are my seniors, working incredibly hard to get ready for graduation in a month's time.

I feel compassion for all my students, but most especially this class. They start their day before 6 AM and I can look out my bedroom window across to their class at 10, 11 PM at night and they're still in there studying.

Unlike most of my classes, these are genuinely good kids and they work hard and many of them speak English decently well. I have them immediately after lunch on Mondays and Fridays. The last few weeks, when I have gone in there, they are absolutely exhausted. Most of them can barely lift their heads from their books, let alone keep their eyes open.

School's almost over, it's warm and sunny, and they've already passed their finals. I just let the poor things sleep today. They deserve a little rest. 

D@mn the Chinese Internet

Word to the wise. If you need to have a serious, highly nuanced, and potentially life-changing conversation with someone via Skype and your Chinese internet is not working, by all means, wait until it's working again. Mixed signals and unintended meanings get conveyed far too easily.Half of what I said didn't even go through. That can make for a lot of awkwardness.

On the bright side, it does make for great comedy, verging on the burlesque. I laughed myself silly when it was all over. :D

Don't teach at Shaoyang Number Three Middle School!

I've been meaning to write this for a while, but I'll just go ahead and warn anyone who is considering it: Don't teach at Shaoyang Number Three Middle School (AKA Shaoyang Foreign Language School).

Even the locals will tell you this isn't a nice school. The kids are mutinous and the staff is misleading, unhelpful, unfriendly, and at times, downright hostile. They go through foreign teachers like Kleenex. If you deal with anyone named Flora or Lisa, RUN.

If you have questions, I can give more specific information privately. But I know now is the time when people are making their plans for teaching next year, so I just wanted to give you a heads up.

I don't regret coming to China, and I've learned a lot and made a lot of good friends here. But there are much better places you could be. 

Voyage to Guangxi

The week before my 28th birthday was quite eventful. I traveled from Hunan Province with my friends Nick and Sarah to the cities of Guilin and Yangshuo in the neighboring Guangxi Autonomous Region. Guilin and Yangshuo are major tourist centers and I was definitely looking forward to getting a taste of Western culture after spending such a horrendously cold and dreary winter in Shaoyang.

We were to travel five hours by bus, leaving Shaoyang on the morning of April 3rd. The day got off to a rather unpleasant start when I had to make a quick visit to the restroom before departure. Whoever is responsible for cleaning the Shaoyang North Bus Station's mens room ought to be brought before the Hague for crimes against humanity. There was human waste at least 6 inches deep in every toilet. I have a rather weak stomach when it comes to such things, and I fled the bathroom coughing and gagging violently. I ran back to Nick and Sarah, my face red, hair messed up, tears running down my face, coughing and retching. They thought I had been assaulted... which was true in a sense. My mind and my psyche had been assaulted. Truly the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in person.

But enough about that. The rest of the trip was more pleasant, I promise.

The bus ride was rather uneventful, and we arrived in the city of Guilin early on a cool, rainy afternoon. Our first stop was our hostel, The Backstreet. I was excited and a little apprehensive because I'd never stayed in a hostel before. But it was quite nice and had a lot of people from many different countries. It was nice to just sit in the lobby and watch the people come and go, speaking dozens of different languages.

Since we were only spending one night in Guilin, we stayed in the tourist district, doing some shopping and sampling different foods and going to a bar. I tried sushi for only the second or third time in my life. I tried some crab with caviar on it and some baby octopuses in something that tasted a bit like barbeque sauce. They were ok I suppose, but I after a few bites I was done. I could never make a meal out of such a thing. Just not my cup of tea.

The next day we had to rise early to make a bus that was to take us to the Lijiang, or Li River, for a bamboo boat tour that would take us to Yangshuo. The Lijiang, along with Phuket in Thailand, was the basis for the Chewbacca's home planet of Kashyyyk in Star Wars. During the two hour boat trip we saw some of the most beautiful scenery I've ever seen. The karst topography along the river consists of hundreds of small, very steep limestone peaks covered in vegetation. The rain, mist, low-hanging clouds, and the overpowering GREENNESS of the area created a level of natural beauty verging on the mystical. It was a refreshing and much-needed dose of nature after the stark, polluted, industrial slums of Shaoyang.

While on the boat, I sat next to a very nice Royal Air Force pilot named Chris who was touring China. Chris was also traveling to Yangshuo. He and some other foreigners he had already befriended joined us for a round of drinks at the rooftop bar of Monkey Jane's, our very cool hostel in Yangshuo. We had a very diverse group of individuals over the course of the evening: Americans, Canadians, English, Scottish, Germans, and Dutch. It was like a mini-NATO summit. From the roof of the hostel, we could see all of Yangshuo. It was surrounded by the river on one side, and the lovely karst peaks were visible in all directions, some of them topped with brightly-lit colorful temples. I'm a sucker for a nice skyline and Yangshuo did not disappoint.

One of the other English lads noticed that there was an unusual deal on the menu: Watch a snake being killed, get to drink its blood and eat its still-beating heart, get a snake meat meal cooked, and get a free Monkey Jane's t-shirt. Saying he would go through with it provided he didn't have to pay for it, we took up a collection and the snake was duly caught and brought to us for photos.

I am violently afraid of snakes, but having had a few beers, I was able to at least stand on the opposite side of the roof instead of jumping off. After a photo shoot, the lady who brought the snake whipped out a pair of scissors and proceeded to decapitate the serpent, much to everyone's horror. The blood was then mixed with baijiao, a ubiquitous Chinese liquor somewhat akin to antifreeze, which was then drunk. Unfortunately the heart was lost in the preparation process and he didn't get to eat it. Quel dommage.

But all was not lost, soon there was a steaming plate of snake rice and a bowl of snake soup on the table. I was game enough to try some of the snake meat, which was chewy and, true to the cliche, tasted like chicken, but had a consistency somewhere between pork and shrimp. I only tried a bite. I would like to have had a bit more, but having just watched the varmint being slaughtered in a bloody reptilian holocaust, I wasn't feeling much like chowing down.

The rest of our trip consisted of climbing Full Moon Mountain, which has a perfectly round hole straight through the middle of it. This was truly a trying experience; 800 marble steps to the top. I'm a good bit slimmer than when I arrived in China, but it took a lot of huffing and puffing and more than a few rest stops to get to the top... but I did it! I was quite proud of myself, too.

Our last day in Yangshuo consisted of a trip to an underground cave system, complete with underground river, mud baths, and hot springs. These were truly impressive caves, by far the largest I have ever been in. The sparkly rocks, huge stalactites and stalagmites, and underground waterfalls were truly impressive. I had an Indiana Jones moment when I was crossing a bridge over one of the rivers and the board gave way and I suddenly found that I was up to my thigh in broken bridge pieces. Fortunately I was unhurt, so no worries there!

I'd never swam in hot springs before, so I was particularly looking forward to this. They weren't as large as I'd hoped, but the water was nice and warm and we all had a very relaxing time. I was warned I'd probably smell like rotten eggs afterwards, but I'd never felt so clean in my life as when I got out! In the springs I met a cool guy from Tennessee named Derek who has been teaching near Shanghai for a while.It was nice to hear another Southern accent. It turns out his family has a beach house in Garden City, SC one of my favorite places in the world, and only about a 40 minute drive from my home. Just goes to show what a small world it is!

I hated to leave Yangshuo, particularly when I compared it to the gloom of Shaoyang. It's truly a beautiful city and I hope I can go back again someday. It's very clean and modern, with lots of foreigners and English-speaking Chinese. There's all the pizza, hamburgers, Western-style breakfasts and cheesecake one could ever want (Shaoyang not having much in the way of Western food other than McDonald's and KFC). If you're ever in or near Guangxi Province, it's definitely worth a visit!