The Land of China, Part 5

I found the journal that I kept during my time in China. I didn't write in it every single day - most notably, there are no entries for most of those frustrating days when we were being jerked around by the school and the volunteer program. Still, these entries remind me of so many details of the trip that I had forgotten entirely. Here are a few of what I think are the more interesting ones. I've tried not to edit anything.

7/1/07

Days blended into each other on the plane. JFK >> MSP >> NRT >> BJS (NYC to Minneapolis/St. Paul to Tokyo to Beijing). Had a middle seat on the long middle flight. Sat next to a student from the Philippines, returning from vacation in D.C. and northeast U.S.A. She didn't want to go home to start working. Long flight. In and out of sleep the whole way.

Arrived at Beijing Airport and took the bus to the train station in the center of the city. Bus is very quiet and there are no women on it except for Krista. It's dark but the scenery is overwhelming. Tollbooths are traditional Chinese architecture.  Bus drops us off into a sea of panhandlers. Some of them have rickshaws. K and I act indecisively - we realize we are on the wrong side of the street from the train station and from our hotel. In the confusion, my camera is lifted from my sweatshirt pocket. I know this almost immediately but it's too late. The men are all gone and there's nothing I can do about it. I am rattled. Where is the hotel? We only have the name and address in English. We cross the street, which involves climbing stairs and taking a long foot bridge. A guy helps K with her bag. Is he being nice or is he mocking her? Gives her an awkward high five.

We show the hotel address to a cabdriver. He is totally baffled. He laughs at us incredulously, the way an NYC cabby would if you handed him an address in Chinese characters. We show another cabdriver the address. Same result. Train station is closed. Can't ask inside. I pull out my Lonely Planet (total tourist move) and see that the Beijing International Hotel is close by. Surely they must speak English there. We find another cabby and point to the characters for Beijing International Hotel in the guidebook. He takes us there.

The weather in Beijing was simultaneously overcast and incredibly humid. It was actually impossible to tell where the sun was, but I certainly felt it at all times.

We thank the driver and I tip him 5 Yuan, or the rough equivalent of 65 cents. Boy is he pleased! Inside the B.I.H., we are relieved to hear businessmen speaking English. We show the English name of our hotel to the guy at the front desk. He doesn't know it, but in a minute he has found it in the phone book and is calling us to confirm our reservation. What a guy! We almost feel bad that we aren't even staying at the B.I.H. but it is clearly too rich for our blood. Sorry. Another cab takes us to our hotel, which we discover is right next to the train station we were standing in front of in the first place. I'm sure we would never have found it though. It is tucked deep in a dark alley behind the station.

We quickly check in at around 12:30 AM. We are unfazed by pillows that appear to be filled with sand and cardboard mattresses. It is so good to be in bed.

7/3/07

We have so much to do today. It isn't just sightseeing: we also need to buy some essentials, like a new camera.

The Forbidden City is incredibly vast and crowded, and much of it is under construction in anticipation of the 2008 Olympics. This place really is a city in every sense. Gardeners pick weeds out of the cracks. Do they live on the grounds of the City? What is it like for ethnic Chinese to visit this city? Is is a source of pride? Do they feel affection for Chairman Mao, whose portrait graces the entrance gates?

7/4/07

6:30 AM - Children walking in circles around their school grounds. They pass us as we buy bottles of water. (We are jet-lagged and hence, awake earlier than usual.) Long line of children, walking two by two, holding hands. Youngest in front, oldest in back. Smiling as they pass us. Many of them shout "Hello!" or "Good morning!" Beaming and waving. I am guessing they don't see many white people. They have at least seen few enough to make our appearance a cause for excitement.

The Great Wall - We celebrate the Fourth of July with a trip to Simatai, an area of the Great Wall. Along with several other tourists, including a group of six good-natured frat bros from California, we will walk 10K along a portion of the wall. It's really hot out and this portion of the wall includes many stairs, so this is hard work. Bedraggled men and women sell water, beer and Coca-Cola at every tower on the Great Wall. (Beer is about the last thing I want on a strenuous hike like this. The frat boys apparently disagree: they buy two per person.) What are these vendors' lives like? They sell, water, t-shirt, postcards and other tchotchkes for $3 max. They walk back and forth on this wall every day, which must be exhausting. I am having enough trouble doing it in gym shorts and sneakers. They mostly wear khaki slacks and shoes. One woman follows the frat guys the length of three towers, trying to sell one of them a t-shirt, which she finally does. T-shirts, incidentally, say "I Have Climbed Up the Great Wall," which seems like a couple words more than strictly necessary.

One of those "I can't believe I'm in China" moments.

"You buy postcard!" one vendor yells at me, to which I respond, "No I don't!" Is this the only English she knows?

7/5/07

Pearl Market - There is absolutely no such thing as "just browsing" at this massive flea market, or in fact anywhere in China as far as I can tell. Vendors interpret your mere presence as a sign that you are looking to haggle. They attack us aggressively, sometimes even grabbing us by the shoulders, in attempts to sell whatever. One woman seizes my arm and won't let go until I buy a scarf from her for the equivalent of six dollars. I'll give this to Julia, I guess? This is not even my worst purchase of the day. I also buy a book of Chairman Mao's famous quotations for about $2, and then immediately wonder what the hell I'm going to do with it. Vendors are very excited to see easily duped Americans. They yell, "Look at this!!" and shove in my face whatever crap they happen to be pushing.

The sign above the entrance to Pearl Market read,
"The 3rd 4th 5th floor there are all kinds of pearl adornments with our warmth welcome!"
Because one can never have too many pearl adornments.

We walk across the street to the Temple of Heaven. We have no time to walk into the actual temple, but the park itself is very peaceful and serene. Quite a contrast to the Pearl Market. Old men are doing Tai Chi in the clearings. Banyan trees seem to stretch for miles in all directions. If for some reason I had to live in Beijing, I would come here frequently.

Hard to believe this garden is located in one of the world's most populous cities.

The Land of China, Part 4

It had been quite a debacle to actually commence teaching at a school. But I have to say that once I started, I sort of enjoyed it - that is, I enjoyed the three hours I spent standing in front of a classroom, instructing teenagers. I was asked to do so many things in China that were outside my comfort zone, but this was something I felt confident I could do. I liked the kids, who seemed to take it as a matter of course that they were sitting in summer school instead of doing something cooler. I remember that one boy told me he liked my teaching style and thanked me for speaking slowly. (I don't actually think I was consciously trying to speak slowly; I think that's just how I speak. That hadn't really occurred to me before.)

Outside of the classroom, however, there were problems. For one thing, Craig and I were living out of our suitcases in a very cramped hotel room. The hotel that the school had chosen for us had no dressers and, in fact, no furniture other than two twin beds. Another issue was the meal situation. Scott of cheapchinavolunteering.com (or whatever it was called), had promised that all of our meals would be covered - in fact, that the school would be feeding us three meals a day. I believe the Compound in Yangzhou had its own dining hall (which I'm sure served some stellar gruel), but once we were fired, we apparently forfeited our right to be fed. Now that we were in Nanjing, we were told to hang onto our receipts so that the program could reimburse us later. I was skeptical. For one thing, given the way things had gone so far, I couldn't help but question Scott's reliability. For another thing, many of the less formal restaurants in China didn't even provide receipts. Truth be told, you can eat for pretty cheap in China, but still, we had been promised meals and the fact that the company seemed to be reneging on this promise did not bode well.

And then there was the nagging feeling that Big Brother was always watching. Periodically, the representatives from the school would turn up at the doors of our hotel rooms "to check up on us" (i.e., spy on us, or make sure we hadn't run away), which was disconcerting, to say the least. One day, Lisa, the Brit, woke up with a fever and called to tell the school she wouldn't be able to teach. The sympathetic response, she told us later, was "Find another foreign teacher." Within minutes, the phone rang in my room. It was one of the representatives pleading, more than a little desperately, for me to cover her class. It was my day off and I had already made plans so I declined. I showered and got dressed and when I opened the door to leave, there was the guy from the school, standing in the doorway.

"You teach today?" he said. I couldn't tell if he was asking me or telling me. It was as though we had never spoken on the phone.
"No..." I said again, trying to be polite to the man who was, in a sense, my employer, but getting increasingly frustrated, "I'm sorry but I've already made plans."
He stood his ground. "Please!" he begged.
I finally had to push past him, murmuring apologies as I hustled down the stairs and into the street, feeling like Harrison Ford in The Fugitive.

I got on a bus to the center of the city and for the first time, I started to seriously consider the possibility of leaving the volunteer program.

There were lots of arguments in favor of leaving: in terms of housing, food, work and general quality of life, the program hadn't delivered anything close to what they had offered. Again, I hadn't expected luxury, and I had to admit that the hotel, however lackluster, was a step up from the Compound in Yangzhou. Still though, it was cramped and uncomfortable - all the more so given that I had to share it - and it was hard to imagine living there for the next month. Even more upsetting was the lack of appreciation or even acknowledgment from the school itself. The students were lovely, but it was a little weird to slip in and out of the building on teaching days without so much as speaking to another adult. My only interactions with school representatives had involved them inexplicably moving us in and out of four or five different hotels and, more recently, a series of increasingly creepy in-person visits. I was starting to feel more like an indentured servant than a volunteer.

Still, a few issues gave me pause: 1 - There was the vague threat of legal action from Scott and his shady organization. We had signed a contract with the company, after all, even if it was for no pay. But surely anyone could see that the company had violated their side of the agreement; it would have been wildly hypocritical for Scott to accuse me of doing the same. 2 - I had been granted a 90-day work visa on the condition that I would be teaching English during that time. If I didn't teach, would I be technically breaking Chinese law? And didn't bad things happen when you did that? The idea was worrisome, but I rationalized (however rightly or wrongly) that the authorities wouldn't kill themselves to bring one twenty-something white American to justice. 3 - I knew that I would feel guilty if I abandoned the students. They hadn't done anything wrong after all, and what would happen to their classes if their foreign teachers just up and left? But then again, they hadn't even expected to have any foreign teachers until a week ago. These were kids from upper-middle-class families, and they already spoke excellent English. Leaving them would be a mildly crappy thing to do, but I felt confident that they would survive.

Kunming is called "The Spring City" because the weather stays at around 70 degrees year-round. It's actually much cooler than Beijing, even though it's further south. An all-around lovely place.

It so happened that my friend Marc was also spending the summer of 2007 in China. Marc was, and still is, an extremely savvy traveler who, in the ten years since this trip, has worked for the U.S. Foreign Service in China, Thailand, and Turkey. His goal for the summer had been to learn Mandarin, and in an attempt to achieve it, he had flown solo to the southwestern city of Kunming. Once there, he settled in a hostel, advertising his services to local families as an English tutor. It had taken less than a week before an affluent family had snatched him up and all but adopted him. He was now living with the family in their comfortable apartment in the city, soaking in all the Mandarin he could in exchange for a tiny monthly rent. I learned all of this via e-mail, which I checked at a local internet cafe filled to the brim with teenagers playing World of Warcraft. Marc invited me to join him in Kunming. The family was about to take him on vacation with them, he told me, and I was welcome to come along.

In the end, it turned out to be a no-brainer. After my earlier tense encounter with the school's representative, it seemed wise to be as stealthy as possible. I taught one more class and afterward, I returned to the hotel, hurriedly packed my bags and - after quickly scanning the halls and lobby for Big Brother - left without checking out. In two hours, I was on a cross-country flight from Nanjing to Chongqing, and then from Chongqing to Kunming. I was the only white person on both flights.

My plan laid over for a half hour in Chongqing, so I can't really say I've been there. But I did have a fantastic view of the city as we flew in. It has one hell of a skyline. It's hard to believe I had never even heard of the city before the trip and probably still wouldn't if my plane hadn't laid over there.

When I think back on my trip to China, I mostly focus on the final two weeks, which I spent with Marc and his family. The first four weeks had had its thrilling and fascinating moments but had also been fraught with frustration and even the threat of danger. The end of the trip, though, was a guided romp through some relatively obscure locales that most westerners never get to see - all with the guidance of Marc's kind and incredibly generous host family. He had really hit the jackpot with them.

The Land of China, Part 3

After we were fired, on our first and only night in the Compound, my three fellow volunteers and I had a powwow to plan our next move. We had a decision to make: we could a.) call Scott, our American liaison, and ask to be transferred to another school that wasn't surrounded by barbed wire and wouldn't fire us, or b.) cut our losses and travel around the country, having tried and failed to secure a volunteer teaching job for more than twenty-four hours. Truthfully, I was already losing interest in the idea of teaching English for the summer, and was prepared to move in a different direction. I had been traveling around China for a week and a half by now, and was growing accustomed to the freedom. Teaching English had seemed like a good idea when I signed up, but now that I was actually in China, I had no desire to be restricted by a class schedule and, God forbid, the time required to plan classes and grade assignments. It quickly became clear that I was in the minority, however. The other volunteers still wanted to try their hand at teaching, and since I was terrified of being left alone, I went along with them.

Not to be lost in this story: although China can be chaotic and at time downright ugly, it also has some unbelievably beautiful spots. Slender West Lake, with its wooden bridges and traditional pleasure boats, was like the China of my imagination. 

We called Scott, explained the situation to him, and asked if there were any other teaching vacancies. It took him a while to work something out - like two full days. During this time, we holed up in a hotel in Yangzhou, fortunately on the teaching company's dime. We were stuck in a kind of limbo, in which we weren't sure whether or not we would be staying in Yangzhou, or whether or not we would be allowed to teach at all. In 48 hours, Scott called to tell us he had secured another gig for us in the city of Nanjing (where Krista and I had already been), a few hours away. So we hopped a bus to Nanjing, where Scott met us and accompanied us to another hotel. It was his job to travel around from city to city and school to school putting out fires like this one. His superior communication and problem-solving skills made him highly qualified to be the C.E.O. of cheapchinavolunteering.com (or whatever his shady program was called).That night, Scott snapped into action: he took us out to a club, got roaring drunk, danced the Running Man on a stage and passed out in our hotel room some time after 4 in the morning. Truly, it was an impressive display of professionalism.

Having done his job, he left us the next day, with the assurance that the directors of the new school would contact us in a few days with the details about our teaching appointment. Sure enough, two directors from the school arrived at our hotel that evening. We would begin teaching "soon," they told us, but we needed to be moved to a hotel closer to the school. We piled into a van with all of our things (including Craig's five duffel bags) and they drove us to a hotel on the other side of town, where we were to stay until further notice. The school's representatives lacked the ability to communicate clearly with us - or else they just didn't feel like it- and so we never learned the answers to some of our most basic questions: like, when did our classes begin? And where was the school? And why had we been shuttled to three different hotels in as many nights? And was it really the best use of a school's resources to house four volunteer teachers in a different cheap hotel every night? The following night, we were taken to yet another hotel on the outskirts of Nanjing - basically the Chinese equivalent of a Super 8. The building was hard to see from the main road, because it was behind a KFC.

These guys are everywhere in China. I must have stayed in at least eight of them.

By now, I was starting to wonder whether I would ever actually teach a class in China. But at 7 the next morning, I was awoken by a knock. Shaking off a mild hangover, I answered the door and was greeted by one of the school's representatives, nattily dressed and grinning politely. My class, he told me, started in an hour.


I threw on some clothes, gulped down a cup of instant coffee and was in the lobby in ten minutes. I was expecting to be driven to the school, but the representative was apparently not expecting to drive me. "How do I get to the school then?" I asked him. He looked puzzled, as though this question hadn't previously crossed his mind. "You call cab," he finally responded.


So I walked out of the hotel, to the road in front of the KFC, and hailed a cab. (They were everywhere in this city, and actually in every city I visited in China. And they were really cheap.) I pointed to the name of the school, which the representative had written on a note card for me. The cab driver shrugged - but without argument, he drove me three blocks to the school. What a waste of 70 cents.




I entered the building and signed my name at the front desk. Aside from a bored looking woman sitting behind the desk, no one was there to greet me - no principal, no other teachers, no volunteer coordinator. The receptionist pointed me in the direction of my classroom down the hall. I entered the room, where roughly thirty teenage students were already present, and I was on my way.

Truly, the actual teaching was the most conventional part of my experience in China. At this point, I had already taught a year at Wootton High School in Rockville, Maryland. Class sizes were around thirty, and the population of the school was almost one third Asian. I had never been the only white guy in the room before, but in certain classes at Wootton, I wasn't too far from it. Besides, as I soon realized, most of these summer school students in Nanjing spoke average to above average English. They weren't too far behind most of my students back at Wootton.

Since I hadn't really been expecting to teach that day, I had to scramble a little bit to come up with three hours worth of lesson plans on the spot. It wasn't as hard as sounds. The idea was just to make them speak to each other in English, which they were more than happy to do. I remember that one of my activities involved having them give and receive compliments, which turned out to be pretty amusing. "I think you are very clever!" one of the boys told his partner. "Thank you for the compliment!" the partner responded.

Cabbage: Great as an ingredient in coleslaw, but not really an appropriate namesake.

Many of the students already had English names, some of which they had been assigned by another teacher at some point, and some of which they had chosen for themselves. Some of the boys named themselves after NBA players. There was Tracy (for Tracy McGrady), Allen (for Allen Iverson) and Kevin (for Kevin Garnett). Some others had given themselves names that were not names at all. Like "Cabbage" and "Seven" and "Qoo" (pronounced "Koo"). Others didn't have names at all, and wanted me to assign them. I was happy to oblige. I asked one boy what his Chinese name was and he responded with something I didn't understand. "Let's go with 'Howard'," I said after a moment's pause. He was pleased. "From now on I will be Howard," he proclaimed, as though I had just conferred a knighthood upon him.

Stay tuned for Part Four, in which my brief teaching stint comes to an end and I attempt to flee the Chinese government.

The Land of China, Part 2

In Shanghai, we met the program's coordinator, responsible for matching volunteers to schools. This guy (I don't remember his name, but let's call him Scott) couldn't have been older than thirty at most, but he spoke fluent Mandarin, which was apparently enough of a qualification. Scott told us the name of the school where we would be working, placed us in a van with two other volunteers, and instructed us to call him in the event of an emergency. And with that, we were off to the town of Yangzhou, several hours away.

Yangzhou is famous for its fried rice - not at all a bad claim to have. My meals in China were unpredictable to say the least, but Yangzhou Fried Rice was consistently excellent. It was also one of the only dish I learned to order in Mandarin.

On the four-hour trip, we got to know our fellow volunteers. One was a recently divorced 40-something British woman named Lisa (I think) - a high school teacher looking for an adventure following her recent split from her husband. The other was an American of around the same age, whom I'll call Craig. Craig wasn't a bad guy exactly, but he was a big doofus. In many ways, he embodied the  stereotype of the loud American tourist - mispronouncing words with alarming regularity, speaking in loud, abrasive English, and telling everyone who would listen that he was from Washington, D.C., "my nation's capital!" (It turned out he was actually from Columbia, Maryland, which is no more D.C. than Baltimore.)

This was not a person I would have chosen to spend time with back home, but since Craig and I were the only guys, we became room mates by default. Once we arrived at the school (more on that later), his first act was to empty a giant duffel bag - one of the five he had brought along with him - onto his bed. It was full of baseball cards and candy.

"These are to give to the children!" he explained, upon seeing my incredulous stare.
"What children?"
"The children of Yangzhou!" He pronounced it "Young Jew," long after we had heard the city's name correctly pronounced, multiple times, as "Yong - Jo."
"You mean, the children at the school?"
"No! The children on the street! I'm going to bring these with me when we go out, and when we see a little kid, I'm going say 'Nee How!!' This is a present from America!"

He was serious too. In any circumstances, it is impossible for a white guy to keep a low profile while walking the streets of Yangzhou. Despite its substantial size and general pleasantness, it tends not to be a popular destination for western tourists. But it was extra impossible to blend in with Craig at my side.

"Neeeee How!" he barked to one frightened child after another, waving his hand in their faces as though they were all deaf, before depositing a 2001 Topps Derek Jeter in their little hands. "We love your country!"

The worst part was that I didn't have any choice but to associate with this guy. There were only four of us, and to announce that I was going to split from the group to do my own thing during our down time was tantamount to an open declaration of disdain. So instead, I tried to put on a happy face as I explored this new city with the self-appointed ambassador from the metropolis of Columbia, Maryland.

And then there was the school itself. I hadn't heard of Yangzhou before volunteering to teach, but I was pleased when I heard I would be stationed in a large city. During the evenings, I assumed I would cruise the streets, check out the bar scene, maybe find the local expat community. So I was surprised, needless to say, when the van pulled up in front of an imposing compound, complete with guard towers and fence covered in barbed wire. It was ten miles from town.

"Don't worry!" the school's volunteer liaison assured us, "You can call cab to take you to city. Only twenty minute away." We were also encouraged to return by 10:30 PM, at which point the school's gate closed for the night.

It proved to be too much to hope that our summer POW camp at least had nice accommodations. Our rooms were dirty - there was no getting around it. They were sparsely furnished, with only two small cots. I remember what looked like an antique witch's broom propped up in the corner. Worst of all, the room had no air conditioning - a large problem when the temperature regularly tops one hundred degrees. I had come to China expecting adventure, and was more than willing to put up with rustic living conditions. But I hadn't signed up for a Gulag either.

I've been looking on Google Maps for the school, but I don't remember what it was called or exactly where it is. This is a school outside Yangzhou. It might be school where we stayed for a night before our abrupt dismissal. Kind of intimidating, although the towers appear to be made out of an appealing cherry-finished wood. 

I'll say this for Craig - he wasn't passive and he wasn't going to accept the situation. So he complained - firmly and maybe a little rudely, although given the the situation, I could hardly blame him.

And in response to his complaints, the school's liaison "fired" us on the spot. By complaining, we had shown disloyalty, he reasoned, and he obviously couldn't trust us. We would be allowed to stay the night, but would be escorted off the grounds of the compound first thing in the morning.

Sure enough, a woman knocked on our door at 7:00 AM the following morning. (I remember that, for unclear reasons, she was carrying a parasol.) And she watched as the four of us - Craig, struggling to wrangle his five duffel bags - made our way to the gate.

The Land of China, Part 1

In baseball, there is a time-honored maxim that "hitting is contagious" - that is, that good hitting inspires more good hitting. I think the same sentiment applies to writing. After reading an excellent piece about fatherhood by my good friend Steve Orders, it occurred to me that the old "Bank of Barron" has been collecting dust for more than two months now. Luckily, I'm spending the next month and a half at my school's front desk, where I'll be resuming my receptionist duties. Not a ton happens during the summer, which means I really have no excuse not to write. In fact, it was this very job, with its wide swaths of free time in front of a computer, that enabled me to start the blog a year ago.

Chairman Mao's Little Red Book was all over the place.

While cleaning out a drawer yesterday, I came across a journal that I kept during my time in China ten years ago and was immediately overcome with nostalgia. My first thought was the obvious, "I can't believe it was ten years ago." My second thought was that it is incredibly unlikely that I will ever take a trip like this again. I don't just mean that it is unlikely that I'll return to China, although I guess that's true too. What I mean is that I now have a wife and kids, and a house with a lawn that needs to be mowed, and the inclination to want to make at least a little money during the summer instead of just bumming around a foreign country. So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that in the unlikely event that I ever return to China, it won't be for six weeks and it won't be entirely without an itinerary and it won't involve a sketchy program I found on the internet.

The story of my trip is pretty convoluted actually, and when most people asked me about it upon my return, I tried to provide the Reader's Digest Program: "I tried to teach English in China. It didn't really work. I ended up basically bumming around the country for six weeks instead. In spite of my disastrous experience with the teaching program, it was actually a great trip."

Here's the longer story, as I remember it:

At some point during the 2006-2007 school year, I decided that rather than return to summer camp for the umpteenth time, I wanted to do something a little spontaneous and adventurous. So as one does, I combed the internet for all sorts of weird programs abroad. One of these was a summer camp in - I kid you not - Siberia. (On beautiful Lake Baikal, "the Blue Eye of Sibera"!) Thankfully, my dad talked me out of this one. I had never longed to go to China, but the internet was rife with
opportunities to teach English there. Almost all of these programs offered only volunteer work, and volunteers were required to pay their own airfare, but housing and meals were generally free. At school one day, I happened to talk to my colleague Krista about my search and it turned out she was looking for something similar. She referred me to a program she had been considering, which offered American teachers the chance to spend a summer teaching ESL at schools in China. We both interviewed (a rigorous process consisting of a ten minute phone call), and after filling out some paperwork and paying a visit to the Chinese Consulate in Glover Park to procure a Visa, we were on our way together.

Lake Baikal does actually look pretty impressive. On the other hand, summer in Siberia still sounds like a questionable proposition.

Some months before the trip, we were told that we would be stationed in Yangzhou, a "town" with a population of around 4.5 million - or more than a half million larger than L.A. While Yangzhou's description in Lonely Planet sounded appealing enough, we wanted to see more of the country too, and so we arranged to fly to Beijing a week early, to fit in some sightseeing before getting down to business. This part of the trip was fairly conventional. Krista and I stayed in a small hotel in a "hutong" or narrow winding alleyway near Beijing's massive main train station. In a few days there, we hit most of the biggies: Tienanmen Square, the Forbidden City, lunch at the famous Peking Duck Restaurant, a long hike on the Great Wall.

We meant to travel down to Tai Shan, the sacred mountain south of Beijing, but due to a combination of mishaps and poor translations, we missed our train there and wound up going instead to the city of Nanjing, which we actually found quite lovely. Its Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum looked like it had been

Nanjing's humble memorial to Dr. Sun Yat-Sen. The Chinese aren't really into subtlety.

built for a god and could only be reached by climbing approximately 7000 steps, but it was indeed an incredible sight, unknown to most westerners. The next stop was Shanghai, a few hours away, where were to meet our fellow volunteers at small hotel. It was there that we would be sent off to our posts at various schools around the country. Now in the hands of this organization we had found via Google search, we would be forfeiting our autonomy. And it was at this point that our trip went off the rails.

Part Two to come...