Very slowly, I have been reading Contact by Carl Sagan.  I started it way back in the days of Shenyang and wasn’t able to finish before I left China for a multitude of reasons.  I’ve only now managed to get past the midway point.  I know, I’m pathetic.  : )  I’ve been enjoying it, it’s just that I have had a lot of things on my to-do-list lately – being social, searching for jobs, managing my family tree, and studying for the Praxis subject test to name a few.  Anyway, while reading it, I’ve come across several quotes that I’ve liked. The most recent one is a bit dark and pessimistic, but it made a lot of sense to me when I read it at two something in the morning and I thought I would share it. 

If you don’t have time to read the book, you should check out the movie.  For the most part, so far, they aren’t that different.  The only thing you’d miss in the movie is the depth of emotion, a few dozen characters, including a female president(I think) and huge discussion of whether or not they should build the Machine.  The quote below is part of that huge discussion.  I don’t know why, but to me it seems more like an eloquent "Life sucks and then you die" speech than anything else.  Perhaps that is why I liked it so much.

"[D]on’t you understand?" A vein in Lunacharsky’s neck throbbed.  "I’m amazed you don’t see it.  The Earth is a  . . . ghetto.  Yes, a ghetto.  All human beings are trapped here.  We have heard vaguely  that there are big cities out there beyond the ghetto, with broad boulevards filled with droshkys and beautiful perfumed women in furs.  But the cities are too far away, and we are too poor ever to go there, even the richest of us.  Anyway, we know they don’t want us.  That’s why they’ve left us in this pathetic little village in the first place."

If you haven’t had the chance to read My Chinese Headache Part 1 and 2, please click here and here. I suppose it’s not completely necessary, but it may make the following emails more humorous if you do.

Phil wanted me to wait until we got home before I posted them just in case the wrong person happened to come across them. He didn’t want to make our lives any more difficult than they were at the time. And I didn’t want to post it until I had the time to explain our reasoning for why we left. Now that we are home, and I finally got around to telling that story, I can now post what is probably the funniest bunch of emails that I have ever received.

There were several more emails than just the three I’m going to let you read, but these were by far the funniest – particularly the two written by Richard Guo(Yuli Guo).   The other one is written by our recruiter, Lea.  Please know that a lot of what Richard says in his emails is hogwash.  The main reason why I’m posting it is because it makes me laugh until my sides hurt.

ENJOY!

From: Yuli Guo(Richard)
To: Phil, Lea, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Sent: Monday, August 20, 2007

more than 4 months’salary of Tim.  When the teachers she sold in China having difficulties she never gives real help but sending an email to fool both teachers and Jessica about the whole situation. Teachers were not told by Mrs. Walker that how much they were sold. Teachers were also never told that because she cheated the host school which makes the teachers she sent over in a difficult situation. On the surface it seems your contract has no connection with Mrs. Walker’s evil doing, but it closed connected with each other. Phillip and Gabe, don’t worry and no thanks, , we will help both of you go home but always remember that it is Mrs. Walker’s evil way of doing the business that put you guys in a such difficult situation. I do hope you can go to the authority concerned in China and disclose Mrs. Walker’s evil behavior.

Richard Guo

From: Lea
To: Richard, Phil, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Sent: Mon, 20 Aug 2007
Subject: Re: More problems, sorry to bother you.

Okay, I know that it has taken me a long time to get the rest of this story down, but I guess late is better than never.  I’m not going to go into as much detail as I did last time because then I’ll never get this done, but I’ll at least cover the basics.

To sum up the story, my school, or rather, the president of my school lied and tried to get away with it.  The president, Richard – Yuli Guo, thought that he could push Phil and I around and get us to pay our own way home.  He thought that we would not fight for what was our legal right.  Apparently, he has pushed a lot of people around since he became the president of WECL and has gotten what he wanted more times than not.  I think that he thought we were young and stupid, but he underestimated us.

This is what happened in a nut shell.

The school tried to feed us the cock and bull story that there weren’t any tickets left, but the truth of the matter was that Richard just didn’t want to pay what the tickets cost.  They had known well in advance that we were going home.  They just waited until the last minute like they usually do with all other important things.  Once we found this out, we pulled out our contracts and read what was clearly stated on our contract.  Our contracts read in plain English that the school was required to pay our one way international ticket home.  Richard played dumb at this point and asked to have us fax a copy to him.  The funny part is that he personally signed and sent a copy of the original to me and Phil when we decided to teach a semester for him.

We sent him a copy of the contract as he asked and about a day later he told us that he wasn’t responsible.  He said that we should read the contract more carefully before we continued to harass him about paying for our tickets.  Well, we didn’t stop harassing him and that didn’t make him happy at all.  We started doing research to figure out how to get him to pay what he was supposed to.  We also saw at the bottom of our contract a beautiful statement that said if either of the parties broke the contract that between 10,000 and 100,000 yuan was to paid to the other party.  Whether we were going to get that if he didn’t pay for our tickets we didn’t know, but we were going to use it as a backup plan if need be.

For several days, Phil talked to Richard on the phone and argued with him that it was his responsibility to get us home.  At one point he said OK that he’d take care of it, but after talking to our support staff we found he had told them a completely different story.  He had no intention in paying for our tickets.   Richard knew that our visa was going to expire soon and that we would have to leave before that happened.  I think that he was hoping that we would get scared and fly home on our on dime.  Thankfully, our support staff was trying to figure out how to get an extension for us or a possible L visa if it came to staying longer.  We weren’t going to leave until we found out someone else had forked over the cash for our plane tickets.

At another point he said he would pay the cost of what our tickets would have cost if we had left in September because that is when they are cheaper or he would give us 5,000 yuan each.  Either way it wouldn’t cover the cost of what the tickets cost now.  So, we told him no and that we were only going to accept the full amount. 

As all of this was going down, we decided to contact the person who had originally sent us to China and ask her for help.  She gave us the contact information for a woman at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing and told us good luck. We sent the lady at the Ministry an email and hoped for the best.  When we didn’t hear from her we contacted our agency again and asked if she could do anything else to help us out.  She then decided to send the lady at the Ministry an email herself.  The email she sent was also sent to Richard.  We weren’t expecting her to do that.  You can only imagine what her email caused. 

Bright and early the next morning our phone rang.  It was Richard and he wanted to talk to Phil.  For the next 30 minutes or so Richard let Phil have it for involving our agency and the Ministry in our problem.  I didn’t have to ask Phil what was going on because I could hear Richard perfectly.  The man was mad. Fuming mad.  Smoke was seeping from our cell phone.  He screamed at Phil that he was trying his best to find us our tickets and a whole bunch of bull crapity crap.  Although, it could be possible that as soon as he got that email he sent Joe, his lacky, out to find us tickets even if it meant he had to rip it out of some poor dead man’s hands.  I seriously doubt that though. 

For the next few days we called and harassed Richard trying to figure out when he was going to have our tickets, and eventually he stopped taking our calls.  Apparently, we were starting to annoy him.  We then had to direct all of our inquires to our support staff – which didn’t know a whole lot and couldn’t get real answers from him either.  I was starting to get nervous at this point in time because it was just a week or so until our visa expired.  I was just hoping that Richard would somehow come through and give us what we deserved. 

It wasn’t too long(a day or so) after this that we got a call from Joe telling us to go to the school.  He had faxed over our a copy of our e-tickets and wanted us to make sure that we were okay.  We ran to the school and ripped the piece of paper from the fax machine.  All of the information on it was alright so we called him back and gave him the okay to actually purchase them.  We saved the numbers and later confirmed them with United.  They were legit, thank God.  Richard bought us tickets that would fly us from Beijing to D.C and then on to Columbia.  I guess the Ministry possibly getting involved in our problem and the possibility of having to pay us 10,000 – 100,000 yuan – made him search a little harder for the supposedly non-existence plane tickets.

After we were done celebrating that we were going home, the thought of how we were going to get to Beijing crossed our mind.  Richard had mentioned that we would have to take a train from Xiamen and that the school would pay for it.  We thought it would be a good idea to go double check with the school and make sure.  For those of you who don’t know, Xiamen is 33 hours away from Beijing and 33 hours on a Chinese train is a long time, especially if you are in anything other than a soft seat.  Well, when we told the school they knew nothing about our train trip to Beijing.  Our support staff called Richard to find out what was going on and what they had to tell us wasn’t at all amusing.  Richard wanted us to take a 33 hour train ride with all of luggage to Beijing on a hard seat.  I think we hit the floor. 

The bad part was that there was no way we were going to be able to get him to upgrade us to a soft seat.  Richard was responsible for getting us to Beijing, but no where was there written down how he was supposed to get us there.  Thankfully, we were able to convince him to give us what he would pay for the train tickets toward whatever other transportation we chose. So, we each got a whopping 250 yuan credit each.

After some research, we found that the only way we could fly to Beijing from Xiamen with all of our luggage was by buying a first class ticket which would cost us 2350 yuan each.  The thought of dragging our luggage behind us all the way to Beijing didn’t seem fun at all.  We’d done that from Fuyang to Beijing and that freaking sucked more than you can think it did.  Desperate to get home as soon and as painlessly as we could, we decided to fork up the money for the first class ticket to Beijing.  What else were we going to spend that money on?  Even if we took it back to the states and had it converted, it wouldn’t be that much in American money.

The last difficult decision we had to make was how to get to the airport.  The school wasn’t offering to take us, so we had to think of a way to cart all of our suitcases to the main road at 5:00 o’clock in the morning to catch two taxis.  The one thing I’ve learned from coming to a foreign country for a year is to bring as little as humanly possible.  If I had known that before I had flown to China, I wouldn’t have brought three suitcases and a backpack stuffed full of crap. 

The night before we left Xiamen, we got a call from one of the support staff.  She told us that the school had arranged for two taxis to come and take us to the airport.  This made me happy.  It meant I was only going to have to tug all of my suitcases halfway to the main road.  Come that morning though there were no taxis like we were promised and we had to drag our suitcases to the main road anyway.

Two hours later we flying out of Xiamen and we thought all of problems were behind us.  Oh, how I wish that were true.

After waiting 8 hours at our terminal at the Beijing airport, they finally called us to board the plane.  As we handed over our boarding passes we were asked to step aside. I thought we were getting the random search, but it didn’t turn to be that easy or cheap.  The woman before us informed that no matter what we were told by a United Airlines spoke person had said, we were allowed to take only one carry-on and that we would either have to A) throw one away or B) pay $142.00 each to have one of them checked.  We couldn’t quite throw away the stuff in either one of our bags, so after arguing with one another for 15 minutes I handed over my credit card.

16 hours later I was back in Columbia.

It’s going to be a good long while before I head back to China.  Man has yet to invent an Advil pill big enough.

I’ve only been home for about three weeks, and I am starting to remember why I left in the first place. The U S of A is wonderful and free, beautiful and clean, but the truth of the matter is that there just aren’t any jobs for English majors that pay what a person really needs to live. By live I mean being able to own a house, pay the bills, and save for what is supposed to be an enjoyable retirement.

So far, in my three weeks of searching, I have discovered that my job options include flipping burgers, working the 3rd shift at the gas station down the street where I possibly could get shot, answering computer questions as a customer service representative at one of the fifteen call centers, waiting hand and foot on a boss as an executive assistant(that’s a fancy term for secretary), and working as a movie extra.

Now before someone screams, “Why don’t you be a teacher?!” – let me tell you why that isn’t as easy as it seems. After talking to about a dozen people or so(11 of which were completely clueless), I was finally told that in order to teach in the backward state of South Carolina I either have to go back to school and get my Masters or start the PACE program that will take 3 years of my life to complete. Going back to school to get my Masters is out of the question. At this moment in my life, you couldn’t pay me to go back to school. In fact, if someone said I had a choice between continuing my education and certain death – I am 99% percent sure that I would choose death. That is how much I flipping hate school. The PACE program is a possibility, but I don’t fully understand it and what all the requirements are. The one thing that I do know is that I would have to take some graduate courses – and well, that requires school and probably several more tests than I even care to think about. Before I decide not to take that route, I will keep that window open, but it isn’t one that I want to crawl through if I can help it.

So far I’ve given my resume to a travel agent. They asked me the typical question of whether I had any travel agent experience and I had to tell them no, but that I had loads of travel experience. The woman that I was talking to gave me a fake smile and said that she would keep my resume on file and if they ever decided to train someone that they would give me a call. That of course translates into: As soon as you walk out of my store, I am going to incinerate your resume and erase your image off the back of my retina. I’ll go back in a few days and double check. I guess anything is possible.

I’ve also applied for 5 random state jobs. I am pretty sure I am qualified for them, but it really depends on who else has applied and if the person scanning through the resumes thinks I’m special or not. I just applied for them today, so I’m sure it will be a while before I hear back from them.

The sad part about all of this is that I have actually had the idea of going back to China to teach English cross my mind. I know that there are probably several legit programs over there that I would actually enjoy participating in, but without a teacher and ESL certificate, the money I would make over there wouldn’t equal an American salary or a enjoyable retirement.

Just what is a girl to do? *sigh*

Well, I guess I will just either A) hope to win the lottery which I don’t have the money to play because I don’t have a job or B) continue to search through the classifieds on Sunday until something screams at me. Until then . . . you’ll just have to listen to me complain. 🙂

A year and 2 days ago I landed in Shanghai, China. Time flies by so fast. It feels just like yesterday I was teaching in Fuyang, China threatening to kill all my students. This year has most definitely been an experience that I will never forget and I am very glad that I kept some form of journal, my blog, so that I can go back and remind myself just in case I start to forget what exactly I have been through in these last 12 months. Even now I occasionally go back and read and am amazed.

I am still working on the super long post about why I made the decision to go home. I may have to wait until I get home to finish it. It’s already over 2,000 words and I still haven’t gotten to the most interesting part of the story yet. I’ll see what I can do before tomorrow morning when I head out. We’ve just been so busy going to the last few places that we’ve wanted to see and spending time with the people we will probably miss the most – Patty, Eddie, and Elisa, some fellow Americans we met here in Xiamen. Also, we’ve been packing and cleaning for days now and we still aren’t quite done yet. We still have our bedroom to dust, mop and we have to move the extra bed out of there, too. I will post the story eventually, it just might take me awhile. It’s a long, evolved story, and you will understand that once you get a chance to read it.

Well, in case I don’t post again until I get home – Zaijin, China.

The news that I have been holding off telling is that I am going home. I’m leaving China, and I am not coming back – at least not for a good long while. I am currently working on a post that goes into the details on why I made this choice, and I will be done with that soon. Like most of my experiences in China, the story that made me make this decision is slightly complicated, long, a bit difficult, and even at times humorous, but I’ll let you be the judge when you read it.

We will be leaving Xiamen at 7:15 AM on August 28th and flying to the city I love to loathe, Beijing, for our connector flight back to the States. My last impression of China will come in Beijing’s international airport as I wait eight and a half hours for my plane to show up and take me home. I’m still not sure how I feel about the whole thing right now. A part of me is jumping for joy that I’m going; I’ve missed home, my family and my friends. The other part of me is in a quandary. I’ve had a difficult time seeing the good for all the bad lately. Not that I haven’t enjoyed my time, I have . . . It’s too complicated to explain right now. It will take time for me to shift through my emotions and figure out how I really feel about the whole ordeal. Perhaps you will understand better than I once you have read my side of the story. I’ll finish that soon – before I leave.

A lot of crap has been going down lately, and I haven’t really said much about it. Every time I try to compose a blog about it my thoughts get all jumbled and catch things on fire because the whole ordeal just makes me so unbelievably mad. I’ll try to explain to you the frustration that these last few weeks have mad me feel in a single sentence. I’ll go into all the gory details later – when my thoughts don’t burn through walls.

Richard, my boss, is the devil, and all of his WECL schools are little subdivisions of hell.

Ok, and now onto other things.

Today I was sitting in the office reading a recent copy of China Daily while trying to figure out what is going to happen to Phil and I in the next two weeks or so when I came across the horoscope section. Usually, I don’t read them because they are silly and absurd, but for some reason or another I found myself reading Phil’s horoscope. I had already read mine and it wasn’t the least bit interesting so I won’t bore you with what it said. Phil’s on the other hand was quite amusing, especially considering our present circumstances. I nearly fell out of my chair laughing. It was as though someone had written it specifically for Phil.

Phil’s Horoscope: Libra

If you have to deal with someone who is rather unreasonable and absurd, you can defang this individual by treating him or her with the same absurdity.

Well, I didn’t take first, but I did manage to get the next best thing – second place(technically 3rd – read on for more information)with a total of 149 votes in the personal blog category. I was really surprised by the amounts of votes that I received. I didn’t think that many people knew that my little blog existed. Makes me feel sorta special, really. : ) Perhaps now even more people know about my blog. That was the main purpose of Chinalyst holding the China Blog Awards. They wanted to drive traffic to the China blogosphere and promote link-love between the China blogs. I know that it worked for me because I found a lot of interesting blogs that I hadn’t heard of before in these past few weeks. I’ll have to add their links to the side of my page so that you can read through them too. There are a lot of great writers and photographers out there.

So, who beat me?

I was bested by Beijing Boyce who received a total of 198 votes. He sorta came out of no where toward the end, going from 26th to 1st, but I give him my congratulations nonetheless. Ryan’s blog, The Humanaught, who is the rightful owner of second place, came in with a total of 155 votes. Ryan has decided not to accept his second place win and out of the kindness of his heart has passed it down to me. I was followed closely by Ben’s blog, Midwesterner in the Middle Kingdom, who came in third with a total of 126 votes. My congratulations go out to him too, as well as all the others who participated. If you want to see the winners in the other categories, go here.

After my super long post about my week in Yangshuo, I have decided that this time around I’m just going to post a hell of a lot of pictures. I find that I get carried away when I write and never know when to shut up. It is almost as bad as when I talk. So, here you go, more pictures and a lot less words to go with them. Enjoy.

Phil and I walked out into the country side and what a pretty country side it was.

Phil looks so little amongst the mountains.
Looks like someone could step on him.

This reminded me of my friend’s band, Black Bottom Biscuits.
They have a song called Fish Beer.

Standing on the riverside in Yangshuo. Such a pretty view. So surreal.

I am putting this picture here to show off the awesomeness of my new camera. I was standing on a bridge when I took this. And he wasn’t below me. He was further up river.

A wee little village outside of Yangshuo. I think it was called Mu Shan.

I look happy in this picture, but don’t let that smile fool you. I was so hot and miserable, it wasn’t even funny. I didn’t think I was going to make it back to the hotel.

Mu Shan transportation.

A picture of a pretty flower.

I thanked this little guy for sitting still long enough for me to get a good picture of him. I have never seen a dragonfly with a red tail before. There are some many interesting animals and insects in China. You just have to search for them.

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, but between school, students, and the new Harry Potter book, I just haven’t had any time to post. I would say I would post something later today, but tonight is our scavenger hunt and after that I know I will be too tired to write anything. And I would say I would write something tomorrow, but we have classes as a make up for not having classes on Wednesday because the whole area of Qiao Fu Cheng lost power yet again. So the earliest day for me to sit down are write something meaningful would be on Sunday, my only day of rest before I got back to teaching for the week. No promises, but I will see what I can do. I am just so freaking tired.