The beginning of the END

Things are slowly starting to wrap up here, which I'm viewing as a positive development really.  My last time has been spent on domestic jaunts, the last being to a place called 'Qufu', famous for being the birthplace of Confucius.

The highlight of the trip, oddly, was walking around in a graveyard:

It was a nice place to be because you had to go off of the path to find the more interesting stuff, and because the people here are afraid of nature that meant a complete lack of spitting/peeing tourists.  I walked around there for hours enjoying the quiet.

Since then it's been a question of going into work each day, trying to get the material covered before the exams next month.  Part of the challenge is staying motivated with a group of students who largely 'checked out' of school quite some time ago, or so it seems, in this increasingly hot time - and I say hot because I've taken to running (thank you expensive Hong Kong shoes) and have done more sweating in the last while than any other in recent memory.

The other thing I've been doing is running a Japanese club, where I teach elementary aspects of Japanese language and culture.  It's a bit of a stunt admittedly (I like the idea of promoting Japan in china), but it's been a nice respite in a semester of 'best behaviour'.  Recently, I even taught 16 kids how to make sushi:

(note: this will be the only set of student photos to exist here, as small revenge for the thousands of photos of myself that exist on chinese microblog sites)

It was a fun, if slightly messy, time, and a nice diversion from the day to day.  As it stands there are now less than 6 weeks remaining, a polluted drop in the grimy bucket, all things considered.  I only have two more trips planned before my soujourn here is over:

Taishan part deux

Seoul, South Korea

Oh, it's go time (almost)

Domestics

It's been nice having company in the china lately, because it has spurred me on to do a bit of domestic tourism that I'm quite sure I would have skipped on otherwise.  For example:

The city of Suzhou might not have been on my to-do list, had I not been told it was a place to see 'old china things'.  However, a few hours on a weekend train later I found myself there, soon to walk down a famous historical street (Unesco also-ran - and proud enough of it to leave a huge stone plaque up).

It's a street/canal system nationally famous enough to be officially imitated at other better known tourist locales, and proved a good choice for browsing oddities - and finding food I didn't particularly want to eat:

I actually have no idea how you are supposed to eat an entire fried crab.

The main attraction of the city was the 'humble administrator's garden', which is a legitimately-recognized Unesco site (more on that as we go).  It offered nice walking about in the pre-spring cold - an interestingly brief period of the year as spring is often skipped in this country (spring festival, of course, falling in the late-middle of winter).  Clutching teas, we gamboled around landscapes like this before returning to the 'city' I live in:

A couple of weeks more of faking my way through being a senior science teacher (who knew?) I was ready to launch out of the 'bo again to see a bit of a world-class city: BeiJING (you must go absurdly high on the latter syllable).

After a requisite trip to a bourgeois grocery store (kettle chips; one more thing I'd missed where I live) we were off to see the great wall.  As it's incredibly likely to be the only time I see it, I made sure to take photographs.  This is a big photo-post...whatever:

As you can see we got rather lucky when it came to air quality...we were at a semi-restored section (a scant day before Michelle Obama went there which would have made it tricky I'm sure) and had a great time knocking around the wall.  I absolutely both had a beer on a decrepit watchtower roof (mild climbing required) and a pitstop out a watchtower window (glancing around before required).

I have to say that the wall delivers, really: it's a giant serpentine Mongolian-blocker of the highest order.  I mean, the ancient emperors could have swallowed some pride and addressed the problem of the keshiks with gold or steel...but building a monumental stone edifice that will take a long time and prove ineffective is just so damn much more chinese.  They are experts at that.

It's been nice to go around to these spots (it being crazy to live here for two years and not see them etc etc), and we've got Hong Kong coming up two weekends from now.  It'll be nice to get out of china.  I might even get a suit made...crazy...

Loooooooooooooooook!

'Spring' festival

Just a quick bit of writing to catch up.  It's the beginning of March now, and my stupid blog has been inactive enough to annoy me - as a person who likes to read blogs - so I will say what I did.  Or, more specifically, where I did whatever that was.  Here:

As you can see, I went to the next town to the north for my vacation.  Note the glorious chinese scenery and air quality.

The Philippines is a very nice place to visit on vacation not only because most of the people speak English, but also because there are dogs everywhere:

It's kind of like a paradise for dogs; you constantly see dogs that are on missions....or asleep.  It's hot enough that you don't see any fluffy ones, and perhaps because of the canine abundance there aren't cats lounging around all that much.  But you do see these:

...both in real life and fighting to the death on television.  If you are lucky, you can also see things like:

Giant lizards.  Looking back at these pictures now....I kind of wish I was still there.  The only problem for me was that it was ungodly-level hot.  Siesta-style hot.  Sun-burningly hot.  Plus the food was unspectacular...but:

Scenery!  It was an inescapably beautiful place, made more so by having escaped one of the dreariest times of year in one of the dreariest cities in the china (one assumes).  The Philippines: recommended.

Prodigal stunned - part 1

It's the middle of June, and I haven't seen my passport in 2 weeks.  This is a source of consternation, because I am going to be leaving the country on June 26th.

With about seven days to go before departure, I demand to have my passport back.  The reason for this demand? The 'helpers' have said that they are finally going to get off of their asses and take our paperwork to the local security bureau to get our residence permits re-upped.  This will take an inordinate amount of time, so much so that my passport will only be given back to me (assuming nobody loses it, gets drunker than usual, or just decides to take a 'me day') on the early afternoon of my departure day, some 2-3 hours before I am to leave the city.  This is unacceptable, so I ask:

"Is it a question of me spending 2 hours in an office now, or two hours in an office in the fall?  Is this going to matter in any way?"

"No no it's the same, it will be no problem!"

The director of my program having assured me there would be no problems with me re-doing my residence permit in the fall, I confidently re-acquired my passport with a smattering of time to spare before I fled this wretched berg.  I'm sure eeeeeverything will turn out just fine, and no directors will lose their jobs as a result.  The china, everybody!

Prodigal stunned - part 2

So picture this: it's late August, and I'm beginning to actively dread my impending re-departure.  To add to it I have real concerns over whether I'll be able to visit the country (see part 1) at all due to visa issues, but I am officially packed up and off to the airport.

It's worth noting that I had spent about a week emailing everyone involved about the visa issue, to which I got some confident 'don't worry, the police in the city know you are coming!' - type responses.  At a certain point, you just have to believe people.

The check-in person at YVR, alas, was having none of this, and so it was that I informed my higher-ups that I was, in fact, not bound for China on the day I was supposed to due to not being given a visa.  Their solution?  I go beyond my contract's scope and get down to the travel agent (something of an idiot savant for inefficiency about 98% of the time) and arrange my own visa.

The only thing that could be accomplished with any speed was a tourist visa, as a work visa requires city-specific documents that take weeks to get at the best of times because, you know, China.  However, I was assured confidently by the travel agent (whose entire job is knowing everything about Chinese visas) that I could somehow transmute it into a working visa while in-country.  Awesome.

Having already said all my goodbyes, I checked into a hotel for a couple nights to wait the visa process out, rather than going back to the island/crashing friends' couches in Van into oblivion.  The flight was uneventful, and I was picked up by school car (AS IS THE RULE when coming from Vancouver).

I was sure my working permit would be organized in a few weeks.  After all, I'd been given a generous 60-day stay on my visa with which to illegally work, what could go wrong? Many local adults were working hard on rectifying this situation.

5 weeks later they admitted they couldn't get it done....but....was there another option in 'China'? (dramatic sound cue)

Prodigal stunned - part 3

Hong Kong!  What an exciting prospect! I had always known I was going to visit it sometime during this school year, but a free trip?  Even one that probably involves me spending a day in a lineup to get a visa?  Sweet!

Everyone was happy, and stopped worrying about my impending deport-date; old students advised where I should go ("the racetrack! Beer and beauties!"), and I even began to look into movies that would be out/concerts I could check out of various varieties...good times.

After a couple weeks of radio silence regarding my flight date to Hong Kong, there was finally some crazy news: one of the Chinese staff had actually done some work!

While reading a document, the person in question happened upon an interesting tidbit, that being that only Hong Kong nationals could get mainland work visas in Hong Kong (after a recent policy change).  This meant that anybody else had to do it in their home country.  It took about 6 and a half weeks (give or take) for somebody to actually read this document after it became apparent that mistakes had been made.  Efficiency.

Thus I found myself going out to the Jinan airport (because, you know, organised support network) on my own dime.  Explaining why I was going to be gone for a week (Halloween week, no less) to the students left them positively agog at the lack of organisational facility displayed, once I explained all the steps leading from June to this moment.  Their consolations ("haha, it's China!") rung in my ears as I took off for the most travel-logged week of my life.

Prodigal stunned - part 4

A weird few days led up to my unexpectedly sleeping for a few hours on the plane.  I've never really been able to do that, because planes (and my cheap company puts us on Air China for obvious reasons) aren't designed for anybody over 6 feet tall, so it was with patent shock that I woke to find that time had, indeed, passed.

I was never able to fully relax back in the real world, because I knew I was really just stealing time from myself.  It was obviously nice to eat large pieces of boneless meat, breathe smog-less air, drink scum-less water, and sleep on a concrete-less bed, but I knew I was going to pay for it all in the form of an absolute deluge of sub-par assignment marking upon my return - plus there was the ever-present spectre of another looming trans-pacific flight to tug at my zen state.

In a strange way, though, getting to the airport again was also a relief, because it meant my few days of shopping for exotic items my friends had ordered (E45 cream? What the hell is that?), as well as being castigated for tracking dirt into my temporary domicile, were over.  I've become rather inured to flying over the Pacific Ocean since my initial hellish flight to Auckland in 2011, but it doesn't mean I don't hate almost every minute of it.

There's something about being in what amounts to a swiftly careening jerky machine for half a day that will never fail to put my teeth on edge.  The necessary dehydration makes my eyes burn after an hour, which is usually about when they get around to giving you the option to watch heavily-edited movies (for content AND duration!)...which I would need a clockwork orange-like device to make watchable, because my eyes automatically close.  

My thought for this trip was that if it could make me somehow teleport directly to my destination, I would have announced to all the passengers aboard that I was going to do it, and then immediately poured hot coffee all over my crotch for their amusement at my pain.  Alas, that wouldn't actually work...the only uptick is that in the future I will scoff at puny flights from Canada to England/Europe.  8 hours? You can barely get uncomfortable in that time!