Teaching in China with Buckland --from Judy Cairns

9-- National Holiday and Start to work again

Ni Hao Everyone:

It's Saturday, October 9, 2004 here in China. It's a beautiful fall day--no bright colours, but the sun is warm, there is a very slight chill in the air, the nights are cooler--it is a wonderful time to be here--the blistering heat of every sinle day and night is over and I will enjoy this weather until the freezing cold of every day and night is upon us. Mr. Zhou has promised to buy us electric sleeping pads, so that will be good!
Our trip to Lushan was amazing. A former teacher/student of mine went to the bus station on her bike to see how much tickets were, when we could buy them and what times the bus left on October 1. That was a very big thing for her to do for us and we appreciated it so much. Mr. Zhou refused to help us, and refused to let Tom help us. Mr. Zhou wanted us to stay in Ningdu "because it is safer"! I guess he should have emailed me before I left Canada to tell me China was not safe to travel in. I stuck to my guns and told him (through Tom) that we had the right to travel on our vacation and if they wouldn't help us, I would find someone who would. Another student wrote a lot of Chinese out for us, under my English questions--such as where we wanted a bus ticket to, and our return as well. Those students are a real blessing!
We arrived in Nanchang, about 5 hours away, and walked into an administrative office in the bus station to ask about tickets to Lushan. The girl spoke a little English and bought the tickets for us. After that we saw the line-ups at the ticket wickets and we were glad we had found the office first. The girl actually took us right to the bus, leading us through the crowds of people in the bus station. I think she was a little proud to be leading 3 foreigners through the crowd, speaking English to us!
The trip from Nanchang to Lushan is very pretty--it takes about 2 and a half hours--awhile after leaving Nanchang the bus started to climb the mountains--way, way up! We stopped at the ticket office--the entrance to Lushan--where we all got off the bus. We were supposed to find a cab to the hotel that had been booked for us through Annie, a Canadian teaching in Ganzhou (2 hours south of us) who had arrived there with 2 other foreigners (1 Cdn, 1 US) the day before us. We couldn't see a cab, or a bus or anything. We had the Chinese, and started showing people--they just told us to get back on the bus! We were just at the ticket office--Lushan was still about half an hour away. It cost 135 Yuan to get into Lushan National GeoPark The sun was setting, the air was clear and a little colder, and it was beautiful--we were right in the middle of a forest, it seemed.
We arrived in Lushan--the tourist town where we were is called something else, but I forget what--I will just call it Lushan--the bus driver took us as close as he could to our hotel--he dropped us at the bottom of some steps and pointed up. We asked others we saw as we went and they kept pointing up! Finally we reached a turn-off with more steps and the women who was showing us, pointed and said "bye-bye", so we knew we were almost there, legs feeling like rubber. We found our way to the hotel at the end of more steps and a path, where someone showed us to Annie's room. I was Annie's roommate, Lorlie and Nicole roomed together, and the other two, Amanda and Kerry, had a suite 2 floors above us. We got together in the suite, drank some beer, ate some peanuts, dried fruit, real Oreos and talked as fast as we wanted!
IN the morning, Annie and I started out on our own for about an hour while Nicole slept a little longer, Amanda and Kerry slept a little longer, and Lorlie went to the town to get some decent shoes. Annie and I walked up even more steps from our hotel to a road--up more steps, along a pathway. Everywhere we went and turned around the views were breathtaking. The days before it had been really foggy and nothing was visible except the 3 steps in front of you. This day was bright, sunny, clear and the air was amazing!!! It was also quiet! There are so many different varieties of evergreens! So many different flowers and plants and wild plants growing on the mountainsides. WE could see the town of Lushan across the valley on the side of another mountain, we could see many mountainsides, rivers below. We went back to get the others and decided to follow some trails to a waterfall. We had maps of the area. The trails were a little hard to follow--we would see some Chinese people, point to our map and they would point us off in what we thought was the right direction. We followed trails through the woods, breathing in the good air (I was still coughing a lot--my cold was only on the mend, it was not better--I had a sinus infection and was taking anti-biotics for it, so I was a little wimpy). We got to a stopping place, a clearing, where there were trails going off in several different directions. Some Chinese people came along, going to the same waterfall--they had a GPS thing with them. They insisted we follow them. We did--through the woods that got thicker, and thicker and more and more overgrown. We were following a dried up mountain creek bed. It was quite amusing to realize we were lost in the woods in the mountains in China!!! After about an hour we heard car horns and some music, so we knew we were getting close to somewhere. It was not the waterfall, not even close! We came out of the woods to blaring rock music, (good way to ruin the quiet of the mountainsides!) food and drinks to buy, a road with cars and buses. It was also the beginning of a trail leading to a series of peaks called 5 Old Men Peaks. We followed those trails and went to 4 of the 5 peaks. We missed number 2 because it was the same view as number 1. The views were breathtaking--the many mountains, huge lake, villages, more mountainsides and peaks--jagged rock outcrops--and many people. I guess this is the main mountain thing to climb in Lushan. We took tourist photos, climbed many, many steps, rocks, created spectacles of ourselves just by being foreign and speaking English. We said "hello" about a billion times! We had perma-smiles pasted on our faces most of the time. Everywhere we go, we are doing PR, helping people practice English, speaking to people. Our English lessons are not confined to the classroom. They are all the time, everywhere we go!
At the top of some of the peaks there are posts with big chains between the posts. Attached to the chains are many, many brass padlocks with red ribbons on them. They are sold at the mountaintops. They are bought by couples, their names are engraved on them--the couple attaches the lock to the chain and throws the key over the edge! This is to signify that they will be together forever! How romantic!
About mid-afternoon, we found a bus that would take us back down the mountain and into the touristy part of town. We did some wandering around the town--it is not too much unlike Banff, or any tourist mountain town. Lots of tourist trappings, high prices--it was so clean, there were not even any cigarette butts on the street for very long before a sweeper came along to clean it up! We found a place to have dinner, ordered by ourselves with the help of our combined notes--it was wonderful spending time with other foreigners! There were 6 of us altogether. After dinner, we wandered toward the entrance to town, to the lake to watch the amazing sunset. Later we found our way back to our hotel, up, up, up more steps. My legs were feeling a lot of use by now--quads from all the climbing, calves from coming down so many steps! Again we gathered for beer and snacks in the suite of the hotel. This was Saturday. Amanda and Kerry had to teach on Monday, so they were leaving early Sunday morning.
Sunday the other four of us set out--we wanted to visit a waterfall--there are several in the area and we had missed the one the day before. Lorlie misses church more than anything in China and she saw on the map there was a Christian church, so she wanted to see that. When we arrived they were just about to begin a service--choir, minister, the whole works--it was all in Chinese, but the hymns were the same. The other 3 of us waited outside for awhile, talked to some other foreigners who were working at horticulturalists at the Botanical Gardens--one from Scotland, the other from England. Nicole is 24, cute and blonde, so many young Chinese men wanted to have their photos taken with her. She had only been in China for a week, so was a little overwhelmed by everything--I think having other foreigners (2 of us experienced) helped her immensely! I wish I had had other foreigners when I first arrived in China! Anyway, after waiting for almost an hour, we went in the church to talk to Lorlie--she decided she wanted to stay at the service and would catch up to us later. We had our cell phones with us. So the 3 of us started off. We found a cab that would take us to the base of the mountain we had to go to to see the waterfall. The cab was 50 Yuan--we had found others that said 100, 60. We finally settled for 50. the cab driver was funny and kind to us. We followed the throngs to the setting off place near the top of the mountain. We had to take a cable car. There was one set of cable cars that appeared very busy, but we wanted to find the path to walk on that we could see on our map. We kept being told no, no. The cablecar was 60 Yuan. We thought that was one way, and that we would have to pay another 60 to get back up the mountain again. We finally found another ticket seller who told us that this was the cable car to get to the waterfall we wanted to see. We went down many steps to check it out and it seemed deserted! We went back up the steps, having made the decision to pay the 120 Yuan to go down the mountain and back up again in the cable car. Well, we found out that 60 Yuan was the return trip! Bonus. We also found out that the waterfall we wanted to go to was on the deserted cable car! There were about 7 of us altogether on 2 different cablecars going down. Amazing views!!! It's really a good thing I am not afraid of heights! When we reached the bottom, we had to walk about 20 minutes downhill, on a road, leading down the mountain. We reached the look-off point where we could see the waterfall, and we were the only people there!!! It was so quiet! It was so amazing to be able to hear the birds, the bees, the breeze in the trees--we whispered and kept silent so we could hear the sounds of the silence! We had our little picnic lunch on a stone wall that was way up high above the waterfall, which was cascading down a mountainside opposite from where we were sitting. We spent about an hour there. I got a call from Lorlie; we told her where we were, but she took the wrong cable car and ended up at another waterfall with about 88,000 people! We were so lucky. There was a little bit of traffic going up the road past us from a village at the bottom. We were lucky that when we wanted to start back up the steep climb, a taxi mini-cab picked us up and charged us 20 Y to get back up the mountain. He did not overcharge us--there were 3 others in the same cab who also paid 20 Y. Back up the cable car again--on the mountainside there was a blue net covering a bird sanctuary. It would have been nice to visit it, but we had to find Lorlie. When we all got together again we spent about 2 hours walking through the Botanical Gardens--the entrance was right near where the cab had dropped us off when we arrived at the mountain. It was beautiful--so many greenhouses, varieties of plants, flowers, cactii (sp?) evergreens, maples. Annie was in heaven and a little nostalgic because she had managed a nursery about one hour from Ottawa for 16 years! We only left because it was getting late. We were looking for a taxi or a bus to take us back to the town--we showed a policeman our map. He stopped a military vehicle (a spacious double cab pick-up truck) and asked two handsome men in uniform to take us to the town! They took us around the lake to show us; also took us to another set of buildings that were very historical. We went in to another Christian Church--there was no service this time, or we would have lost Lorlie again. They were all set to stay with us! We wanted to go and get dinner, so we indicated that they didn't have to stay with us anymore. I think they were relieved! Anyway, it was fun and exciting to have the military escort down the mountain. They took no money for it either. We tried to pay them, but they refused! I think it was Nicole batting her eyelashes at the policeman that did it!
We did more shopping (window shopping), had dinner at another restaurant and headed back to our hotel. We all gathered in Annie's and my room for tea and snacks after dinner, talked and went to bed around 9:30 pm. It had been a long, exhausting, exciting 2 days!
The next morning, Monday, we found the bus station. It appeared to be closed so everyone else left--but again I walked into an admin office (I could see lights on down a hallway) and pointed to the Chinese on my notes. The woman left her office, we founf the others, and she took us down the street and showed us where to buy the bus tickets to Nanchang. We never would have found it on our own!
We waited for about an hour and a half for the next bus to Nanchang--we arrived back in Ningdu about 6 pm. The bus did not stop at the bus station, but somewhere in the north end of town. Thank goodness I sort of knew where we were, so we walked home. It was about a 20 minute walk.
Nicole lives on the second floor of our building--Lorlie had stopped to buy something. I continued up the stairs to my 5th floor apartment, but heard Nicole calling me--"Judy, there has been someone sleeping in my bedroom, and she is still there!" Right out of Goldilocks! I ran back downstairs--Nicole's bedroom door was locked. Nicole was trying to ask the woman to please come out of her bedroom. Nicole's plumbing had to be fixed--she had given Tom the key to her apartment so the work could be done while she was gone. Nicole had given Tom the talk about her privacy, this was everything she owned in the world, and she trusted him with her key. Well, apparently, Mr. Zhou gave Tom 4 days off at the last minute. The landlady wanted the key so she could have the work done in her own time. NO work was done, but the landlady decided that since she had company over the holiday, it would be ok to use Nicole's apartment for her company to sleep in! Fortunately, Nicole had packed up everything and locked it in a spare room and had taken the key to that room with her to Lushan. We couldn't reach Tom (we didn't know he had 4 days off) so we called Owen. He said he would look after it right away, and I think the shit hit the fan, so to speak! I guess Owen talked to Mr. Zhou, the landlady and Tom. We were told that from now on when there were problems not to talk to Mr. Zhou, but directly to Owen--the same with Tom. Tom and Owen will be working more closely together now. But Tom is a little afraid of Mr. Zhou I think, so I think Tom will still ask Mr. Zhou first--we'll see how it all unfolds. But Mr. Zhou has been very solicitious of us. In a way I'm glad it happened, because now it is not just me complaining about Mr. Zhou, but I have backup. I think Owen believes me now and does not just think I am making too much of things. I found out Mr. Zhou is married and had a baby boy Sept 24. I didn't even know he was married! No wonder he spends so much time in Nanchang--that is where he lives! If