My first wacky week in Wuzhou

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Ive been in Wuzhou for a week and I will be here for another three weeks because I am teaching in the English College here. Yes there is a funny story behind it and yes I will now tell you that funny story.

Getting to Wuzhou was pretty easy. I had to catch the interstate bus from Zhauqing which was easy enough. I used my little pre-written cards to get my ticket and I just kept showing various people in uniforms my ticket and they ushered me in the right direction.

The bus trip was disappointingly boring compared to the crazy local bus in Zhaoqing, but it did take me past some amazing sights. I was rice paddies for the first time. Not only rice paddies but water buffalo too! With all the mountains around it was quite pretty.

My first impression of Wuzhou was that it was quite average, that I might stay for two nights then head down to Nanning. How things change. After I had checked into the hotel I went out for dinner and randomly went into a restaurant around the corner. Wuzhou is out of the way and has nothing special to offer tourists so they dont get a lot of foreign traffic coming through. This became immediately apparent to me when I walked into the restaurant and all the staff, the managers, the waiters, the bar staff, the chefs, the kitchen hands, the dish washers, the cleaners, all came and stood around my table and stared at me. Then they all started talking to me in chinese at the same time. Wierd.

The manager of the restaurant had a friend who spoke English so she rang up this friend on her cell phone and got her to help me order food. I had the duck and it was fantastic. The English speaking friend was very eager to meet me so we arranged to meet later that night.

The womans name was Cherry, and she took me to a coffee shop for rich people and I had my first decent coffee in a while. It turns out that she used to be a teacher at the local private English college. I told her I was interested in teaching and she immediately rang up the head master and made me speak to him.

Two days later I went to the school to meet him and within 5 minutes, without looking at any paperwork or credential he offered me a job. I get 2000juan for the months work which is about $300. It sounds like a paltry amount but the other teachers who work there full time only earn 800juan a month! I also get a free room a the school. It is very simple but sooooo much better than the hotel I was staying in when I got here. At the hotel I was paying 50juan a night and it was an invertebrate miniapolis. Every morning I would wake up all sorts of creepy crawlies creeping and crawling across all of the surfaces in the room. And the cockroaches! These werent just any cockroaches, these were post appocalyptic human flesh devouring cockroaches. The room had an ensuite, but the drain in the floor smelt so bad that it kept me awake at night. Not that I could get any sleep with the construction going on in the room above me. Between 6am and 10pm there were at least three people with sledge hammers hammering at god knows what. Thud pause thud pause thud pause pause pause thud pause thud pause thud pause pause pause for 18 hours a day!

Its not really all that much better noise wise at the school. They have a bell fettish. There is a bell that goes off at 6.30 am for wake up (its a boarding school), 7am for breakfast, 7.30am for morning exercise (a crazy chinese thing), 7.50 for lesson 1 in ten minutes warning, 8am lesson 1, 8.45 end of lesson 1, 8.55 beginning of lesson 2, 9.40 end of lesson 2 etc until the 10.30pm lights out bell. Im not joking. And its not a pleasant bell, it sounds like a air raid alarm and goes for 5 seconds each time. And I discovered, none too happily, at 6.30am saturday morning that it goes all weekend too.

But the school is quite nice, all the students are super friendly. They dont speak a lot of english so teaching and communicating is a bit difficult but they are very eager and always want to talk to me out of class. I have found the most difficult thing has been trying to learn the name of 150 students who all look the same. And this is only made worse by the fact that thier English names (which they choose themselves) all sound like Icky when they tell me. I cant discern from Vickey, Ricky, Jacquie, Lucky and Nicky.

On my first day of teaching I was very ill. I thought I might have caught chicken flu from the markets I had visited the day before. I discovered the markets one day when I was walking and went in because it looked interesting. It turned out to be a meat market and was a very unsavoury place. There were hundreds of cages holding thousands of birds, chickens, ducks, geese, pigeons, finches and quails. You could pick any bird and it would be butchered and cleaned for you. Normally this would not be a problem but it was raining very heavily outside and all the water was running across the floor in torrents and collecting in ankle deep puddles of shit and entrails that I had to wade through to get out. But the good news is it wasnt bird flu, just a cold.

There have been major floods and landslides in Wuzhou this week. The city straddles a giant brown river and is surrounded by very steep mountains. For three days it rained very steadily and very hard. I didnt think much about it because I didnt leave the school building once during that time, but I saw on the weekend the extent of the damage. I went out to dinner with one of the teachers on saturday night and we had to walk from the school. All of the streets were covered with piles of red mud that were being shovelled and hosed by an army of workers. I asked what was going on and the teacher explained all the damage from the flooding. Just around the corner from her house the entire side of the mountain had slid onto the road, taking two shops with it. Telephone poles were down, trees were across roads, it was terrible. 10 people died and 3000 people are homeless while they fix the foundations of enormous appartment buildings that have become unstable.

That is all from my first week in Wuzhou. I will write again when something interesting happens.

CHow

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