The Fear Dragon Garden

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…..Kelly, Liz & I receive the biggest bill for a meal since our arrival in China. A shade under ¥500. Between three people that works out at around Au$80 each. However this was at the Ri Ri Hong (Sun Sun Red) hotpot restaurant with the other grade 3 teachers, a total of around 20 people altogether, plus one child. Make that about Au$4 each. You'll need to add a few drinks. I asked the teachers earlier what they wanted then went to the Da Run Fa to buy Orange juice & suan nai (yoghurt, more particularly the thinner “drinking yoghurt” they prefer). Add another ¥60 or around 50 cents each in Australian money. Wine isn't usually a feature of meals here & only we foreigners have beer. They were all merry enough as most of us walk back over the new bridge, narrowly escaping a drenching in a massive thunderstorm......

…..tomorrow it's off to Changzhou, to the Kong Dong Yuan, (Fear-Dragon Garden or, to translate a little less literally, the Dinosaur Park), with the grade 3 students. Like me none of the other foreign teachers I spoke to had heard of Changzhou. It's either a woeful lack of interest in the surrounding area or just a reflection of how densely populated Jiangsu province is but we had completely overlooked a city of 3.5 million less than 100km from Yangzhou. Apart from the Fear-dragon garden it's the centre of a huge comb industry &, at over 150m high, has the tallest pagoda in the world. Maybe worth a second trip, without the kids.....

…..an email arrives giving details of the excursion. Grade 3, Kelly & I to take bus number 7 at 6.25am. Thankfully it's not too cold & it's not supposed to rain today. This year's weather has apparently been atypical & although spring has been trying hard to get started it's having problems & every time we've had a short spell of warm sunny weather it's been spoiled by the following cold, grey, wet, miserable days.....

…..to keep track of your colleagues in any Chinese tour group you are issued with identical hats, preferably in a garish colour & sometimes for good measure in an outlandish style. This produces a kind of ridiculous, technicolour uniformity. There is a stack of brilliant orange sunhats on our bus, of the type that toddlers wear in Australia to protect themselves from the sun. These ones can be reversed to display an alternative McZhang tartan. Kelly & I try ours on, take one look at the Chinese English teachers, Suzy & Roger, laugh out loud, shake our heads & remove them. Kelly & I are tall & distinctive enough to be incapable of going unnoticed in a Chinese dinosaur park.....

…..there is a lady on the bus who appears to be a sort of MC. She gets the kids singing a few songs then hands the microphone to teachers to do a turn. I keep my head down but the kids start to chant, “Day-vid, Day-vid....” I get them singing their favourite, “Hello, Goodbye”. Kelly does the toothbrushing song from last week's lessons. Soon we are on the highway & everyone is remarkably quiet. We watch kilometre after kilometre of bushes in the median strip of the road, thousands of them, all trimmed neatly into almost identical sawn-off cones about five metres apart.....

…..this Thursday is apparently the Excursion Day for schools in Jiangsu Province, an area about 10% bigger than Portugal but with a population of 75 million. The queue at the gate is phenomenal (you'll have to look at the video). Considering this & the decision to take the students to the toilet as soon as we get into the park it is remarkable that we are ready to look around within half an hour or so.....

…..after passing several full size (I almost wrote “life-size”!) models of the largest dinosaurs the massive entrance gateway, made to look like a giant rock arch, is also impressive. Inside brilliantly crafted models of dinosaurs & buildings housing very detailed displays with complete fossil skeletons of very large prehistoric animals are dwarfed by the colossal constructions still in progress & an administration building that appears to be a stylised representation of 3 giant concrete dinosaurs supporting an enormous hamburger. They sit amid a forest of food & drink stalls & fairground rides for all ages. There are impossibly tacky fountains & innovative equipment to turn you at high speed through 360 degrees & all points of the compass. Thousands of students race past the educational displays far too fast to absorb any information but leaving more time for the fairground rides.....

…..I have just resigned myself to hanging round with different grade three classes in a pretence of helping the Chinese teachers when Teacher Suzy, the English teacher, (who gets car sick riding from the school to the city centre), decides that we are not needed & that the bigger rides are worth exploring. I look a little incredulous but am whisked off to be whisked around, thankfully after a moderate breakfast & no snacks in the meantime. The photos & videos should give you some idea.....

…..the Chinese will often tell you, apologetically & somewhat wistfully, that China is a developing country, often in a tone that leads one to expect something akin to Burkina Faso or Angola. My view is not totally balanced as I have spent most of my time in the big urban centres. There is undoubted poverty & lack of development in many areas, particularly in the countryside. However after a ride on the massive Pendulum we walk out through a covered area lined with wide screen TVs. Automatic cameras have been snapping away during the ride & by the time you walk out the pictures are displayed, numbered, on the screens. It's also possible to scroll through on a computer & find your picture. On payment of ¥20, or about Au$3 you receive a print of the photo, 25cm x 20cm in a cardboard frame, within a couple of minutes.....

…..back to Yangzhou with a remarkably quiet busload of Grade 3 students & some very tired teachers, many of whom slept on the way. As part of my fascination with the monumental level of development happening here, yes, even in our little home town of Yangzhou, I spotted a cluster of large apartment blocks on the south side of the city with twenty two cranes.....

…..Shen Yue, mother of one of my students, Jeffson, is one of the better English speakers I encounter on a regular basis. Still I have had to dedicate some time to replacing her very imaginitive neologism, “toppest” with the more commonly used word, “best”.....

….the Dong Hong Fang, or “Restaurant across the road” is now once more “across the road”. For a while there was no road but it has now been surfaced. However the restaurant is doomed for demolition, apparently to make way for the bike lane, which has not been started yet. The landscape here is in a continuous state of flux. Large clusters of apartments have risen all around in the time I have been here, roads constructed & landscaped, old houses are now being demolished on the number 32 bus route into Yangzhou & tonnes of earth moved near the new bridge. After six weeks back in Australia in July & August I don't think I'll recognise the place when I get back.....

…..I am almost involved in a fight at the Vegetarian restaurant at the Living Mall. Paul, Cathy & I have decided to take our new friend Sunny for dinner. I met him on the bus a couple of weeks ago when he picked my accent as Australian & he is very keen to keep in touch & meet more foreign people. After the meal I go quickly to pay before he has any chance to jump in first. He is right behind me as I take the money out & virtually wrestles me aside to pay the whole bill. It's only ¥60 or around Au$10 for four people but it's the principle! He promises to let us pay next time but you just can't trust the Chinese in these matters.....

…..I'm now at the stage where I sometimes kick myself for not working out what the Chinese call things from the few words I do know. A few devastatingly logical Chinese words, with the literal translation included; bing xiang, (cold box, or refrigerator), chang yu, (long fish, or eel), huo shan, (fire mountain, or volcano). Needless to say there are many others.....


Great photo, audio or video opportunities missed this week:

…..the number 32 bus on a Sunday afternoon, with thirty five people standing & a young woman giving up her seat to two old ladies who sit down, one on the other's lap.....

…..on a beautiful, sunny, spring afternoon in Yangzhou, walking along Dongguan Jie with Paul & both of us wearing tee-shirts &, seeing the faces & hearing the local people, wearing sweaters & padded jackets, saying, “Ni leng ma?”, (“Aren't you cold?”).....

…..at dinner at the Dong Hong Fang with Aussie teacher Paul, the Dean of the Middle School, a middle school maths teacher & Angel, Chief administrator of the Foreign Teachers. The look on the Chinese faces when told what a haircut (without hair wash or any other extras), would cost in Australia.....

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