As you fly into Nanning airport you see bright lights from the sky advertising Nanning airport. It’s a fairly provincial airport but modern enough to have airbridges and avoid the hassle of a bus transfer to the terminal. I flew in on an China Southern flight which was about half full, with 4 ‘westerners’ on board. Two of us are new teachers joining the same school. The other two are American pig farmers living and working in Nanning. I haven’t decided yet if they were pulling our leg or being serious!
The drive into town is about 45 minutes. This is partly because the Chinese drive very slowly. Apparently most have purchased their driver’s license and not sat a test. The roads are modern and big. As you get into the city you can see all the Neon lights (in Chinese characters of course). There are plenty of modern looking tall buildings. The Yong river (Yõng Jiãng) crosses through the city. From the bridge you see some clusters of modern looking buildings (this area is called Langdong and it's the new part of the city).
The school that we’ll be working at is off the Minzu Dadao (one of the main thoroughfares in town). It has about 400 students from age 4 to adults. There are 8 British teachers at the school (only two girls) and a handful of local teacher assistants (for the younger classes). Our work hasn’t started yet but we have two weeks of training/introduction to the way the school works. As this is a language school, the classes are taught in the afternoon/evening and at weekends. There is a coffee shop next to the school which does the majority of its trade from the teachers at the school! I’ll be a regular no doubt.
I’d arrived here (on the last leg of my journey) with an English girl who is also starting to teach here. This weekend some of the admin staff at the school have been helping us to find shops, open bank accounts, buy a sim card, set up internet for our homes etc. I also needed one to help explain the washing machine and tv to me as it’s all written in Chinese characters.
Today one of the guys gave us a ‘city tour’ where he showed us some of the sights around town (and to the ‘western’ shops selling familiar foods and with a book swap for English books). We walked, took the bus or a taxi. Both the bus and taxi seem reliable and modern. There are also tuk tuks that go around the town centre. You need to haggle the fare with them so I think I’ll wait until I get a basic grasp of Mandarin before I do that!
There are also lots of bikes (especially battery operated ones) and moped.
We walked down Minzu Dadao from the school and passed several museums (I’ve heard that the Guangxi Provincial Museum is worth a visit as it tells about some of the different areas of the province). Some of the other places we passed included the library, some exhibition centres and the municipality building. We eventually reached ‘Wanda Plaza’ which is a big shopping centre with Wallmart as its flagship store. This is a huge shop with everything you’d want in it. It was very full it seems that this is where many of the locals shop as it has a good variety of stuff. With the approach of St. Valentine’s day, there are chocolate displays everywhere (lots of Ferrero Rocher). The tradition is for women to buy chocolate for the men and men to buy roses for the women.
We walked down Minzu Dadao from the school and passed several museums (I’ve heard that the Guangxi Provincial Museum is worth a visit as it tells about some of the different areas of the province). Some of the other places we passed included the library, some exhibition centres and the municipality building. We eventually reached ‘Wanda Plaza’ which is a big shopping centre with Wallmart as its flagship store. This is a huge shop with everything you’d want in it. It was very full it seems that this is where many of the locals shop as it has a good variety of stuff. With the approach of St. Valentine’s day, there are chocolate displays everywhere (lots of Ferrero Rocher). The tradition is for women to buy chocolate for the men and men to buy roses for the women.
At this plaza we stopped for lunch there at a noodle shop (this is their fast food equivalent, you get a full meal for about Є1-2). From there we went to see the cinema. We now went through a pedestrian area, again full of shops, mostly upmarket, designer ones, including an Apple store (yes, they have the ipad and iphone 4 – but they are not cheap though). The cinema was very busy. Apparently they show one show in English (with Chinese subtitles) each week. I couldn’t see which they were showing this week as all the listing was in Chinese!
Our next stop was Elephant Square. The legend has it that there was a time that Nanning was often flooded and an emperor had a dream that 5 elephants would save Nanning. Since then the flooding stopped and now they honour the elephants. Walking around this area we found lots of street vendors selling anything from roasted potatoes to caramelized strawberries or pickled vegetables. We also came across a lady sitting on a stool repairing shoes (this reminded me of India, where I’d had one of my shoes repaired at the side of the street) and a lady ironing clothes and sewing repairs.
The language spoken here is Mandarin but there is a local dialect and when we passed a group of older men with a collection of cardboard boxes they were speaking this lingo. My ‘guide’ wasn’t able to understand them (he’s too young) so we weren’t able to figure out what they were doing with the boxes.
I did learn that majong is popular here (not really a surprise) and they also play a game with dice. You’ll see people playing this game in bars where they drink beer (they buy a crate and just keep going!). I’ll have to learn this game – though I doubt I’ll be able to keep up with the beer drinking. I did try some Chinese wine but it wasn’t the nicest one I’ve had...
This evening I had a walk around the area I live in (about 8 minutes from the school). There are noodle bars everywhere you look, as well as fruit shops, salons and 24 hour shops selling an array of things. Once you get on the main roads, there are many fancy clothes and shoe shops (all too small for me as the Chinese ladies are much thinner than us Europeans - though not all short as we are all led to believe). I also came across a sushi bar (where I had a lovely dinner).
My apartment is a studio with a separated area for the bed. It has a balcony with washing machine. The kitchen is tiny (with my fridge in the living room, as well as shelves to keep crockety/food etc) and the bathroom is Asian style (a bit of a shock when I arrived, it hadn’t even occurred to me to expect this). But... it’s comfortable and I'll get used to the restaurant noise. Activity on the street lasts until late (2-3am) but as I won't start classes until the afternoon I will just adjust my sleeping patterns. I live in one of several apartment blocks that have a security gate at night for car access and there are two doors to enter before I get to my apartment. So far I feel safe here – including walking home late at night on my own!
It is ‘spring festival’ now (Chinese new year) and this will culminate on Thursday with the Festival of the Lanterns. Traditionally this involved people going to the main park and lighting tea lights which rise in a parachute like contraption. Since last year they have banned this activity (safety?) so I’m curious to see what this year will involve.
