Stranger No More

Mark arrived on Monday evening into Beijing and despite his hitting the Sichuan Airlines desk at 9:02PM they had already closed and just couldn’t possibly get him on to the 9:30PM connecting flight to Chengdu where I was waiting to meet him. Things were off to a bit of a rough start but he was taking it pretty well.

He arrived the next morning and I proceeced to take him to lunch at Peter’s Tex-Mex. I explained that he would have plenty of time to try a variety of Chinese dishes but I sort of wanted to take the infrequent opportunity to eat western food. He was cool with it and later described the cheesesteak sandwich that he had as ‘the best Philly cheesesteak I’ve ever eaten‘ when talking to his brother on the phone. So, if nothing else, he got that out of China. By midafternoon we were on a bus and on our way to Santai. Having just come 12 hours by air before his connecting flight of 2 hours he was not really thrilled with the prospect of a 2.5 hour bus ride. Mark is a solid 6’2″, (1.88m), and well there are Chinese as tall or taller the travel accomodations just aren’t made to suit them. Jammed up next to the window so he could take it all in while I enjoyed the more spacious aisle seat he found, as we turned off of the highway, the Chinese countryside fascinating and beautiful and happily snapped away with his new camera while the bus careened through the hills. As he was pondering the ubiquitous rice patties and the farmers to there knees planting them by hand he turned to me and said, ‘no gophers‘. I told him that I hadn’t actually thought about it but that I thought that he was right. He then said it again saying that there couldn’t be since they’d drown. I thought it was a pretty funny observation.

The next day was to be my students last day before a holiday so essentially my last chance to see them and Mark was very interested in meeting them. I explained to him that I haved 32 classes averaging about 60-70 students but he seemed nonplussed. Before heading to the classrooms I took him on a quick field trip across the street to see the market where fruit, produce and meat is sold daily as well as the shop with the huge vats of bai jiu are. It is a bit strange to be a tourist in what has been my home town for nearly two years.

We began our visits to the classrooms and were well received by the Chinese teachers whose classes we were interrupted. They enjoyed meeting Mark and we kept it to just 3-5 minutes a visit in order to get through all the classes by lunch. One of the highlights was Mark being given the Chinese name 马大壮, ma da zhuang, which is literally horse big strong and a name he said he may keep through his travels. He was pretty pleased at being given a name by a Chinese student. And so begins his China experience. We managed to get to every class of mine plus a grade 3 class as a bonus before lunch. As repetitive as our visits became I’m not sure who was enjoying it more, him or the students.

After an enjoyable meal we began to make our way back to the school for a rest when we were struck by a flash mob of elementary students, many who knew me from the children’s school, who wanted us to write our names for them. It is no different than our amusement/interest in seeing them write in Chinese for us except that they are typically over-enthusiastic 6-10 year olds. While at times things did get awfully pushy the thank you’s helped make up for that. It is one of those things you can’t plan but was a cool thing for Mark to get to do.

Finally free from the little rascals we went to regroup and evaluate our travel plan. It is still in a state of flux but we were saved by Cam who has a ton of experience traveling in China from my making an error in planning but we now have a bit of a better idea.

Realizing that Mark may be taller than Jon but that Jon was, um, bigger I decided that we could take the Santai tour on my motorcycle. A quick tour but a pleasant enough one and he really enjoyed the countryside.

We ended the evening at sao cao, or street vendor barbecue along a street that has many great places to choose from although my usual haunt was closed up. We found a seat behind the cloth partitions they put out in the evening and were pretty quickly approached by the children of the neighboring table and then finally the adults and their bottles of beer. After sharing a few bottles and toasting back and forth the friendliest guy let us know that he was paying for our meal. Good times.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 1st, 2006 at 9:04 am and is filed under Life in China, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.