July 9th
Holy fucking shit have I ever had a weird 24 hours. It's a pretty linear narriative, so I'm just going to go in order, and everything should make the most sense. We left the school in Beijing around 12:30 on a bus, which was suprisingly comfortable, and air conditioned. We got on the highway, and things promptly came to a screeching halt. As we slowly crawled down the interstate, Logan made an important observationabout Chinese traffic that requires me to explain a little bit about traffic in Beijing. Never in my life have I been so completely calm and accepting around traffic that obviously wants nothing more than to detroy me. As we left the stand that we got lunch at, both Logan and I had to jump out of the way of a van making a 30mph left and turn at a red light. In a normal situation, I would have been shook up, but in China I just laughed and kept on walking. Anyway, what Logan said was that traffic here behaves like pedestrians; everyone goes where theres space, with complete disregard for the flow of motion. It took us half an hour to get three blocks, and folowing several snags of this variety, we made it to the train station.
We arrived pretty early, and because of this, we all had to huddle around in a circle for an hour. We had a guitar, and we entertained ourselves and several chinese people by playing any song we knew, regardless of content. This is how I ended up singing The Best Ever Death Metal Band to several little Chinese girls. None of them seemed to care about the content. After way too much of this nonsense, we boarded the train, and everyone got a big suprise. See, when everyone said that teains were going to be crowded, I though that it was going to be airplane crowded. It...was...not. Apparently you can buy standing room only tickets on trains here, and if someone doesn't show up for their seat, you can sit, so I boarded the subway-crowded train to find a man in my seat. After a bunch of yelling and me showing my ticket, I gothim out of my seat, focing him into the asile, along with many other people. Miles was less lucky. He discovered that someone had used his overhead storage space, and had to keep all of his bags on him. This left me with the guitar on my lap for the journey. Following some more shuffling and yeling, the ride began.
Riding a train through China is an odd experence. There are three kinds of sights: Farm land, cities, and what I can only describe as a kind of waste, which looks like the bottom of an old riverbed, which has dried up and has been replaced with scrub grass. Sometimes there's sheep or cattle, but mosty there isn't. All of these things are interspersed with weird industrial pockets, power plants, odd factories, and construction. Construction seems to be a constant. I saw more construction cranes than I could count, and it's all very high apartment buildings, hundreds of them dotting the landscape, sometimes in the middle of nowhere. The ride lasts for five hours, and we were all pretty excited to get off the cramped train.
This is where the strange really takes over. We get off the train in some generic large city, and boarded a bus. We were told the ride was going to take an hour, which should have been a tip off that something odd was afoot, but we continued on blindly. We got on a highway, and headed out of town. Chinese highways are like Mexican highways. They're dark, narrow, and you really don't have a sense of direction on them. After a loing voyage, we pulled off the interstate in the middle of nowhere, and headed down the road. As we drove through the dark, what can only be described as a cheap knockoff of an American suburb popped up out of nowhere, and we turned in. I said, "If the school is here, I'll eat my hat". Guess what? There was the school. Hat eaten.
As we filed off the bus, many dead eyed Chinese laborers crowded the gate, giving the scene a Children of the Corn feel. We lugged our stuff through the dead of night into what felt like a prison cafeteria, had some really good cake and a bowl of warm whole milk, and were escorted to our rooms. Remember how bad our rooms were in Beijing? these are worse. One room in a building that looks like it may have been a barrack once, 8 bunks, mosquito nets on all the beds, and washbasins, because our rooms don't have running water. There are two showers in the same room for all 30 people, and the toilets are slits in a concrete slab with a big pit underneath them. Everyone freaks out. There's a wall next to our building with broken glass on top to keep people out, and there's this eerie sense of fear everywhere. Attempting to make the best of the situation, all of the guys decided to treat it like a summer camp. I'm probably going to shower once in this next week, despite the fact that all I do is sweat here, and we're all just going to have to work through it.
The good news is that it's much better in the daylight, and everyone here seems to be really happy that we're here, and wiling to learn. We'll see where we're all at tomorrow. We meet our students today, and we teach tomorrow. Let's hope I don't flop. How are things back home? It goes without saying that I miss it right now.
-Cooper
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