Travelling and Teaching in Taiwan and China

Spent two weeks in the paradise island of Taiwan. It is a paradise from the flaura, fauna and geology viewpoint, also the people are very friendly – but the houses, yuk. They are generally pre-cast concrete monstrosities that are blotched with black and green algae stains which thrive in the tropical climate. But the birds, and the butterflies and the frogs, etc. – they are the things to remember.

The pig killing ceremony to welcome the birth of our new grandson- Dali – was a great day. Held near the village where Rafe’s native wife was born and was living for a month following the birth (a tradition of the atayal tribe), it consisted of killing, butchering and barbecuing a black pig, drinking lots of beer (the first time that I have started at 6 a.m. – I think), rice pounding, karaoke, speeches from the tribal leader translated into Chinese and then English, much shorter speeches from me translated into Chinese, and questions from one of the tribe about the effect of the union that produced Dali on world peace. More karaoke and pig eating with rubbery rice swilled down with beer. Sleep for some, more beer and karaoke and dancing for others. Swimming in a nearby river pool for some, quiet walks for others. Further supplies of beer having to be purchased from somewhere, more of everything then a long drive back to Taipei with most people asleep but the stalwarts still drinking beer.

Rafe lives in an aboriginal village a good way out of Taipei where he works. It is a hot-springs resort, very overdeveloped and yet primitive in many ways. It lies in a beautiful valley cut by the River Xindian, but actually reminds me a of a bizarre chemical works with plastic pipes threading their way between buildings and even straddling the river (they carry the hot mineral water from above).

The view from Rafe's terrace in Wulai

Margaret and I went on a trip to the East Coast which is relatively undeveloped. On Rafe’s recommendation we daringly hired a scooter (traffic here is anarchic) and explored a little of the incredible Taroko Gorge which wanders through sheer marble cliffs. We also visited Juoefien, a town set in a stunning location near the coast. I climbed Mount Jilong (it has steps all the way) and on reaching the top found a large group of people partying: cooking, eating, playing music, laughing and chatting. Naturally I ignored them, staring fixedly at the views in a cold English manner. But they would have none of it, dragging me into the throng they plied me with fruit and nuts, asked me where I was from and posed for photographs. The Taiwanese are very friendly.

We spent a lot of time in the 7/11 convenience stores which abound around the island. For the fearful traveler they provide the soft option of pre-packed food (their microwave heated railway lunch is delicious – and edible with chopsticks) and cheap beer. The stores usually have basic tables and chairs outside and in. I treated Mrs Walters to a number of nights out in a 7/11.

We returned to Hong Kong and then to Yangshuo in the south of China where our ‘orientation’ was to take place. This is an incredible place; a unique location. The city is built amongst strange limestone karsts which abound in this area of China. These are strangely shaped hills with very steep sides, some of them look like volcanic plugs but they are not. They are generally small in diameter but tall, wooded and abrupt. How the trees and bushes cling to them I do not know. To see them shrouded in mist and vanishing into the distance is an entrancing sight.

The town itself is a madness of commerce and transport of every kind. The normal taxi here is a motorbike with two passengers crammed onto the pillion seat. I wish that I had a photo of Margaret squashed between the driver of one of these machines and our Chinese friend, David – her face frozen in terror as the bike squeezed between a great trailer like thing powered by a stationery engine and a three-wheeled heap overflowing with fruit. But I could not take that photo, I was too busy clinging to the rear carrier of my own "taxi". There is every form of wheeled transport known to mankind thronging the roads of Yangshuo, not to mention the pavements which are beset with silent electrical scooters.

Beer is 3 yuan a large bottle here – that’s about 20p. However, in West Street, in bars like the Buffalo or the Lounge Lizard you can pay more than 10 yuan (a startling 60p for the same stuff). West Street sells everything from silk dresses to Omega watches, all genuine, all at special discount prices. It leads to the River Li where I realised a boyhood dream: we went out on a boat in the darkness with a cormorant fisherman and saw the whole business in action – fascinating.

Our training over we had a day of leisure up river beyond Xinping where the karsts are even more spectacular and the villagers live in adobe houses. The karsts here have names like Seven Horses and the Camel – because of their odd shapes. We saw women washing clothes in the river and adobe huts with satellite TV dishes on them. We also saw the endearingly classic Chinese scene of men with sampans following a plough drawn by a water buffalo through flooded rice paddies.

That night we went to a show. It is sometimes called the light show and was phenomenal in scope, size, colour, imagination and I do not know what else – a grand work of art on the colossal scale. What is China’s greatest asset (and challenge)? People. And this is a show with an apparent cast of thousands played out on a large lake surrounded by those weird limestone karsts illuminated by hundreds of movable, colour variable floodlights. It would take too long to explain. Suffice to say we were both very moved, I even spilt my beer.

And now we are in our flat in Yan’an in the north of China, in Shaanxi province, which, by the way, is next to Shanxi province – really. After a very nice welcome lunch with the vice principal and a lovely English teacher called Mandy (many of the Chinese have an English name in addition to their real one).we were taken to the flat. It was very dirty, nothing had been touched since the last two teachers left in despair. The toilet, shower and washing machine did not work, the bed still had dirty linen and there were dubious smelly things in the fridge. But the lounge is very nice and the computer has an Internet connection and the good news is that we have a week of preparation time – we start teaching next Monday, 20 classes per week, 60 students to a class. The Chinese school system is very different from our own – they start work at 7.30 a.m. and finish at 9.30 p.m. six days a week or more. It is very exam oriented and we have been told to expect that a proportion of the students will be asleep! We can see one sleeper from our window. He seems to wake up only for breaks when he smokes a surreptitious fag through the window.

The whole northern province is a dust bowl. Our area of Yan’an is quite poor. There are open sewers all around and people behind our fifth floor flat (which is within the school) live in, what are to us, appalling conditions. Most people stare at me as if I had just arrived form Jupiter or further – really. They just stare and stare, quite rudely and with no reaction. In groups they laugh at us. With some exceptions, some of the children of the school for example, most people do not talk, smile or greet us in any way, we are so unusual as to be wary or shy of, perhaps. Yesterday we went to the centre of the city with our adviser, Mr Ma. This was a little better. It has pagodas and some temples which we want to visit later. It also has a KFC, which qualifies it to claim city status. We get a bicycle each! I have already been for a ride on mine. It is a modern bike with suspension and gears. Mr Ma told me that it cost the equivalent of 36 pounds new.

The next few months will be a challenge, and that’s an understatement. Margaret is more committed that I am, after all she is the real teacher, I just fell into this role by accident. One thing’s for sure it will all be an experience. We finish in July, will then do more traveling in China before returning to the UK for mid August via Taiwan.

Second part written 21/5/07

We have now been in Yan’an for two weeks and I have just given my first lesson of this week. It was not a success. Generally the kids are interactive and fairly respectful. However, I tried an exercise in which I made them all become tour guides. It didn’t work, mostly because there are too many of them. Whilst one group of four were presenting as tour guides, the other 56 tended to drift off, get noisy and spoil the whole thing. I dashed back to the flat to prepare something else for the classes this afternoon. I am now going to make the theme of the class "sleeping" and get them all singing.

A class of 64 plus

We actually started working last Monday, but it was an exam week so we were "laid off" on Wednesday and went traveling. The first days of teaching were daunting, facing a class of 60 plus is bound to be. However, they tend to give you a tremendous greeting, a lot of cheering and at some command all get to their feet and shout very loudly, "Welcome teacher’! It’s a good start. I introduced myself, then gave them the opportunity to ask me questions. Most of the questions are predictable like, "Do you like China?" But some are more interesting; one lad asked me, "Do you think the girl sitting next to me is beautiful?" It’s all blackboard and chalk here so you get covered in white dust in addition to the reddish dust of Yan’an. I could do with a decontamination chamber at the entrance to the flat. It is hot in many of the classrooms and can be very noisy. Some of the students do sleep and we have been advised to let them – I don’t, I have always had an aversion to teaching people who are asleep (on the other hand these kids are probably exhausted). The other teachers are mostly helpful. They seem to be very young, but appearances can be misleading amongst Chinese people. There is a teacher’s office near to each set of classrooms where the teachers smoke and furiously mark the workbooks using proper red-ink pens. I am very impressed by the speed of marking – but if you have a couple of classes of 60+ there is a lot of it to do. I am studiously avoiding this onerous task by sparing my students the extra load of English homework. After all, when they are not in their lessons or marching about the courtyards in military style or chanting words that we do not understand, they have to clean the school! They have short brooms made of twigs and dented metal dustpans, they also swish water around and dolefuly mop it up. They are all monitored and marked according to how well they do these tasks. Over the weekend we happened to pass a school that was moving. Each pair of students carried a double desk between them with the chairs tied on top. There were hundreds and hundreds of them walking ant-like beside the road in a never ending stream. Certainly saves the cost of a removal van.

Finding that we had five free days we decided to explore some of cities around us. We had already visited the centre of Yan’an twice, once with our minder – Mr Ma – and once on our own. On this second trip we quickly finished with the shops (thank God) then visited the News Museum – a major source of communist propaganda when Mao made this place his headquarters in the late 1940s. We decided to climb up to the temple which is way above the museum. But first we had to pass through a courtyard swarming with people, many of them listening to a group of musicians singing and playing the odd two-stringed "cello" which is popular here and very Chinese. We stopped to listen and the crowds attention wandered. They began to watch us watching the musicians! Hundreds of them. At one point I was offered the microphone, but declined. It is still very strange that we are regarded as such a spectacle. Later, in that same square, a young man came up to us and tried to talk to us in English. In no time at all a crowd of thirty or so had formed around us, craning forward to catch anything that was said, yet understanding nothing.

The temple was big and surprisingly well-maintained considering that Yan’an was the Red Army headquarters for some years. The approach to it and the descent took us through living conditions that make the claims of poverty in the UK quite laughable. The people there live in sewage-washed squalor; the smell can be sickening and many of the houses are near derelict. Yet life goes on, and just at the bottom of the hill is one of Yan’an’s finest restaurants. This is a land of contrasts.

So, with our free five days we decided to travel away from Yan’an. We went by bus to Yinchuan, a dangerous journey as all travel by road here is. It is not the fault of the roads, they are often quite new. It is the drivers, they are crazy and if there are any lane rules they just ignore them. We crashed into an oncoming brick lorry – but no one was hurt. However we had a long wait whilst the financial compensations were evaluated and a settlement made in cash.

We liked Yinchuan. It has wide roads which are tree-lined and did not smell of sewage (much). We found a reasonable though basic hotel for 70 yuan (5 pounds) and had a good meal in a lively restaurant where, to our utter relief, the menu had English translations. This is not usual, the menus are usually based only on Chinese characters and hence quite, quite unfathomable.

We had not intended to stay the next day but the earliest train south did not leave until after 10pm. So, stuck at the railway station we were at loose end for 12 hours. Against my traveling rules we decided to take a tour by taxi (usually a rip-off) to three of the sites which seemed interesting and are near to Yinchaun. We were accompanied by the driver, the guide (whose English turned out to be very shallow), her Dad and a shadowy character who seemed to be in charge of the money. We saw the burial ground of the ancient Xixia emperors, the magnificent Buddhist pavilions beneath the mountains, only two remaining of 100, the rest were destroyed by the communists, and a gorge resplendent in pictures scratched into the stone. It was quite a good trip but I sensed that we were a bit of a disappointment to our entourage, we just do not do what tourists are supposed to do – spend, spend, spend.

Overnight to Lanzhou via a "soft sleeper" which we shared with a Chinese mother and daughter who had no English. They both looked appalled and concerned when we took out our sealed tumblers of rice rocket fuel (34%) and began drinking. Fortunately Margaret did not finish hers before struggling up to the upper bunk or she might never have made it.

In Lanzhou we spent an hour trying ascertain train times without success, then we were directed all over the large station (they are all large here) just in time to see the barriers placed across platform 2 and our chance of getting to Xining vanish. Margaret had her first tearful breakdown at about this point. Something to do with lack of hygienic toilets and the general frustration of living in a country where little English is spoken (though many people can read it and write it) and the apparent illogic of the Chinese. We found some clean toilets and she began to recover from Phase 3 of "culture shock". We caught the bus to Xining, more dangerous but less bureaucratic.

Xining, we had thought, was quite small - it turned out to be enormous. You cannot believe the rate of development here even when you see it happening. In our (admittedly 2002) Lonely Planet book the city is listed with a population of just over 1 million, it is now 3 million and growing, yet one lady assured me that this was one of the smallest cities in China. Lost and shocked we could not get to the great inland lake which was our target, in fact we could not go anywhere. After a long and frustrating search for a bus during which I got near to my first breakdown (complete loss of spirit rather than tears) we had to negotiate with a taxi driver to take us to the only attraction we could reach by that time – a Tibetan monastery. This turned out to be pretty crappy. Very run down and, for China, the entrance fee was very expensive. I got the feeling that the monks could not wait for us all to go so that they could use the entrance fee money and the donations to Buddha to get down to the supermarket, buy some beer and spirits and have a yak buttery, boozy evening. Many of them were fiddling with their mobile phones whilst their large and scruffy domain deteriorated. I met a rat in one of the courtyards, he seemed quite friendly. Also met Arnau a Frenchman who had lived and worked in China for one year and knew the language and the ropes. We traveled back with him in a shared taxi, booked into his hotel and had dinner with him.

Size aside, Xining is an interesting place. Though there are plenty of Han Chinese here, there are also lots of Tibetans and Muslims, both the latter wearing traditional dress. I was staring at them as much as they stared at me. We traveled back to Xi’an, our nearest big city on the new Lhasa to Beijing Express. You may have heard of it; it travels at such a height through the Himalayas that oxygen has to be supplied for those who get altitude sickness. The total journey takes 48 hours but our section was relatively short, just 12 hours. It was interesting to watch the changing scenery from the mountainous region of Xining following the Yellow River down to the plain in which Xi’an (known for the Terracotta Warriors) lies. We met an over-confident Canadian traveler, plus some pleasant Chinese young people who spoke a little English.

Next day we did the history museum in Xi’an and then took a rather terrifying coach ride back to our smelly city of Yan’an. The trip had been OK but the distances involved meant that there was a little too much travel and not enough local experience. Now I am busy teaching my classes to sing the children’s song: "There were ten in the bed and the little one said, "Roll over, Roll over." How did I come to this?

Third part written 28/5/07

Have now completed our first entire week at the school, that’s twenty classes over five days. Some of the other teachers say this is too much, they have only two classes each day, but they also have to do marking and other duties. The classes are only 40 minutes long, my heaviest day is today, Tuesday when I have five classes, two in the morning and three in the afternoon. The mid-day break is quite long, from 11.30 until 2.20. Most of the teachers and the students have a sleep then, I think that most people in China do. However, they are early risers, the students have to be in class by 6.50 and the day is long. We celebrated the end of the week by taking the bus into the city centre. Margaret went shopping, I went for a walk and a beer. When I entered the restaurant two of the army of waitresses that they employ in these places ran away! They hid near the counter so that they did not have to attempt the difficult task of serving a foreigner! They have great difficulty accepting the fact that I only want a beer, keeping a careful watch on my table, also some of the other diners show concern, asking me in sign language if I want something to eat. Ordering food is very difficult anyway since everything is listed as a series of Chinese characters which mean nothing at all to us. It would help if menus were written in Pin’yin which is the phonetic version of the Chinese language, but no one uses it much out here in Yan’an. So we try to order using sign language, guide books, pointing or trying to find a waiter who has just a little English. On our celebration night we ended up with some slushy stuff with noodles in it which we just didn’t fancy. I indicated that the army of waitresses could eat it for us – which they did without hesitation. We were happy enough eating a pile of egg fried rice and drinking beer from the barrel. Yes, I ‘ve found some. Not sure what it is yet, but it is from the barrel (plastic), is not so fizzy as the bottled stuff and costs about 25p per pint.

We are surrounded by people living in third world conditions at the school. Our fifth floor flat, which is actually in the school grounds, is rather nice, though every day holds the excitement of whether there will be water or not. We drink water from one of those large dispensers that you usually find in offices. Many people go down to the free hot water dispensers in the school yard to save the cost of heating up water by natural gas. People are generally friendly, though they do not on the whole speak English – even the teachers. We have two particular friends: Mandy who has taken a bit of a shine to Margaret and is teaching us Mandarin, and Mr Ma who is the Foreign Teacher Officer and is teaching me Chinese Chess. Mr Ma has very good English and is outspoken on all subjects from spitting to democracy, from Chairman Mao to Chinese corruption. He drinks beer with me and over the weekend took us to the Pagoda which overlooks Yan’an and to the place where Mao and his army lived for some years after the Long March (Yan’an is famous for this association and people travel here from all over to visit the rather boring buildings in which Mao and his fellow communists lived). It’s set in a rather nice park well out of the city.

What with the school work and general life (running, the gym(the school has a broken down one), eating, drinking, writing, cycling) time has passed quite quickly. Our predecessors at the school lasted only one month. They left precipitately, unable to stand the stress of teaching large classes we think. I expect that we will stay the course, Margaret has her professional teaching pride and I am not finding it too bad so far. The students can be very pleasant, today a couple of young girls from one of my classes came into a shop where I was trying to buy bread (everything is very sweet here). "Hello teacher, can we help you," they said – and they did. We get a lot of greetings and smiles, though with 1,200 students each we do not know if they are from our own students or not.

The Chinese do not seem to have developed the ability to party. Mr Ma goes out with other teachers sometimes on Monday nights (male only, women do not drink or smoke, he tells us) and they just eat and drink themselves silly. I am hoping to join him on one of these outings soon.

It is incredibly hot here – it makes us both sleepy. Also we are both running tummy bugs, I went down before Margaret but she succumbed today. It is not surprising; this is not a clean place. We take all the obvious precautions but we do eat out a lot because it’s cheap and because we do not have the right ingredients or equipment for much in the way of home cooking. This means we are eating lots of really tasty things but also ingesting lots of local intestinal flora. And the toilets, well, best not talked about really. The men in the house opposite pee into an open drain in full view of all, and on my running expeditions I encounter precipices over which small communities regularly hang their bottoms. All pretty wretched, but the building continues – 16 tower blocks are going up not far from here and a smart new football stadium was opened last year, the apron at its entrance spanning the River Yan which smells to high heaven of sewage.

I heard a cuckoo yesterday and it reminded me of home – but wanderlust still dominates and the opportunity to live in a free flat and get paid to work in this remote part of China is just great.

Fourth part started on 4/6/07

Another week has passed by very quickly, during that week I sang "ten in the bed" at least 12 times as a solo and then joined in whilst my classes slowly and tunelessly demolished the song. They mostly enjoyed it though, especially singing, "Roll, over, roll over". This they did with gusto, though the rest of the song devolved into a chant rather than a tune. They are used to chanting, it is part of their lives here at Number 4 Middle School. Mostly they have an innocence which is endearing, though of course there is a quota of sour-puss girls and malevolent young men (usually the bigger ones). These types are best left alone, though I cannot resist trying to bring them into the class activities and stamp heavily on those that try to use their mobile phones for games and texting – it’s a job to keep an eye on 64 plus kids though. Some of the teachers become quite animated when I enter the teacher’s rooms between classes. Some want their photos taken with me, others help me to wash my hands or get water, yet others ignore me because of the language barrier or just because they are not interested in foreigners - I will never know which.

Almost every week there is a wedding amongst the teachers or their offspring at our school. Fire crackers erupt and a string of decorated cars take the guests to a wedding lunch (for which the guests effectively pay by giving a cash wedding gift). We are angling to get invited to one of these marriages though we are told that they are really quite dull – no speeches, music or dancing as a rule.

We do have an English newspaper here, the China Daily. It is a thin publication usually full of good news – a terrible flood is reported which kills a number of people, but the ministry responsible is reported to be fully in control and detailed plans are described that ensure this will never happen again; American pets have been poisoned by Chinese pet food, but all is OK because China has the most demanding rules on food quality in the whole of Asia and these rules will be strengthened and imposed with greater vigour; meanwhile the mountain of foreign currency being built by the Party continues to grow and so all is well.

We spent my birthday weekend in Xian, having taken the sleeper train to there on Friday night. Arriving bleary eyed and sleep deprived at 6 a.m. we managed to find our way to the Terracotta Warrior site which is about twenty miles away from the city without taking an organised tour. We went on a rickety old bus with the locals. It was incredibly hot by the time that we arrived, but the displays are covered and relatively cool. Though we were early the place was already filling up and by mid morning was awash with people from all over the world. It is, for China, an expensive place to visit, about six pounds for an entry ticket. It’s worth it of course, but I was less impressed than I had hoped to be. Nowadays with TV, the Internet, books, mags, etc. we have all been overloaded with pictures of the warriors and, though it is impressive to see the sheer expanse of their domain - and to wonder at the megalomania of a ruler who, 2000 years ago took more than 6,000 flowerpot men with him to the grave - there is so much déjà vu that it takes away the awe that one might feel in seeing the spectacle for the first time. I became a little critical, suspecting (with good evidence) that the museum authorities had lined up the better preserved flowerpot men to impress us. In fact most of them are badly damaged and much of the site is left undisturbed, probably for that reason. However the place is very well arranged and calls itself the "Eighth wonder of the world"; I’m sure that Bill and Ben would agree wholeheartedly if they had a heart.

Curiously I found Banpo more interesting. This is Neolithic site located between Xian and Terracotta Warrior museum area. It proved difficult to get to. After a great deal of searching for the 807 bus I found a young man with enough English to tell me that this service had been cancelled by the government 5 years before (we have a very old copy of the Lonely Planet Guide purchased for very little as a reject copy from Oxford County Library, sometimes I think that the savings made over buying the up-to-date copy are not really worth it, but than again it makes for more adventurous stay). I negotiated a taxi driver down from 100Yuan to 40 for the journey to Banpo.This took an inordinate period of time – the sticking point was over 5 Yuan. He wanted 45 and I became entrenched at 40. Later I was to reflect that my saving of 5 Yuan was worth 33 pence in ‘real money’ – but dammit there was a principle involved here. Banpo was a stone age village some 6,000 years ago and may have been the first in China (the oldest known to date anyway). I was really impressed by the craft of the people of that time in terms of pottery, tools, arms and even jewelry. I have been to an even older site in Turkey and was similarly impressed. At Banpo the dig is well preserved beneath a permanent roof. You can look at the outlines of square and round homes, the moat, the pottery kiln and the cemetery (there are skeletons on display, I like looking at old skeletons for some reason, it’s like looking into a long and distant past, it made the settlement very real to me). The museum people have also reconstructed some of the huts and have a strange but exciting exhibition of modern day primitives – a contrast or link to the Banpo people I suppose. A peahen strutted around the expansive gardens and Margaret bought me a painting created by a ‘local farmer’ for my birthday. The painting is a swirl of golden fish beneath large colourful blossoms – it is charming. It will take pride of place in my toilet at Paradise Square. However, since it is a gift Margaret may allow me to display it in the main house!

We spent the evening in Xian, a night in a luxury hotel (called Hotel Darling) at a rip off price of 24 pounds and boasting its own infra-red room and a Jacuzzi plus sofas and a table and clean sheets and a complete mosquitoes (or so I thought). We failed to find the Alberon Music Bar that night – finding anything in Xian (perhaps in China) is well near impossible for us despite the helpfulness of the locals. I had to be content with beer in a restaurant. The place was closed down for the night whilst we were there and I counted 21 staff taking their evening meal, yes 21 in a place that might have a staff of 7 if you are lucky in the UK. The over employment here is incredible – and of course the resultant wages are a pittance- but perhaps better a pittance than nothing. We then went for a rare treat, a Western style meal of beefsteak, macaroni, fried egg and other mysterious stuff, all of which tasted as un-western as it is possible to be. Then back to the room with a bottle of the local firewater - a sort of rice brandy, not nice to taste but very strong and headache inducing. I awoke the next morning (June 3rd, the date of my birth 60 years before) to the tune of "Happy Birthday to You" emanating from the street nine stories below. Was I dreaming? No, it started over again, and again. It was not a recording or a live performance, it was an awful electronic version of our internationally basterdised refrain. Who on earth had organised this performance for me? No one knew that I was here except my wife and she seemed as bemused by the whole thing as I was. Then realization dawned - the rubbish trucks and water trucks advertise their presence by playing these awful tunes all over China and in Taiwan. Normally the noise is very irritating but the coincidence on that morning was really confusing, then really amusing.

Later we went to the Western style supermarket in the centre of Xian. Not only do they make you feel at home by providing all sorts of stuff that you can only get at home, they also provide these things at homely prices, or more. It is all very expensive so not many Chinese shop there. I bought the following things: mouthwash, sweetener and creamed cheese. Such an indulgence! These things are unheard of in Yan’an though the 100 or so staff at the main supermarket will happily take you on a wild goose chase around the place looking for them.

After this the journey back to Yan’an and our school. We took ordinary seats rather than the soft sleeper usually taken by westerners. Though you have to fight, almost literally, for a seat (the concept of queuing is quite alien to the Chinese) these seats are quite adequate, much cheaper than the soft sleepers and give you a good chance to view the Chinese at close quarters. The man opposite me, a little man in his 60s (as I now am) was clearly experiencing his first ever train ride. He watched the evolving scene as we traveled north through the striated loess hills of Northern Shaanxi with bird like attention, smiling conspiratorially if by chance I did manage to catch his roving eye, jumping to his feet when something unusual filled the window of the slow moving train.\

We finished the day in our home town of Yan’an, dining on hot pot and drinking the most awful red wine I have ever tasted. Nice restaurant though. We had six people taking our order and a regular audience to watch us eat. One old lady had to be escorted away by the elbow from our table, even the staff thought her closing presence at our table might be intrusive. In a way I was disappointed, she had a very unusual face, small rounded and creased, and she was taller than the usual locals. I was about to take her photo when she was removed. The photo, I think, would have been a fair exchange for her invasion of our privacy.

The week is now progressing, I have a new theme for my classes– money. It is proving very popular. I have sealed some sterling and euros in a clear envelope so that the students can see it without tearing or stealing it (unlikely by the way). They almost fall over reach other to get at it. Once they have the envelope they are absolutely absorbed by the notes, pointing at the queen and the other features of our currency. Why the notes are quite so interesting I do not know. Their own money has a picture of Chairman Mao on the front and of Xingpin, which I mentioned earlier, on the back – which is interesting enough. In fact, to me, the Yuan notes seem just as interesting as our own, though they are smaller and perhaps less colourful. Perhaps their obsession stems simply from the fact that my students have never seen foreign money before?

I am now suffering from a cold – caught from a pregnant woman who slipped into our sleeping compartment on the way to Xian. Also ongoing stomach problems which, from previous experience, I will be stuck with until my return to England, and a series of strong mosquito bites along my right side. I am in a pretty miserable condition if I think about it for too long. However, beer and the diversion of classes helps to deter me from massive introspection – and last night I beat Mr. Ma at Chinese chess! It was only our second game and it was a pure flook that I won- but I’m not sure that he will want to play me again. Margaret has none of my debilities, she has a strong Stow-on-the-Wold immunity system perhaps. Tomorrow we take off for Beijing (by train). We have to teach in the morning but after this the school is devoted to the most important event in the life of any student here – the university entrance exams. You would not believe how important these are: for some students the exam is almost a matter of life or death, and we are told that the parents regularly block the roads outside the schools to prevent distraction of their seedlings by noisy traffic! What a place China is! Fascinating.

Fifth Part started on 12/6/2007

Missed the train to Beijing! The saga that ensued provides a good insight into Chinese life. I already had the tickets having cycled to the railway station to get them on the previous evening – soft sleeper all the way to the capital for just 500 yuan each, not bad for a 15 hour journey. The train was due to leave at 3.36 pm. Fortunately our classes for that day were all over by 12.30 so we had plenty of time to get to the railway station. But it took longer than I thought. We got out of the taxi in the station forecourt at 3.29 pm, a bit close but plenty of time, I thought. But, the harridans at the entrance would not let us in! I couldn’t believe it. I know that we were cutting it a bit fine, but hell there was still time to get on the train. They were obdurate, I was incensed. I charged through the gate wielding my backpack as a weapon and scooted for the escalator (the trains depart from the first floor of Yan’an’s swish new station). The army of ticket inspectors shouted for me to stop. I certainly would not, and I hoped that they did not have guns tucked into their resplendent uniforms. Another uniformed lady tried to prevent me entering the escalator. I ignored her, continuing my gallop and hoping that Margaret was keeping up with me; I could not spare the time to look over my shoulder. At the top of the escalator I could see the Beijing train still on the platform. I rushed for the glass doors, ignoring the two uniformed ladies waiting there. I grabbed the handle, the door moved a little then stopped. It was retained by a chain lock at ground level. I pointed at the train. The ladies smiled and also pointed – it started to move off. They seemed to find the whole thing very funny. I did not. I tore off my backpack and threw it unkindly onto the nearest seat. Margaret appeared looking tight lipped and with the unsaid phrase, "I told you that we should have left the flat earlier," floating like a critical caption above her head. Then the negotiations began.

A uniformed lady was found who spoke a little English. She explained to me that I had missed the train, well thanks for that. I explained to her that this was not my fault, what should I do? She said that I could take the train the following day. I explained that we were teachers and only had a short break. She did not understand this. I showed the tickets and asked if I could get my money back. She said that the tickets were no good, they were for the train that had just departed. Her logic was impeccable; most Chinese have a surplus of logic and paucity of customer care. I said that this was not fair. She looked puzzled. Other people were consulted, the conclusion was the same: train missed therefore ticket no good therefore, buy another. I refused to accept this and was taken downstairs to the ticket office for confirmation. Others joined the debate, one man looked like a film star with his low-peaked cap, his jutting jaw, high cheek bones and casual manner. I had great hopes for him, he looked the type who might take the whole thing over and resolve it to everyone’s satisfaction before moving on to his next performance, but he did nothing to advance our cause. Our poor lady with her smattering of English was under pressure from all sides, there is a great willingness amongst the Chinese to join in any debate, dispute or altercation whether it involves them or not. Our lady was at the centre of it all, she was tall, had a sweet typically Chinese face and an impeccable white and navy uniform. At last she concluded that train had been missed therefore the ticket was no good and therefore buying another was the only logical solution to the problem, they do tend to go in circles. I asked to see her superior/manager/boss/whatever. She pointed to someone behind the ticket office window. The woman indicated did not look like a boss, she didn’t even have a uniform!. I demanded to see the boss of the whole railway station. She took my tickets and went off into the upper area of the station, I took this as a good sign and told Margaret so, but she was unimpressed. After some time our lady returned with a young man and another uniformed lady. I didn’t think that the man was the boss but he announced, "I have an idea!"

His idea was simple but took some getting across, fortunately the new lady had better English than the first and this helped enormously in the explanation. The idea was that we take the bus to Xian and there transfer to our original train. The bus should reach Xian in three hours, the train in five. Half an hour had elapsed so far. I decided to go for it. "We must hurry," said the new lady, and we were then marched at high speed to an office deep within the station building. I think this was the office of the station manager – a stern looking butch of a woman dressed in a uniform that barely contained her muscular frame sat at a desk in a vast area of otherwise unoccupied space. Everyone in the room seemed in thrall to this woman, the empress of the railway station. that included Margaret and myself who, sensing that we needed her help, stood to attention with our backpacks discretely shouldered. The situation was explained rapidly, the manager barked commands into a mobile phone, then took up another supplied by one of her many manservants. She listened to someone on this phone loudly ‘ahing’ and ‘ohing’ as the Chinese do, then she returned the phone and sat poised as if considering the justice of our position. Suddenly the decision was made, she dramatically drew a red rubber stamp and pad towards her and thumped a red circle full of Chinese letters onto the back of our tickets. Everyone seemed to relax at this moment which was followed by a great flurry as we were swept from the throne room and out of the station.

I had no idea how we would get to the bus station, I thought that it was in another part of town. However, the man that had had the original idea marched us across the station forecourt, across the main road and onto a waiting bus. I could not believe it. There was a bus to Xian just opposite the railway station. For the first time I thought that we might actually make it. But the action drew to a halt, the bus did not go. I paid for the tickets and then was surrounded by people who wanted to know where we were from, what we were doing in Yan’an and so forth, the usual stuff. Then they all got off the bus, I do not know what they were doing there in the first place. Yet still the bus did not go. It became obvious that the fat driver and his thin conductress were waiting for more fares, this was what the Turkish call a dolmush, a bus that waits until it is full before departing. Since there was no business at all he at last pulled away, having waited for at least one quarter of an hour. My spirits lifted, it was still possible to reach Xian in time. But the driver became a kerb crawler, driving slowly out of Yan’an at about five mph scouring the streets for extra passengers. We couldn’t possibly make it at this rate. Fifteen minutes later the bus entered the expressway and speeded up. It was now just possible that we would make it. But no, less than halfway to Xian we pulled off the expressway into some town to renew the search for passengers. Then the driver declared a toilet break. We had been told that our train left Xian for Beijing at 8 pm. It was already 7.30 pm and we were less than halfway! No chance. Depressed, I sat steaming in the dangerous front seat just behind the driver. What a waste. Not only had I forfeited the train fare and missed the train twice, I had now wasted more money on a fraught journey to Xian by bus – the city that we had left just three days before. The thin acerbic conductress showed no sympathy at all – yet later she did slip me a tiny piece of paper. Unfolding it I was touched to find a 10 Yuan token for a hamburger – great.

We finally arrived at Xian station some time after nine. I decided to cast myself upon the mercy of the lady who guarded the soft sleeper waiting room. Traveling by soft sleeper is a little like traveling first class in the UK, there are perks and one of the most important ones is the special waiting room that are provided with their plush chairs and fewer people staring at you. At first this lady was dismissive, just as I had expected – we had missed the train and that was that as far as she was concerned. That train had gone, life moves on, my ticket was worthless. But I pointed to the red stamp deposited by Yan’an’s powerful station keeper and that seemed to change things. More people were involved. Various contradictory messages were written to me on scraps of paper: ‘We could take a train at 11 pm, it was a hard seat train. We would have to pay to get a soft sleeper. We must buy a ticket for the next day. We come from Yan’an’ (naturally we already knew this).None of it made sense so finally we were asked me to sit down and wait. Then we were ignored. We had time to think: perhaps our problem was insoluble and Chinese logic would then dictate that we were put to one side until a solution occurred. Perhaps they had just forgotten us as they admitted more and more new passengers and allowed others to pass onto the platform when their trains arrived. As time passed I became concerned. I walked towards our lady but she signaled me back to my seat.

At long last our lady approached with a note. ‘You will wait at 0:58,’ it said. This could have meant anything. It was now gone 11 pm, we were hungry and techy. I thought that the note meant that we could board a train to Beijing at 12.58 – but I could easily be wrong. Should we risk leaving the comfort of the soft sleeper waiting room in order to search for food? It was possible that our lady would not be there on our return and all would be lost, we would have to start from scratch! I indicated to our lady that we were going to eat. She seemed to understand this (always a dodgy assumption in this country) so we went out into the familiar environs of Xian station. The sweaty restaurant on the corner was open. It calls itself Californian something or other and is a sort of Chinese McDonalds: fast food, no beer, hot, not nice. We wandered further afield but there was nothing open that took our fancy – just basic Chinese eateries with demonstrably low hygiene levels. We pressed on and found ourselves in a dead area of hotels and offices. Fortunately, on our return we found a really nice place. Its theme was green – tablecloths and staff trousers. It was busy, looked clean, had a variety of stuff and, thank you very much whoever runs that restaurant, pictures of the food. I think we started with 6 waiters attending to us but the throng thinned out a bit later. Everything I ordered was off. Then I found something that was on – but it was off by the time the order got to the kitchen. As an apology they gave me six luncheon meat fritters, free of charge. Oh that the railway station staff could behave in this way! Having eaten these up I was full up – so, apart from the beer, my meal was free, and very good too.

We returned to the station in good spirits (beer does do that to one).Our lady was still there, thanks be, and she kindly gave me a tea. Margaret went to sleep. By this time we were the only travelers in the, once so busy, soft sleeper lounge. Soon a man came to talk briefly to our lady. He then led us off through the platforms at a rate that Margaret could not match. I kept up with him and kept an eye on my wife. Halfway through this trot he halted to talk animatedly to another, more officious man, they seemed to be arguing. Then the officious man took the lead, which did not seem good. We finally reached a platform and I was pretty sure the Chinese characters on the departure board were correct for Beijing (the first character means North) but when the train came in I was convinced that it was heading in the wrong direction – perhaps they were sending us back to Yan’an, this was quite possible. I said ‘Beijing’ quizzically to our new minder and he nodded dismissively. The train stopped and the smartly dressed hostesses opened their doors and stood with military erectness alongside them. No one got off or on. Our man talked rapidly to the chief hostess, a young, unsmiling lady with tightly pulled back hair. I was asked for the tickets which were carefully examined by the chief hostess, especially the red stamp placed on the back by the station master in Yan’an. At last, and with great relief we were allowed to enter the train, the hostess indicated that we should stand in a smoking section where two carriages joined, like naughty children. The train slowly and silently left Xian, it was about one in the morning and we were about five hours late, but at least we were on our way. We stood in the smoking section for about ten minutes wondering if we had been abandoned, then one of the hostesses came for our tickets. She was efficient but not friendly – I think we were interfering with her heavy load of doing nothing whilst the train sped from station to station, the hostesses only duty seemed to be door monitor and ticket fiddler (they take away your ticket and substitute it for a token, then return the ticket near journey’s end). I had to buy supplementary tickets for 120 yuan each from this lady, after which she pointed dismissively down the train turned on her heel and left. The train was in semi-darkness, we had no idea where to go - no idea whether we had a seat or a sleeper! I could not read the ticket and we rapidly found ourselves in an area of hard-sleepers, here each compartment has six bunks and they are open to the corridor, no doors, no privacy. I knew that I would not be able to sleep at the top, these bunks are in the roof and have virtually no headroom. I finally found a hostess who was not too busy doing nothing, she had just unlocked the toilets (they lock them whilst the train is "stabling" - yes, it really says that on the notice). She grudgingly helped us to find our bunks which were in entirely different carriages. I did not like to leave Margaret to sleep on her own with a whole carriage of Chinese strangers; but of course I did so, reasoning that there is safety in numbers. Both our bunks were middles so that was good, in fact I grew to prefer the hard sleepers to the soft sleepers where you are incarcerated with two complete strangers. Hard sleepers are more fun because you get to see more of Chinese life and they really are not that hard. And so, after many mishaps, we arrived at the western station of the capital at about one in the afternoon, total journey time from Yan’an of over 22 hours.

We did the usual things: visited Tienanmen Square, the Summer Palace, the Forbidden City. We got tricked into drinking very, very expensive tea with a supposed English teacher from the People’s University. It was very hot and humid in the city and my cold suddenly broke out with unrestrained fury in the air conditioned coolness of our windowless, but king-sized, hotel room. In the evening we ate Beijing Duck and found live music interspersed with an Eric Clapton blues video. We drank cocktails to celebrate our 40 years of marriage and headed ‘home’ to Yan’an without event in a soft sleeper. We did not do the Great Wall – that’s just for tourists ;-). We found Beijing incomprehendably vast and I suppose that we were privileged to see it at a unique moment - as it undergoes one of the greatest face lifts in its varied history, this time making ready for the Olympic Games which are to be held there next year. It seems that most of the central streets are being resurfaced - the work goes on all night. Also most of the larger buildings in the Forbidden City were garbed in scaffolding as they got their Olympic face lift. Getting anywhere in Beijing takes a lot of time because the underground system is limited (we did not use it), but bus fares are incredibly cheap and the buses very effective. Centrally it is a very smart city with wide, tree-lined boulevards, however there is little of antiquity beyond the Forbidden City and Summer Palace, and even these have been regularly rebuilt across the centuries through fire and insurrection.

Back in Yan’an we resumed our role as teachers – we actually talk of little else since preparing the lessons, giving the lessons and coping with the odd changes in timetables takes up a lot of our conscious thought. I am still not well and cannot run or exercise which is frustrating. I also have to sleep propped up on our early Odeon style sofa in the lounge in order to avoid attacks of dizziness. On Tuesday Margaret had a bad day with both pupils and teachers so we forsook our kitchen and the cheap, basic local restaurants for a surreptitious journey to central Yan’an’s only nod to internationalism – the Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was, as ever, pretty awful – but Margaret enjoyed the salty french fries ( a poor substitute for chips) and I bought a new Tshirt for 38 yuan – my other one blew of the rail outside the window of our 5th floor flat in a characteristic gust of Yan’an dust and was never seen again. The trip was reviving but, as usual, we came away from central Yan’an thinking that there must be more to this place than what we saw.

And there was. The very next night we ignored the threatening thunder and took a bus towards the centre. This time we got off early, alighting at an uncharacteristically pretty roundabout decorated with flowers. We crossed the bridge over the evil smelling trickle which passes for a river and found a new supermarket. We did not buy anything but noted for the future that it did have a good range of tea and cakes – no bread though, that is very difficult to find here. We followed the river for a while but found nothing of interest, then Margaret complained of a pain in her leg. We turned back across the river to find a restaurant in which we could drink a beer. Sitting there in this strange quarter of Yan’an we were surprised when a young lady gave us a friendly wave as she went to one of the private rooms with a crowd of blokes (private room dining is very common here, and usually the rooms are occupied by a crowd of blokes getting pie-eyed on beer and white spirit). I thought that she was just being friendly but Margaret, who has a better memory for faces than I, said that she was a Chinese teacher from our school, a lady whom we had met on the bus the week before. Soon she came to join us. The party she was with were all policeman and she, like most Chinese women, did not drink so she was glad to get away. Her husband was a policeman and he liked to drink every day, she told us with some distaste – I confessed to my owned predilection but was forgiven. She wanted to help us just as so many Chinese people do and, since she lived in the area, I asked her what it was like in this part of Yan’an. She advised us to turn right at the end of the road and head into town. If we went straight on then we would enter an area of bad people. Like many Chinese women she giggled a lot and she had an endearing way of covering her mouth with her long fingers as she did so. She tried to pay our bill as we left, but I deflected her – they are so generous to us and we earn more than them.

We left and headed straight for the street of bad people. It was great. There are bars there and interesting restaurants and dubious goings on. We found a place that barbecued fish and decided to give it a try, we do not get much in the way of fish to eat in Yan’an. As we went inside I was delighted to find that they specialised in draught beer, two different types that they poured into large jugs from the barrels – one light in colour, the other dark. This dive was really lively, the army of girls serving food and beer were kept really busy rather than hanging around giggling. I ordered two pints of the light beer and, I thought, two helpings of the barbecued fish. Got the beer OK but all we got in the way of food was two fish the size of sardines on a large silver tray. I ordered ten more then led the waiter around the restaurant pausing at each table of diners until I found something that looked good, pointing to it and indicating that I wanted two lots of that. All this causes amusement in China, I think it would cause annoyance at home.

Two men behind us were roaring drunk. They were (this is very common) playing some sort of drinking game with dice. The dice shakers were made of china and they were slamming them down so hard that they would surely break. Then one did smash which caused the two drunks to laugh hysterically. They were so lost in mirth that they were, for a while, unable to demand a replacement shaker. Someone argued long and hard at the cash desk about the size of their bill, then left, then returned, then left again, then sat outside shouting. The beer was good. I had three of the lighter ones then tried a dark. It was awful, like a thick Ribena with some unidentifiable bitter taste in the background. At the next table the two men kept giving us bits of their food, the worm sized kebabs cooked on a thin wire and something else which was pastry based. As I paid the bill one of the drunks came to the cash desk, he took the bill from me and carefully checked it through, swaying from side to side as he did so. This took some time but at last he gave me the thumbs up - no one was trying to rip me off. So I paid up my 40 yuan for five beers and a meal and left with every intention of returning. It’s so cheap here, however will we readapt to English prices?

The Internet connection has failed in the school. It became abysmally slow over the weekend and by Wednesday had ceased altogether. It is frustrating, but already we have become more accepting of the inevitability of such things. Nothing is reliable here except the coming of night and day. It is now Friday so I have been without email for six days. Does it matter? Not a lot really. Our life focuses on the school and the ongoing glimpses of life in the raw that is provided by the settlement to the rear of our flat – "Coronation Street". Every night a family there spends its whole evening cooking something in a large wok. It stands on a concrete wood burning stove outside their cave-like house and is lit by a single bulb dangling from a cable. The stuff that they produce is paper white and custard yellow. It is ladled into round dishes and sets overnight. The content is then carefully removed by hand and placed in large plastic buckets in the rear trailer of a tricycle together with various accouterments. It is then taken to be sold at the roadside. We have no idea what it is, and having watched the unsanitary process of production would not wish to try it. But it is clear that the sale of this food is the source of income for a family made up of, at least: a skeletal old man who still carries huge buckets of water from the standpipe to his home using a yoke, the woman and the man of the house, a teenaged girl, two dogs and a cat. Yesterday their neighbours took possession of a twin tub washing machine like the one in our flat. It stands proudly outside the front door and discharges its water onto the pathway. The man of the house is in charge of this new device, whereas washing by hand is women’s work. I think that this is the first washing machine in Coronation Street. Two days later it had gone.

I started the sixth week of classes with a new theme: culture. I tried it this morning. Characteristically the students can find nothing wrong with their culture but have no problem finding good things (respect for the aged, polite greetings, food, etc). It is left to me to list the bad things: spitting and pushing, for example. They have no idea what I am talking about so I have to demonstrate. I feign spitting, of course. I then get a group of them to form a queue (there are monthly queuing lessons taking place in Beijing at present – another preparation for the Olympics). I also include a simulated eating race in which I use a knife and fork and they use chopsticks. They always win, of course. Yesterday I cooked a typical English meal for Margaret and myself. I bought meat from the street market (somewhat different from the supermarket this, but very fresh, probably killed that morning) and potatoes, carrots and beans. The cooking pots are too thin to cook meat so I placed a stone in one of them. It was OK, the ingredients for the meal cost a little over one pound, the bottle of red nearly three pounds! Then we scanned the channels for English language films – no luck. When we did find a western movie it turned out to be in French with Chinese subtitles. Other films are dubbed, but the occasional one is played in English, mostly these are badly made action movies. As the week draws on it is still raining and the Internet connection to the school is still not working. Last night we went to dinner with Angela, one of my teaching colleagues (the English teacher’s mostly have English names, hers was Angel but I have renamed her Angela) and her student friend Nancy. They are both very young, Angela has only been a teacher for a year and is not happy, she tells me that sometimes the students make her cry.

Sixth Part begun 1/7/2007

Putting aside the ups and downs of teaching classes that range from excellent to pretty hopeless; this part of the trip has been dominated by a trip to Yulin, a visit to a cultural performance put on by the schools of Yan’an, and a wedding! We had planned to visit Yulin from the outset. It is way to the north of Yan’an, the last city in the province of Shaanxi before you reach Inner Mongolia. It is on the edge of the Gobi desert, has some remnants of traditional architecture, and the Great Wall passes through it – all this, plus the fact that there is a direct train from Yan’an to Yulin, made it a must – even though Mr Ma, who comes from the area said it was not of interest.

We left Yan’an early on Friday 22nd, there was to be an examination for juniors the next day so the class rooms had to be rearranged so it really was POETS day. This meant that the teaching timetable had to be reorganised with the result that we had no classes in the afternoon – great. By the way, no one thought to tell us about the change, one of my students who has the attractive name of Miaomiao (yes like a cat) sorted things out for me at my English conversation club on the night before we left. The club is something that Margaret and I have started to give the more enthusiastic students a chance to talk to us in an informal environment. I run two clubs and try to limit the attendance to 10 students in each. We hold them in the reading rooms on Thursday nights and we, and the students, enjoy them.

On the trip to Yulin we got to the railway station an hour before the train was due to depart – no repeat of the Beijing disaster for us. The journey lasts for about five hours and we booked hard seats, a cheaper alternative and a choice that throws you into the carriages of the ordinary people of China. We are often the star attractions on trains and buses, I suppose that quite a few people have not seen a westerner before. The train was packed but we found two separate seats near a man who spoke a little English. He worked for the government in Yan’an and was just off to the north to collect his regulation single child (in fact we find that quite a few people have larger families, especially in the country). Our conversation was closely observed by his wife and many others, though its content was quite beyond them. I sat next to a villager from the Yulin area who seemed quite unable to accept the fact that I could not understand Chinese (I know how to say that in Chinese now – but few people understand me). He was a thickset man of maybe fifty years, with thinning hair and a tendency to roll up the legs of his trousers (a fairly common trait here, if it gets very hot some men roll up their Tshirts, but you do need a bulging stomach to do this properly). The government man invited us to his home in Yan’an "so that you can see how Chinese people live". People are so friendly. He got off about half way through the journey and we alone for about half and hour which gave us time to look out of the window, to admire the red hills of Northern Shaanxi (our province), observe the rushing, mud filled rivers and watch the peasants at work on their fields. But then the train stopped at Suide and our carriage filled with a youngsters, many of whom wanted to try out their English. Two lads from a middle school like ours were first. They were lightly moustached and made an odd but devoted couple, one shy but able to converse a little, the other much more outgoing but frustrated by his inability to speak. They were joined by a delightful couple of female university students who gradually took us over because their English was better. They were aged about twenty and in their first year at university, the one intensely pretty, the other very different in appearance, her features almost those of an American Indian. They suggested that we had dinner together, but, since we had nowhere to stay, we had to decline - our first task on getting to Yulin was to find a hotel. In principle this wasn’t so hard. We were besieged by hotel touts as we left the large station, some of them shouting at close quarters and waving unintelligible business cards. The boys tracked our progress and veered over to us to say quietly that the touts may be bad people. They were annoying us anyway so we used our Chinese word for no and they gradually desisted. It was raining and we now found ourselves in a very dubious area, a dubious mixture somewhere between a neglected industrial estate and a swamp. The boys pointed to the only hotel in the area, said it was very expensive then left. We did not want to be here, it was getting late and it was pretty clear that we were no where near the centre of Yulin where I was sure there would be a selection of hotels. We had no idea how to get there and couldn’t take a taxi even if there was one because we didn’t have the Chinese to ask for the town centre and no taxi drivers here speak any English. We started walking, hoping that we were going in the right direction. Then the boys reappeared. We don’t know why, perhaps they were worried about us. They helped us hail a taxi and came with us into the city where they walked off – "to play games". We found a hotel with the help of another group of middle school lads and then set out to find a restaurant. This wasn’t easy. China does not have much of a late night culture and for a while we could find nothing that was open, we ended up outside the excellent city walls in another bad area. Turning back towards the hotel we found a smashing little place with yellow tablecloths. The proprietor had a bizarre Tony Curtis hair style and spoke little English but he made a great fuss of us, communicating mostly by writing into a notebook. The food was good too and towards the end of the meal we had the entire staff sitting around our table, watching us eat and trying to understand what we saying to Tony Curtis. We were not at all surprised when he told us that we were the first westerners ever to come into his restaurant.

Yulin is flat whereas Yan’an is very hilly. Perhaps that’s why we liked it, you do feel a little trapped in Yan’an. Though Yulin is on the edge of a desert it is quite green and has a large river running through it. One of it’s gems is a long street of traditional single-story buildings that serve as small shops and offices. They are ornate with pretty roofs and trellised frontages. Every now and then a large multi-storey tower bridges the road. All the towers are different and all very Chinese, very beautiful. There are narrow alleyways leading off this street, usually barred by heavy wooden gates; these lead to the traditional courtyard homes in which the Yuliners used to live – now rapidly being supplanted by tower blocks of apartments - but even these have a little more style in Yulin. This wonderful street is relatively traffic free so no horns honking for a change. To the south it transforms into a seedier area where you can buy huge chunks of coal or massive water melons. We turned back at this point towards the main shopping drag and found, to our delight, a "music café" where we dined at that night, a large shoe shop where Margaret bought some pretty shoes for (she claims) about four pounds, and a large restaurant which sold western style food and had a beautiful lady playing the piano. We entered and had a waffle some apricots and strong coffee (which gave me a frightening caffeine shock, I must keep away from the stuff entirely). We then went in search of the bus to Shenmu because I was convinced that we would see the Great Wall on the journey to this outlying town. We couldn’t find the bus but, in our searches, bumped into the two students that we had befriended on the train. What a coincidence! They were lovely, very kind, bought us fruit and guided us to the bus station, helped me to buy the tickets, sat us down in the bus and departed looking a little concerned that we were going to Shenmu all alone.

The journey was as hectic as usual, it’s best not to look out of the front window, it only adds to the terror of the trip and there is nothing that you can do to stop the driver overtaking in the face of a vast oncoming truck anyway. We got to Shenmu unscathed but did not get even a glimpse of the Great Wall along the way. Three hours journey for nothing it seemed, though, danger aside, the scenery was interesting. Shenmu was a dump, a coal dump where the people stared us even more intensely than in Yan’an. I had planned to return by rail and as soon as we alighted from the bus I asked someone where the railway station was. The man I talked to had no English and barely understood my faltering Chinese. But soon a crowd had gathered and from the twenty or so throng I ascertained that there was no railway station, then that there was a railway station, but there was no train. Then that the train had gone. Then that the next train to Yulin did not depart until the next day! So we would have to make our return by bus. So my next question was where did you take a bus to Yulin in Shenmu? This puzzled everyone. I had just got off a bus from Yulin, why did I now want one to go to Yulin? I abandoned this line of questioning and asked about the Great Wall.To my amazement I was told that it was in Beijing – the capital. Amazed by this apparent display of ignorance we wandered off. I had seen an embankment with a range of hills behind it and managed to persuade Margaret to ascend it with me. Beyond was a wide, partly dry, river bed and beyond that a steeply rising cliff face. Ranged along the top of this were traditional towers and joining them some castellated walls. It was the Great Wall, I was sure of it. I got as close as I could and asked anyone that I met along the embankment path what it was, but no one spoke English. Then Margaret pointed to a garage immediately below us. It had a sign in English saying "Great Wall Motors". We had found the wall, and very imposing it looked too. We could not get to the wall itself, it was way above the embankment and the onward path was blocked. Nonetheless I took a few good pictures and marveled at this great engineering feat. Of course it was here at the western end that the wall began, not at the Beijing end - that came much later, and the part that tourists usually visit is very much restored. We travelled back in a mini-bus. There was a line of them waiting to fill up with people at the bus station. Some of the people employed to tout fro customers were a bit overzealous, one of them grabbed my arm and tried to march me on to his bus. We chose the one at the front in the hope that it might be the first to go. It was, but only after little stools had been brought out, arranged along the thin central corridor between the proper seats and filled with fare paying passengers. Unfortunately smoking is allowed on these smaller buses and for smokers there is little else to do but smoke on bus journeys. This applied particularly to a Chinese copy of Michael Jackson who chain smoked through the journey as he sat in his jacket with rolled up sleeves, his jewelery, his long, long hair covered partly by a trendy bandanna, his eyes shielded behind large sunglasses and his skin peeling horribly where the skin whitening treatment had gone wrong. Someone spat at Margaret, well not directly, but the effect was the same. He sat in front of us and spat out of the open window as the bus sped along. Of course the force of the wind threw the spittle back into the window and on to Margaret’s face – how disgusting. I was going to remonstrate with him but she did not want me to. Fortunately he did not spit again during the journey, even though spitting and the awful sound of hecking that proceeds it is rife in this land. The Chinese can spit but they cannot queue.

We were glad to get back to Yulin undamaged (apart from the prospect of secondary cancer from tobacco smoke and yellow jaundice through contact with spit). It was quite late so we were glad to find the music café open and ate a good meal of fish with ginger to the accompaniment of the theme song of Titanic played over and over, possibly in our honour. We fancied a whisky nightcap so wandered along to the restaurant that sold western food. They did have whisky but I was told by a man sitting at the bar that I could only buy it by the bottle for some reason. Margaret had an Irish coffee (with whisky?) and I settled on a large glass of vodka. Very expensive but we were feeling expansive. The man sitting at the bar turned out to be the proprietor. He calls himself Fox and after a long conversation invited us to join him the next day for a trip to the fort near to Yulin which is part of the Great Wall. So next morning we were back at the same restaurant for a third time, this time lots of photographs were taken with my camera, these included us with Fox and the army of waiting staff. I promised to email them to Fox so if you are ever in Yulin you will probably see our pictures on the wall of his restaurant. Fox brought a young lady called Yuan Yuan with him on the trip. A pretty Chinese girl of 22 years she told me that she had graduated in mathematics from Xian (there are 100 universities in that city alone). Why she worked in the restaurant I don’t know, perhaps she was Fox’s girl, though he is 16 years older than her. He was a short rotund man with limited, but adequate English and had trained for the hotel industry in Singapore. He was from Guandong province and therefore his native tongue was Cantonese. His father was a translator of Mongolian into Chinese. I liked him, he was a quiet man, but confident. He told me that the restaurant had needed 1 million yuan to get started and was not doing well. The locals came there to drink beer and play cards but they would not try the expensive western food, preferring their own dishes and prices. The fort itself was not too old (Ming Dynasty) and in Spartan condition. It links with the Great Wall which was made of rammed earth at this point along its great length and is crumbling away, in fact the section between the fort and the city of Yulin has gone altogether. This state of decrepitude reinforces one’s impression of the age of the wall; nothing of that immense size is going to remain unaltered for 2,000 years.

Fox was keen to take us elsewhere but thought it impractical when I told him the time of our train. So we took another walk around central Yulin before collecting the backpack from our hotel and taking a taxi to the station (no mean feat since no taxi driver seems able to recognize the words for railway station when spoken by me). We met the lads who had helped us to get to the centre of the city in the waiting room. They were as shy as ever, but plonked themselves down on the seats next to us and we told them of our adventures, regularly interrupted by other waiting passengers who spoke no English but wanted to know, through the boys, where we were from and why we were there. We were marched to the platform, being in a station is a bit like being in the army here, then waited sometime for the train. Margaret and I had often looked with interest at the overfilled double-decker carriages on some trains and this time we found ourselves in one. Though the seats were very hard it wasn’t quite the cattle truck it appeared from the outside, however our seats were very crowded since there were soon eight people sitting where six were supposed to be. Some trainee nurses from Yan’an quickly discovered us then sat with us in shifts throughout the journey. They had been to take an English exam in Yulin for some reason. We told them about ourselves and doled out English Christian names. The youngsters in China loved this, during the journey to and from Yulin we probably christened at least ten people. We take the role very seriously, studying their faces and mannerisms before lighting on an appropriate name. We have to write the names on little pieces of paper else they would soon forget them. Though the youngsters seem unaware of the large age difference between us and them, or at least do not mention it, the middle aged man sitting very close to me asked, through one of the trainee nurses, my age (this is very common, they also ask what our salary at the school is but we tell them that it is a secret). Having determined that I was sixty he opined that I should be at home, not travelling around the world. He also tried to stop me writing my notes, saying that it would tire me, he then fell asleep and left me in peace.

The Yulin trip is over, it’s another Monday. This week I my theme has been pollution for some classes and culture for others. I try to liven up the former by producing a bottle of contaminated water, getting them to solve anagrams of words like smoke and sewage and to suggest solutions to pollution – "plant trees" is the most popular recommendation, though Yan’an itself has plenty of trees on the hills. Its main problem is the open sewers and mountains of discarded rubbish, but they do not mention this. The students they are mostly, loyal, brainwashed, or protective about such things. Criticism of their own country is not their style or culture. A free press might change this for the better?

On Monday Mr Ma obtained tickets for us to a cultural show put on by the schools in the area. We went along with Mandy, our friend and Chinese teacher. Unfortunately there was no one else there! Mr Ma had the wrong night. So we went drinking in the street of the bad people which was nearby. Mandy, who had previously told us that she did not drink, got a little bit tipsy and told us more of her love life which has a particularly Chinese bent – influence of family and so on. We have advised her not to marry the present suitor. He is approved of by the family, in fact was introduced by them, but she doesn’t love him, though he is "a good man". Mandy is 25 years old and an English teacher at our school. I gave her a hug when we parted; it was like hugging a frightened gazelle.

We set off for the cultural show again the next night and this time it was on. And it was really good. The glamorous hostess (really glam) was a music teacher at our school – a great source of pride for the fourth middle school – and there were other performers from the staff and pupils of our school in the show. It was quite something. I shall never forget the parade of the teachers, some dressed in sporty gear, some posing, some walking like fashion models (though their bow legs usually negates the overall effect), some pretending to play violins others writing Chinese characters on blackboards. One or other of them would regularly step to the microphone and tell us how proud they were to be part of the teaching profession (according to Mandy our interpreter). Surely this could never happen in the UK! The performances were generally of a really high quality – they had to be, the ‘leaders’ were present. These men came in late, were provided with free bottles of water and, at the end of the performance, mounted the stage whilst we applauded them or the performers – who could tell which?. A couple of musical sets really moved me. One had some beautifully dressed young girls playing the Chinese equivalent of harps and xylophones, and another was a solo performance by a local teacher on three stringed guitar and knee operated clapperboard (local Yana’an stuff this with a touch of Rambling Sid Rumpold).l There were swirling dances, a mini play which was full of sad drama, and songs from the time of Chairman Mao. The cast was enormous and aged between 6 and 40. Everything had been carefully drilled, the Chinese are good at that sort of thing (can’t wait for the opening of the Olympics next year). But how the children found the time to fit the rehearsals into their busy school schedule I do not know. Of course the show it wasn’t all to my taste but it was an invaluable peep into Chinese culture. At the end our school leader ordered Mandy to take us home in a taxi - as if we cannot look after ourselves. We didn’t, we caught a bus and drank more beer!

My stomach calmed down during this week, what a relief. It is depressing to be ill all of the time. At the weekend we were going to visit the only waterfall on the Yellow River with Mandy but had travel problems. Mr Jong the vice headmaster comes from the area of the waterfall and, through Mr Ma, volunteered his car for the next weekend. As a leader he has access to one of the school cars though as he is only second in line he has to stand back if his leader wants the thing. Anyway we decided to take a chance on that offer and defer the trip for a week - it will become our leaving trip. The rearrangement was just as well because we were invited to a wedding on the Saturday! Our dream come true! We did not know the couple, she is a teacher in the junior school and I have no idea what he does. However, Mr Ma got us invited somehow and we were very keen to attend, this was going to be a very cultural week. We were late leaving the school because Mr Ma had the time of the wedding wrong. We finally got to the hotel at about 12.15. By 1.15 we were leaving again, having eaten a sumptuous meal, toasted the bride and groom with tiny eggcups full of the Chinese fiery white wine, bottomed up with the headmaster, had a good photo session with the happy couple and best man and sung three verses of the Red Flag. No, that ‘s not quite true - I made up the last item. They do not mess around in China. Talk about coitus interruptus, I was just settling down to a decent drinking session when the bell went – everybody out. Well not quite literally; but when everyone has eaten as much as they wanted (and hopefully left plenty uneaten else the families would lose an awful lot of face), everyone leaves – the Chinese are so efficient in these matters. If we had been much later we would have missed the whole thing. As it was we did not see much since our presence was demanded in the important people’s private room, we dined with the headmaster and his senior staff which is a great honour, but we would have much preferred to have been in the main room with the other guests. Even so I’m told that we did not miss much. On the other hand Mandy tells me that there are other traditions to do with marriage that take place at the homes of the parents – these involve the giving of money and carrying the bride into the new home.

Perhaps to compensate for the truncated wedding reception Mr Ma, Margaret and I met at my local that night and got quite pie-eyed on the local fresh beer. We played the local game of dice to decide who should pay for this extravaganza and Mr Ma lost, or won, neither of us are sure really. In any event he paid. However, the amount would be less than a third, probably a sixth of the amount we paid to go to the wedding. Yes you pay as a guest here and, if like Mr Ma you are a senior member of the school then this can be a real drain on the purse since there are school related weddings almost every week! Still we have achieved a small ambition, and I have the wedding photographs and an imprint of the bride’s torpedo shaped breast on my side prove it (Chinese women are not strong in the breast area department so standing close to them for a photograph can be punishing).

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