The Warriors in winter

Last weekend I finally made it to the Emperor's Warriors in Xi'an. Considering it was a snowy day at the end of November, I was surprised that the place was still fairly busy













(with Chinese tourists of course, not foreigners.) Visiting off peak certainly made the experience more pleasant as, with all Chinese tourist attractions, you have to run the gauntlet of souvenir shops, food stalls and street hawkers before you get anywhere near the site. In this case, it was almost a twenty minute walk between getting off the bus and getting a glimpse of the warriors! I think with crowds and the heat of summer, the experience would not have been a pleasant one...
Anyway, the site itself has been reasonably well managed and between buildings is actually very pleasant to walk around.





Here's a photo of the most biggest (and most famous) pit - the shot everyone recognises but, for me, it was the smaller pits of semi-excavated ruins that was the highlight. Looking at the broken 2000 year old statues who are no longer doing a very good job of guarding Emperor Qin Shi Huang's tomb reminded me of very much of Shelley's Ozymandias, "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Plus, I have to say the lighting in the smaller pits was much, much better than in the biggest one. Many of the warriors haven't been excavated at all yet and are still covered over (hopefully left for the future when better techniques can remove them more safely!)







The last building was a small but well lit and well laid out museum and at its entrance was a giant puppet warrior which was used for the Beijing Olympics and must have been cool to see walking around.
It was a pleasant day out - not least for people watching. Watching Chinese tourists taking photos of their heads popping out from the top of a headless warrior's body is all part of the fun of life in China!

Danfeng - the rich, the poor, the beautiful and the ugly!

Although Danfeng is officially classified as a poor part of rural China, not everything in the town is basic or falling apart. There are plenty of small, expensive looking shops where the owners take great pride in keeping them sparkling and pretty like this Chinese version of Boots.





There are also much poorer looking areas, where the shops are simply goods placed on the ground outside the people's houses, like this pots and pans shop.













And again, there are many people with no shop at all but simply a cart they wheel into town every morning and home again each night - and most of the vegetable carts have great looking vegetables!
















Shopping (or window shopping) is the main activity for people round here but I prefer to walk down by the river which is much more peaceful and the colours of the mountains in the early evening are beautiful.















And finally, as promised, me in my new red coat - though unfortunately most of the snow had gone by the time I got round to taking a pic!

what I actually do...

It's probably about time now that I say a bit about what my general work life is like here. I've been very lucky in that my school has been happy to let me make the decisions on what I do. VSO suggests volunteers take 1-2 months to simply observe and assess the situation before jumping in with ideas and changes and so I've been careful to do that. Actually, it only takes a few days to appreciate what the key development needs are but the longer timescale is required to understand the people and the culture and how best to approach these needs. I'm actually nowhere near understanding how best to meet the needs but I am now under pressure to make a move and do something.
VSO advises that countries and cultures are usually slow to change but here in China there's an extra dimension. The schools themselves - by which I mean the leaders, who aren't actually (and have never been) teachers - are keen for fast change, but those who actually have to implement the changes (the teachers) are much less keen. This causes problems for me as I obviously want to see things moving, but my main empathy is for the teachers and I want to support them at a pace that's right for them.
I did my first "English Corner" today - a group for the English teachers which aims to help them improve and grow more confident in spoken English - by organising a 40 minute chat on a specific theme. I wanted them to choose the theme but was told it was best for me to choose the first theme as they wouldn't know what to choose (and would therefore choose nothing.) I chose "Chinese and UK festivals" as a neutral theme that would allow us both to know each other's cultures better. I also chose the group that I knew would chat best (Grade 9 rather than Grade 8 or 7) but I still found that all the effort was on my part and that they were passive. Even when it came to them telling me about Chinese New Year, they still required prompts and questions to speak to me.
As one of my key objectives here is to make the students active learners, I worry how that can happen when even the best of teachers here aren't active learners themselves and therefore are going to find it very difficult to encourage their students to be...
I must say that, in general, what a Chinese teacher classes as busy would make a Scottish teacher laugh. They teach two (identical) 40 minute lessons a day to the same two classes each day of the week and the rest of the time they simply mark homework and write out a lesson plan which they don't follow.
My first workshop (on Enthusiasm and Motivation) is at the start of December and although I've told the teachers that the "enthusiasm" is for the students, it's at least as much as, if not more so, aimed at the teachers!
I'm also very lucky in my office. I share with three others, my translator (a university student teacher who is taking advantage of the chance to improve her spoken English (but who's sadly only here till Feb) and two 30 something female staff ( one who has been put in charge of the "foreigner" as she speaks a little English - and wanted the job) and one who is in charge of the Communist Youth League - still trying to find out exactly what this is...
We all get along great (although obviously half the time I don't know the finer points of what's going on - not helped by the fact that the Youth League Rep speaks no English whatsoever.) There's quite a "girly" atmosphere in the office, which I'm taking advantage of, and I'm now quite competent in offering compliments on clothes/shoes/hair in Chinese!


I know this is a terribly out of focus shot but I like it cos it it represents my office: minus 4 degrees inside - Ms Zhuang and Ms Yang warming up with their electric heater - me with my electric hot water bottle - snow outside - and a girly bonding session!

Winter in the morning and summer in the afternoon

The weather here has taken a cold snap and it's now around minus 2 at night. I have made all the necessary Chinese purchases - warm pyjamas, wrist to ankle thermal underwear and a long red padded down coat. The strange thing is that by the afternoon it can hit the 20s and it's t-shirt weather again. As my interpreter says, "For you it's winter in the morning and summer in the afternoon." It is indeed!
At the start of this week, I went on an interesting day trip round the rural north of the county to visit half a dozen schools which had "special features." What this means is that the government has given the school a substantial amount of money and they had often chosen to spend it on prettying up the exterior of the school with fountains, ponds, gardens etc. Nothing wrong with that per se, but then you walk into a dirty, bare cramped classroom with 80 kids sitting on broken stools and can't help wanting to tell the proud headmaster that the money could have been better spent. I managed to restrain myself though, and waited till I got back to school to tactfully put my views to my own school.



View of front of one of the "special feature" schools





Not all of the schools spent the cash on pure decoration. One school had built a library and one had built a "psychological room" to help students with emotional difficulties. Great idea! The problem was that these rooms were beautiful and were kept beautiful by not letting any students into them. So far, I have seen quite a few science labs, computer suites, libraries, sports areas etc and NOT ONCE have I ever seen any children using them.
"psychological room" - unused but beautiful!


A few schools however, put the money directly into benefiting the kids. I visited a very remote school (two hours along a dusty track up a mountain) for children of migrant workers. This means the parents have gone to the city to find work and have left the children alone so the school puts them up in dorms and feeds and educates them. I have seen some pretty gruesome dorms already and as the migrant school is for the poorest children, I expected the worst. However, the school leaders had spent the money on very practical things - the dorms and dining hall - and, for China, these were fantastic.

The dorms of migrant workers children. It looks unlived in, I know, but that's just instilling in the kids a sense of Chinese discipline - the
kids sleep two to a bed as well.




















Me and two of the migrant workers children. They were very shy as most of them had never left the mountains before and were probably wondering why a strange white woman was wandering around their school...

The reason that we were visiting all these schools is because my school, Longju Middle School has also been given money and the headmaster, Mr Yao, wants to see how best to spend it. Let's hope I can subtly influence him less for show and more towards the practical!

school pics

Me playing colour game
Me observing class
Me in my office

Me facilitating a Grade 7 teacher meeting
Grade 7 classroom block as seen from my office

School life...

In terms of daily life, things are pretty settled here in Danfeng but the school situation isn't quite as straight forward. The staff are friendly (in a smile -at-me-as-they-pass way) and the management seems happy to trust that I know what I'm doing and leave me to it, but I'm finding that (like teachers everywhere) there's a lot of complaining from the general staff that they're too busy for new things and that the things I'm suggesting won't work. It's a bit depressing, especially since I'm following VSO's 'go slow' approach and the things I'm suggesting aren't really going to take any time or effort on the part of the teachers - that's supposed to come later!!
My daily routine is -
6.50 - get up and get ready for work
7.45 - meet my translator outside my building and do the 5/10 minute walk to work together
( I love the walk as I like watching the stall holders setting up their vegetable/plastic container/cloth stalls on rickety tables and those with permanent shops sweeping down the pavement outside with bunches of twigs. I also love watching the old folk exercising in the newly built town square. It's always a kind of slow Tai Chi movement but some days they use fans, some days bits of red material and some days giant fans. So cool!)
8.00 - weave my way through a playground of 3000 students all simultaneously doing morning exercises to instructions through a loud speaker (check out 'my videos' section of my blog to watch the exercises)
11.30 - home for lunch and the toilet (as I try my hardest not to use the female staff toilets. It's not just the stink and filth but that there are no cubicles, just a row of pits where everyone can watch everyone else and from which female students are not banned - on one horrific day, I went to the toilet and just as I crouched down between 2 other female staff, half a dozen 14 year olds came in and of course just stood and stared at me. Still gives me the shudders!)
1.45 - meet Zhao Man (my translator) outside the building again and walk back to work
2.00 - back in the office
5.10 - the day is finished for me - but not for the kids. They're back at 6.30 and study till 8.40. They also start way before me and have to be at school for 6.30. Luckily, VSO specifies that volunteers follow a reasonable Western working week!
I know I haven't said anything about WHAT I'm actually doing at work yet but no need to rush - I can keep that for another post...

My life in China so far

My first Chinese wedding. The bride and groom were very welcoming, even though they had no idea who I was or what I was doing there!






The happy wedding chefs (the bridegroom's neighbours!)


The wedding feast which generally tasted good but the dish with the chopsticks in is pig's ear (too much cartilege!)


Danfeng municipal government built a new fountain to celebrate China's 60th National Day. When I arrived, there was nothing there. Six days later, they'd built a square and a fountain.

My school (teachers and students) performing in the town square for National Day.

Child with bread - more interested in watching me than the National Day celebrations.


A girl from my school at the National Day celebrations.

Lovely looking dried fruit at a market in Xi'an.

Food market in Xi'an - I'm not sure how appetising it looks to an outside eye but I had my worst meal in China here...

Finally part of the world again!

My flat in Danfeng

Finally, after almost six weeks in China, I’ve got my internet problems sorted out and I should now have regular access to my blog and facebook (at £6 a month to my UK proxy server.) It’s well worth it, though, as I also have access to BBCiplayer and ITVplayer, which means I can now watch the X-factor and see the Christmas Dr Who!!)

Anyway, it’s impossible now to go back to fill in the last month’s experiences so instead I’ll pick out a few highlights in photo form and give the basics in writing of how things are in general. I’ve settled well into Danfeng. I love my flat (small but private – though a kitchen sink would be a plus!) and I like the town a lot. It has far more available food and clothing than I was expecting. I can get almost everything here for daily life (except decent bread – sob!) and in Xi’an, which is 3-4 hours away by bus, I can get books in English (limited choice of course.) One thing that I can’t get at all in China is magazines – I’m missing Delicious and Good Food mags already!

People here are friendly and, as I’m the first white person EVER to stay in Danfeng, they’re pretty curious. The stares are slowly becoming fewer though, at least in the few streets that I use every day (from my flat to the school and to the one supermarket!) I also have a few “friends” which makes me feel part of the town;

- the baker who I buy bread from and gives me a daily monologue in Chinese that I can’t understand a word of

- the hairdresser down the road who sits on a stool outside her shop as she never seems to have any customers but smiles at me every time I go past

- the old, old man who seems to be the foreman of a building site (though I’ve never actually see him do any work) and who keeps beckoning me over – which so far I’ve chickened out of!

I also have two little friends - Han Liang (6) and his big sister Han Yue (8) who appear at my front door every few days with a present for me. Sometimes it’s homemade biscuits, sometimes fruit or nuts and last night it was an omelette in a carrier bag! They won’t take anything from me though, and run away as soon as they’ve given me the present.

I’ve lots more to say, but will keep how my school is for another time.

Oh, and for the buddies who love me, my address is

VSO Kirsten Gould

Longju Middle School, Dan Feng

SHAANXI

陕西省丹凤县龙驹中学,726200

China

Should you have the desire to send me a xmas card/birthday card/Delicious magazine ;-) just copy, paste, print it out and stick it on the front of the envelope!

I am now a Beijinger

Although I’ve been in China for quite a few days now, the Great Firewall is not letting me access either my blog or facebook (sob!). Hopefully, I can fix that when I get to my village but for now I’ve asked my sister to post this up for me. I can still get email and am also sent any comments posted on my blog through yahoo.
Anyway – I’m loving Beijing. It’s a much cleaner and calmer city than I was expecting. When I took the subway to work during rush hour on Monday morning, you would never know that 23 million people were doing the same thing.
The VSO Chinese office staff are great – we all went out for a banquet lunch together on the first day and they’ve all been taking time to chat and answer questions.
On Tuesday, I had my first Chinese lesson here and as the level was too easy, I said I would just practice alone. However, VSO have found me a private tutor and I had my first 3 hour lesson with her today. After a bit of dialogue practicing asking for directions and finding my way about, we went out into the streets for a real life practice and it was hilarious. She would be walking beside me hissing in Chinese, “Ask him how to get to the nearest subway station,” and when I did, she would be standing right behind me (clearly a local) so our victim would be looking at us both suspiciously while answering my halting Mandarin. Once when I asked, “Can you tell me which number bus to get to Jianguomin?” the guy gave me a very strange look and said, “The bus timetable’s right behind you.” Oops!
Yesterday, I took the afternoon off and went to Tian’an’men Square. It was great just to have the chance to wander around on my own, taking photos and people-watching. Once I get to my placement, I can hopefully post some pics. I wandered up to but not into the Forbidden City and also went into Mao’s Mausoleum which was very interesting although I won’t explain why here (on a public site.)
On Saturday, I’m heading out of the city to visit the Great Wall. Soooo looking forward to it!

One day to go!

I've now said goodbye to Edinburgh and moved out of my flat. I'm back home with my parents in Fife for the final two nights. I finally feel that I've done everything I can do before I go. All the packing, all the cleaning, all the many,many telephone calls to various companies to cancel things...
So far, I have two big bags to check in and two fairly big bags to carry on. My job for tomorrow is to try to whittle things down a bit. ;-)
Today I got some details from the Beijing Office about my in-country training. The two weeks are a nice mix of cultural awareness, VSO training and language skills. Plus, next weekend I get to pay a visit to the Great Wall! Can't wait!

Trying to fit in a bit of packing

Just over a week now until I leave and the whole packing thing is taking much longer than I expected. Perhaps that's because I'm spending a fair bit of time trying to fit in some one-on-one time with my friends before I leave and also because I seem to be having a fair number of leaving parties.
Party number 2 was last Sunday in a friend's flat with lots of my closest friends there and it had a Chinese theme. In the pics, you can see me standing by a sign which says "Bon Voyage" and a plate of cakes that say "Good Luck." There was also a Who's Kirsten's Best Friend quiz (judged on who could answer the most questions on my likes, beliefs and travels) and a slideshow of photos of me over the last ten years in Edinburgh. Awww, thanks you guys!

Two weeks today...

Two weeks today I'll be in China!
Got my passport today with a cool Chinese visa with a picture of the Great Wall on it. I also got a bit more information from VSO yesterday about the plans for my initial few weeks.
I arrive in Beijing on Saturday morning and have Saturday and Sunday to rest and relax and hopefully see a bit of the city (Tiananmen Sq, here I come!) I start my in-country training on Monday and am then in Beijing for almost two weeks with culture/VSO/language training. On the night of the 18th, I take a sleeper train to Xi'an and then have 3 days there for an education conference where I'll meet the other education VSO volunteers working in China.
After that, my new boss will come and pick me up and take me to Danfeng which, all going well, will be my home for the next two years. Eeeee! Exciting!

Less than three weeks to go...!

Things finally look like they're coming together. I fly to London with BA at lunchtime on Friday 4th Sept and then on to Beijing late afternoon, arriving early morning on the 5th. My passport is now in London waiting for the work permit to arrive from China so I can get the embassy to give me a visa and I have (I think) a tenant for my flat. I'm starting to pack up my things, which is a much bigger job than I thought it was going to be, and most (but not all) of my financial stuff is sorted out. Although I'm really excited about going, I'm starting to feel like I'm in freefall towards departure. There are so many little things I still need to do, so many things I still need to buy and so many people I need to say goodbye to. I'm incredibly busy and have things booked for almost every day and night until I leave now. Still, I wouldn't change it - I've had some great moments. A group of work friends took me out on a fantastic night to say goodbye - the highlight of which was a boozy limo trip around the crags! (see pic) I'll have lots of great memories to keep me going in my dark days when I'm missing home.

Or not so definite a date...

I got back this evening from a week's VSO course in Birmingham to find an email from my Volunteer Placement Advisor saying that the start date of my training in Beijing has been changed. So I'll now be flying out a few days earlier than planned (well, VSO's motto is 'be flexible.') It's not a huge problem but it will mean I won't have a final weekend with all my family together - sob! I don't actually know the date yet but it'll probably be the 3rd or 4th of September.
I also got an email today from the VSO language tutor in Beijing asking what my level of Mandarin is - ha!!!!
Anyway, I'll let you know as soon as I actually get a flight date confirmed. Either way, it's less than a month now. EEEEEEK!

A definite departure date

VSO confirmed my departure date as Sunday 6th September today, flying from Heathrow on the 1640 flight direct to Beijing. Hooray! Presumably they're also flying me from Edinburgh down to London on a connecting flight but I haven't been told about that yet.
Also today, I bought a Chinese dictionary which I'm very much looking forward to using - my Mandarin has hit a block these last few weeks and I seem to be making very little progress despite the excellent efforts of my teacher, Zhou Wei. I wonder if this blog will support Chinese and pinyin script? Only one way to find out...

下 个 九 月 我 去 中国

xià ge jiǔ yuè wǒ qù Zhōng guó

Which says (I think) In September, I'm going to China. :-)

A classroom in Longju Middle School, Danfeng
and the outside of the school.

Six weeks to go...

Well, the paperwork is done and the waiting has begun. Hopefully, on the 6th of September, I'll be heading off to Beijing for my in-country training. My placement is in a small town called Danfeng, about 3 hours south-east of Xi'an (see map on my blog.)
There haven't been any volunteers there before - it's a brand new placement - so it'll be new for the teachers at the school as well as for me (hopefully that'll be a positive thing!) I have a photo of the school which I'll try to attach to this blog (I don't really know what I'm doing with this whole blog thing yet.)