the desert is very hot

*** this is duffy writing, not kate***

hello from turpan, tulufan in chinese.

we arrived here yesterday and are planning on leaving this evening. the plan had been to spend the night here, but the atmosphere, both societal and climatalogical, has changed our plans. turpan is a desert oasis on the northern silk road. it is a small city that has not been an important destination for most of the past 600 years. recently, the city has had a concerted effort to increase tourism, which has been very successful. the city's main street has been covered with grape vines, which makes for very pleasant walking in the day-time heat, and there are numerous ancient ruins and beautiful natural scenery nearby, which makes it a very attractive draw.

that being said, the tourism aspect of the city has proven to be a double-edged sword for us. there is no train station in turpan, so one must take a bus for about one hour to get here from daheyan, the nearest stop. immediately after leaving the train station, a chinese-speaking guide approached us and offered us a bus to turpan. the price was right, so we took it. on the ride out of town, she gave us her tour company's brochure, and the name and number of a hotel in turpan. so far, we were very pleased with how well things were going. outside of turpan, a gentleman who had distinctly un-chinese features flagged down the bus and got on. he started talking to us in english and told us that he had a good hotel at a good price that we could look at in turpan. we agreed, and soon after entering the city, but before the bus reached the final stop, he told us to get off and flagged down a taxi. the hotel was fine, so we agreed to stay for one night, and then the man who met us on the bus introduced us to a tour guide. the tour guide was the first sign of trouble. the usual route for tourists in turpan is to buy seats on a set tour on a bus to 8 sights around turpan. everyone we've talked, including our book, said that only 2 or 3 of these sights are worth seeing, and even those are barely worth the high entry fees. the guide kept expalaining his tour to us, but never told us the cost, even though we repeatedly asked him how much, in both english and chinese. the one sight we did want to see was not on the tour. it was a trip to a salt lake that is about 90 km south of turpan that is the 2nd lowest point on earth. he told us that we could work something out, but, agian, would not say a price. we finally told him that we were very tired, that we did not want anything today, that we didn't know how long we'd be in turpan and that we would call him. he then told us calling him was not possible, even though we'd seen him on a cellphone, and tried to make an appointment for that night. we said that wouldn't work and finally he gave us a card for a tour company with, suprise suprise, his phone number. we went to our rooms to have a nap, and about one hour later, the phone in my room started ringing. sure enough, it was the same guide. once i hung up, he called again. the calls continued until i finally unplugged the phone.

the next morning, on the way to breakfast, he was waiting outside my room. when you travel in china, aggressive guides are normal, but they usually get the hint when someone isn't going to be a big spender and leave, especially in a tourist town, when there are much bigger fish. this time, the pestering was bordering on stalking. he asked again what we were going to do. we told him we'd decided to get bikes and go to the one anicent city that everyone says is worth it, but that we'd be willing to talk about going to the lake. we bargained down to 160 from 180 yuan, which matched the guidebook, but he told us that the road has been washed out and the trip would take 4 to 5 hours. he then told us that we couldn't go that afternoon, even though we could take the same car and the same driver and go on the prepackaged tour that afternoon. we then agreed for the next morning, at which point he asked for a deposit. this is beyond bizarre. no one, ever, asks for a deposit on a car tour. hotels do, but they give you keys in exchange. drivers ask for them, but only halfway through the tour. bike rentals do, but they give you a bike. every traveller here knows that giving a deposit without getting anything in return is just a good way to lose money. we flat out refused, and he began telling us how the people at the hotel knew him, so we should trust him. somehow, that didn't reassure us. he finally agreed to no deposit. he then asked if we were checking out. we said no, since we had previously agreed with the hotel that we could stay one day, then, if we wanted to, stay another. at that point he spoke quickly with the hotel desk clerk, who then told us that there were no room availiable for that night, even though the hotel was deserted the night before and that night was a tuesday, and she then pulled out 100 yuan to return us our deposit. again, quite a shock. we then said that we needed to pack our things before leaving, and that we would be out by the noon check-out time. convinently enough, the guide who was doing a very successful imiataion of my shadow, told us that he had a hotel for us, and that he'd be happy to set us up, but it wasn't as nice and a little more money, since there was a big festival that day. we told him to start looking while we went to pack. on the way back upstairs, we decided that all these coincidences had just been too much and that going 90 km into the desert, where there wasn't even a road, with a guy this desparate for money and clients, in the height of tourist season and during a festival, was probably a good way to get robbed. our visions included some kind of party of bandits hiding behind desert rocks in a canyon. this seems a little weird and paranoid now, but so many things that had never before happened to us had happened with this guide in the bargaining process, and since we'd never been beset by bandits, we thought that this may just be one new experience we were about to have.

I went back and politely told the guide that we did not want to go to the lake, we did not want a hotel and that we were going on to urumqi to meet our friend that afternoon. he told me that he had seen my friend in turpan and that she hadn't left yet, so we didn't need to leave for urumqi. he then preceeded to say 'she is a very fat girl, right? who is also a teaher?' i were about to say 'no, she isn't fat at all,' but then i realized his statement had other flaws, like the fact that my friend was 3000 km away. he agreed that he had made a mistake. finally, as i was walking away, he ended with 'oh, do you want my car to take you to urumqi?'i told him we'd take the bus and that was the last we saw of him. his driver however, we saw 2 more times, once waiting outside as we left the hotel and once at breakfast.

in short, turpan seems to be a tourist town woefully short of torists. we spent the rest of the day renting bikes and riding 5 miles out of town to a really nice ancient city that was a lot of fun. we are about to go on the bus to turpan, so we need to get moving.

while most of china and travelling is a lot of fun, it's nice to have situations where you avoid close calls to remind you to keep on your toes.

and i saw a herd of camels....

i saw a herd of camels on the side of the road. ten of them staring at our bus as we passed.

duff and i have had the first successful sightseeing of our trip! today we went to see the mogao caves, the third largest complex of buddhist cave paintings in china.

getting to the caves wasn't easy, but it worked out very well. we spent a night and a half of the train from wuhan and disembarked at 2:30 am. it was a pleasant train ride and amazing to see the scenery change as we traveled. i started to knit another sock, and another chinese train employee came by and ripped it out. she was very friendly, though, and knit almost as much as she ripped out. we had an odd experience with some guys in our compartment. there are 56 minority groups in china, and three of the people in our 6 bed berth were minority. one guy was really friendly, i think he was traveling with his mother, but the other 2 guys were a little confrontational. the guys were huge, especially compared to han chinese. they were strong and had central asian features. many of the uigurs and western chinese have tatoos, as well as purposeful scarring on their forearms. the guys overheard me tell a fuwuyuan we were american and the smaller of the two guys tried to get into it with us. it was frustrating to understand enough to know he was badmouthing us and americans, but we couldn't understand all of what he said. he talked about foreigners coming to xin jiang and not knowing the language, he was derisive of tourists, and kept saying muslim. he went into a lot of bombing and shooting noises and got the whole car involved in this discussion. duff and i climbed into our bunks and ignored the guy. the knitting woman stuck up for us, calling him down and saying we were teachers. the guy tried to pick a fight between us and a pakistani guy on the train, who wouldn't even give the mean guy the time of day. when things died down, the guy from our compartment satisfied hiself by singing loudly in arabic for a few hours. after that the han chinese were really smiley with us, i think they were embarassed.

we arrived in liu yuan in the middle of the night and checked into a hotel for a few hours. this morning, we took a three hour bus to dun huang. from dun huang we hired really persistant little cab driver to take us to the caves. the caves were first carved in 300 AD, and the most recent in 1100 AD.

there are over 700 caves in the complex, of which we saw 10. the entrace fee was really steep, 120 kuai, but included in the price was an english speaking guide. her name was jessie and she studied english in lan zhou. she was amazing. the caves are locked, to protect them, and there are no lights inside. she took a flashlight and pointed out important features. they are set into a cliff face and have been really well preserved. they were discovered in 1900 by a monk named wang who took it upon himself to restore the caves and preserve them a a holy site. many expeditions have been to the caves and took with them many of the caves historical treasures. these are now housed in museums in england, russia, japan, france, and harvard. some of the scrolls, paitings and sculptures were sold by wang to finace his excavation. the greatest loss was the work contained in the hidden library. it was a cave honoring the work of monk hong bian, who worked in the caves, translated religious works and had a great impact on the area. hong bian's family and followers sealed the greatest works in a cave with a statue of him to protect them from warring minority groups in the south.

we saw the third largest statue of buddha in china, at 35.5 meters tall. the other two are in sichuan. in the complex there is also another 29 meters tall buddha and a 15 meter long reclining buddha. the reclining buddha is supposed to be after he reached nirvana and is placed in a coffin shaped room. there are 72 statues surrouing him with various expressions on the faces, indicating these people's different comprehension of nirvana and buddhisim. our guide talked about how as buddhisim was introduced, it fused with daoism, making it easier for the people to accept into their lives. they share many of the same dieties. we saw paitings of the daoist/buddhist dieties of thunder, lightening, wind, and rain. thunder had numerous arms to bang on drums, lightening had a metal knife, wind had a bag from which the wind came when he opened it, and when rain blew, there was rain. there was also a depiction of the tallest man in buddhism, whose feet touch the bottom of the ocean, and whose head passes the tallest mountian and he holds the sun and the moon.

the mogao caves are one of the best sites i have seen in china. i wish it had been one of the first places we visited!! it ties asia together, because it was such an important site on the silk road. in a few minutes we'll get on a bus back to liu yuan and get the train, again at 2:30 am, to turpan.

the travels begin....

duff and i are getting picked up to go to the train station in hankou in 1/2 and hour. amy and the international office have been giving us a wonderful send-off. we had lunch at amy's apartment today with her family, it was the first time we had ever been there. the food was so good, too!!

our friend lindsey has set up a blog (in a round-about way, we helped) and you can follow the link to the left for "mississippi misstepts" and read her reactions to our travels and get a different perspective. we are excited for her. she is meeting us in urumqi on the 29th of june, just in time for my birthday.

okay, now i have to take the trash out and unplug everything in the apartment.

when are you coming back?

l to r: (back) harrish, lindsey, sandrine, katrina, me, duff, brad, johnny. (front) meghan, happy, carol, wendy.

never have i left a place that i have loved so much and not had a plan to come back! last night, lindsey and harrish got everyone together for a farwell dinner for us. it was so thoughtful of them, and duff and i are really flattered. we never would have gotten that together on our own and our goodbyes would have been scattered. so many people have asked when we are coming back, and one of the worst parts of leaving is i have no answer to that. always before i have. leaving alaska? back next summer. leaving seattle? back after china. leaving cincinnati? back asap! here, it is different. i have never been so completely torn about leaving a place. i wish i could say that i will be back for a visit and say when. that would make leaving here a lot easier. it is so great that for the rest of forever, i can come to china to see wonderful friends.

bye bye, everyone, and thanks for a wonderful 2 years. we will miss wuhan very much.

chinese turkestan

duff and i thought it would be wise to give a little introduction to the travels we will attempt in the next month. we will visit a region of the world that fascinates me. it is remote, of course i am interested!! it is china, technically, but it is not. this is a land of arid salt flats, mountains, basins, grasslands, camels, the silk road, the end of the great wall, the furthest outposts of chinese civilization, minority peoples.... we get to visit central asia without leaving china. i will try and paint a little introductory picture:

we will travel out into the desert of western china. there are a number of very large provinces in this region that we will visit. we tell the students we are going to xin jiang which is apparently the size of alaska. xin means new and jiang means territories. the region is properly known as the xinjiang uigur autonomous region. the uigurs are the chinese muslim minority people. many uigurs have left xin jiang and now live in all parts of china. there are so many in wuhan (which probably helps explain why a train leaves for far western china daily). in the big cities, uigurs open noodle stands and bbq places. they have a trilling call to draw attention to their roadside stands. there are 4 or 5 different guys who set up by the south gate of our campus. i am excited to go to xin jiang for the food. i love the muslim noodles here, they are hand pulled and dropped into a soup pot. my favorite is liang mian, a cold noodle with a lot of spice on top and fresh cucumbers and tomatoes. perfect for the hot hot weather (wuhan has been wildly hot recently, we have a heat index of 119 degrees F. they say xin jiang is the hottest place in china, but checking the weather reports it is about 10 degrees cooler and less than 1/2 the humidity of wuhan. wuhan definitely lives up to it's reputation as one of the furnaces of china).

the biggest draw of western china is the opportunity to travel parts of the old silk road. we will hit northern silk road oases like turpan and kashgar, and travel the southern silk road from kashgar to golmud. from, golumd we will go overland to tibet. the silk road really started in 100 bc, and items traded included silk, jade, cucumbers, figs, sesame, walnut, grapes (and winemaking), porcelain, paper and so much more. in turpan, they grow grapes and make reportedly good local wine. to fight the heat, they have trellised the streets and shaded them with grape vines. i am excited about that.

we will go to the sunday market in kashgar were it sounds like we will be in the middle east. this market is one of the most famous in the world, and not only chinese people but people from all the neighboring counties come to it. . the market apparently has 100,000 visitors each week. many of these people are villagers who come in from the country. many people in the area still live a nomadic life, and live in gers (yurts) like in mongolia. there is a large kazakh population in the area who are nomads and live in gers. the minority peoples can be identified by their different head coverings, i only hope i will know enough to appreciate all of this. they sell animals, clothes, wine, fruit and vegetables, knives, pots, carpets, spices.... i have a feeling lindsey and i are going to go shopping crazy.

we have a lot of big sites we want to hit, like the second lowest point on the planet (the tarim basin), outside turpan in taklamakan desert. we want to ride camels to city ruins on the southern silk road. our first stop will be the mogao caves in dunhuang. the silk road passed through here and the temple caves have paintings that are important to chinese buddhism. monks, pilgrims and scholars would stop here as they traveled the silk road to translate religious texts. i can't remember when the first temples were built, duff remembers reading they have been painted over a period of 2000 years. during the cultural revolution the caves were not harmed because they were under a direct protection order from zhou enlai.

there is so much more, i won't even attempt to explain tibet at this point (xi zang in chinese. this translates as the 'western treasure house.' interesting, eh?). i need to concentrate on western china now. we planned to leave today, but we haven't been paid by the school yet, so we hope that we can leave tomorrow. as we travel these areas we will keep up the blog and provide a lot more detail.

we are getting really excited and ironing out the last details. we are finalizing our plans when we will meet up with lindsey (she has to stay at work a tad longer than we do), and i am getting ready for an amazing trip... and getting ready to live out of my pack for the next two months. it is a good thing i am so strong. hee.

where is the green fish?

final exams are over. i am 1/2 way finished with my final grades, i should finish them this morning. i am packing up and moving out of my apartment, and preparing to travel for two months (yikes!). i am getting ready to move to seattle and looking for a job there. i have been so busy, it has been relatively easy to push the fact that i am leaving wuhan out of my mind. it is not an easy thing to think about, i will miss everything here so much. i can't believe i have lived here for 2 years. i have really built up a life here, and it is going to be very difficult to leave.

i have taught at the same university for the past two years. foreigners are celebrities here because we are such a novelty, but if you stay around for more than 6 months then everyone at the whole school knows who you are. i have been very fortunate to be here because i have built up a wonderful community and amazing friends. i don't know how i am going to leave this life behind. duff and i certainly have a large community of foreigners (not nearly as large as last year), but this year we have spent more time on our campus and with chinese people. there are people (esp. office workers and food vendors) i have dealt with everyday for two years. i will leave my friends and my students and neighbors.

the little girls that walk me home from school everyday, i will leave them. i keep forgetting that we are leaving in 4 days, and i think to myself that i should invite them over, or we could play in the park. when they met me, i had my hair down and i was wearing a green necklace. when i came to china, i was worried that i would never be able to tell my students apart. when you aren't familiar with a culture, people can tend to look the same. while this is no longer an issue for me (i know everyone uniquely by their appearance and their personality) the little girls who i meet are still thrown. they always run up and yell my name. sometimes they don't believe that it is me. if my hair is up, they make me take it down, then they start believing. then, the secret question: where is the green fish? i guess to them my necklace looks like a green fish, even though it is just a large green bead. if i am not wearing it, i put it in my bag so i can prove my identity to them.

we will have to say goodbye to all the food vendors who have kept us alive, and most who have never given us food poisoning. we go to the same people, the same restaurants every day. i have been going to these people for two years, and for duff, a year. i fondly remember the reception i got at my favorite restaurants when we came back in the fall. i shouldn't have been surprised that they remembered me so well, but i was pleased and flattered. i have my favorite fruit seller, and vegetable people, and there is the person i always buy tomato paste from.... there is the bao zi woman who i would swear worries about us if we don't come for our breakfast. in town, there is the beer lady, who has a restaurant by the bowling alley. last year, the bowling alley didn't sell beer, so we would buy it from the beer lady (for 25 cents) and take it in to the bowling alley. then, the bowling alley started to sell beer, but for quadruple the price. now, they also sell 2 kuai beer, so we don't go to the beer lady for beer anymore, but we eat at her restaurant once a week.

saddest to leave will be our chinese friends. my chinese teacher, amy, i know i will miss the most. i think she is having a little bit of a hard time with it too. i want to come back and see her soon, and someday i will have her come to america, but that doesn't make leaving now any easier. amy is certainly my best friend here, and she has done so much for me. she has taught me everything i know about china's people and language and culture. she has helped me out of a million jams. she has taken care of me when i was really sick (a few times), and shown me some amazing and beautiful places in wuhan. and so much more.

last night, she and her husband and son took duff and me to the asia hotel in hankou. at the top of this famous hotel there is a revolving restaurant. we got there just before sunset and we could see the chang jiang (yangtze), the han river, and the three parts of wuhan. we watched the blazing red sun set (thanks to the pollution of a rapidly developing city of nearly 10 million) and the lights flicker on around us. it was beautiful and wuhan's size never ceases to amaze me. it is hard for me to remember how big this city is, i am so involved in my own little life with my friends and students on our campus at the far south end of town. we tried, but failed, to show our gratitude with gifts. i am terrible at presents, but they loved them. we gave long long a frisbee, a flaying plate. i guess he's been asking amy to get one for him for weeks, so we got her off the hook.

i guess it still hasn't sunk in that i am leaving. i really don't want to. i could be very happy here for another year, or even longer. if i had had the same students this year that i had the first year, i am almost sure i would have stayed. my first group of students and i were so close. there were only 47 of them and i saw them for 24 hours a week. i could really make them work and we made so much progress together. if i had had them again this year i am confident we could have made that much progress again. some will go to canada soon. i love seeing them on campus. they call me kayt-he, and always say it twice, really fast. even though, by the end of last year, the could say my name perfectly, they all still say it they way they did when we first met. this year, teaching was far more frustrating and not nearly as rewarding. i am thankful i had my first year, had i only had this year i don't know that i would recommend teaching in china. this year i had 400 students and saw them for 2 hours a week. they never come to class and when they did their behavior was terrible. i don't feel that i have made much of a difference in their lives, but i have noticed improvement in their english. still there are a few star kids who i became close to and i will miss very much. thank goodness for e-mail!

i realize that i won't be able to do everything i want to one last time before i leave. there isn't enough time to see everyone that i love, and not enough time to eat all my favorite foods. leaving snuck up on me because i was just living here, and now i have to go. i guess i will just have to come back to china!

AND....happy father's day, dad!!!

the world cup....too bad it is the same week as final exams

how can you come to a final exam and not bring a pen? especially when you have been reminded that you will need to bring a pen repeatedly? why did I have to give 5 students pens so they could take their final exams?

we have just started exam week here at 湖北工业大学. i am giving 10 exams this week, 8 of them are for my listening and speaking classes. my exam is split into two parts. the first 45 minutes assess the students' listening comprehension and vocabulary. for the second part of the exam, i assess their speaking. because we have a limited amount of time, the students were supposed to come to class with 1 minute of speaking prepared. memorized. i told them i wanted it to be like i was watching cctv-9 (china's english language tv station, not that i have a tv, i have only seen it in hotels). the students are allowed to speak about anything they want. i got a lot of flattery, but a great number of kids talked about the world cup.

the world cup is huge here. advertisements are everywhere, and everyone is talking about it. during the speaking exams today, i had three kids tell me they have been staying up until 5 in the morning to watch every game. it is too bad that final exams and the world cup are the same week. that's going to hit the kids' scores hard.

the whole country seems to be in a giddy party mode. last night, we met at drunken river moon for the birthday of jennifer paradise. this is a huge restaurant and we sat on the 2nd floor balcony overlooking the main dining hall. in other words, we had front row seats to witness amazing foolishness. the restaurant was showing the pre-game on a huge 8X10 foot screen. many groups (largely men, university-student aged to 60s) were having dinner and watching a little of the game. competitive drinking is a visible part of chinese culture, there is toasting and cheering and a lot of puking. it is an important exercise, or so we are told, because you gain a lot of respect from your peers if you can keep drinking and challenging others. it doesn’t matter if you throw up. you drink, and throw up, and drink again. we regularly see people throwing up under the table at restaurants, no one even seems to notice. oddle, they never seem to get very drunk because few people can keep it in their system. sorry to get a little graphic, but if you have been to china, you will surely have seen this. i have always wondered how this works with when Chinese and American businesspeople meet. as a woman, this doesn’t come up, we are served lovely watermelon juice, but for men it can be a different story. last night we watched two tables abuse their bodies like it wasn't a monday night. i had a student, spring, tell me this morning as part of her speaking, that her uncle was so drunk watching the game, he called her and told her germany had lost when it had, in fact, won. or so she says. we all know i am not following this in the least, and am totally clueless regarding sports in general. advice to anyone coming to teach in china: know about the nba and football.

vampire beach.

this is the off season at hainan, or so the guide book says. it is just the beginning of the rainy season, like it is for all of south east asia. last year, we were in thailand, malaysia, indonesia, and singapore for monsoon and really didn't notice much of a difference. the beaches here, though, have been deserted. all day, it is like we have a private beach. there are a few other tourits, but we are really spread out and all of them are russian. interestingly, this must be a huge place for russians on vacation. there is more russian in the town than english (menus, signs, etc.). it is good we can speak a little chinese.

the beaches have been enormously pleasant and relaxing. there is a lot of trash, but there are people cleaning it up all day as it washes ashore. this is the terrible result of china's wanton littering. i am swimming and covered in bits of plastic wrapping. lying in the sun, styrofoam blows across the beach and sticks to me. there are plastic baskets and shoes and pieces of discarded clothing washing up on shore. all day the big hotels send workers to the beach to sweep up, but they don't get the garbage out of the water.

last night, duff and i decided to take an evening walk on the beach. we had come in from the beach around 3:00 to cool down and get out of the sun. the day before we had food poisoning (which i have now had on beaches in two countries!) and didn't want to overdo it. we brought our instruments to the beach and lazed away the afternoon playing fiddle and bodhran, at which duff has made amazing progress. at sunset we headed back down to the beach. there were thousands of people there! all chinese. we'd barely seen 10 other chinese people on the beach up until now, and now the water was thick with them. if this is off season, i can't even imagine how crowded the beach must be during the peak. people were loving the waves, and swimming in their underwear, which apparently is okay here. kids up to 10 year old needed no suits at all. everyone had blow up innertubes to hang on. chinese people don't really learn to swim. amy can, and it is a really big deal for her. we always joke she should put it on her resume. the big hotels had huge spotlights on the breakers illuminating the beach.

white skin is highly prized here. girls and boys use skin whitening products (which make them break out terribly), and if it is sunny, no woman goes anywhere without and umbrella to protect her from the sun. they are shocked that we don't use them. last year, when i returned from spring festival in thailand, proud of my tan, the students and amy, scandalized, exclaimed that i had become "so black!" no wonder the beaches are deserted during the day and packed at night.

luckiest of the lucky.

never have i ever....had a vacation start off this smoothly. duff and i safely arrived on hainan island last night, after a brief (2 hour flight) from wuhan. since then, everything has been going enormously well. the plane didn't crash. we immediately found a great hotel with bus from the airport. slept well. early morning bus to sanya. we flew into haikou, at the north end of the island, and easily got an express bus to sanya, the resort area, at the south end of the island. the drive was beautiful. it looked like southern india, palm trees dipping over canals and small waterways...lush hills....oh, and rice paddies. we very easily found an excellent hostel in sanya, a 100 kuai answer to the 600 kuai resorts surrounding us. the hostel has great services...towles, and straw hats and mats for the beach, balconies that overlook the ocean....and wireless internet. it is true. duff brought his computer so i could finish up the very little i have to write of my final exams (i am writing a different exam for every class to cut down on cheating, but that means i am writing 10 exams). i cannot believe our luck. it was going to be a lot of time at the internet cafe. it is hard to be away from internet while planning a huge trip, trying to find jobs, and moving away from somewhere we have lived for two years.

this afternoon we spent three hours on the beautiful beach. the waves are HUGE (like sri lanka huge) and fun to play in. i am all tuckered out. we are off to catch dinner and the sunset at an outdoor restaurant.

lindsey jackson: if you can make it down here this weekend, do.

hainan....here we come!

last minute, duff and i have decided to take a beach vacation next week. since coming to china, i have wanted to visit hainan island, in the south china sea, almost to the vietnamese border. it is called the hawaii of china. i hope it isn't as expensive.

we have next week off because our students will be preparing for their final exams and the cet-4 english exam. if you have been reading the blog, you know that we have been talking a lot about cheating in our classes. the students have to pass the cet-4 to graduate. one student told me to pass the cet-4 you can pay another student 3000 rmb ($375) and they will get you the answers. there are various methods for transmission during the exam, mostly through cell phone. she also mentioned that in all of the bathrooms (there is a lot of grafitti in china), there are phone numbers to call if you are interested in getting a wireless earpiece for about 400 rmb. i also learned that to pass the cet-3 in high school, you can pay 1500 rmb, and for assistance on the cet-6, students pay about 6000 yuan. i cannot believe that students are able to come up with this kind of money. when i said this to my student, she said 5 or 6 kids will go in on it together. amazing. and i finally figured out why the kids all write the same answers to different test forms: camera phones. someone in the first class snaps a picture and it ruins a week of testing.

duff has finished writing his final exams, and i hope to finish mine today. it is cool and rainy, a great relief from the 100 degree heat we have had in wuhan. if i can get my exams finished and copied, i am basically done with school. we give finals in two weeks, and grades should be pretty easy to tally. tentatively, we leave for western china on 23 june.

we'll be gone sunday to sunday, but we'll post from hainan. they weather may not be that great. it is typhoon season.

happy june!

some photos of shawn and jazmine to start june off right.