Hi again from China,
It’s been a while since I last posted, but not for a lack of excitement. In fact, I just got back last weekend from a week-long vacation for the National Day of the People's Republic of China (like Canada Day, except that here we get a week off from classes). To make the best of our free time, a few friends and I decided to take a 25 hour train ride to Guilin, located in Guangxi Autonomous Region in Southern China.
Our principal destination, however, was Yangshuo, which used to be a small backpacking village with beautiful scenery. The plan was to take a bamboo raft ride down the Li River through the Karst Formations, which are steep mountains made primarily of limestone. After being slightly tricked by local salespeople and finding out that the government has regulated the raft industry into small PVC rafts, we reached Yangshuo. While the scenery has not really changed, much else has…
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Thankfully, our hostel was a short walk away to the next village where it was much more peaceful. During our stay, we took a biking trip through many surrounding villages, went rock climbing, took a cooking class, lazed about in a mud bath and a hot spring and took a hike in the area around our hostel (where we may or may not have gotten lost in a forest trying to take a shortcut to the river)!
Prior to our longer trip for the national holiday, I made several other small day or weekend trips. First, I stayed in Nanjing and went to Purple Mountain. I took a half hour gondola ride up to the top for a beautiful (and polluted) view of Nanjing. I also got the opportunity to spend Mid-Autumn Festival eating moon cakes by Taihu Lake, Nanjing and exploring the surrounding area at night.
Most of the exchange students also took a weekend trip to Wuzhen and Hangzhou, in Zhejiang province, just to the west of Jiangsu province. Wuzhen is a small, old water town built on a series of canals, which is now primarily a tourist destination that has retained some of the flavour of an old town. Hangzhou is the largest city in Zhejiang which is famous for West Lake, a large lake located in the city. With less cooperation from the weather than we had hoped for, we found more excitement trying new foods which included skewers of crab, donkey and ostrich.
If all of that wasn’t enough excitement for a few weeks, we also paid a short visit to Suzhou in Jiangsu province to meet with some of the officials of the Ontario Jiangsu (OJS) exchange program. We took the chance to walk around the city at night and visit the ‘Humble’ Administrator’s Garden, which spans about 13 acres.
In the meantime, there have been classes to attend and ceremonies to participate in, food to try and neighbourhoods to explore. This past weekend, I was even an extra in an episode of a Chinese sitcom! The classes are all in English as my Mandarin is definitely not strong enough for a full class. For that reason, all of my classmates are international students who are mostly doing full degree programs in China. Many of them do not put much effort into participating and listening in class, which makes for a much different class atmosphere than I am used to.
While I try my best to remain positive as much as possible, there have been frustrating times as well. The electricity was shut off without warning until we payed our bill (which does not exist and upon further inquiry, included electricity charges dating back to April). That was an interesting situation to sort out. After parking our bikes outside the dormitory for weeks with no regulations listed against doing so, my bike was towed by campus security and I was unable to recover it until the following week, once I figured out where it had been taken. Sometime during the national holiday, my bike was also stolen. At the end of the day, there is nothing to do except roll with the punches and try to understand the culture and methods of conducting day-to-day lives.
So long for now!
Shaun