Anna's China Trip: April 2008

Hello everybody! Finally got my Internet connection sorted. Either my knowledge of 3 words Chinese is great or the prospect of a fuming weird white hippo scared the China Telecom people into magically resolve all issues at once! (And only at the cost of a whopping 10 Yuan (= approx. EUR 1 / USD 1.6)
But let me start at the beginning ……

I left Holland on Saturday 19 April suitably under the influence of several valiums.
Thanks to my parents, brother and his girlfriend for listening to my usual “I don’t wanna fly!”- Rant on repeat since the early hours of Saturday until they waived me off at customs.
Lucky for me the baggage belts at check-in 13 were broken making it was harder for them to see how heavy my bag was exactly, as I don’t think they would have let me off with the nearly 8 kilo extra I was carrying.
Floating into the plane I did warn the staff that in case of emergency I would be slightly slow to say the least, as I was severely under the influence of prescription meds
Gods, I loooooove flying…NOOOT.
Must say that for the first time I met a KLM stewardess who I didn’t want to strangle straight away (must have been the meds!), but she looked after me splendidly the whole flight, popping in ever so often to see if I was ok and providing me with all the smoked almonds I will ever need in my life. The flight was quite uneventful, which was probably for the best for all other passengers concerned. We landed in Shanghai with only a slight delay.
Of course as usual when I am travelling to countries that require you to fill in immigration cards, I had forgotten to print off the details of where exactly I was going. Luckily the lil Dell still had enough juice in its dying battery for me to find the details in my folders.
Chinese immigration thoroughly inspected my passport and visa, while I was smiling at them in the sweetest possible manner. Luckily for me I didn’t look too dangerous and a firm red stamp on page 6 of my passport granted me access to the country.
Good thing that I had changed some Euros into RMB on Schiphol, as this made it a lot easier to move about in Shanghai and beyond.
Bus number 1 took me from Pu Dong Airport to Hongqiao Airport, right around Shanghai itself, for an astronomical amount of EUR 3.00. At Hongqiao I spent around 4 hours trying to keep my eyes open waiting for the next flight to Wenzhou. I did not quite succeed in that task, as I woke up one time after a nice snooze on the shoulder of the guy sitting next to me. Bless him for patiently sitting there till I woke up on my own and not walloping me awake.
The plane to Wenzhou was quite grotty and smelly, but bless the happy pills again, I was off snoring the moment I sat down in my seat. Flight was bumpy to say the least, but I don’t even think a bomb going off next to me would have woken me up at that stage.
In Wenzhou Effie, the foreign teacher coordinator met me. She took me out for dinner and then dropped me off at the apartment
My predecessor Linda has been absolutely fantastic, showing me around and introducing me to loads of TEFL teachers here. It is such a shame she has gone back to Canada today.

As most of you know, my biggest fear was to be stuck on top of a mountain in a village consisting of two sheds, a goat and a general population of 2.5 … I have moments now that I really wish I was yodelling on that mountain top! Wenzhou is BUSY! Extremely BUSY! The main roads through town are 3 or 4 lanes in each direction. Too bad Wenzhou council spent all that money on road markings, as usually there’s about 2 lanes’ worth of more cars, busses, bicycles taxis, bicycles, scooters and anything else that has wheels on them. The road markings are straight, the traffics curves. Everyone just drives everywhere. It is absolutely amazing to watch from the footpath (while being careful not to get run over by cars, bikes and bicycle taxi’s there either). The traffic uses every possible centimetre of space on the road and beyond. My biggest nightmare now is crossing the street as nobody stops. Even at pedestrian crossings (with lights or without) they just keep on coming from all directions at once. My current mantra is “please don’t kill me”. I can chant this now about 25 times before I get to the other side of the street. I believe I’d rather fly pill- and drinkless than cross the street here. But eh, I just will have to get used to it, cause I can’t stay on one side of the street forever.

Right, this is it for now. I have to catch up on my sleep, as I have been out for two whole nights solid and that’s getting a bit much for one my age :) :)

More on Wenzhou and the school next time. :)