Yesterday I may have inadvertently participated in a Chinese remake of Ferris Beuler's Day Off. This story takes some explaining, so I'm going to have to go back a bit. You see, there's a main square in Wu Dan, and every night, people gather for what can be described as an outdoor combination of a carnival and a senior center. There's carnival rides around the outside, like a weird tilt-a-whirl thing and then there are old people dancing to drummers in the middle. There's also a town jumbotron that only plays videos of Asian men breakdancing. I don't get it either. We went there on Saturday, and wandered for a while, which was nice, and so tonight, at a loss for things to do on our off day, we decided to go back. Yesterday, there was a stage set up, and various people performed in different ways. I watched a man fit through a foot and a half wide metal hoop, and then break a metal chain with his chest. This was fun for a bit, but I soon got the urge to move around, and I soon found Miles. We wandered down the road, and I continued a mission that I've been on since arriving in Inner Mongolia: finding a bar, any bar.
I tried to find one Saturday when wandering around with the group near the square, but I was completely unsuccessful, and began to believe that bars don't exist here. We wandered down the road, found some really expansive construction, and not much else, and turned back to the square. Instead of going back to the square, we took a turn and walked down a different street. Going past what seemed like a brothel (prices posted outside, nondescript waiting room), we saw some bright neon signs, and figured why not. We got there, and thought it was just a restaurant, but gave it a shot anyway. As it turns out, bars look like restaurants here. We got two giant beers for 7 yuan (about a dollar), and quickly drunk them because time was running out to get back to the square, doing our best to answer the staff's questions about us. The waitresses kept giggling at us, but I'm not sure if they thought we were cute, or just kinda dirty.
When we got back to the square, we discovered that the remaining teachers were being mobbed by people wanting photos. We're kind of inadvertent celebrities here. The plan was to have everyone go to the bar for a drink, but we were soon sidetracked when it was discovered that one of Alejandra's students was going to be singing on the stage soon. When we arrive at the stage, we're pulled to the front, where we watch for a bit, then I was pulled aside by Alejandra's student and asked a simple question “Would you guys sing a song?” I talked to everyone, and the answer is a big yes, but with a problem: none of us know a song to sing. I thought about this problem, and remembered that my phone was in my pocket. I flipped through the songs on it, and I realized that most people in the group would know Brown Eyed Girl. The thing is, nobody except me and Logan knew the words.
We decided that we'd just go up and sing it, because it was getting to be time to take the stage. We got up there, and I hit play on my phone. As the intro played, every teacher was pulled up to the stage. Me and Logan sang/lipsynced, and everyone else danced. Apparently my Van Morrison impression is part Van, part David Byrne in Stop Making Sense, and part Joe Cocker. Rachel took photos, I'll get them up sometime soon. Dan pulled the pretty woman who was acting as MC up and danced with her, and everyone else did whatever they felt was appropriate. The crowd went apeshit. The whole thing felt like the Twist and Shout scene in Ferris Beuler, but in the middle of Inner Mongolia. We were given a bag of free soap for our performance. The bag was shared among the group.
But that's not the only weird thing that's happened over the past 48 hours, in fact it's far from it. We had all of yesterday off, and following a morning of sleeping in, everybody decided to use the afternoon to explore Wu Dan. Miles and I decided to take a right out of the gate of our hotel, and just keep walking. We soon came to a place where a bridge over a stream should have been, but there was no bridge, and the stream was mostly industrial runoff. Deciding that we'd come this far, we crossed the stream, and climbing the bank of this weird runoff river, we found ourselves in what I would consider to be the rough part of town. Except we didn't realize it was the rough part of town when we first got there. In fact, it seemed to be a slightly more rural version of Wu Dan, but slowly the signs came to us. The shops were all gone, replaced by garages and places selling obscure equipment and electronics. Trash was everywhere, and the smell was markedly worse than before. The big sign for us was that nobody was smiling back at us, or really going anything other than glaring. Did that stop us? Hell no. We walked all the way to the edge of town, and back again. We really didn't have anything better to do. We crossed the river intact and unharmed, and roamed about town some more, although none of that is really of note.
Moving backwards in time, I discovered on Saturday that organizing a water balloon fight with 175 teenagers is not a good idea, especially if it's damn near impossible to communicate with them. There were supposed to be four games, and I explained the way that the games worked beforehand. However, I counted on two things, them paying attention and sturdy water balloons, that turned out to be things that I should not have counted on. The first game went well, baring some disorganization. They filled the water bottles up, and everything went well. The second game saw the introduction of the water balloon, and, well, you probably shouldn't leave overly full water balloons out in the sun. They almost always broke on contact, which made them nearly unthrowable. The second event ended in a draw. Playing steal the bacon worked well with them, and everyone cheered and had a good time. However, when it came to the final event, an actual water balloon fight, things fell apart, and the fight was over in about two minutes. Oh well. We closed off the day by lining up all the students for a photo, and instead of taking a photo, we just dumped water on all of them from a balcony. Classic summer camp prank.
I was supposed to run a mini-Olympics today, but it's raining, so I'm off to figure out something to do inside. I'm thinking Family Feud.
-Cooper
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