Xinyu, Lanzhou and Xi'an
CHINA | Friday, 9 October 2009 | Views [141] | Comments [4]
Sorry it's taken me so long to write, it's been so busy what with being an importand English teacher and all. So basically we first decided to venture away from our project for my birthday weekend where we decided to go to Nanchang and through to Xinyu where Richard and Dan (the other two volunteers in Jiangxi) live. Surprisingly we managed to navigate getting two different buses in the huge bus stations and actually ended up there. We then had a really fun weekend eating a huge banquet on my birthday with lots of their teachers and then having our first KTV experience. KTV are huge karaoke bars where you hire a room and get a big screen and microphones and can choose all your songs and seem to be the bees knees here as the chinese absolutely love singing. I think this was possibly one of the biggest cultural experiences we've had so far in China as we then had to listen to all of their teachers warbling away at the top of their voices to truly awful, cheesy chinese songs! And the strange thing is the chinese do not seem to mind if they are awful at singing, they will still get up there and sing extremely loudly with apparently no problem whether they're good or not. And then came the dancing. I was made to ballroom dance with all the old men teachers for ages and then they taught us some mad hopping dance which is very popular in china which continued for about half an hour. And then they got us to sing and absolutely loved it when we sang uptown girl and many other westlife songs that we hadn't heard for about 10 years.
Anyway then we had another week of teaching, and I am starting to absolutely love teaching, it is so much fun and I've become quite good friends with a few of my students now. Then we went off on our travels to Lanzhou to do a week long Chinese language course in our National Day holidays. This train journey was not so much fun, I take back my initial comments of 'trains in China are so nice'. This time we had a 32 hour journey and got on to find the rooms were about half the size, leaving about a foor between the two sets of bunkbeds and my top bunk hadn't been cleaned and was full of rubbish and orange peel and smelt of smokey chinese man. So that wasn't the most pleasant two days! But we survived and it was pretty amazing watching the scenery as we travelled across half of China from our lush south eastern side to the barren north west. In Lanzhou we then stayed with Chinese families in the evenings and went to lessons in the school in the day. Staying with the Chinese family was so much fun as our families all seemed to feel the need to constantly take us out to really fancy restaurants and treat us amazingly. I don't think I've ever eaten so well, or eaten so much in my entire life, especially as they would look so happy when you ate everthing and when you said you were full they'd look so devestated you'd feel you had to eat more! So that was quite fun and we also went and visited some famous temples etc. Then we also decided to take them out to some pool bars which they loved as most of them hadn't ever really played pool before and also took them to KTV which was pretty hilarious. Thursday was National Day and this year it was exactly 60 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China so there were some huge celebrations (some really awesome fireworks which we watched by the yellow river)and many huge parades in Beijing. I think this was another cultural experience moment to say the least when i got so many texts from my students all saying things like 'teacher i am so happy today for china is so successful!' or 'teacher today is such a great day! i feel so happy to be chinese'.
Anyway then on Saturday a group of us decided to travel to Xi'an as we still had a few days holiday left. As it was the National Day holidays it was really hard to find accomodation so we ended up staying in a really fancy hotel (but which was still only 14 pounds per night!) which was amazing! It was so strange though, as soon as we arrived we went into a dico's in the station and there were two sets of different foreigners there! It was madness there were probably more foreigners in that station than in the whole of Jiangxi province put together! So in Xi'an we went and saw the Terecotta Army, which was amazing and generally did all the touristy things like went and visited some beautiful temples and famous pagodas. It was quite hilarious though, being in such a large group we attracted so much attention. On the first evening a few of us went to a bar with live music and just as we were leaving Richard (who was quite tipsy at this point) decided to ask if he could hold the main singer's guitar, and then got ushered up onto the stage so play a song. Next thing we knew it the musicians had all left the stage and we were pushed up there and Alice was made to play the piano and us to sing and so we ended up singing Let it Be, Hallelujah and Mad world to the whole bar. We then went to a club and were immediately put up onto the stage to dance! Then the next night all 10 of us went to a club and all got bought free beer if we would dance up on the stage with the singers and professional dancers! Being a foreigner in China is really quite similar to being famous at times. What was most fun though was on the last night we were just walking through the centre and walked past the huge fountain display when one of us decided we should run through it, so we did and then got so wet we decided we might as well dance in it so started to do so and soon realised there were huge hge crowds gathering around us so we ended up doing a caleidh for them all which they loved and got soaked to the skin and then at the end spent about half an hour posing for photos with all these random people who'd been watching. We then decided to go to a club soaking just because it would be hilarious, and once again got ushered onto the stage and got given free beers.
We're now home again and I'm really glad to be back and teaching again as I was starting to really miss it! It was so nice to arrive in Jingdezhen and see all the porcelain lamp posts, it's begun to feel like home now. It was also so good to go back to our favorite little restaurant and have our 5 kuai (50p) plates of friend rice with chicken and vegetables. Thank you so much all of you who left happy birthday comments it was so nice to get them and thanks also to everybody who has written letters, I am officially receiving post now and have worked out that it takes about 9-10 days between you sending and me receiving things. Also I have put up my Beijing photos and will soon put up a lot more, they're on the left handside of this page under galleries. Miss you all lots xxxxx
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