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JISHOU, HUNAN — It’s the weekend and I finally have time to blog. So here goes …
October 1 is China’s National Holiday, rather like the Fourth of July. We got a week-long vacation, which I spent traveling to nearby places in Hunan. Officially, the National Holiday is only five days long, but universities typically move weekday classes to the following weekend to extend the holiday. The downside of this reshuffling is needing to teach for seven days straight after a seven-day holiday.
That post-vacation marathon coincided with the beginning of classes for the freshmen, so I had 32 classes from the 8th until yesterday the 14th. Needless to say, I was a little drained by the time I finished teaching at noon yesterday. Next week, I’ll have a more manageable 22 classes in a week, a schedule I only need to keep until the new foreign teacher arrives in a few weeks.
My only plan for the holiday was to visit a friend in Yueyang 岳阳, several hours away by bus or train, and just north of the provincial capital, Changsha 长沙. A couple of days before the holiday started, I dropped by another friend’s shop in Jishou to say hello. We soon discovered we were heading in the same direction. Tina and her husband were driving to his hometown, Huarong 华容, for his sister’s wedding. If I didn’t mind hanging out for a couple of days at the wedding, I could come along, then they’d drive me to Yueyang, 30 minutes away.
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 Snoop and Wheat, together at lastThis photo is from August, when I visited Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in LA. Somehow teaching classes got in the way of posting it.
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 Somehow, yelling "Flame on!" just doesn't work  But it works for the Human Torch. SANGZHI, HUNAN — OK, so I’m not really Johnny Storm, but it’s a cool photo, anyway. My friend snapped it as we were leaving Jiutian Cave here. After a long climb out of the cool, humid cave into the warm, drier surface air, I was sweating and my head was literally steaming.
The cave trip Thursday was my last excursion for the week-long National Holiday. Earlier in the week, I accompanied two friends (a young married couple) to a wedding in Huarong, a small city near Yueyang, Hunan. Then they drove me to Yueyang, where I met another friend and visited that city for two days. When I came back to Jishou on Wednesday, I literally turned right around and headed out again to Sangzhi with another friend, her cousin, aunt and uncle.
We also visited the reconstructed home of He Long, a revolutionary leader who was later purged during the Cultural Revolution. He was thrown into prison (where he died at age 74), his original home was razed, and his siblings were prevented from attending university. He didn’t get a formal state burial until 40 years after his death.
On our way back to Jishou, we stopped at a roadside marker for the Guzhang County “Golden Spike” — an international reference point for the sedimentary layer corresponding to stage 7* of the Cambrian Period beginning 503 million years ago. The rather elaborate marker includes relief images of Lejopyge laevigata trilobites, which made their first appearance at this time.
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JISHOU, HUNAN — You’ve all heard of culture shock, but for someone who has lived abroad for some time, it works the other way, too: reverse culture shock.
It works like this. You move to a different country (hell, you could move to a different state and still feel culture shock) and live there for several months, or years. At the beginning, everything is new, or weird, and you experience culture shock. How you expect the world/society/people/friends/lovers should behave is completely different from what you have experienced in the past. Successful ex-patriates revel in the new milieu and move on. Others go bonkers and move back to the States as soon as possible.
Assuming you’re the type who stays, eventually the new cultural milieu becomes second nature to you. As a trivial example, I no longer expect to see a knife, fork and spoon alongside my plate at a restaurant. In most Chinese eateries, you get a pair of plastic chopsticks in a paper or plastic envelope and a set of ceramic dishes with a ceramic soup spoon shrink-wrapped in plastic. (Most restaurants outsource their dish washing to a third party, who cleans and sterilizes everything and seals it in plastic.) In addition, every table gets a pot of tea or hot water. And rarely, you also get a packet of paper napkins or at less upscale places, a plastic container with a roll of tissue paper inside. (Kleenex on the cob, as a former student — Emily Plant, was it you? — once described it).
This is a preview of Of reverse culture shock: ‘Where’s the chopsticks?’ . Read the full post (896 words, 1 image, estimated 3:35 mins reading time)Possibly related posts:
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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