Spring Smile & Fly Tiger

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.....my bike, standing outside my front door, on the landing, is covered in thick dust. After the unusual combination of a windy & smoggy day last Saturday I have some sympathy for the Chinese constantly clearing their throats. I can't always concur with the timing & location but it's a necessity when all that “particulate matter”, as environmental scientists like to call it, gathers in your respiratory system. It's certainly one of the downsides to living here. The sky has been grey & visibility low for a few days, in this case mainly due to the tremendous sandstorms that have filtered down from northern China, (reaching as far as Hong Kong), but normal air quality here is poor at the best of times.....

….. there are trees all lined up on the road to the west of the school where they haven't already been planted in the scores of holes dug out of the pavements for the purpose. By the end of the week I predict they will all be in the ground. The trunks are all wound round with rope. I haven't tried to calculate how many kilometres of the stuff.....

…..there's nothing guaranteed to emphasise my age than knowing that one of our foreign teachers, Patrick, is twenty three today. It was my age when I left home in the UK to spend two years in Botswana, a long time ago. It's a cold, grey, miserable night. We all agree to go to the Dong Hong Fang across the road. At least, it used to be a road. Now it's just a quagmire where the tarmac has been ripped up for a complete rework. Walking carefully like a flock of marsh-dwelling birds we all make it there & back, to the great pleasure of the owners, whose cash flow has almost certainly been swept away by the sea of ochre mud that separates the school from the other side of Qinyou road.....

…..carrying on from last week's lessons we are teaching the Solar System again this week, taking detours to reading astronomical numbers in English & some other, unrelated, items. I find some information on the internet & compile a chart of planet names, in English, Pinyin & Chinese characters, complete with diameters & distance from the sun. In the process Kelly & I learn a few things. “Xīng” is the word for a star, a planet is “Xíngxīng”, where the different tone on the vowel in the first “xing” means “circulating”, making it difficult for us to emphasise the distinction between our star, the sun, & the planets. I also note that Jupiter has acquired a lot more moons since I was ten years old......

…..how did we manage before the Internet? I find a site which will calculate the sizes & distances for a scale model of the solar system if the size of the facsimile sun is entered. With a soccer ball or basketball for the sun I may be able to assign my most troublesome students from class 3/9 to take small marbles to the appropriate locations & with luck the orbit of Uranus or Neptune should end up in the middle of the Grand Canal.....

…..in Chinese large numbers are also named differently. There is a word for ten thousand, (“wan”) but not for a million. So, if I get involved in a conversation about population, for instance, I have to say, in Chinese, that Australia has around two thousand ten thousands (“liang bai wan”) people, usually with an extended pause while I check the calculation.....

…..the Chinese teachers can teach vocabulary & many of the children know a good many individual words. Putting them together is at a more basic level. I draw a smiling boy's face on the board. “What is he doing?”. “He is happy”. “No, what is he DOING?. Ta ZUO shenma?”. After that it's a process of ensuring they know the vocabulary, smiling, frowning, laughing, etc, then writing a skeleton sentence, “WHY is he (smiling, frowning.....?)”, then underneath, “BECAUSE he is (happy, angry.....)”. Today I walk around the class & get them to ask ME, “Why are you.....?” as I fix them with a tetanic grin, a theatrical frown, manic laughter or heart-rending sobs. They seem to really enjoy that.....

…..the guitar, damaged when I fell on the frictionless wet floor last week, apparently can't be repaired, at least the school is not prepared for it to be. It's still playable so I take it back & will use it as it is. I'm still a little sore but can cough now & can almost lie on my left side. How about that for a measurable level of fitness. I might be able to go to Tai Ji on next week.....

…..I realise that, like most people it seems, I rely firstly on my sense of sight, secondly hearing & the other senses often take a back seat. The smells of China are naturally many & varied, ranging from the appalling to divine, as you might expect. A trip through the streets can provide anything from the smoky exhaust of a diesel truck or bus, the raw manure smell of the many incredibly productive allotment gardens on the outskirts, the great selection of spicy aromas from various street foods, occasionally a whiff of durian, the King of Fruits, a portion of which I once bought but had to dispose of soon after. Stinky tofu, the fried & spiced doufu which is available everywhere I liken, in principle, to parmesan cheese. It does smell pretty awful but, in my humble opinion, tastes fine. This opinion is not shared by many foreign teachers I have to say. The choking incense burned at Buddhist temples in, not sticks, but huge logs, bought as offerings by a surprising number of devout followers. (Have a look at the photo of the incense shop outside the Jinshan Temple in Zhenjiang)…..

…..of course there is the incendiary smell of gunpowder from frequent, loud displays, which can happen day or night. When they are ignited between 2 blocks of apartments the reverberations are remarkable, partly for the fact that no one really takes any notice &, in a restaurant or at a family lunch, they accept the fact that conversation has to cease for a until it's all over.....

…..my new friends, the ones I met walking on Huangshan (Yellow Mountain) last month, live in Zhenjiang, a small city, as the residents apologetically inform me, of less than three million. It's just across the Yangzi River, over the longest bridge to cross this great waterway. I hitch a ride on the school bus on Friday afternoon, manage to get a small flip down seat at the front, over the steps next to the door. I arrive after an hour's journey with one small child having narrowly missed me as he threw up on his way out.....

…..Wan Qian, his girlfriend, Lu Chun Rong, who tells me her name translates to “Spring Smile” & Fei Hu (“Fly Tiger”) meet me in the evening after an afternoon spent wandering around & taking a bus to what appears to be the only famous attraction in Zhenjiang, Jinshan Temple. I manage to get some nice photos near sunset. Of course they won't let me pay for anything but promise to let me return the favour when they are in Yangzhou. I hope all the people to whom I owe a meal don't all arrive on the same day!.....

…..Qian is working part time at KFC but has just landed a job as an engineer at Volkswagen in Shanghai, starting later this year. Lu Chun Rong is a secretary whose job is “so-so”. Fly Tiger is studying Ecology at Yangzhou university. They are all keen to practice their English & conversation gets easier as the evening progresses. The electronic dictionaries in their mobile phones are a huge bonus. I must get one. Qian has a car, a late model Nissan. I have to tell him there are certain manoeuvres that he should not attempt on any European, American or Australian road especially the one involving driving on the wrong side at night while looking for a convenient turn off.....

…..we finally find a hotel for me to stay in overnight. The ones in town all apparently being full I end up paying more than I intended at the 168 Motel opposite the Jinshan Temple park. It's part of a huge chain in China. ¥188 per night, or around Au$30. For that you get a room with one single & one double bed, an ensuite bathroom plus flat screen TV (with remote control in Chinese of course), air-con, kettle plenty of clean, fresh towels & an all-you-can-eat breakfast in the morning for another ¥15, or Au$2.50.....

…..Qian arrives at the park in the morning but apologises as KFC has called him in to work four hours. He leaves Spring Smile to guide me around the temple & Fly Tiger turns up later. It's a really good morning, they are very intelligent & switched on & we talk about all sorts of topics, from language, travel, religion, work, the western provinces, including Xizang, better known in the west as Tibet. They are not keen to talk at length about it but some of their comments seem reminiscent of some Australian attitudes to the aborigines, “We give them a lot of money & opportunities so they should be happy”. It's not delivered with the same venom that I have heard in Australia however & they seem at pains to stress that they have no animosity towards the people from the sometimes troublesome far-flung areas. We move on, literally & metaphorically.....

…..after lunch I'm keen to get back as some of us at the school intend to have dinner with Kevin, our new friend from the light factory. Spring Smile takes me to KFC so I can apologise to Qian for not being able to stay longer. She then makes sure I get to the right bus stop &, ¥13 & forty five minutes later I arrive at the centre of Yangzhou, much richer in Chinese vocabulary & local knowledge. I also managed to get some good photos (see the link).....

….my bike is filthy after last week's duststorm. I must clean it.....

…..now that Google has stopped censoring Internet sites in China some appear not to be loading well. I look up the population of Chinese cities & crash Firefox several times before giving up.....

…..Tomb Sweeping holiday next weekend. That, for us with no tombs here to tidy up, Monday off. A couple of students will be visiting from Nantong next week, Wen Yi, who talked to me on the train to Harbin before getting off at Shenyang, & a friend, I have no idea who. Having tried unsuccessfully to find affordable but reasonable accommodation here they are overjoyed to find that the school guest room is available for ¥40 per night. That's ¥20 each or around Au$3. Even a student can afford that! With my deep knowledge of Chinese culture & the city of Yangzhou, gained over all of six months, I will probably be the budget guide to match the cost of the accommodation....

…..the weather is so beautiful today & even the sky is blue. A pale blue but blue nonetheless. I decide to take my Sunday student outside for today's lesson. We can play a word game in the fresh air. After another great lunch, rice, fish, chicken, donkey, egg dishes & various vegetables, Tianyi's mum decides we'll all go to the He Garden. She gets on the E-bike, Tianyi sits behind, facing backwards. Typical of the consideration & small acts of kindness that happen all the time his dad comes out with a bottle of water for me, in case the sun is too much after the long winter. We wander around looking for things beginning with various letters of the alphabet until it's time for me to return to school & for him to go to his ping pong game.....

…..I now have video of all my classes singing “Always look on the bright side of life”, from Monty Python's “Life of Brian”. The Class Ten rendition appears to be the best. I'll see if I can upload it to Photobucket at some stage. I think they liked the whistling, although many can't manage it very well.....

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