Yesterday I had a couple of girls from the evening class I taught last term over for the evening. We cooked dinner together (well, they did most of the cooking) and they told me some Chinese stories and legends. Just thought I'd share one of them with you (hope I remember it right). There are of course many versions of the same story, but here's the one I was told:

Once upon a time there was a cowherd boy called Niulang. The only thing that belonged to him in the whole world was his cow, who was not an ordinary cow at all but quite a magical one. (oo, magical cows right in the beginning!) One day the cow told him that the seven daughters of the Goddess of Heaven would be coming down to earth to bathe in the river. The cow suggested that he play a trick on them and run away with their clothes while the girls are in the river. And so he did. To get the clothes back, the girls decided the the youngest of them, Zhinu, would ask the boy for them.

The boy said that he would give the clothes back if the girl would marry him. And as Zhinu looked at him, she thought that Niulang seemed like a good man, and decided that she would accept the offer. So, the other sisters took their clothes and returned back to heaven, while Zhinu stayed back with the boy.

The couple settled down to a life on earth, and had two children, a girl and a boy. Time passed and the cow died, but before her death she said to Niulang to keep her skin and wear it when the need was the greatest, and he would get magical powers, too. One day, the Goddess of Heaven, who had been longing after her daughter, found out that she was living on earth. She became furious and descended down to earth, taking Zhinu away from Niulang and the children. At this point, Niulang remembered the advice of the cow, and put on the skin he had kept all these years. With this, he got the power to fly and so he grabbed the two children and the three of them flew after the women in pursuit. But the Goddess of Heaven would have none of it, so she took her hairpin out of her hair, and with it she tore the heavens in two, creating a river in the sky separating them from Niulang.

Niulang, devastated, sat on the other side of the river day and night, crying for his loved one. In the end, the Goddess took pity on him and promised that for one day each year, the lovers would be allowed to cross the river and meet. This day is the 7th day of the 7th month in the Chinese lunar calendar, a chinese "Valentine's Day", if you will. On this day, thousands of magpies will bearing twigs in the beaks will fly up to the sky and build a bridge for the two lovers.

And the heavenly river is of course the milky way, and there are two stars, one in the east and one in the west, that are Niulang and Zhinu.

This term I have asked my PhD students to keep following news, both local, national and international, which we can then discuss in class. This concept has worked really well and almost all the students now come to class with a couple of stories they have prepared to be presented to the class.

Last week, a few of the news stories presented were related to something you can't avoid seeing in any city in China (...I assume based on all the places I have been to so far and the stories I have heard) : beggars. In Baoding, there really aren't all that many, but in some other places you will see beggard on every street corner. Disfigured children, smelly old men, or women in rags with babies. So how do you deal with this? Do you give them money?

The problem is that a lot of the begging is organised, and the money you give to that poor little kid will go straight to a rich old geezer, who practically uses these children as money-collecting slaves. One of the news stories reported how the police in Hangzhou have been putting extra effort into getting rid of the beggars in the city. In the story, they introduced the case of a young girl, who was picked up from the street and found to be working for a man, who had been putting her in the street every day for the past five years. Every day this man would cut the girl's ankles open to increase the sympathy points and thus her earnings. And if my students translated correctly, this girl was making some serious money.

Similarly, there are many stories of children being kidnapped and then used for begging, while disfiguring them in one way or another (like cutting their tendons etc). Or children are lured away from countryside families by promises of money for the whole family and a better life.

A different variation to the begging theme was offered last week by a story of an orphaned university student, who begged for 10 days over the winter holidays in order to be able to afford the tuition fees for this semester. And in that time he did indeed make enough money to pay the fees...

So the question remains, what do you do? Do you give to those children, which means you would probably be supporting some sad old loser who just exploits the kids? But surely some of these people do it out of a real need? How do you know which is which?

You tell me...

On days like today my students keep making me smile and make me realise how lucky I am to be living here, and how privileged I am to be spending my time with people like them and actually getting paid for it! Before going to class this afternoon, I was not feeling all that motivated, and thought I'd just have to stay awake for the next three hours and keep the discussion in class up somehow. But my PhDs woke me up from my coma very quickly by making me laugh and argue with them, and the three hours seemed to just fly by. After class, I headed out to the sports field with Jenna and Bruce (or Zhao Zhihui and Liuqing Liang) to fly a kite. Bruce protested at first by saying that we were too old to do that, but Jenna insisted and in the end it wasn't too diccifult to get even him to come along. So there we were, running around giggling and screaming like little kids, trying to keep the little orange butterly from miserably crashing to the ground, and I just couldn't help doing my worst Mary Poppins imitation of "Let's go fly a kite". These are the little moments I will miss when I'll eventually leave Baoding...

Lately I have not been making nearly enough effort to actually learn something myself (instead of just being the teacher). Rationally thinking, I realise that this is an amazing opportunity for me to be learning Chinese in an environment where it's spoken, as well as getting to know a new culture from the inside. I could easily learn a few new words each day, and practise by talking to my students, people in the shops etc. Instead, over the past couple of months, it's been more like one word per week. My Chinese is still very basic, a kind of "survival talk", which gets me the things that I need but doesn't allow for conversations much past the "can you show me the red one?/I am an English teacher./Turn left, please." What's more, Feng Ying, who gave us the Chinese class twice a week last term, has been recovering from an operation so no classes so far this term.
But, I *will* start making a real effort, we'll probably start the classes again in the next two weeks, and I *will* take at least a while every (other?) day to look at my Chinese books. Really.

Last saturday (which happened to be Valentine's - just a coincidence) we had a little gettogether for the laowais in Baoding. Originally, I just had an idea that we should get some people together for the beginning of the new term, which is mentioned to Griselle and we just passed the word on to people who then passed it on to others etc. In the end we were almost 30 foreigners in Nongfu, met lots of new people from different countries, even a fellow European, which was nice (as you get to reminescense about bad eurodance hits and Antoine de Caunes on Eurotrash). A few of us ended up going all through the night until 6:30 in the morning, just staying up and talking. I took in five strays who had no place to sleep (as some schools close their gates around 10 or 11 pm, after which you are either in or out), since i have an extra bedroom and sofas in the living room. In the end, the whole thing reminded of the first year at uni, it's been a loooong time since the last time i actually stayed up the *whole* night like that. But, it won't become a habit ;)

I've finally created a completely new photo album for some of the pictures Olli took during the time he spent here in china with me, so go check it out.

There are pictures from our trip in Nanjing, Suzhou, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Beijing, as well as pictures from Baoding. So you'll have a chance to see pics of my home town, my life here, as well as from the places we visited. Go check it out here!

This will be a one-time album, I won't be adding any more pictures to this one. All the new photos from now on will go the my "Images of a Chinese Life" album.

Pheww, it's getting a little better already. I had a couple of good classes today, the MSc students' group seems to be a really good one (just like Bishi said), talkative and lively. And they laughed at my lame jokes and let me do a full-on "entertaining teacher" routine today, which made it fun. And ah, those compliments, haven't had so many of them from my other students anymore (what?? they got tired of telling me every day how beautiful i am??), but these new students are full of them. Time for yet another ego-boost...

After classes today, I went along with one of my PhD students, Wang Yanxia (or Wendy), who showed me some of the greenhouses on campus, as well as her lab. She's working on plant genetics, researching transgenetic plants (you know, creating all those wacky genetically modified plants). To be honest, I didn't understand a whole lot about the details of her work, but it was interesting anyway, looking at all the weird machines and the thousands of little bottles filled with these blobs of cells and plants at various stages of growth. Just a contibution of a couple of pictures from my life today :)

The day in Shijiazhuang today wasn't quite as good as Beijing. It's too polluted, too crowded, and there really isn't much apart from shops in the city itself (there are some nice places around it though). The people from Shijiazhuang claim that in Hebei province, they are known for being nice and friendly, while the Baoding people are supposedly known for their bad manners and being rude. But today, it seemed to be exactly the opposite, a million zillion people bumping into us, spitting everywhere, and never ever saying 'excuse me' or 'I'm sorry'. It didn't exactly help that Griselle's wallet was stolen in a DVD shop, good thing was that she only had a little money in it, and nothing else. So, after a lunch of disgusting greasy pizza and some shopping and trying to push our way through the crowd, we decided to head back to Baoding. And once we were on that train, everything seemed much better again :) And guess what, right when we got to Baoding, we had people talking to us, *smiling*, being nice, helping us off the train. So, no matter what they say, I'd take good old Baoding over Shijiazhuang any day!!

I posted a couple of new pictures from the Great Wall trip, sent to me by Eric ze French bloke. I also posted one explaining the source of my annoyance today, just a street in Shijiazhuang with people, people, people. I was going to take another one at the train station, which was a total chaos, but had the guy behind me looking into my bag, being a little too interested in its contents, so I decided not to get the camera out.

First of all, I just posted a whole bunch of pictures in the gallery, so go take a look.

The few days in Beijing was just what we had planned. Shopping, eating, going out... And yes, it is a great city indeed (how do I have the feeling that I've said that before...ehhh). We stayed in a hostel in the Chaoyang district, conveniently located nearby the Sanlitun bar/restaurant area. The hostel wasn't too bad, the room really was like a hotel room. The only problem really was the weird people who were staying along the same corridor, a bunch of Indian (?) men who were being loud and one of them even had a Chinese woman staying with him, and she obviously wanted to leave, over which they were having arguments right outside our room. She kept begging him to let her leave, but ended up coming back anyway. And geeeez lady pleeeez don't wear those heels if you walk around the corridors at night.

But the shopping... you really should have seen us. We really were (once again) the two bag ladies from Nong Da. We arrived with just a backpack each, but left with a zillion plastic bags. But those markets are just *dangerous*, they sell all kinds of stuff (most interestinlgy clothes & shoes) for such cheap prices. I've never have the shop-a-holic woman come out in me like this before, I've even thought I'm quite reasonable when it comes to buying things. I guess it's just one of those things that China does to you.

Even in a tiny supermarket in Sanlitun, where they have some Western goodies (as there are lots of foreigners living in the area) we went absolutely bonkers. Not so much in terms of buying loads, but just really acting like two countryside girls who walk into a shop full of just about everything they would imagine heaven to hold in one room. We only realised after about 10 minutes of running around the place and shouting "aaaaggh!! I can't believe they have *this*!!" that we were really behaving like a pair of idiots. But hey, we really are countryside girls here... and oh those wonders of a big city!

And yes, we made it to the Great Wall! We wrote our names down for a tour organised by the hostel and took off in a minibus after 7 in the morning, going to SiMaTai, which is part of the wall that is still pretty much in the original state, about 2 hours away from Beijing. Altogether we were seven people: us, a really nice young Chinese couple, two French blokes, and a Chinese guy studying in France with the two. The day was really cloudy and foggy, the only foggy day that I've seen for a couple of weeks, actually. First we were a little annoyed by the weather, as it really has been sunny every other day before it and since, but actually once we got to the wall, the weather gave the scenery a dreamy, even mystical quality, it really reminded me of those Chinese paintings that you see. It was a really good trip, we climbed the wall all the way up the hil,l we made it to the 12th, which is as far as you could go. Up there, it was just totally silent, there was no one else around except for us... amazing. And kilometres and kilometres of hills, wrapped in clouds, in every direction around us.

The saying here goes that you are not a real man until you climb the wall. I don't know how that worked for me, but they also say that a woman gets more beautiful if she climbs the wall. Dissapointingly, no matter how closely I've been keeping an eye on the mirror, I can't seem to notice any change.

At night, after all that climbing and walking and stumbling down the hill in the end, Griselle and me decided to keep going and go for a real night out. So after dinner we did some bar hopping, checking out a few places in Sanlitun, and finally ended up in a bar called Poachers. By the time we got there, we we almost ready to go home soon, but ended up staying until the wee hours, dancing on the table to all those songs that we'd been missing. It was great fun, I'm not a big clubber but when I do feel like dancing, then it has to be done properly. And what better way than on a table in a middle of a crowded bar in Beijing.

But now, back in Baoding once again and -- aaagghhh--- the last week of holiday. To be honest, I'm not looking forward to teaching again, but I guess there's no avoiding it. I do like the students, and it's really not a bad job, but I really am enjoying my freedom right now, getting paid for doing nothing ;) But still a few more days of that to go, tomorrow me and Gris are heading to Shijiazhuang for a day, just for the heck of it. No big plans, just walking around, eating out, maybe some more shopping (nngghhh, can't resist!!)...
But once again, being back in Baoding today and walking to town, no matter how much I like Beijing and would love to live there, I realised once again how much I like Baoding, too. It might not have those tall, shiny buildings and fancy bars and restaurants, but it has it's own charm, and it's home home home right now.

I'll post some more pics soon, but now the sofa is calling. Never resist the call of the sofa.