Video Diary Tiger Leaping Gorge

Last night after my mandatory weekly massage (only in China), I decided to go through the often spastic and always amateurish videos that I shot while trekking Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan. I learned a couple of important facts:

1. I have absolutely no future as a videographer
2. I sound like a 14 year old girl on film and say “So” and “Now” why too much
3. Ryan Seacreast’s doomed first season sidekick is a sharper commentator than I am.

Still, the videos are somewhat amusing and do capture the challenges and quarks of adventuring in a place light-years from Disney’s Epcot.

I will say that I got better as I went along, but if you experience vertigo or seasickness, you might not want to watch. Heckle at your leisure. Note: As part of the Great Firewall of China, I cannot view these videos on the blocked blogspot site. I've been told that they appear in backwards order, so watch the last one first. I will switch them when I find roughly 14 hours to wait for them to load.

Baby Mania

Babies! Everywhere are babies! I knew coming to China would be a huge cultural experiment for me; however, I didn’t quite expect to leapfrog life milestones in my personal social ladder.

I hear rumors of people my age actually married and starting families, but the vast majority of my friends are spouse or significant other free. Most of my closest friends are still on the “Look, I just bought matching dishes” level of their game of life. A few are experimenting with cohabitation, but that degree is as far as it goes; no little pink or blue pegs are in the back of their little plastic car (refer to Life board game if confused).

I venture to China and suddenly babies are among us. One of my coworkers has a one and a half year old, another has a one year old, and a pair of married teachers just had their first child two weeks ago. With the surge of diapers, squeaky toys, and incidences of Peek-a-Boo also comes previously unknown baby decorum.

Baby Wisdom #1: Baby’s First Birthday is a right of passage for the parents even more than the oblivious baby. Guest should bring cameras and be prepared to capture every even potentially adorable moment even if all that is successfully snapped is images of baby with his finger up his nose and parents making odd horse lips while speaking to the baby.

Baby Wisdom #2: Beer is an acceptable addition to Baby’s First Birthday and is greatly beneficial for keeping the non-married guys from bolting in terror in a baby-overdose.

Baby Wisdom #3: Do not bring anything around the baby that you actually want to keep: soccer balls, shining objects, keys… What baby wants, baby keeps.

Baby Wisdom #4: Baby showers are like reliving my eighth birthday all over again. The party was equipped with matching plates and napkins, pastel colored decorations, and party games. I was left wondering where the Strawberry Short Cake of my youth was hiding.

Baby Wisdom #5: Paper plates are a constant source of entertainment and embarrassment like when a room full of thirty woman are asked to place the plate on their heads and blindly draw baby. (Wisdom learned here: avoid paper plates.)

Baby Wisdom #6: A newly discovered way to pick out a “keeper” is to throw a baby in the mix with a Wii and see which ones captivates his attention. When the new parents brought their baby girl to a BBQ last week, most of the guys were too absorbed in the Wii to notice if even a tornado ripped through the campus. The girls swarmed the baby for the first viewing…I should say all the girls and one guy. Of course, he and his fiancé are already considered the next parents-to-be up to plate.

Baby Wisdom #7: The only motivation you need to never EVER want to have children is watching Ricki Lake’s documentary The Business of Being Born. With all the talk about babies lately, four of us though it would be an interesting way to spend an evening. I watched the horror movie The Descent the night before and think that movie is less terrifying. When footage of a C-Section flashed on screen, three of us reacted more violently than during any slasher flick. We screamed and covered our eyes.

I was expecting culture shock and unknown nuances when deciding to sojourn to China, but what I didn’t expect was that part of that social imbalance would come in pint sizes with dimply cheeks and contagious giggles. Babies…

Waterlogged

As soon as the weather began to warm, a new inflection struck the middle schoolers. Every once in while a student walked passed with wet clothes clinging to him while his squeaky tennis shoes left little pools in his footprints.

Of course when questioned on the cause of his recent sogginess, the student always swears that he (it’s always a he) was sweating while playing basketball, spilled a drink, or fell in a puddle and rolled…repeatedly. The waterlogged students keep to the unspoken code of adolescence and would declare any farfetched possibility but never the truth.

I stumbled across near contamination in March. I typically return to the middle school early after lunch. As I cut through a small stripe of trees between the building and the basketball courts, I heard the distinct voice of a middle school boy saying, “Wait! It’s a teacher!”

The middle school students are near constantly planning, performing, or covering up some sort of devious activity; I just needed to figure out what they schemed this time.

I kept walking casually until I reached the corner of the sidewalk. I paused behind a tree and waited for the students to emerge from their hiding place. Before long I saw a middle schooler’s head peeking out from the third story window. Without warning, a red water balloon appeared cradled in his hand. It hung suspended for a second before plummeting to the sidewalk nearly taking a local school student out in the process.

I raced into the director’s office to inform the assistant director, who is the Mr. Wilson to the collective Middle School student body’s Dennis the Menace. I have never seen an administrator run that fast. His hatred for the water balloon skirmishes rank just a little below the teacher inspired rubber band war of earlier in the semester. By the time he reached the third floor, the culprits were gone.

Yesterday the scattering of spontaneous soakings turned pandemic. With only one period left to go in the week and all their monthly tests over, the boys of my larger English class decided to commandeer the garden hose behind the cafeteria for an all-out water war.

If Shanghai runs low on water in the next week, the officials just have to sop it out of my moderately submerged classroom after the teenage sponges decided to ring all their clothes out in the middle of English class.

One hyper-prepared and over-protected homeroom teacher brought clothes for her student to change into while two other students fought for the prime spot by the Aircon to dry off in the breeze. My British student begged to be allowed to stand for class in his thick British accent because his jeans were soaked and he couldn’t sit down. Friends lent jackets so their compatriots wouldn’t freeze in the air conditioning. Shirts, shorts, and boxers (yikes) were draped over chairs and empty desks. Combs came out so all the boys could fix their previously meticulously spiked and gelled hair.

Fortunately, since the students took their English monthly test the day before, we were just watching a movie. Still, my English class crumbled to summer camp status because of something as unassuming as water.

Wake Up and Pay Attention

Quite accidentally, I stumbled across the secret to motivating the apathetic student. Every middle school and high school has a handful of them, intelligent students who simply do not care. They sleep or sleepwalk through their education.

I have one such self-misguided student in an English class. With jet black hair hanging like curtains to his nose and an unimaginative wardrobe of black and grey, he would fit in with the goth crowd of my youth although now they have been reclassified as emo.

Mostly he stares off into space with an inappropriate comment thrown in here or there. When he's not faking a coma, he's tweaking his hair with the precision of a plastic surgeon.

This quarter we have been working on mock trials, which the students have thoroughly enjoyed partially because it means that they get a break from their somewhat dull literature books.

As a fluke, the last and largest mock trial proved to perk up the emo student from his apathy-coma. The plaintiff’s last name is the same as the student’s first.

After his initial reaction of “What the hell,” his perplexity was compounded when he realized that the plaintiff was a woman suing for the wrongful death of her fiancé…who also shares his first name.

The class was generally amused with the ideas of the emo student having a fiancé. The merriment reached a boisterous level when the Trifecta matriarch won the role of his lovelorn fiancé. She focused her standard classroom theatrics towards her surrogate dead fiancé, the emo student.

The emo student willingly volunteered without even the need for me to threaten to confiscate his contraband i-pod. Of course, he offered to play the role of the dead fiancé, but I appreciate the little steps towards improvement.

For the next three days while the class worked on the mock trial, I never once had to interrupt his trace-like state to bring him back to the reality of his confinement in English class. The mock trial preformed that task for me. Every time his name was mentioned in the mock trial, he jerked his head up to identify the source through the light-filtering strains of his hair.

And his name was said very, very often.

I Told You So

Everyone reaches that moment in their life when the elder generations can smugly sit back, cross their arms, and say, “I told you to just wait until you get to be my age”. Those occurrences have happen a half a dozen times since I took the role of part parent, part referee, and all the time victim of preteen mood swings or otherwise known as a middle school teacher.

For the most part, the boys are completely absorbed in their own awkwardness. Any social wrinkles are solved with a punch on the nose or a shove on the basketball court. The issue is then completely forgotten.

Girls are a different matter. When they have the slightest snag in their perception of what their life should be like, it can domino into an atomic bomb sized imprint on the hapless souls unfortunate enough to be around during the melodramatic explosion.

I'm not talking about the dozens of Hermmiones waiting patiently to turn into Emma Watsons but the Mean Girl/Gossip Girl It Girls of seventh grade. I have three in one English class, and I refer to them as the Trifecta.

At least once a day one of the three either has a friend, an appearance, or a boy meltdown, which usually ends with me confiscating a note, a hairbrush, or a mirror. The range of impromptu weapons is quite diverse since at this age students still equate flirting with beating the snot out of the guy. “Boy related issues” is when I’m mitigated to referee mode.

Typically, I maintain the stance of a casual observer into the highs and lows of the Middle School soap opera, but this week I accidentally threw myself into the headwaters of the preteen torrent.

One interesting side effect of being on crutches last week is that I was forced to walk slowly through the halls. I had more time to read the cornucopia of student projects plastered on the walls. On little heart shaped cutouts the students wrote what they liked about their school. Many students listed the names of their friends. I noticed one of the Trifecta’s name was furiously crossed out in marker under “friends”.

Identifying the owner of the construction paper heart as one of the Trifecta’s many cohorts, I checked my student’s corresponding heart. Just what I expected; the frienemy’s name was scribbled over in black ink. Permanent marker is quite step for the same girl that loved me, hated me, and refused to speak to me in a five minute time span.

That day in class I asked the Trifecta sovereign if she and her friend have forgiven each other yet.

She gasped and took a step back. “How did you know!”

I maybe slurred together, “violent-permanent-market-scribbles” before the girl jettisoned into the turbo-speech preteen girls have perfected.

Between the “likes” and “you knows” I deciphered something about the ex-friend spending too much time with one of the other Trifecta members. Feelings were hurt. Words were spoken. An infamous note was written. Now the girls haven’t spoken in a month.

The whole catastrophe was a little confusing because all girls involved are… or were (I’m a little baffled whether this fracture merits past tense) friends.

I found myself wondering, was I like that when I was thirteen? The answer resounded confidently and unbidden through my mind: yes, yes I was. The rapid speech is not a question. I still speak notoriously fast much to the chagrin of boyfriends and my students.

The melodrama? Yep, I did that too. I distinctly remember a fight involving a banana and not speaking to a visiting friend because my other friends told me not to.

After suggesting the Tifecta queen write her friend a letter detailing her feelings and how she wanted to be friends again, the student bounced off in a complete about-face mood swing.

I suddenly realized what my mother meant when she said, “Wait until you have a daughter just like you.”

Just as suddenly, I realized that I really, really do not want to have children.

The Real Chinese Torture

Forget the infamous water torture technique, I now understand and have personal experience with an on-the-ground scream-worthy practice: namely, navigating the treatment for an undiagnosed, mysteriously appearing, and slightly debilitating injury in China.

I didn’t do any serious damage; I just hurt my foot. Actually, most of my foot is fine except for the muscle under my big toe. Still, I came to realize last week that this particular muscle is vital to the concept of walking painlessly.

The downward spiral to wretchedness began last Saturday when my toe was a little tender. Sunday I limped a bit but still blanketed myself in an ignorance that my suffering would dissolve overnight. Unfortunately, by Monday, I could not put any pressure on my foot what-so-ever without bolts of pain scorching my leg.

I’m pretty stubborn when it comes to going to the doctor when something is actually wrong; however, an inability to walk is somewhat problematic when I live on the fourth floor, have an office on the third floor, and walk to work everyday (even if the trek is roughly the distance from my apartment to my parking space in the States). I needed a half hour to manage a typically five-minute walk to the on-campus clinic.

Four doctors were enthusiastically ready to help me as soon as I stepped into their office; the only problem was that none of them spoke English. My angst-ridden soliloquies describing the pain using various creative analogies were reduced to “pain” and “swollen” when translated into Mandarin.

The Chinese-speaking physicians directed me into a large office with only one doctor, who I am going to refer to as Mr. Giggles quite aware that a B-worthy horror movie about a dentist shares the same name. The too jovial Mr. Giggles proceeded to examine my toe by poking it, wiggling it, and bending it to the point that he must have been testing whether I am double-jointed. The entire time the joker-size grin never left his face, and he occasionally giggled…maybe at my grimaces of agony. The chair I sat on probably has equally spaced tears in the vinyl from where I dug my nails in to keep from howling.

I only learned one piece of information from the consultation. “Well, I don’t think it’s broken.”

I was tossed odd smelling self-heating bandages that reach an almost unbearable temperature. The doctor cheerfully informed me to come back if it got worse.

Still with no knowledge of what actually was wrong with my foot, I hopped along as best I could to my classes. George, our adorable grandpa-like dorm guard, stormed into the middle school and burst into my classroom. He handed me crutches that he dug up from who knows where.

The one beneficial aspect of my current impairment is that the preteen populous of the middle school have all become Florence Nightingales and Mother Teresas. Even students I don’t have refuse to let me carry my books and laptop by myself. I had to negotiate a compromise with one English class because they wouldn’t let me stand up to teach; they were finally pacified with me sitting on a desk. AND when I struggled in the packed hall with my crutches that ended in me spilling what felt like a gallon of water, students and Chinese homeroom teachers scooped down like I was a baby bunny lost in a forest packed with wolves. I’m frankly surprised none of them tried to carry me back to my office.

It’s been a week now and while I’m still limping and am in a little bit of pain, at least I can put aside the crutches. I’m still not sure what exactly was wrong though I’m fairly convinced I had some sort of muscle strain. What I do know is that I never EVER want to be on crutches in China again.

May 12, 2008

It has been awhile since I have posted and partly the reason is because I knew I had to say something but didn’t really know what that message should be.

As everyone knows, on Monday, May 12th a magnitude- 7.9 earthquake devastated the Sichuan Province of China. While the shock waves were felt at a distance equal to the continental United States, I didn’t personally register the shaking. Although swaying skyscrapers were evacuated in Shanghai, my building is only three stories tall.

It can be hard to identify with loss in a developing country thousands of miles away because so many people suffer globally every day. I can’t help but think back to when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. At the company I worked for at the time, the televisions in the lobby that are typically scrolling Wall Street numbers were glued to the 24-hour news channels. At any time of the day various amounts of staffers hovered around, shaking their hands, and wondering how something like this could happen in America.

China is my country right now, and thousands of people have died near an area where I traveled only two weeks ago. A disproportional number of the deceased are school children, the same age as the ones I teach.

I always have trouble disassociating, but to me the victims aren’t faceless. They are not just one more notch is a rapidly increasing casualty toll. I see the grandparents who were found cradling their two-year-old grandson when their apartment collapsed; the half dozen school children who bunched together for a security that ultimately didn’t come; the 9th graders who, looking forward to graduation in less than two months from their prestigious satellite school, had all the opportunities in the world suddenly evaporate in mere minutes.

Sichuan will honor their dead, rebuild and move on though geographical as well as emotional scars will remain for decades. For my own benefit, I wanted to take a small pause from my typically light-hearted posts and remember those that did not or will not survive the earthquake on Monday.

While I’m constantly amazed at the resilience of the human spirit, this tragedy has hit the people here pretty hard in what should be a glorious year for the Middle Kingdom. I am one of them.

If you are interested in donating to the Sichuan earthquake victims, I would recommend the following charities: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, World Vision, or Mercy Corps.

The High Trail

I’m always been a wanderer. It’s a trait my friends note but just accept with a shrug and the nonchalant comment of, “You always eventually wander back.”

I have traveled in six continents now and in some significantly remote locations, yet I have rarely seen such untouched beauty as what I found in Tiger Leaping Gorge.

For two days I hiked nothing more than a goat trail weaving along the curves of the mountainside. Hundreds of feet below me was the frothing green headwater of the Yangtze River punching its way through the rocky terrain. On the other side of the ravine, lead grey rocks jettisoned into the sky forming razor sharp peaks rolling in succession. Streaks of sunlight punctured the cumulus clouds, spotlighting the terraced farms tumbling down the hillside into the river below the trail.

We took the high trail halfway between the rushing waters gathered in the fold of the gorge and the sky.

One of the dangers of taking the high trail of Leaping Tiger Gorge is just finding the path. The beginning is simply a dirt foot-trail cutting passed an old middle school before disappearing into the hills. Another challenge is staying on the trail. It has no handrails or freshly painted sighs like you would find in the United States. Here, nature is just left alone except for a scattering of spray-painted boulders pointing the direction to the upcoming guesthouses. Where boulder makers weren’t presents, we followed the fresh footprints of earlier trekkers in the sandy dirt. At every bend or fork we would examine the rocks and grounds for something as simple as a faded outline of an arrow to know which way to go.

At times the trail was little more than a slightly flattened stretch of rocks a foot from the sheer mountainside and a hundred foot drop. Other times it took on an element of Heidi as we walked in endless hills with impressive peaks towering above us.

Our only company on the trail was locals on donkey-back, farmers, other trekkers, and the occasional goat. On the morning of the second day, my friend and I did not see another person for close to two hours. That stretch was the most alone either of us have ever been in China.

Besides the indescribable beauty of one of the last pristine natural spaces in China. Tiger Leaping Gorge had another unique feature: the silence. Only the wind whipping through the gorge and rustling the tall grass provided constant accompaniment for our trek. Occasionally, the rushing rapids of the river below or the callings of a happily munching goat broke into the wind’s auditory dominance.

In my life when hectic schedules and impossible deadlines have me craving a sliver of peace, I will daydream of wandering through the serenity of Tiger Leaping Gorge.

The Fatality of Overconfidence

With only three months left until my time in China is over, my friends and I are in a frenzy to squeeze the most out of our Chinese experience. During the Labor Day holiday, a friend and I compacted a week long vacation in Yunnan Providence into a four-day break.

Eight months deep into living in China, I am confident in my ability to maneuver through China. The fatality of that mistake came crashing down as soon as I stepped into the Lijiang airport. Already late because of flight delays, our initial plan of hiring a car to take us to the little village at the foot of Tiger Leaping Gorge proved impossible. Right outside the pit-stop terminal was a semi-circle of drivers looking for their tour groups and one bus to Lijiang but no drivers for hire.

We jumped on the bus, figuring that we would be able to catch the “Lonely Planet” confirmed bus to Qiaotou in Lijiang. Except the “bus station” proved to just be a slab of cement between a few buildings in what looked to be the chop-shop portion of town.

The taxis refused to talk to us let alone take us the two hours to the distant village. We were told that the “legendary” bus could be found across the street at Bus Stop 11; however, only a parking lot full of sketchy clown car vans trying to entice us from out their window could be found.

Knowing that we were quickly losing the daylight and that we would need about eight hours to reach our guesthouse on the mountain once we started hiking, we settled on being completely swindled and paid one of the mini-bus drivers to take us the two hours to the foot of the mountain.

Our driver proved to be the right combination of ingenuity and insanity to get us to Qiaotou. We were only twenty minutes into the trip when we came to a jolting stop at a roadblock. The road was the only real path over the mountain that wasn’t an hour out of the way, and that solitary road was completely closed.

Instead of turning around like the other vehicles, our driver put the car in park and went to have a smoke with the construction workers. Trusting his ability to work some quangxi, I laid out in the backseat, turned on my I-pod, and waited.

About fifteen minutes later a smiling construction worker let us through the barrier along with a few dump trucks. We literally flew (with moments of being airborne) along the deserted road until we hit the reason that the road was closed. For some reason, dump truck after dump truck of dirt was being piled in great mounds on the road.

Our escort/local expert/civil engineer conferred with the two cars that also made it through the roadblock (deviously I might add). An agreement was reached. As soon as one of the construction rollers back up, jeep 1, jeep 2, and clown car forged over the steep bank of the mound and drove on the fresh dirt to the other side.

After crossing a narrow crumbling bridge, we reached Qiaotou in the shadow of the mountain. We began our two-day trek up Tiger Leaping Gorge at 12:40PM with seven hours of sunlight remaining and eight hours needed to reach our guesthouse…

The Miracle of Flight

After a chaotic fight to hail a cab that involved my friends begging, pleading, and being half dragged down a hectic Chinese street, I was on my way to the airport last Wednesday for a furious Labor Day excursion to Yunnan Providence.

Traveling to the airport certainly isn’t the worst aspect of living in Asia, but flying in China does involve a little bit of courage and a lot a unpredictability

1. Whether you choose noodles or rice for the in-flight meal, you have about the same likelihood of monopolizing one of the toilet closets while trying to throw up and not get thrown out of the stall in the process. I must have a stomach coated with steel after Kenya and now China. On the way to Yunnan we were served what looked and smelled suspiciously like dog food.

2. Chinese airport security has the same impartiality and consistency as the hall monitors of old. When flying to Huangshan, one of my friends had her jelly confiscated but not her peanut butter. We met someone on top of the mountain that was denied peanut butter but could keep his jelly. This time the brutes of aviation insisted on opening and sniffing everything in my FAA approved toiletry bag. My yellow curly hair gel certainly threw them into “potential threat mode”. They left me the gel but took my small container of contact solution after they let me put some in my contact case (because the liquid is obviously considered a threat if they actually let me use it like directed on the bottle).

Go south of China and security is a little lax. In Thailand someone forgot to lock the slide doors to the runway. Thinking we were late, we rushed out to catch the shuttle bus to the flight. I lead the way, prepared to hold the bus for my friends. The mistake was corrected the moment I stepped outside and realized no bus was available to be caught. The door slid closed behind me and locked. My friends and I stared at each other through the thin glass door before the powers that be at the airport felt sorry for me and let me into the airport.

3. When all else fails, follow the herd of Chinese experts.

My friend and I finally made it to the plane Wednesday, settled into our seats, and half listened as the flight attendants went through the safety protocol. One word caught our attention “Yiben”…specifically, “Your trip to Yiben”. We bought a direct flight to Kunming so my friend and I were confused. Is that the name of the airport? Does the flight go to Yiben after Kunming? Are we just misunderstanding the stewardess?

The name was repeated over and over again to the point that when the plane landed, we had no idea where we were. Even when the flight attendant welcomed us to Yiben, we were dumbfounded.

In typical desperate-foreigner fashion, we glanced around to see what all the other people on the flight were doing. Everyone was getting off the plane so we stepped off as well.

It turns out that Yiben is the Chinese air travel version of Breezeway, Pennsylvania. (Those of you that have made the Ohio to DC trek know what I am talking about.) As soon as we stepped off the plane, we were given an East Grand Canyon ticket as a voucher to get back on the plane that was nowhere near East Grand Canyon (to my knowledge). We were led into a “waiting room” not a terminal.

We took a seat, watching all the Chinese passengers make frantic calls on their cell phones. Somehow knowing the Chinese citizens were just as confused as us was very comforting.

After about fifteen minutes, an assertive older Chinese woman pointed at us before pointing out to the plane. Taking the hint, we were half thrown through a large crowd back onto the runway. A flight attendant took our East Grand Canyon ticket, and we returned to our seats. Completely baffled, we continued on to Kunming.

Even though buying train tickets in China should be considered a combative sport, it’s better than taking a plane.