Worst. Vacation. Ever.

Since Niels and I began dating, we’ve been lucky enough to take quite a few vacations together. It’s one of the benefits of him being English-German and still having family overseas and the fact that we currently live in CHINA!  One Two Three weeks ago we were in Wuhan visiting some of our friends from our working holiday in Yichang during Spring Festival. Even though there were some really wonderful moments, we decided that it was our Worst Vacation Ever.

The crappiness didn’t trickle in, it was a full on flood from the get go. Our train departed Zhengzhou at 12:34pm on April 30^th. It’s normally a 20 minute train ride from the school to the station and because I’m totally slightly neurotic I like to get there at least 30 minutes before the train leaves just to be safe. So, we caught a taxi over an hour before our train left, thinking we would have plenty of time. It started off well, but then we got into downtown, and traffic got insanely bad. At one point it took us 10 minutes to go one block. I was beginning to freak out, worrying that we weren’t going to get there in time. And I had every reason to worry. It seems everyone and their brother was leaving the city for the May Day holiday (Workers of the World Unite!) and the streets were so jammed that a 20 minute trip took over an hour. We literally had to run to catch the train. Had we been five minutes later we would have missed it.

Luckily enough the train ride didn’t hit any snags, we had hard sleepers, which are surprisingly comfortable. There are 6 bunks to an area, on this trip I had the bottom bunk, and Niels had the top one. Have the bottom bunk can be a blessing or a curse because sometimes your other bunkmates will feel it is completely ok to sit on your bed. Luckily on this trip I didn’t have this problem.

On the train ride we met an older man, Li Yu, who was very excited to have met foreigners and be given the chance to practice English. While he was talking with Niels he commented on how “strong” I was. This was not the first time I had heard this, many of my students tell me I’m strong, which I much prefer to being told I’m fat, which I’ve also heard quite often. (“Teacher, have you ever thought about losing weight?”)  Niels talked with Mr. Li talked for a short while, then retreated to his bunk for a short rest. I wasn’t tired so I took out some knitting and about .5 seconds later, Mr. Li is sitting on my bunk with me trying to start up a conversation. His English wasn’t that great, although my Chinese is non-existent so I shouldn’t complain. We managed to have a nice chat. One thing I noticed to be a bit strange was that when he would tell me a word that he thought I didn’t know, he felt the need to write the character on my thigh (I was sitting cross-legged). At first I thought he may have been hitting on me and then was all “no, he’s just being friendly, very friendly”. But after telling Niels about it once we arrived in Wuhan, he agreed that my first thought was correct. I in fact was hit on by a 60 year old Chinese man. 

Amazingly enough we got into Wuhan without any problems; we exited the station and managed to deal with the construction around the train station without getting lost. After a short wait we met up with our friend H and she took us to the Inn we would be staying at for the week.  

The Inn. Wow. It was the worst place I’ve ever stayed at in my life. The Inn itself was nice, very simple, no frills, and nice rooms. Except ours. We had the worst room. It didn’t have windows (did I mention that Wuhan is considered the “Furnace of China”?), the lock on the door was a pushbutton on the knob that anyone could bust through, there was no place to hang anything, the bed was on the verge of collapsing and the toilet didn’t have a flusher but a bucket for us to fill and dump down the squatty. My favorite… wait for it…the second day we were there we got ants. Did I mention we were on the fourth floor? But I have to admit the owners were really great and sprayed stuff to kill them the next morning, but unfortunately they didn’t sweep up the ant carcasses afterwards. I’m so glad I brought flip-flops.

By Thursday staying in the room was beginning to be unbearable due to the heat. We couldn’t use the AC, otherwise we’d get charged an extra fee, and even though there was a wonderful breeze outside, we weren’t getting any of it. Because it was so hot out we were dreading the thought of spending lots of time outside, the temperature was in the 90s. For as beautiful as Wuhan is, I could never, ever live there, it’s just too hot. It felt like D.C. in August and it was only the first week of May. Our friends told us that in the summer it’s often 40 – 45 degrees Celsius and if it gets above 40 the city pretty much shuts down because the heat is just too dangerous. Buffalo gets snow days, Wuhan gets heat days. I would rather have a snow day any day. You can have fun with snow, when it’s that hot out, there’s nothing fun about it.  

During our trip a couple of our female friends told us on more than one occasion that they wished they were boys. Niels and I were horrified by this. But this idea is so ingrained into Chinese culture that our friends who are wicked intelligent, funny, outgoing, and beautiful think they’re not good as boys because their girls makes me angry. Angry because they can’t see their self-worth due to the generations of women who went before them who were told the same thing and passed it on through the years to today. It also makes me sad, because there’s not a thing I can do about it. Yes, I can listen; I can tell them that they shouldn’t have these thoughts. But I’m a foreigner, I don’t live here, I don’t deal with it everyday. Yes, I deal with discrimination here. But I can leave when ever I want. But they can’t. And they don’t even know what to do to help change the system. The Party line is “There’s no discrimination in China.” If the Party says so it must be true. Our friend H who’s getting her master’s degree in economics is having the hardest time finding a job because she’s a girl. In China woman are still expected to have one of the following three jobs, teacher, secretary, or nurse, and anyone who deviates from those three will be ostracized in a number of ways. The irony of it all was that one afternoon Niels and our friend C were having a lively debate and C said there was no discrimination in China.

Sorry for the tangent now back to normal programming… what ever that is… 

We did see some wonderful things while in Wuhan and it was a treat to be able to see so many of the people we met while in Yichang. But so many things went wrong that we shouldn’t have been surprised when one of the worst things to happen while traveling in a foreign country happened.

Saturday afternoon, after spending the morning in “Snack Row” eating some of the best foods I’ve ever had, including spicy snails, Niels and I were heading out from the Inn to go to an Internet café to spend the afternoon escaping the heat, eating as much ice cream as we wanted and having as many glasses of Coke or Fanta as we wanted for all of 18 RMB, when the owner said we owed them for another day. We were completely confused, it was Saturday, we were leaving the next morning and we had paid in advance for our stay. How could we own them more money? We called C to ask her to talk with the owner to see what was going on and try to clear things up. After a few minutes of talking C told us that yes, we did owe the Inn for another night. We were convinced the owner had made a mistake, but weren’t willing to fight it because the owner didn’t seem like she was trying to rip us off. So we paid her the money, thanked C for her help and went on our way.

Niels and I were talking about how she must have made a mistake and tried are darnest to figure out what was what. When were about a 20 minute walk from the Inn when it dawned on me that I should look at our mobile phone to check the date. I stared at it horrified, and said to Niels “It’s not Saturday, it’s Sunday and our train leave in 30 minutes.” We had to sit down. What were we going to do? The train station’s on the other side of town, hell it’s on the other side of the river, there was no way we’d make it back to our Inn, pack and make it by taxi in 30 minutes. I laughed, what else was I going to do? (I cried later, but quickly recovered.) We had somehow lost a day. Lost. A. Day. How do you lose a day? I don’t know, but we managed it, yes we did!

We made a hasty return to the Inn & hastily packed, sent messages to our friends letting them know we wouldn’t be having dinner with them, because it’s Sunday and well we have to figure out how we’re going to get home since by now we’ve missed our train. We received some of the most helpful text messages and calls from our friends, “How are you going to get home?” “What are you going to do?” Gee, thanks guys, very helpful. Luckily enough one friend called us, as we were in a taxi on our way to a booking office, and asked if there’s anything he could do to help. He called the train station to see if tickets were available, and thank goodness, there were. Niels totally rocked and was able to buy two tickets for us using his mad Chinese skills. We grabbed another taxi to the Hankou train station and waited there for an hour and a half for our train to depart. After having missed a train I didn’t want to take any chances at missing another one.

So, that was our trip to Wuhan. It was wonderful to see my friends, but next time they need to come to Zhengzhou because if I never see Wuhan again, that’ll be ok with me.

Niels and I are done teaching in two weeks, and will be heading West to Xi’an to hang out with the terracotta warriors before heading to Beijing so he can take the LSAT. We fly by to the States on June 14^th, and yes it’s really weird to think that in a month I will be at my parents’ house. The time has just completely flown by. It’s going to be difficult to leave our friends, but it helps to know that we’ll be back in Zhengzhou at the end of August so we’ll see them in a few short months. I look back at the first night here where I cried myself to sleep and am amazed that I made it this far. I know most of the things that I’ve written about haven’t shown the good side of China and Chinese society, but it really is an amazing place and so many of the people are the most generous, warm, inviting people I’ve ever met.

But I’m sooooo looking forward to coming home for a two month visit.