rupert and hannah

Hi Hannah here, to let those of you who didn’t know, know that we are back. Back in wonderfully clean, quiet (apart from the seagulls at 4am) and (despite what you may have heard), civilised Wales!
We were sad to leave Haikou but had some great leaving do’s. We organised a leaving party for all our students and used a big meeting room on campus. We made some huge banners and put out a load of drinks and snacks and tried to have a Western ‘mingle and chat’ type party. The students were obviously expecting a more Chinesey party which is where people give performances, regardless of whether or not they actually have any skill in singing/dancing or whatever. We managed to avoid giving a performance but Rupert did give a quick speech, mainly just to tell them what to do as they were all sitting staring expectantly at the stage. We also met up with the class of little first years that I had taught for eight hours a week in the first term and Rupert taught for two hours a week in the second term. They were very sad to see us go, we were the first foreigners they had ever spoken to and they had all become very attached to us, some even cried at our last meeting. The Chinese don’t hug but they think that all westerners do so they all queued up to give me a rather awkward and sweaty hug goodbye! They gave us a cute gift of a little album with an individual photo of each student with a card behind it. The cards contained funny Chinglish messages such as “how fly the time” and all ended with some version of “wish you happy everyday”. On our last night we invited our closest friends to a leaving meal at the posh restaurant on campus and had a fabulous meal for about twelve people for a cost of about ten pounds. Leaving the next morning was all a bit surreal and even now I don’t think it has sunk in that we have truly left.
Oh and we had a great time in Beijing, we did all the sights, ate Beijing duck and were amazed by the massive hype surrounding the 2008 Olympics, even two years prior to the event. We dread to think what it will be like when the games are actually on. At the moment the city is filled with ridiculously huge, boastful signs about ‘One World, One Dream’ and they have created these five little animal characters, one for each colour of the rings, they are supposed to be five of the most famous animals in China but the only one I can remember is the panda. You don’t see much of the five rings and I have just heard that it maybe because they are similar to something used by Falun Gong, the sect that is banned and heavily persecuted by the state. Everywhere you go, around Tiananmen square, even inside the Forbidden city people are flogging Olympics memorabilia, much of it probably fake. The city is undergoing a huge clean-up operation ready for the Olympics which sadly meant that every single attraction we visited including the Forbidden city, the Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace, the Lama Temple and Jingshan Park were all under scaffolding and had little armies of men chipping away at them and slapping on new coats of red paint. The most impressive part of the Forbidden city, called the Hall of Supreme Harmony or something like that we rechristened as the Hall of Supreme Scaffolding, although you couldn’t even see through the scaffolding to see what it looked like because they had covered it with a huge tarpaulin with a picture of what the building should look like painted onto it. Rupert was appalled by the quality of the work being done on these old buildings, he saw workers pouring concrete into the roof of a palace in the Summer Palace, men chipping away at a beautiful old door in the Temple of Heaven with pickaxes and filling in cracks in the old stone altars with new cement, it seemed that no attempt was being made to use original materials in the restorations.
We managed to eat some of our favourite dishes in Beijing, we found a wonderful Sichuan restaurant with one of the most perfect ‘Gong Bao Ji Ding’ (spicy chicken with peanuts) that I have ever had. One night Rupert was pleased to find that he prefers the ready made Beijing duck you can buy in supermarkets like Sainsburys to the real thing!
We left the Great Wall to the last day, partly because we had managed to get sidetracked by shopping (Beijing is great for cool fake stuff) and partly because we were kind of dreading going there knowing it was going to be full of Chinese tour groups who are a law unto themselves and we had been getting very annoyed by the ones we had to fight our way through at the other sights around Beijing (think matching fluorescent caps and T-shirts worn by hordes of very Chinese people from provincial cities with few foreigners, who are hence more interested in staring at the foreign tourists than the attractions they have come to see, led around by a stressed tour guide with flags and megaphones trying to herd them from place to place at a pace that must leave the tourists exhausted by the end of their holiday). Although it is something like two thousand miles long, there are only a few sections of the wall open to tourists and we elected to visit the nearest (and hence the busiest) one. It was nothing like another, more remote section I had visited four years earlier, but was still impressive as it snaked away over the hills as far as the eye could see. Sadly the tour groups were out in force and there was only so much we could take what with the sun beating down on us and me hobbling around with a painful, bruised toe (having somehow got it tangled in Rupert’s whilst we were walking along the day before) so we had a quick look around and then headed off the wall to find some shade. The transport up and down the mountain to get to the wall was a strange kind of toboggan crossed with a roller coaster that was possibly the highlight of the day. One moment that we shall never forget was when we were trying to get down the steps off the wall, and realised that the steps were wide enough for two people to pass each other but that the hundreds of people trying to get on and off the wall were all pushing to get through at once and the only way off was to join them and quite literally fight the people coming the other way to push your way through and get off the wall. It was terrifying and what made it even worse was that to the Chinese it was completely normal and acceptable. I have come across this crowd mentality before in China and it never fails to shock me, each person for themselves. However many coats of red paint the authorities add to the attractions in time for the Olympics, it is not going to make up for some of the cultural differences which may well horrify the international visitors. Don’t get me started on the spitting or the communal toilets…
So after an interesting and fun week in Beijing we flew into Heathrow, looking forward to some cool, refreshing British weather. We were quite disappointed to hear that you guys were in the middle of a major heat wave and even more disappointed to see that my little sister is as usual way more tanned that us even though we had a head start of a year in the tropics. We have been back for about two weeks now and “how fly the time”. Rupert has been doing some work at his parents house involving moving big stones and digging holes and I have been at my parents promising to write the final blog for the last two weeks but the time really has flown. We are not quite sure what will happen next, there haven’t been many science teaching vacancies for Ru to apply for and so we are thinking now that we will find random jobs and a flat (probably in Bristol) and Ru can wait for next term/year and see if there are more teaching vacancies around. So I guess this is it for this blog, now that we are back in the real world we shall have no need for it. We are not really sure how many people that we sent the link to, actually looked at our blog, but if you are reading this then I suppose you did, and you may be the only one (and you’ll probably never know) but thanks a million and we “wish you happy everyday”.