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That 32-hour train journey I mentioned? Much better than expected, even without much sleep. The other Jiangxi volunteers were on the same train as us again, and after Dan came to find us in the morning (I was dozing with my eye-mask on and nearly had a heart attack when he woke me with a kiss on the cheek) we spent the majority of the journey with them. Some pushy Chinese parents shoved their four-year-old at us to practice his English at one point, so we sat and smiled patiently whilst he screamed "welcome to CHINA! My name is ANDY!" repeatedly, and we waylaid a train-salesman (yes, they exist) trying to sell some electrical-massage thingy for a while, but most of the journey was spent reading, chatting and counting the hours. All worthwhile though, because the beautiful city of Lanzhou would make any journey worthwhile... oh wait, no, I'm lying. Lanzhou is awful - right up there with the world's ugliest cities. Basically, as we got closer, all of the greenery died out into muddy quarries, and when we arrived it was to rain and a sea of concrete.
The language course we were attending is arranged by "The High School Attached to Northwest Normal University", where two other volunteers, Kyall and Alex, work. Because we arrived so early, we had most of the day to kill until everyone else arrived, so Kyall took us to a huge shopping centre, Vanguard, for the afternoon. The big selling point of Vanguard was that you could buy cheese there (harder than you'd think in China), but nearby there were also shops where you could buy English books and restaurants serving traditional Lanzhou beef noodles. Most excitingly - I thought - I was given a huge bun in the bakery section of Vanguard, FOR FREE. Apparently it was a tester, so I felt obliged to actually buy another afterwards, but still, free cake! The rest of the afternoon was spent napping and waiting for the rest of the volunteers to arrive, and then we went out to dinner. Finding a restaurant with enough seats for everyone - even after the group had split in two - was difficult enough, but ordering was another thing again. Speaking so little Chinese, we hadn't much choice but to point at random things on the menu and hope for the best... which is how my table ended up ordering a bowl of stewed squid and starfish. Luckily, everything else we'd ordered was pretty good, so apart from that and the fact that we'd accidentally left two volunteers back at the university, dinner worked out quite well. After that, we regrouped at the university and headed to a bar across the road for the rest of the night.
Our first official day of language-learning started badly: despite waking our poor, exhausted selves up at 7, we were still late for the buses that came to collect us - and that was before they spent about 10 minutes chasing down unreturned room keys and searching for a missing bag (eventually found on a chair in the middle of the room). Then we drove to the biggest school I've ever seen, dumped our bags in a classroom, and climbed 5 excruciating flights of chairs to a very nice conference room with very ugly views across Lanzhou. We were welcomed by a whole panel of important people whose titles I've forgotten and presented with traditional Chinese tea sets, as welcome gifts, before our student hosts arrived to be introduced. My host was called Sophia; she was 15 and spoke brilliant English, so we talked a lot whilst I was staying with her. The main thing I learnt from talking with her was just how hard Chinese high school is for the students. Obviously I already know how long the school day is, how much homework the students have... that sort of thing. But seeing it first-hand was completely different: we would get back to Sophia's house in the early evening and have tea, then she would shut herself in her room to study until midnight. The Sports Meeting (kind of like Sports Day, but a BIG deal) which took place later in the week afforded her three days free of lessons, and so less homework, which she was really excited about. I asked her what her favourite subject was once, but she told me she doesn't like any. I asked her what she likes doing, she told me sleeping - I laughed and asked what else, but she couldn't think of anything. Her ambition - shared by almost every student in the school - is to get into an American university, where she hopes the work won't be so hard.
As for the actual Language Course - well, it wasn't brilliant. We had 5 lessons: the first taught us to order Lanzhou beef noodles (of course it did, Lanzhou is absolutely obsessed with its beef noodles); the second was meant to teach us useful shopping phrases but went much too fast; the third was even faster, but we did manage to scribble down lots of classroom phrases to teach ourselves later; I have no idea what we were meant to be doing in the fourth lesson, but we did learn a Chinese New Year song and perform a Mexican wave; the fifth was about calligraphy, but basically meant being given a brush and some ink and left to your own devices. The lessons, then, were brilliantly unhelpful, but we were given our own Chinese textbooks as well, which are pretty good. I spent my evenings trying to learn new vocab whilst Sophia did her homework, then I would test it on her on the bus to school next day. It felt like starting primary school again because I was teaching myself such simple things, like telling the time! Sophia was very patient with me insisting on using my minimal Chinese at every opportunity, and she says my accent is good so I'm feeling excited about learning Chinese again - I've been slacking since I started teaching!
Our Chinese lessons only took up the mornings; in the afternoon, we were mini-bus'd about to various sites of cultural interest around Lanzhou... I could skim over these by just listing them, but then you might not be able to appreciate the thrilling photos I took at each of these exciting locations, so I'm going to take my time. Lucky you! SO.
Day 1: Lanzhou Waterwheel Garden
This is a garden and museum dedicated to the wonder of engineering that is a waterwheel. Unfortunately most of the exhibit explanations were in Chinese, so I can't tell you as much as you want to know about the ancient art of water-wheeling, but I can tell you that it revolutionised, erm, something and that there is something of a dispute over who designed The First Waterwheel. This museum also did a nice line in rocks, with a whole two rooms dedicated to mildly-interesting-at-best rocks found in the Yellow River. Highlights were the little rocks arranged to look like plates of food, and the display of rocks that supposedly resembled animals. Yes, really. Outside, you could wander down to marvel at two actual real-life waterwheels - and if you got close enough, to see all the litter clogging the bottom of them. Fun for all the family.
Day 2: The Provincial Museum
Unfortunately, I and a few others were a bit late (more on that later!) so we only had two hours to explore rooms of ancient pottery and fish fossils labelled only in Chinese. To be fair, they did have some impressive reconstructed dinosaur skeletons, the exhibits were all well-designed, the Communism exhibit was interesting and I'm sure if ancient history was your thing (and you could read Chinese), you'd love it. As it was, we were all outside, waiting to go, for about an hour before the prearranged time.
Day 3: Qing Opera Museum (advertised as Wuqan Mountain)
The museum buildings were pretty and photo-worthy, but all the rooms inside have blurred into one for me. Oh, apart from one, which recreated the inside of a theatre. There were rows of seats laid out, facing the empty stage, some filled with enthusiastic waxwork opera-goers, others filled, inexplicably, with Chinese tourists staring blankly ahead at the empty stage. Adrenaline junkies that we are, the museum just wasn't enough for us and the group turned instead to gambling in a home-made coin-flip lottery. Lowri won the grand prize of 12 yuan (£1.20), 1 fen (1p) and a string bracelet, which obviously required a prize-giving ceremony - the lighting of an Olympic-style torch (aka a cigarette) and lots of kowtowing.
Day 4: Baita Mountain
This time, when they said mountain, they actually meant mountain. The bad news was we didn't have time to climb said mountain, the good news was that there were fun things to do at the bottom of the mountain. Well, if you think zoos where the animals are visibly on the edge of nervous breakdowns are fun (cough Jonny and Ned cough). Other activities included watching maintenance workers kick cats and having new-bought drinks snatched from your hand by litter-collectors. Lanzhou was really outdoing itself here.
I'm sorry, I know the chronology of this is a bit weird, but I'm going to leave it here for now. Part 2 coming soon!
xxx
- comments
Ann B Simpson I rate this blog 5 star but the rating closes so quickly I didn't get further than 1 - sorry. It was so good to see and talk with you yesterday. Had a really exciting day 'cos I got to do the same with Meg. Hope your voice is back and the cold clearing. Take good care of yourself. Much Love G x
Jim S Very dry and very humorous.