Tomb Sweeping Day

Not too far off the heels of Spring Festival is Tomb Sweeping Day/Clear Brightness Day (this one was actually Thursday). I ever-so-politely invited my SO and I to a Chinese friend's family home in Shi Shi, a suburb of Quanzhou, for the holiday.
Shi Shi is about an hour and a half away from Xiamen by bus and about thirty minutes outside of Quanzhou. It's apparently known for a booming clothing manufacturing industry. Coincidentally, Quanzhou is also where the school I initially signed on with when first coming to China is located.

I knew my friend's family had a lot of money because A.) she has not one but two siblings and B.) she's going to grad school in England and her father is paying for the whole shebang. When we arrived at her apartment though, I discovered that were we staying at the nicest home I have ever been to in China.

Napoleon? Of course.

I absolutely love this wall. The door to the storage room (or what in a western home would be used as the pantry) is all but hidden when it's closed!

Oh yes, that is a projector you see over the couch and central air vents over the loveseat. I've never even heard of central air here before.

I think she felt a lot of pressure to entertain us in Shi Shi. The 24ish hours we were there, we rode in three of her family's cars (three!), went to two coffee shops, three restaurants, one temple, one museum and one beach. When I asked her what she'd be doing if we weren't there, she said sleeping, ha.

The temple in Shi Shi was nothing too special. More colorful than your typical, northern China temples- much closer in style to Taiwan's temples, but I realized I hadn't been to a temple in southern China at all yet. The best part was definitely the view of the harbor.

Because Buddha like juice boxes too you know.

After the temple we went in to Quanzhou to go to the museum (and as my third Chinese museum, I have decided they're all pretty awful).

This is somehow underwear. My Chinese friend was also confused...

They are way too trusting with these tiny "No Touching" signs and no other barriers or precautions to prevent said touching.

Seriously, too trusting.

I mean come on, this guy is begging to be touched.

Does this bother anyone else? It remind me of this (second photo from the bottom).

That night we ate out with her family for her brother's birthday. Her family isn't big on drinking (which we discovered when we were the only people that ordered beers with dinner). After dinner we returned home to eat chocolate cake and watch a movie. Everyone except her brother went to bed after the cake though; it was a very chill night. Not what I was expecting at all, especially since there had been rumblings of ktv for the birthday boy.

I was also surprised to find that their entire movie collection seemed to be subtitled American action movies. Her was just apparently the only one interested enough to stay up and watch Minority Report (after he'd turned off Looper because it was too long).

Awesome projector screen movie viewing experience.

The beach the next day had a sand sculpture contest. There were a bunch of Disney sculptures and some Chinese themed designs as well that I enjoyed.

You know you love this. I certainly do.

After the beach it was time for us to catch our bus home to Xiamen and leave the family to do the actual holiday thing. Tomb Sweeping Day is about honoring ancestors by visiting their graves and burning "money" for them to use on the other side (this used to be real, but now they mostly print fake money for it). Not exactly something we needed to crash.

random photos: misc Cambodia

I thought this was the funniest thing ever. A billboard for a brand of condoms called "OK"... first off, "OK"?!?! That's the best you could come up with?! The brand of choice for abortion clinics and date rapists. Secondly, why are there four guys at a ktv with no girls on the billboard?! What is going on here?!

These little shrines were everywhere in Cambodia, every business or home has them.

Even though it rained frequently throughout my time in Cambodia (it WAS rainy season after all), it really wasn't bad. It didn't hamper any plans at all.

This was the most bizarre fruit ever. The second you put it in your mouth, you had the worst case of cottonmouth ever. It instantaneously sucked all the moisture out. It didn't really taste good. It was kind of an all around fail.

A bug bit my foot like the second day there. Then about 4 days later my foot started turning black. It was no bueno. We drew a circle around the black and said if it spread any more we'd go to the hospital (I hate doctors). Luckily, the smiley contained the black and it went away, eventually.

Battambang (day 5)

Our first full day in Battambang, my friend from the States and I rented a motorbike, my Songyuan friend and our new friend from Busan got a tuk tuk, and we paid the driver to be our tour guide for all that the city had to offer. This turned out to be an all around awesome plan.

Our driver had amazing English, was really friendly and really knowledgeable. It was crazy that he was able to remain so positive while telling us about some of the atrocities the Khmer Rouge had committed against the general population of Cambodia while we were at the temples. They basically killed everyone with an education, or that looked like they might have an education (i.e. everyone that wore glasses), in order to create a society that would just work and not ask questions. His family members were killed by these people and he was still such a happy guy telling us about all of it.

The first place he took us was to grab some bamboo sticky rice (this had another name that I completely forgot, also, this was where he started talking about the Khmer Rouge, so I DO have a logical thought sequence here). To make this, rice, milk and beans are stuffed into a hollowed out section of bamboo, wrapped in banana leaves and then placed over the fire. To eat it, you peel the bamboo away and break of chunks of the mixture; it kind of all sticks together and isn't messy at all. It was really good.

This was right across the street from our first temple of the day.

So, what I said above about the Khmer Rouge? Look at some of the labels on the map at this temple...

Looks like monks live here...

These kids were having following us around practicing English a bit; they were adorable.

After that, he took us to what he called the fish market.

drying fish

catfish heads

fish paste

making more fishy products

Next, we went to watch a woman make rice paper. That was really cool to watch, she's got it down to such a science. The rice paper is so delicate, but she never rips it and it always comes out perfectly.

step 1

step 2

step 3

On our way to the next stop (lunch) the tuk tuk got a flat tire, so they had to melt it to close the hole.

This guy painted the whole temple. He'd been at it for at least two months.

Khmer Rouge killing pit at the temple. They would keep prisoners captive in the temple itself and then push them down this hole into a cave to kill them.

Temple on top of a mountain = gorgeous

After this temple, the tuk tuk took my Songyuan and Busan friends back to the hostel and my friend from the States and I took the motorbike on our own adventure. We checked out some more of the countryside, basically just driving down random roads that were clearly not heavily traveled, it was an amazing afternoon.

No, the elephant isn't real. This was at a temple we stopped at.

We stopped to walk through some rice paddies and these kids we had driven by came chasing us. They ran along the borders of the paddies to get to us and they were having a grand old time. When they reached us, I turned around and started chasing them so we had a funny game going.

 

We went to some other rice paddies and found this little shelter and decided to watch the sunset.

Getting there I misjudged the stability of some mud and was completely surprised when I sank in up to my knees!

That night, the four of us tried to have a night on the town. Everything in Battambang closes so early though, it seemed that our only option was ktv. We found a ktv near to our hotel and were at the door when my friend from the States (the only male in the group) turned around and was like, "We're not going in there..." A Cambodian guy sitting across the street saw the whole thing and started laughing hysterically. Apparently the ktv was a whore house and us girls were just completely oblivious. Our next best option (and the only thing open) was the convenience store across the street. A bunch of Cambodians had grabbed beers and were sitting outside drinking and watching a movie on a projector, so we followed suit.

Yes, this is a pull tab bottle.

field trips

In the past three weeks I've gone on two field trips with my favorite class (my only class actually, but I love them regardless!). The rule for field trips is theoretically "English only" and the majority of the class must go. That class is a really fun group with good chemistry and they also happen to be adults with really good English; I think of them more as my friends than my students.

Field trip number one was a picnic. It's been raining basically every day for the past month or two, but luckily on picnic day the weather was absolutely amazing. There was one point where we thought maybe it was going to rain, so we packed up all of our stuff, but we ended up just relocating our base.

Enough of my students have cars for them to have been able to drive us all about 30-45 minutes away from school near the river and Long Hua Temple, basically in the middle of nowhere (yay for nature and green things).

Yep, some cows were hanging out with us. They made fun of me for taking a picture of them though, "Haven't you ever seen cows?"

...and some farmers.

Everyone brought food or props or something; I was in charge of games. We played tradition American picnic/children's games (Capture the Flag, Telephone, Red Light Green Light), some Chinese games (some kind of awesome blindfold game and the card game all the old men always play outside) and some we all knew (Charades, Hot Potato, soccer, relay races, three legged races).

Class is supposed to be four hours, 8am to 12pm, on Sundays, which picnic day happened to be. My students picked me up at 8am and I think I got home from the post picnic dinner at 6:30pm. I got to hang out with people I really like all day, enjoy nature and great weather, be active and get paid for the whole thing. It was kind of awesome.

Field trip number two was to play badminton (with a sprinkling of ping pong) this past Sunday. We were going to have class from 8am to 12pm, do lunch and then go, but we ditched class an hour early for more game time.

My students all work for some subsidiary or other of CNPC, the big oil company here, and we went to one of their offices to play (none of them actually work together). His office was kind of nuts, it was in an old hotel and you could definitely tell, they hadn't remodeled the majority of it. The carpet was my first clue, and not just that there was carpet, even though you rarely find that here, it was that "main-hallway-of-a-hotel" pattern also. In his office there was a bathroom and a bed (granted it was a twin), but it had clearly been a hotel room. There was even the standard fire evacuation map on the back of the door.

The ping pong was in the same building, in what might have been a conference room. They had special sport flooring and maybe ten tables, with balls, paddles and homemade hoppers (like in tennis, containers on handles that you can push down on top of a ball and the ball pops into the container so you don't have to bend over to collect them all). It was legit.

I mostly stuck to the badminton. One of the guys came into the badminton room and he was really sweaty, I asked what he'd been doing and when he said playing ping pong I was sliiightly confused. And then I went to watch. They're really intense about ping pong. They put all kinds of crazy spin on the ball and stand literally almost a full table length away from the table to play.

In a separate building, in what appeared to have been an auditorium of sorts, the company had recently built the single badminton court. The guy who's office we were at said everyone could play for a half hour of each workday. Since it was the weekend, we had the place to ourselves. We ended up playing for something like five hours.

I keep meaning to tell them about Sunday Funday and forgetting. We're essentially starting the Sunday Funday Field Trip Series. Next up: bbq and strictly English ktv!