Tsingtsao and Snow & more!

We survived our second weekend in China!  On Friday night we did some serious advertising/recruiting in the town square.  Gary, Shelly and I got decked out in our matching school T-shirts and led our students in songs with about 200 people watching.  We had to compete with the karaoke, the HUGE TV, the line dancing, the fireworks,  and the traffic.  It was quite an experience!  We are getting used to stardom and anyone and everyone taking our picture.  They adore our blond hair J  Saturday morning we “taught” 3 hours of school.  We played games, sang songs and watched a bootleg, Chinese subtitled version of Home Alone.  The humor seemed to transcend the language barrier.Saturday afternoon we packed up and headed to Linfen, the city where the rest of the teachers are staying.  It’s about a one hour drive.  We checked into another hotel room and went shopping.  Linfen is much bigger than the city we are in, with more traffic, shopping, people, etc.  We shopped for a few hours and found some really good buys.  Gary bought a few shirts, and we got a few gifts.  Unfortunately Gary and I can’t find shoes big enough to fit our feet so we just had to window shop for those.  After shopping we stopped at a restaurant and ordered beer and our favorite steamed buns.  I’m pretty sure they thought we were nuts to come in and just have that, but it worked for us.  There are 2 Chinese beers that we have come to like, Tsingtsao and Snow.  They come in really big bottles with little cups to share, but we usually end up just getting our own.   We had to run to the supermarket to get food for our supposed “picnic” on Sunday.  Since we can’t read any of the labels, we usually get a hodge podge of random snacks.  We got some interesting meat this time, and by interesting, I mean really gross looking.  Sunday morning we woke up at 4:30am, yes AM, to go on a field trip.  It was more for the teachers in Linfen with their students and it was optional for us.  We arrived at the bus and asked our host how long the ride would be and where we were going.  He told us we were going on a picnic and it would be about an hour maximum.  So we loaded up onto 3 buses and started off.  We drove for about 2 hours, then 3, then 4, then we started up these scary one lane mountain roads with a ton of switchbacks.  Our little bus (with one bald tire) barely made it up this mountain and we were holding our breath and closing our eyes.  The driver kept getting stuck on the corners and we’d have to put rocks behind the tires for him to back up and try again.  So finally, about 5 hours later, we arrived at the top of this mountain called Li Shan translated “farming mountain”.  The view was breathtaking and the mountain air was extremely refreshing after breathing pollution for a week.  We hiked a loop of 8 km and stopped often to take pictures.  They gave us matching, bright orange hats to wear and there was a Chinese cameraman shooting video the whole time.  We are pretty sure it is going to be a promotional video for their school in China, and a recruiting tool.  We’ll be scouring You Tube when we get home to see if we can find it.  J  Shelly and I decided to take a potty break on the top of the mountain behind some shrubbery, using our Delta Airline’s blanket for a little barrier from the Chinese paparazzi.  Finally, we stopped for a brief moment to have our picnic, bread with jelly and strange Chinese snacks, and it started raining.  We hurried down the mountain to hop on our bus and thought we were heading back.  About an hour later, after more pictures and speeches by our leaders, we got on our bus and started down the mountain.  At the very first switchback we got stuck, and now the mountain roads were wet.  Gary and a few other people got off the bus because they were afraid of plummeting to their death.  I was brave and stayed on for about 2 more minutes until the bus lurched forward and almost didn’t stop.  The edge of the road was a steep drop-off—all the way down the mountain. We all got off the bus and decided to walk down the mountain.  This was a downhill, 45 minute walk with bags and all, and I was wearing flip flops!!!  But it was worth it to not be in the death mobile on the corners.  We finally got out of the mountain and stopped in this really beautiful little town in the middle of nowhere.  I should mention the bathrooms in this town.  If you had asked me, before I went to China, to picture the worst imaginable bathroom in the world, this would’ve been it.  It was a brick type structure put up with no roof and 2 holes in the brick floor.  I actually went in there once on the way up the mountain, once on the way down.  Gary went in this “bathroom” as well.  When he was finished he realized a tall bus could see him over the short brick structure.  I’m going to drop down and kiss the first toilet I see in America J  Thankfully, the 4 of us that had to get back to Huo Zhou were able to take a car back to Linfen because we still had an hour drive back to our “home”.  Our driver was an absolute saint and stopped at McDonalds on the way back to the hotel so we could get some dinner, we quickly packed and got back around 10pm.  We were tired teachers today!  We think we have just this week of teaching left, then hopefully we will be traveling and sight-seeing.  Nothing is for sure in China, so we’re staying flexible.