The end of the semester is approaching and already I am having flashbacks of finals week at St. John’s; long hours spent studying in the library and few hours spent sleeping. And this year I am giving final exams to all four hundred sum graduate students. Just like my lack of experience in teaching, I have no experience giving final exams (no guidance here either). So I began emailing several Chinese faculty and asking a lot of questions (December 5th-9th).
When do I have to give final exams to the students? What format do I have to use for the final exams? When do I have to have final grades turned in? When am I free to leave for vacation? What resources are available to me for the final? I sent several emails to different people trying to find out some answers (this is the second week of December already). Basically I was not able to get any questions answered because nobody knew what was going to happen for the rest of the semester yet. Talk about frustration! How can I start planning for my winter vacation when I don’t even know when finals are? St. John’s or any other University in America would have had the whole year planned out way ahead of time. Even though I was unsuccessful in finding any answers through emails I was not totally left high and dry. What I found out was that the foreign English teachers and I were going to go on a trip to Wu Shan with some of the other Graduate Chinese Professors during the weekend. I was told to bring a change of clothes and my passport because we would be staying overnight. Somewhere, at sometime during the trip I was told I would finally get some answers.
It was 7:00am on a Saturday morning and there I was standing and waiting for a bus to pick me and the other teachers up from gate number six. We had no idea what was going to happen during this weekend’s get-away with the other professors. All we could do was follow along and hope that we get some answers.
Shortly after boarding and finding our seats in the back the bus departed and a tour guide began to speak into the microphone. I wish I could tell you what she said (If I could have, this story about my weekend trip would be a lot less exciting). Soon after she finished speaking she handed out itinerary sheets and then sat down. It did not matter that we were able to get one of the itinerary sheets in the back of the bus because like the tour guide, the sheets were in Chinese. We would continue on with the trip not knowing details. After driving for four and a half hours we finally stopped at a small town along the Yangzi River to eat some lunch at a restaurant. At lunch we found out that the next stop in the trip was a famous temple that was about thirty minutes down the river.
When we arrived at the Zhang Fei temple I noticed something about it just didn’t look right, it didn’t look like it was 1,700 years old. Apparently the whole temple and its relics were relocated about fifty meters up the hill in order to preserve it from the rising waters levels of the Yangzi caused by the Three Gorges Dam. The temple was kind of interesting but, most of it looked new and I couldn’t read or understand anything. After spending about an hour at the temple we boarded the bus and were back on the road again for two more hours of driving. Soon after arriving we checked into a hotel and then gathered into a large conference room to discuss issues that came up during the semester and answer any questions that me might have (it’s about darn time!). 
The meeting was very comical (at least to me) and different from any kind of conference meeting I had ever participated in. The meeting began with one of the administrators giving a long welcome speech followed by some speeches of a few other faculty members (all spoken in Chinese of course). While these speeches were going I had to keep myself from smirking because for one, I can’t understand anything in their long speeches, and two, there was a very entertaining show of several people trying to figure out how to solve the microphone technical difficulties in an environment that didn’t need microphones (no one knew what they were doing). When the speeches were finished everyone in the room split up into three small discussion groups to discuss any issues that had come up during the semester. Finally we had our questions answered. Following the meeting was dinner at the hotel and then a short trip to a shop to buy snacks for our early morning the next day.
I began the day at four thirty in the morning to embark on our next part of the trip to an unknown destination to do any unknown activity. We loaded up onto the bus and headed out on the road again. After a couple hours of driving we arrived in a town called Wu Shan. There, we would get on a ferry and travel up the Yangzi River to a part of the Three Gorges. The river there was quite breath-taking. The sun was shooting beams of light through the gray clouds and burning away the morning mist. Being a major river, the Yangzi is a major shipway for cargo ships and cruise ships. Did you know that the Yangzi is so deep now because of the Three Gorges Dam that you can take a large cruise ship all the way from Shanghai to Chongqing?
Eventually we got crammed onto a medium size ferry and headed down the river. Despite it being cold, I wondered up to the viewing deck and was fortunate enough to get a window to take pictures from. We passed underneath a massive red arched bridge and passed by many cargo ships, and small towns. After about an hour and a half we disembarked at the Three Gorges to do some “hiking”. I say hiking with quotation marks because I am used to hiking in the United States where you hike in the wilderness, walk on soil and are relatively alone when you do so. Here, hundreds of people are funneled onto a stone stairway that is two persons wide (more like standing in line if you ask me). I did not hike to the top because I was too impatient to deal with the congested trail. To return we took a ferry to the bus and then drove for nine hours back to Beibei.
Even getting simple things in China such as buying a pair of shoes is not easy in China. It kind of takes the fun out of it when you can conveniently buy everything you need at one location (like at Walmart or Target). Here, everything requires a journey and leaves a good story to tell.
No comments:
Post a Comment