Orienting Ourselves: Paul's a procrastinator...

He should be doing some work right now, but it is 9:00 in the morning on a Friday, and he has the next three blocks off. So instead of marking and inputing grades, he is sitting on his couch, trying to summon the will to do some real work. So far... no luck.

He has the three blocks off because all of the students at the Junior High are at a seminar right now, where a famous author from one of Beijing's most prestigious universities is lecturing on how to become better students, how to become more self-controlled and how to work towards becoming an international elite. Heavy stuff for kids as young as 9, but a really cool opportunity at the same time.

Tomorrow (Saturday) all the teachers will be working in order to make up for the time we will be away on our May holiday. Apparently we get 8 days off in a row, but we are only supposed to have seven, because there are only seven Chinese traditional holidays that are being replaced by this one long break. So in order to get our time off in consecutive days we are working Saturday. However, many of the students are leaving to go home tonight so classes will be pretty empty tomorrow. It looks like we may be doing a review day or working on our aural English skills by watching an English language movie.

By 8:00 tomorrow night we will be winging our way towards Beijing. We are spending the night near the airport there before taking off in the morning to Guilin, the first of our stops in Southern China. We will be exploring the region around Guilin (which is a fairly modern, unspectacular Chinese city, set in an otherworldly landscape of Karst mountains and river valleys). We will be basing ourselves in Yangshuo (or Yangshou not sure which spelling is correct) and biking, rafting, boating, rickshawing and hiking around the Li and Yulong river valleys. We will be exploring ancient villages (some thousands of years old) wandering through rural markets, and will get a chance to watch farmers plant their rice fields with the help of water buffalo powered plows. We may even make our way to the Longsheng area to see the Dragon's Backbone Rice Terraces where years of labour have converted entire mountain ranges into terraced rice paddies.

Unfortunately, the one drawback to this area is that you have to share it with hundreds (possibly thousands) of other tourist (mostly Chinese, but Yangshou is also big on the foriegn tourist trail). Menus may include traditional dishes like beer fish and stuffed snails next to oreo milkshakes. Also, it looks like rainy season has started a month earlier then usual, and that for the entire time we are in the area the weather will modulate between damp and downright stormy.

Anyways we are definitely looking forwards to the trip. Here are some photos we haven't found the proper post for, but think you should see.