The kindness of strangers (Courtney)

As mentioned by Marcus the weather has been hot. It's so hot I don't really think there are words for it. I remember a few years ago on my birthday it got to 45 degrees, and that was the hottest day Melbourne had had in...well, something like a couple of decades! Here, it is that kind of heat every single day. I love summer, but I have my limitations...which was proved to me yesterday.

Yesterday Abby and I decided to meet up in the city to do some shopping. We figured if we met late in the afternoon it might have cooled down a touch and after shopping we could then go for drinks/dinner. All sounded too easy. So at 3pm I left for the bus stop. The bus stop for the centre of the city is a 15 minute walk away - and the majority of that walk is through the school. Marcus insisted that I take an umbrella with me, and in hindsight I am so glad I did as otherwise right about now I would have third degree burns. I got to the bus stop and felt like I was just melting, the heat is so oppressive. So I stood in the shade and downed a bottle of water. Stood and waited some more. Ten minutes passes, no buses. Not a big drama as our bus normally comes every 10 to 15 minutes, so I figure I must have just missed the last one. Another 10 minutes passes, by now I'm started to feel over over hot, like I can no longer regulate my body temperature. I start to realise that I have not seen a bus, let alone the one I want. There are 3 different routes that go along this road, but there had not been a bus in sight. Some people are leaving the bus stop. I start to wonder what is going on when a young Chinese guy comes and asks me something in Chinese. I had to laugh, as I thought, of all the people you could ask at the bus stop, why the heck would you chose me?! When I said I didn't understand, he reverted to English and asked me which bus I was waiting for. I said the 42. He points to a scrap of paper sticky taped to a tree down the road and says - no 42 bus today. Great. I ask, do you know which other bus I can get to go to the city? But he doesn't understand so wanders away. What I don't realise is, that he hasn't just wandered away, he's gone off to try and find someone who speaks better English to help me.

We have days here, where it all seems too hard and difficult, which I'm sure we would feel in any country. You find on a lot of sites or blogs, people rarely talk about the difficulties faced here, I think a lot of people want to give of this vibe of how travel savvy they are and how nothing could phase them blah blah. But Marcus and I want to be honest in our descriptions and experiences and here, things are different. On top of just generally not fitting in and being unaware of ingrained customs, we also stick out like sore thumbs. But yesterday really showed me that for the most part, the Chinese are just curious about us, and want to know more about us - mostly, what the heck are we doing living in this district?! I often feel intimidated (never scared) by a lot of people on the street, with the pointing and staring and the loud "hellos" and it's a constant thing for me to tell myself that they are just curious because we are so different. Yesterday also showed me that most people are only too willing to help, but are generally to shy to do so because of the language barrier.

So within a minute, a young girl came over with a group of friends. They were heading somewhere too and wanted to know where I needed to be. I explained where I was meeting Abby, and said I just basically need to get to the city and I can go from there. (My problem being that I was going to just jump into a cab and try to wing it, but I had no clue how to explain to the driver where I needed to go!) The girl says, the bus has been changed, but we will help you. She hails a little bike cab (you will remember seeing pictures of these from previous posts) and explains that we want to go to the next bus stop. An argument ensued over price. He wanted 4 kuai, they wanted to pay no more than 2 kuai. I kid you not. Now remember, this little pedi cab is for me, so I say - look I'll just pay, if he wants 4 kuai lets just give him the money. But no, an agreement was not reached, so it was decided we would walk to the next bus stop.

Walk. It's 45 degrees out and the sun is blistering hot. The next bus stop is at the medical centre, which is a 20 minute walk. So off we go. I figure I had better give Abby a call at this point and tell here that I'm having a bit of a hard time getting into the city! So we walk to the next bus stop, by the time we get there I am so hot that I feel as though I am going to be sick. I am standing there praying this does not happen, as I don't think this would be a good impression on my new friends! Still, no buses, and no shade at the bus stop, just our little umbrellas keeping the sun off our shoulders. I can feel my feet and legs just baking in the sun. So one of the guys decides to go and find us a taxi, of course we are in the government district by now, so there aren't a lot of taxis driving around the manicured streets. He runs off down the road, and comes back 10 minutes later in a cab. We all pile in. By now...and I don't really want to admit this via a public blog...I was just feral. I've never been so hot in all my life, I was beet red and dripping with sweat. Thankfully as I look around, I realise that everyone else is the same. So I'm sitting in the back of the cab trying to dry off with a bunch of tissues, it was just madness how hot it was. We start off on our journey, when we pull up in a sidestreet. The young guy gets out, comes back a minute later with icy cold bottles ofwater for everyone - including me! This is what I mean by how helpful and friendly people can be. All of this effort for some foreigner who they had never met before, they were just so lovely.

We had a great chat as we went into the city. The girl was Nancy, and she works for a company near the school, we drive past it sometimes. Her dream is to go and study at Monash university and she seemed very switched on so I told her that if she wants it to keep working towards that goal. She was really lovely. What was funny was the taxi driver. Normally our conversation with the drivers are pretty limited, sometimes we will get one who rambles on and on but we don't understand a word. Well this guy realised that we had effectively a translator with us and proceeded to bombard me with questions. I was the first foreigner he said had ever been in his cab and he was curious as hell to know why I was in Wuxi, what I did, how long I had been here, did I like it, where did I come from, how old was I. The questions came thick and fast. Nancy was saying I was the first foreigner she had ever seen in our district. She says occasionally they have a foreigner come to visit their factory for work etc, but never someone who actually lives in our district...which I can believe as we have no doubt that we are the only two people in the area who look like us! Imagine that the next time you are at the local shops or walking down your street, imagine being the only person in your entire suburb who looks like you. Kind of makes you feel like you are a member of a lost tribe or similar!

We finally got into the city at 4:40....an hour and forty minutes after I had left the house. Nancy and her friend insisted that I would not give them money for the cab and that in China is final. I would have paid not only for the ride into the city but also for wherever they were heading, but they would hear none of it. What was an exhausting experience was also a really positive experience. A group of people who went absolutely out of their way to help me. All they could have done was basically told me the bus wasn't running and pointed me down the street...but instead they generously gave up their time and delayed their own plans to help with mine. I was immensly grateful, and have sent Nancy an email this morning thanking her again - and saying that if she ever finds herself in Melbourne I'll be more than happy to return the favour!

Turns out Abby and I had a fun evening, which ended in numerous cooling cocktails...hey, the weather made us do it ok!

Hot hot hot! (Marcus)

Well so far the holidays have been somewhat on the hibernative side. The weather remains stinking hot; both day and night. My neck has been really sore the past few days so I decided to walk into town and get a massage. It was around 7:30pm when I left and it must have still been at least 35 degrees. The Chinese were out in force, most opting to sit outside with fans as they likely don't have air conditioning running(or choose not to use it due to costings).

The massage was great. It was at the same blind place we have been to quite a few times before now. These guys really know how to give a good massage, you can feel their expertise as they methodically work every muscle in the neck, shoulders and back areas(or whatever you request).

Had a bit of an awkward moment as the guy was trying to get me to sit on the bench in a certain way to stretch me(he had all these funky contraction style moves he'd do) and I had absolutely no idea what he was meaning. He couldn't speak english, I couldn't understand what he was trying to show me to do and we both cracked up, along with the other woman in the room and her male customer. Ahh language barriers.

When I first entered the room I was immediately relieved that it was air-conditioned. The other two benches were already being occupied by customers recieving massages and when I asked the woman who guided me in, "30 minutes?" in chinese, the first benches occupant immediately looked up. Oh my god, WHITE MAN!!! I think they can detect us talking Chinese at at least 30 paces as whenever we do, suddenly we have everyone in the local vicinity's immediate attention.

I felt sorry for the poor helpful girl in China Mobile the other day. As soon as she started to speak a little english to us to help us sort out inability to call Australia, every single person in the shop(at least 10 customers and 4 staff) all had 200% attention on her and us. I felt uncomfortable to her. Everyone is absolutely amazed by simple things such as that. The girl probably spoke much better english than she let on - and in fact when we saw her in the food street later on and Courtney spoke to her - her english was in fact good - but under that pressure, I wouldn't blame her if she suddenly couldn't speak Chinese!

Anyhow side-tracked as usual and I have forgotten the point of this post. It's been hot hot hot, sooo damned hot - much too hot for us poor Melbournians. It's certainly living up to what we feared at any rate. The air-conditioner is practically staying on.

Poor Courtney went into the city this afternoon to do some shopping with Abby but couldn't get a bus as they had been re-routed. Her experience sounded nothing short of horrible(with a happy ending!) but I am sure she will relate that story here.

For now, I'm off to scrape out frozen coke from the cup I have frozen it in - ahhh inexpensive frozen treats. I could NOT live permanatly in a country with this kind of Summer - and with this amount of FKNG mosquitoes.

Later!

Too hot to trot (Marcus)

First and foremost, please please please keep on voting if you can get a moment!

Pic 1
Pic 2

We are getting trumped by a few other photos with a lot more votes(which I am sure is the same people over and over and over) so...if you get a moment, please pump the 5 star on the above 2 links and i PROMISE we will send you kudos vibes!

As Courtney posted earlier, it has been absolutely stinking hot here lately. Wuxi - or rather this whole area is known to be almost unbearably hot during the months of July and August and well, as soon as it ticked over to July, bam, the heat came with it.

It's interestingly seasonal here - I have never seen such specific seasonal changes. When it ticked over from Winter to Spring there was an actual instant rise in temperature and the whole place began an almost instantaneous transform of growth. Summer ticked over and suddenly the amount of rain that came down went considerably up. And then finally the last two months of Summer...Man I do not know how we're going to travel in it - but thank GOD there is air conditioning in our hostels - it just better work!!!

Our sole activity today involved catching the bus to Decalathon - a huge outdoors store and bought ourselves rucksacks for travel. We will likely either ship these home at a later stage or ship the suitcases home - all in good time.

We've been hibernating indoors as even a short walk to the supermarket and back and we're just hot and stuffed. On the weekend we will possibly go into the expat bar Blue Bar and see if we can watch the Wimbledon final on their cable TV. There's actually a channel I had never heard of before, called the Australia Channel, which seems to broadcast a lot of football games and the like. Has been kinda cool watching an AFL game while in there - despite not really caring anymore(my carefactor directly proportional to how bad Essendon is sucking nowadays).

There's not really much else to tell. We both had a chuckle last night in between killing 40 million mosquitoes. Laughing about the hothouse bathroom with it's dripping brown rust gunk, fruit flies all through the kitchen, wall to wall mosquitoes, temperatures so hot you could bake a cake by just walking around with cake mix in a bowl, the fact you cant walk around indoors without slippers on unless you actually like having the souls of your feet black. Ahhh it's just hilarious in semi-hindsight. I just know we'll look back on everything and laugh; hell, we already do!

I guess that's the most important thing about being able to live in China; a sense of humor. Sure you need to be adapable and patient and any number of other virtues, but if you can't just take it all in stride and have a laugh about it, you're basically stuffed.

I think this whole adventure has really shown that we can deal with things that beforehand we possibly thought would have sent us packing. We have never come apart and kicked into war mode but have always banded together and come through shining. While we are both looking forward to returning to Australia early next year, there are things that we will undoubtedly miss.

Every second day the feeling of being a rock star gets incredibly old. Some days when we walk into town the starefest just gets too much, yet on others, bleh, it simply is. We were walking home from town the other afternoon and were talking about it - about how bad it would be being someone like Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie - some days would be normal, others you'd just crave your own privacy - your own anononimity. Well here we actually; unbelievably, experience almost the same thing they would - though without all the perks of having millions of dollars.

I can't even remember what it's like to drive down to the shops, wander around with no-ones company other than my own. No-one is looking at me, no-one cares what I am wearing or what I am buying or what I am doing - man I am looking forward to that again. Here it's just nuts how many people look at us - but it's not just looks. They will nudge each other, we'll hear them drop the chinese word for American on their mobile phones to whoever they might be talking to. Little kids will call us Americans and laugh in joy at how alien we look. It's unbelievable.

I guess the fact we live in an area of Wuxi that really wouldn't see many whities expotentially increases it - but we've got this far, we'll get to the end. It will actually nice to just kick into tourist mode for the next 4 weeks - at least we'll feel like tourists then. Here we're not tourists but we're also not locals - we're just here.

Of course living in a local area has its perks - just take a look at the following photos:

One of the most ..I don't know what you'd even call it - we were both amazed and stunned at the same time. Take a close look at the size of the child in the back of this truck. We were eating in our regular coffee shop steakhouse haunt when it rolled up to the lights. That kid, just standing out in the open, couldn't possibly be more than 5 or so years old - yet here it is in the tray of a truck....unbelievably there was even room in the cabin - only the driver seat was occupied. Different value of life? Yes!

Check out this jalopy. You should hear the engines on these things - they must have been worked and reworked and worked again and reworked and worked and so on and so on since the early 40's or something. I remember seeing a line of these in an old looking chinese community thinking they were just wrecks - OH NOOo - there's not really such a thing as wrecks around here - if it has wheels and can carry stuff, it can hold a motor and it WILL drive.

Once again it's movie time on the pavement. The local mobile phone shop puts up a TV out front and the crowd gathers for a bit of free cinema. We have written about this once before. This time we made the stupid mistake of walking in front of the crowd - hello instant 50 pairs of eyes following us - yeah that's a good feeling for two absolutely drama-confident and outgoing people such as we!

And on a final and unrelated note - a glimpse of the wilderbeast migration that occurs every day at precisely 11:45am. The school has the uncanny ability of going from ghost town to jam-packed crowd mass within minutes.

A gripe with Mother Nature (Courtney)

Oh yeah, that's right folks, whilst it might be a sunny 35 degrees...it in reality feels like 45. Yup 45 freaking degrees!!! What is going on?? The first week of July, and as expected, the weather has lost its mind. Supposedly we have 2 solid months of this put up with. Just great when you remember that we are about to embark on a pretty full on journey around the entire country.

Oh the irony, that we are finally on holidays...and yet do not want to leave the house!!! Whhhyyyyyeeeee!!!!!

The school lake is looking more and more appealing....kind of like what I imagine an oasis would look like if one was lost in the desert.

On top of basically being housebound over the last few days (which we need anyways), not being able to sleep even with the airconditioner on, the mossies have reared their ugly heads again and this time in massive numbers. Last night we killed no less than 40 of the little darlings. You start to question your sanity when it's past midnight, you've had a freezing cold shower to try and cool down and you are aimlessly wandering the house, electric tennis racket in hand, trying singlehandedly to outwit the entire mosquito population of the wider Jiangsu province.

Start your engines! (Courtney)

We are a mere week and a bit away from starting our adventure around China, so I thought I'd do a post on where we are actually going.

Today we headed down to the train ticket office to try and get our tickets for Beijing. Mr Pan had recommended that we go down between the 1st and 3rd of July so off we went this morning. Buying train tickets we have so far found incredibly easy. I mean, stupidly easy. The ticket office is this shoebox size place down the street, with just a counter and a timetable on the wall. I really thought we would never be understood or get what we want, as you always read of absolute horror stories of foreigners trying to purchase tickets. So far though, so good. Who knows if our luck will continue on our travels, but the ticket office in our area is great. Well, the service can be a little lacking (as in the guy this morning completely ignored us until I just thrust all of our stuff through the window to him to make him pay attention) but it's fast and easy. We also found a website that lists every single train in China - you just key in your destinations and it tells you train numbers, times and costs. This makes things infinitely easier when you get to the ticket office. We ask in Chinese then hand over the train number and wham bam thank you maam!

Hi ho hi ho..it's off to Beijing we go!

So above is a map of where we are actually heading. The lines in red are our route, the lines in green are two places we hope to still get too. Well....in saying "we" I really mean "I" when it comes to the location on the far left. I really, REALLY want to see Kashgar, which is about as far west as you can get in China, but obviously it's out of the question this time around. What with the distance, and the fact it is on the border of Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan it would be ridiculously hot!!

So, I digress. From Wuxi (in between Shanghai and Nanjing) we head overnight to Beijing. We have 7 nights in Beijing, which should give us ample time to see everything. Beijing should be looking pretty good now, what with the lead up to the Olympics. From Beijing we will get another overnight train to Xi'an. Xi'an was once the capital of China, and has a lot of history. It also has a large Muslim population and supposedly one of the best remaining Muslim quarters in the country, renowned for it's food. What's even more exciting is that we have decided to live it up and stay in a hotel in Xi'an...which has a pool!! So really, once we check out the food and the Terracotta Warriors I basically wont be leaving the water for the next few days ;-)

From Xi'an it will be onto Chengdu for a week. Chengdu has been one of our must see places since we decided to come to China, and was a place we originally looked for work in. Chengdu is known for being home to the panda and teahouses. It is supposedly very laid back, to the point where other Chinese have a tendency to think of the people as being lazy. Chengdu is part of the Sichuan province, also well known for chillies - and lots of them! The food should be amazing, and our Chinese friend Josh has restaurant owning family down there, so hopefully we will tee something up with him. Sadly the large panda reserve (which is a long way out of town) was damaged in the earthquake, I think a number of the pandas have been relocated, so we will have to stick to the smaller panda centre which is closer to town. The surrounding around of Chengdu has lots of beautiful sites and I think it will be a highlight of the trip.

From Chengdu, it is then even further down south to Yunnan province, near Vietnam. We start off in Kunming, where we will be joining an Intrepid tour which does a little triangle route throughout the province. The tour goes for 9 days and takes in Kunming, Dali, Lijiang, Tiger Leaping Gorge and Zhongdian, known nowadays as Shangri-La. We are both so excited about this part of our journey. Yunnan province we hear is one of the most beautiful areas of China, you would know it if you saw pictures - all the huge karst stones, mountains, yangzi river etc. It should be green and lush and clean! I am hanging to see Lijiang, which I fell in love with when I saw it Kylie Kwong's latest book on her travels through China. It looks like a beautiful old town, cobblestone lanes, little creeks. Zhongdian looks amazing too. This is the largest Tibetan town outside of the Tibetan province. It looks very remote. When we were organising the trip Tibet was still closed, with no sign of it being reopened prior to the Olympics. However it has just reopened last week, but we will not have time to go there. From Kunming we will then fly back to good old Wuxi, where we will have a good two weeks before teaching starts again. I think we will be buggered by the time we get home, and will probably be thankful for some days at home. We are travelling around 9,000 kms which is a fair effort but certainly worth it.

All that remains is for us to buy our packs and we will be ready to go!

Yummy! (Courtney)

Just wanted to show you a couple of pics of two of our fave foods around these parts. Down at the food market, we have an awesome "food street" by the side of the market, which we were introduced to on our first day in Wuxi. It took a while but the men and women who operate these stalls are now pretty familiar with us (what with us being the only two laowai in Dong Ting!) and we have a few favourite stands that we frequent. We are even pretty much charged the local price too! Maybe a kuai or two more every now and then, but on the whole I think we have earnt their respect by buying and eating their food, and also speaking to them in Chinese.

The street is yet to feature in the blog, as I feel that by taking the camera down there, I will effectively make them uncomfortable, in some sense turning it into a touristy thing, and in turn making me a tourist. Marcus reckons they would love it, and they most likely would, but I am saving my photos until just before we leave. Then...it will be a free for all of photos of this little street!

Whilst down there today, we ran into the two girls from the mobile phone store, who had helped us only 10 minutes prior. We went to the phone shop yesterday and then had to return today to try and get our Chinese phones fixed. Seemingly we can now call Australia again, but we've sent a few test messages to people with no replies, so we imagine that texting is still not an option! So we had a funny little interaction with the two girls from the store, as I think they were pretty surprised to see us ordering from the same cart that they too were getting their lunch from. It's these little interactions, and also our own behaviour, that helps us to "fit in". We will categorically never fit in here, but these little steps I think help to show other people that we are just regular folk, getting our food, eating etc and that we don't see ourselves as better than the local market. Whilst we are still pointed at and called out too, the people who we have interactions with are all just charming, helpful and friendly people. It all works both ways. It helps with our understanding and it helps with their understanding.

But enough of that, I'm getting all philosophical when I all I wanted to do was show you two pictures!!

Here we have Marcus' fave flat bread. These are obviously made all over the world in various countries, but it's certainly not something you can just pick up on the street in Melbourne. These are made in a 44 gallon drum, that looks about 30 years old, with a fire at the bottom. In goes the bread, little bit later out they come and onto a piece of dirty of mesh. You can get either salty ones or sweet ones and they are both delicious. Marcus loves them and devours them in record time. Six of these things cost 2 yuan, about 30 cents.

And this is what we have dubbed "Asian Souvlaki". A little lady has an old cart with a pan of oil, and a small chopping board. Onto these incredibly thin pancakes goes an assortment of things, from these old enamel bowls. Various noodles, greenery, seaweed, chilli, and of course, the frankfurt/hot dog sausage, which the Chinese go GAGA for. They are so yummy and at a cost of 1.5 yuan, I have no idea how she is making any money. Next to her is our friend the popcorn lady. Now that it is summer she no longer makes popcorn but helps out her friend chopping up noodles and bits and pieces.

If you could see this little street you would think us crazy to eat there, but my god there is just so much amazing food being produced there, all with little to no equipment. We will sorely miss this sort of thing once we return home!

Photo competition

Hi again,

I think last week I did a post about a photo competition that Marcus and I have entered here. Well today voting opens! So as previously stated...please vote for us! Please see the below links, and if our photos make you smile (or even if they don't!) then please vote for us...even out of sympathy.

And tell all your friends to vote for us too!

Up for grabs is some much needed travel money, which we would absolutely love to be able to add to our dwindling travel fund.

http://tui.cn/en/contest_gallery.php?week=3&id=user485343ae4c552

http://tui.cn/en/contest_gallery.php?week=3&id=user48534aa1bdc7c

Voting closes on the 10th, so plenty of time.

And of course, thank you for the support!

Courtney and Marcus =)