Back to traveling

I've made the plans necessary to add a couple of entries to my travel blog. I've booked tickets back to the US for October and a trip to Shanghai next weekend. This will be my vacation for the year. Aside from weekend trips to Hong Kong and Macau, I haven't been able to travel much in China since I've been here. I've traveled a bit outside of China, but aside from Chenzhou, where I live, and the Pearl River Delta, where I lived for a short time last summer, I haven't traveled much inside the country. I hope to change that in the future, starting with a trip to Shanghai.

I've been to Shanghai once before, about seven years ago. Shanghai was actually the first place I saw in China. I only spent a couple of days, so didn't see much of the city. I know Shanghai has a lot to offer and am eager to go back an explore the city at a more relaxed pace. I'll be taking time out from sightseeing to enjoy the food and drink, and will hopefully be posting some nice pics and observations. I've got more time that I usually have in Hong Kong and there won't be any cross-border shenanigans (like bank cards not working) so It will hopefully give me a good opportunity to make some nice travel posts.

In other news, I'll be coming back to the United States in October. A trip I've been dreading since it's all work and no play. I have to move all of my belongings from their current temporary storage (thanks, Sharon!) into something more permanent. I don't really ever expect o return to the United States long term, so I don't want to rent a big storage space. I'll be spending the whole week selling furniture on Craig's List and making trips to drop things off at various charities. I'll be taking two enormous pieces of luggage to bring back as much of my remaining clothes as possible. Trans-pacific flights are the last flights that allow passengers to take a large amount of luggage without an additional fee. Most trans-pacific flights allow 2-23 kg pieces of luggage per passenger, which is more that a person can easily drag behind them anyway. I hope to fill my two pieces of luggage with all the clothes I can carry and donate the rest to charity. Optimally, I would like to have nothing to store long term, but I also know that probably isn't realistic.

I shouldn't say that it will be all work, since I have several good friends in Salt Lake. Seeing them will be nice, and we'll hopefully get a night out or two, but the main purpose of the trip is to get these things dealt with. I've said I should make a list of the things I want to do/eat while I'm there, but I also think they should come naturally. If I don't think: "Boy, I'd like to eat..." then it obviously wasn't that important to me. I can't think of a lot I want to go back to Salt Lake for, other than visiting with friends and eating. Despite what you may have heard about Salt Lake, there are several good restaurants around town. Though most are Asian places. There are a couple of good Nepalese restaurants and a great Indian buffet, a food type that has yet to move to Chenzhou, and which is not readily available anywhere I've found in China. There are also a few western things that I think I'll be ready for, like a pastrami sandwich. And then, of course, drinking isn't the same here as in the States. I'll definitely go for a high quality draft beer. (Draft isn't a think here.) And mixed drinks. The Chinese aren't big on mixed drinks, so I can only get them when I go to Hong Kong, and the prices there are a bit high. So I'll be having a martini, a gin tonic, and perhaps a long island. 

Finally, a Mexican restaurant that serves margaritas by the pitcher. Wait! NO! I'll be in Utah! Margaritas by the pitcher aren't allowed! Real drinks aren't allowed! Only a thimble full of alcohol is allowed in each drink. Oh Jesus, now I remember why I'm not all that thrilled about this trip.

Yes, much of what I miss about the states can be found in Utah, but much more cannot. In some ways, this trip will be little more than a tease. I will be getting close enough to see the US but it will also feel like looking through a chain link fence into the country and not being able to partake fully.

And I haven't even touched on Trump's America. But I'll leave it at that for this post. I've been working hard for most of the summer and this is the first post I've made in a while. Stay tuned, I hope to show a bit more of Chenzhou before school starts back and also to have a few posts on the other blog for Shanghai, the first real vacation I've taken since I started it.

Dragon Boat, Children's Day, and a trip to Hong Kong

I just returned from a trip to Hong Kong and boy are my arms tired! Wait. That doesn't make any sense.

In any case, I've been working seven days a week for the past few months and the Dragon Boat Festival presented a nice opportunity to get away to Hong Kong for a couple of days. It was a nice trip even though everything seemed to go wrong. First, I couldn't book the hotel in advance because the only app that I can use with my debit card wasn't working. This is always a bad sign since the price in the app is almost never what the hotel actually offers when you arrive, even if they have rooms available. So my first stop was a hostel in Causeway Bay, a popular and central neighborhood on Hong Kong Island. The hostel was full by the time I arrived ( which was already after dark), so I had to find a 7 Eleven to buy a sim card for my phone. (Chinese SIM cards don't work in Hong Kong.)

Once I was connected to the internet, I was able to find a nearby hotel. I made my way there and discovered it to be in a building with about a thousand other hotels and apartments. Most rented by the hour and promised special rates after midnight. I wasn't bothered. I was getting a real room for the night and there wasn't anything that was going to ruin my Hong Kong weekend.

The price was exorbitant and the room was mediocre at best, though it was clean. I've heard of hotels in Chungking Mansions in Kowloon that don't have a lock on the door, but this place didn't have a key. The room was right next to the check in desk and the front desk guy told me he would be there to open the door when I came back. I did find the whole operation suspect, but I only left once to go eat and didn't have a problem getting in when I returned. However, I did discover upon my return that the room didn't have the correct outlet to charge my phone.

Hong Kong, you see, has the traditional British wall sockets in older buildings, but almost anything built after the handover has an amazing super outlet that will accept virtually an cord you can imagine: British, American, German, Chinese... I'd never stayed in an older building before, so I wasn't expecting the older outlets. Needless to say, I spent the majority of the next day out looking for a new hotel and trying to get my phone charged. I did finally settle on a nice hostel only a few minutes walk from the previous night's hotel, one which I have stayed at before.

Despite the fiasco with the hotel, I did manage to get an eye appointment and a new pair of glasses. Things like that are much easier in Hong Kong because there's virtually no language barrier for an English speaker, so I do save many of my seemingly ordinary tasks for my trips to  Hong Kong.

The following day I wanted to go see the dragon boat races, a central part of the holiday in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, I wasn't an early riser that morning and when I arrived at the bus stop there was already a line of 1.5 hours for the bus in addition to the forty minute ride to get there. Since I had a train to catch that evening, I decided to forgo the races and just spend some time window shopping around Causeway Bay.

Finally, this week was children's day. That's an international holiday that's​ exactly the bullshit it sounds like. To be fair, it isn't really a day for the children, it's a day for overbearing parents to force their children to do shit they don't want to do like sing and dance in a school show. Which kinda ruins their day off.

I helped one boy memorize a long speech in English for the show. Well, kinda English. Actually, like most Chinese attempts at English, it was a completely incomprehensible word salad that would have been funny if they hadn't forced the boy to spend so much time memorizing it. Which he did perfectly. The whole episode just proves again to me that memorization is not the same as learning a language.

A new blog...

Well, an additional blog. I'm just posting this short entry to let everyone know that I'll be posting for the weekend to a different blog. No, I'm not stopping this blog. This is still the place to go to keep up with my experiences living in China, but I wanted to start a separate blog to cover my travels.

I first thought of maintaining a separate blog last year when I got the opportunity to travel in southeast Asia. I wasn't really keeping up with posting to this blog at the time, but it did occur to me how different my experience was traveling than learning the in​s and outs of living in China. Further, the audience might be quite different, so I thought a separate blog might be the right answer.

The idea has been rattling around in my head since then. Some friends of mine will be playing in a rugby tournament in Guangzhou this weekend and I'm going down to watch. It will be my fortieth birthday weekend as well, and I hope to get some sightseeing in, so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to start the new blog.

The new blog will be less about daily life and personal issues and more about traveling and the places I'm going. I hope to be taking more pictures and videos as well, in keeping with the theme. I will consider making it a vlog in the future. As soon as I find out what that is.

Needless to say, I expect to have a flurry of entries for this new thing, then nothing at all for at least a couple of months. That's usually how travel goes. I'll insert a link here and post a notice on G+ when I get the new one set up.

Working 9 to 5... What a way to make a living!

I've finally gotten started on classes, though out of all of the classes I've got, only one class is really going well. I have a group of students from around age six to twelve. That class has been going for about a month and a half now and the students seem to be learning a lot, though it is a beginner's class. I plan the lessons for that class ahead of time and execute the classes fairly well, though my school doesn't really have anything that's necessary for the class to run properly. The school has no toys to help teach, lacks the basics for elementary age students (like scissors, construction paper, crayons, etc...) so the classes are basically just me saying the words and the students repeating, along with the occasional game of Simon Says and red light, green light. I also don't have a computer, so my lessons are planned on scrap paper. And there's no screen or projector to use in the classroom. Despite this, it's probably the best planned and executed class I've encountered so far in China, so that's something, I guess.

It Begins!

I wanted to take a minute to let everyone know that the long-awaited event has finally arrived. I'm now teaching classes at my new school, Mastermind English. I have one class of students aged 6-9 and another class that has students from teenager to adult. The classes are going quite well, I think, though I still don't have a teacher's book for the adult class. Nevertheless, the children's class is going well. The kids are getting adjusted to a teacher that doesn't let them just do anything. (Chinese kids are terribly spoiled by their parents and, subsequently, by their teachers.) Surprisingly, though, it doesn't take much discipline to set them behaving fairly well in class. Education at this age also focuses much more on games and songs than a 'lesson' presented formally. Last week we began by learning the alphabet and had our first test on introducing yourself and learning the words for common toys. All of the kids did well and a couple had perfect scores. I can only hope the adult class, which has just started, will do as well as the kids have.

We have two classes for each of these groups on the weekend and that part of the work day is over by lunch. After lunch we head over to a music school where we do demonstration classes for some of the students there. The idea is that if parents have the money and inclination to have their kids do extra curricular music lessons, then they might also want their kids to take extra curricular English lessons, which is what our school offers. The same applies to karate lessons, dance lessons, etc., which are all located in the same building in town. That's usually a good place to recruit students. And then there's Darcy.

I don't know if I've mentioned that school in previous posts, but in short, it's the school where almost all the foreigners work in Chenzhou. While most schools have difficulty in securing one foreign teacher, Darcy has nearly a dozen. They spend a lot of money on getting foreign teachers and, in my opinion, their teaching supplies suffer. I think a lot of the kids walk away from Darcy classes without a grasp on how to speak or use English. I think our school, if it is managed properly, will end up taking a lot of students away from Darcy.

That makes things awkward, however, since most of my friends in town work at Darcy. This process will take years though, so I'm not terribly worried about it now. I imagine that most of my friends will be long gone before Mastermind provides any real competition for Darcy. Darcy is well established in Chenzhou, with three schools and a kindergarten, as well as schools in two other cities.

Right now, we're only really worried about getting ourselves established and running with a couple hundred students. Currently we have ten.

Beginning the year

The Spring Festival holiday lasts two weeks in China. New Year's Eve is the first day of the Holiday and the last is the Lantern Festival. The Lantern Festival is becoming popular abroad as well, since it's one of the more festive Chinese holidays. Lanterns are already hung around town for the Spring Festival and my understanding is that several will be flown on Saturday for the Lantern Festival. If you've never seen it, this is one of the holidays where the sky is filled with lanterns which, when lit, function as miniature hot air balloons. It sounds impressive, but I don't know if there's one place that people go in Chenzhou to send their lanterns skyward, so I'll try to figure out if any of my friends  are doing it this year.

In any case, the year is starting off with a bang. Sort of. I've been glued to foreign news trying to figure out what Donald Trump will do next. People here aren't too worried about it. Chinese people are never worried about the news. The Great Wall isn't just a literal wall in China, there's also a cultural barrier that makes the outside world little more than a novelty most of the time. Even the foreigners feel it while there here. There's a tendency even to just tune out of the news and focus on what's going on here. I fell into that last year and made it my New Year's resolution to start paying attention to the news more. As far as my personal life, not much has changed. The school I moved back to Chenzhou to work at is just getting started. I did a small demo class today at an art school. We're working with them to try to get some of their students to sign up for ours. Parents often send their kids to extra schooling after the normal school day is over and, usually, every night of the week is occupied in this way: Monday night, piano; Tuesday night, dance; Wednesday night, karate; Thursday night, English classes... and so on and so forth. Then we'll have classes all day on the weekends.

After the excitement of the Holiday

Well, technically the holiday is still going on. Chinese New Year was last week and the festivities last for about a week, then there's a week of dead time before everyone heads back to work. We're still in Spring Festival week, the week after the Chinese New Year. That's when the Chinese mark the start of spring, which is obviously wrong because it's still cold as hell here. Actually, I'm exaggerating. It's cold today. At the time of this writing, but the weather is supposed to warm up into the low 20s over the weekend. That's pretty warm for February. And we've had several warm spells over the winter, such that we've only ever had a few weeks of cold weather at one time. It does get down close to freezing when its cold, but that isn't that bad when we're talking about a nighttime low.

The weather here used to be colder. Whenever people show me pictures from ten years ago or before, there's always snow on the ground and people are bundled up. Now, it almost never snows. In fact, there was a huge ice storm in 2008 that shut the city down, destroyed trees and power lines, and resulted in several deaths. That was the last time it snowed here. Before that, the river flooded and destroyed the old part of town, called Yu Hou Jie. That part of town was rebuilt in the traditional Chinese style and is now a popular area of town for bars, restaurants, shops, etc. There's also a great little Hostel in that neighborhood.

Yu Hou Jie was a popular place for people to go for New Year celebrations. There were a whole lot of fireworks going off for the new year, so that was fun to watch.

Yu Hou Jie on a warm day, just prior to the New Year

It's also growing in popularity as a place to go for dinner and drinks, though housing construction has stopped in the neighborhood, likely due to the reluctance of businesses to return to the neighborhood. Prior to the flood, the neighborhood was known for crime and poverty. Now, people have returned in substantial numbers, but stores have been more cautious. Restaurants seemed to be the first to return, and several payed the price, attested to by several that had to shut their doors after only a few years.

Overall, though, I think the prospect is good for the neighborhood. Most of the commercial space is filled and the variety of businesses is promising. Currently, it has everything from Hostels to Hair salons. There's even an Italian restaurant there, the only one I know of in Chenzhou.

Getting settled in.

Well, I've been back in Chenzhou for several months now. I haven't started my new permanent job yet, but that's supposed to start next week. Right now we'll just be doing demo classes. That means we teach a class to prospective students for free and the parents decide if they want to send their children to our school. To be clear, this is a 'training school'. That mean that students come to our school after their regular school hours to learn English. In Chenzhou, their regular school is free up until the 9th grade, so the parents pay money to send their kids to these training schools and they want to know that their kids are going to learn English before they pay. Chinese parents are quite different in this regard. They don't drop their kids off at the training school and come back when classes are over. They sit outside the classroom waiting on their kids to finish the 1.5 hour lesson, sometimes even standing at the door to peer into the classroom. (Classrooms always have a window.

More importantly, it's Spring Festival! The New Year begins on Saturday and the town is gearing up. I passed a fireworks display on the street the other day, Probably just a test run, but that's what will happen on the holiday. I missed New Year in Chenzhou last year because I was on holiday in Vietnam (they call it Tet there and there was an impressive fireworks display in Hanoi). This year I will be spending the holiday in Chenzhou. I've had a couple of different friends ask me to spend the holiday with their family, so I will be having a traditional dinner for the New Year. I know there will be a lot of fireworks and a lot of food for the holiday, but I'm not sure what else will be happening. I'm interested to see it.

The New Year in China begins the Spring Festival. The Spring Festival is the big holiday time in China. I'm told the city will be empty by Friday because most people in the cities will go to the countryside to spend time with family. While foreigners use this time to travel ( I have friends going to Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore this year.), Chinese use this time to spend with their families. Some will only stay with family a few days, while others will stay a couple of weeks. Chinese cities have grown substantially over the course of the past few decades, so the majority of people in them have family in the countryside, where they come from. That means that most of the businesses will be closed over the holiday, so that will be interesting as well.

By the way, I realize that late January, early February is not spring. The Chinese do not seem to have caught on to this. I'll attempt to post some pictures over the holiday when I see something interesting.