A journey to civilisation

James...
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RYAN…

Today after our Friday lessons we jumped on a bus to go see our Aussie friends in the nearby town of Yongzhou. Daoxian and Yongzhou are separated by a mountain range, so to get there we had to go over the mountains. The bus careered up and down and around corners that were u-bend shape completely blind at more than 50km/h with only a continuous honking to alert other drivers that we were coming. Often we would come whipping round a corner and come face to face with a massive truck carrying timber and only survive own certain deaths by swerving out of the way just in time. The problem was that when these near misses occurred the bus wheels came within (literally) inches of the steep precipice that plunged downwards and the driver would fishtail the bus tying to correct himself. On top of this, the Chinese people don't really travel that well and most of them started to be sick 20 minutes into the 3 hour journey.

As we danced we were surrounded by a gaggle of Chinese men...

Tim and Barbarra from America...
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Well, Yongzhou is just another polluted Chinese city in my opinion. A big river, a car factory and a Buddhist temple is about all it's got. Oh, and it has shopping - a slight step up from Daoxian - which has nothing. Normally we wouldn't care less for the place, but on this occasion we regarded it as civilization compared to the way we had been living in the sticks.

Our friends James and Laura are from Tasmania and work at No.2 Middle School in Yongzhou. They met us and wined and dinned us with spaghetti and actual red wine (none of this Mei Jo stuff). That night we explored a street that has lots and lots of little tents that run a BBQ trade. Basically you pick what you want from a pile of things on sticks and they throw it in the deep fryer and hand it to you 10 seconds later (bit of an exaggeration about the time there, but close). Each stick costs around 5 jiao (8 cents maybe). Not bad I thought. After the BBQ we headed for a nightclub. This was like a complete other world to us hillbillies from Daoxian, as the closest thing to nightlife we get is getting drunk and going to a private karaoke room with David (not so great) or staying at home to watch a dodgy pirate copy of the Legends of The Fall (also not great).

Laura...
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So the nightclub was a real blast for us. We danced, dank beer leisurely from (expensive) small bottles - as opposed to being made to compete with some Chinese man I’ve never met before and drink a whole longneck in one go while every one else at the table shouts the Chinese equivalent of “Chug! Chug! Chug!”

James and Laura's friend Valley (English teacher from Ghana originally) has a lot of money and likes to treat his friends. Lucky for us that he does because Chinese nightclubs (as we found out) are really expensive and one can expect to pay 300 Yuan (AU$50) for 12 bottles of imported beer.

As we danced we were surrounded by a gaggle of Chinese men (who looked like Chinese boys no older than 15 to us). I suspect that they were on some dug or the other (ecstasy probably) because they all went crazy and grabbed our hands and formed a big circle and started to jump around with us like we were at a Greek wedding. We also noticed that when the Chinese are on dugs they love to hoot when they get exited (whho! Whho! Hoo! Hooo! Hoo!) and throw their arms up in the air. They reminded me of that stupid owl from Narnia's “The Silver Chair” who made exactly the same noise (and probably took drugs in his spare time too because he was always cross-eyed and wobbly).

The next day James and I went for a bit of an explore on some bikes. It was really cool to explore Yongzhou this way because it's a totally different experience. Like James said its definately “stop paying attention and die!” but apart form this factor it's lots of fun. We took a turn off the main road and went to explore the Buddhist temple and after this we headed of into the rural section of the city. It was really cool getting away from all the traffic and getting down into the place where all the peasants live. The streets are only wide enough from bikes and it was really quiet. We saw heaps of women farming a vegie patch and James managed to have a pretty coherent conversation with a local farmer, which I thought was pretty cool. Some people loved posing for our cameras but others were a bit grouchy and told us to piss off in Chinese.

After conversing with a few locals we headed further into the rural area and eventually found ourselves riding along a small tack only wide enough for a goat. The track ran between two rice paddies full of water. We stopped to look back at the peasants and then it was like slow motion: James missed his footing and I watched as he slowly overbalanced and went face first into the one and half metre drop into the rice field below, bike and all. I couldn't control myself it was so funny, the funniest thing I'd seen for ages. Surprisingly he emerged completely dry, as he managed to miss the big pool of muddy water by a few meters. I think it would have been funnier if he had of fell in the pool and even funnier still if the locals had of seen him, but he didn't and they didn't.

We had dinner at some other Australians' house who work in number 6 school (Geoff and Margaret) and we also met an American couple the we trained with in Yangshou (Tim and Barbara). It was really good to sit down and chill out and basically share thoughts and experiences about China. We had a really good time.

Got dropped off at the bus station by the wife of James and Laura's principal (Ms Ding). She wanted to drive us because she had just gotten her license and wanted to try it out. I thought she was pretty good for her first time, she only drifted across a few lanes while answering her mobile phone and only once put us horizontally in front of an oncoming truck while getting stuck doing a three point turn. Other than that she got us there safely. Following that we rode the bumpy bus back to Hickville.