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Surprise reunion

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

Yangshou, China.

What a small world! Yesterday (Monday) on our way to class, Laurie told us that we would be picking up a guy named Tom who was coming to watch us for a day and learn more about VET and possibly volunteer himself. When our van pulled over to let in this Tom, Steve and I were both surprised to see a guy from Orange County, California who we had met in Beijing the day before leaving for Mongolia! How weird! Well, I guess it’s not that weird since I’d talked to him for a couple of hours and somewhere in there had mentioned our plans to volunteer with VET and he had sounded interested. I guess the biggest shock was that we knew he was going to study kung fu for a month East of Beijing somewhere and neither Steve nor I had realized it’d already been over a month since we had last seen him! Time flies! But I guess we had both forgotten that we’d met him before going to Mongolia, so that made a big difference. But it was neat running into him again and I was glad that my recommendation had gone somewhere.

We had a good day of teaching. I took the 4th graders and Steve took the 5th graders (Sue and Gordon had the 3rd and 6th since they’re a little more difficult). The 4th grade class went really well. We sang and colored and played games. The 5th graders were a little more difficult, with one boy in particular who was trying his very, very best to piss me off. I literally just stood and smiled at the back of the class while he did who knows what behind me to try to get me upset and to also entertain his friends. Eventually he stopped, though, and asked me to help him color later on in the class. Steve did a good job of changing gears when the boys were a little too wild when they were playing a game. The older kids are a little more of a challenge just with keeping them under control. But I guess that’s probably the same with kids everywhere. 13 year olds are harder than 11 years olds. But it was a good day.

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Our first week teaching with V.E.T.

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008

Yangshou, China.

It has been a very busy couple of weeks. We ended up leaving Fenghuang a couple of days later than I thought… the little shrimpies we had for dinner turned on us–me especially. I was up half of the night over a squatty potty being sick. Not as easy as it sounds (and I imagine it doesn’t sound too easy). I’ve gotten pretty used to the Chinese toilets and in some ways I prefer them to Western toiliets (in public bathrooms you don’t have to touch anything–often not even a stall door). It was a long night, and I was exhausted in the morning so we decided to wait another day before taking the overnight bus to Guilin. We left Tuesday morning, I think, so one week ago today. Everything went okay, I suppose. We had to take a two hour bus to the next nearest city where we booked our overnight bus to Guilin which would leave at 5:30 pm. So we had about two hours to sit and relax and make sure my stomach was holding up. The overnight bus was pretty nice. It was similar to the bus that we took from Beijing to the Mongolian border in that it had beds instead of seats. The woman who was organizing the bus stuff (taking tickets and that sort of thing) wouldn’t let us put our backpacks under the bus in the storage compartments. Instead she put them on the floor at the back of the bus, so we ended up having to take two beds on the bottom bunk at the back of the bus (the beds are set up two high and three across the width of the bus–and maybe ten beds along the length, so 30 in all). The road to Guilin was not paved and was so full of pot holes that I didn’t sleep at all and literally flew up out of the bed a few times! It was nuts. Not fun at all. We stopped around 3 a.m. for a pee break, and I was so tired that I tripped in the aisle and fell down. All of the Chinese people laughed at me and it was so disconcerting. I wasn’t hurt, but I was exhausted and it wasn’t fun to be laughed at. We arrived in Guilin pretty early in the morning, but the bus just stopped at the station and they let anyone who wanted to stay in the bus and get some sleep until the sun came up. Small mercies. So we ended up getting a couple of hours of sleep before getting up and looking for a taxi. We had already picked what hostel we wanted to go to–a little expensive at 120 yuan a night, but it was near a lot of restaurants and we’d have our own bathroom, so it was worth the splurge. We had to wait a couple of hours until someone checked out of our room, so we ordered scrambled eggs and toast and had our first Western meal in a long time. It was delicious.

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