A Tale of Two Minks': January 2015

I know it’s been WAY too long since we last blogged, so I’m going to do my best to sum up these past few months in one post. We’ve discovered that I (Hunter) hate messing with the pictures and Chelsea hates doing the writing. So this time I’ll write and Chelsea will choose the pics she wants. This could be our new thing...

Even though we haven’t been on any major trips since Korea, we’ve still been super busy this semester. We’re getting settled at our new apartment, exploring Hangzhou, and making short trips whenever our schedule allows it. For those of you who don’t know, we started the 2014-15 school year at a new school - Hangzhou Foreign Languages School. Like the school last year in Kunshan, HFLS has a main Chinese school as well as a foreign degree program for students who want to attend universities abroad. The difference is it’s a British program instead of an American one. The strange schedule takes some getting used to and I have to pretend to know what people are talking about when they use words like invigilate (turn out it’s the British term for proctor…as in proctor a test), but overall I really enjoy it. The students are all fantastic and our new colleagues are very nice and helpful. Plus the school as a whole is very reputable and well known throughout China. I think we lucked out to both get jobs here.

Our first holiday this semester was Mid-Autumn Festival back in September. We got four days off and used them to head to the island of Zhoushan, about two hours away by fast train. We actually had to take the train to the nearby town of Ningbo, then catch a cab to Zhoushan. We should have done a little more research though because it turned out to be another two hour cab ride and we had trouble finding a driver in Ningbo willing to take us that far. Even then, he refused to use the meter and insisted on an up-front payment of 600 RMB.Obviously we weren’t excited about this but it was getting late and we didn’t really have any other options. We conceded and eventually made it to the hotel around 11 PM. Zhoushan is actually made up of tons of little islands with some nice beaches and we spent most of our time there just relaxing. The main beach is famous for sand sculptures and has a bigfestival centered around them every year (like the ice sculptures of Harbin). Unfortunately we missed the main festival (also like Harbin) but still got to see some of smaller sculptures, as well as the artists working on them. On one of the other days we took a ferry to a more secluded island and did more relaxing on the beach. Other than the stress of actually getting to Zhoushan, it was a very relaxing trip.

The big holiday in the fall is National Holiday in October. It celebrates the founding of the PRC in 1949 and is the second biggest holiday of the year (behind Spring Festival/Chinese New Year). We had a whole week off and had planned to go to Vietnam but unfortunately had some issues with our resident permits. We were unable to leave the country until that was resolved, about a week after National Holiday. Luckily we hadn’t bought plane tickets yet and were only out $30 for the Vietnamese visas. Our backup was to go to Xiamen, which is on the coast of China and would have been a similar trip as Zhoushan, but as this was a major travel holiday for the Chinese (and Xiamen is a major tourist destination), all the trains that week sold out in a matter of hours. Our last resort was Shanghai, and even though we’ve been countless times, we always enjoy our time there. We went to all of our favourite places, as well as a few new places, and took a ‘Night Eats’ street food tour where we had some delicious food we would have never thought to try. I also learned a fun new Chinese vocabulary word…XiaoLongXia is ‘crawfish’ in Chinese – literally ‘little dragon shrimp’. I thought that was amusing. It was disappointing to miss out on Vietnam, but we can never complain about Shanghai…definitely our favourite Chinese city to visit.

Our last holiday of the semester came just this past weekend for New Years. We only had three days off but decided it would be worth it to head down to Hong Kong. We really enjoyed our trip there last year and thought it would be nice to check out a few of the places we missed the first time. We had to work on New Years Eve and therefore couldn’t get a flight almost 9:00 that evening. It was after 11 when we landed so we weren’t able to make it out for the countdown, although we did see (part of) a great fireworks show from our taxi. It was well after midnight when we checked into the hotel and we were way too tired to go out that evening. Since we only a few days there, we thought it would be best to get some rest in preparation for the next day. Our favorite thing from the first trip was the hiking, so we planned to do more of that. We found online that a trail called The Dragon’s Back was ranked the #1 Urban trail in Asia by Time Magazine (I assume by ‘urban’ they mean a trail still within the limits of a city). Although we can’t attest to the #1 ranking, we can definitely say it was the best we’ve been on so far. There were some amazing views from the peaks we made it to!

The next day we took the ferry from Hong Kong to the ‘Las Vegas of Asia’, Macau. We also went there on our last trip but didn’t get a chance to stay long, so we thought we’d check it out again. Like Vegas there are tons of huge casinos with some great shows. We saw Macau’s most famous and longest running show, “The House of Dancing Water.” It was basically an acrobat show over water that also included some dancing and a vague story line. It featured some of the most athletic people I’ve ever seen performing some very impressive acrobatic tricks. It was definitely a great show. Afterwards, we had dinner and drinks at one of the many hotel restaurants and then lost $200 Hong Kong dollars almost immediately at the casino. We decided that was a good stopping point for the night and headed back to our own hotel. The next day we took the ferry back to Hong Kong, had a last meal of decent Western food (which can be hard to find in mainland China), and headed to the airport for our flight home. Due to the amazingly annoying Chinese practice of making up holidays, Sunday was a workday.

Unfortunately this school follows a little more traditional Chinese school calendar than the American Program did last year, which meant we didn’t really get real breaks forChristmas or Thanksgiving. We made the most of both holidays though by participating in an expat Thanksgiving cooking class in November and finding a great Christmas dinner at a local expat bar on Christmas Eve. The Thanksgiving meal was cool because we got to actually make all the food ourselves, as well as meet some other expats living in Hangzhou. Both meals included all the traditional holiday food such as turkey, ham, stuffing, potatoes, pumpkin pie, etc. It’s a little hard to get in a true holiday mood here since no one really celebrates like back home, but we made the most of it and had a good time both evenings. The British program at school also had a Christmas get-together at one of the local hotels that included a good buffet.

Aside from the actual holidays, we also kept ourselves busy on the weekends also. We made several other trips into Shanghai for various reasons: we did a cool fun run called the ‘Shanghai Rat Race’, which was a scavenger hunt we finished dead last in; we met some friends from last year for a pottery workshop, which was way more challenging and frustrating that the movie Ghost makes it look; and we made another visit to the fake market where I got more knock-off New Balance shoes that fell apart within a month. We also made several visits to downtown Hangzhou were we rented bikes to ride around famous West Lake. If you can manage to avoid the crowds it really is a beautiful lake.

We also spent one Sunday judging a national debate competition at one of the other Foreign Language Schools in Hangzhou. Teams from all over China participated and we saw some really impressive debates. The topic was ‘’Countries should not possess nuclear weapons’’ and we heard some pretty convincing arguments, as well as some not so convincing ones that included the need for protection against aliens and asteroids. Our school had several teams participating, all of which did very well. It was a round robin competition in which 60+ teams competed for spots in a 32team bracket, which was then single elimination format. We had several teams make the tournament, two of which made it to the semi-finals (not against each other). The debates were all excellent, especially considering they were doing so in their second language. Overall it was an interesting experience to judge the debates. We made a little extra cash and although I wouldn’t want to do it every weekend, it was a surprisingly fun way to spend a Sunday.

I think that pretty much covers our semester. That got a little longer than I wanted, but I guess that’s what happens when you cram an entire semester into one post. For now, we’re counting down the days in January to our three week break for Chinese New Year. We decided to go to Thailand and are very excited to see the beach again! Hope everyone is doing well back home. Thanks for reading.

-Hunter

A few pictures of the HFLS campus: