Gone to war

So, I haven't updated in a while. There have been things to say, but not a lot of time. The whole thing about police boats I alluded to last time? Not really an interesting story. Seriously, what actually happened can't be half as interesting as what any of you THINK happened.

The last thing I'd like to mention about my vacation in Yangshuo....which was 3 weeks ago now, is that the sleeper bus on the way back was one of the more unpleasant experiences of my life. And know that I've seen a few excerpts from the movie Pearl Harbor. Anyway, we bought our tickets from a travel agent a few days in advance...but what we didn't realize is that we apparently didn't have guaranteed seats. There was a big crowded rush to get on the bus, and normally I ignore this. Chinese people crowd everywhere. If there's nothing else to do, they'll crowd. This happens at the train station, at bus stops...pretty much anywhere, even in places with assigned seats. So in this case I decided to hang back and get on the bus at a leisurly pace. Unfortunately it turned out that they'd oversold this particular bus, and so I didn't get a seat so much as a place on the aisle in between two seats. I think this was punishment for wondering earlier if it was possible to make the sleeper bus seats more uncomfortable.

Since then, it's been class as normal. Oh, and one of the other foreign teachers got mugged and cut pretty badly, but everythings fine now.

For the past week, my classes have been giving presentations, and some of them have been pretty good. One class had to come up with some kind of advertisement, and so the used the sinking of the Titanic to advertise a mobile phone (the message was bascially, "If you used our mobile phone service, then you could have joined your family safely in a life raft instead of futilely searching for them in the cargo holds and thus drowning cold and alone.") Others were blatantly plagiarized, as they could not actually tell me the meaning of half the words they used. The best example of that was a group that, instead of a script they wrote, handed in a photo-copied script from a book. What's more, one of the group members didn't even say anything (and the most important rule I wrote down and repeated many times was "Everyone in the group must talk"). So now I have to figure out a way to give this girl double zeroes.

Finally, I come to what I intended to be the actual subject of this entry, war. Yes, last night I went to war. For as long as I've been here, I've held a tenuous peace with the mosquitoes that inhabit my apartment. I usually only got one bite every few days, and as a result I maintained a "live and let live" policy with them. But last night, they just couldn't leave well enough alone. First they would buzz in my ear each and every time I was about to fall asleep. Then I noticed, within the span of about a half an hour no fewer than 8 new bites. So, at 3 this morning, I set out to kill as many as I could, only to realize just how many of them there were. 17 dead mosquitoes later, I still couldn't see an end to them, because they would only come out 2 at a time. The situation looked hopeless until I remembered that I actually have a mosquito net over my bed, and I'd just never really used it. Despite the embarassment, I went ahead and chalked that one up as a victory for humanity.

So there you have it. I've listened to presentations and managed to outsmart some insects. I've made all of you proud.

I'm gonna be a part of it....Yangshou, Yangshuo

First of all, I'd like to warn any of the weak of heart away from this entry as it contains mature content. And by that I mean talking general scatalogical disucssions.

You've been warned.

So, I've been out of contact for a while because I've been in Yangshuo. It's near Guilin. Yes, THAT Guilin. Impressed, no? Once again, I will try to spare you the boring point-by-point itenerary.

Yangshuo and Guilin are famed for their scenery, and I have to admit that it didn't disappoint. You know the traditional Chinese landscape paintings? It actually looks like that in Yangshuo. They have many natural parks filled with pristine walking paths under the wonderful peaks, and the whole thing is quite serene. What wasn't so serene were gastro-intestinal escapades in the park's public toilet under the wonderful peaks. There's a reason they don't show that part in the traditional Chinese landscape paintings, as it does tend to spoil the mood.

Now, just for a brief explanation of Chinese toilets. For those of you uninitiated, Chinese conceptions of toilets are quite different from ours. From my travels, I've seen pretty much every type, and all of them fall under the category of "squat pots". Others are more like troughs, with a stream of water flowing through. The last variety are the simple holes in the ground. Needless to say, they all tend to run in varying degrees of unpleasantness. Chinese people will often try to argue that Chinese toilets are more sanitary as your posterior never actually touches porcelain. I dispute the "more sanitary" claim by pointing out that people can, and frequently do, miss. This makes bathroom experiences significantly more unpleasant than normal.

This toilet side-note basically exists to frame the hotel where I stayed in Yangshuo. It was only 25 yuan a night (about $3) and it was worth every penny. Everything from no air-conditioning to bug infestations plagued my nights there, but the real kicker was the shower. There was a public bathroom (just two stalls with squat-pots), but we couldn't find the shower. What we had, instead, was a bucket. If we wanted bodily cleansing, then we should fill the bucket with water, stand in the stall, poor it over ourselves, lather, and rinse again from the bucket. Normally this wasn't actually too bad, but we did have to stand in the stalls....and like I said before sometimes people miss.

The less said on this subject, the better.

So, I'm trying to think of non-restroom highlights of the trip. I went into a cave. That was fun, except that being 6' 5" and relatively inflexible don't really put me in the group of people best suited for moving through cramped spaces. I was also the only laowai in the group, and if you're the only laowai in a group of Chinese people you get to be part of a fun game called "Stupid Foreigner". It involves everyone closely observing everything you do, laughing when anything happens, and occasionally throwing in some middle school English.

Another annoying thing about Yangshuo was that no matter where you went, people would try to sell you something. I hiked up a mountain, and a lady with a cooler strapped to her back hiked right up with me, trying to sell me water, cola, beer, or post cards all the way up.

The other interesting thing about the tourist shops were the shirts they sold. Obviously they had people who could make custom t-shirts, so you could get Michael Jordan, Yao Ming, Tony Blair, pretty much anyone on a t-shirt. I spotted, and this is by no means a definitive list: Saddam Hussein (pre and post capture), Osama Bin Laden, and Wen Jiabao (China's Premier) all together. What kind of message are they trying to send? The wierdest shirt I saw consisted of a very simple drawing of a cartoonish, buck-toothed coolie straight out of a 19th Century political cartoon. This was being sold in the heart of China.

I'm going to wrap this up for now, but I'll finish talking about it later. The next installment involves wacky adventures at a youth hostel as well as incidents with police boats. Be sure to tune in!