David's Big Adventure in China

The school had a big Olympic style sports meeting last week from Thursday through Saturday. This is something they do every year. I got a call about a week before asking me to come to the office to get measured for a sports suit (running pants and jacket) then the next day I got a message saying they changed their mind and were going to give us money to go buy our own sports suits. The next day I went and collected the money and went shopping over the weekend and found a nice sports suit for less than the money they gave me. On Tuesday I received a memo saying to attend a practice meeting on Wednesday wearing a business suit. Then on Wednesday morning I got a text message saying the practice was cancelled and just show up on Thursday for the opening ceremony. Originally they told us all classes were cancelled for Thursday and Friday then at some point changed their mind and decided to cancel classes on Thursday afternoon and Friday. They failed to notify us of this change and thus students showed up for class on Thursday morning with no teachers present. I don’t have any classes on Thursday mornings so it was not a problem for me but some of the other teachers were upset when they got calls Thursday morning asking why they weren’t in class. This level of disorganization and lack of clear communication is quite common here and from what I’ve heard not unique to this school.

Since I didn’t have classes Thursday night or Friday I took the opportunity to get out of town for the weekend and headed south to Jinghong. I left Thursday (Thanksgiving) night after having dinner at an Italian restaurant with some of the other teachers. I took an overnight sleeper bus that cost me 200 yuan (about $27) for a 10 hour trip. The road on parts of the trip was quite rough so I didn’t sleep too much. I noticed along the way that there were many trucks and busses lined up waiting for fuel at the service stations on the highway. At one of them I counted 130 vehicles sitting on the road parked waiting for fuel. It didn’t appear the line was moving at all so the station must have been waiting on a delivery. There were service stations on both sides of the road and the station on the other side of the road must have had many more than 200 vehicles waiting. I can only surmise that there must be a serious diesel fuel shortage here.

Jinghong is the center of an area called Xishuangbanna (pronounced She shwang banna) and is located on the Mekong River near the borders of Myanmar and Laos and also near to Thailand. There are many minority people in this area and the weather there is sub tropical. Some of the minority men wear skirt like wraps instead of pants. Jinghong is a city but not a big city (I didn’t see any McDonalds’, KFC’s or Wal-Marts) and there is not that much to see in Jinghong itself. It serves more as a starting point for visiting the areas around it. I visited the Tropical Flower and Plant Garden and a local park (see pic’s). At the local park many people bring their birds in their cages to visit with the other birds (their must have been about 40 cages). I also went to the Banna Wild Elephant Valley that is part of the Sanchahe Nature Reserve. They have a small zoo there and an elephant show. I didn’t see any wild animals during my 2 hour hike through the park except for a quick glimpse of some monkeys playing in a tree. Many people use Jinghong as the starting or ending point for a multi-day trek through the countryside and forest areas. The local people are very friendly and invite trekkers into their homes for meals or to sleep for the night. Some request a small payment but many do not. If I go back to this area I would like to do a 3 or 4 day trek.

The building I live in is next to the auditorium/theatre. They started a couple weeks ago tearing that building down and it has been interesting to watch them. They are basically removing and apparently recycling almost everything from the building. They removed the roof one board at a time then knocked the walls down. The walls are brick with stucco exterior and there are several women working to remove any stucco or masonry from the bricks before throwing them in a pile. The piles are then neatly stacked in a truck for removal. Well that’s about all for now. I’ll be visiting the states in January and am looking forward to some good home cookin’ and seeing many of you!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 at 12:49 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.