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JISHOU, HUNAN — I’m not sure if inserting the map in the previous will show up in Facebook Notes, so I made it a separate post.
Courtesy of Google Maps and some amateur Photoshopping, here is the route I took. Shanghai is at center right and Changsha is bottom left. Jishou is off the map, to the left (west) of Changsha. The route represents about 1,200 km (740 miles) of rail travel in 9 hours, including an hour of transfer time between the two Wuhan railway stations.
 Major cities along my high speed rail route There is a handy English language website, www.cnvol.com, that keeps a comprehensive, up-to-date search engine for Chinese trains. I use it to plan my travel and to specify which train I want when I buy tickets at the ticketing office. This map of the Chinese rail system is from cnvol.com.
 China Railway Map, from www.cnvol.com Permanent link to this post (151 words, 3 images, estimated 36 secs reading time) Possibly related posts:
SHANGHAI – I’ve been to Shanghai before, but only to its airports. Taking a shuttle bus from one airport to another doesn’t count as visiting a city. This time I decided to fly into Shanghai, hang out for a few days (money permitting), then take the train back to Hunan. Two friends were there also, so I had some guides to help me along.
By this time, I’m almost an old hand in Beijing, having visited several times now. The travel books say Beijing and Shanghai are both immense, crowded cities, but there the similarities end. It’s like comparing Washington, D.C., with New York City.
This city has a completely different feel from Beijing. While Beijing is steeped with hundreds of years of history, Shanghai is a relative upstart, imbued with just over a century of international wheeling dealing. Western dominance of Shanghai ended decades ago, but the West never really ever left. Maybe that’s why Shanghai feels more cosmopolitan and “with-it” than Beijing, which is no slacker either.
 The Shanghai World Financial Center behind the Jin Mao Tower Both cities have public transport systems that put most American cities to shame. The subways are fairly clean and efficient, and easy to navigate. I had more trouble navigating the LA Metro than I did with the Shanghai Metro. In Shanghai, it’s at least more obvious which side of the platform to stand on to get to your destination. Signage in LA is minimal, or maybe more impressionistic
I did the typical touristy things, visiting the Bund (Wai Tan), the Pudong skyscraper district, where I rode to the 100th floor of John Bunyan’s bottle opener, the World Financial Center, and Yuyuan Bazaar, which offers a smorgasbord of Chinese food and handcrafts. Time did not permit visiting Yuyuan Gardens or the Temple of the City God, both nearby.
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JISHOU, HUNAN – Somehow, my grand plan of blogging while traveling did not come to pass. The time and means to upload to my site were not always available. So, now you get the updates about a week late.
SOMEWHERE OVER THE ALEUTIANS, Aug. 14 — One of the problems in spur-of-the-moment traveling is coping with glitches. While my arrival in and departure from the US were all arranged, travel in between was a bit murky.
My plans were hang out in Los Angeles for a few days, fly to Chicago, see my son graduate from Purdue, do stuff depending on the plans of my family members, and then leave from Chicago Aug. 13.
Complicating this grand, if somewhat sketchy plan was a glitch with my credit card. My account was locked out because I made the honest mistake while in LA of changing my phone number and password at the same time. Dumb. The company’s fraud bots locked me out and the only way to unlock it was to send proof of my legal address in the States, which I wouldn’t have until I got to Indiana.
So I went the old-fashioned route –a human-based travel agency and cash payment.
But which one? My friend Isabella’s friendly security guard offered to help, but all he did was try to do the travel agency work himself online, which I had already done with better success, I might add. Not only that, he seemed more willing to talk to the pretty Chinese girl than the middle-aged guy about the whole thing. Can’t imagine why.
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YONGSHUN, HUNAN — This part is less about the teaching, and more about the whole experience of the training gig.
First of all, getting there was a job in itself. This part of China is mountainous, a lot like the Appalachian region in the USA, so straight line distances on maps mean nothing. For example, I had passed through Yongshun 永顺 back in February, when I visited Jackie Li in Longshan, which is even further back in the hill country. On a map, Longshan 龙山 is only about 150-200 km away from Jishou; the trip took seven hours.
Yongshun, fortunately, is not at the end of a major road construction project. Even so, it took two hours to get there on twisty roads that rival New York City streets for potholes per linear meter.
Aside from topography, and the attendant isolation, there is not much else in common between Appalachia and this part of China. For one thing, Yongshun County has a population of almost 500,000; the city has about 70,000. That’s a pretty big “small town.” The city, like Jishou, is a big grubby, but also showing signs of steady improvement. In other words, it’s not Podunk, but you can see it from there.
After we arrived, we settled into our hotel (about a 2-star in my book, but the closest to the school where we’d be teaching) and then had dinner with, not the teachers, but the local and prefectural mucky-mucks who were all men ranging age from 30 to 50. Baijiu (Chinese “wine”) is a necessary part of such gatherings. Michael and I did our part to represent America in the Baijiu Drinking Cup, earning some respect from the local pros.
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YONGSHUN, HUNAN — I have participated in who-knows how many teacher workshops, training sessions and in-service days during 25 years of teaching. Last week, I approached the task from a new angle — as an in-service teacher — and it went better than I expected.
Several weeks ago, my foreign affairs officer, Cyril, asked me if I was going to be around during the summer. The Xiangxi Prefecture foreign experts bureau (the people who hand out our teaching licenses) was organizing a one-week oral English workshop for local middle school teachers. The job actually sounded like fun, although the pay was also decent, so I agreed to do it.
I was joined by Michael, an American teaching in the Foreign Language College in Zhangjiajie. Our duties were to teach pronunciation and intonation, useful expressions, and the differences between American and British English. Michael took the expressions assignment, and I did the nitty-gritty pronunciation/intonation tasks.
Our students were 37 teachers from Yongshun, Huayuan, Luxi, Baojing, Fenghuang and Jishou — all counties or cities in the Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture. Most were between the ages of 24 and 40 and, I am happy to report, had really good English speaking skills already.
Having sat through endless training sessions where the trainers read Powerpoint slides to us and talked in pointless generalities, and having enjoyed fruitful and well planned workshops where we actually learned shit, my aim as a leader was to focus on the practical side. After all, I am now an English teacher, too, and I know what I wish my students had learned before they come to university.
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JISHOU, HUNAN — Here’s my travel plans for the next few days.
Today – July 25: Yongshun, about two hours from here, co-leader of a teachers’ workshop for middle school English teachers
July 26: leave for Changsha, hang out a day or 2
July 27 or 28: leave for Beijing, hang out till Aug. 1
Aug. 1: Beijing to Tokyo to Los Angeles
Aug. 1 (local time): LA, hang out a couple of days
Aug. 5: Chicago, then W. Lafayette, Indiana
Aug. 6 – 13: ???
Aug. 13: Leave Chicago for Shanghai, arrive Aug. 14 local time
Aug. 14 – ??: Shanghai
I’ll blog when able.
Permanent link to this post (107 words, 1 image, estimated 26 secs reading time) Possibly related posts:
JISHOU, HUNAN — Yesterday morning, I left my flat to head downtown. Ahead of me, I saw a young guy crouching down to take photos of a bright green garden snake who had gotten very lost. Here’s the little fella:
I say he (or she, kinda hard to tell) was lost because there’s nothing but yards and yards of concrete up where I live, and he was having no luck scaling the wall.
Anyway, the photographer guy and I are admiring the snake when an older woman walks past and starts freaking out. As far as I know, she doesn’t live anywhere near me, but for some bizarre reason she homed in on this garden snake with the intent to do it in.
First, she tried whacking it with a stick she was carrying. We stopped her. Then she picked up a chunk of concrete, and tried to bash the snake with it, all the while fussing loudly in local language (not Chinese). We tried blocking her again, but she managed to heave the chunk in the snake’s general direction. No harm done. Her pitching arm is in Little League, and the snake was wisely sticking close to the wall.
The Chinese guy tried to calm the lady down or shoo her away, but she was determined to flatten that poor snake. We weren’t sure what the lady would do if we picked up the snake and threw him to safety. As hysterical as she was, she might have bashed one of us with the concrete chunk. Mostly, we just ran interference.
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