Why I hate Chinese "outings."

Well, Sunday was interesting enough that it deserves its own post. You see, we went on an "outing." At least, that's the most polite way I can think of describing it.

For about a month now, David has been saying that he wanted to take us to these caves that were nearby--conveniently close to another town, called Jianhua. Now, we'd been putting David off because we don't particularly like to go do stuff with him. He's usually condescending, or downright rude, when we don't have other people around, so we try to limit all our time with him. In any case, we tried to avoid this trip as well, by claiming we plans with another teacher, but David was kind enough to call this other teacher and cancel our plans for us. I should have known then that something was up.

You see, David didn't really want to take us to the caves. Oh, sure, that was the reason he gave us. But he doesn't like spending time with us any more than we like spending time with him. That's why it seemed so strange that he was so insistent on going to these caves. I just assumed Jane had told him that he had to take us out somewhere.

Turns out, David's best friend(s) live in Jianhua. And so does his girlfriend. So we left around 10:00 AM on Sunday for Jianhua, arriving around 11:30. We get to the school there, where we wait for about a half an hour for the foreign teachers to arrive. Then we all go to lunch. Josh and I, David, the other two foreign teachers, and then about 8 other Chinese teachers (David's friends and girlfriend.) The actual eating part of the meal took about half an hour, and none of the food was particularly good. Then the drinking started in earnest. Another two and a half hours later, we finally left the restaurant for the caves.

Now, you have to understand, those two hours were like hell for me. I already don't particularly like big social things like that with people I don't know. Then imagine them all smoking (at least 10 cigarettes each) and drinking until they were (literally) drooling (some of them.) They all start to shout after their third glass of rice wine, and so it's incredibly noisy, hot, and smoky. I hated it.

By the way, I hope it's clear that the problem wasn't that they were drinking, but that they were so ridiculous about it, along with all the other problems they were causing.

We finally left for the caves. Qingyen, or something like that. We got there, after Cam (one of the other foreign teachers) had to make an emergency bathroom stop. That part was hilarious, actually, because he was literally begging David to stop the car, and David (who is a jerk by nature anyway) was trying to make him hold it as long as he could, and neither of them understood the other because they were so drunk (and stupid.) So it was just a lot of laughing and yelling.

After we arrived at the caves, we had to wait for half an hour, because they wouldn't take such a small group of us on the tour. Another group of tourists eventually got there and we all went in together. The caves were amazing. Different from the caves we went to before. The first ones, from March, were a "vertical" experience, a lot of climbing, with narrow chambers. These were much more horizontal. We didn't go up and down hardly at all, but the caves were like these massive, massive rooms. Incredibly big, I wish I could have taken decent pictures. There were some beautiful stalactites and other rock formations, although I think I liked the ones in the first caves better. The best part was the boat, though.

We climbed down to this underground river and took a boat along it for maybe ten minutes. Short, but very cool. There were some girls singing songs in Chinese (part of the tour, I was told.) It was a very, very neat experience. Unfortunately, we spent it with David and Cam (who was an equally ignorant person in his own way.)

After the caves, we had to go to another dinner. Imagine the scene from lunch, only everyone (except Josh and me) started off drunk and just got drunker (or more drunk.) That went on until 8:30 PM. We finally got home at about 9:30, which meant Josh still had to plan his lesson for Monday, and I was just sick of Chinese people.

On the plus side. We may be taking a trip to Beijing this weekend. We found out that we have a six day break, starting on Thursday, which would give us plenty of time to go to Beijing and come back. It will be a ton of traveling, but it should let us visit another city before we go home at the beginning of July. Even if we don't make the trip, at least we'll have six days off! I'll let you know what we end up doing.

Oh, one last thing. I'll put up some pictures from our trip. While we were waiting at the school, I took a bunch of pictures of hilarious signs in English. After reading them, you might wonder, as I did, why they didn't just have the foreign teachers help them use correct English. I still don't know what they were thinking. The pictures will be on the picasa address at the top.