English, cornered

Though lots of people come to Yangshuo for the mountains (photo included), we went there for the free housing and food. Through a volunteer placement service called Workaway, I contacted an English school and arranged that we would exchange English teaching for room and board. Upon arrival I was pleased to find that we were only asked to teach for two hours a day, three days a week. The rest of the time was ours.

Just as in Poland a year before, I found the students intelligent and engaging, and really a joy to talk with. They were mostly around the age of 20, generally university students taking a summer course improve their English. Some, though, were taking a much longer course of eight months at the school, which I found incredible. For young Chinese people, better English pretty much means more money. But the students were forking over huge sums every month, and putting in long hours each day for classes. In addition, the accommodations and food were perhaps less than five-star. Auberon and I both got pretty bad food poisoning, and even the students said it happened to them too.

Kept relatively dorm-ridden thanks to air conditioning and illness, we didn't stray too much from the school or the section of town we were in. I really enjoyed the nightly English Corner sections I led. While I was infirm, Auberon gave an extremely well-received presentation on places to see in California, from Lake Tahoe to Hollywood. On the last school day, we were judges for a speech competition. The students all did great, overcoming nerves and a formidable language barrier to tell stories and give speeches on current events.

I did take time to explore the paths into the hills, past some burial shrines and to a nearby strangely deserted little village. It was the heat of the day, and anybody that had any reason to be inside was taking full advantage of it. The hills were just as beautiful on the other side of the river and it was very pleasant to walk alone on the the path. I also took a bike into town from the stock kept by the school. Remembering my Vietnamese lessons, I made liberal use of the bell the whole ride. "Town" meant Yangshuo proper, removed by a few miles from the area with the school. It was naturally much busier and with lots of construction going on, and it was hot enough that I didn't stay long that afternoon.

But on the last or next-to-last evening, some students invited me out to the touristy West Street, which was very exciting. It reminded me a bit of the tourist area of Hoi An, though most of the tourists there were Chinese instead of foreign. They had some traditional methods of making a kind of dough on display, with muscular men using a huge two-handled pole to pound the flour while chanting. Also of interest were the girls in military costume selling ice cream out of refrigerated ammo boxes, and the your-face-on-a-shirt stall that was evidently providing work for the blind.

The next day two of the same students dedicated essentially their whole day to making sure we could get our train and bus tickets, and the day after that one of them actually accompanied us to Guilin to help us deal with the train station. We're very thankful to Grace and Hedy for getting us safely to Chengdu.