Partying with the Teachers in Wan'an

So, blogspot seems to be being blocked by the great firewall of China, so I can't actually look at my blog, but I think I can still post - very strange. So, I can write all the subversive anti-Communist stuff I want, just nobody will be able to see it here. Bummer. Anyways, I can't remember exactly where I had left off in my blog, so I might be repeating some stuff that I'd already mentioned in a previous post.

Anywyas, my first night in Wan'an, I met up with some teachers at the local Junior High School. I was just eating at the restaurant, and they invited me over, and they seemed like pretty fun people. Anyways, so the next day, I was planning on just recovering from my exhausting bike trip to Wan'an, and didn't really have any plans, so I figured it would be nice to go check out the school and talk to the students and teach a couple English classes. Pretty low key, and it seemed to be a good way to make some good impressions of the west and such.

So, the next morning, one of the teachers took me over to the school and I taught some English to three classes of extremely excited students. The average class had around 50 to 60 students - they really pack them into the classroom. Since there was no pressure to actually teach them anything, I spent most of the classes trying as hard as I could to embarrass the students by drilling them on toungue twisters and making them pronounce the word "with". There isn't anything funnier than having a class full of Chinese students stumble through "Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear" - I don't think I could ever get tired of that. I also did the typical "ask about Western culture" moment, and got the typical questions from the girls "Do you think Chinese girls are pretty", and I was quite happy to disappoint them all this time around by letting them know that I am married! That tends to kill their dreams of dating the foreigner - and also it lets them realize that I am an adult and not really going to be their "friend" or anything like that.

Anyways, that afternoon, I went off to the local reservoir with one of the teachers. This reservoir was about 100 feet below capacity, so it was a bit of a hike down to the shore, where we set up to go fishing. Fishing in China doesn't require a license, so catches tend to be much smaller, and overfishing is pretty rampant. If you catch anything, you keep it. Anyways, I caught a fish (not a very big one) in the first 5 minutes, and it was the only fish that I caught the entire time. But I can now say that I have actually caught a fish in China. There was a lady fishing next to us though who was catching a fish every 5 minutes or so - it was crazy. In any case it was a pretty fun day - a good chance to get out and talk to people and get to know what their lives are like. For example, the teacher in the school that took me out never actually went to university, but actually just got a degree through some sort of self-study continuing education program. He made 1500 yuan a month (a little under $200 US), which actually seemed pretty good to me given that his wife also taught at the school, and that their housing was 400 yuan a month. So I bet that they were actually saving quite a bit of money every month.

Speaking of Chinese finances and such, a few days back, I watched an interesting program on CCTV-2 (the economy channel) that was about people who were doing pretty crappy stuff to make a living. One was a person who went through a garbage dump near Beijing to collect recyclable material to sell. She made about 30 yuan a day doing this (less than 4 dollars), so in a month she made about 900 yuan. I was thinking that it would be pretty tough to live on that, but then the program had an analysis of how she used her money - her housing was about 200 yuan a month, food was about another 200 yuan, and then other expenses (transportation, household stuff) came to about another 100 yuan. So she was actually saving almost400 yuan a month! I was really surprised - and then it turns out that she has 20,000 yuan in savings (about $2,500) and has even started investing in the stock market. Multiply this individual by 1.3billion and add in increased access to investment opportunities other than traditional banking, and you have the stock bubble that China currently is experiencing. Interesting.