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The most exciting thing that has happened recently was that we had two weeks off for a little bit of traveling. In China every May there is a Labour Day holiday, which usually happens on the 1st of May. We were told by the school around Christmas that we would have at least a week off so we decided that we would spend it in Chengdu, Sichuan. Our friends in another part of China had already been there in February because they had more time off during the New Year festival so we thought we would knock it off then so we wouldn't have to in the summer. Then the school told us that we had three days. We were pretty annoyed. In China nothing is set in stone, the school doesn't even know its holidays until about a week before, which makes things pretty difficult to plan. So we shuffled around some classes so we had a week and arranged to meet our friends there on the 29th of April.
Then the two weeks before we were going to leave we found out that we had the week before off because of exams! Often, about once a month our students have exams and we don't have to teach, but for the past 2 months exams had fallen on days that we didn't work so we were getting a little frustrated. Now we had two weeks off! We called up our friends Pete and Henry and arranged to visit them after spending a couple of days in the north of our province with our friend Dan looking at ancient villages and caves.
On the Friday, after cleaning our house we set off as soon as Beth's classes ended. We spent 2 days in Wuyuan a small county. It took us about 7 hours on a tiny bus to get there. Wuyuan is somewhere well known in Jiangxi for its scenic beauty, especially around Tomb Sweeping Festival when lots of yellow flowers blossom in the fields around the county. However, Wuyuan is a pretty rural place, it doesn't get many foreign (or laowai and waiguo ren as we call them - it means foreigner in Mandarin) tourists so no one really speaks English. On the first day there we went out to a small touristy village called Li Keng. Instead of being conned into taking a taxi for the day and paying 300 yuan for the pleasure of it we got the bus which cost us about 8. Beth and I paid 50p for two flower headbands which almost made us points of interest as far as the other tourists were concerned! While we were there we meandered around the town, catching a small bamboo boat up the canal, trying some of the sweet potatoes, green dumping and tea. It was packed with Chinese tourists.
That night at the hostel we met a Dutch couple who had ended up in Wuyuan by accident and couldn't speak a word of Chinese. In the end we all went out to dinner and talked about where we had been traveling and the stories we had. One of the lovely things about backpacking is the variety of people you meet from all over the world and all the cool stories they have to tell, we always end up explaining about Project Trust and they are often quite surprised when we tell them that we are 19! We often feel so young as most people we meet are in their mid-20s. The next day we headed out further into the country to go caving. The first cave we came across was quite small and lit by LED lights in a very Chinese hoch poch fashion. It wasn't that impressive. The next caves we went into were far more interesting. A grotto, in the mountain that stretched over 2km. We even had a tour guide, although she couldn't speak a word of English we talked to her and one of her friends whose father worked for the tourist board. In the end we took a boat out down an underwater canal.
After that we caught the bus to another town to look at an old ancestral hall, which was briefly interesting. Finally we hitch hiked our way to the Rainbow bridge where we walked across some stepping stones on the river and chatted to a monk with a phone better than mine!
On the Monday Beth and I took them to the bus station and we all travelled to our provincial capital Nanchang. They went off to get their train and we went shopping because we had about six hours to kill before ours. We went to Wall-mart (a massive treat) for some peanut butter, an Indian restaurant for a cheeky foreign meal (that only cost about 4 pounds) and then to get our nails done. Finally we got on the sleeper train at about 9 and arrived in Xi'an at about 2 the next day. From there we had to catch another bus (which was hilarious because a woman fell asleep on Beth's shoulder) and then a taxi before arriving at 11 in a tiny village in south Gansu. Because Beth and I live in the south we get lots of rainfall as it has a more tropical climate so everything here is green and luscious. Also, because we are connected to the Yangtze River our province is quite rich. Pete and Henry live in Gansu in mid China, and it's a pretty ugly landscape. It's very hilly, hot and dusty. Plus when you drive through the country side all you do is see massive almost empty factories and power plants.
We spent two days at the boys' house. Which basically entailed getting drunk off wine at dinner (paid for by their friends), watching a couple of their lessons, having a badminton competition, and watching Piranha 3DD which is probably about the worst movie I have ever seen in my life. The town they live in is small, much smaller than Chongren but has a pretty decent super market! Pete and Henry are pretty laid back guys, but there house was an absolute tip. They never wash their sheets or do any sort of cleaning; Beth even washed some of Pete's clothes for him! It was disgusting, but awesome to see them and get to see what their town was like, as it's really interesting to compare their experience to ours.
On Friday afternoon we left them to get the bus back to Xi'an in the blistering heat (during the afternoon it gets to about 30 to 35 degrees there). After nabbing another cheeky McDonalds we headed over to the train station and got on our next sleeper train. We were accosted by Chinese students all the way. Often we are asked if we will be their friend or talk English with them, which is sometimes a little painful if their English is bad or we are in a rush. Arriving in Chengdu at about 3, we made some friends on the train that taught us some Chinese words and practiced their English with us. They even went to the trouble of helping us get on the metro and find our stop. Chengdu is a big city being the capital of Sichuan province and so it's metro is new, cheap and clean, making it very useful for traveling around the city. Finally we made it to the hostel for a lovely shower and some pumpkin soup off the in house menu. While we were there we met one of the hostel managers, a Chinese guy in his mid-20s called Kaye. Kaye had met our friends in the winter and still talked to them on facebook so we said hi and then chilled out for a bit.
Our friends were arriving the next day at 5 AM so we took it easy, had a look around and then went to bed at a reasonable hour. The next morning we were up at 7. As part of our trip we had decided to climb Mount Emei, which was a couple of hours south of Chengdu, for two days and hopefully see the sun rise at the summit. This plan turned out to be disastrous but at the same time, oddly hilarious. Basically, we arrived at the bottom of the mountain after about 3 bus trips, then we paid the entrance fee (student discount is a godsend) and started walking. After about an hour and a half up steep steps we asked some students how far to the top. 10 hours they said. Oh no! We had been told it was about 3 to 5. Then we realised that we should have caught a bus higher, so we trekked all the way back down and paid another 10 quid to get a bus up to a higher point and then walked, in the mist, rain and darkness for another 3 hours without torches (ended up using my itouch for light). When we got to the top we had to look for beds and realised that basically there are nothing but expensive hotels which charge £50 for one night. After begging some workers to let us stay in their apartments, being accidentally led to a meteorological station, begging to sleep on their floor and then coming across quite a swanky toilet and considering that, we walked down for 20 minutes and hit a cheap hotel where we got four girls in two single beds for 20 quid between us! The next morning we got up at 5 and walked all the way back up only for it to be FREEZING and foggy as anything. After standing around for another 45 minutes for the mist and fog to clear we gave up and walked down again - in the rain.
When we got back to the hostel we all immediately rushed for the showers and then mooched about in the common room on the wifi. While we were there a guy walked in that I was pretty sure that I had seen early that morning on the mountain. We started chatting and it turned out he was a Canadian called Travis so we hung out with him playing pool and drinking Tsingtao beer and another girl from America. Callum (our friend from HK) turned up later, at four in the morning.
That day we set out for a small village about half an hour away from the city. It turned out to be a typical Chinese tourist attraction: newly (and poorly) done up, filled with stalls selling food and generic Chinese gifts that you can find anywhere and filled with Chinese tourists. Ella and I bought flower headbands and wandered down the stream in the middle of the street, every once and a while we would be stopped and asked if we could pose for photos with some Chinese people. When we went back to get the last bus back to the city we found about a million people also waiting in line. We did some queue jumping and got through about half of it and then a bus arrived and the crowd made sort of a buzzing noise and then everyone ran forward and it was chaos. Beth got her leg slightly crushed under a metal seat so we found some other foreigners and decided to car pool some taxis back.
That evening we met some more laowai but they were all a bit older so we played some drinking games with them and then got ready to go out. When our friends were there in the spring they found an expat bar called the Jellyfish. They had bigged it up so much that we couldn't wait to check it out. It was smaller than we thought, the drinks were about English prices, but the music was good and it had loads of foreigners. When we go out drinking, we can't really afford the prices in bars and clubs. Sometimes you end up getting free drinks and it's quite easy to get them off Chinese people but you need the right environment. So, normally we drink Chinese spirits which are about 56% and 50p for a small bottle a bottle. That night was pretty good fun. The next day, we all felt like terrible. But, in the true backpacker spirit got up anyway.
We had met and English guy called Matt who was traveling alone and staying in our room so we adopted him for the rest of the week and set out for the People's Park. While we were there it began to bucket it down so we took shelter in a tea parlour and played cards for two hours. Later that night, we just had a casual evening after going out for dinner with Matt and having a massive gossip session.
On Thursday, early in the morning we got up so we could go and see the pandas with one of the hostel tours. Kaye, our new best friend, came with us. It was adorable. Pandas are the cutest things every, although they are also pretty lazy. We met two English girls, Charlotte and Ashley, who were about 25 and were making their way through most of Asia, it was Charlotte's birthday and her parents had given her £200 so she could hold a panda! Later that afternoon we went out to a beautiful temple in the centre of the city. That night we decided to go out again, but this time head to bar street, we picked up some Canadians, also in their mid-twenties and went through most of the drinking games we knew and then caught some taxis and headed down. When we got there we found each other (Beth and Ella were already pretty pissed on beer and spirits) and headed into a bar, which we immediately decided to vacate upon hearing the prices. Fortunately some Chinese guys asked for a toast and we told them we had no drinks so they pulled up some chairs and bought about a crate of Heineken so we could play dice games with them. Then we headed over to Jellyfish again. This time it was pretty much dead but the barman gave us a shot for Charlotte for her birthday.
Feeling totally wrecked the next day, we headed out with Charlotte and Ashley (and minus Beth) to go and see the giant budda Dafou at Leshan about a three hour drive away. It was so painful trying to get sleep on the bus in the heat but it was worth it as it was a beautiful place and a lovely day out. Friday, was, by far, the busiest night. At one point we were on the dance floor and this guy in his sixties was popping out some dance moves and then he got up on the stripper pole and started boogying it down with a young Chinese girl. In the end the whole club was cheering him on! It was hilarious. We had a little bit of a dance with him later.
The next morning we got up at 9 and headed to the train station to get the 26 hour journey back. Thank god we had beds. I pretty much curled up in mine and slept and read the whole way home!
It was soooo good to get a way - traveling is definitely the best thing about living in China, that and the friends you make in your town. Right now as I finish this I am watching my 6th Wall-e sitting next to two of my favourite year 7s showing them videos we took of the pandas an adorable little boy whom I call Monk because at the start of the year he had a shaved head. He is very cute and hilarious but does absolutely no work in class!!! Frustrating! They have just asked me to fill in a cute little sheet with all my information on like my favourite colour and my email address. I am going to miss this place when leave, and it will be so strange to live in England again! Life is so different here. But I am ready to come back, talking to my grandmother last night I realised just how much I do miss people and just being in England is so different.
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