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I'm surpassing my own expectations here, writing a new post a mere 2 weeks after my last one and in the run up to Christmas no less! Well, I hadn't been expecting to have had such a relatively eventful fortnight, with actual events I can write about instead of pseudo-highbrow waffling masquerading as commentary. So, without further ado, I'll get right into it.
Last weekend was a bizarre concentration of new experiences in what has otherwise been a fairly uneventful few months. A friend of one of the members of our class graduated in the summer, and since then he's been alternating between travelling the world and doing internships. He recently arrived in Beijing, and has proven to be great fun. One idea of his was to book a chalet in a ski resort nearby, invite far more people than the place can hold (because it's China and fire codes are really only advisory) and have a ridiculously oversized party. There's no snow for miles around because this is apparently the warmest winter in ages, but there's plenty of artificial stuff where business depends on it, so it was all looking good. Unfortunately, with my ankle finally better but still very fragile, I decided throwing myself down a mountain with a plank strapped to my feet probably wasn't the smartest idea, so had to give it a pass.
Then I found out that there's a group of students at PKU that go hiking every weekend; nothing too adventurous, more an excuse to get out among the mountains and mingle with other international students. I'd pretty much done none of either since arrival (Cambridge year abroad students are in a separate class from the rest of the foreigners learning Chinese, a situation that unlike most of my class I actually quite like, but then I'm the sort of weirdo who enjoys classical Chinese), and it was really starting to rankle. So, I joined the WeChat group (an app very much like WhatsApp but better, and used by almost everyone in China), packed far too much into my rucksack and met the group at the subway station next to the university.
Getting out to the place we were hiking took most of the day - riding the undeground as far west as we could, then a huge scramble at the bus stop to get on the one bus that was going in the same direction we and a horde of Chinese people also wanted to go. In the end we all (somehow) squeezed our way on, but pretty much everyone in our group ended up standing in the aisle for all or most of the three-hour journey. We all found different ways to pass the time - Christoph (Cambridge), Alaistair (Oxford) and I spent the journey doing the vocab flashcards that are so crucial to learning Chinese but which take up a ridiculous amount of time and looking up rude words and comical definitions in our dictionaries (personal favourite - 相公, meaning 'lord', 'master', 'young gentleman', 'male prostitute' or 'mahjong player disqualified from a tournament by unintentionally taking in the wrong number of dominoes'), and a Swiss guy who was with our group spent it drinking heavily and making ridiculous claims about himself. We later found out that it was his birthday on the Saturday, so he'd decided to spend the Friday telling everyone that he was a mountain guide from Mont Blanc as a joke.
This wasn't the sort of thing where 'you had to be there' - it was really that underwhelming. He was enjoying himself though. So much that an elderly Chinese man told him as he got off that it was considered impolite to drink on buses. I was a bit further up the crowded bus so didn't see it, but when other people told me that the man had been silently fuming for quite a while, I wasn't surprised. What he'll have actually meant was "you're a boorish foreign w***er with no manners, and you've been pissing everyone off for the last thirty miles" because as far as Chinese manners are concerned, it's very impolite to interfere in a stranger's business, even to tell them off for something unless they're completely out of line, which this guy was.
When we got off the bus, we had some taxis arranged to take us to the village where we'd be spending the night. Fortunately I managed to avoid being in the same car as the Swiss guy, who by this point had decided to tell everyone that he was a Muslim; as my car pulled away he had his coat spread out on the floor, 'praying' in 'Arabic' with a cigarette in his mouth. It seems his coat lining wasn't flammable, because a few minutes after I arrived, so did he, with a bunch of deeply irritated fellow hikers in tow. Apparently he'd decided that the best way to give credence to the 'Muslim' story was to keep shouting about how he was going to blow up the car.
The village itself, Cuandixia, was interesting though - lovely old courtyard architecture from hundreds of years ago nestled away in the mountains, a fascinating mix of faded Maoist slogans on the outside of centuries-old courtyard walls, spring couplets written in the traditional characters that the Maoists tried so hard to eliminate around the doors, and a temple to a semi-divine warrior from history. Also, as it was just a regular weekend in the run-up to winter, there was hardly anyone else there. The guy in our group who'd suggested going there had been there before previously, and got the phone number of the owner of one of the courtyard hostels. Unsurprisingly, he was delighted to have a group of 20 booking out his place in the middle of the low season, so he used his contacts to get us in to the village without going through the main gate (as a tourist site, it charges admission).
The place we were staying was about as traditionally Chinese as you're likely to find anywhere - built around a courtyard with lots of small rooms, each of which is largely taken up by a kang, a large bed for more than one person, made of stone but surprisingly comfy with a few blankets, warmed by a fire underneath. After a fantastic dinner prepared by the host who was more than happy to bring extra portions of any dish we fancied, as well as preparing some absolutely fantastic leg of lamb, the group headed out for a night hike. Thinking of my ankle I stayed inside, wrapped up warm on my portion of the kang in my room and read a few chapters of the classical novel that with any luck I'll be writing my dissertation on - Romance of the Three Kingdoms. A modern Chinese version with pictures illustrating pretty much every sentence, but you've got to start somewhere.
The next day we woke up early (for a Saturday) to have breakfast at 8. It was Chinese-style breakfast, which I learnt last year I'm not at all fond of, but fortunately there were plain steamed buns and honey to dip them into in addition to all the congee and strange vegetables that I can't stand. Shortly after, we were off. It was a very strange hike, with no real goal in mind (the tallest peak nearby, which is the usual hiking trail in the area, was closed for winter), so we just meandered up a nearby hill for a while until we came to another village, equally old but much smaller than where we were staying even before it was mostly abandoned. A wizened old shepherd wandered along at one point with a flock of sheep, and seemed to enjoy the slightly bemusing chat he had with some of us, which was nice. I get far too few opportunities to use 'wizened', but that was definitely one of them. The scenery was gorgeous too - very stark hills with low shrub growth and a few bare trees. The hills were almost all bizarrely stepped, with stone walls built into the slopes creating what looked a bit like rice terraces. In an incredibly arid area like this though (it's rained once in the four months since I arrived), you can't grow rice - the terraces were there to prevent landslides.
We got up there by around 11, wandered around for a bit then went down into a different valley and followed the road back to the hotel for lunch at 1. The owner of the hotel had cottoned on to the fact that we liked his honey, so had put it out for lunch as well, and to his visible delight most of us ended up buying a jar to take home, me included. Then it was just another achingly long journey to get back to the city (at least this time we all got seats) and normality. The whole trip cost me just under 200 yuan, or £20.
One of the many reasons I love China is that the very next day, I earned £90 for three hours' work, coaching final-year university students looking to do masters' degrees in the UK and preparing for a credibility interview. I thought it had been complicated to get a student visa for China, but it turns out I had it easy. It seems there's an ocean of paperwork that non-EU students have to provide to get a UK student visa, including bank statements to show that they can afford the course fees and living expenses. Even with all the paperwork in order, there's an interview only a few minutes long which can put an end to the whole thing. So, unsurprisingly, interviewing well is quite important to these students.
I got the job through a friend of a friend who happens to work in the English department of the agricultural university, just across the road from me, and arranges English tutoring for the sort of internationally-recognised exams that are hugely important for going abroad or working for a foreign company. Despite having no experience in visa interviews, I think I did a decent job of polishing their prepared answers, and having two students at a time at least let me repeat most of what I was saying. The point of this story, however, is that this woman suggested I give an extra two hours' coaching to one of the students (whose English was particularly shaky) the next day. I agreed, and got paid in advance, but for some reason she only paid me for one hour. I asked her and she fobbed me off with some story about how "the students are told it's 150 yuan an hour, but I give you two at a time so you get 300 an hour, so if it's one student, you only get 300 for two hours" which was obviously nonsense. I told her so(1), and said that if I was only getting paid for one hour, I would only teach for one hour. She was a bit put out by that but eventually agreed, although it was fairly clear that I had to explain the 'change of plans' to the student.
When the class came round, I tried to explain how plans had changed in English and he didn't really understand. So then I used my fairly limited Chinese to explain that I thought it was 300 yuan per hour, because if you pay 150 per hour for a class with two students, that's like paying 300 per hour for one-on-one teaching, and to my surprise he completely agreed and said that was his understanding of things as well. Apparently, he'd paid this woman for two extra hours of my time at 300 per hour, and only half of that had actually made its way to me! I felt really bad for the student, so gave him an hour and a half of coaching instead of just one hour. Whether he'd cottoned on and sympathised with me, or whether he was just so used to nodding his head and going along with whatever a 'teacher' says that he agreed to less time before b****ing about it later to everyone he knows I'm not sure, but hopefully his interview went well. £120 for 5 hours' work isn't exactly shabby anyway.
So, being cheated out of £30 aside, I've had a pretty good time of the last few weeks.
I'm having to remind myself that Christmas is in fact approaching at a shockingly fast rate - it's cold outside but there's no snow, and aside from occasionally hearing a Christmas jingle blaring out from a shop, there's almost no indication that 'tis very much the season by now. It was nice to not be saturated with cheer by the time my birthday rolled around, but it's starting to get quite weird. At the very least, I have a Gruffalo advent calendar and 2ft plastic LED tree to remind me. Oh, in keeping with the anecdote focus of this post, here's another weird thing that happened yesterday after I wrote the first part of it - I spent 20 minutes in a car being driven around Beijing, reading out words on a screen for a voice recognition software company, and got paid 150 yuan. Presumably that was for the emotional suffering caused by making me listen to One Direction and Maroon 5 whilst I did it. Oh, and I've just remembered that today is exactly four months since I arrived in Beijing, yet I only bought an iron this week. Some things never change. Anyway, Merry Christmas to all!
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1. Well actually I didn't - outright calling someone a liar and then expecting them to keep giving you money is nonsense even in Britain, never mind in China where saving face is so important. What I actually said was that there had obviously been some huge 'misunderstanding' that we could avoid next time.
- comments
Iain Tom, so if the stone bed belonged to chap called Louie, would that make it.........Anyway, great post, shame about your friend's visa faff; be worth a test run to HK. Can you put that village on the blog-map?
Iain Tom, so if the stone bed belonged to chap called Louie, would that make it.........Anyway, great post, shame about your friend's visa faff; be worth a test run to HK. Can you put that village on the blog-map?
Rosie Weekend in the hills sounds like the start of a screenplay! Great read x
Allan Good read Tom, I like your style and sense of limited adventure and self-preservation! FIDO. Allan