So after much procrastination, much pestering from good friends, many imaginary obstacles, and the several real obstacles, I can finally send an update on what has been going on with me in the past five months.
So, lets see... In December, classes ended Christmas Eve. Like everything about my classes, I could decide how the finals went, and so, naturally, they turned out terribly. But its all filed as a lesson on what I can improve the next time around. I really didn’t want to use more than one of our 15 weeks of class to do the finals. Also I wanted to talk to them individually for the final so that I could accurately assess their level. I also wanted to do them all in class and not in my office hours since the students seemed to already have busy enough schedules. Taken all together, that was a terrible mess. It meant that I had to talk to all my students in little 2-minute spit-fire sessions and was so worn out by the end of the week that couldn’t think straight.
But that did end. And I gave varying levels of passing grades to all my students, and with the exception of one student and missing attendance records, everything turned out rather well. I certainly am not really an excellent teacher, but I do think I get the job done, and the students are really nice. I had this movie club that met every Sunday and we watched a few interesting movies and I felt like I had maybe taught something, passed ideas about American culture and gotten a few students interested in things that they weren’t so much beforehand.
I spent Christmas and New Years in and around Chongqing, in separate trips. I got to know some really cool PCVs and some interesting areas of China too. In the middle of January was our grand trip to Malaysia and Thailand, and that was amazing.
It started with a trip again to Chongqing, seeing some other PCVs there and going up to another volunteer, Wendy’s town, where it snowed on us. I was really really cold and I decided for sure that cold weather is just not for me. My feet hurt and I just felt terrible. It really wasn’t even that cold for us, except for the fact that central heat doesn’t exist here like it does in America, so that sucks. But I just don’t do so well in the cold anymore. Too much heat from Atlanta, Tucson and Africa over the past years has spoiled my ability to bear anything below freezing.
So we flew out from the Chengdu airport to Kuala Lumpur, capital of Malaysia. We were a group of six initially, meeting up with a seventh in KL. We arrived and stumbled our way to a lovely little hostel and promptly realized we had no idea what to do with ourselves there. We had been constantly referring to the trip as our ‘Thailand trip’, and soon realized that we had planned for a layover of about 4 days in KL and needed to get to know the city.
The only thing I was vaguely aware of was that there was a movie with Sean Connery that had a climax centering around the Kuala Lumpur twin towers, the ones with the bridge in between way up in the air. Other than that, not any of us knew another thing about the city or the country. Well, with some exploring, we figured some things out. Firstly, KL itself was a huge, dynamic and diverse city with many different religions, ethnic groups, and perhaps most delightfully, foods. We had chai tea every morning, and with dinner sometimes too. There was nan bread and curry and noodles and so much more.
Appropriately enough, our hostel was located immediately next to the Kuala Lumpur China-town. So we had some idea about the food there, but even within those shops were many surprises, foods not just from Sichuan but from Hong Kong and elsewhere. The long market street of China-town had people selling food, flowers, clothes, toys, lighters, bags and shoes of all kinds. There was a shop selling diced mango next to a cart selling thick fried strips of bacon next to a cart selling all manner of scarves. Compared to the markets I have been in in Senegal and in China, this was the most fantastic. Like a Dakar market on steroids. And people bargained there! It was what they keep telling us about china but never see. It was like Senegal. I went and asked about a hat and got the price down from 25 ringlets to 12. I don’t quite remember the exchange rate, but that was a good deal. It’s a nice hat I think.
There was a massive Hindu festival going on that weekend. We got to go out to this huge cavern place with a giant golden statue at its entrance. Thousands of people were there, paying respects, climbing the many steps inside, up into a special enclosure, where monkeys try to steal food and bottles from people with cameras. It was an amazing place, magical even, and we had more amazing food. Later we went to a jungled park. We hiked up a trail and saw a series of waterfalls, more monkeys and had a wonderful day in fresh air and forests like I hadn’t seen in years. We also got out to downtown Kuala Lumpur and had photo-ops with the towers, went inside them and explored the park at their base.
I really liked the city. Malaysians seem really helpful and friendly. Many people speak English from an early age, so we had little problems with language barriers. The food was great. And it really just seemed a lovely place to travel. Besides being frightened by a pet albino monkey, I thought it all went very well.
At the end of our time, we headed back to the airport, got fast food and doughnuts, and flew out for Thailand. We flew into a small airport in the southern part of the country, Hatyai. There had been some troubling terrorist activities in that part of the country recently, so we had been warned by PC to be careful and not to hang out around the airport or anything. It turns out that everything went fine and we didn’t even notice any increased security or anything anywhere.
We took a van a couple hours to a sleepy coastal town. Checked into a small hotel and we had our first authentic Thai pad-thai. It was pretty good. One of the first things that was clear was that in part of Thainland we were in, or at least in the small town we were in, people did not speak much English and though we learned a couple phrases (hello, thank you), it was not as easy to get around or figure things out as in Malaysia. Not that we needed much, the beach was there, there were some restaurants that had wonderful foods, it was all good.
The next day we took a ferry out to the island of Ko Tarutao, where we would be staying for almost a whole week. This place was pretty amazing. The hotel on the island was much more substantial than I had assumed it would be. We even had electricity at night. Mostly, we did typical beach things, but we also did our best to explore the rather good sized island. The site used to be a prison island until the 1940s where there was a prisoner uprising and they took over, took to pirating for several years until British troops landed and put a stop to that nonsense.
The island is home to troops of monkeys and other cool wildlife, there are mountains and bluffs and caves. In the evening we came across photo-luminescent algae, or some such things, in the water along the shore. It was an amazing week, I took a lot of pictures of the whole thing, up on my picasa account, if you haven’t seen them. In the end, we had a long ride back to the mainland, back to the airport, flight back to Kuala Lumpur and back to Chengdu.
In China, it was the Chinese New Year’s eve, and there was great celebration going on. We got out of the airport near 11pm and to our train station a little later. In the taxi the streets were lit with lanterns and sparklers. Fireworks were going off everywhere. There was constant thumping and banging and whistling and whooshing from every direction. It was a little dizzying. The taxi drivers seeming complete ability to ignore them and speed down streets recklessly and without heed to the people standing in the roads and the bombs bursting all around us, really was a nice welcome back to the madness of China.
We got to the train station near midnight. Many of the workers were out and the security police were having a photo-op with lanterns on the front steps. We just wanted to get train tickets back to one of the volunteers we were with, Joel’s towns so that we could stay at his place for the night and go back to our sites the next day. Of course we had not planned for New Years. No trains were running until the morning. So we were stuck for the next 6 hours with no place to stay. That was a bit funny in itself, it was cold and uncomfortable in the train station, and the next best place we could find was a 24-hour McDonalds in another part of town. We ordered some snacks and some of us slept on the tables while we waited for morning.
I did eventually make it back home ok, after one of the best vacations I have had in a long time. Shortly after that, we had our In-Service Training (IST). This was two weeks in Chengdu with all of the other volunteers that I had come to country with and many of the volunteers that were here before us. We got together for more language training, and to talk a good deal about our work as teachers and how we can use improved teaching techniques or deal with common problems in Chinese classrooms such as teaching to multilevel environments and large class sizes. My Chinese level is still pretty bad, though I did get a little confidence from the training and the progress of other volunteers in similar situations.
Shortly after IST, School started again at Yibin University. I have the same classes and most of the same students this semester as I did last semester. Still six classes of freshmen English majors and one smaller class of freshmen Teaching-Chinese-as-a-Foreign-Language majors.
Wrapping this all up, classes this semester have been going pretty well. Our school year doesn’t end until the third week in June here. My schedule this semester doesn’t really allow for too much travel on weekends unfortunately. We have had a couple small bike trips around Yibin. Unfortunately we went on really terrible rented bikes that didn’t really have working gears or brakes or sometimes handlebars. Also I did get up to LeShan a couple weeks ago and saw the famed ‘big-Buddha’. I have more pictures of these up on Picasa too.
That’s all the gist of what has been going on here. I have been doing Frisbee with my students on Saturday afternoons and movies in my office on Sunday afternoons and that has been fun at times. Currently, we watched half of the first Pirates of the Caribbean and today we are watching the second half. That is rather funny because a lot of explanation for pirate speech and nautical terms. But I think they like the movie.
Ok, before this gets any longer, I will end it here. I will have more updates later. I will really try to never go this long again without telling y’all I am still alive. PEACE.
