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Mr. Tian and I at the State Hotel |
October 1st is China's National Day, the day the
country celebrates its founding. This
year the school has generously given its teachers and students 13 days off to celebrate
the holiday. Normally the holiday is
split with one week for the mid-autumn festival and one week for National
Day. However, this year they decided not
to take off for the mid-autumn festival and instead they added both weeks together
to the National day holiday. Most of my
students have decided to take this time to travel home so the school is mostly empty. I decided that I too would travel and visit with
some old friends. Originally, I had
planned to go to Shanghai but that didn’t work out with one of my friends. So, I’ve spent most of the holiday in
Langfang practicing my English and playing with friends. However, I did make a few small journeys.
My first journey was not for pleasure but, rather, for
business. This year, I was informed that
I was being nominated for the Outstanding Foreign Experts of Hebei
award. I was told that all foreign
workers in the Hebei province were eligible and not just teachers. This meant that engineers, doctors, lawyers, businessmen,
and anyone who has Foreign Expert status is eligible. I was told that I was competing against 2000
other candidates so I figured I wouldn’t win.
But, being nominated was honorable enough for me. However, I was informed right before the
holiday that I had won the award. Out of
the 2000 foreign experts, 20 were selected to receive the award. Only 8 out of those 20 were educators and my
name was among the 8. So my boss, Mr.
Tian, and I travelled to the province’s capital to accept the award. The capital of Hebei is Shijiazhuang (Chinese: 石家庄; Pinyin: Shíjiāzhuāng), which is nearly impossible
for me to pronounce properly. To give a
feeling of the scope of the event: Hebei has over 71,854,000
people and Shijiazhuang has over 10,163,700 people. So this is a pretty big event. There were photographers, media, and a whole
host of government officials. Mr. Tian
and I were invited to the State Hotel, a five star hotel, where we were given
three meals and a room for the night. We
would meet the following morning with the leaders of the province, including
the secretary for foreign affairs. We
arrived on Friday night and were fed in the hotel’s restaurant. At 10:00 am the next morning we were to meet
in the state’s main meeting hall for the ceremony. Each of the selected foreign experts were to
give a three minute speech followed by their selected interpreter giving the
Chinese translation. Mr. Tian served as
my translator. The meeting went well and
each of us were personally thanked by the secretary for foreign affairs. It was an amazing experience. However, there was one bad part. The hotel used smart technology to sense the
location of guests in the hotel room.
This means that special sensors were setup to turn lights off and on
based on your location and movement.
However, there was a slight malfunction with this system. In the middle of the night all of the system
shutdown. I was left in the dark with no
way to turn the lights on. I went to the
door and tried to get the electricity to turn on again in my room. Nothing worked. Finally, I had the idea to step outside of
the room and re-enter the room using my key.
In retrospective, this was not the best of ideas. If my key didn’t work then I would have been
stuck outside of my hotel room in just my sleeping pants. Nevertheless, the trick worked and the room’s
electricity came back on when I reentered the room. I was rather annoyed by this as it was 2:00
am in the morning I just wanted to A/C to be on while I slept. Apparently, I don’t toss and turn enough
during the night to keep the sensors on.
My second journey to Shijiazhuang was not so official. Instead, I was invited down to spend the
weekend with one of my old friends.
Sunny, my friend, was a student at Langfang Teachers College who often
came to the English Nights in my apartment.
She was never my student but we were still good friends. Sunny graduated this past year and is now
working on her master’s degree in Shijiazhuang.
Sunny only had three days off for the holiday so I decided to visit her
and her family during those three days.
I went there by train and it takes about 4-5 hours to get from Langfang
to Shijiazhuang by train or by bus. The
bus is the direct route. The trains,
however, have to go north to Beijing and then south to Shijiazhuang. Both end up being the same time. I prefer traveling by train because you can
get a bed to lay down on and a bathroom to use.
It’s a little bit more expensive for a train ticket but it’s a much
nicer way to travel. Sunny's family
lives out in the countryside so it took an hour-and-a-half by public bus to get
to her hometown from the city's train station. Her hometown was literally the last stop on
the bus line. We bumped along down dirty
roads and bounced over potholes. When I
say that her family lives in the countryside, it is very close to being
third-world out there. It is a large
farming area where most of the crops are planted and picked by hand. You can see a legion of people out working
the corn fields from morning to night.
Sunny's hometown is a very small village. I was the first foreigner to ever visit this
village and all the locals came by her family's home to get a look at me. Sunny's family was very nice. None of them could speak English, but still
they were very hospitable. Their home is
built in the traditional Chinese style with an outer wall, inner courtyard, and
separate buildings for each room. There
is a separate building for the kitchen, the living area, and sleeping
areas. However, their house is missing a
bathroom. Instead, you have to go
outside the outer wall to a public outhouse with a concrete slab over an open
pit. A bit barbaric but nothing I haven't
seen before. The family fed me very well
with some excellent home cooked and locally grown food. We had hotpot, dumplings and I even got to
cook an enormous fish for the family. They
wanted to have one American style dish so I fried fish fillets in apples and
honey. Everyone loved it and they all
wanted to cook it themselves. Sunny's older sister had a new baby girl and she was just lovely. I would play guitar and sing for her and she would laugh and smile at me as she watched me play. I finally
said goodbye to the family as Sunny and I traveled back to Shijiazhuang. Sunny would go back to her school and I would
go off to the train station. Sunny told
me as I was leaving that she loves her home but she would rather live in the
modern comforts of the city than out in the countryside. I agreed with her.
My last story for today’s blog actually takes place in
Langfang. My good friend, Renee,
recently invited Janakie and me to experience a tea ceremony. I’ve experienced one before but Janakie has
not. So it was a great new experience
for her. Renee's good friend owns her
own tea shop and we went there one afternoon for a private ceremony. We were greeted by the host, sat down at a
special table, and the ceremony began.
Our tea server showed us the various tools and how they are used. We were given several tea samples to taste
including oolong and a sweet black tea. My
favorite was the black tea. The owner of
the shop also bought us some cookies from the bakery next door, although, that’s
not normally part of the ceremony. Our
ceremony was a bit informal. We sat
around the tea table talking and laughing the whole afternoon. Janakie was asking many question about the
tea tools. Both Renee and I acted as
translators between the tea server and Janakie.
At last, I ended up turning into the teacher as I was helping the tea
server say some simple sentences in English.
Then, in the evening, we went to Renee’s home where her husband cooked a
wonderful dinner for us. It was a very
good day.
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Meeting the Hebei Officals |
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Photo with the Leaders of Hebei |
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My Room at the State Hotel |
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I'm feeling very posh! |
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I made friends with the other foreign experts. |
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Sunny and Me! |
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Sunny |
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Sunny's Brother-in-Law and the New Baby |
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Hot Pot! |
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Breakfast! |
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Sunny's Older Sister |
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Porridge with Melons |
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Steamed Bread |
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The Outer Wall |
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The Main Street |
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Drying Corn |
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The Dirt Walkway to Sunny's House |
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The Local School |
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The Road into the Village |
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The Local Market |
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The Front Gate of Sunny's Home |
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The Outhouse |
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Dumplings! |
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Fish and Apples |
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Neighbors |
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The Bus Route |
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Sunny's Family |
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Tea Ceremony Training |
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I was drawing pictures for my friends. |
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Our Tea Server |
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The Wealthy Frog |
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Tea Cups |
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Janakie and the Owner |
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The Tea Shop |
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Buying Vegetables for Dinner |
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Renee |
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Renee's Husband |
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Cooking Eggplant |
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Janakie's Gumbo! |
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Being Silly! |
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Traditional Tea Cups |
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The Tea Shop |
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Tea for Sell |
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An Old Tea Pot |
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Buddha and a Tea Cup |
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Black Tea |
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A traditional tea server dress. |
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My friend is serving tea. |
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My new tea server friend! |
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Another tea shop! |