Wufeng

The trip to Wufeng was very interesting. The journey was long(4 1/2 hours in the car) and the roads were really bad (muddy, full of holes and twists and turns)infact we had our trusty Chinese travel sickness dots behind our ears and other teachers took car sick tablets...but the journey still claimed casualties with a few churning stomachs not able to handle the gruelling journey. In total there was six teachers from our school, a reporter from the "Three Gorges Daily" newspaper and the driver. We arrived for lunch on Thursday and then went to visit the school. City schools have been teamed with a sister school in the country to try and help them whenever possible...Our school has been teamed with the school in Wufeng. Wufeng is really very different to any other Chinese town I have visited...It just had a different feel, I'm not sure why?? It is set in the mountains and the scenery is breath taking. The town is considered quite poor and many of the teachers kept mentioning that it must be the poorest Chinese town I have visited. It may be poor in monetry terms but the people there were very, very friendly and I liked them very much. It is not a tourist town and it is quite rare to see any foreigners there, so I aroused much curiosity...but interestingly enough, there was no "Waiguoren"(foreigner) comments and no "Hello's" followed by giggling...they were just curious and looked at me a lot :-)Much of the town is populated by one of China's minority groups, the Tujia people...their food was delicious and as I mentioned the people were very friendly and kind. Once the kids at school got over the initial shock of seeing a foreigner walking around their school, I was quite literally mobbed :-) Many of the kids worked in teams to construct sentences and then one brave child would come and ask me the question that they had just constructed..They wanted to talk,touch, have photo's taken, ask questions...really an amazing experience. Seems I have a new nickname...xióng māo..means Panda :-) (not big, fat and cuddly lol ...but....precious, valuable and rare)
The class I gave the teachers ended up being ok. I stress before, am fine whilst teaching and then stress after that it was good enough :-) but thats just me I guess.