Guilin #1

Sunday, 7/8: At about 9 pm the train arrived in Guilin. We were met by Zoe, our contact at the school, and Hai'er (whose name is the same as that of a common appliance brand in China, similar to Kitchenaid). They are both English teachers at the school, which is the Middle School attached to Guangxi Normal University. Zoe took us in a cab back to our apartment. It is in a set of apartments for teachers right next to the middle school. It is very nice. There was a watermelon and cold water waiting for us in the refrigerator, along with an enormous bunch of bananas (the short, very sweet Guilin kind) and a vase of sunflowers. Charlie and Forrest are sharing a room, which has air conditioning. I get my own bedroom, but it only has a standing fan. It is very hot and humid in Guilin! We also have a kitchen, a bathroom with a laundry machine, and a room with a computer with Internet access.

The style of our bathroom is very typical in China. There is a drain in the floor, and then the showerhead is just stuck on the wall and water gets all over the floor whenever you shower. When you finish you can use a broom to push the water into the drain. Also, the tube from the laundry machine doesn't quite make it to the drain, so every time we do laundry it floods the bathroom floor. It's a little bit of a surprise to be sitting on the toilet and suddenly have water washing around your ankles. The only atypical thing about the bathroom is that the toilet is Western-style. Most toilets in China are squatters. I like squatters better at this point because they seem cleaner, but if you have indigestion/diarrhea (la duzi) then it is nice to be able to sit down.

Monday, 7/9: There is a big lake right next to the school, so this morning we spent an hour or so walking along it. Guilin is like living inside a fancy walled-in rich-people community, or Disney World. There are pretty, ornamental bridges all over the place (my favorite is a steeply arched, M-shaped, wooden one whose planks bend and creak as you walk over it) and so many trees and bushes and flowers that you feel like you are in the countryside rather than in a city, and there are randomly people sitting around on the pebble paths by the water playing traditional Chinese instruments. The Guilin scenery is stunning, because the city is dotted with these greenery-coated miniature mountains that look like they spontaneously shot straight up out of the earth. They continue off into the distance, so that the horizon is a continuous, jagged line of hazy blue mountains.

The school gave us a banquet for lunch at a nice hotel across the lake. So much food! One of the dishes they served was mifen, rice noodles, which is a specialty of Guilin. Three English teachers were there (one of whom had the same name as a Chinese kung fu movie star and who told me that he wanted to find an English-speaking wife so that he could practice his English with her), and a school administrator named Sue who is in charge of our class. There were also students there, whom we were told are the school's best students. Only one of them (Gissing) is going to be in our class, though. Two of them wanted new English names, so we named one Rose. The other went through a whole list of names we gave her before she settled on Alexis. They had Charlie, Forrest, and I stand up and each introduce ourselves in Chinese, which made the students giggle a little bit. After lunch, they gave us a doggie bag full of baked potatoes and purple sweet potatoes (which are now also my favorite ice cream flavor - it is creamy and purple and tastes like a buttery hazelnut).

After lunch, the students took us around Guilin. Charlie wanted to buy new sandals, so they took us to a super-expensive shopping mall (which didn't have what he wanted anyways) and a Nike store and a cheap mall in the underground passageways for crossing the big streets. Charlie didn't like it because he said it felt like babysitting, and you could tell they were eager to go home because in the middle of the day in Guilin it is very hot and muggy and most people stay home in the air conditioning and rest. Schools generally have a break from 11:30 to 2:30 so that their students can go home to eat lunch and take a nap through the hottest part of the day. I attempted to buy the students ice cream (there were 6 or 7 of them with us) but they wouldn't let me, so then Charlie just bought it for them anyways. I need to learn to be pushy like that because that is courtesy here, where people never own up to what they want. As a blunt American, if someone offers me something and I want it, I say "sure!" But then the ice cream turned out to have melted and re-frozen, so it was icy and the cones were soggy. Oh, well. In the evening Forrest and Charlie went to play soccer with Hai'er, but I just lay in the apartment in the blessed air conditioning.