And I'm alone in my apartment, and will be working on tomorrow's lesson plan once I finish this post (and enjoy one of my mother Tammy's WORLD FAMOUS PEANUT BUTTER BALLS ... I love the postal service ...).
Tomorrow's lesson plan?, you ask. But surely, tomorrow must be Saturday - even in China with all that confusing International Dateline stuff. Oh no, you've understood correctly. It's just that I'm living in Communist China, and what the Communist Party says, goes. So, when they decide that the week-long holiday you were just on was far too extravagant and that the country must make up for lost time / productivity, you work on Saturday, too. Oh, China. However, I really can't complain that I just had a week long vacation, and a little lesson planning never hurt anyone.
So how was this week-long break? Well, dare I say, a bit of a bust?
Our plans were made oh so quickly. One day, as I was teaching, two other teachers came to my room and asked: "Do you want to go to Ningbo? It's a few hours away and there's this beach nearby. You have to decide like, right now. We're going to buy train tickets." Well, you said beach. And you're taking care of the details? I'm there! I pretty much knew nothing beyond this, and I was more than okay with letting someone else take the reigns of my travels. We left for Ningbo on Friday the 1st, which was National Day in China, which celebrates the birthday of "New China" - Communist China. What this really meant for the people was that pretty much the entire country was plopped in front of their televisions with their families watching the "Military Review," and ooohing and ahhhing at their large tanks and intimidating soliders (think Olympic Opening Ceremonies, except less glitz and more combat boots). When I asked my students about their thoughts on this all-morning-long specacle in Tiananmen Square, they said that they loved watching it, and that they were so proud of all the progress their country has made in the last 60 years. It's pretty amazing to see this kind of patriotism, actually. It's not something I find often back home, especially Madison : )
Anyway, we left on National Day. We took a bus to Ningbo, which was about 3 1/2 hrs away. Since there was NO room any any of the hostels in town, we ended up staying at a class-ay hotel. We settled in, had some dinner (Ningbo is near the coast and is known for its seafood), and then hit the town for the night. After spending the evening / wee morning hours drinking whiskey with tea (seemingly the choice beverage here), no one was quite prepared for an early morning wakeup call to head to PuTaoShan - the island with the beach that was advertised to me. Because it would have taken way too long to get there and it cost a pretty penny, we decided to spend our day seeing what Ningbo had to offer instead. We had lunch at an excellent Japanese chain restaurant, and then went our separate ways. Jones and I accompanied our friend Wilson (the new "Hao" of the group: Chinese-American, speaks perfect Chinese / English, the man who gets us out of every pickle in China) to buy our train tickets to Shanghai and his bus ticket to Wuxi for the next leg of our trip. This was, as things often are in China, more hassle than we had anticipated, because of having to go to a few different locations. When we returned a few hours later, we learned the rest of the group was at Starbucks. After three months without having any such coffee concoction, I thought it was high time to indulge in a bit of sugary, globalized goodness. Mmm. We followed with a highly competitive paddle boat race - see below - amongst the 12 of us (three teams of four. My team lost, but I'll have you know the other teams were dirty cheaters), and then a delicious dinner.
The highlight of the evening was certainly the celebration of Mid-Autumn Festival. From what I can gather, this holiday is celebrated at the first full moon after the turn of the season, and Chinese people celebrate by going to their hometowns, visiting with friends and relatives, and eating a gelatinous "dessert" called mooncakes while enjoying the beauty of the full moon. I enjoy mooncakes, though on the sly. Most Westerners find them absolutely repulsive, and I can absolutely understand why: they're often fairly gross. However, Chinese people eat them like it's going out of style. Another tradition of Mid-Autumn Festival is the lighting of lanterns into the sky. You have this paper lantern with a candle-y waxy thing beneath, and you light that, and it warms up like a hot air balloon. When the air within gets warm enough, it floats away into the sky and you make a wish! Doing just one is fun, but not all that impressive. However, when you have a whole skyline filled with thousands upon thousands of spots of fire, it is truly a beautiful and magical thing. I felt like I was in a fairy tale as I watched all the lanterns aglow with their wishes light up the night.
That evening was lowkey, in preparation for the big beach day to follow. We woke up early and were out of the hostel by 8am. First we had a quick taxi ride to the bus station, but our bus wasn't to leave for another hour or something. So, we had a light breakfast while we waited, and then took our 1 1/2 hr long bus ride to the city where we would take the ferry. We got there, hopped right on the ferry, and then took that for another 1 1/2 hr. (I was having flashbacks to the Aran Islands in Ireland - I had horrible nausea on that ferry, and this was probably exactly the same boat. However, I managed to fall asleep for the whole trip. Lucky, too, because Matthew wasn't there to distract me!) We get to the island around right around 1pm. We wait in line and buy our entrance fee tickets - a whopping 200 yuan!, which was just shy of 30 bucks and three times the price of going to the GREAT WALL of CHINA. Can you say holiday inflated prices?! Then, we go to buy our ferry tickets back.
Uh oh.
Wilson comes back from the ticket window and informs us thaaaat ... every ferry after 1:15 is booked. It's now about 1:07. Gah! Darn you, throngs of Chinese tourists! We book it to the ticket place, where we plead to get a refund on our minutes old entrance passes. At first it didn't look promising, but we all made sad faces. We did end up getting our money back, probably more in part to Wilson's Chinese than our poutiness. And then, there we were, about ten minutes later, waiting on the dock to take the ferry right back to where we had started from.
To make a long story short, we ended up back at our hostel around 5:30pm, and effectively traveled for 9 1/2 hrs so that we could eat at a Lebonese restaurant across the street from our hostel. Lovely. I will say, it was darn good falafel. : )
Jones and I capped off our holiday by heading to Shanghai to spend another large portion of our now dwindling paycheck, and then got back to Wuxi for a day or so to unwind before classes started. Now, however, it's getting later and I must start lesson planning before trying to Skype with Matthew. I am going to try and post pictures of my apartment and campus tomorrow! We'll see how that goes ; )
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