More weekend adventures!!

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We have had a very busy fortnight! Since our last diary two weekends have passed and we have been taken out by school teachers both weekends. The school had an inspection by government inspectors a fortnight ago - I actually saw the teachers clean their staffrooms! The school was decked with brightly coloured flags and long banners and the students spent the day before industriously cleaning. The inspectors were rating the school and everybody was very pleased that they passed and the school has been upgraded again - it is now one of the top schools in the province and is allowed to take more students! Though where they will put them I have no idea... There was a lot of show the 3 days the inspectors were here. For the first time we saw all the students in school uniform and they had many evening activities put on to impress the inspectors, eg science groups, sports and we were asked to do an English lecture. Jerry ended up doing the lecture on his own as I was dragged (it's impossible to say 'no' to them) off to dinner with the Grade 2 teachers. They tried everything they could do to get Jerry not to take the lecture as it was organised by the Grade 1 staff and didn't count as far as the Grade 2 teachers were concerned!
Jerry came out for the meal afterwards and we both thoroughly enjoyed the food. There was so much food and half of it wasn't eaten. They kept bringing out heaps of vegetable dishes and wanting us to eat them. We were full and then piles of freshly cooked bread was bought in - they had ordered it from one of the street stalls when we mentioned that we liked the local bread. Thankfully the alcohol wasn't pushed on the women that night. The teachers wouldn't allow us to help pay for the meal - they told us the cash came from a 'secret place' and we weren't to tell the headmaster! And they still had a lot of cash left to spend!! I dread to think where it came from....
After the meal the lady teachers took me window shopping - at the supermarket! The women all walk arm in arm together down the street over here when they go out. Jerry had been taken off by the male teachers, supposedly to walk back to school but they ended up in another restaurant with more food and beer. The school week passed fairly uneventfully except our computer died again - this time the school decided to give us another! Hopefully we will have more luck with the new one - which is actually another old reconditioned one so we aren't hopeful it will see the year out.
On the weekend Champion decided to take us to another reservoir to go boating and have a meal. It was another fabulous day! We left early and we were very pleased we found his wife and daughter were to come with us. Champion asked if he could borrow Jerry's sunglasses as he had decided previously that he looked 'cool' in them. Jerry has since given them to him as he loved them so much. We caught a little minibus from the school into the city where Champion was to negotiate a price to hire another minibus for the day. We were interested in this as we've been curious as to how much it would cost to hire one for the day. We planned on hiring one ourselves and it's always a good idea to know the Chinese price. However we ended up by chance going to a village close to the reservoir in a minibus owned by the lady whose house we had visited the previous weekend - who just happened to be driving past - so we ended up not hiring one for the day.
At that village we were the centre of attention - there was a large market in full swing and we were surrounded by the local people. The village school was a sister school (Guangshui No 3 Senior Middle school) to our school and we met one of the English teachers from the school who spent the day with us.
From the market area Mel, Renee, Champion and I caught a taxi to the reservoir which was actually a big dam where they were raising the height of the dam wall. We had a very comfortable half hour drive up into the mountains over a windy dirt road. Meanwhile Jerry and the others waited and hired a minibus for the rest of the trip. They had a much more uncomfortable trip (we experienced it on the way home) - Jerry was sitting on the equivalent of a builders work horse all the way up and down!
At the dam there was a rough group of tents for the labourers and their families, a very interesting toilet block and a small shop. The toilet drained into a very smelly pool just above the tents. All toilets in the villages are for communal use so are divided into male/female. This one was particularly dirty and only had ragged curtains as doors. The local shop owner appeared to be very poor but he had 3 children. As he lived in a rural area he could by law have 2 children but he would have had to pay a Government fine of 5,000 Yuan when his 3rd child - his only son - was born. The baby woke up whilst we were there and we went into have a look at their house. It was very poor - dirt floors again and an old TV with a faded screen plus a very beautiful large cane baby cradle. The children had to give us their tiny wooden stools to sit on. The parents slept in a bed right behind the shop counter. Quite often the shops and market stalls are also people’s houses - in Guangshui you can see beds in many of the canvas stalls. There is nothing else but the merchandise, quite often on the bed so it has to be removed before they can sleep.
Champion had arranged a boat trip on the reservoir for us all so we scrambled down the scree to the shoreline and boarded a flat bottomed boat normally used to transport goods around the edges of the dam. We were in an area called 'Flower Mountain' and the Chinese families with us wanted to pick flowers! The boat trip was very enjoyable and stopped a couple of times to allow everybody to scramble up the hills surrounding the water to rip large branches of flowering azaleas off the trees. Soon the boat was covered with branches of wilting flowers.
At the end of our cruise we were deposited at the foot of the dam wall where we climbed a long flight of stairs, dragging branches behind us, to the top of the dam. A short walk across the fields took us to a small village where we were to have lunch. Lunch was cooked for us in a family compound by an old man and his wife - she cooked in a large wok over an open fire, he fed branches into it to keep the flames high. We really enjoyed looking around their house. Long flat baskets covered with small fish were hanging outside allowing the fish to sun dry. The mother hen and dozens of chicks were under a turned upside down fishing net. The usual pig was in the sty and a tiny boy was eating lunch with his chopsticks. We were given the seats of honour - the ones furtherest away from the doorway again. The table was groaning with food and Jerry joined the men in wearing Chinese shorts. They all roll their trousers up to the knees to keep cool. At the end of the meal the table was arrayed with all the scraps - fish heads and bones - you just spit out what you don't want to eat straight onto the tabletop.
After the meal we clambered aboard the minibus for the trip back down the mountain - Jerry claimed the wooden seat again. They had tied the azalea branches to the top of the bus and the trip was so bumpy we figured we lose them part way down. The taxi ride up had been very comfortable in comparison to the ride down. One family couldn't fit in the bus so went ahead on a motorbike - 2 adults and 3 children! As usual we had no idea what was happening next but we ended up back at the teachers house at No 3 school where they were planning to spend the afternoon playing mah-jong. We left them to it and decided to visit the school. We were surrounded by students as soon as we arrived. It was their Saturday afternoon off but word got around very quickly that we were there. We spent two hours with the students and up ended up giving an impromptu lesson each. Some of the students offered to show Renee and myself their dormitories but when we went to go inside they changed their minds and wouldn't allow us to enter. They were obviously embarrassed about their living conditions.
The welcome we received from the students was very warm and some were visibly upset when we left. The school photographer had been summoned and we had many photos taken with the students. Champion came out looking for us and we went off to explore the town. We were a little like Pied Pipers as we had a trail of students following us begging us to take their photos on our cameras. We obliged but didn't press the shutter button down! Mel and I wandered off on our own but ended up being 'kidnapped' by the school photographer. He worked in a local hairdresser cum photographic studio and I had to stand in front of a background in the studio and have my photo taken yet again. Our photos were then taken at the door of the hairdresser! I'm sure if we were to return this week our photos will be in the front window of the hairdresser - 'You can look like this (blonde) if you come inside!'
We all went back to the teachers house for the evening meal, which had been cooked by her husband as she had spent the afternoon playing mah-jong. The apartment was very shabby and dirty and made us really appreciate our modern, if dusty, apartment at No 1 school. Many foreign teachers in China must live in much older, shabbier apartments then we do. After dinner we left everybody (Champion's wife as well) playing mah-jong and went back to Guangshui with Champion in a taxi. The trip took half an hour and cost 25 Yuan in total - about AUD $4. So ended another lovely day out! Next day late in the afternoon we went for another long walk through the surrounding countryside. It turned into a much longer walk then we planned as we found that we couldn't get back into Guangshui as there was a long patch of water in the way! We had to walk until we found a crossing and then walk back again on the other side... Altogether we walked for nearly 4 hours and were a little footsore and weary when we finally arrived back in town again. We followed a constant stream of small tractors and bicycles into town and found ourselves in a very busy market area where the farmers were selling garlic stems. They are a very tasty vegetable and Champion told me next day they are the main industry here at this time of the year. They are sent all over China from this area. I bought a bunch from the supermarket last week and paid 10 fen for them (100 fen in a Yuan, 6.5 Yuan to a dollar). If you ate nothing else but vegetables in China you would spend virtually no money at all.
I managed to sort out our taxation problem this week thankfully. I begged Champion to phone the main Bank of China branch in Wuhan to see what papers we needed to allow us to convert Yuan to dollars. I had been insisting that we needed taxation certificates to be able to do it but the school kept telling me it wasn't necessary! Champion rang and told me we did need the certificates. He was quite surprised but then immediately took me to the taxation office to pay our tax for the two months we have been in China. I knew that we only had to pay tax each month on 300 Yuan each - the balance of our wages was tax-free - but the lady at the office said she would have to check with the manual. I understood that of course but started to get a little edgy when she began reading her manual from page 1. Twenty five minutes later, and after everybody else (including Champion) were all trying to read it I asked Champion if they could look up the index as it might help them find the right page! They did and found the information straight away, which thankfully matched mine, on virtually the last page. Another twenty minutes for Champion to fill out the form, 15 minutes to photocopy my passport and contract (they didn't even worry about Jerry's as I didn't have it - I had no warning that we were going to the tax office and Jerry and his papers were out) and then I asked Champion if we were to go downstairs to pay the tax in another office. He was very surprised to that I knew the money had to be paid elsewhere but after 9 weeks in China you very quickly learn how Government offices work. You never pay in the same office as the forms are filled out - it would be too easy! We proceeded downstairs, out into the street and around the corner into another office where it took another half hour to type me two receipts. I complicated matters by insisting my name was typed in English to match all my other papers and the lady had never typed in English before! She took half an hour to type 19 letters in English..... At least it gave all her fellow employees a change in routine as they all abandoned their computer games and knitting to shout encouragement at her. Two hours after entering the tax office I eventually paid my tax - AUD $2 each per month - and did somehow manage to stop myself laughing hysterically in the process. And we have to go through it all again every month we are in China. I won't even bother to describe the pantomime I had when I tried to buy 10 postage stamps to Australia. I must have been shown every stamp of every value in the post office before I gave up and decided I didn't need to use snail mail in China! Jerry decided he wasn't going to let the post office get the better of him - he enjoys a challenge - even he couldn't buy a stamp for 4.5 Yuan (they are available as we bought them in Wuhan). Anybody who gets a letter from us will have 4 stamps on the envelope.
This has gone on for long enough. We have a week off in a couple of days so I shall write another instalment then. We are spending part of that time off going on a boat trip through the Three Gorges with Mel and Renee and are looking forward to it. I'll try and download some more photos but it keeps rejecting my attempts at the moment.

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