"Boating"

Earlier this week I was invited by my Chinese teacher to go boating. After I let him know I wanted to go, he sent me to another teacher's office to find out the details. I went and was told we would be going boating. Getting the specifics was a bit tough because of the language barrier, but I also got the feeling she was being purposely vague with me. I was told to meet at the East gate of campus the next day at one-thirty sharp.

I arrived at East gate and met the other students who were going. They were all white females. It was clear the teachers had hand picked the most "western" looking females in class, and signed us up for a boating trip. We hopped on a bus and drove about four hours to a small city named Guangyuan. The city is only famous for one thing: being the birth place of China's only female emperor. Her name was Wu Zetian, and she ruled during the Tang Dynasty.

Anyway, we pulled into the only hotel at Guangyuan, stepped off the bus, and looked up to see a large, red banner that read, "The Welcome Foreign Friend Team to Stay at My Hotel." I knew then that we were in trouble.



I asked the coordinator of the trip, "So what exactly are we going to be doing?"

"We'll be racing the phoenix boats for the Wu Zetian festival. Don't worry, just pretend that it's a game." I got the impression that the other teams wouldn't be pretending.

The hotel was nice. Really nice. They gave us a free dinner at the western style food restaurant. The food was good, and the drinks were free.

The rooms were nice too. They were large and spacious. We were provided with bathrobes and slippers, tea and ice water. It wasn't until about eight o'clock that we noticed something was amiss. My classmate and I were sitting on the beds watching Chinese TV when we first noticed it--

Cockroaches.

They were everywhere. They were in the bathroom, climbing the walls, in our bags, under our clothes. My classmate seemed a bit annoyed at the situation; I was completely freaked out. So I did what any sane person would do; I started squishing.

I squished some here:

And here I squished a bunch:

There's one here:

Here (this one almost qualifies as Mysterious English)

There's a small one here:

At my insistence, we slept with the lights on so that the roaches wouldn't come near us.

The next morning we donned our new rowing outfits and headed out to the river. We were provided with a police escort (why?) and arrived with only a few minutes to don life jackets and jump into the boats. We realized almost as soon as we got there that our competitors were all finalists. The races had been going on for several days before we arrived.

We sat two by two in the boats. The coxswain stood in front of a large drum at the front of the boat. She pounded the drum to help us keep a steady rhythm of rowing.

It took a few minutes, but pretty soon all the boats were in place at the starting line. The gun went off and we dug our paddles into the water.

The first minute or so of the race wasn't bad. We hadn't had enough time to fall too far behind. After about three minutes, our arms felt like jelly and we stopped making much headway. The coxswain started shouting "Yi, er, yi, er, yi..." to keep us at the same rhythm. It wasn't helping. By this point we were at least a hundred yards behind. Needless to say, we lost.

After the race we were carted off to a banquet held in our honor. The banquet was really good. We ate tons of food, and thoroughly enjoyed the communist officials raising toasts to us.

It was a fun day. The weather turned out nice, and we had a good time on the water. I've posted all my pictures of Guanyuan and the Phoenix boat races to my webshots account. You can view them by clicking the link to the right. I'll be posting the best ones here later.