David's Big Adventure in China

We arrived back in Nanning on August 30th and I had my first class a few days after that. The first couple weeks we didn’t have a full schedule of classes so it was good to get back to work gradually. This week we’re enjoying the week off as two big holidays joined together this year to give us a total of 11 days off including the weekends and our normal days of no classes. Of course we still have prep work to do. We decided not to try to travel anywhere during this time since so many people in China travel during these holidays that anywhere we’d want to go would be so crowded. The government decided to not charge tolls on the roads during the holiday to take some pressure off the train stations and the end result was massive delays on the highways because of so many cars trying to get on them. Almost all of the intercity highways here are toll roads (for both funding and control). Most of the time the intercity highways are not too crowded and much of the traffic is trucks and buses.

A couple days before we left Nanning in late July for our trip to the states we moved to an apartment on campus which is provided to me as a foreign teacher. Because I am married to a Chinese teacher we were able to get a larger apartment than what I had when I lived on campus before. It’s about 900 square feet and is pretty comfortable except for the traditional Chinese wooden sofa and the very small kitchen. It’s not nearly as nice as the apartment we moved from and has a view of the back of another building but it’s comfortable enough for now. It does have good a/c and heat and we’ll get some cushions to soften up that wooden sofa. It also comes with some western channels on the tv (HBO Asia, CNN International, and National Geographic). When we got back to Nanning it was strange coming back to a place that we had barely moved into because we had trouble remembering where things were.

Last week we went to check out a new shopping mall located near where we used to live on the other side of town. It is a very upscale mall with shops like Coach, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Boss, Gucci, Prada, Versace, Ralph Lauren, Burberry, and Cartier. It also has Nanning’s first Dairy Queen (but no sandwiches) and Starbucks and an ice skating rink. I continue to be amazed at how much upscale shopping there is in the town that’s supposed to be a relatively poor area. There are at least 5 or 6 upscale malls in Nanning. The new mall also had an upscale supermarket (called Ole’) that had a pretty good selection of western goods. Until next time……….