Lucky, lucky you – I don’t post for weeks and now you’ve got two in five days! I’m celebrating the purchase of my beautiful new camera and I’ve got shutter fever. So here’s a bumper crop of photos from around Beijing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Greetings readers, I’ve finally decided to emerge from my blog-shaped hermit home and say Nǐ Hǎo. I know, I know, it’s been a few weeks since I’ve channeled my diatribe onto the web but I’ve just had two glasses of imported chardonnay and I’m feeling insipid. Sorry I mean inspired. Read the rest of this entry »

Good morning class!

Whoops, sorry, I seem to be using this strange, chirpy teacher’s tone even outside the classroom; I think I might have lost my adult mind by December. I’m getting into the swing of things now though, and feeling far less worn out generally - I stayed up until 10.30 last night which is the early hours for me, even by pre-teaching standards.

One thing I’d forgotten whilst being a lazy bum was how much you look forward to the weekend, and this one got off to a cracking start when we were inexplicably dismissed from school at lunchtime on Friday (things operate on a need to know basis at the school and, as a rule of thumb, the foreign teachers don’t need to know), to allow the children to go home and practice for their national day celebrations, whatever that means. So we found ourselves three hours early for our Friday teacher’s meeting in the pool hall down the road and had a nice long afternoon of student-free relaxation. By the time I wandered home I was a little bit tipsy and promptly fell asleep on the sofa - another rock and roll Friday night for me.

On Saturday James and I met up with our friends Stelios and Hee-Jeong, who were passing through the city with their family on a mini-tour of China: Beijing, Xi’an, Shanghai and Hong Kong in the space of not very many days – more than we’ve seen in six weeks.  Seeing them was rather surreal since we kicked off our trip by staying at their apartment in Qatar (we would have returned the favour of accommodation but our flat is the size of a biscuit tin) so we’ve seen them more regularly than our parents over the last seven months.  James took them camera shopping in Beijing’s massive electronics district while I rudely excused myself to go and watch a rugby match.

On Sunday I woke up with a mild, rugby-related hangover and a sense of impending doom – I teach  at a private school every other week and have the class from hell, but a call from Stelios inviting us to dinner with his parents offered some light at the end of the tunnel. The only thing I look forward to more than dinner is free dinner, and this is exactly what we ended up getting thanks to Stelios’s ‘connections’ (you have to have them in China). His dad is some kind of dimplomat (sorry, Stelios, I don’t quite know how to describe his job), and he brought along the Cypriot ambassador and a very nice Chinese business man who, for reasons unknown to but fully taken advantage of by James and I, insisted on paying for several courses of fantastic sushi, sake and beer. Five months of rigorous chopstick training came in useful, since every time I reached over to hook some food I risked an international relations upset by potentially throwing raw fish eggs or similar all over the other guests. Luckily I didn’t disgrace myself (except for eating more a little bit more than my share of the food I suspect) and we had a lovely, international themed evening (two Eastern Europeans, a Korean, a Chinese, several Cyrpriots, and American and two Brits were in attendance) before Stelios and hee-Jeong jetted off to see the Terracotta Warriors. ..another Chinese sight we haven’t got round to seeing.

When I was a kid I used to whinge at my mother, who was a teacher in her former life, every time she came home from schoo tired: she’d stagger in, cook dinner, drink a glass of wine, collapse onto the sofa and nod off before the Simpsons had finished. Mum’s school was like a lunatic asaylum and consequently the nodding off routine used to occur on a fairly regular basis - I don’t know why it used to bother me so much since being a teenager at the time I was terrible company and didn’t want to speak to her anyway, but I used to complain about it endlessly. I didn’t understand why a day in the classroom would tire her out more than me.

I’ve now been teaching third grade – 9 year old – Chinese kids for a total of two weeks (10 days to be precise) and my views have altered somewhat: it’s a wonder to me that my mother even made it home awake let alone cooking dinner and lasting for 6 minutes of a 24 minute episode. I only have to do 24 lessons per week and I’ve lapsed into a state of extreme mental and physical exhaustion, catching forty winks here and there on my way to work and hiding in the toilets between lessons to collect myself for the next onslaught.

I started my teaching life a week last Monday at the Beijing Foreign Language School, along with eleven other new English teachers and, in true Chinese style, we were given our teaching syllabus forty eight hours before we started teaching, so I spent a fraught weekend last weekend trying to write lesson plans. As it turned out I needn’t have bothered because they’d given me the wrong syllabus, so I had to wing it all day Monday. Fun. The school is a big place – 1200 students of which I teach eight third grade classes: my main worry before I turned up getting my head around lots of Chinese names, but apparently all the kids are allowed to choose an English name that they use in their language lessons. You’d think this would make things more straightforward but the names range from the sublime to the ridiculous, and in one class I have John, Richard, Kelly, Billy, Wish, Glory, Vera, Dragon, Tiger, Hamster 1, Hamster 2 and Hamster 3. I’m having trouble remembering which one is Hamster 1 and which one is Hamster 2, but luckily Hamster 3 bears a striking resemblance to a desert rodent, so I usually get his name right.

I’m fast learning that kids see their English lessons with the foreign teachers as a bit of a break from the drudgery of other classes, so the order of the day is games, songs and lots of chatter. The students are almost without exception bright and enthusiastic, but some of them can be the devil incarnate if they fancy it  - if you have images of identical, well-behaved, silent little Chinese kids reciting comprehensions, think again – most of my classes are organised carnage (’Simon Says’ can get particularly raucus, especially if you make the mistake, as I did, of including ‘Simon says act like a monkey’ as one of your actions…I’m waiting for an invoice for the classroom repairs after that one). The school itself is a specialist foreign language school so my kids, at nine, have been learning English for at least three years and they can chatter away quite happily, in some cases more than I would like them to.

So, as you can gather, after seven months of bumming around doing an actual job has come as a bit of a shock, particularly one as demanding as teaching. Having been accustomed to getting up at 7.30am, ish, for a leisurely breakfast cooked by somebody else followed by some sightseeing to break upthe morning, my alarm now goes off at 5.45am and I have breakfast at the subway station on the way. Chinese schools work a long, long week: the kids get there at 7.30am and lessons kick off at eight, but some of them have a P.E class before that. The teachers get a break at 8.40am when the kids go out for half an hour of military-style exercises and flag raising, then it’s more lessons through to lunchtime, then lessons again until 5.25pm, so they’re lucky to get home before six every evening. Most of them seem to do English lessons or some sort of private tuition on Saturdays and Sundays as well. And next week, when they get a few days off to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of communism in China (the country’s most significant public holiday), guess what? They have to come in at the weekend to make up for the lost time with extra lessons. No wonder China is taking over the world’s economy; from the age of five its children are indoctrinated to work, work, work.

Having said all this, most days it’s pretty good fun and I’m learning as much Chinese as they’re learning English, not to mention conquering my long-held fear of children. There are quite a few I still don;t trust though, it’s that funny little glint in their eye.

Rugby and football training started this week so I’ve finally started to do some proper exercise again and we have our first rugby match in four weeks time, so settling in to Beijing nicely all in all. Shamefully, we’ve still yet to do any sightseeing in or around the city, but we’re saving Tiannamen Square for the 60th Anniverary celebrations, which promise to be absolutely immense: they had a practice there last week and 200,000 people turned up just to watch.

Right, I must go, James will have his apron on to cook my dinner but I’ve got one more class first – no hamsters in this one.

I’ve been let off my leash. Or rather, I’ve been forced to untether my leash and pay a brief visit to Hong Kong for visa shenanigans - apparently, you used to be able to change a tourist visa to a business visa on the mainland but the Olympics gave the goverment an opportunity to throw a bureaucratic spanner in the works and it hasn’t yet been removed. So here I am in Hong Kong, waiting for my over-priced visa to apear from the travel agents, while James whiles away three peaceful days in Hooters  (I’m not joking, it’s about fifty yards down the road from our flat) back in Beijing.

Despite having to fly both ways (it’s 26 hours on a train and I start work next week), which makes me very grumpy on emotional, environmental and financial grounds, Hong Kong is not a bad place to wait for your visa. The plane was delayed yesterday so I got in very late and decided to catch the Airport Express into town to save time: honestly, after the last five months of rickety buses and smokey train carriages, it was like stepping into the space age. Sleek, bullet-like, weirdly silent and with not a speck of dirt anywhere, it rocketed me into Kowloon at break-neck speed and deposited me into a terminal with so many exits it took me 25 minutes to escape onto the street. I just wandered round in ever decreasing circles, reminding myself of a guy I used to work with when I was involved with British University Sports…he was the sports president at Preston University and he met me in London once to sit on a disciplinaty panel at the BUSA offices. He was Northern Irish, and before going to study in Preston – which he thought was the Metropolis of Metropolises – he’d barely been of his family’s farm in the beautiful Irish countryside. Belfast was like Vegas. When I met him at Euston he’d never been to London before and he looked like an antelope caught in a buffalo stampede. His first words were ‘I was going to meet you at the offices but I don’t know how to get out of here onto the street’.

Anyway, I finally found the right exit and managed to navigate through the packed streets of Kowloon to my hostel, although I nearly got run over about fifteen times through gawping at the lights, smells and immense energy of Nathan Road, the city’s commercial epicentre, not to mention being almost bowled over by the heat. Despite the lateness I took a detour to the harbour to see the pretty lights of Hong Kong Island, which has got to be one of the most beautiful and show-offy urban views anywhere in the world. The water flashes with an electric rainbow of reflections, every skyscraper competes to have the boldest light displays, the hills loom up in the background and you can see the posh houses twinkling smugly up on Victoria Peak - it’s like Singapore on steroids, I cannot imagine what the electricity bill is but clearly they have the money here.

My hostel is possibly Hong Kong’s cheapest at about a tenner a night: the room – a double, allegedly - is a large cupboard with a shoebox for a bathroom, but it’s clean and quiet and I think it’s pretty secure, unless of course the building catches fire in the night which is a definite possibility…has anybody reading ever stayed in Chungking Mansions? It’s amazing – fifteen cavernous floors of little dark corridors, all containing separate guest houses except for the bottom two which hold restaurants and shops run by traders form every conceivable corner of Asia. Indians offer you tailored suits, Cantonese offer you cheap rooms and Jamaicans offer you all sorts of things - it was an interesting place to rock up to at midnight last night but after wandering the money-stuffed streets of Hong Kong Island today I’m quite looking forward to getting back there for a beer tonight. 

I’ve visited a lot of great cities in the past few months but, on first impressions, Hong Kong has probably left me the most open-mouthed. Partly it’s the sky scrapers; they’re so densley packed on the harbour that walking between them you feel like an ant, and partly it’s the ecleticism. It’s like a mixture of Monaco (crowded, hilly), Beijing (Chinese, exotic), London (double-decker buses, anally polite signs about littering, sensible traffic) and Cape Town (views, beaches), with some San Fransisco-style trams and a whole load of people thrown in for good measure. I started the day by visiting the birds and monkies – who are absolutely free to see and very well-looked after – in the zoological gardens, then hid from the heat in Hong Kong Park for an hour or so before spending too much money in the antiques shops on Hollywood Road. I had grand plans for a few museums as well but by the time I got back across the harbour I was reaching sensory overload so I shall go for a quick pint instead.

The visa is sorted and I fly back to Beijing tomorrow, so I won’t have enough time to get to know the city warts and all, but for now I’m happy to treat it like a cheap date: it looks great although I’m not sure how much there is under the surface, and I’ve had enough of for now but I hope to be back…much the same thoughts James is probably having as he emerges from Hooters…on that note, I think I’ll go and get a beer.

Katie Melua doesn’t know what she’s talking about: there are nowhere near nine million bicycles in Beijing. I should think there probably were in the nineties, but over the past ten years they’ve been seriously upgraded and there are now nine million Mercedes…as well as fifteen million people, about three million building sites, half a million shopping malls and a billion small dogs. Some of these figures might be a bit exaggerated but the point is, there’s a lot going on here.

Once we’d made the decision to have a few stationary months we whizzed straight from Dali back to Kunming and, after a quick overnight stop during which I picked up a nice bout of food poisoning (from the first Western meal I’ve eaten in weeks), made the 2100 kilometre trip north east to the Chinese capital, with me throwing up about every 100 kilometres.

We arrived in Beijing last Thursday evening with the following to do list:

Find a job

Find a flat

Buy stuff for the flat

Buy some clothes that makes us look like ordinary citizens rather than tramps

Replace technological items

Make some friends

Ambitious, but having done very little for six months we felt ready for a bit of self-discipline. It’s now Tuesday, and I’m writing this from our little studio apartment on James’ new lap top – she’s no Ruby but she’s very pretty. I’ve just signed a contract for a four month teaching job at a local primary school (why are you laughing? I love children) and we both have some shiny new clothes from the brilliantly named Alien Street Market, which is full of cheap fur coats for the Russian residents. Not a bad start.

It’s been a bit of a mental few days but it’s all very exciting and Beijing is full of promise: of all the cities we’ve visited in Asia, it is far the most energetic and ambitious, even more so than Bangkok in my opinion. I hate to use the old cliche ‘east meets west’, but it’s very apt for Beijing – the long-standing communist political dogma is still alive and well here but, thanks to China’s increasingly open economic policies, Beijing is voraciously commercial, with a plethora of bars, clubs, theatres, shops and restaurants, a massive business district and an extremely ambitious, stylish new generation of young Chinese.

Thankfully, it doesn’t feel soulless despite the shopping and money-making frenzy, and China’s older culture still permeates through the modernisation – you never know when you’ll fall over a crumbling alleyway crowded with old men playing mah-jong, a little smokey tea houses, a patch of beautiful old architecture or – James’ favourite – a dirt cheap dumpling shop.  We’ve got four months to make ourselves acquainted with it so we’ve done no proper sightseeing yet, but tonight we’re going to sniff out a few bars and, I hope, some Pee King duck. If anybody fancies a visit, we have a very comfortable sofa…

 

It’s been such a busy week I don’t really know how to start, so I’ll take Maria Von Trapp’s advice an choose the very beginning, since the last post anyway, which was Dali.

With James reduced to only one technological gadget (his mobile phone) tensions were running high, so when we arrived in Dali we proceeded straight to the police station to register the loss of Ruby and our other stuff. It was a long drawn out afternoon (six hours from start to finish) but the Dali police could not have been nicer. They arranged for an interpreter to come and meet us then drove us down to the new town, half an hour away from where we were staying, to register our police report. There was a very sinister looking chair with attached handcuffs and ankle shackles in the interrogation room which made us a bit edgy at first, but the interpreter assured us that our wrists and ankles were too big for it so they let us sit in normal chairs and go through the painful process of describing Ruby (small, shiny, covered in flag stickers) and her playmates. We emerged a few hours later with some official looking froms, all marked with a big red police stamp and, amusingly, James’ fingerprints, which he was asked to press over his signature on each version of our statements. Our interpreter must have noticed the sceptical look on James’ face as his fingers were being dipped unceremoniously into the red ink pad because he asked ‘don’t they do this in your country?’. James replied ‘only to criminals’, which the police found hilarious. When we were all done they found a couple of on duty PCs to drive us back to Dali old town in a police van – they didn’t speak a word of English but they both grinned at us, stuck the flashing lights on and jumped every traffic light on the way. We felt as though Interpol were after us.

Faith in Chinese authority partially restored, we spent a couple of days wandering through the very picturesque, packed streets of Dali old town, which are permanently teeming with well-heeled Chinese tourists and a handful of foreign backpackers. Dali has a beautiful mountain and lake backdrop and the old town is a perfectly preserved jumble of old buildings and cobbled streets – despite the many souvenir shops and the constant chaos of people it was a nice, easy place to recover from a miserable few days. There was even an English run bar (Bad Monkey – highly recommended) with live bands and a free pool table; perfect.

We’d planned to spend a few days hiking in the mountains then carry on North east to Lijiang but, for all manner of reasons that I won’t bore you with, we decided over several beers that we’d hit the six month travel fatigue barrier and we needed to be stationary for a little while. So we’re off to Beijing for a a few months. Running around like headless chickens at the moment trying to organise ourselves (James is madly gaffer taping his wounded rucksack) so I’ll continue when we get to Beijing…

 

Well readers, Jeannie and I have had an eventful few days which will remain memorable, but for the wrong reasons.  It’s tragic tale, so keep the Kleenex handy.

After spending a few days in Kunming we decided to take an overnight sleeper bus east to the border town of Ruili.  Ruili is the main border between China and Burma and promised both the bustling excitement of a dusty border town and the opportunity to head out into the countryside to visit a clutch of magnificent temples and pagodas.  Perfect.  We prepared to board our 8pm bus but were promptly headed off by a scrawny little fellow who proclaimed to be from the bus company and was here to collect our ‘luggage fees’.

Read the rest of this entry »

I shall begin the first blog from China with an understatement of epic proportions: it’s really, really big. I knew it was big before we crossed, of course – it looks massive on the map, it’s bigger than India and it holds 1.3 billion people. But it wasn’t until we’d spent five hours on a rickety, smoke-filled bus, passing through a wilderness of mountains, rivers and villages,  just to reach the first town of any significance (apart from the border town of Hekou)  that I realised just how insanely stupid it was to think we can see much of China in a month – extending our visas is a priority.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quicky – I’ve just discovered a new gizmo for my mobile phone which sends our LIVE location back to the blog so you can track us in real time. There’s a new map ‘where are we’ on the homepage which shows where we are, as long as my phone is charged and has a signal. I’ve also updated our map page too and you can see a live view of where we are on there too.