Hui Sanya & Shanghai
Hours before the sun comes up over the mountains across Yalong Bay, an armada of fishing boats is out catching today’s lunch and dinner entrees – lots of rowboats, a few sampans, a couple of trawlers. There’s a big cat out there too, which I suspect someone lives aboard.
We came in 12:30 Saturday night (or rather Sunday morning), an hour late from Shanghai. The resort hotel car was a normal-size BMW sedan, fitted out as a mini-limo for two persons — the driver didn’t expect the mountain of luggage we’re traveling with! Of course we’re packed not just for Sanya and Shanghai but for six months in Perth. Somehow he managed to stuff it all in for the nearly an hour journey from the airport to the hotel.
We spent Sunday just lazing around our favorite pool. The spectacular Sheraton grounds feature a maze of paths around secluded pools nestled among tropical vegetation. Have a look: http://www.starwoodhotels.com/sheraton/search/hotel_detail.html?propertyID=1447
The hotel’s huge open-air breakfast room is surrounded by a pool full of fish, mostly multi-hued carp. There’s a big cast concrete fish painted with a sign in English and Chinese characters saying “Please don’t feed me,” but some people can’t resist. (Particularly the little kids, of which there are many here at the moment.) The roof is a pool of water too, and gargoyle fish scuppers pour water down into the pools. My seat at breakfast was actually half over the water and I could feel the spray. It can be a bit cool early in the morning and after the sun goes down, especially when the wind whips up.
Besides the thatched huts tucked away here and there, there are lots of cast concrete figures of fish spouting water or fishermen hauling nets, the island having been a major fishery before tourism arrived. Judging by the boats in the harbor, it may still be. It’s also all farms between the little towns, hand-tended vegetable patches and rice paddies.
That rustic picture won’t last for long, though. The Chinese government has declared Hainan to be the country’s major tourist resort destination of the future. Real estate prices are changing literally daily. Development may include gambling — they’re looking at the experience of Macao, where the proceeds from gambling provide 70% of the state budget, and worrying about Singapore, which is just about to open its first casino. The Hainan development plan may also include a red-light district like Amsterdam’s to attract the Japanese sex tourists, who go to Thailand now, although that would be a bit out of character for official China. (As opposed to reality China, where attractive, well-dressed young hookers quite openly hang around the elevators in hotels catering to businessmen.)
Looking at a globe, I was surprised to see how close we are to Vietnam, just across the Gulf of Tonkin. As the old saw says, travel is educational, especially about relative geography.
There are some military vessels out beyond the breakwater and we hear great booms coming from that direction, sometimes accompanied by smoke coming out of the water. Depth-charge testing? Training exercises? Who knows?
The school is kind enough to give us a couple of free days to get over the jet lag before I have to start teaching, but Tuesday morning I’m on. In fact, because I need to go to Shanghai on Thursday afternoon, I’m doing morning, afternoon, and evening sessions on Tuesday, working 9AM to 9PM. Wednesday is a normal 9-5 day and Thursday I wrap up with a half-day so I can get packed and off to Shanghai.
The classes here were a little frustrating, as a matter of fact. We started with about 45 students on Tuesday morning, but only about a third of the class faithfully stuck with the program. It’s tough to compete with the beach on a beautiful day and with the golf course just across the street. Half of the students were also involved in preparing some kind of a big-deal presentation for a New Year’s party this weekend. The school staff told me not to take the truancy personally, that it’s just the price of performing at a resort, but at some level I couldn’t help feeling “dissed”. We’ll see what the evaluations say.
Anyhow, I don’t think I let it visibly affect me. I still did the best job I could do and I was well rewarded by the obvious interest of the faithful few.
Thursday afternoon at the airport while waiting for my flight to Shanghai, I was reading a children’s primer (a great way to learn a language, I think) and a little girl, maybe eight or nine, noticed. Maybe my reading the kid’s book made me look less intimidating than the usual big foreigner might seem, so she ginned up the courage to ask me where I was from. I understood her question and responded, “Wo shi Meiguoren.” We chatted a bit and her family was very proud of her for daring to engage with me! They began to ask me questions too, and she switched to her grade school English to translate for them, because they had a strong regional accent of some kind. It was a real international moment. We all went away very happy with ourselves!
The Shanghai flight was delayed on the runway in Sanya for an hour by the air traffic control people, so what the crew did once we were all aboard was open the bar and advance the dinner service. Chinese airlines put their American counterparts to shame. They scramble to serve full meals even on relatively short flights, and beer and wine are free. So the time passed quickly and by the time they picked up the trash we were airborne.
Something about daily life in China that I’ve noticed before and meant to comment on: a lot of things like packaged food are wrapped in real old-fashioned cellophane, rather than the plastic wrap we usually use in the U.S. I wonder why?
I was met at the Shanghai Pudong airport by a driver from the school who’s picked me up before. On the hour trip into the city, we had sort of a primitive conversation in Chinese, and he proclaimed himself impressed by how much I’ve learned since the last time he drove me. That makes me feel good.
When I woke up this morning and opened the drapes, I was stunned. When we first came here, maybe five years ago, across the street from the Ramada Pudong where the school always has me stay there was a big farmer’s field and some thatched roof outbuildings. The last time I was here, they’d built a major women’s hospital complex on part of that land along the road to the right. Now, less than a year later, the rest of that farmland has been replaced by a huge office park built around an artificial lake! Welcome to China, but don’t blink!
The two-day exec ed class in Shanghai went very well. The participants were all in the automotive industry in one way or another and you know they’re pretty serious if they give up their Saturday and Sunday to listen to me carry on! Most of the 30-some people seemed to really get into the material, to judge by the interest in their faces, and several went out of their way to be complimentary.
Monday morning I taxied downtown to see if the HSBC people could explain online banking to me, and also to sign up for an ATM card. The Chinese government only just let HSBC issue an ATM card; before now they’d denied foreign banks that privilege. Maybe that’s a sign of some loosening up of their stringent financial controls, although they’re not likely to let the RMB float anytime soon.
Looking up, trying to get a good picture of the tallest building in China (for now), I stumbled over a small wall and scraped up my shins again. Sheez. More material for Sylv’s threatened book about emergency rooms around the world! These were only Band-Aid scrapes, though.
The flight that evening back to Sanya was uneventful. It was a different airline this time, China Eastern. Brand new Airbus. Of course most of the airlines in China are flying relatively new equipment – they haven’t been in business that long! Nice crew. One stewardess was particularly impressed when I attempted to speak to her in Chinese. They all say my accent is pretty good, so the online school I’m studying with must be doing a good job.