To our dear teacher:

I think still remember that day the peasant workers closed the doors of teaching building. that is because of our school leaders haven't paid their wages in time.* I don't know how did you think about it. In addition, the refuse is thrown everywhere, the people spit randomly. Our English are so poor. You are so hold conversing with us... I think all these things are out of your expectation. I don't know how would these things being impact on such a girl teaching abroad. I'm sure that you would become appointed to us, our scool, even China pn these reasons.
Even though I still pray that you don't lose belief of us, our scool, our country. Please believe me. We can study English better and better. We will do our best on everything.
You are good teacher. How beautiful and kind you are. Thank you for teaching us so well, we hope you'll have a very nice time in China.

From your students.

(Please excuse me if I made some grammar mistakes)

*Workers building a library of the college were on strike(they closed all doors of the main building), as they hadn't been paid for 6months. Looking for a way out I met this student and his friend who showed me a "secret door". A week after this incident he wrote me this letter. I post it as it was written.

Weekend in Xi'an,Shaanxi Province

This weekend we went to Xi'an, a city with a history of more than 3000years. It was an eastern starting point of Silk Road, this explains the presence of so many muslims in this city. There is a whole Islamic street with huge restaurants, snacks, shops. A visit to a chinese mosque was quite surprising: the architecture and writings being chinese and having nothing to do with mosques we've seen in Morocco for example.

Xi'an is a beautiful city, worth visiting. There are streets in ancient style, city walls from Ming dynasty(one of the few left in China), and the Drum and the Bell Towers. - In China almost every place of visit has been rebuilt some years ago (communists destroyed what they could), the government now develops tourism all over China and they go back to their history and start to exploit the fact that they had a rich culture and civilisation. They do it really well! And get lots of money for it.-

In one hour from Xi'an there is the Army of Terracota Warriors, which is a part of funeral objects of Emperor Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum. Not one warrior is the same, moreover, the soldiers have different ranks, clothes according to their rank, some of them hold weapons and some don't. There are also chariots and charioteers and 2 types of horses: those drawing chariots and those for riding.
The sight is really amazing and impressive!

To get back to Wuhan we had to take a sleeper bus as no train tickets were left. It took us 13hours and on Monday morning we were inWuhan ready to go to work.
OreLENA.

Back in Wuhan

Well, we are now back in Wuhan, back to work...
I really am pretty busy and I think the way till the Summer break is going to be really tiring.
As you know, France has chosen its new President. That got me depressed for the week but I am now trying not to think too much about it. After all, french knew who they were voting for, now they'll get what they deserve.
France has chosen to send its principles into the shadows of the past, let it be.

La France ressemble de plus en plus à une chimère...

So long!
ORELena

Hangzhou-Tea Museum

Unfortunately, clouds are now covering the skies of Hangzhou and it's been raing so we canceled the plans to move to a nearby city and we decided to visit some museums and do some shopping.
We are leaving tonight at 23:00 for Wuhan, so we still have a day in Hangzhou.
Yesterday, we have visited the Chinese National Tea Museum, the only chinese museum dedicated to tea.
It's located a little outside of the city, in the middle of the surrounding hills, circled by tea fields.
A really beautiful area. The Museum was nearly desert and that's a shame because that really was a pretty museum. It shows the history of Tea and many ustensils and tea wares from different periods.


The entrance of the museum

A view from the museum

A glass of Long Jing Tea, the famous tea from Zhejiang Province.

Hangzhou-West lake

I made some research on the West Lake, so famous in China. Here are some citations of what I have found.
From Wikipedia:

"West Lake (Chinese: 西湖; pinyin: Xī Hú) is a famous fresh water lake located in central Hangzhou, in Zhejiang province of eastern China.

The lake is divided by three causeways called Su Di (苏堤) , Bai Di (白堤), and Yanggong Di (杨公堤).

The name "West Lake" (Xi Hu) is also used by a large number of lakes in China and surrounding countries (with 800 West Lakes in China according to Lonely Planet). However, the lake in Hangzhou is the most famous of these, and the terms "West Lake" and "Xi Hu" generally refers to this lake.

The West Lake is said to be the incarnation of Xi Shi, one of the Four Beauties of ancient China. Hence, since ancient times, the West Lake was associated with a large number of romatic poets, profound philosophers, national heroes and heroines."

It' s a really beautiful place, well done and taken care of. The Chinese did a good job restoring historical places destroyed by communists during the Cultural Revolution. Now this place attracts more than 20million tourists a year!
During May Day holidays this place is crazy. So many chinese-surprisingly?- everywhere!!! Hotels are full, taxis busy, traffic jams everywhere. On the lake people walk in a line, otherwise it's a mess. That's when you realise that there are 1,3 billion Chinese on this planet.
Enjoy the pictures,
OreLENA.

Hangzhou

So, today was our first day in Hangzhou!
The first thing to say is that it's terribly touristic...Every street is overcrowded and taking a cab or a bus won't really get you anywhere faster than your feet would. Kind of.
But enough said about the things we didn't like about Hangzhou: the weather was glorious, nearly too hot to be honest, and the XIHU (West Lake) really deserves his reputation. That's a very lovely lake, extremely well taken care of and beautified and arranged by the city for tourism.
You could probably spend 2 days to walk all around the lake and see all there's to see.
We'll try to upload some pictures a little later on (by the way, did you notice i added pictures to the Shanghai posts?).
Right now we are sitting in a very cool Cafe called Fotoyard Cafe, it's a cafe-photo gallery. A really nice one with very talented chinese photographers.
They even have a website you may want to check out:
http://www.fotoyard.net/photoshow_english/Findex.asp
OK, I'll just leave you now and join Lena in her degustation of Nepal Black Tea... ; )
ORElena

Arrived in Hangzhou!

Yep, we're in Hangzhou, all right!
Well, we can't say we've seen a lot of the city since we actually arrived around 6pm, it was already nearly dark and then it took us more than two hours to find a hotel with rooms available.
Yes, we didn't book ahead and sincerely regret it now. We are again in a Motel 168, which is actually a pretty good chain of affordable hotels, but the one of Hangzhou is really far from the city center... So we're already thinking of moving to another hotel tomorrow.
Ok, at least we have internet in the room so I just post this little message and will try to update some pictures.
Tonight, we had a nice dinner in a nearby restaurant:
-Water chestnuts with green chilis and bacon
-Chili beef
-Vegetable Spring Rolls
and some herbs we have no idea about their names.
We also had 2 local ''beers'' which were very rightfully called ''LIGHT'' beers...
They're the first beers i ever drank that have actually even less than 2 degrees of alcohol!
It really felt like bubbly water but was kind refresing, it's called XIHU, (west lake), in case you're interested.
OK, now I have to keep searching for another hotel so I'll leave you for now!
Stay tuned!
ORELena

Shanghai3

Yesterday was a day basically spent arranging the rest of our holidays. We bought tickets to go to Hangzhou (Zhejiang), that is suposed to be a beautiful city not very far from Shanghai.
Then we changed hotel, this one doesn't have internet unfortunately, and then we decided to treat ourselves and go eat some real good food.
We started with a really good and unexpensive Japanese restaurant (Ebi Sushi) and then in the evening we walked along Nanjing Lu all the way to the Bund... That was all extremely crowded and that gave us a real taste of the Shanghai we had imagined. Crowded streets full of huge neon signs, advertising screens, restaurants, bars, shopping malls and things like that.
This morning, we'll leave the hotel and then go take a train for Hangzhou at 2pm.
We'll try to post something from there but of course it all depends on us finding a hotel with an internet connection.
Have anice day!
ORELena

Shanghai Museum

Well, I've just lost a looong message I had written about yesterday and our visit to the great and very modern Shanghai Museum, so I am really upset and I won't write it all again right now.
What I said was basically that:
-Shanghai Historical Museum is very well arranged, classy and very well lit.
-The collections are rich and interesting with plenty of explanations in english.
-You can have a look at their website:
http://www.shanghaimuseum.net/en/index.asp
-Chinese school kids visiting the museum were a real pain. They're spoilt, noisy, rude and nobody ever dare say anything to them. They used the museum as a crazy playground.
-We visited the Old Town and the Antiquaries market.
Amazing contrasts, nearly destroyed houses and poverty being juxtaposed to the skyline of the skyscrapers...Pretty impressive.
-Last night we went to Xintiendi, a really popular block with all the fashionable bars, restaurants and shops for foreigners and chinese who have too much money in their pockets. Pretty and fun but a little too expensive for our wallets.
-We don't know what we'll be doing today, nor where we'll be going but will probably stay in Shangai another day because we havent booked tickets yet.
Ok, see you soon!
ORElena
PS: I just got Segolene Royal's letter to the French Abroad and it's definitely more touching than the one Sarkozy sent some days ago.
And she even talks about ecology!
Crossing fingers 'till sunday...