I complain a lot on this blog, and for that I apologize, but I sometimes think that if I keep it all bottled up inside, I may just go berserk, and find myself sitting in the dark depths of a Chinese prison for whatever it is I did in the heat of uncontrolled insanity.

But I do have some fluffy news that may warm your hearts.

On most days, I take the bus to and from school. It’s convenient when I am not in a hurry(or freezing my little tushy off) and even better than that, it’s cheap. I only have to shell out a mere one yuan for each bus I get on, and I only have to get on two of them(that’s just 24 cents if you’re curious) to get to me to the school. I wish there was a direct bus, but hey, you can’t have it all.

Just recently though, Fuyang got new buses. They’re much better than the ones that they used to have. They’re bigger actually, and have two doors so that everyone is not trying to get on at the same time that everyone else is trying to get off. They’re even so modern now that they have invested in a coin box that sits by the door. If you only have big bills on you, there is still the ever trusty person(I can’t think of a name for it) that sits closest to the door and will break them for you. I’ve seen one hundred dollar bills broken before. It’s funny watching the person(again the name for this occupation escapes me) digging through his/her change purse for 99 yuan in change. The most I’ve ever broken is a 10.

On the number 8 bus, the one that everyone swore wouldn’t take me anywhere near my school, there is one of the nicest Chinese people I’ve ever met. She speaks maybe 4 words of English, so we’ve never really had an in-depth conversation, but I’ve always felt that if we could understand each other we would be the best of friends. I have no idea what her name is.

She is always smiling. Always. Every time she sees me getting on the bus she says hello, smiles at me, and waves. For the few minutes that I am in her presence, she looks at me and smiles some more. When it is time for me to get off the bus, she waves, smiles, and usually says bye-bye, but just recently I heard her say see you tomorrow.

Yesterday, I decided I would try to talk to her in Chinese and try to let her know that I would be leaving Fuyang. It didn’t work very well. She didn’t understand my awful Chinese, but it didn’t matter. She kept on smiling at me. After drawing some pictures and repeating myself a few times, I think I finally got her to understand that I was moving to Shenyang.

She will be one of the few people that I will miss when I go. I don’t even know if I will see her again because there are many number 8 buses and I never know which one she is on. I always come across her by chance and only realize that she’s there when I hear her familiar voice as I put my one yuan in the box by the door.

This is a bit on the late side of things, but hey, late is better than never. These pictures of course come from the time we spent in Shanghai during the National Holiday – aka The Golden Week. Since pictures say a thousand words – I’ll keep this nice and short.

A common thing you’ll see in China is the way garbage is carted away. If it isn’t the little garbage truck that sings “Happy Birthday” over and over again it’s the cart/bike you see stacked as high as possible with trash. When I took this picture, the guy peddling it down the street was aware that I was about burn his image into my memory card for all eternity, so I had wait until he was blocked by the cardboard box. People make me nervous when they know I’m taking their picture and I’m sure that feeling is vice versa. On average, I see about ten of these a day. I always think they are going to topple over because they have so much stuff on them.

It doesn’t matter where you go in Shanghai – this is the scene you will encounter on every street corner. Shanghai is something like 8 times bigger than New York City. If I ever make my way there, NYC will look like a small but busy ant hill.

Nanjing Road, and all of its madness, is a long pedestrian road in Shanghai. Once was really enough for me because it’s just one big, expensive name brand store after another and more people bombarding you than you can shake a stick at. It was a sea of black heads all around me. I’m just glad that I was taller than most of them so I could see what was to come. If you look closely you can see the KFC sign on the right.

It was a little like being in Vegas. This is just one of the buildings on Nanjing Road. At night, the entire road is lit up and it’s very beautiful. At about 10 or so at night they turn off all of the lights to save energy. I wonder if they do the same in Vegas. I had some pictures of the Bund(another touristy place in Shangahai) as well, but they came out all fuzzy and blurry. My camera doesn’t like taking night photos. This one didn’t turn out so bad, though.

And this here is how the Chinese keep out people they don’t want coming onto their property. I ran into a lot of things jumping fences when I was meter reader, but I never came across glass shards. I’ve actually seen this quite a bit in China. Hey, if it works, use it.

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Place cursor over slide show to see the titles of the pictures. I believe that slide shows are going to be the way of the future for my blog. It seems to be much easier and less time consuming than adding only five pictures at a time to Blogger. This in turn will make me very happy, for I have about a billion pictures that I have taken, but not yet posted because Blogger is slower than dirt in China. These pictures, as the previous post would suggest, are from our trip to the largest cave in Asia, the FuChun TaoYuan. It wasn’t as big as Carlsbad Caverns, in Carlsbad, New Mexico, USA, but there weren’t any bats or their guano, so it’s a winner in my book. 🙂 Like most of China, pictures don’t do this place justice. For those of you with over active imaginations, I suggest that you use them here.

I really enjoyed this trip. It was nice to get out into the country side of China and away from the constant construction of Fuyang. Unlike some people who come to China, Phil and I decided to go here by ourselves. Chinese people are always asking who we are taking with us and are usually surprised when we say no one. Because we are American and don’t really know Chinese, I think they assume that we are going to get lost or ripped off and sometimes that happens, but we get to experience more or the “real” China this way.

For instance, the only thing we knew when we left on Thursday was that we wanted to go to the cave, but we had no idea how to get there. We knew there was a bus that could take us close to it, but then we didn’t know where to get on it. So, we hopped in a taxi and told them we wanted to go to the bus station where we could find the bus we needed. Either he didn’t know or he wanted to make some money because he immediately told us for 110 RMB he would take us there. I really didn’t feel like trying to find the bus, so 110 RMB didn’t seem that much to me. Off we went. The country side of China all sorta looks the same. You see the same run down home over and over again. The same poor woman hanging her clothes out to dry. The same little garden. It’s a bit dismal to see that much poverty in a 30 minute taxi ride.

It really makes me appreciate what we have.We’ve got a better apartment than most of the people who are native to Fuyang. When we do have guest come over, they are always commenting on how comfortable it is or how big it is. We actually have hot water and windows that close and aren’t just holes in the walls. Our floors are hard wood and not a slab of grey concrete. When we wash clothes, we just throw them in a washing machine and hang them up to dry. In the apartment right next to us – everyone washes their clothes in the same water troff. The same troff that they use to bathe in as well. But for some reason they have cars. I will never understand how the poorest people can live in the crappiest house, but then have one of the nicest cars. Someone needs to do a study on that for me.

But, I digress. We got to the cave just as the cab man promised, although he did make us climb up a hill to the top of the mountain that he said we take us up to the entrance. For a small second, I thought that he had dropped us off in the middle of no where. Up the hill we did find the entrance, thank God. We thought we were the only ones there because it looked deserted, but I liked it better that way. Big crowds turn me off. We ended up having our own private tour with a woman who spoke about 30 words of English – which is better than nothing I guess. She was very nice, and walked us all around the cave trying to think of English words to describe the formations. We humored her and tried to make it look like we understood.

Eventually, we came across a large tour group, and somehow joined them. If we hadn’t have met up with them, I’m not sure we would have seen the rest of the park. After the tour of the cave, we hopped on a little train that took us through another cave. Before I got on though, the Chinese man I was going to sit next to pointed to the seat trying to tell me that it was dirty. I pulled out one of the tissues I carry around with me and tired to clean it. The seat wasn’t dirty. It was just stained. The conductor of the ride didn’t realize I hadn’t made it on yet and started off without me. I had never heard some many people cry out at once that I wasn’t on yet and for him to wait. Of course, whatever they said was all in Chinese, and I don’t really know what they said – but I bet it was something a lot like that. Thankfully, the ride stopped and I was able to get on. I really felt like I was on the cart ride form Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom. If you have seen the movie, you should understand a little of how that ride worked. On the plus side, there was no one chasing us through the tunnel. Heh.

On the other side was a bunch of stairs waiting for us to walk down them. I’m glad it was down and not up because I was in no mood to walk up anymore stairs. China is littered with stairs. It’s amazing. No wonder all of the Chinese are so thin and fit. So we climbed down the stairs and played a little on a playground we came across. It was pretty big and reminded me of a playground I used to play on as I kid. Like Phil said in his post – the adults were playing on it, too and enjoying themselves. I heard lots of the women squealing like little girls and the men were laughing at them. It was a site to see. After that we went down to the lake which looked nothing like the picture on our ticket, but, eh, the view was nice even though it was completely overcast and hazy. We tried to leave at this point, but got chased down by one of the leaders of the tour group. She asked for our tickets and made us follow her down to the boats. I’m glad she found us because we got to enjoy a bamboo boat ride around the lake – which was bigger than I thought. The only down side was all the dead fish we saw floating in the water. Poor fish. After the boat ride it was time to go home, but there was no taxi that we could pay 100 RMB to take us there. We stood at a bus stop for a while, and after two or three went passed without stopping we started to worry.

At this point in time it was about 4:15 in the afternoon and it was getting dark pretty fast. There was a Chinese man standing at the bus stop too, so we tried to find out which bus we needed. After a lot of “bu dongs” we finally understood that the next bus wouldn’t be around until 5:30. That was all fine and dandy except that it was getting cold and the rain was bound start falling eventually. We decided to walk. This is when we realized how far out in the middle of no where we were. I probably should have panicked a little more than I did, but I didn’t. Everyone stared at us as we walked by their houses. We were probably the only white people ever to walk down that road. Finally, I saw an older woman looking at us with a lot of interest and seemed like she wanted to talk. I told her that we wanted to go to Fuyang and Phil asked where the bus was. She said some words that we didn’t quiet understand and before we knew it, she had waved down a white van and we were on it, hopefully going toward home. Not long after we got on the bus it started to rain just like I had feared, but we were in a nice warm van, so I didn’t care. We were afraid for awhile that we were going anywhere but the place we wanted, but about 30 or so minutes later – the van/bus stopped for us and the driver said it was our stop. We made it home AND we knew where we were. It was a flipping miracle. So, I close this post with this . . . Cost of a Taxi to the largest cave is Asia – 110 RMB($13) Two tickets to get into the largest cave in Asia – 196 RMB($29) Two pictures beside some pretty formations – 20 RMB ($3) Getting on a van that you don’t really know where it is taking you – PRICELESS

If I could read this sign, I’d have no problem at all getting around Fuyang on a beggar’s income. It only costs 1 yuan to ride the bus here. That is about 12 cents if you are trying to do the math. Since I don’t understand a lick of written Chinese, I have to jump on a bus and hope that the woman who takes my money can understand enough of my broken Chinese to let me know when I’ve reached my stop. If she doesn’t understand me and no one else happens to be getting on or off when I need to, the bus will just keep on going. I then have to get on another bus to take me back the way I’d come. And that is the very reason I’ve become comfortable riding only 3 of the 9 bus routes in Fuyang. (Huge city, I know . . . hehe.) Every morning I take the number one bus to the other side of town and then get on the number 8 bus that drops me off right in front of school. The bus isn’t very clean and it can be cramped, but it beats paying 7-10 Yuan for a taxi twice a day.

Here is a picture of me trying to teach my students the beautiful sport of baseball. It didn’t go over too well like most of what I teach them. The only thing I think they understood was bat, ball, and run and even those three words vanished from their memory banks once they walked out of my room.  Everything else went in one ear and out the other. So, it made it really difficult to play baseball with them the following week. The one thing they did like was me singing “Take Me Out To The Ball Game.” I never thought I’d sing in front of more than just my shower curtain, but I think it may be the only real way to reach them. Guess I better start voice lessons. Doe a dear . . .

Every fall, the schools in Fuyang have a Sport’s Meeting. That means that the students get a few days off to compete in something that resembles the Olympics on a much smaller scale. Some of the students take it quiet seriously. And some of them are pretty darn good. Ask Phil and he’ll tell you all about it. Heh. But anyways, if you enlarge the picture to the left you’ll find some interesting errors. The first being that Atlanta is the capital of George and that it’s also known as “The City of Tress.” They tried to describe Izzy, the Olympic mascot, but messed up in that department as well. Take a look and you might laugh as hard as I did. Sometimes I worry about the students and who in the world is teaching them English. Their Chinese teacher’s only know so much and some of what they do know is wrong. And so the cycle keeps repeating itself. Foreign teachers are the only real cure. And look who they sent – me. God help them. God help them all.

My school had an English Competition on my birthday and they asked me to be one of the judges. There were about 25 students in it from grades 2 and 3. If they were in middle school back home they would probably be in 7th and 8th grade. A few days before the competition, I had some students read their speeches out to me. They wanted help and advice and I gave them what I could without rewriting their entire speech. There were more errors than there are thorns on a rose bush. And I’m not kidding. The sad part is that a lot of the errors were advice that the their Chinese English teachers gave them. That is the evil cycle I am talking about.

I took a picture of this girl as she preformed her speech. I don’t know who she is. She may be one of my students, but I can’t keep track of them. If you had 700 students, you wouldn’t be able to either! I think I can pick out maybe 4 or 5 students that I know are mine if I see them walking around. The cool thing is that every single one of the students memorized their speech. They didn’t have a single card with them. And some of their speeches were pretty long. A couple had some problems, but for the most part they all did pretty well. One of my students, Grey, got first place, but so did about 5 others. Guess they tied or something. I marked all the students a lot lower than the Chinese teachers did, but that’s because I actually knew what the mistakes were. Alright, gotta go. Have to see what kind of trouble I can get myself into. Fuyang and all of it’s glory awaits!

We found this pretty little bench in the gift shop at the end of our tour. After seeing the prices on the books for sale, we had to sit down to catch our breaths. The prices were pretty steep, at least more than I was willing to pay. I was hoping that they would have some smaller items for my cheap blood, but that didn’t happen, and we left the gift shop without anything in tow.

I am not sure exactly what you would call this. I thought it was a fish at first, but then I changed my mind and thought it looked more like a dragon. After looking at it for several minutes, I decided on the phrase – Fish Dragon. It seemed fitting. We had a tour guide, but she didn’t speak a lick of English – go figure, so I never found out what it really was or what it symbolized if anything. The only good thing my guide was good at was pointing and motioning “this way” with her hand.

We climbed up some stairs into a building we shouldn’t have gone into, but our tour guide hadn’t found us yet. While I was up on the second story, I took this picture. The village is pretty even though it is a little run down. There are only a few more buildings than what you see in this picture. Like I said, the village is small. Hence the name – village. Heh.

This looks like a fabulous job. All day she sits and paints this rubber flower stamp with some green paint and then gently presses it on the paper square. This process repeats itself over and over again. I was hoping to come across these little pieces of paper in the gift shop, but I never saw them.

A few weekends ago Phil, Mayia(one of the Australians teaching with us), and I went to an Ancient Paper Making Village located about a 5 minute taxi drive from our front door. The village is pretty small, and if you spend an hour there – you’ve been there long enough to see everything.

I won’t go into too much detail about it. Writing something interesting about paper isn’t easy. I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking.

This first picture is just a random building that I thought was pretty cool looking.

The Process(In My Words – Simplified and Probably Wrong)

To start the process, they have to create paper mush. To do that, they take big slabs of old paper(hurray for recycling) and let that round, heavy stone roll over it a couple hundred times until it is exactly that – mush. Then they take it and throw it into the container in the back right and let it float around a bit in some unidentifiable liquid until it breaks apart some more and turns to pulp. I think it may be a part of a cleaning process as well, but I really have no idea. It’s a complete assumption, as are most of my Chinese experiences since no one ever tells me what is going on.

After all of that, the pulp is then taken into another room and dropped into a vat of water. The pulp floats around in it and a man(or woman) drops this rectangle piece of wood covered tightly with mesh into it. He lets the pulp settle into the mesh and then slowly pulls it out. The mesh now has a thin layer of very wet paper laying on it.

In a very crafty motion, the man(or woman) takes the mesh covered rectangle out and lays the wet, paper side down next to the vat. It sits there for a few seconds and the it is lifted quickly, leaving behind a thin layer of paper on top of the many other layers of paper that have been made prior to that one. They sit there until a certain number have been created. I am not sure why the pieces don’t meld together, but they don’t. Each piece remains separate as they wait until the next step.

The sheets are then carried into yet another room. This particular room is very warm because there is a large wall in the center of it producing heat like one big iron would. A man or woman picks up one of the sheets of wet paper and places it on the wall. All of the water is almost immediately zapped out if it. You can see the steam flowing off of it. To make sure though, they take a brush and glide it over it until every drop of water has been removed. After that, they very easily take the dry piece of paper down and lay it in another pile.

That is the main process of paper making, but not the end. The dry pieces of paper are taken to another room where they are cut, stamped, or written on and then bound to be sold in the expensive Gift Shop.

Please don’t shoot me if I just completely mucked up the process of paper making, but like I said, no one told me what they were doing, I just watched and wondered. The place was pretty neat, and was worth the Y25 to get in. I have more pictures of the place that I will post. Hope you enjoyed your Paper Making tour. Heh.

Without any further delay, let me take you back to the week we spent in Shanghai. Like all things you enjoy, it went by a little too fast. Phil and I will need to go back in order to see the rest of it. We were only able to see a portion of the city.

Once Phil started feeling a little better, we decided to venture out into the massive city. And that is no exaggeration. Shanghai is something like 8 times bigger than New York City and has an unofficial population of 20 million. Although, if you asked anyone important, you might hear a much lower number like 14 million. Apparently, there are a lot of illegal immigrants here and they all live as squatters in the apartment buildings that are constantly being constructed.

Our first stop – food. We had been taking advantage of the western food that Shanghai had to offer. There are no McDonalds or Pizza Huts in Fuyang – only KFCs, so we tried to stock pile as many Big Mac’s and pepperoni pizzas that we could fit into our tummies. It was good to eat the yummy fast food fatness, but we could only eat so much of it. A Big Mack or a piece a pizza for every meal can make you wish for Chicken Feet and Snails . . . . okay, maybe not, but you get my point.

Shanghai is a lot easier to get around, in that I mean it is easier to order food because a lot more people speak English here. A lot more people. Almost every restaurant we went into had a English menu or had a server that knew some English. It made life so much easier. In Fuyang, we have to do something I call “Point and Pray”. In Shanghai, we knew pretty much what we were getting right off the bat. The first picture I have included came from a restaurant called Laava restaurant. Weird name, I know. I don’t know if they meant Lava as is hot molten lava or some other strange word I can’t think of. But we were hungry, so we didn’t care what clever name that had picked for their restaurant.

When we walked in, all of the tables were empty. I took this as a bad sign at first, but since I hadn’t seen any other places to eat – we decided to stay. The wait staff didn’t notice we were there for a few seconds because they were all asleep. Yes. Asleep. They were all curled up in the booths or had their heads down on the table. It must have been a very slow day. There was one woman standing behind the counter mindlessly cleaning a glass with a rag. She seemed out of it as well until she looked up at us. She nearly dropped the glass in excitement that she had some one to wait on. She immediately put the glass down, nearly dropping it in her happiness, and brought us a menu. She only spoke Chinese, but it didn’t matter because the menu was in English – so I was happy. An English menu is like a small piece of Heaven. She didn’t seat us right away, which I found weird, so Phil and I decided to order standing up. I ended up getting some Fried Rice and Phil got some Japanese Curry. It was one of the first meals we had had at a restaurant that we liked and knew what we were eating. I wanted to take a picture, and I did, but Phil thought I was insane for taking a picture of my half eaten plate of food. Do note that they had forks for us to use. We’ve gotten pretty used to chopsticks, but it is nice to use what you are used to every once in a while.

After lunch, we decided to visit my second home, Wal-Mart. Going here was one of our top priorities. I know that we are weird, but Wal-Mart is supposed to have everything and we needed to stock up on some things that we couldn’t get back in Fuyang. In order to get to Wal-Mart, we had to take a 20 minute subway ride, and then take another 20 minute walk – stopping every few blocks to ask someone in Chinese were it was. People slowly pointed us in the right direction and soon we saw a familiar sign. I was so happy that I did a little dance in the street. A Wal-Mart Dance of Joy.

It wasn’t quiet like I thought it would be. Mostly, it was just the name that was familiar to us. Other than that, the inside looked a lot like the other grocery stores that we have been to. The RT Mart, that we visit a lot back in Fuyang, is actually bigger and better. It wasn’t until we got to the second floor that we felt like we were in a Wal-Mart. It smelled like a Wal-Mart if that makes any sense and it had more of a design like one, too, except the departments were a lot smaller. I had to take a picture of the sign for the escalator. I felt a little funny holding up my camera to get it. I’m sure some of the Chinese customers thought I was nuts, but I thought that it was funny. The travelator. Heh. I want to know who translates this stuff for them.

Going to grocery stores in China makes me cry. Why you ask? Why? I’ll tell you. Every time that I go to buy fruit or vegetables, I have to walk past the live turtle, eel and crab section. In every grocery store, they have them. Some times they have the turtles in bags, which really makes me sad, but to see them sitting there waiting to bought and eaten totally just ruins my day. I know that it is no different than our Lobsters back home, but I don’t like seeing that either. It is one thing picking out a ripe apple or good looking carrot, but I know I will never be okay with trying to find the best turtle to cook for dinner. And even though I really don’t care that much for Eels, I still feel really bad for them, too. Poor little guys. I know that I have been severed eel a few times. Hopefully, I haven’t been given turtle, but there is no real way to tell. I watched a Chinese family try to pick out a turtle one day. They picked up one and looked as though were sizing it up against the other ones available. Of course, they wanted to get the one that had the most meat on its body and would taste the best with a side of cow stomach. I wish I was lying when I said they ate cow stomach, but I’m not. Why do the Chinese have to have such weird food taste? Why can’t they be meat and potato kind of people?

We stayed at a hostel for the week we were in Shanghai. I had never stayed in one before, and didn’t know what to expect. I always had visions of dirty, cheap places where you roomed with 8 other travelers you didn’t know. This was not the case with Koala International Youth Hostel. Phil and I booked a room for ourselves with a private bath and a small kitchenette. It also came with cable TV and internet access in the room. The one thing that was right about my vision of hostels was that it was cheap. It cost Phil and I a total of $144.00 for the both of us for 5 nights or roughly 990 yuan. It was a very good deal.

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Here is the view of our bathroom. The big yellow thing is the shower and the white thing on the wall is the hot water heater. In China, it is very normal to have a shower like this one. Even in our apartment, our shower consists of the wall and the floor. The hostel did give us a shower curtain though – which we used for an entirely different reason. The door to this particular bathroom is one big sliding glass door. Yep. A glass door. One that you can see through. So, Phil took the shower curtain and rigged it up so that you wouldn’t have to watch other people sitting on the pot. I’m glad Phil and I know each other pretty well – or else it would have been 10 times more embarrassing to go to the bathroom. The glass door nor the curtain could keep out the sounds. I’ll leave that to your imagination. Another good thing was that we got a western toilet. Squatting to use the bathroom, to sum it all up, just plain sucks. Also, if you use a public bathroom, you should always bring your own toilet paper. If you don’t – you could find yourself in trouble. This is also a norm of China. Holes in the floors and no toilet paper to wipe your bum. Nice visual huh?

And our little kitchen. I was surprised to find a microwave, a refrigerator, a table, and a pot to boil the ever so famous China water. It was more than I expected really. The refrigerator appeared to be brand new. When I tried to plug it in though, I hit my head on the door handle of our front door. I still have a bump from that. It hurt so bad that two little tears roll down my face. Thank goodness I have a hard head, or else I may have knocked myself out.

This was the view from our second story window. All of those high rises are apartment buildings. They are everywhere in Shanghai. And I mean everywhere. There are like 14 million people living here and it is 8 times larger than New York. Do note the blue sky in the background. It only drizzled that first day, but after that we had pretty good weather the week that we were there.

Once upon a time I went to Lisbon, Portugal and I rode the metro there during five o’clock traffic. That was a bad idea, and I will never do that again. Every time that we got on the Shanghai metro, which was pretty easy to maneuver once we got used to it, I had moments of terror – thinking that I may have a repeat of Lisbon all over again. I shutter now just thinking of it.

I’ll will post more pictures later, but I have a lesson plan to write for my little devils tomorrow. Ugg. I am not looking forward to teaching again.

Ah. Shanghai. Where do I begin?

Like usually there is so much to talk about, but I’m tired and can’t think of all of what I want to say. I didn’t take as many pictures as maybe I should have, but that just leaves me with more of a reason to go back to Shanghai one weekend. Heh. I could probably spend several weekends there and still not see everything there is to see. Shanghai is huge and spread out. Every street corner has something to behold. Well, I won’t keep you waiting. Here are some of the pictures that I took.

As luck seems to always have it – Phil was sick the day we departed Fuyang for Shanghai. Joy. He was hacking up all kinds of green goodness, but still managed to get all of his stuff together so we could make it to the train station in Hangzhou on time. This is a picture from the back of the bus we took on the way to Hangzhou from Fuyang. The bus, like every other bus, was bumpy for the entire hour we spent on it. I am beginning to think that buses here don’t have shocks because you feel even the tiniest bump.

We got to Hangzhou fine. That was the easy part of the trip. Getting to the train station was almost easier because all I had to do was hand the cabby the paper that Ruby(some random Chinese woman) had written on for us last week. It had the name of the station on it. He took off, and before long we were there. Then came the hard part. We had to try to buy return tickets by ourselves without a Chinese helper. With my phrase book I wrote down in the worst Chinese ever that I wanted 2 soft seat tickets from Shanghai to Hangzhou on the 7th of October in the afternoon. It went pretty smoothly, almost too smoothly, and I would find out later why. She handed me the tickets, I glanced them over, and deemed them correct. But they weren’t. And I didn’t figure it out until we were in the waiting room for our train. My eyes had been deceived! Everything that I wanted was on the train ticket except for one minute and very important detail. That little detail was that the ticket said from Hangzhou to Shanghai and not Shanghai to Hangzhou. 96Y down the tubes, but oh hell, at least it was only the equivalent to $12. It could have been worse. We got on the train anyway, hoping that we could fix the problem once we got to Shanghai. I can totally see why Eric, a guy who came to China the year before us, brought a Chinese friend along with him on his long distance travels.

Poor sick Philby. He didn’t enjoy his trip on the train to Shanghai. I wasn’t feeling all to great at this point either, but Phil was a lot worse off than I. Doesn’t he just look so sad in this pictures? He’s seen better days for sure.

Shanghai Train Station is a freaking maze to get out of. Or at least it was for us. I don’t remember seeing a single exit sign that actually led to an honest to God exit. We eventually had to go through an entrance door and that was fun because we had to push up stream through 100 anxious Chinese people who wanted to get IN the train station. It was a moment of LET US OUT LET US OUT vs LET US IN LET US IN(please see the movie Clue to understand this.) And then we had to try to find a taxi who could find Xikang Road where our hostel was. That was an adventure as well, one that got me all frustrated. All I wanted to do was get to the hostel so that we could go and find some food, but no taxi driver wanted to spend any time on us and when we finally got one to stop – it took a good while to finally get him to understand where we wanted to go. It took a bit longer for him figure out which end of the Xikang it was on. Did I mention that it was raining? No, I didn’t think so.

Here is one last picture of the train station before I head to bed. I will post more pictures and tell more stories of our week later, but I be a tired woman, and I need my beauty sleep. I was still sitting in my seat when I took this photo. I don’t know why I took it – it is just a man walking slowly down the platform. I wonder what he was thinking at that precise moment in time.

I have not gone into much of our flight over here, so I guess I will take the opportunity to do that now.

The flight was about 14.5 hours long. I don’t care what anyone says. 14.5 hours is a long time to spend on a plane – too long. I was doing ok for the first 6 or so hours, but then I just started going crazy. Crazy is a word I introduced to my students this past week. The way I describe it to them is how I felt for the last long leg of our journey.

Picture someone standing silent and very still and looking very happy right in front of your face. Imagine yourself standing right in front of this person and thinking he or she appears to be the most sane person you have ever seen. Ok? Do you have a good image stuck there behind your eyes? Alright, good. KWAMABMO!!! The person now starts screaming and running around like a mad monkey, throwing his or her arms in the air and then finally puts his or her hands on your shoulder and starts shaking you. ~ Shake shake, shake shake, shake your booty. ~

That is exactly how I felt, except I also had an urge to puke on the pretty attendant that would walk by offering me random stupid things that I really didn’t need. Toward the very end I went pretty nuts and came really close to using the barf bag that I have always seen but never needed. I couldn’t even bring myself to eat my last meal. The thought of it made my tummy turn.

When I act out crazy, my student’s flip out and nearly have a heart attack – especially the girls, but I get the boys sometimes, too. I love scaring the crap out of them. It brings much joy to my life. It helps me sleep at night knowing I have forever scarred them. Insert evil laughter. Hehe.

Here are a few more pictures of our flight over. The screen on the seat in front of me really helped me through the 14.5 hours of insanity. I never fell asleep. When we go home, I am so taking some sleeping pills, damnit.

Just seeing the word Shanghai got me excited. Although, it also made this part of the trip drag, and drag, and drag. I thought after 3 hours that our plane had maybe gone 2 inches. I was probably just delirious. I probably was. All in all I was up for about 30 some hours. And we all know that a tired Gabe is not a happy Gabe. I have been nicknamed Grumpy on occasion for a reason. I think I would have been happy landing in Beijing at one point and living there. Anything just to off that damn plane.

After sitting in the airport for 30 minutes waiting for more teachers to arrive we got on bus that took us to a bus station where we got on another bus that took us Hangzhou. I remember at least 3 things vividly. 1 – I wanted to die because I felt like crap. 2 – I thought I was going to die because we had the craziest bus driver in the entire world. It was like we were in a game of Crazy Taxi, but worse. 3 – Are we there, YET?! I didn’t think we would ever get to Hangzhou. It was the longest 70 KM I had ever driven.

We stayed at a place called the Babel Language Center for a few days. Besides the beds being harder then the floor (no I am not lying – it truly was like sleeping on the floor) it wasn’t all that bad. After getting some sleep, though, and some food and water, I was much happier. The picture to the left shows the excitement of my first day in China. The heat of China soon came, though, and wiped that happy smile off my face. As you can see from the picture below, the heat did not make me happy. I should have paid more attention to this day, though. It was one of the last days that I saw a blue sky. I miss my blue skies.

These pictures were taken at West Lake, as was the one taken of me above. West Lake was beautiful. Beautiful and hot. I need to go back when it is cooler. I would enjoy it more that way.

West Lake was covered in Lotus flowers in bloom.

Here are some Chinese tourists enjoying West Lake, the view, and the heat that could of fried an egg on the pavement. I would pay someone to send me a piece of a South Carolina sky or any western sky for that matter. I didn’t know how important a blue sky was until I didn’t have one anymore. I guess that is how things work.