Somehow I managed to dream up yet more lessons to fill 3 weeks, and suddenly my year was over. I’d expected that although I’d had times when I’d looked forward to the end, when it came I’d wish I could do it all again. I didn’t. I said goodbye to my classes and gave them a quiz to see if they could remember anything I’d taught them, then gave as prizes all the junk I’d brought thinking it would be useful and finally just needed to get rid of, like magazines, comics, tartan pencils and little flags. At times in my goodbyes I almost thought that I loved teaching after all and wished I could stay, but never quite believed it and felt only a little emotional as I wandered back to my flat after my last class. If anything, there was a tinge of relief there.  

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My father and brother arrived in ffice:smarttags" />Beijing that weekend, and I took a 20-hour train to meet them in Yunnan province for three weeks of adventure around China before it was finally home-time. We climbed over incredible gorges, explored old villages, took very bumpy sleeper buses, and saw the biggest Buddha in the world which is carved into the side of a cliff. Then it was back to Chongqing to pick up my things and have a last meal with the people I’d shared my year with, then off again. We saw the Terracotta Warriors in Xian which was quite impressive, and then in Beijing walked around the Temple of Heaven which is covered in scaffolding for a year, apparently in preparation for the Olympic crowds. The Great Wall was, as expected, a highlight, and was even worth the 4-hour bus journey there and the hanging around on the way back when the bus broke down on the motorway and we sat there for an hour before getting out and hailing another bus to take us the last hour’s drive into the capital. This was our second bus breakdown of the trip, after the previous week when we had got stuck in a tunnel and the driver had played with bolts in the engine for an hour before realizing that he’d run out of petrol. However the bus breakdowns came nowhere near being as infuriating as the rip-offs. Dad and Owen had been got when they first arrived, being charged 400 yuan for a 100 yuan taxi trip from the airport to their hotel. Then in Yunnan when we bought plane tickets to fly to Sichuan, we were charged both commission which was over the going rate, and then tricked into paying our tax twice, which we didn’t realise until it was too late. Finally, in the Temple of Heaven park, we drank a nice coffee and then were hit with a 95 yuan bill, which is about £7 and could feed someone for a month in China. After that experience, I was so mad that I wrote a poem. Please don’t laugh as it’s not supposed to be a work of art, and I realise that the last sentence is probably quite untrue, but that’s just how I was feeling at the time, under the tree, after being ripped off.

                        Heavenly Illusion

            Under a tree in Heavenly Park

            All is shade, but not too dark

            Insects burr and birds tweet tweet

            Around me and my earthy seat

            Scores of ants run over bricks

            Birds fly by over fallen sticks

            A cool breeze rustles leaf and branch

            Then calm.

            But plastic music, wooden chairs

            Chinese people stop and stare

            I notice cars and painted rails

            The peace begins to crumple and fail

            Noisy tourists crashing by

            The beauty all now seems a lie

            Not nature-formed but man-constructed

            For money.

And the next day I wrote another, while sitting on the bus for the Great Wall, waiting for an hour and a half for it to get on its way:

                        The Bus

            Sunny sky, stuffy bus.

            When will we leave?

This was on the bus that all the travel agents had told us did not exist. They told us we had to go to Badaling, and that that was the best place, but we kept trying and eventually found this bus to get to Simatai. Badaling is meant to be Great Wall Disneyland, where all the tourists go, almost totally reconstructed and not really a proper wall experience. Simatai is really impressive, the wall’s built up over steep mountain ridges, and is not too reconstructed, so it was really a much better choice we thought. There’s a cable car up which we didn’t take, and as we climbed along the wall up to the cable car stop, we were accompanied by some Chinese pop music which was rather irritating, being as we were trying to get a feel for a piece of history and not really being in the mood for singing along to this week’s most popular love song, but that was only a small section and it didn’t spoil the experience too much.

Saturday, the Great Wall of China. Sunday, I’m back in Dundee. I’ve left behind that strange country, where people decide to take their dog for a walk and so pick it up,  carry it around for an hour, then go home; where the people who work in places you go to have name badges with no name, just a number; where people don’t eat the meaty breast of their animals but prefer to dine on brains, intestines and congealed blood. Now it’s all just a memory, a bunch of photos and a few dozen weblog entries. Now, far from being a Foreign Expert with responsibility for the cultural education of 800 young minds, I’m jobless and lost in my mum and dad’s house. The future is not so much a haze in my mind, as a slide-show of vivid images, all totally different from one another, none of which could really exist in harmony with any other, but represents a complete potential for my life. Which, if any, will materialize, I can only guess. I feel like a soap opera fan whose favourite soap has been suspended for an indefinite period, and one day it will come back on and I’ll see at last what happens next. All I can really do is wait and see.

Labour Day came and with it, a week’s holiday from school. Julia and I packed our bags and jumped on a plane to the tropical ffice:smarttags" />island of Hainan. I would just like to say, before I go any further, that I was not really fair to Julia in my earlier blog. I should make it clear that she’s not really very posh, that is just something people started calling her. She’s very lovely. So when the holidays came and our friends jetted off to Thailand to do whatever it is young men like to do in Thailand, Julia and I went off on an adventure of our own.

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Hainan’s nickname is “China’s Hawaii” as it is an island on the same latitude as Hawaii. It’s therefore very very hot. After a night in the capital, Haikou, we took some buses to a beach. Fred had been there in the Spring Festival holiday, and all we had to follow was his scribbled memory of what buses to take to what towns and villages, and I felt slightly worried on the way that this was crazy and we had no idea where we were going and what if he was playing a joke on us? We were in the middle of nowhere and the rickety old minibus had gone from being packed full to being occupied by only one man other than ourselves. We got to the last stop, at the end of a dirt road, and jumped off to find that at least we had arrived at the sea. As we walked through the palms at the top of the beach, an old woman with a typical Chinese conical sun hat and a huge smile drifted towards us. She pointed us in the direction of a hotel, and called to a little man to lead the way. We weaved through trees and little huts, over a lawn, and suddenly were faced with a large conference hotel which looked very out of place. Luckily, they had a free room for us. In fact, they seemed to have all their rooms free, so we got 50% off, and then after dropping off our bags, we made our way back to the beach to sit with the smiling old woman and drink from coconuts.

The next day, we took a funny little vehicle to a nearby town where we boarded a ferry for a peninsula with a massive coconut palm plantation. Again, we took a bus to the end of its route, but this time with no directions to follow, and even less idea of where we were trying to get to. It was very beautiful along the way, very South-East Asian, and so far away from the smog of Chongqing. People dozed in hammocks between the trees, and called to each other in their strange Hainan language. We were happy (and surprised) to find, when we got off the bus, that we had got to within 5 minutes walk of a beach, so made our way there and spent the rest of the day swimming in the sea and lazing on the sand, with no worries in the world apart from how badly we would be hurt if a coconut fell on our heads.

After a couple of nights at Gaolong Bay, we managed, surprisingly easily, to find a bus going to a town in the centre of the island where we thought we’d spend a night or two. The bus took us along red sandy roads through Hainan’s lush countryside, and I sat contentedly chatting with some locals, and gazing out of the window with the wind in my face. It was not until we arrived in Qiongzhong that I discovered that, sitting by the window, I had become completely covered in sand from the road, and my hair was bright orange as were my eyebrows and I looked very scary. Qiongzhong was quite a nice town, with colourful tropical fruits being sold at stalls all along the streets, and practically nothing on the roads other than millions of motocabs. In the first hotel we came to, we managed to get ourselves a suite of bedroom, living room and bathroom for about a fiver, and thought we were doing very well, until we realised later on that we were right next door to a night club, and the music was so loud that it may as well have been coming full blast from our own room. However, the club seemed to close at 11, so all was well. The next day we went for a walk and you can read about it at Walking Stories if you so desire.

Our next destination was the Jiafengling Nature Reserve. The guide book indicated a very long way round to get there, but we managed to find a bus that cut through to the right kind of area, rather than going down to the south and around the coast, so we got on it. It was a sleeper bus and felt like the most dangerous bus ever invented, but I guess that most buses in China feel like they’re about to fall apart, so we probably weren’t in any more danger on this one than on any other we’d taken so far. At the destination, we were told there were no more buses to where we wanted to go, but we managed to find one going in the right direction so we got on it. The driver was very friendly and when we got to the town, he helped us find a hotel. This one was less than £2 for our room, which was good, but then again if we wanted to go to the toilet we had to go out onto the balcony behind a sheet of tin, and if we wanted to shower we had to throw a bucket of water over ourselves on the balcony, so I guess it’s not really surprising it was cheap. The town was fun, with pigs walking about all over the place munching on anything they could find, and also when we walked about in the evening we saw a woman with an upside-down dead dog that was on fire (there was no barbecue or bonfire, just the dog, on fire). At night, I couldn’t sleep and ended up being glad, as after lying awake for a few hours, I heard a strange noise, and then a thud beside me, when I screamed and switched the light on, to find a huge ginormous black bug on my pillow. I thought it was a cockroach, and it looked like one, and maybe it was one, I don’t know, but it was not a nice thing to have on my pillow. I’m very glad I wasn’t asleep. Imagine I'd had my mouth open and it’d fallen into my mouth instead of onto my pillow! Eurgh.

The next day we took another bus through the lovely countryside, and then a motorbike sidecar up the hill to the nature reserve. With the two of us and our rucksacks in the sidecar, the motorbike was having a lot of trouble, so when our driver’s friend came past on a motorbike, Julia went onto that and we eventually managed to get up the hill. Unfortunately, all of the accommodation at the reserve was full. Fortunately, the reserve manager said we could sleep on the floor of the conference hall. Stupidly, we didn’t ask him how much money he wanted for that, and the next morning he asked for a ridiculous amount, and I was too tired to argue, so that ended up being probably the most annoying part of the whole holiday. However, we had a lovely time at the reserve. It says in all the books that it’s a rainforest, but with no rain it wasn’t very rainforest-like, just like a forest really, with many insects. We had a bit of a walk, and swam in the lake in the evening and again first thing in the morning, and it was great.

Last part of the holiday, and we were back to the beach. This time, it was China’s most popular beach resort, and there were quite a lot of people there. We had a couple of days relaxing, trying to swim in the sea (and not really succeeding, due to the crazy waves and currents), drinking coconut milk, and eating lots of good fish and shellfish. The flight back wasn’t the most fun of flights. For me, taking a plane is never fun, but it was made even worse when we found out that we had to stop off somewhere on the way, and therefore take off twice. They had craftily joined some flights together, and didn’t even bother to tell us. And then, I left my fancy electronic dictionary on the plane when we left. Silly me. But anyway, we had had a good holiday, and I was back, all ready to face the last 3 weeks of my contract.

Last weekend the 7 BC ffice:smarttags" />Chongqing people all went for a trip to Chengdu. This was something that we kept saying we’d do, and kept putting off, and I realised last week that time is running short, and it may be now or never. So I rounded everyone up and off we went. It’s supposed to be less than 4 hours’ bus ride away, but our bus took 5 hours and the one that some of the group got on earlier in the day took 7.

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When Chongqing was in Sichuan province, before it became a separate municipality, Chengdu was the capital over Chongqing. Chongqing, however, feels much more like a capital city. It’s bustling, there are neon lights everywhere, and loads of cars everywhere, and people rushing everywhere, and people hanging around everywhere. There’s always something going on, there are many centres with many shops and many things happening. It’s simply chaotic. Chengdu is so much more laid-back that it feels like it may just drift to a halt. The streets are wide, tree-lined, with few cars on them. Being flat, as opposed to hilly Chongqing, it is much more cyclist-friendly, and there are wide cycle lanes separated from the road by a line of trees, where a flow of people pedal along, together with an occasional rickshaw. It seems eerily silent, coming from a city where the horns don’t stop day and night. And while it was pleasant, and we had a nice time there, I think most of us felt quite pleased that we had been sent to Chongqing, which seems so much more full of character and life.

The one thing that reminded me we were in the capital and a big city were the foreigners. We were taken, by the Chengdu BC teachers (including Ali & Carl who I met in the Spring Festival holidays), to an Irish bar which was packed with non-Chinese people. There are hardly any foreigners in Chongqing, even if you go to somewhere like the Newcastle Arms, and it was really strange, and really hard not to forget that everyone can understand what you’re saying for once. Fred, Olli and Ian spent the whole weekend in that bar and seemed to have a very nice time. The rest of us saw a bit of Chengdu, but to be honest there didn’t seem to be that many things to see. We went to the panda centre, which is one of the main places in the world for saving pandas from extinction. We saw loads of gorgeous pandas and it was really surprising how much they act like humans. Then, in the information centre, we watched a very interesting video about panda reproduction techniques. The funniest thing I saw was to be found in the gift shop. There was a toy panda there, and if you pressed its paw it would sing and dance. You pressed its paw, and it started dancing energetically and blaring out ‘London Bridge is falling down’ with all its might. I almost fell down with laughter when I heard it.

Saturday afternoon, after popping into the bar to have lunch with everyone else, Jenni, Julia and I found a lovely park to walk around. There were trees and flowers and streams and that was one thing I did kind of wish I lived near. The only park near me in Chongqing has giant paper trees, a mouldy swimming pool, and costs far too much to get into.

On Saturday night, we went to several places before finding ourselves at a very dodgy Chinese-techno club. On the dance-floor, a girl came up and hugged me violently, then looked at me and said ‘you are beautiful’, before disappearing into the crowds with a man. This was clearly not a genuine compliment, and this suspicion was confirmed when a Danish girl who we were with found that her purse was gone from her bag after a similar encounter. Later on, Ali found that his very expensive mobile phone had been stolen from a buttoned pocket, so the night ended on a bit of a downer.

Sunday, and yet again everyone gravitated towards the Irish pub. I dropped off my bags there and went for a walk into the centre of the city to have a look. After walking for about 40 minutes along a seemingly never-ending tree-lined avenue, I suddenly came to its end, where a giant stone Mao greeted me. This was supposedly the centre of Chengdu, but there didn’t seem to be a lot going on. There were people and traffic, and building works and shops, but no atmosphere and nothing interesting to see or do, so I turned around and found myself a pedicab to take me back to the pub for a quick bite to eat before we all went to catch the bus back to Chongqing.

(photos uploaded)

I took this stuff out of my last entry as I wasn't sure that writing it was a good idea, but my friends have demanded that I put it back in (attention seekers that they are) and so here we are guys, this entry is all about you.fficeffice" />

My BC friends are all getting on very well as respectable teachers and the blokes are seen as being English gentlemen, very popular with both staff and students. They are very proper and polite and mature and sensible. But come the weekend, they suddenly transform into totally crazy creatures. Being with them can be a little embarassing sometimes! Of course, even though sometimes I wish I could pretend I didn't know them, I do love them all and am very happy to be in this group, as in the whole of ffice:smarttags" />China's BC teachers, we are the closest-knit bunch here in Chongqing and I really couldn't have chosen a nicer group of people to spend the year with. But come Friday night everything really does get silly sometimes. I think most other people I know grew out of this kind of behaviour after their first year of uni, but not Fred and Olli. Two recent examples of their antics include: getting drunk and eating live tropical fish out of the ornamental fish tank of a nice restaurant to name one small incident which took place a few weeks ago, or going to a British Consulate do, whipping off their shirts after dinner, and insisting that the Consul General judge their manly muscles and skills as they race to see who can do more press-ups in the space of a minute, to name another. And almost every weekend you can see such things as roly-polys on the dance floor which causes a little chaos, or people being picked up and carried around (and occasionally dropped). I could mention more but I have to censor this a little as I don't want to get anyone into trouble. It is all a little ridiculous and I don't think being drunken 'Brits abroad' is really the image that the British Council recruited us to promote. But somehow, even though at times there are moments when I think, uh-oh, they've gone too far this time, people never seem to be offended or annoyed with them for long. A simple, "oh, only joking!", or an "I love China!" shouted loudly in Chinese will get everyone around smiling again, and sometimes a table of people will come to toast us all and say how happy they are to meet us. These bizarre Friday nights are breaking up a little, as Fred has started going away for weekends, I have started spending more time with my Chinese friends, and Jenni and Alex are not always around. But those evenings in the first half of the year will remain forever, for better or for worse, as an unforgettable part of my year in China. There's Ian, who doesn't like rice and doesn't like spicy food. No-one's quite sure why he came to China, and even less to Chongqing, which has the spiciest food in the country. And then there's Julia who's the new girl, she came about a month ago just for one term, and also went to Bristol uni and is posh (I'm not being nasty she just gets called posh by everyone). So there we go people you have your own little entry in my blog for all the world to see.

I've been so busy experiencing ffice:smarttags" />China, I've had no time to write about it for quite a while. But now here we are, I shall tell some stories. For one, last week I finally stopped making excuses and accepted an invitation to go to a student’s house for dinner. At first I thought this seemed a bit of an odd invitation but apparently teachers go to students’ houses all the time for dinner in this country, and it even encourages me in my contract to do stuff like that. As well as the three-person family there were another couple of Chinese women at this nice little dinner party as well as, to my surprise, a Sierra Leone man and a New Zealander. We had a lovely dinner of about 15 different dishes, and I managed to splash my soup all over the place by dropping chicken in it, which I explained away by laughing and saying ‘oh dear, I am awful at using chopsticks’, which made everyone else laugh at me too and made me feel awfully patronized and wish I hadn’t said that and fume invisibly and silently for a few minutes, mainly because I made everyone laugh at my ability to use chopsticks when I can use chopsticks perfectly well, it’s just being in a country where they like to put loads of jaggy chicken bones in their soup that caused the problem, but I could hardly have said that. Obviously I was just being childish so I soon snapped myself out of that. After dinner, which was very very nice and I don’t want to seem ungrateful with my chicken bone soup reference, we played mah jong for hours on end, me with my beginner’s luck winning everyone’s pretend money, and always thinking I should get going, then being drawn into ‘just one more game’, and starting to realise just what’s going on at those little stone tables all over the place under the trees around which all the oldies gather. I shouldn’t have put off accepting the invitation for so long, this was the most Chinese culture I had experienced in one evening since I arrived in the country.

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Tonight I had quite a different interesting time. I have a student friend who is an actress on local TV and a model in her spare time. She has several times called me to ask me to do some catwalk modelling with her, but I’ve unfortunately been busy (not that I can picture myself ever getting up on a catwalk, I’d get the giggles and never be able to take it seriously). But this evening, we had arranged to see each other anyway, so when she called to say that instead of coming to my flat she would pick me up in a taxi and take me to Chongqing TV, I couldn’t have thought of a reason to say no even had I wanted to. At the gate, she called a director and he had a car come pick us up and drive us through the guarded gate and along a few hundred metres to the door. Around some winding corridors and up a lift, I met this man, who I’m told is very important and has directed a 30-year-old soap opera from its first days. Well, I think that was what they said. But now, thinking about China's past 30 years, I suppose that's rather unlikely. I also think that my friend Angel has been in this programme, but I can’t be sure. Another thing that I picked up was that I will probably be starring in this TV show sometime soon, but again, I’m not certain, although I think it’s probably a little important to find that out! The latest Chinese song I have learnt is called ‘Chess piece’, and I really felt like I could sing it and mean it tonight as my friend tries to make me a star, and I just go along with it all, not really having any say but assessing the situation along the way and thinking yeah, this is quite fun, imagine me being on telly! me being an actress! that’s another childhood dream I could tick off my list… and therefore not protesting or trying to take back any kind of control, but sitting back and going with the flow. After a short chat in the office, we drove to one of the director’s many houses where I was shown the beautiful flowers in the garden, and his elderly father lying in bed, before being given a seat and a coffee while the director tended to some men who came to fix his fax machine. Halfway through this apparently over-complicated procedure, he reached into the top of a cupboard and brought down a bag and gave it to me as a gift. I don’t know if this is normal, but having been told never to refuse gifts from Chinese people, I made myself looked delighted as I opened the bag and studied the expensive men’s wallet set and electric men’s razor. I looked up at Angel, still with a happy smile on my face, to see if she thought this was normal, and she was also smiling happily, apparently not in the least bit surprised that her boss had just given me a gift of swanky men’s items. Then again, she is an actress. I thanked him gratefully, making use of my own amateur skills to keep my veneer smooth as I chuckled inside at how strange this all was.

After the fax machine was fixed and the coffee was drunk, we said goodbye to his housekeeping mother and drove up a mountain to a hotpot restaurant. Hotpot, which I have talked about before, is a great thing to eat with friends and a risky choice when with strangers. I remembered this as I sat there wondering how on earth I could keep this polite manner up while avoiding making myself ill with all this horrid stuff that they like to eat here. Usually, I will make myself try anything once, both to be polite and to be adventurous, and although I had already had cow’s stomach before so the latter could not apply, for politeness’s sake I smilingly stuffed a big flappy knobbly grey sheet into my mouth when it was kindly served onto my plate by the driver. The director asked the required, ‘tasty?’ and I automatically replied, ‘oh yes, lovely’, which I immediately regretted as then the driver smilingly fished out another piece from the bubbling oil and plopped it into my bowl. I was still chewing my way painstakingly through the first bit, which was tasting less and less ‘lovely’ all the time, so I had no choice but to look at Angel with a pleading smile and ask her in English if she would mind having that as I couldn’t manage. To this, she suddenly tuned into what was going on and told them they shouldn’t be giving me cow’s stomach as I didn’t like it. I felt quite stupid and like I’d been caught red-handed after having just said how nice it was, but at least I didn’t get any more of that stuff. I did get more strange parts of animals, as the others, as good Chinese hosts, eagerly dished out random stuff from the hot pot into my dish, but I stopped asking what it was and just ate it, resigning myself to being a chess piece for the evening. 

After dinner we piled back into the car and started off, only to drive into a ditch as we exited the car park. This was a super-expensive car, so no-one was too pleased, and we spend the next 15 minutes gathering rocks to minimize further damage on the return to the road. A quick stop for a check with some torches at the director’s house on the way past revealed only a little paint scratching, so it wasn’t too serious, and then the director was dropped off somewhere before the driver took me and Angel home. As I said, many things are less than clear in my mind, including the serious likelihood of an imminent acting career for me, ha ha, but I’m sure that I’ll find out soon enough, and who knows, maybe soon I’ll find myself being a real life celebrity.

In ffice:smarttags" />China, in the squares which are found here and there around a city, many people gather. Lots of them just sit, watching things. If anything remotely interesting happens, a crowd will gather, even if it’s just something like someone clearing all the leaves off of a tree (ok so I did stop and look at that too, it was a little bizarre). There’s a real sort of community thing, people are really interested in what’s going on around them, they don’t just walk around in their own little tunnel. In the evenings, even more people come to the squares, music blares from loudspeakers, and they dance. In fact I have seen some groups of people dancing just on a street, with no music or anything. But in the square it’s more organised, they stand in rows and rows, all perfectly lined up, all doing the same steps and turning the same way at the same time. I guess they must have learned this together, but I’ve never seem them learn, they all just know what they’re doing. In Shapingba square, two minutes’ walk from my school, there is a group like this, of about 200ish people, and beside them about 50 couples ballroom-dance to the same music. It’s very sweet and always makes me stop and smile. On Saturday evening however, Fred decided he felt like showing off, and dragged me into the midst of the ballroom couples and started swinging me around ridiculously. Of course, a crowd gathered, and when Fred gave a bow, they all clapped and said what wonderful dancers we were. They must have been joking, as this was nothing like a proper dance, but at least they didn’t seem to mind us gatecrashing their party. The crowd expanded and wrapped itself around us, as Fred made them all laugh with his bursts of Chongqing dialect and strange humour. Then he suggested that an oldish man dance with me, to which I was not too happy about but couldn’t very easily refuse, so the next thing I know I was waltzing around Shapingba square, in a circle of perfectly-spaced Chinese people all doing the same dance and moving round at the same speed. It was really bizarre, with all the neon lights and skyscrapers towering above us, and the very serious faces of the dancers, and the old men sitting under trees spectating. My time at ballroom dancing society at uni was not wasted after all, and I managed to fit in well enough with the rest of them that for a moment, I felt like I could even be Chinese.

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I found out the other day that some of my earlier weblog comments on aspects of Chinese life were actually not just a foreigner seeing things the wrong way and I was interested to see that some of the things I had observed were discussed in the papers. For example, you may remember me saying several times that I felt just a little uncomfortable with all the fireworks that were being set off all over the place, especially by 3-year-old children, but the Chinese insisted it was perfectly safe and everyone knew what they were doing. However, the papers pointed out that over half of all Chinese fireworks do not meet safety regulations, and that many cities are bringing in bans on them being set off because people keep getting hurt and killed. There were signs in Beijing when I was there saying setting off fireworks was not allowed, but one particular image is still clear in my mind, of one of these posters trodden into the ground, and small children gleefully running away from a banging thing they had just lit only a couple of metres away. The bans don’t seem to be working. The other thing was about televisions. I said that no matter how small and poor a family seems to be, they all still have a TV set, most better than mine (and mine’s pretty great). Over Spring Festival, the government gave lots of people in a poor province a TV as a happy new year present. I would have thought that the dancers in the square would be enough to entertain everyone, but this helps to explain why absolutely everyone in China seems to have a TV set.

Going back to school has not been as bad as I feared. Many of my classes gave me a big cheer when I went in last week, which was kinda nice. And the activities went well. Then yesterday, in one of the more lively and unsettled classes, a lizard was being waved at the girls by the boys to make them scream. I went over to confiscate it, thinking it was plastic, but withdrew my hand at the last moment as even though it looked plastic, I couldn’t be sure. Thank goodness I did, as then a boy picked it up and it started wriggling. Then it seemed to disappear, probably into someone’s desk, and I carried on teaching for five minutes, and then looked down at my desk to see Mr. Lizard lying lazily on my notes. Of course, I screamed loudly and leaped halfway across the classroom, which was hilarious for everyone, including me actually, as for some reason I didn’t see this as being unacceptable behaviour but quite normal in a Chinese classroom. My friend had told me how one day in his class a girl showed him the rabbit that lived in her desk. So I laughed along with them, before getting a boy to put the lizard in a box and I took it and put it on top of the water dispenser at the front of the class, telling everyone not to touch it. These kids are so fast and I must be blind, as the next thing I knew, I turned round and it was gone. I had a look around, but couldn’t find it, and then saw the box, empty, and spent the rest of the class paranoid that there was a lizard in my bag or on my back. But there wasn’t and everyone did the work better than they ever have before, and now even the ones from that class who used to be rude and rebellious say hello nicely when they see me around, perhaps because I was such a good sport about their horrid lizard. Or perhaps they’re just laughing at me for being the victim of their little pranks.

I had been warned about travelling during Spring Festival in ffice:smarttags" />China. It was supposed to be mayhem. Getting anywhere was near impossible. The whole of China was on the move. I sat on a half-empty plane from Guiyang to Beijing, annoyed that I’d spent five times the train ticket price on a plane trip, after having been led to believe buying train tickets would be impossible, when Wendy was sitting on a train having bought her ticket with no problem only the previous day. I wondered whether it was exaggeration or good management which had led to this situation, and decided it must be the latter. I had had 6 planes to choose from that day, and many extra trains had also been put on to cope with the demand. I was impressed, I doubt they could ever deal with such a situation in the UK. As soon as I arrived in Beijing a friendly student came over to help me decide which shuttle bus I should take, and despite my insistence that I could manage, took the bus with me, got off with me at the right stop, fended off hawkers, and put me in a taxi after making sure the driver knew where my youth hostel was.

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Beijing was nice. But cold. After leaving behind 20 degrees and bright sunshine in Guiyang, snow one day and clear skies and minus 20 degree temperatures the next was a bit of a contrast. I was sort of fed up of sightseeing, but I made myself play the interested tourist nonetheless, and dutifully spent several days wandering through the Forbidden City, round the Summer Palace lake, and through narrow old streets. People would come up to me, as for example one young man when I was trying to make my way the long way through the streets to get to the other side of Tiananmen Square when it was cordoned off due to a meeting taking place inside. He hurried out of a canteen to walk with me, exchanging a few words about the weather and Beijing before gasping in shy excitement that he’d been studying English for ten years and had never met a real foreigner before. The long route took a long time, and he walked with me for about an hour, making himself very useful by taking a photo of me by the gate of Tiananmen, without which I would have no pictures of myself in Beijing. Another young man came and sat with me on a kerb in Tiananmen Square as I munched through a bag of conkers for my breakfast one morning. He told me that for the night of Chinese new year there would be no kind of events I could go to. Not in Tiananmen Square anyway, as I’d kind of hoped, as they didn’t like people gathering there. Oh yes of course, silly me. So on new year’s eve I had dinner in the hotel and watched the Chinese new year TV, where singers and comedians entertained the nation. Most Chinese spend the evening with their families, so there wasn’t much going on. From the next day though, the festival began, and there were lots of fun things to see. In parks and along streets, stalls were lined up selling everything from mini scarecrows to colourful hand-held windmills to scorpions and starfish on sticks if you fancied a quick bite to eat. In temples, people prayed for a happy year, threw their own incense sticks onto piles of other people’s, threw coins at gongs and had their name engraved onto good luck metal objects. As I approached the gate of a temple complex, I saw a very long queue of people stretching back for about 600 metres. I was confused, and there was no way I was waiting in that just to go and see what it was like in a temple on new year’s day. But at the gate I saw other people walking straight in from the other side. I bought a ticket and entered by the short queue. Inside, I saw that all of those people were waiting in a queue for several hours to rub a stone which made up part of an archway. Must be good luck or something.

On my last evening there I met up with a Chinese friend who I knew from my time in Japan. He and two of his friends took me to a restaurant in Beihai Park which is called the Emperor’s Dining Room or something. It’s all gold, and you eat Emperor’s food there. I had been eating vegetarian for a few days by then, but I could hardly refuse to eat any of this. It was very very very expensive, and the Chinese way is that they couldn’t let me pay for any of it. So I enjoyed eating like an Empress and talking to these people who studied at the best university in China, who my students would probably have fainted in awe at meeting. Then we went to a very swanky bar, again with extortionate prices and very small drinks, and I had a fun evening of experiencing Beijing’s rich lifestyle.

The next day I tried to go to Mao’s mausoleum, but it was closed even though the signs indicated it should be open. Then I tried to go to the Temple of Heaven park, but I missed the right bus stop by about 7 stops, and then tried to walk back to it but was much further away than I thought I was, which I discovered after walking for about an hour and a half. So I gave up. I picked up my rucksack from the hotel and went to the train station. I was happy to learn that I’d managed to buy exactly the right ticket several days before. In Beijing train station, so the Lonely Planet says, there is a ticket office just for foreigners. Yeah ok where? There was none that I could see. I had gone to the ticket office and done the trick that always worked perfectly in Japan – stand looking around confusedly, and at least 4 random people will come running within seconds, asking “Can I help you?” It didn’t work in Beijing. I stood looking confused for about 10 minutes but no-one cared. There were about 30 ticket windows, all dealing with different things, and no English signs. Luckily I can read Chinese well enough to pick what I was reasonably sure was the right window, and stood in line with my heart thumping in my chest for 5 minutes, preparing myself mentally for trying to buy a ticket from someone who I knew would probably not speak English and would probably sneer at me and be totally impatient and tell me to go away and not understand a word of my Chinese and would probably make me cry. Sure enough, she didn’t speak English, and she did sneer, and she was impatient, but she didn’t tell me to go away and she did understand my Chinese, and sold me the right ticket. So I got onto the train for Chongqing and a nice man put my bag up onto the top bunk for me. The top bunk is the cheapest, and is very claustrophobic because you can’t sit up and you’re squished between hard bed and ceiling. But you can sleep in it, and I spent the daytime sat in a very uncomfortable fold down chair by the window with my book, where at least it was not claustrophobic and at least I could see a view. Some of the train workers cornered me in the wash-hand-basin-room and gigglingly asked me all sorts of questions about where I was from and why I was in China. And then after 25 hours I arrived back in Chongqing. The train station was packed, and I had my only experience of busy Spring Festival travel, as I made my way through the crowds from the train to the buses which would take me back to my nice little flat.