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In my last entry, I tried to give a rough overview of the whole week. This time, I'll try to fill in some of the blanks - starting with why I was late for our trip to the Provincial Museum on Tuesday. When we arrived in Lanzhou, we'd already made plans as a group to head to Xi'an immediately after the course ended, because Xi'an is home to the ancient Terracotta Army - and not that far from Lanzhou, in China-terms. By the time we reached Lanzhou, everyone apart from Nicole and I had booked their tickets, and train tickets had sold out, so we were keen to get to the bus station to buy tickets as soon as possible. The Xinjiang volunteers wanted to book their tickets home from Xi'an as well, so on Tuesday lunchtime 8 of us piled into taxis to the train station (luckily I'd taught myself the word for train station before we left for Jiujiang), which is a short walk from the bus station. My taxi driver drove like an absolute maniac, cutting off other cars, overtaking into oncoming traffic and the like, and our journey only took 20 minutes - which we stupidly used as a guideline for how much time we needed to get back. Our ticket buying went perfectly, thanks to a mixture of my spoken and Nicole's written Chinese, and we met a nice man in the queue who chatted to us and let me practice my Chinese on him, and an Australian ex-pat who was trying to get back to Xining in time for the birth of his first child. We knew we were a little short on time when we met back up with the others, who were just reaching the front of their queue, but reckoning on a 30-minute maximum drive, we thought we'd get away with it. We were so, so wrong. Not only did our new taxi driver threaten to throw us out of the car when we disputed the inflated price, but we got caught in the most awful traffic on the way back to the school. We'd been in the car about twenty minutes already when I asked him whether we were far away, and how much longer we'd be. Not far, 15 minutes. 15 minutes! We were so late that by the time we ran through the school gates, one of the buses had tired of waiting and was setting off. The four volunteers in the other taxi were even later, because they'd been dropped off at the university campus and had to walk from there. It was baaad - the Chinese teacher in charge refused to talk to us when we tried to ease the situation with small talk.
That night, Sophia's aunt and uncle brought her very shy 12-yr-old cousin round to practice his English on me. He had to confer with his mum for more than 5 minutes before any question and, although I answered as simply as I could, Sophia had to step in to help translate most of what I said for him. I didn't really mind, but it was quite awkward - I was relieved when it was over! The next night, we had another of Sophia's aunts round for a visit: we chatted for a little bit, via Sophia (who seems to be the only English speaker in the family, apart from her brother, who is at uni in LA) and she gave me and Sophia some nice savoury pancake thing, which was cool. Generally, my evenings at Sophia's were quite boring, but in a relaxing sort of way: I sat and tried to learn from my new textbooks, smiled and nodded at various visitors, chatted with Sophia and occasionally managed to read emails on my ipod. Friday was the exception to the rule, because that was the night of the school talent show.
The talent show at the High School Attached to Northwest Normal University (the name gets catchier every time) was a much bigger deal than anything I think you could expect in England. The corridor to get into the hall was crammed with jostling students and the stage set was enormous, and very professional. The student presenting the show were super-dressed up in suits, diamante ties and ballgowns and each act had their own personalised graphics shown on the screen behind them. The quality of the acts varied quite widely: there were several Mean Girls style dance acts, two boys singing/rapping Linkin Park, a painfully long comedy sketch, more singing, a couple of acts playing traditional Chinese instruments... some acts included the hosts of volunteers, so Beth angrily shushed anyone who dared talk during their performances, and we all screamed and cheered at the end. The bulk of our enthusiasm was, however, saved for the two Project Trust volunteers who took their turns singing towards the end of the show. First up was Ellie, who had everyone up in their seats - and others running on stage - to dance along to her rendition of Dancing Queen. She was even awarded a banana, which is apparently given as a token of thanks to singers liked by the audience, so it was clearly a success. Then Jono came up to play guitar and sing to Adele, which also went down very well.
As we were leaving for Xi'an early on Sunday morning, Saturday was the last time we were able to spend time with our hosts. We wanted to do something fun as a group, and Nold came up with idea of holding a ceilidh. This isn't quite as random as it sounds: Project Trust headquarters are in Scotland, and all volunteers take part in ceilidhs at both their Selection and Training courses, so although most of us still can't remember any of the dances, we like to think of ceilidhs as kind of 'our thing'. We held our ceilidh in the school grounds after morning lessons, starting on a wide path and moving to the playing field, and somehow it worked pretty well. Luckily we had enough Scottish people there to keep the dances on track, and after a quick all-PT demo-dance the Chinese students were pulled over to join in. It was really good fun, and Nicole managed to film a lot of it so I'll try to upload the movie here later so our dancing skillz can be properly admired! Just a warning though - Nicole is absolutely peeing herself laughing throughout the whole thing, and her laugh is so wacky and funny it will probably distract from the dancing! Post-ceilidh, we had shoulder-wars, made human pyramids and took lots of photos together, before splitting up to go for lunch. Sophia and I went for lunch with Catherine, another Jiangxi volunteer, her host and her host's friend, then headed off as a group for an afternoon of intense shopping.
Catherine and I were on the hunt for gifts for our hosts, but they were having none of it. Every sly question about whether they liked chocolate, or if they thought this or that headband was pretty, was shot down with blank refusals until we began to get quite desperate. Catherine managed to buy some chocolate cakes for her host, but knowing that chocolate gives Sophia nosebleeds (unlucky!) I decided on buying her a photo frame instead - ostensibly for the photos she'd liked of herself with some of the volunteers. I had no idea where to buy one, and she flat-out refused to tell me. I knew enough Chinese to ask "where can I buy ___", so I managed to get the word for photo frame out of Catherine's host and marched off to ask a shop assistant, much to their horror. It didn't work, because I immediately forgot the word for photo frame, but Catherine's host was so embarrassed on my behalf that she came over to help and I did eventually manage to buy a present for Sophia. Plus a small punishment present for not helping me choose one in the first place, muahaha. We went to recover from the gift-buying ordeal at KFC, where Sophia presented me with a pair of earrings she'd secretly bought me, hidden inside a chicken nuggets box, then we went to the street market. WHICH WAS AMAZING. Catherine and I were appalling market-shoppers, because we ran over screaming and exclaiming to everything we liked the look of, which obviously made haggling a little more difficult, but we still got loads of good stuff really cheap. We bought nail varnishes, headphones, tons of DVDs, wall stickers... all for about £20. Then, Catherine tried to buy a hoody. She'd been looking for one for ages and found the first one she liked at a stall with a rude woman who demanded 60RMB and refused to haggle. Our hosts thought she might lower the price if we started to walk away, but she didn't. Catherine wanted to go back immediately, but they insisted she was bound to find an equally good hoody somewhere else, so we carried on up the street, scouring each stall for nice hoodies as we went. There was something wrong with each hoody: wrong size, ugly colour, stupid slogan and Catherine only wanted to go back and get the first hoody, but our hosts couldn't bear the idea and grew more and more desperate to find her another hoody somewhere else. Most of the other shopkeepers either asked for, or were quickly haggled down to, 50RMB so we knew the first woman was being unfair with her prices, but she did have the best hoodies, and eventually Catherine won the argument and managed to drag us all back to the first stall. Neither Catherine or I thought it was that big a deal - after all 10RMB is only £1 - but the hosts were genuinely quite upset about having to go back to the woman who'd been so rude to us earlier. I didn't realise quite how much so until I heard Sophia moaning about it to her parents that night - I think it's the whole losing-face thing again. Whoops.
Anyway, we had a great last day in Lanzhou and overall the whole week was pretty good fun. Admittedly, the lessons and organised activities weren't as successful as we might have hoped, but the people we met there were lovely and it was fun just having the full group reunited again. We left Lanzhou early on Sunday morning, but as even this turned out to be stressful and newsworthy, I'll save that story for another day...
- comments
Snoop Lion what do you mean the whole losing face thing? whats that about
Ella Yeah, hi Maddy... I don't know how to explain it properly, but it's basically a pride thing - if something happens that makes you look bad, like losing an arguement or being treated rudely, you 'lose face'.
Jo Love the photos of PT guests andhosts doing gay gordons and dashing white sargent in deepest Gansu... surreal but very sweet. XXXX