In Wuhan

The train from Chengdu to Wuhan was 18 hours. Spent most of today recovering. Only still awake because I can't seem to put down my mando after spending so much time away from it. More later, including some pictures if our internet decides to stop acting up. (Been really slow today.)

-Peace

In Chengdu

Sorry I didn't do an update from Panzhihua. Things moved pretty quickly there and we ended up not really having enough time for me to blog.

So here's how stuff went down. Earlier in the week, on our first day of hiking in the Gorge, we met this really cool Chinese dude named Ken and we mentioned that we were planning to head to Chengdu via a city called Panzhihua. When Ken heard this, he got very excited because Panzhihua is where is parents live and where he would be for New Year. He was planning on leaving the Gorge a little before us, and gave us his phone number so he could help us settle in when we got there.

Long story short, we had a wonderful dinner with Ken, his parents, and some of his friends. Ken helped us find a decent and well-priced hotel very near to most anything we could want. The next day, we got our train tickets to Chengdu. The only ones available were for 4pm on the 27th. We arrived at the Chengdu station at 6:00am on the 28th. We checked into our hostel and took a nap and now I'm writing this blog post in the lobby of the Mix hostel.

More when more happens.

-Peace

The Tiger Leaping Gorge

So let me give you the breakdown of what happened in the Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Walter and I took a shuttle from our Hostel on Friday morning and arrived at the start of the trail around noonish. We hiked the upper trail for a good long while until we finally ended up at a hostel called the "Tea Horse Guest House." The Tea Horse was really good. The food was great and the family that runs it was super duper friendly. The view from the window of our room was also stunning.

The next morning we loaded up again and headed all the way to the end of the gorge. We ended up at Sean's Guest House, recommended to us by friends who hiked the gorge last year. We stayed with Sean for Chinese New Year, but something was kind of. . .off about the atmosphere there. Maybe it was just because it was the off season, but Sean did not seem to be the exuberant and jovial fellow described by both our friends and numerous testimonials we saw at a few hostels along the way. But we had dinner with Sean and his daughters. Conspicuously absent on this family-conscious day in Chinese culture was any sort of wife. Perhaps that had something do do with the mood. We didn't ask.

After all that, we spent the next day hiking the lower gorge and ditched some bags at Tina's, making our shuttle reservations to get back to Lijiang today. The next day we hiked back up the Tea Horse and spent the next couple of days derping around on the trail and taking pictures. Walter took nearly 300 photos, so it's going to take me some time to sort through them and get some good ones to post on here. Probably won't do it tonight. Might be a pretty long time. Whatever. Tomorrow we're off to Panzhihua to visit our friend Ken, a Chinese engineer we met in the gorge. After that, we're going to try to get to the Great Buddha in LeShan.

Until next time,

Peace

Back from the Gorge

Walter and I made it through the Gorge alive and we're back in Lijiang. We're starving, though, so we're going to go get food and then I'll post another update with a detail of our adventure in the mountains and maybe some pictures, too.

See you in a couple of hours.

-Peace

Some pictures

You want some pictures? Here are some pictures.

This is a bull with another bull under it and a tiger biting its tail. It is in Kunming. I don't understand it.

Some animal people outside a restaurant in Kunming.

The same.

Me standing in front of a huge gate near our hostel.

Some pictures of our room at the Hump.

Don't drink and drive.

If you're going to graffiti, don't do it on a cop's torso.

A street in Lijiang, I think.

So we met this really old doctor named Doctor He. He was pretty cool.

Get it?

New Facebook profile pic. Me in front of Mao.

Walter doing the same. Of the two of us, Walter is clearly the better photographer.

Tomorrow morning I leave for the Gorge. There might be internet at some of the hostels in the gorge, but I would not be surprised if there is not. As always, I'll get in touch again as soon as we arrive somewhere with internet, but don't be surprised if that's in like, a week.

Maybe a Poor Judgement Call in Retrospect

So today Walter and I went and explored some of the Naxi villages with a guy named Richard He. This is how this went down:

Walter and I got in from the bus station and arrived at the hostel around 8:30ish. We then proceded to wait several hours in the lobby till the room we had reserved was deemed fit for us to occupy. After checking into our room and taking some much-needed showers to wash the smell of the overnight bus off, we decided to tackle the challenge of lunch.

We found this nice restaraunt but inside we were approached by this guy who claimed to be a local tour guide. He was one of the Naxi people and offered to give us a tour around to some of the smaller Naxi villages. We tried to blow him off, but long story short he was just too endearing to tell no and we argued him down to half his original price, so we were like fuck it, let's go.

Once I was inside this guy's van, it occurred to me that he could easily murder us and dump our bodies in the mountains and no one would ever fucking know. But he didn't and we actually had a pretty good time buying knicknacks and seeing some cool shit and we didn't die and now we're back at the hostel not being dead.

Unrelated to my travels: I was gonna throw a wikipedia link up there to Naxi, but Wikipedia is blacking out for the next 24 hours in protest of SOPA. If you don't know about SOPA, go to Google and check out today's doodle. Then do something to stop it from happening. Once the blackout is over I'll put up the link I was gonna.

-Peace, OUT

In Lijiang

Walter and I have arrived in Lijiang after a 12-hour overnight bus ride. We rode the sleeper bus, so we were on these little bed things. Actually, they were rather comfortable all things considered. They were maybe just a couple inches shorter than would have been ideal, but that's what comes of us tall Westerners using Chinese transit. We left Kunming around 20:00 and arrived in Lijiang just before 8:00.

I'm writing this from the Panba hostel in Old Town Lijiang. Lijiang is a UNESCO world heritage site, so there is part of the city that must be preserved for posterity and another part that is more modernized. It is cloudy today and we are so high up that the sun is having trouble making it up over the mountains to warm us. But the possibility of a beautiful day is written in the clouds and the sunrise.

More later.

-Peace

Keep it Movin'

Tonight we take the overnight bus to Lijiang. We've got a reservation at a hostel there. I'll try to update when we arrive. Only one more day in sunny Kunming.

In Kunming

Walter and I made it in to Kunming on Friday night. Our hostel has WiFi and is extremely cool in a number of other ways as well. There's a bar/restaurant in the lobby and it is generally a really happening place. As mentioned, there is wifi, but sometimes it can get a little spotty and it doesn't like to play nice with my VPN, hence it taking me three days to tell you we've arrived. On Tuesday night we will take a overnight bus to LiJiang and from there move up into the Tiger Leaping Gorge. Basically, we're awesome and you should be jealous. Kunming is a beautiful city. I sort of wish that I had gotten a job here instead of Wuhan. We're at a higher elevation than Denver and a lower latitude than Atlanta, so the weather is frankly just gorgeous. In fact, Kunming is known as "The City of Eternal Spring" and let me tell you, visiting here in the dead of Winter, I can easily believe it.

There should be internet access at our hostel in Lijiang, so I'll make an effort to update from there. Once we move up into the gorge though, all bets are off. Even money says there's no internet up there since none of the hostels we've seen info for in the gorge even have email addresses.

Stay sexy, you awesome readers.

-Peace

Travel Plans

First semester is over, grades are in, the die is cast. Now it is time for a few weeks of rest and relaxation before we plunge back into the maelstrom of educating the Chinese.

Tomorrow I depart for Yunan province with my friend and co-worker, Walter. We're flying from Wuhan to Kunming and from there basically wandering around the province however the fuck we feel like for a couple of weeks before either flying or getting a train back.

Now not that it will make much difference given the track record of this blog, but it is highly possible that I will not have internet access for the duration of this trip. This means no blog updates. I'm currently in the middle of a somewhat long-term project over at Words of the Drewcifer. I've done 8 of the proposed 100 themes so far. It should give you something to read for 3 to 7 minutes, depending on how fast you read. I'll be taking the list of themes with me on the road and hopefully doing a little work on them here and there while I am travelling. I'll post whatever I've gotten done when I get back.

For those of you who are relatives of mine and read this blog and worry about me (which, let's be honest, is probably most of you), I will make sure to post an update when I get back so that you know I have returned to Wuhan safely and can once again be contacted through the internet.

That's all for now. I leave in the morning, so if I think of anything between now and then, I'll update this post, I guess? Barring that, see you in February.

Nikadidas

I know it's been a while, but I'm terrible at blogging. I'll stop apologizing and instead just start blogging again.

Today in my orange book class, we did presentations wherein the students were charged to create a new sports product, be it a drink, piece of equipment, or other. One group of girls created a sports drink called "Nikadias," the slogan for which is "Just do it, and nothing is impossible!" After class they gave me the logo from their bottle. It is an Adidas logo nestled in the curve of the Nike Swoosh. I will try to upload a scan of this work of art at some point.

Next I am presenting a feature I call "Evolution of the Minstrel Through Hats." Starting with the hat I came to China with, moving on to a hat I was given for an event, and ending with a hat I bought a couple weekends ago at a Japanese clothing store called "UniQLO." Let us commence:

Upon arrival

Cowboy up

Current

You may notice that I have something of a beard now. This was mostly intentional. This post was originally going to be a bit longer, but these pictures took over an hour to upload. I will do another post tomorrow.

-Peace

Apologies

Sorry for the long silence. My tunnel under the Great Firewall collapsed and I only recently got a ladder tall enough to get over it. I'll try to gather my thoughts and post an update in the next couple of days. I can't make any promises though, as we're entering a very hectic time; the end of the quarter rapidly approaches and that can mean only one thing: Finals.

OMG

Today I rode a monorail!

Good Classes, Bad Classes, and the House of Pain

Okay, I need to catch you all up a bit.

So on Saturday night, following our crazy clubbing experience, I for one expected to have a nice quiet evening in. This was not meant to be.

First, let me explain a couple things. So I've already established that seven of us went and were in a movie on Friday. There was additional shooting done on Saturday. Three of the original Friday crew (Kesha, Derek, and Jay) returned for Saturday's shoot. Additionally, several other of my colleagues joined them. I'm not positive who all was there, since I wasn't.

Shooting ran much later in the day on Saturday than it did on Friday, but that was okay because the actors were on a boat and I'm told there was an air-conditioned break room. Luxury. So anyway, here I am, about to head out and grab something to eat on Saturday evening, when I bump into Huw and Emily who say "We've just got a call from Peter [the Chinese faculty member with the connections to get us in this movie]. Are you up for some free dinner? Come to the taxi right now." Those of you who know me know that there was a 0 percent chance of me turning down a free meal.

So it turns out that Peter's friend, one of the producers or something, decided to take all of the Jianghan instructors who worked as extras out to dinner on his dime. It was an extremely different experience from anything I was used to. I ate a sparrow. We also drank a lot of beer and quite a bit of a Chinese spirit called "baijou." I managed to avoid getting totally hammered, but I was feeling rather. . .erm. . .happy by the end of the meal. Following that we drank on the roof for a bit and I called it quits about 1am. This led to me getting that nice relaxing evening in I had wanted on Sunday.

I don't think anything especially memorable happened on Sunday, to be honest. Let's skip ahead to Monday.

Monday I paid my year-long gym membership--one of the last big up-front costs left to me here--and became a member of what we lovingly call "Jackie Chan's House of Pain." The gym is run by a remarkable man called, you guessed it, Jackie Chan. (No, not that Jackie Chan.) Jackie really knows what he's doing when  it comes to getting people into shape. But holy shit does it hurt. I've been to the gym three days in a row now, and honestly after the leg workout Jackie hit me with tonight I'm not sure I will be able to walk immediately upon waking.

Tuesday night saw the return of me to teaching. Last week, my Tuesday night class had been a big disappointment to me. None of them brought their books to class, they were rowdy and unruly, and I wanted to smack every single one of them. This week, however, we clicked and they are now my second-favorite class.

Wednesday morning intermediate English, however, is a different story. Teaching them is a lot like teaching forty-some-odd slabs of stone. I don't think my curriculum is the problem, since my Wednesday afternoon class had the same curriculum from the same teacher and they responded very very well.

Looking forward to tomorrow though. I only have one class and it's my last one for the week. Plus, I blatantly play favorites with my Thursday class because they are the best class.

Peace.

And there's more where THAT came from

A longer post will be coming later, but for now I thought I'd give you one of those pictures I promised of the movie shoot.

From the left that's Emily, Huw, Derek, Me, Jay, Kasia, and Loren. This is us before shooting began, just after we had changed into our costumes. Do you see what I meant about the "sailors'" uniforms? When one looks at that, one might think "mime" or "painter" or even perhaps "droog." But not sailor.

Weekend Update (with Andrew Blatt)

Okay, so on Wednesday evening I went with Li Jing to the airport. Once there I picked up my luggage and my new upstairs neighbor. Said neighbor is a pretty cool chick named Julie. I think she's decided that we're going to be friends and I'm cool with that.

As a result of having my essentials once again, I was in a much better mood on Thursday and considerably less stinky than I had been Monday through Wednesday. This made me a much better teacher. I'm going to have to make it up to my Tuesday and Wednesday classes next week for being so grumpy and by-the-book. Also notable about Thursday was the arrival of my other upstairs neighbor, an extremely awesome dude named Dan. Dan is starting his second year of teaching here at Jianghan, is pretty serious about studying his Chinese, and (I'm told) has a Chinese girlfriend. All of these things combine to make him a pretty useful man to have around in China because he speaks much better Chinese than 90% of his fellow Foreign English Teachers.

Yesterday (Friday), I got to be an extra in some sort of documentary that is being made about the Communist Party and its history in China (I think). We were apparently doing some sort of scene for a reenactment of a historical event, I think several important Party leaders arriving in Wuhan in 1927. The upshot of this is, I spent 10 hours standing in the sun in a ridiculous outfit (I'll try to post some pictures later) that was supposed to be a "sailor's" uniform, but looked a lot more like a French painter or window washer. It was hot, and sort of miserable, but also pretty fun. If the thing ends up panning out and I get a copy of it, I'll do my best to share any clips with me in them so you can all have a laugh. It might take quite a long time though, so don't hold your breath.

So yeah, being a movie star ended with me irritated and a little bit sunburned, but after a shower, some mandolinning on the porch, and dinner with Dan, Derek, and Julie I felt much much better. Then the four of us got some beer and drank it on the roof. After that, I went with several of the other teachers across the city to check out the Wuhan club scene. We went 3 places, the Prison Bar, a little hookah place across the street from it, and a club called Vox. The Prison bar was nice because it seems to cater to Westerners. Half of the bar staff were Caucasian and the other half were also fluent in English, so ordering wasn't a problem. It is a very very small place, though so it got very crowded. The Jianghan teachers managed to acquire several hangers-on throughout the night. Most of these were acquaintances of my colleagues who teach at other schools in the city. There was literally no one else in the hookah bar when our enormous contingent of tipsy foreigners rolled in and filled up the place. It was nice, but sort of boring after a while. After the two returning teachers who had been acting as our guides left, the remaining five Jianghan instructors decided that instead of calling it a night and going home, we would get dangerously drunk in Vox and then try to negotiate a taxi home using the Chinese characters for our school that our guides had scribbled into my notebook before they left.

Vox was. . . kind of like home. For my Purdue readers out there, imagine something sort of like a middle ground between Where Else? and the Neon Cactus, but much much cooler than either of those places. The beer was sort of expensive by Chinese standards, but not very expensive at all by American ones and there was quite a lot of foreign beer to be had. We danced, we drank, we danced, we drank some more.

Surprise ending: none of us died.

Hell of a lot of fun.

YEAH!

MY STUFF IS HERE!

Mid-week Update

So it turned out that I ended up having to cover for a teacher that was sick on Monday afternoon, so Tuesday night was my second day of classes. I only had to teach one class each on Monday and Tuesday, but today (Wednesday) was packed. Not only did I have my regularly scheduled classes, 8:20-10:00 and 2:00-3:40, but I also ended up picking up some more slack for another fellow teacher having travel difficulties, so I had to teach from 10:20-12:00 as well. This may not sound all that bad, but I means my day basically went like this: Wake up at 6:30; shower; get dressed; stop by the noodle stand for breakfast with Derek; eat breakfast with Derek; teach; teach; lunch; teach; home. And yes, the lack of full stops in there was fully intentional. I mean, it's basically no worse than my parents' job and so far I've only got one day a week like that, but still. Fortunately, I've already been informed that my paycheck will be a little fatter this first pay period to compensate me for my extra classes.

Now on to some good news: Li Jing has informed me that my luggage has arrived. We will be going to the airport to pick it up in about 45 minutes. All I can say is: Alleluia! Glory to God in the Highest! Blessed is he who. . . wait, nevermind. I think I got a little carried away there. Regardless it will be nice to have fresh underwear, socks, and shirts again. Also, I can finally apply some deodorant and trim my beard a little bit, which will make me both look and smell less like a hobo.

I'm pretty beat right now, going to nap for a few minutes while I wait for Li Jing. I'll try to post an update after I get my Luggage as well.

Peace.

Newly Arrived

I made it to China, though my luggage so far has not. I've got my boss, Li Jing, working on that for me as we speak. In other news, my apartment is quite roomy for a one-person deal. There are a couple of problems with the apartment, but they are minor things. So far, the remote for the TV does not work and my clothesline is busted. I am confident these things will be fixed soon. Tomorrow is my first day of class. Expect another update after then.