Lots of stuff happened this week! I don't even know where to begin!
Well, yes I do... Let's start with Tuesday.
Tuesday was a field trip day. In a manner all too familiar at this point, none of us had any idea what was going on the entire time. We were told on Monday that it was mandatory that we go, and that we needed to be at our school at 7:30am to help the kids load onto the bus.
We woke up at 6am. The morning was chilly; it was a lot colder than normal in fact. There was not a sight of frost, but I noticed that I could see my breath. I bundled up as warmly as I could, considering my completely inappropriate wardrobe for China. As it turns out, I did not prepare for the hot hot heat or the cold cold freeze. We scarfed down some coffee and once we got to school we helped ourselves to some of the free breakfast.
This was my first experience with traditional Chinese breakfast. I was aware of what Chinese people ate for breakfast, but up until this past week I always just did my own thing. Normally Laura and I have some coffee and some little store-bought buns that taste a little sweeter than the "FRENCH BREAD" label would indicate. We are also fans of these little egg and flour cake bar things. I have no idea what they are called, and the label is in extremely fancy cursive Chinese that I am unable to decipher. The only reason that I know they are "breakfast" bars is because I saw a lady eating one on the bus one morning.
School breakfast, though, was interesting. The quintessential Chinese breakfast is 粥, or Congee, which is a porridge or sort of oatmeal made from hot water and rice. Some restaurants will serve very fancy rice porridge, and you can even get it with seafood in it. The school's, though, was completely unflavored. Just imagine mashed up rice in a bowl of hot water. Delightful! There were also these sticky rice balls in the shapes of pyramids called 粽子 or "Zongzi". I had been meaning to try one of these ever since we first landed in Zhaoqing. It was, surprisingly, delicious! Very filling and very sticky! I wanted a second one, but by the time I finished my first the cafeteria had been closed.
So we milled around the school for over an hour waiting for, well, anything to happen. Despite being told to arrive at 7:30am, and that the bus was going to leave at 8am, we didn't start boarding the buses until almost 8:30. By now we had learned that the field trip was actually not mandatory for the foreign teachers, and that they had nothing for us to actually do. We also learned that we were going to a place called "Gaoming". After asking what this enigmatic place was, exactly, we got no fewer than three different answers from three different teachers. Angel, our boss, said that it was a farm. Chris, one of the Chinese ladies, said that it was a farm, but she wasn't sure if there were animals. Jason told us it was a theme park. Nathan, our Scottish coworker, said he had heard it is just a small village town in Foshan. Rose, meanwhile, and the other Chinese teachers just told us they "didn't know" where we were going or what we would be doing.
Ignorant yet satisfied, we made our way to the track where the students were congregating and lining up. All 1,600 students were loaded into about 30 rented buses. It was a veritable fleet of buses. I felt like we were going to war, albeit some sort of an academic war. Maybe a math war? Anyway we piled into the buses and were off.
I was reminded of just how big Foshan is during our ride. We rode in the bus for a little over an hour, and yet we were still inside what is considered to be the city limits. The ride itself was miserable. One of the chaperons had a microphone and LITERALLY talked the entire time. It was a monotone speech that lasted for over an hour. There was no intonation, no pauses to breathe, and no emotion in her speech. It was like a chant except I didn't feel as though I was part of a religious ceremony. In fact it felt like I was in hell. Over the chanting was the general screaming and playing of nearly 60 kids on the bus who were all extremely wired and excited to be going on a field trip. To make matters work, after about 40 minutes about half of them started singing over the monotone speech and the general din. Also, we were in the very back of the bus where it was the most bumpy and carsick-y. By the time the Buses got off the main road and started parking, I had gained a level of hatred for children the likes of which I have never experiences before, and hope to never experience again.
We unloaded from the bus and were hit with a wall of cold. Unguarded by the tall buildings of downtown Foshan, the wind bit through my meager hoodie and jacket. The other thing I noticed was that we were in the middle of nowhere. How was this empty, cold field in the middle of nowhere a field trip that the school had planned? We learned on the bus ride that last year the school took all of the kids to Chimelong Zoo in Guangzhou! (Remember that awesome zoo I went to a few months ago?). There definitely seemed to be budget cuts afoot.
We went through the entrance and they said that the foreign teachers could just walk around all day. We had nothing expected of us, although they asked if we wouldn't mind helping with the "cooking lesson" in a few minutes.
The park is really hard to describe. It felt like an apple orchard or something similar that kids would visit in the US. I was trying to compare it to my own elementary school experiences and that is the closest I was able to come up with. The Gaoming Ecological Park is definitely a sort of farm, although because it was December 2 and literally the coldest week of the year, absolutely nothing was growing. So imagine an apple orchard but with just acres and acres of empty fields and little seedlings getting ready to be planted for next year.
As we made our way to the "food area" we passed a few fun things, such as an obstacle course. There were already kids from other local schools at the park and they were playing on the obstacle course. The course was made up of various logs and chains and things over a ravine. It actually looked a lot of fun and I was surprised to see that a sort of safety net was included in the set up. Of course, upon closer inspection I concluded that if someone did fall, the safety net would do them absolutely no good and the child would probably break a leg. But oh well!
We finally arrived at the eating area and it was a little bit like a cooking area at a campground. It was still in the middle of the outside, but there was a roof overhead and some cement on the ground. When we were originally clued in about this "cooking class", I assumed that it would be led by a teacher or maybe an employee of wherever we were going. I thought maybe the kids would learn how to peel a potato or something equally safe-yet-educational.
Nope.
Full. On. Chaos. By the time Laura and I arrived on the scene the children had already been given their food and "equipment". Their food was a bucket of unwashed, uncut vegetables and a sack full of raw and bloody chicken meat. It was a whole chicken that was essentially just pretty badly mutilated. some meat chunks even had feathers still! Their equipment included a pile of sticks and a bucket of flammable oil and also a butchers knife.
Did I mention that these children are 7 and 8 years old? Did I mention that there were almost no adults around other than us foreign teachers and one or two of the Chinese teachers?
There was raw meat everywhere. On everything. On the ground, on the cutting board, on the vegetables. There were young boys CHASING each other with cleavers and other children were sword fighting with the sticks. Rose, approached me and said "Jon start the fire". With what?! We had sticks and oil, but no matches or flint or paper or anything. Rose promptly disappeared (she's really good at this). I elected to pick a "team" of kids and take away their butcher knife. I became the vegetable cutting captain, while Laura became the "don't touch the raw meat anymore god dammit" captain. Leon became the eggs captain, because there was also a bunch of eggs and egg shells all over.
Eventually some little old Chinese lady appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, and dumped half of the bottle of oil onto the stick pile. From there she produced a flame, apparently from the same netherworld from which she herself came, and lit the sticks on fire. Then she placed the bottle of highly flammable fluid right next to the inferno and disappeared. I think she was whatever the Chinese equivalent of a Leprechaun is.
Against all odds, we managed to keep our group under control and get some food cooked for them. School-wide, there were no injuries. I am not sure what to make of this. Statistically speaking 1,600 kids playing with some 300 butcher knives and some 300 piles of sticks that are on fire should have resulted in a few injuries. Maybe the Chinese are just naturally better at cooking outdoors. Maybe I have been coddled my entire life. Should my mother have let me play with raw chicken guts from the time I was a toddler? Sleeping with a butchers knife as if it were a teddy bear? Who knows.
There were some close calls though. Due to the enclosed nature of where we were, and the rather haphazard way in which the Leprechaun lady lit the fires, there was a lot of smoke everywhere. Kids were crying and coughing and running around the meats and the knives with their eyes closed, complaining of the smoke. I was worried someone was going to pull a Mike Skupin and do a nose-dive into what would be an already made funeral pyre, but all was well.
A brief trip to the bathroom to wash my hands led me to find myself in what was assuredly the most Chinese bathroom in all of China. It was just three holes in the ground about 3 feet apart from each other. You could very easily poop three abreast in this room, and I imagine that at some point in history someone has tried it. Today was not my day, however.
Laura and I were reticent to eat this "lunch" that was in front of us. We had, after all, seen it made. We knew EXACTLY where it came from and where it had been. Unfortunately we didn't have very many options. Our boss had told us yesterday that we would "go out for barbecue" during the field trip and that we "wouldn't need a lunch". Of course, this orgy of dirty meats and vegetables was what she meant by "barbecue", so we didn't have much of a choice.
Surprisingly, seven days later I still have not been sick.
After the lunch adventure we explored the grounds some more. Beyond the farm land there was a little amusement park area. It was not much to look at, and reminded my a lot of a traveling carnival, the kind that you often see at Gibraltar or in church parking lots during the spring or autumn back home. Everything was, in a word, "janky". I was wayyyy too big to ride anything, and the lines were Cedar Point-esque in length. Laura and I explored more of the grounds and happened upon some livestock. There were goats and cows, and they were pretty cute. There was nothing to separate the animals from the people though, and despite a few signs that politely said "please don't touch", there were children running up and playing with them. Kids were literally climbing on top of these poor cows. I secretly wished the cow would kick a kid. Nothing too damaging, just enough so that the other kids would stop abusing it.
At the opposite end of the park was a closed down/abandoned water park. Signs indicated that it would open up again the next summer, but everything was seriously run down. Chipped paint and falling-over structures. The main pool still had water in it and also about 3 feet of mud, dirt, floating wooden boards, and rusty nails. Do they take the nails and boards and mud out of the pool before the summer season? I doubt we'll ever know. It had the look and feel of one of those abandoned theme park slideshows you see online sometime. It would have been spooky if not for all the annoying kids.
Yes, even here there were children. One of the other schools visiting the "park" that day was a middle school. In China a middle school covers everything between the end of elementary and the beginning of college, so that meant teenagers and lots of them. The teenagers, presumably "too cool" for climbing on top of sad cows or riding busted up bumper cars, were all loitering around the water park area. I got the impression that their school does not employee foreign English teachers, because they were all shocked to see us. After their initial surprise they get very brave and very annoying. They tried talking to us, chasing us, picking fights, and taking pictures. We didn't stick around the water park area long.
The saddest and most distressing part of the Gaoming experience was definitely the "zoo". In the dingiest and darkest corner of the park was a building labeled "zoo". I took a peak inside because I thought maybe it was a fun house or something. Nope. It was an actual zoo. I saw monkeys, ostriches, crocodiles, and pigs. Each had its own cage barely the size of its body and children were going around and throwing food at them. It nearly drove me to tears.
What actually drove me to tears was that the "zoo" also operated as a "pet shop". Like all cheap, crappy carnivals, people were selling tat everywhere. From junk yoyos to those gooey hand toys that everyone's little brother slapped them with once or twice back in the 1990s, this carnival had it all. The "pet shop" though, was selling baby rabbits and baby ducks. Much in the same way that some carnivals have a "throw a ping pong ball in a cup and win a goldfish" game, they were just handing these animals out and HUNDREDS of kids were buying them. These kids were walking around with tiny little animals in tiny little cages, stuffing them in their pockets, or taking them out to show one another. I'm not sure why the kids were allowed to do this or, even more horrifyingly, to take the animals home. Most schools in China, including ours, are boarding schools. This means that the kids, upon leaving Gaoming on Tuesday, all would be going back to school and living in their little dorm rooms for at least 3 more days. The poor little creatures inevitably were going to end up stuck in their tiny cages on a window sill in these rooms, and almost certainly die before the weekend. It's making me sad now to even think about it.
I like China most of the time, I really do, but they have absolutely no regard for animals at all and sometimes it is outright disgusting.
After about 3 hours we decided we were really cold and really sick of walking around. Unfortunately we discovered that there was not a single indoor building in the entire park area. Even the changing rooms near the water park were just outdoor huts with some thin plywood walls slapped up. There was also nowhere to sit that wasn't aboard one of the rides. We asked Nathan how much longer until the field trip was over, and he lamented that it was due to be another THREE MORE HOURS.
We walked around like zombies for a while and we must have looked pretty miserable, because eventually one of the Chinese teachers came up and said "Do you want to go home?". We said that we did, but that there was nothing we could do. Like an angel fulfilling a glorious prophecy, she said, "I have to take two children back to the school right now. Would you like a ride in my car?"
Since the field trip ended up not being mandatory at all, we saw no harm in it. We rode home in her car and then went and found a Burger King in downtown Foshan.
All in all I guess it was a pretty great day.
Thursday and Friday were notable for one reason: None of the foreign teachers had made any lesson plans because we had been told that Thursday and Friday were "the sports days". On Thursday morning we learned that the sports day had been cancelled because "it is so cold and also it may rain", and so we suddenly had about 1 hour to make 8 or so lesson plans.
It was stressful, it was annoying, it was frustrating, and it was par for the course.
The day as also notable because I received a "blast from the past" in the form of a text from my old boss at the Zhaoqing school. She asked me how we were doing, how we liked Foshan, and if we missed her...
Then she dropped a bombshell...
"Jon I'm going to be honest. One of the American teachers just quit and we really need your help. Can you come back to Zhaoqing and work for us?"
I explained to her that, no, of course I couldn't. I have a full time job here!
She came back with the response that, "we could still use you on the weekends. How about just coming out on Saturdays?"
After a bit more negotiating and a few more "I don't think so"s, we agreed on a deal.
They decided that they would pay Laura and I a month's salary EACH for doing the next 7 weekends (not including Christmas), and that they would cover our bus far to Zhaoqing every week.
They say everyone has a price, and this one is apparently mine. With 2 months salary for a combined 8 days of work (at only 5 hours each day!), this was really a steal. And with a few thousand extra bucks in our wallets, Laura and I will be able to go on a few extra trips this year to places we wouldn't normally be able to go. I mean we could theoretically save it, but this may be the only time in our lives that we are in Asia and I think at the end of the day (or the end of the life), I'd rather be able to say I really truly experienced Asia.
Speaking of which, we have officially booked our plane and hostel tickets for Taiwan! That's right, we are going to spend a 4 day weekend in Taiwan over Christmas. Taiwan is like China, but not. For those of you not up to date on your world history, when the nationalists lost the Chinese civil war, they fled to the island of Taiwan and promptly declared it independent of the mainland. To this day, mainland China does not recognize Taiwan as separate from China, even though it has absolutely no power over there and Taiwan has been recognized as an independent country for like 50+ years worldwide.
Both the mainland China and Taiwan proudly declare that they are the "real China", and both eagerly await a day when Taiwan can be part of the mainland again. Of course the communists on the mainland want Taiwan to be a part of communist China, and the Taiwanese want the mainland to be a part of Democratic China.
Effectively, I am really looking forward to being able to experience a "different" China. It will be fun to see what is different and what is the same. Plus, even though the mainland would argue otherwise, it will be my second official Asian country on my trip. Can't wait to go and tell you all about it!
So after finalizing the deal with Jojo (the Zhaoqing boss), we suddenly had to change our plans. On Friday after work we bought a bus ticket and hoofed it back to Zhaoqing.
Wow. It was weird being back. It was so strange! Even though it's only been about (but not quite) 4 months, it really feels like a lifetime ago that we were there. My handle on the Chinese language, while still quite terrible, is easily 3x as good as it was before. I can read all the street signs! I can understand what some of the teachers are saying!
It was like riding a bike, though, once we were back it felt like we had never left. We went back to the Grand Buy mall and walked back to our old workplace. Once there we met up with our old/new bosses, and they walked us over to our new/old accommodations.
Instead of a hotel, this time we are staying in an apartment. As a matter of fact it is the apartment that belonged to Arby. You may remember me mentioning Arby back when we lived in Zhaoqing. He looks like my friend Jack Davia but is at least 6 feet tall.
Anyway he is apparently the one that is no longer with us. Come to find out, he didn't quit. The school messed up his visa and he got deported! I guess visa-related kerfuffles are quite common over here. I now realize how close of a call that we had back in September!
The apartment is nice, and I have to say this will probably be the only time in my life that I will ever have two apartments that I can call mine. Arby left a whole bunch of things behind, including some nice cookware and an oven! We may "steal" it for a few months since we have been told that Arby will not be coming back to China until at least the end of February, and also that he may be banned from China for life.
Working on Saturday was pretty alright. The Zhaoqing school has a much shorter work day, which is really nice, and it's a decent trade off considering the fact that we are expected to teach every single minute of the day and are given no prep hours. It was a strange transition going back to only working with 3 children at a time, and it was even stranger going back to their curriculum. I have gotten used to being able to make my own lesson plans and being bale to do essentially whatever I wanted. It made the 40 minute blocks of class time go by achingly slowly!
It was very nice being able to catch up with Hercules and Maria, our Greek friends living in ZQ. We also had the opportunity to meet their new, permanent staff. Surprise, surprise most of them are from Detroit! Apparently our recruiter lady was working over time this school year. I'm starting to think that Guangdong province my have the second biggest population of Detroiters outside of Detroit itself.
The workday went by pretty quickly and before we knew it we were bound back for Foshan. I have to say that even though working 6 days a week is going to get very tiring, it's not really that bad at all. The bus rides are a nice opportunity to sleep on something more comfortable than a plank of wood, and I also get most of my reading done on the bus now. We still have Sundays to relax and do errands, and the money we'll be making doing this extra work will go a long way.
We learned on Saturday night upon returning to Foshan that a local Spanish restaurant would be having a big party on Sunday. To celebrate their 2nd anniversary in business, they were having an all-you-can-eat Paella buffet! If there's one thing Laura and I love, it's eating food. If there's one thing we love more than that, it's probably Paella.
Sunday rolled around and we were sad to see that it was cold and rainy. The restaurant was very far away, and we didn't know if there would still be room for us to eat. Apparently reservations were required. We decided to brave the elements and risk it because... it's a buffet! We got there and discovered with much rejoicing that there was plenty of room!
Not only did they have Paella and an incredible pudding, but they had ALL YOU CAN DRINK SANGRIA included in the meal ticket. Needless to say, Sunday was a great day. We spent a lot longer there than we had planned on, and we made a lot of new friends.
The Spanish restaurant was located in a "creative park" which was sort of like an outdoor mall. It reminded me of a place you would find in Royal Oak or Ann Arbor, with lots of little artisan shops and a bunch of foreign restaurants. There were also a number of modern sculptures and art installations in the area, and even though it was cold and rainy the creative park had a certain vibrancy and energy to it that was really infectious.
One of the sculptures was just an enormous pair of breasts. Like, comically large. It was especially weird because of how conservative China tends to be when it comes to sex. I wasn't sure what to make of it, but I posed for some pictures nonetheless.
Aaaandddd that's the week! Maybe it is just the holidays, but I have been in a very good mood lately. I'm generally happy, of course, but everything has been going especially well lately. I don't even mind that I'm still sick like 80% of the time, or that I have chronic pain from the beds, and that the constant noise and pollution gives me headaches that never go away!
See you next week
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