SuperStar Nathan

Yes, that is the famous Nathan being badgered by fans and paparazzi for his autograph and photo. Nathan had me fooled – I just thought he was an ordinary Arkansas kid with a computer science degree and a nice wife. But his cover was blown by the fact that band started playing the minute we walked thru the security gates at WenHui Primary School.

Nathan and I were invited to WenHui Primary School, a private Elementary school yesterday, to help celebrate two holidays – International Childrens’ Day and Dragon Boat Festival. We traveled with Mr. Chen, our Assistant Dean of the English Dept and whose son attends WenHui, along with his secretary for research Mrs. Wang.

After being led to our seats in the auditorium under the thunder of clapper applause, Nathan was immediately coerced into giving an impromptu speech. He did us proud. He sounded like he had prepared for hours. Very smooth and even a couple Chinese words thrown in to impress the audience. I am sure that this speech and the fact that he is cute – sent him into the ranks of a superstar. I had a really hard time not chuckling with all the students crowding around him to get his autograph.

We watched the students perform on different instruments such as the GuZheng (21 strings) and the ErHu (2 strings), as well as dance, sing and do martial arts. The children were all extremely talented but my pictures don’t begin to show their skills. After the performances there were fair like activities outside such as picking up marbles using chopsticks, dragon boat race (the kids’ feet were hooked together) and of course lots of pictures (mostly of Nathan).

We were invited to the school cafeteria and fed a traditional Dragon Boat Festival meal of Zhongzi, which is pyramid shaped sticky rice with meat or egg filling wrapped in leaves, along with a hard boiled egg and a couple shots of an alcoholic drink. Ganbei! Yes, there was alcohol on a school ground and it definitely wasn’t a sipping wine, it was one of those shots you have to slug down. We were even given a gift bag of more Zhongzi and hard-boiled eggs. I think they must give really practical gifts because I got laundry soap and toothpaste for Mothers’ day and now food. We should probably do more of this in the US.
A wonderful experience and day, thank you WenHui Primary!

Side Note Information about the Dragon Boat Festival can be found here
http://www.c-c-c.org/chineseculture/festival/dragonboat/dragon.html

West Lake English Corner

This is not really a specific location. It is anywhere one westerner and more than 5 Chinese are located. With one stipulation – They only want to talk to you when it is has the "English Corner" Label. I have noticed that the Chinese won’t talk to me on the bus when I am bored out of my mind and would love some conversation. To counteract the boredom I take my iPod with me and listen to NPR’s Car Talk. Only problem is that when I laugh out loud at “Click & Clack the Tappet Brothers” they look at me very strangely and back away.

Back on topic. One of the dreaded assignments that you can get when teaching overseas is “English Corner”. You are assigned to report to a specific place at a specific time and wait for the Chinese students to crowd around you and ask you the same questions over and over. Do you like Chinese food? How long will you stay in China? How long have you been here? What places have you visited in China? Will you sing a song? Do you speak Chinese? (they like to laugh at my lame attempts). Do you like Hangzhou or West Lake or etc? and the (try to read it sounding like David Lettermen) Number 1 question, always asked by every person - Where are you from? (Make sure you read Nathan’s answer to this question in his blog). Last couple of Sundays I have actually ridden the hour long bus and voluntarily reported to West Lake’s English corner. This is due to the fact that 2 days without classes and without speaking to anyone except by SKYPE or email is my limit and (shhhh – don’t tell) I wanted an excuse to eat at McDonalds afterwards.

I had heard that the West Lake English Corner was a rather large gathering and it is. The minute you walk into the area, you are spotted as the new person the Chinese can practice their repertoire on. After we got thru the predicable questions I really enjoyed myself. This group had some older Chinese attendees so the topics were a lot more varied and interesting. I learned more from them than they did from me. First week we talked about retirement, health care, and Bush. This Sunday I brought my laptop and showed some of my iPhoto slideshows (of a wedding, my neighborhood, a fishing trip, and Zac & Nicole’s Florida Bike Trip). So our topics stemmed from the photos in addition to the predicable questions as mentioned above.

It is held in a beautiful setting with the only problem being that you are sort of stuck in one spot. The first Sunday, after 2 and half hours of standing in one location, my legs got really stiff. So I left, took a walk by the lake and then hopped into a taxi and began the frustrating process of showing the driver where to take me. I had an English map (with pictures) which I figured would be understandable to the driver. The second week I took a map that had Chinese characters because the first driver used the fact that the map was in English as an excuse to pretend he didn’t know where I wanted to go. He kept trying to tell me to get out of the car, but I pretended not to understand him. Poor guy didn’t know how determined I was to have my cheeseburger and fries. After much stalling he ended up taking me most of the way. He just kept talking Chinese jibberish the entire way and I just kept pointing directions and talking English jibberish. After I saw the Golden Arches a block or so away I let him get rid of me. The second week with the help of Tom, an English Corner attendee, who kindly walked me to the taxi and told the driver where I wanted to go – I got to my desired destination with no arguments. Tom (his English name & who is sitting next to me in the photo above) is an engineer at a local electric company who is interested in computers and reminds me of Jason B. who worked at the Perry Building with us. Not his looks but his personality. Both of them are just really nice young men.

Side Note: Sometimes it is very humorous to be in a situation where no one understands anyone else. Whenever I get a phone call, it is almost always a wrong number. After they say “way” a couple of times (Chinese "Hello") I go thru my repertoire of my 2 Chinese sentences. “I don’t understand.” And "I am American”. Sometimes they will hang up but others will just keep talking. When that happens I just start talking too. After a while they will finally realize how useless it is to keep up their end of the conversation and hang up, but it provides me with some live entertainment for a couple of minutes.

Exploring the Stange World of Blogs and Podcasts

If “Katie’s Midlife Adventure” is your first and only experience with an online blog (online journal), then you need to broaden your experiences. I have two recommendations for the newbies of you:
• Nathan’s Blog (one of the other foreign teachers here)
• and a video podcast from an entertaining guy name Ron who teaches English in Fuzhou, China.
Nathan’s blog is an example of what a real blog looks like, mine is more of a journal. If you are brave to venture forth into Nathan’s and Elizabeth’s world www.whereisnathan.com , make sure you read at least 2 of their entries. Scroll down to the entries dated 4/16 (Chinese Characters) and 5/10 (To Changsha & Back). I will give you a quick explanation for the first entry. One of the questions you get over and over and over again is “Where are you from”. Nathan, who already had a couple of tattoos, recently added another. He had the 3 Chinese Characters for “American” (Mei -beautiful, Guo-country, Ren-person) literally tattooed onto his shoulder. His explanation and pictures are great. The second entry is by Elizabeth and she explains about Chinese toilets. I am so lucky to be working with such talented and interesting people.

My second recommendation will take you a little deeper into the strange world of the Internet. If you don’t know what a podcast is – think – Radio-On-Demand. Most podcasts are FREE and there are thousands of people on the Internet making home-made radio shows. Some are professionally produced such as the ones by NPR, NBC, CNN, BBC shows. The other extreme are the really strange ones made by some wacky kid down the street. (Yes, even Paula and I made a few called "What We Did On Our Summer Vacations). Ron’s podcasts fall in between the NPR ones and the wacky kid down the street, but with an interesting twist, he video tapes at the same time. Each episode runs approximately 10 minutes and with it you will get a surprizingly accurate picture of what it is like living and working in China. My favorite episodes are Street Food, The Village People, the Game of Death, Fuzhou Nights, and Engrish Class. The easiest way to view them is to use iTunes (free for both Windows and Mac). Do a search for it under podcasts it is called “the illworld: China” hit the subscribe button or you can go to his web site (www.rsims2.com) and download from there. Ron does use explicit language at times, but after teaching middle school for 33 years, I don’t easily get offended but I did get quite a few chuckles out of them. Try them, you might like the added variety.

Gettin' Around

No I won’t write about the driving, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you. Being a passenger in any China vehicle is one of those adrenalin pumping adventures that you have to experience to “accept it”. (Please Note: I did not use the words “comprehend it or understand it”). Also I will limit this blog to just the 2 more popular student forms of transportation: the city buses and the Green “Stuff-It-Vans.

City Buses
Even though this campus is literally at the “end of the road” it works to our advantage when it comes to the buses. ZUFE campus is the starting and stopping points for 3 main bus routes (K401, X1 and the new B1 bus). When leaving campus you will always have a seat, which is a luxury in China, because they start out empty. Unfortunately, getting back to ZUFE you will probably have to stand for the hour long ride.

“Stuff It Vans”
Amazing, I am sure the drivers have graduate degrees in “efficient routing” They know how to transport passengers, each requesting different destinations, efficiently and make a profit to boot. They would be perfect for setting up the Glynn County school bus routes. They could fit more kids on the bus, get them to school faster and even save gas. BUT, we may have a slight problem with getting any part of the vehicle to pass any sort of safety inspection. Engine maintenance is usually done while waiting in line for the next group of passengers. I have only seen seat belts for the driver. Seats have no padding and the mothers from St. Simons would complain that their little darlings would have permanent damage to their kidneys due to the fact that all springs have long been destroyed by the speed bumps they fly over. Try not to sit in the back seat. The back seats are very painful plus you need to be proficient in a few yoga moves to get back there. You can fit 3 people in the back, 3 people in the middle (2 on the car seat and 1 on a stool) 1 in the front and they encourage sitting on laps. There are sliding doors on each side. (Drivers gallantly close them for you by speeding up and slamming on breaks so they fly shut) I am amazed how quickly they can adjust their routes when they take on a new passenger. They will reject passengers and wave them on to the next van if their new destination cannot fit into their complicated but flexible route. The cost is 2 quai (25 cents). Don’t be a ‘newbie’ like we were and pay more.

The most necessary piece of equipment for these drivers (and all drivers) is not the engine but the horn. I haven’t figured out the Chinese horn code yet because there are different honks for different things. They honk…….
• when driving down the road to let people know they have a seat available
• to let the other car or bus know you are cutting them off
• to get a bike, walkers or trucks to get out of their way (the trucks, bikes and walkers mostly ignore them). Just never make eye contact. Keep your head down and keep walking. Most of them won’t hit you.
• just to make sure the horn is still working

Just Side Notes-No Main Blog

Side Note I: Hotel/Apartment repairs and quirks. Being in a partially converted hotel has its advantages. There is a restaurant on the second floor, a canteen on the first and a front desk to help you when you lock yourself out of the room. During the holiday there was some sort of mishap where we lost a part of our glass roof that covers an atrium that is open from the 3rd floor to the 6th floor. So until the new glass panel came in there was a lot of running around the halls with buckets whenever it rained. The above picture is of the workmen installing the new panel.
Plumbing seems to be a problem here. The water cut off yesterday when I was trying to do a load of wash. The pipes make some interesting sounds every now and then and sometimes the water has a questionable color. I had to buy a plunger and I use it frequently. Don’t worry I only drink bottled water and always wait for clear, quiet water before climbing in the shower.

Side note II: I badly needed a hair trim. I had already been given the ‘go ahead’ by Nicole because she said she could fix my hair if things went bad. There are probably about 8 beauty/barber shops ON CAMPUS that are located under a lot of the dorms. In China first floors of almost all buildings (including some houses) are shops, stores or restaurants. I got Rachel, one of my post-grad students, to pick a shop and a stylist she knew had a good reputation. Rachel actually stayed with me the whole time for translation and any panic purposes. I paid 10 Yuan (a buck and a quarter) for a shampoo and trim. The stylist spent about 45 minutes working on it and it looks pretty good. I showed Nicole on my SKYPE camera what it looked like and I didn’t hear any major groans so I guess that means it looks acceptable. There are a couple of drawbacks. There is more of my gray showing because he cut out a lot of Nicole’s great cover-up work (he actually asked Rachel if Nicole’s dye job was my natural hair color) The second drawback is that my ears look much bigger and droopier. Maybe I am getting to the age where the ears are growing or maybe my 3 earrings are pulling my lobes down. Barb, my sarcastic sister, recommended that I should just get 3 or 4 more piercings cause I have so much more room for earrings. It’s a pain getting old. PS. A lot of these college kids already have gray hair. The Chinese seem to get gray pretty early.

Side note III – As I walk around the crowded campus not understanding any of the conversations I wonder if it will feel really weird to come back in July where I can actually understand what everyone is saying. Barb said that when she was in China, she used to gravitate toward anyone that looked like they spoke English and rudely butted into their conversation. I think I am getting to that point.

Side Note V – I had 4 students come over Wednesday to try and teach me how to play Mahjong. Maybe after a couple more sessions I might be good enough to teach others. Starting out the game is probably the hardest with a complicated version of deciding where you get your tiles from. There are 144 tiles and 3 types of ‘suits’ and a bunch of extras. With your tiles you try to make run of 3 of the same suit or a 3 (pong) or 4 (gong) of a kind. When you take someone’s tile you are “eating” it. I won a couple of sets with the help of a student coaching me from behind. But of course the students won the most cause they actually knew what they were doing. The game sort of reminds me a little of Gin Rummy. After listening to the students’ stories it sounds like there is a lot of ‘paying up’ when you make mistakes or when you lose. I paid up with some of my peppermint patties and a couple of bonus points on their midterm.

Shameful Secret......

May 12, 2006
I have a few shameful secrets, one being that I am addicted the Survivor Show and I share this addiction with a friend (who shall remain nameless to protect her reputation). When I am in the United States we will watch the TV show while on the phone with each other. We will comment on the contestant’s personalities, second guess their decisions and generally have fun and a lot of laughs. When I came to China I figured that we would have to give up this obsession for a year. But as they say necessity is the mother of invention. This is how we worked it out. I am lucky enough to have Friday off so I can talk on SKYPE during Survivor time, but just talking and not seeing didn’t really fill my craving. So “Friend X” carries in a ladder from her garage and props it on her wall and places the tiny video cam on top facing her TV. If the Internet gods are in our favor I can watch and listen to a fuzzy version of the show as we have our discussion and laughs. I am aware that I could always download the show from the Internet and watch it the next day, but most of the fun is being able to watch it together. So many thanks to “Friend X” for being willing to do all this finagling just to watch a one hour voyeuristic show. Just in case you are ready to lose all respect for me, in my defense this show is a great Psychology, Sociology and group dynamics field study. (Yeah right…)

Suzhou - Part IV

Friday – last day in Suzhou. A few sprinkles today but did not need the umbrella until I got back to the train station in Hangzhou.

After my cold pizza breakfast I got another “communication fix” on the computer. We started our tour at 10 and drove to 2 fishing towns Luzhi and Zhouzhuang (no I can’t pronounce either one). The driving thru the countryside was more interesting than expected. You have to remember that I have only seen a narrow part of China because of my location in my educational district of Ziasha, which consists of mostly affluent students. On the drive, the houses ranged from thatched roofed large farm houses to the new 3-5 story ones that government helps build. The farmland along with the water areas were partitioned off each family. So it appears that each family had their own specific area to fish as well as farm.

We came upon a small traffic accident involving an overturned bike/wagon and a motorcycle. There were police on the scene who were putting a driver into a back seat of their car. The strange thing was that the other driver was punching him as they were putting him and the police were letting him.
Both of the towns had lots of waterways, bridges, famous wealthy merchant’s houses and tourist shops. The streets were very narrow and crowded. Lunch today was NOT alone. I ate lunch with my guide Tracy at a local restaurant with local food. Remember those small silver fish I was mentioned? Well they put them WHOLE in a scrambled egg dish. I can now brag to Nathan that I ate fish eyes too. I assumed that there were pieces of fish meat in the eggs and that the little black dots were pepper. Wrong assumption, the black dots were attached to the heads of the tiny fish. I had no digestive repercussions, but I am glad I had eaten it before I knew what the black dots were. We also had a local pork dish cooked in a sweet brown sauce. I couldn’t figure out what part of the pork it was from Tracy’s description. She called it ‘pork knuckle’ but on the Internet they called it “Wansan’s Pig Upper Leg”. The meat underneath the thick layer of fat was really tender and good.

As we were leaving we went by a bunch of tourist shops. I saw one with a lot of old looking mahjong sets which I needed so I could learn how to play. I bargained the store clerk down from 480 yuan to around 200 yuan. She claimed that it was an antique with a mahogany box, bamboo and bone pieces. Yeah Right…I type sarcastically. It was really some sort of plastic with mahogany grain and a picture painted on the top part (bottom part was not even painted). As for the antique game pieces, the bottom part of the tile DOES look like bamboo but the top part, doesn’t look like bone and the tops of a couple of them keep falling off. The directions were printed on old looking paper in ENGLISH. I didn’t argue with her cause I was more worried about the weight of it because I knew I had to lug it home from the train and bus station along with my backpack and purse. Also I was pretty sure from the Chinese going on behind me that my guide was going to get a cut - which she deserved cause the tip from a ‘one person tour’ is pitiful to what she might have gotten from a whole group. After the purchase we walked down the street for a while and surprise, surprise - she says “oh I left the ticket in the store – sit here while I go back and get it” - Yeah right…..as I said she was a good tour guide & deserved the cut.

We got back to the crowded train station where Tracy got me settled in my soft seat waiting room and gave me instructions as to how to read the schedule board (wait for the English version to come up) and how to get to the correct platform (go under the tracks).

My train was late and it was raining when I arrived in Hangzhou. There was a long line for the night bus but I caught the second one and used my large size to push in line and get a seat for the hour long bus ride. Fortunately, it had stopped raining by the time we arrived on campus because I was not looking forward to walking the mile back to my apartment/hotel with all my stuff in the rain. I got in bed by 11pm. It was a good mimi-adventure.

Suzhou Part III

Thursday in Suzhou– another beautiful day

The Humble Administrators Garden was first stop on our tour. It was built in the 1500’s, by a retired imperial inspector Wang Xianchen. He got the name for the garden from an essay called "To cultivate my garden and sell my vegetable crop is the policy of humble man". It covers about 13 acres with a large pond in the middle occupying a fifth of it. Besides the many flowers, plants and people, there were lots of mosaic sidewalks, rockeries, bridges and framing windows (interesting openings in walls that ‘frame’ the outside scenery).

It was hard taking pictures because of the crowds of people, but even with the mob you can get an idea of the beauty, planning and the amazing attention to detail. One section contained a large selection of bonsai plants. I admire them but would never have the patience to cultivate them. One of the many ponds contained some mandarin ducks that were very pretty. My photograph does not capture the colors on the male. The link below has some great pictures of the garden that I found on the Internet. They are worth the time to look. http://www.hpmuseum.org/china/trip3/suzhou.htm

Tracy told me a neat story about how the son of one of the owners lost the whole garden betting on a game of Mahjong. I am determined to learn how to play. I will see if I can con one of my students into teaching me. They told me it is a game that old people play, and I guess I qualify. I promise I won’t bet the homestead in Georgia on a game of Mahjong.

Ouyuan or Classical garden was the next stop our tour. Besides the bonsai, flowers, water, and zig-zag bridges it had a very large man-made yellow stone rockery that was full of kids. Its’ history was a neat little love story of how the husband built it for his wife. To leave the area you took a very short Venice-like boat ride. There was a paddler but no singing. Since I had declined the ‘rickshaw ride’ part of the tour, we walked thru the town. The houses along the canal are part of Suzhou’s historical district and can’t be torn down which means that most of them were empty due to the cost of making them livable. It was very quiet. We walked through the local vegetable/meat/fish market. They have really shrimpy shrimp, along with lots of fish, eels, and strange vegetables (including a lima? bean that looked like it was on steroids).

After another lunch alone we went to the Hanshan temple. This working Buddhist temple was made popular due to a poem about listening to their bells. According to Buddhist legend, everybody has 108 kinds of annoyances per year and each bell tolling can help people dispel those coming annoyances. (I kept thinking back to when I taught middle school – I think that they might have meant 108 annoyances a day and not per year) During New Year's Eve, thousands of visitors gather at Hanshan temple to listen to the one hundred and eight bell tolls at the same time praying for luck and happiness in the New Year. They have 2 bronze dragons (they looked like a cross between a mean dog and a turtle) that you rub for good luck or money. I did my share of rubbing. This was one of my favorite places, even with the crowds it gave me a peaceful feeling and smelled great with all the incense.

We finished up the tour and I was dropped off at the hotel about 3 pm and strolled around my hotel area again. On my wanderings I discovered a foreign language book store, a grocery store that carried ‘coke light’, a Confucius Park with a really cute dog and a Pizza Hut. So guess where I had my 6th solitary meal? Yep, you guessed it. Well at least it was an American restaurant. I carried the leftovers back to the hotel and ate leftover pizza for breakfast – how American is that? The pepperoni pizza tasted the same but the garlic bread was not even close to the real thing. Wrong kind of bread and just the barest hint of garlic. Garlic is not their favorite spice. In this area the Chinese food seems to contain a lot of cilantro (not one of my favorites) and of course msg (which I do like but make my feet swell).

On the way back to the room I finally noticed that there was a very small ‘business center’ in the hotel so I jumped on their solitary 6 Yuan/hr internet computer and caught up with my small corner of the English language world. The room smelled like a giant ashtray but it worth it and anyway I had a warm “Coke Light” to drink so I was happy.

I don’t think it was the same guy as Wednesday night but I was lucky enough to get a repeat performance of a Chinese male banging on my hotel door for entrance. I decided not even to bother answering him. I had the lock on and it was getting boring. He quit before I had to call the front desk. Weird.

Side note - It is VERY loud today in the very echo-y, marble floored, large hallway. The workmen are yelling at each other and it is hard to concentrate. Nothing is quiet in China. I am going to crank up my country music just to let them know I am alive and kicking and taking my part in contributing to the noise.

Suzhou Part II

Wednesday, after eating a Chinese breakfast (alone) of baozi and fruit in the hotel’s restaurant, Tracy and the driver arrived and we began our Suzhou Tour. Suzhou flourished as a major trading and silk center after the Grand Canal was built during the Sui dynasty (6th century). The canal linked Suzhou to the capital. Not surprisingly, one of Suzhou’s nicknames is “Venice of the East”. Trading during the Ming and Qing dynasties made many of the local exporters rich. Much of this wealth was spent in creating over 150 elaborate gardens.

The first garden on our tour was the Lingering Garden. It had beautiful rock formations, ponds, and of course lots of flowers and people. The Lingering garden is well known for having some of the most famous rock sculptures. There are many of these “grotesque rockeries” all over China. They seem to be in all the parks and in front of any building that has the money to put one there. The Chinese kids love climbing all over them and they have some very strange shapes. Since the Song Dynasty (960-1279) masons have been quarrying these limestone rocks from the mountains near Lake Taihu in Jiangsu Province. They shape them a little bit and then stick them in the lake and let nature take over. After a few years they take them out and cement different pieces together to make the final sculpture.

Next stop was a boat ride through the Grand Canal. It isn’t just one large canal it is a bunch of them of different sizes. If you look at a map of Suzhou the waterways look like roads because they create blocked shaped islands. It really did look a little like Venice. There were a lot of unique old stone bridges and the water was surprising very clean. It had the same color and clarity of our marsh waters in Georgia on a good day. Lots of strange fishnets were in the water which Tracy said catch a very small silver fish. (I will experience them later). In the canals I saw a wedding boat, women hand washing their clothes on the rocks, and 2 boats that looked like they were made of cement. (It must have been an optical illusion- I wasn’t quick enough to take a picture).

No Chinese tour is complete without a “factory tour”. This one was of the “Number 1 Silk Factory” I was prepared to tolerate this obligatory tour as I had many times before. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this one was REALLY interesting. Honest! It was a real working factory with the real live silk worms, mulberry trees and all the machinery that actually showed how the cocoon gets turned into silk thread. I would honestly like to go back!

Lunch alone and then onto Panmen Gate which is a water gate and the last part of the original city wall. This present wall/fortress was built in the 1300’s, and consisted of two water passes, two land gates, and an ambush area outside a city gate but inside the first gate so the enemy could be trapped. Inside the gate is the 7 story Ruiguang Pagoda which is the oldest Buddhist pagoda in the area. There were also lots of colorful and hungry coy in the small lake.

We finished up our day early so I added an optional ‘foot massage’ onto the tour. It was worth ever Yuan. They dropped me off for an afternoon break and dinner alone and then a night performance at another garden. There were singers, actors, and instruments. The Suzhou Opera is slightly different from the Peking Opera. Still very nasally and high pitched but not as hard on the ears. It was a much softer sound. My favorite ‘acts’ were the flutes and a weird ‘forerunner’ of the slide guitar.

Bedtime provided some excitement. A man kept banging on my door insisting in Chinese that I was in his room. He finally figured out I wasn’t going to leave or let him in and left. Maybe he just wanted to see the foreigner in her pj’s.

Chinese saying "In Heaven There is Paradise, on Earth There is Hangzhou and Suzhou." Part I

I have to confess that I picked the Suzhou tour because I was a little bit chicken. I know you guys think I was brave coming to China but I picked this type of “midlife adventure” because it is a fairly controlled and regulated situation with the added bonus of having ZUFE’s great foreign affairs office staff coddle me whenever I need it. I still have (and probably always will have) trouble eating dinner by myself in a restaurant, irregardless of my location: Georgia or China. So going on my first ‘solo’ tour dredged up that same type of “solo restaurant dinner” fear and avoidance. I talked myself into the tour using the following arguments:
• Suzhou is very similar to Hangzhou (see quote above)
• It is close enough to go by train (because I didn’t want to tackle taking a plane on my ‘first’)
• It will be WAY better than sitting in my apartment/hotel for a week watching DVD’s

Tuesday morning I got to the train station by taxi. Even this mundane mode of transportation ended up giving me a little scare. No, it wasn’t the normal crazy Chinese driving, it was the taxi’s route. The driver went down all these really strange back roads to get to the train station. So many and for so long that I actually started text messaging Ricky, who was staying in Xiasha, the number on the cab driver’s id. I never had to hit the send button because we arrived a little later at the very crowded train station without me being abducted into white slavery. My ticket was a ‘soft seat’ ticket (more money, more leg room, and more service) which meant you get to wait in a really nice waiting room with soft sofas, no beggars and no pushing and shoving when getting on board. I am buying those every time!

Second half of the 3 hour train ride a Suzhou native talked to me and gave me his cell phone number in case I needed help. The Chinese are so helpful to foreigners. I ended up having to take him up on his offer immediately upon arrival because we could not find Tracy, my tour guide, right away. She quickly found us and took charge of me and got me settled in at the Fuhui Hotel. After I unpacked my tiny backpack, I ate some snacks I had brought for dinner (cause I didn’t want to eat dinner alone in the restaurant- sound familiar) and had a tolerable night’s sleep on the typical hard Chinese mattress.