National Week/ Modern Sky Festival

October 1st is National Day, a holiday to celebrate the founding of the PRC in 1949. Most people get a week off to celebrate and I was one of the lucky ones. When I say that I got a week off, this is both true and misleading. We get a week, as in 7 days. So, I had to work on Saturday and Sunday the 27th and 28th to make up for 2 of the days that we would miss during the week. Make sense? No. It doesn’t. At all. I am glad you are keeping up. I was supposed to teach my Monday classes on Saturday and my Tuesday classes on Sunday. However, I only taught one of my Tuesday classes because I was one of the foreign experts invited to a swanky dinner with the Hubei Provincial government. I went with Joy (a fellow teacher who is from Australia) and Lily (my liason). After being stuck in traffic for a good hour, we made it to the official government building where we waited in the official government waiting room drinking official government tea. When we were finally escorted into the main dining hall, I was relieved to see that we were sitting at the same table as Jim and Steven (two of the new Augie-in-China teachers at CCNU) and Lory (my old liason). For all of the pomp and circumstance, the ceremony and meal were quite short. We were seated around 6, and by 7:30 we were in the car on our way back to campus. There were awards and honors for prominent businessmen who had helped the Hubei province and speeches by several government officials, including the governor himself. They spoke of the Beijing Olympics and the Shenzhou 7 mission with glowing praise and pride. Whatever will they do next year to match the events of 2008? The meal itself included turtle, lobster cakes, and “snarls in noodles”, which (upon closer inspection) turned out to be snails. The meal was punctuated with toasts about every three and a half minutes. We are all sitting at the same table: Cheers! You are an old friend: Cheers! We are former colleagues: Cheers! We are new colleagues: Cheers! We are both eating: Cheers!

So, my holiday officially began on Monday. To celebrate National Week last year, we headed to Shanghai. This year, I joined a crew from Wuhan that was heading to Beijing for the Modern Sky music festival. There were about a dozen of us total including the current Wuchang crew, people who have moved on from Wuhan in practice, but never in spirit, and one legend. I put my trust (and cash) in my friend Avi’s hands and he booked our train tickets and we found a cheap hotel. Most of us were leaving Wuhan on Tuesday night at 9pm. Kevin decided to join us after we had booked tickets, so he was on a train that left at 5pm the same day. We figured that he would get to the station in Beijing before we did, so we would find him when we got there and head to the hotel. Ah, the best laid plans…

We got in at 7am on Wednesday morning. We made a beeline for the ticket line to book our return tickets. In China, you can only book one-way train tickets, so you need to get your return tickets once you arrive in your destination. While most of them waited in line, Marguerite and I went in search of Kevin. I told him that if he didn’t catch us getting off our train he should wait by the taxi queue. We would be able to find each other easily. White faces and lighter hair tend to stand out in a Chinese crowd. We checked the first taxi queue. No luck. Checked the second queue. No luck. We regrouped with “team tickets” and found out that all the tickets for Saturday and Sunday were sold out, so those of us who had to teach on Monday had to leave Beijing on Friday at 4pm. Also, they didn’t have any sleeper tickets available, so we had seats, like on a bus or airplane. So it goes.

There was still no sign of Kevin, so half the group went to check into the hotel and Matt, Marguerite, Geoff, Dostav and I began the Great Kevin Hunt. We walked around for a while and still there was no sign of him. We set all of our bags down and spread out in search teams. After looking for an hour, we noticed on the arrival board that there was a train from Wuhan that was delayed, and would be arriving at 9:30. We decided to wait until that train arrived in hopes that Kevin was on it. He didn’t know where we were staying and we had no backup plan in case we never found each other. 9:30 rolled around and people streamed off the train, none of whom were Kevin, though you would be surprised how many Chinese people look like him when you are hungry, tired, and really want to find someone… Finally, we gave up. We decided to do one last loop through the station and head to the hotel to meet up with the others. Just as we were on our way out, I saw him. He had just arrived after a 17-hour train ride. Apparently, we were on the express. He was not. Now we know that leaving Wuhan earlier does not necessarily mean that you will arrive in Beijing earlier.

Now that the whole group was assembled, I was ready to make the most of my 54 hours in Beijing. We were all starving, so we grabbed lunch in the hotel restaurant. We spent the entire meal giggling over the Beijing Accent. It is common for people from Beijing to drop off the end of a word and replace it with “-arrrr”. This makes you feel like you are surrounded by Chinese pirates. Instead of hearing “she-ay she-ay” for thank you, you would hear “she-ay she-aaaaaaarrrrrrrr”. It is really cool to be able to hear and recognize the regional differences in a language (even if I still don’t know what people are saying most of the time).

After lunch, we went out exploring. Some people went straight to the festival, but a handful of us headed to see the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube. It was cool to be there and see the buildings that were all over the news two months ago, but the swarms of people that still surrounded anything Olympic made me really glad that I was nowhere near the insanity of the games themselves.

The Modern Sky music festival was really cool. It was like a good ol’ American festival. There were three stages: one outdoor, two indoor. Vendors set up stalls along every main artery. The bands were all punk bands from China. They had originally planned on bringing in a few international acts (I read that Bright Eyes was a possibility for a while), but they wanted to keep it a little more low key in the wake of the Olympics.

We spent the next few days eating, drinking, and rocking out. We ate everything from super-cheap cattle kabob pita pockets at the festival to a really nice Italian dinner complete with a basket of bread (real, delicious bread) as an appetizer. Before I knew it, we were headed back to the train station. The 12-hour ride with a soft seat was one of those experiences that I can say that I am glad that I had, because it is distinctly Chinese, but I NEVER want to do again. Imagine taking an international flight on an airline that doesn’t tell you how long the flight is (or when you need to get off) with people smoking and a Chinese man falling asleep on you the entire time. Enough said.

Crawling into my bed at 5am on Saturday morning was quite the glorious moment. It is a good thing that I had the weekend to recover before going back to work on Monday. Three and a half days of traveling, the arrival of blissful fall temperatures and staying up way too late had left me with a nice cold. It was all worth it, though. I had a great time with great people in a great city and I have a lot of great stories.

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