Watching the rice grow!

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It's been a month since my last entry. Life has been relatively quiet. The weather has become unbearingly hot and we don't really want to walk around the fields during the day any more. Our last walk was a couple of weekends ago when we caught a bus to the next village and then walked back for a couple of hours until we felt too hot and tired. We then waited beside the road for another bus to drive past heading back towards Guangshui. One always comes by eventually. The fields were very busy that day as all the farmers were planting rice, harvesting wheat or ploughing their fields ready to plant rice. The wheat was all cut by hand of course, sheafs bundled together and then carried out on shoulder poles to the edge of the roads. There it was spread over the roads and left to dry. All the buses etc came by, drove over it and released all the grain from the stalks! Then the farmers pick all the loose sheafs up, pile it up into haystacks and sweep the remainder (the grain) into a pile in the centre of the road and bag it. It is amazing how fast rice grows - we can almost see the field next day change height day by day. However China can't produce enough rice to feed their population. We are using a bag of rice grown in Thailand and last week were speaking to a man who works in a rice factory who told us they were in the middle of processing 40,000 tons of rice from Australia. The rice is not harvested until September and October.

Last week we had 5 days off as the Grade 3 students throughout China had their university entrance exams. The 2 days that these exams take are considered the most important days of a students life and will decide the direction that their future heads in. Over 10 million students sat for the exams and less than a quarter of them will be accepted by universities - and then only by universities towards the bottom of their chosen list (because they all aim for the highest and hardest universities to get into!)The remaining three quarters will then have to try and find a job - most will have difficulty finding a job they will pay more than the minimum wage and will feel failures in the eyes of their parents for not being able to achieve their parents dreams of a better future. It puts the students under intense pressure. All the schools were closed as they were used for the exams. Usually there are around 80 students per class, but there could only be 20 students per room during the exam so a lot more rooms were needed. Students from smaller schools were bussed in and whilst the students were sitting for the exams all the roads around the school were closed to traffic - with police guards - and nobody was allowed to use their horns (a very common occurrence here) or let off firecrackers. We had been in Wuhan during the first day of exams and had been turned back whilst in a taxi and wandered what was happening. Now we realise the taxi was going to drive past a senior school and wasn't allowed to. They try and keep the surroundings as quiet as possible. The school gates are also locked, to keep all the frantic worried parents out. We didn't know this at the time - everybody had forgotten to tell us - but I found out next day upon our return to Guangshui when I went shopping in the break between exams and came back via a bus which wasn't allowed past the closure. After walking 4 blocks in the blazing sun (with the grocery bags cutting through my fingers) I got to the school to find the gates locked! Thankfully Jerry has regularly bought Pepsi and iceblocks for the young guys on the gates so they took pity on me and let me in. There were heaps of parents waiting outside though, many of them praying.

The young gate keepers are typical examples of where our students who don't make uni will end up. They have the worst job as it is so boring! All the employees and their families of government offices, banks, insurance companies, schools etc all live in apartments within a compound behind their office blocks. These compounds all have gate keepers who wear grey military style uniforms and whose job it is to control who enters or leaves the premises. The mail is also delivered to them and they distribute it from there. They are on duty 24 hours a day and sleep in the tiny gate houses. Many places may have curfews though that is less common now. Certainly our students do! The young men on our gate spend their days reading books and watching a TV with a miniature screen. The Chinese people really enjoy reading - the book shops are like libraries. People sit on the floors and stairs in them reading for free and for hours at a time. Most of their books and magazines look very dull - cheap newsprint paper and very few coloured pictures. There are many small lending libraries scattered around the streets - though they lend mainly magazines. Even our school library has an enormous selection of Chinese magazines - there are books in another library but I haven 't found it yet!

The main reason that I haven't written is that we've both been ill and not really feeling like doing too much. I developed an infection and though I had medication from Australia it seemed to be taking too long to go away so asked in the staff room if I could go to the school doctor with a lady teacher. No problems except that they insisted I went with a male teacher! The clinic was spotless but the doctor wasn't interested in talking to me and even though I explained I only wanted a script for something similar to what I had bought from Australia she told me to get the name translated into Chinese even though I had the Latin name and all Western medicine here has the Latin name as well as the Chinese name. Eventually a group of male teachers translated it for me and she told me to buy it at the chemist! By then everybody in the school probably knew what was wrong with me!

Anyway Jerry and I were heading into Wuhan to spend a few days sightseeing so I figured I might as well go to the hospital there and get a pathology test done. We went to the largest hospital in the province - it was new and enormous and absolutely thronged with people. Thankfully we met a lovely young woman who was working on the information desk who spoke excellent English and she stayed with me for the morning to translate. What and experience! One queue after another - 1. you registered on the ground floor (cost 3 Yuan) 2. next you took your registration slip to the relevant department to await your turn to see the doctor. 3 Karin got me to the head of the queue - and I didn't complain this time about the special treatment - where I had to pay another 7 Yuan to talk to the doctor. 4. The doctor spoke English so Karin left me here for a while. The doctor shared her desk with a colleague and both of them seemed to be talking to five people each at the same time. There was no privacy as you could hear what everybody was telling the doctors (I just couldn't understand it!). It was a training hospital situated in the grounds of the Medical University so each doctor had a student with her. The doctor decided to do a pathology test - another 23 Yuan, paid before it was done - and I was told to wait. 5. Five minutes passed and the pathology test came back, she wrote me out 2 scripts and I escaped the pandemonium. 6 Karin was waiting outside for me and took me to get the scripts filled. I took the scripts to another floor, lined up where the price of one script was calculated. I then took that piece of paper to another queue where I paid my money - 57 Yuan - and then went to another queue to actually get the medication. 7 Then I waited in three more queues on another floor to get the second script filled - 20 Yuan - things are not simple here! Anyway it was an experience I hope we don't have to repeat and at least we now know how the hospital system operates here. Most people go to a hospital if they need to see a doctor. The general practice style of family doctor which we are used to in the west doesn't operate here. Neighbourhood doctors just seem to dress wounds and give people antibiotic drips. These drips are a standard procedure here if you have anything wrong with you. There are dozens of tiny, dirty little doctor's offices in Guangshui and they always have at least one person attached to a drip in them. Antibiotics are available over the counter of any shop, even the smallest, and are very much overused here.

We enjoyed our few days in Wuhan despite the incredibly hot humid weather. We have never felt heat like it before and there are still the two hottest months of the year to go. Wuhan is considered one of the 'furnace' cities of China because of the summer temperatures. We visited both museums in the city and one of the Buddhist temples. The main museum was being renovated and will be an impressive building when finished. We enjoyed that museum because it had all the relics from the tombs unearthed in 1978 from Sui Zhou, the city we visited on that 'memorable'' day out with Jargon. The tomb dates from 433 BC when the Marquis died and was buried with 21 young female sacrifices and 15,000 bronze and wooden artefacts, including a full orchestra of musical instruments. The wooden coffins were very large and lacquered with orange and black patterns and still in amazing condition. The bronze household items were very detailed and elaborate. The highlight of the collection was a set of 64 large bronze bells, ranging in weight from a kilo to a quarter of a tonne. Each bell can produce 2 notes depending on where it is struck and it took modern craftsman 5 years to duplicate the instruments with the correct sounds. All the items in the museum are originals and it was certainly an impressive display.

The other museum had displays of calligraphy and pottery as well as a big exhibition on what Wuhan was like 100 years ago. We didn't have enough time to finish that museum but as it is next to the railway station we will be able to revisit it easily again. The temple we visited was a large Buddhist complex with hundreds of statues of Buddha. Previously most of these statues had been outside but the smoke from the incense that visitors were lighting at the bases of them all became such a problem that most were taken inside and put into glass cases - thereby preventing people from leaving offerings at their bases.

Other than that we did our usual supermarket and DVD round and enjoyed the comforts of the hotel. We walked around the smaller neighbourhood areas along the shores of the Yangtze but the intense heat eventually drove us inside - though we did cross the river by ferry. It is a very wide and very brown river! When we arrived back 'home' we only had two days of classes before the weekend. We met Renee in the city for a meal on Friday evening and then we all watched a DVD together. Mel had returned to Australia the day before as her contract had finished. We miss her heaps - she had such a happy personality and bright smile. Renee will also be returning to Australia by the end of the month and Jerry and I will then be the lone foreigners here. Hopefully by the time we come back from our holiday there will be some more teachers here ready to start the new school year and we can show them Guangshui!

I became very ill during the night on Friday with severe vomiting and diarrhoea. I can't ever remember feeling as ill ever before. At one stage there were filthy buckets everywhere and we had no water!!! 3am in the morning and for some reason it was off... Jerry came down with it 12 hours later and when I was still running between the bathroom and the bedroom. He didn't have it as badly as me though he took longer to totally recover from it. I couldn't go to work on Monday as I was still so weak and the school also told me to take Tuesday off as well. Both of us are over it now though Jerry needed to visit the school doctor to get medication. At least this was one problem she was prepared to handle and she didn't fob him off like she did me ten days earlier. We don't know whether we picked up a bug from the restaurant on Friday night, though Renee didn't get sick at the time. One week later we are feeling fine but Renee now has it!

The other couple of terrible things that have happened this week was one of the young male teachers (bought to China by the agency that bought us here) had a fall in Wuhan and suffered severe head injuries. Thankfully he is making a recovery but his family have arranged to have him repatriated back to the US. To end what has been our worst week here one of my 17 year old male students committed suicide by jumping from a window in the school dormitory. Nobody knows why he did it, though I imagine pressure of studies had a lot to do with it. His parents were very poor and would have been struggling to find the money to cover his fees. We were told that the parents came to the school and smashed windows in anger and have insisted that the school pay them a lot of money as compensation.

On a happier note we are enjoying another five days off as the school is holding entrance exams over the next 3 days. The students who wish to start in Grade 1 here in September have to pass an exam to gain entrance to the school. Other then the wealthy students of course, whose fathers will just pay a little 'bribe' to get them a place here. I only have 10 more classes till the end of the school year, Jerry may have another 4 above that. The exam date is 1st July at this stage, though that has already been changed from 28th June. It appears that the programme for the smaller exams is worked out via the stars so they may still decide that the 1st July is not a good day for an exam and change it! We have our photos on display at the front of the school advertising the fact that the school has 'foreign' teachers and can therefore probably charge more for tuition. Foreigners are basically 'show ponies' when they work in a Chinese school as their photos etc are rolled out to add prestige to the school regularly throughout the year.

My students were very sad when I told them that we had just finished our final class together - some of the girls even cried! The last lesson was just fun - lots of games etc. We played 'parachute' (same as hangman but you cut the parachute cords and let the man drop into the open jaws of a shark) and the students loved it.. They took it so seriously! I had one cord to cut on the parachute during one game and I asked one boy (one of my very shy students) to give me a letter of the alphabet.
He said 'No' - I said very kindly 'Please, just one letter' and he said, very seriously, in the longest English sentence he's probably ever used - 'I can't, I won't be responsible for his death by the shark if I say the wrong letter!' You have to bite your tongue very hard to prevent yourself laughing!

We've had a great few months so far here - both of us enjoy teaching and some times feel we earn our money pretty easily. However we are both starting to feel very tired and am pleased that the school year is drawing to a close. General day to day living here is very wearing though and we are constantly finding out things that totally frustrate us. Yesterday we discovered that we cannot use our bank book out of the province to draw money out of the bank. We can use the ATM card in the bank in other parts of China (or in an ATM if the bank has one - not a lot do) but if our card is lost, stolen or just decides not to work whilst we are travelling we will have no access to our funds. The only bank which can cancel and reissue cards on our account is the branch that we opened it in - in Guangshui! And has we'll be thousands of kilometres away most of the holidays.... We've decided that I'll have to open an account now and transfer half of our money into it so at least we'll have another card on another account. The idea of opening the account was to save us carrying wads of 100 Yuan notes round with us on our holidays.

Next we tried to find out how to get to Pingyao from Guangshui. Pingyao is a very pretty walled city 5 hours by train south of Beijing which we wish to visit on our way to Beijing to start our tour. The guide book explains how to get there so armed with the Chinese symbols we headed to the bus station to check out buses. We eventually managed to find out the info but the only bus to that city from here is a sleeper bus and we've vowed never to travel on them. They have rows of little bunks and you spend the whole trip either lying down or half sitting up! Luckily we met a young teacher from the old school who helped us look up the train timetables on the internet - they're all in Chinese naturally -and we know that we can catch an overnight train from Guangshui to a city south of Beijing where we'll then catch a bus to Pingyao. The only problem now is trying to buy the sleeper ticket - it's the banks all over again - because the train originates in Wuhan the only place that you can buy a sleeper ticket in is Wuhan! As I said there is no easy way of doing anything in China.

These types of day to day struggles really accentuate the differences in our cultures. Certainly there are times you just want to bang your head against a wall in despair - or laugh hysterically - but they are what makes China such an interesting place to visit! We are very pleased though that we have taken the easy option and paid Intrepid tours to guide us through three weeks of our holiday. You need unlimited patience and plenty of time if you travel independently around China.

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