I met Caleb (Pronounced kay-leb) during my visit with Russ in Alaska. He's the other one in the photos of our hike into the Tolovana Hot Springs. And yes, he is just as funny in person. Almost immediatly I felt like I knew him for years, Just a really great guy.

<Russ wrote>__Caleb has been teaching English in China and has sent me a couple of e-mails. I just remebered that he came out to Tolovana with us ans his news from China is so entertaining to read I decided to forward them to you. Take your time with them as they really are worth reading in total.... There kind of long, but you gotta expect that from someone whose been isolated from home for a while...</Russ wrote>

email 1:

to all the girls i've loved before, and to all the friends and family, near and far: "wei! wo shi hen hao, tai hao le! ni ne?" this is caleb and his snazzy new e-mail address-- my old e-mail at UAF has expired, beings how i is gradjuated and such. i will try and keep in touch with you all as much as possible, but just know that e-mail here in china is somewhat sketchy-- all of the foreign language teachers here at the college share access to a single computer, which is old and slow (and internet connection is a crap shoot: the only other e-mail message that i tried to send prior to this never went through...) but! my mailing address is listed at the end of this message, and any tangible lovins posted thereto should wend their way thereto in 2-4 weeks. also note, for the serious investor: my telephone number is listed (but talk ain't cheap)...i believe i'm 16 hours ahead of you all in alaska, 13 hours ahead of you in central standard, and so on (so call me if you need assurance of tomorrow). interesting fact: the people's republic of china is easily large enough to cover several time zones (geographically), but the entire country is set to ONE time (beijing time)...this doesn't make a lot of astral sense, and the folks in the far west are forced to follow a later work schedule so that they're not heading to work two hours before dawn...(although, of course, that wouldn't be any different than fairbanks in the winter, eh?)

so! if you're on your way to work or school, and you only have a few minutes to check your e-mail, then you'll have to save this message until later...i have MUCH to blather about, yes! i flew out of alaska at the end of august and arrived in hong kong (a couple hours late because the pilot had to reroute en route due to a mild typhoon, at least that's what i think was happening-- i was on korean air and wasn't really sure what was being said). i was met in the airport by someone from the school here, and he dropped me off at an "apartment" of sorts and then left. unfortunately, he spoke almost no english, and i had no idea what i was supposed to do next....turns out, i poked around hong kong for 4-5 days while several more teachers filtered in (all but one of whom had no more of a clue than i did, and the one was a returning teacher from last year who said to get used to the feeling). my impressions of hong kong are indefinite: millions of people packed onto an island(s) straining to be vertical, perhaps the most vertical city i have ever wandered, a frantic blur of colorsoundsmellit made me dizzy and i slept only a handful of hours over the entire stay...

then, onto a bus to peizheng college, which, it turns out, is way out in the sticks...about two hours north of guangzhou (the capitol of guangdong province), the middle of nowhere really...rural, with rolling hills like fairbanks (although pointier) and semi-tropical. when i got off the bus the temperature was in the upper 90s and so was the humidity...if i could have boarded a plane back home at that instant, i would not have hesitated. the heat was bad enough that my vision was literally spinning and i almost vomited (not aiding in any way was the fact that i had slept only six hours in four days). we were met by another one of the foreign teachers, informed that classes had been in session for a week and a half already, and told that we would begin teaching the next morning. that was it. no formal reception by any actual member of the college staff or administration, no expectations given, no instructions offered. it is incredibly weird. i have basically no accountability to anyone in any way for the classes i am teaching. no one has told me what to teach, or even asked me what i am teaching. i could play bingo in class everyday, and no one would know, or care. our schedule of classes gets shuffled periodically, for no apparent reason, but as of the moment i have ten classes that i teach for a total of about fifteen hours a week. supposedly i should have fifteen students to a class, but they seem to range from 6-7 to 20 or more (of drastically varying ability)...the classes are all "oral english" and needless to say my first week or so was rough. i walked into my first class with absolutely no idea what i was supposed to do or say....nightmare! so then i sat down and actually worked out a syllabus on my own-- so far i've been drilling a lot of speaking mechanics and language skills (pronunciation, articulation, intonation, blah blah blah). the only thing that prevents class from being utterly worthless is my own unwillingness to have it so. one thing i have noticed is that any time i do an activity that is open-ended or that requires the students to be creative and imaginative, they have real difficulty with it. sad structured anti-individualism....i heard that about a week before i came here a primary school teacher in the north of china actually cut off one of her student's fingers with a pair of scissors because he wouldn't be quite. i have not had to resort to such motivational tactics yet, at least!

the house that i live in here is absolutely wonderful-- big and quiet, although i did have to get used to the general creepy-crawliness of everything here. in or around my house i have seen snakes and rats and salamanders, plenty of bugs and mosquitoes and ants and one particular type of jumping spider that is everywhere, cockroaches and even a preying mantis once in a while. for a time i didn't have any house-mate, and then for about a week i shared this place with a really nice teacher named jenny, from scotland (who actually says "aye" when responding in the affirmative), but she just got bumped because a guy named "roman" from russia is supposed to be moving in here, although he hasn't shown up yet...i don't question these things.

the housing is provided for free, although i do have to pay for the utilities (which is why i never run the air-conditioner), and my salary works out to around $400 u.s. dollars a month, which is absolutely incredible here. foreign teachers are a real commodity, an item for the school to wear on its sleeve, and as such i earn about 5-6 times as much as the chinese teachers at this college....i truly have never felt so rich in my life. i have more money than i know what to do with, but of course it is all relative. the rich-poor gap here is extreme...i can walk into one of the nicer hotels in guangzhou and be the "poorest" person there by many many times, and then walk outside and be confronted by the utterly destitute. the poverty is brutal.

the other foreign teachers here are great, for the most part. there are about eighteen of us at the moment-- i say "about" because everything here is in flux. they range in age from 20 to over 60, and come from the u.s., canada, england, scotland, ghana, russia, australia, and singapore (the chinese students here may find learning pronunciation a nightmare, but rest assured i am teaching them to speak correctly!) there are about half a dozen of the teachers that i hang out with all the time, and we have taken to cooking communal dinners for each other, which is really nice because i only have to cook about once a week (although i earn enough money to eat out every single meal if i wanted to). going into the local market here definitely lets you know that you've walked off the face of the western planet...it's outside in the town square, and the beef and pork are usually dead and hanging, but all the fowl and fishes and reptiles are usually alive and waiting. we've prepared many different meals, mostly chinese-style dishes since those are the groceries available, but the last time i cooked i tried to have a change of pace by making chili....but there weren't any normal beans available, so i used some sort of white lentil and some red beans, which are sweet-flavored...it turned out fine, but i made too much, and after two days of eating only chili i got a bad case of the squishies. i went to the bathroom a dozen times in as many hours, which is fine in the house since it is equipped with a western-style toilet, but everywhere else in china the standard toilet is just a hole in the ground that you squat over, so that experience was another bit of "exposure" for me (exposure to hepatitis, probably).

the cantonese are amazing when it comes to the spectrum of their cuisine. they have no qualms-- if they can catch it, they will eat it. which means i've had the opportunity to try things i've never imagined eating before, even things i've never imagined as being "food" before...so far my list of consumed culinary exotica includes: snake, snake skins, snake bile duct (in a rice wine liquor); soft-shelled turtle; camel; dog; hedgehog; ox-tail, tongue, and tripe; shark fin; frog; eel; emu; kangaroo; silk worms; bee larvae; and water cockroach (actually a type of black beetle). i have yet to try: cat, rat, scorpion, lizard, crocodile, stingray, etc...but the year has only begun. most of these things are better than they sound, and many are delicious-- more exposure, eh? strangely enough, the best-tasting drink that i have had here is a male-potency concoction that sells under the name "buck genital liquor" and includes, among some thirty different chinese medicines, deer penis and dog penis.

transportation is a nutty business here, as well. only the very rich have personal cars, and they are mostly absent from local roads. longer jaunts are usually made via bus, but for anything under an hour i usually find myself on the back of a motorcycle taxi, each time an act of faith and acquiescence since it is surely tempting death. traffic lights and lane lines are universally ignored, and i have been white-knuckled through red lights, dodging trucks and wrong-ways. i really ought to get a cheap bicycle, but i'd have to special order one because all of the ones around are too small for me!

one of the things i appreciate the most about living here is that it forces ingenuity. the college really is out in the middle of nowhere, and the ONLY entertainment available is of your own making (even the resources available for such endeavors are quite limited, so you have to be doubly creative). we wanted to play chess, so we made a chess board and set of pieces out of paper and cardboard. we wanted to go fishing, so we scavenged some bamboo and some fishing line and hooks (the foreign teacher houses border a large lake which is lovely to look at, but is a little thick with particulates-- it appears as if anyone could walk on it, not just the messiah-- we actually did catch a large fish, but not with the poles. it apparently had gone mental and was just swimming around in circles, so we scooped it out of the water with a basket...still tasted good!). we wanted to play hacky-sack, so we got some small lentils from town, i cut up and old sock, and stitched one together with dental floss. we borrowed a BBQ grill but it broke, so we built a grill using old bricks and some metal grating (first dish was roast duck, an entire duck costs less than $2)...actually, my birthday is this coming saturday (26!), and we thought it'd be fun to roast an entire pig, so we went into town yesterday to a welding shop and had them put together everything we'd need to make a big outdoor spit...! basically i have a lot of creative energy and a lot of time to use it-- i teach, take a siesta in my hammock ($2) and read a book, or study chinese (i've been learning brush and ink calligraphy from one of the chinese teachers here), or play the guitar...here's a funny story: just a few days after i first landed here, i was informed that all of the teachers from the college would go to a hotel in huadu for a banquet. every year at this time there is a national chinese holiday for teacher appreciation (incidentally, one of the customs is that students give their teachers "moon cakes," which are exceptional among chinese foods in that they are not good). anyway, at this banquet there would be a "talent show" and they wanted the foreign teachers to perform as well. well! five of us hurriedly formed a band, named ourselves "bu hao" (which is chinese for "not good"), and went to guangzhou to buy instruments. three of us got guitars ($18 each), plus we brought in a harmonica, fan cover, chopsticks and a tea kettle lid. that left us with two days to learn how to play and to write a song (in chinese). so there we were, in front of two or three hundred teachers and administrators, and even though most of the talent show was comprised of bad karaoke (seriously), we somehow managed to commit a greater musical atrocity that night (by many degrees). at one point in our "song" i even knocked the microphone off of the stand and it went clattering to the floor. the horror! that which does not kill me might still be too much exposure. however, i am still plunking away at the guitar, and i love it. except for this very moment-- it is currently unstringed because i was going to try and paint it like the chinese flag, but when i started to slop on the red paint it just looked terrible, so now i have been stripping and sanding it down to the raw wood by hand, which is tedious to say the least. but it looks good (originally my guitar had been painted a bright blue), and i can oil it with peanut oil (the only cooking oil that is available here). amazingly enough, we have been given a standing offer to play gigs at the local student pub (which gives you a better idea of the magnitude of the entertainment void here), and i am sure that "bu hao" will have a come-back tour (a second song is in the works!)...

let me leave you with one last story: for national day here (october 1st, the inception of the people's republic) we had an entire week of vacation from school. the first part of it we spent in shang jiang, a little piece of heaven about 6-7 hours from here on the south china sea. i swam in the ocean all day, lay on the beach, and got a fairly decent sun burn. the first couple nights away were actually a little trip sponsored by the college for the foreign teachers, so we were all there and everything was paid for. then the time came for the bus to take us back to the school, but i decided that i just wasn't ready to leave and several other teachers shared this sentiment, so we waved goodbye to the school bus, moved out of the cushy hotel rooms that the school had tabbed for, and just camped out on the beach for another couple days (nice and cheap, but not much sleep, since people were launching fireworks all night long-- but as a bonus i did get to purchase a bunch of whistling bottle-rockets and artillery shells, my two favorite kinds of fireworks, and we had a beach battle that could have come straight from my formative years). then we packed up, left shang jiang, and spent the rest of our vacation time in macau, a lovely city a fraction the size of hong kong with a very european feel to a lot of the architecture (cobblestone streets even)...it was colonized by the portugese, whereas hong kong by the brits. thing was, our posse stayed in the cheapest accommodations possible, and the little "hospedaria" we landed was stunning in its dilapidation. it only set us back $3 a night (each) but it truly looked as if IV drug users and whores would be standard clientele...the floors were made of rotting wooden slats, the room walls incorporated a ridiculous amount of chicken wire, and parts of the roof were open to the sky. anyway, now for the story i want to leave you with: this whole week of vacation was fine and untraumatizing, with the singular exception of the commute between shang jiang and macau. the ride took several hours, and we went during the middle of the night on a sleeper bus. i wasn't really thinking, and i drank three bottles of water right before we boarded the bus....i made my way all the way to the very back of the bus, top bunk, and smushed into it with four other people. the bus started. it was very bumpy. three bottles of water drained into my bladder. the ride continued in its bumpy fashion. a look of terrified comprehension dawned on my face. there was no bathroom on this bus, we had hours to go, and there was no way i could even get to the driver to ask him to stop (the aisle of the bus was also jammed with people flopped all over) and yet, this water was going to come back out. between me and the nearest window was only one sweaty chinese bloke (who kept rolling over on me), and i tried to wake him up to let me have a piss out the window, but he was passed-out cold and yet, this water was going to come back out end of discussion. i started to feel panicky. finally, i woke up scottish jenny and asked her if she had a bottle of water ("aye"), begged it off her, reached across the sweaty mound next to me and poured it out the window, then, as best i could, refilled it. let me just say for those of you who have never attempted it that peeing into a bottle in the dark while hunched over in the top bunk of a sleeper bus banging and bouncing down the highway at top speed is not as easy as it sounds, AND THEN, to have to stop, mid-stream, and empty the bottle out the window before filling it again....the horror! i can only say that i was able to get MOST of the piss in the bottle, and that the experience has changed me.

alright then, i hope i have written at a length sufficient to make another six-week silence desirable. i will try to respond to all of your individual e-mails-- getting notes from home is like gold! until then, just know that the only thing i miss more than the cold is your company, truly!

love, caleb

Caleb Conley
Foreign Teacher's Office
Peizheng Commercial College
Chini Town, Huadu District
Guangzhou  510830
CHINA

If you haven't fallen off your chair you might want to email him at zokuzoku@go.comzokuzoku@go.com">zokuzoku@go.com>. I'm sure he would appreciate any email. Just let him know what you thought of his experience so far and let him know that he has been eternally imortalized on pecknet!