more or lessica...

Teacher's Day in China was last week so Wednesday we were told there would be an "outdoor activity" for all the teachers in the Pearson-Longman schools (12 campuses in Shanghai = loads of teachers.) They were taking us on a trip to Suzhou! (pretty town near shanghai) Dispite free travel incentive, I debated extensively over going because none of my teacher buddies could make it. I went anyway.

Wrongest decision of my life.

Firstly, they didn't tell us until Tuesday afternoon that we would be catching the buses at 6:50am Wednesday morning. FML. So I stay out until about 1am, drag myself home and get maybe four hours of sleep, then hop on a tour bus with about 50 Chinese teachers and 4 foreigners. We sit through painfully orchestrated get-to-know-you games on the bus (impossible considering the language divide) and two hours later it looks to me like we're getting close. Pretty scenery, mountains, temples, lakes, and the like.

Bus finally stops and we all pile off. I know things have gone terribly awry when all I can see are horses, camels, fake Teepees, and Chinese people wearing cowboy hats. We had arrived at Cowboy Town.

At first I'm giggling and enjoying the bizarre turn of events with the other foreign teachers. Then they file us into a big conference room where we're forced to sit through a long and extremely boring meeting (often accompanied by singing or poems.) The rest of the day took a turn for the worst.

I had inadvertently and voluntarily signed up for my first corporate team building experience. It stopped being funny immediately after lunch when they forced us into teams and started yelling directions over a megaphone in Chinese. To give you an example of how painful this process was, it took them almost an hour just to get us organized in teams and lined up correctly. My Chinese colleagues looked disheartened when I bowed out after that first terrible hour. Out of about 200 teachers (12 foreigners) there were two of us that took the low road. I regret nothing. Toward the end they FINALLY gave us some free time to go boating or go-karting but at that point our spirits were so crushed that we all just sat exhausted and depressed drinking beer at the cowboy lodge, discussing how exactly we had been tricked into wasting our day off.

I would say it DID result in some cohesiveness between the foreign teachers. Those of us that went (only like 12 out of probably 50) now reference Cowboy Town with the kind of solemn gravity reserved for disaster victims or wartime veterans.

The other notable experience from last week was a major local soccer match - Shanghai Shenhua vs. Beijing Guoan. Shanghai soccer is notoriously bad, both for the low quality of play and for the general lack of understanding by the spectators. This game, however, was supposed to be about as good as it gets, considering Shanghai and Beijing have a long-running rivalry (for obvious reasons.)

So I organized a group of about ten people to go, and spent the first twenty minutes of the game desperately searching for tickets. Eventually we located them at the ticket booth ("no duh?" you say? no, nothing is obvious in china...) where I was nearly crushed to death in the mob of about 70 drunken middle-aged Chinese men scrambling to stuff their money through the tiny window slots. I think I elbowed somebody in the face.

The game itself was brilliant!! The crowd ooh-ed and ahh-ed, screamed and booed to practically every kick of the ball. And I learned a pretty good curse word. The equivalant of calling somebody an eff-ing SeeYouNextTuesday. The entire stadium was constantly screaming it at the Beijing team, then after the match they were all outside, still screaming/cheering, and burning Beijing jerseys (even though it was a tie game!)

Obviously in the future I will be attending as often as possible.